The Holy Spirit's Role in Sanctification and Transformation

On Sunday, Pastor Russell Johnson opened with Fletcher Reede in the 1997 film Liar Liar, a man who cannot make his hand write a lie about the pen he is holding. He said Romans 7 runs the same way in reverse: we want to do right and find ourselves doing the opposite. Turning to Romans 8:1-8, Pastor Russell traced a tightly argued chain. The word behind "no condemnation" points less to the verdict than to the sentence being carried out, and the old sentence is the one Ephesians 2:1-3 describes. We have been pardoned, yet we keep showing up at the old prison asking for our old cell. Verse 2 answers with a higher law, the law of the Spirit of life, and verse 3 with a Son sent in the likeness of sinful flesh, so that verse 4 can call us to walk rather than work. Using a doll held down by gravity and lifted by balloons, Pastor Russell pictured prayer, Scripture, worship, and community tied on one at a time. Romans 8:5-8 gives the mechanism: setting the mind. Borrowing an image from Jonathan Haidt, whom he was careful not to endorse, he described a rider on an elephant. We do not wrestle the elephant. We aim it, daily, until desire follows.

Look up Galatians 5:16, Colossians 3:1-2, Romans 12:2, and Philippians 4:8. Paul gives us the walk itself in Galatians, the direction to aim the mind in Colossians, the transformation that comes as the mind is renewed in Romans, and the actual content to dwell on in Philippians. How do these passages together shape what you let into your mind on an ordinary day, and what would it look like to clear one thing out and plant something better in its place this week?