I love this passage from Romans 8:11, "The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as he raised Christ from the dead, he will give life to your mortal body by this same Spirit living within you".
The very same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you and me? Do you realize what that means? It means that God didn't give Jesus one type of "spirit" and then gave us a "lesser kind of spirit". It says that we have the same spirit. But do we live our lives as though we believe that?
In our Old Testament readings, God only gave His Spirit to a select few people but now that Jesus has come, the Spirit is available to all. Acts 2:38 says, "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit".
To me this says that I don't necessarily have to wait until the Resurrection to be living a new life. Jesus said in John 3:5-6 that no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.
If God's Spirit is living in me (Christ in you and me), then we have the power to overcome whatever it is that wants to keep us beaten down. I love what the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 6:2-4: "We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
We can live a new life - now, because the Spirit lives in us. We have the power to break the chains of bad habits that may continue to plague us. May the same Spirit of the Lord that was with Moses, Gideon, Joshua, Samuel and Jesus come powerfully upon us!
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