Because the Spirit of God dwells in you, do not live according to the flesh. In today’s First Reading, St. Paul seeks to remind the Christian community in Rome of their obligation as those who have been re-born in the waters of baptism. In a particular way, he wants to call their attention to the kind of life they had professed to live as a people who not only died but also rose with Christ. In baptism, they were given a new life in Christ (cf. Romans 6:4), a life patterned after that of Jesus Christ. St. Paul calls it a life in the Spirit [of God]. It is a life that is opposed to what was apparently taking place in this community, what Paul refers to as living according to the flesh.
When Paul speaks about the flesh, he is not referring to our bodies. Our bodies were given to us by God the creator, and as such are sacred and are just as important to us as are our souls. Moreover, when Jesus assumed the flesh, he made our bodies a means of our salvation. When he talks about the flesh, Paul means the sinful tendencies that have become like a second nature to us as a consequence of our participation in Adam and Eve’s disobedience/rebellion (concupiscence). Paul uses the flesh to refer to the deformed state of the human person after the fall (fall=the loss of grace in the Garden following the sin of Adam and Eve). Without God’s grace, it becomes impossible for an individual to respond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit in order to do the will of God. Without God’s grace, it is impossible to love or be kind to others. Without God’s grace, the life of charity that is essential to our living as sons and daughters of God is lost. It is such life outside God’s grace that Paul refers to as living according to the flesh, a condition that is remedied in baptism.
Baptism remedies humanity’s post-fall deformity, not by doing away with (replacing) the deformed nature but rather by filling an individual with enough graces from God to enable him/her resist the inclination to do that which is contrary to God’s will (sin). What this means is that at any one time in his/her life, a baptized individual will always have within him/her two opposing inner drives: a deformed inclination to sin as well as a grace-filled inclination to do the will of God. While the baptized will still have within him/her the sinful drive, his/her sharing in the death and resurrection of Jesus has the effect of countering and overpowering the deformed sinful drive. But this only happens when the baptized individual does well to cooperate with the graces of God conferred upon him/her in the reception of the sacraments.
The baptized participate in the life of the Spirit [of God]. It is a life that is focused on what pleases God. This is the life that the Roman Christian community had professed to live when they accepted to be baptized in the name of Jesus. Any deviation from doing what is pleasing to God leads to death.
St. Paul’s instruction to the Roman community remains relevant to men and women in every generation. Baptism empowers men and women to live the life of the Spirit while keeping off the works of the flesh (sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, and orgies [cf. Galatians 5:19-21]). Such works lead to death because they put the one who harbors them at enmity with God.