The Holy Spirit's Role in Sanctification and Transformation

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.