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When you walk in the spirit of Christ, you are walking in the spirit that obeyed every single law perfectly unto death……and then came alive!
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My desire to read the Bible comes out of my desire to have the law of God written in my heart.
Romans 8:7 Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
A question I myself have had and have been asked many times is, “How do you walk by the spirit?” It’s pretty difficult to do if you don’t know how. To most people, walking by the spirit is a hit or miss thing. When they do it, they don’t know how they got there, and that’s why life with God is just such a difficult thing to do.
So this study is to make how to walk by the spirit very very clearly understandable. We’ll take it step by step, so that hopefully each step is a “duh” moment; each one so obvious and self-evident These steps will include do’s, as well as do nots! And as always, we’ll let God speak for Himself.
One: To walk by the spirit, God must write His law in your heart. That is, what God has revealed of Christ within you has become your own personal law to live by and obey.
Hebrews 10:16, 17 This is the covenant (contract, testament, agreement) that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord; I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them. And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.
Here God makes reference to an agreement He will, in the future, make with mankind, specifically Israel. Of course, this is a quote from the Old Testament. So this agreement which God will, in the future, make with mankind is not in existence in the Old Testament, at least at the time of this prophecy.
Never forget that God’s dealings with man in the Old Testament (which includes the 4 Gospels….except for the man, Jesus Christ) are before He was able to write His law in their hearts.
This quote in Hebrews is from the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, and was written in the neighborhood of 600 BC. Here is how it reads in its entirety.
Jeremiah 31:31-34 Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which covenant they broke, although I was a husband unto them, says the Lord: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, says the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
Two: To walk by the spirit, the law God has written in your heart must be more important than any Old Testament law. That is, you must be clear in your heart that you are free from Old Testament law where and when it regards the law God has written in your heart.
This is where most well-meaning Christians get it wrong. They just don’t see how absolutely detrimental it is to walk by the 10 Commandments, to subject themselves to what God says in the Old Testament, to seek to modify and improve their fleshly mind and behavior, to stand approved before their Pastor, friends and/or family.
God had to make a new covenant with man, because the old one wasn’t good enough. This might surprise you, that God had a covenant with man that wasn’t good enough, but remember, an agreement is between at least 2 parties! And when one of those parties is dead in tresspasses and sins, any agreement they have with a perfect God just isn’t going to be good enough.
Romans 8:3 For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.
Here it sounds like God condemning sin in the flesh really put it to us, but in actuality, He condemned the source of sin, the devil, justifying us in the process. If this is a new concept to you, read the study Justified, what it means. He did this for a reason, that we could be righteously fulfilled in this life, which only happens when we walk by the spirit, not when we walk under the 10 Commandments.
Romans 8:4 That the righteousness of the law (which could only come about when you’d died, having never ever broken one single law, because as long as you lived you still had to obey every single law, so that that “righteousness of the law” was never “fulfilled”) might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.
When you walk in the spirit of Christ, you are walking in the spirit that obeyed every single law perfectly unto death……and then came alive!
Three: To walk by the spirit, you cannot try to obey God with your flesh. You must live where you have “died to self.”
As you’re beginning to see, all these “steps” are intertwined, and they meet as one single truth in the oneness of Christ.
Romans 8:5-8 For they that are after the flesh do mind (dwell thoughtfully on) the things of the flesh; but they that are after the spirit, the things of the spirit. For to be carnally minded (same exact Greek word for “mind the things of the flesh”) is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind (same Greek word again) is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
In verse 7 is the phrase, “neither indeed can be” which should be translated “for it has no capability.” Interestingly, this negative is a conditional negative, meaning it is subjective! Not sure what this means? This means the negative depends on the subject….you and me! It is a person’s carnal mind which chooses to believe unto Jesus Christ….his death, resurrection and ascension to the throne of God. That carnal mind, for the one who chooses (if they so choose, which makes it conditional, therefore subjective), does indeed receive the ability to be subject to the law of God. That carnal mind is replaced by a spiritual mind….that is, it has the ability to dwell thoughtfully on the things of the spirit…..which is life and peace!
So the “carnal mind” spoken of in the verses above is the mind which has not (yet, if ever) believed unto Jesus Christ. That mind, at best (which is still never good enough) endeavors to obey laws which govern the flesh. And that mind knows deep down that it is separated from God and can never be good enough. That mind knows it is dead to God, and has no ability to make itself alive to God.
Four: To walk by the spirit, all the weight of responsibility for righteous living must be cast upon the spirit of the person of Christ Jesus the Lord.
In order to walk by the spirit, we can never be trying to succeed before God; we can only be living from out of that which has already succeeded. That success can never be our flesh. That success can only be and it must always be … Jesus Christ.
Romans 8:2 For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.
Five: To walk by the spirit, obey the laws which God writes in your heart. Where Christ is the head, and no man is more important than that headship of Christ.
Don’t worry about what He hasn’t written in your heart yet, for all of God’s laws are one, and to obey one is to obey them all. That is why the youngest believer in the kingdom of God is as important as the one who has been a citizen of heaven for decades, with the same abilities!
So…..what law(s) has God written in your heart? That is the law you obey….from your heart! You see how individual your walk with God is meant to be?!! What God writes, and how He writes it and how you respond to its writing….that is your walk of the spirit, and not to be compared with any other.
II Corinthians 3:3-6, 17, 18 Forasmuch as you are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart. And such trust have we through Christ toward God; Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; Who also has made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. Now the Lord is that spirit; and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (freedom to be uniquely and completely yourself); But we all, with open face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the spirit of the Lord.
Let’s sum up the 5 things I’ve covered in this study:
1. Allow God to write His law in your heart.
2. Disavow your need to walk by the Old Testament law.
3. Surrender to the fact that your flesh will never be good enough.
4. Every place you encounter the need to be right, put Christ there.
5. Live in subjection to the rightness of what God has written in your heart.
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Other related studies:
HOW to Walk by the Spirit
Jobs of the Holy Spirit
The Form of our Doctrine
How Christ is Building His Church
Dying to Self
