Romans 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. And for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh.
For a long time, I wondered what these expressions meant. Sin in the flesh. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death, and what it meant that God condemned sin in the flesh.
We know that the physical body doesn’t commit sin. It may be the instrument or the weapon that does the thing, but there’s no sin in the physical body itself.
Sin lies in the will. If you choose to sin, then you can make your body do it.
According to the law, there isn’t any sin unless it’s performed by a physical act. You can think murderer as much as you want, but you’re not a murderer in the sight of the law just because you thought it.
The law doesn’t recognize anything that hasn’t become conduct as an act.
Now, there isn’t any sin in your physical body. There’s nothing wrong with your body.
It’s you, the hidden man of the heart, which makes the body do things that are unseemly and wrong. Then what does it mean by sin in the flesh?
For a long time that bothered me. I think I’ve found a key to it in verse 11 because it’s all in one argument.
But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead shall also give life to your mortal bodies by His Spirit who dwells in you.
He’s not talking about the resurrection. He’s talking about giving life, healing life, to our physical bodies.
Our physical bodies don’t need life unless they’re sick, do they? That is the conclusion of the progressive argument of Romans 8, 1-11.
What is he talking about? He’s talking about disease, sickness, and the sin that is in the flesh. The sin of a broken law in your body.
Sin is breaking the law, some kind of law. And sin in the body is breaking the law of the body. Disease, then, is a disease, isn’t it? Make it two words, dis-ease. Broken law, wrecked ease, dismantled ease, ease that had been destroyed. Ease is health. Dis-ease is sickness.
So, God has condemned sin in the flesh, hasn’t He? There’s no escaping it, then. That is just what it means.
Now, there are three kinds of sickness: the sickness of the body, sicknesses of the soul, and sicknesses of the spirit.
The basic sickness is spirit sickness. I dare say, if you could be healed completely in your spirit, every single one of you would be well in your bodies.
But the whole problem is cleaning up a man in his spirit.
To use a business analogy, if you can become a successful entrepreneur in your spirit, you’ll bring your body with you to the bank. You say, my body is so tired.
But your body is tired the moment the spirit is discouraged. Your body breaks down under it. As long as your spirit is triumphant, you’re a victor, and you can go right on.
But a man is defeated only when he is defeated in his spirit. Let a man lose courage, and courage is not part of the intellect. When he loses courage, he’s whipped.
The only way to put the man on his feet again is to renew a right spirit within him. That isn’t the Holy Spirit. It’s to renew the spirit that has been defeated and conquered.
Healing then is on 3 planes. Spiritual healing, soul healing, and body healing.
Basically, the person that is sick in the body most likely has been sick in their spirit for quite a while. It’s gotten down into his soul and passed through that into the body.
I can’t tell you what this truth I’m telling you now has meant to my life. I can now trace every physical change in my body to a spiritual condition.
My body responds to my spirit. I want to give you something that is of infinite value.
The other day I was called to see an 80-year-old man who’d been sick for two years. He had blood poisoning in his teeth and it had gone through his whole body.
I walked into the room with a healthy spirit, a conquering spirit. And I didn’t even think of this when I went there. When I went back today, I saw the effect. His spirit had caught the contagion from me.
He was whipped. He had sat there in that chair until he was defeated. I sat by his side and opened the scriptures, and something in me, this is perfectly scriptural, out of your inner being, that is your spirit, the inner being, shall flow rivers of living water. Out from my spirit, went into his spirit, healing for his spirit.
He was a very reserved Scotsman and didn’t respond much, but I knew that it went into him. I knew it. I talked to him for a little while and opened the word and then prayed for him and left.
This afternoon, his lovely motherly wife, an older woman herself, called me up and said, he wants to see you again. He’s going to come down to the hotel to see you because he doesn’t think it’s right to ask you to come all the way up here.
Think about that. I said, no, I’ll come up. When I visited him this afternoon, I carried into his presence, I discovered it in myself immediately after I left the house, that I’d carried into his presence health in my own mind, in my spirit.
I’d carried a dominating, victorious spirit, and that man responded to it. Do you know what happened? Before I left the house, I saw the reactions in his physical body. Things had happened in his body. When I sat there and prayed for him, his spirit had become adjusted.
The spirit in me received its health from the Lord, and I communicated something to his spirit, and his spirit made contact. Just like when you flip the switch and turn on a light, you make contact with God’s Spirit and when it did, healing came down into his body. His entire demeanor changed. It changed everything about him.
I have been defeated, and I am full of defeat. And that corroding defeat has come down over me and I’ve lost out. I have broken connection.
Have you ever seen a corroded battery in a car that has its contacts and wires eaten up and it wouldn’t start? What’s the matter?
Something is corroded there. You should have kept that battery clean. Corroding cares come and surround your spirit life, and it just covers you and it breaks your connection with the Lord. This is true.
The first real healing is the healing of your spirit, getting your spirit adjusted to the Lord. And your spirit is the part that contacts the Lord. If your spirit is out of harmony and out of shape, you can’t get faith for healing, can you? Nope. You must become adjusted to the Lord.
I saw a young man that was in a desperate condition and required a first-class miracle to touch his life at all. I sat by his side and said, if you will accept Jesus Christ as your Savior and confess Him as Lord and receive eternal life, you’re healed. He asked, what do you mean?
I replied, just the moment you’re born again, you are healed. For years, I’ve never been afraid to promise that. Why, I didn’t know it for years.
Now I can tell you the simplest thing in the world, the moment they are born again, eternal life comes into their spirit. That spirit then can come into the closest relationship with the Father, the great Healer, and the life of God then pours into His spirit, into His soul, and into His body, and He is immediately touched and made whole.
You can’t get healing for the body as far as you are personally concerned, somebody else’s faith may do it, but until your spirit is right, you can’t get healing for your own body.
May I call your attention to another thing? Faith is a product of your spirit, not of your intellect. Your intellect does not produce faith. Your knowledge may give you ground for faith, but faith is resident in your spirit.
Joy is something in your spirit. Happiness is something that’s connected with your surroundings. You’re happy because of your surroundings. You are joyful because you are in right relation with the Father.
And now faith, love, joy, and hope all spring from your spirit being, the hidden man of the heart. All are products of your spiritual life.
The reason that people don’t have a rich, beautiful faith is that their spirit is denied the privilege of communion and fellowship with the Father. Do you understand me? You don’t read your Bible, you don’t pour over it, you don’t live in it, you don’t spend any time in fellowship with the Father, and as a result, your spirit is depleted and weakened.
Faith springs out of the Spirit, but the faith that grows out of it is like a sickly houseplant.
On the other hand, your spirit life is made fruitful and built up and is enriched by communion with the Father and by reading His Word. And as your spirit becomes strong and vigorous, there arises from it a faith that is triumphant and creative.
I dare say that the men and women who are weak in faith, who once were mighty in faith, are so because they have stopped feeding on the Word of God and stopped having intimate, close fellowship with the Father.
Let me say to you with all frankness that you can’t lose your faith until you have broken your fellowship.
As long as your fellowship is rich and your spiritual life is at high tide, faith is triumphant. I’ve followed that in my own life.
For years, I didn’t understand the law that governs it. I see it now. You see, it’s incredibly important for the spirit life in a man to be kept healthy and vigorous, and kept healthy and vigorous by three exercises.
There are more ways, but three in particular. One, feeding on the Word. Two, a continual public confession of what you are and what Jesus is to you. I’m not talking about sin. I mean confession of your faith in Christ, of what Christ is to you, of His fullness, of His completeness, and of His redemption.
And 3, communion with Him. Feeding on the Word, confession, and communion. Three simple things, aren’t they?
And yet they’re the things that produce great spiritual life, and you don’t have it without them.
There are three planes of healing, spiritual, mental, and physical. Now just for a bit, I want to call your attention to another especially important fact, the relation of your body to your spiritual life.
Paul said in 1 Corinthians 9 that he kept his body under discipline so that after preaching to others that he wouldn’t be disqualified or laid aside. Not lost, but laid aside. No longer usable. Why?
Because his body had gained the ascendancy over his spiritual life. If you become a glutton and just live to gratify your appetite by eating and drinking, you will lose out spiritually. But if you’ll keep your appetite and your body under as Paul said he did, your will has a chance to prove itself.
You may be a great spiritual athlete. You may have been a great spiritual athlete, but somewhere you’ve stopped feeding on the Word. The Word lost its flavor and taste to. You ask, how can that happen? But it does.
I know preacher after preacher who had great power at one time, but they’ve lost all the joy in the Scripture. How do I know?
Well, I know by the way that they act. When a man loves a woman, he wants her to be with him, doesn’t he? He doesn’t want to go off and spend evenings alone. And when a man loves his Bible, you will find the Bible with him in his arms somewhere. He has gotten hold of the thing, and he’s holding it.
When I see an older man, and his hair’s going gray, and I see that he loves the Bible, I know that man is fresh in his spirit life. One of the mightiest men I ever fellowshipped with in my life in prayer, when we would get together in prayer, sometimes I would open my eyes and look at him, and he would be on his knees with his Bible, kissing it.
He didn’t want anyone to see him, and he thought my eyes were closed. But he was holding it just like a man holds his wife in his arms, and kisses and embraces her, and loves her dearly.
Whenever I reach a place where I lose my appetite for the Bible, and I’d rather talk with people than read the Bible, or read books about the Bible than to read the Bible. Then I know I’m backslidden in my spirit.
I can trace the downfall of every spiritual giant that I have ever known in my life to one of those three things. He’s lost his desire for the book.
I heard one of the greatest men this country ever produced. And when that book was in his hand and he preached just like this, he drove me to my knees.
Every time I would hear him, I would go out, get alone, and pray if I could speak. He just battered me and hammered me and drove me into my hole, so to speak. He thrilled me, filled me, and lifted me.
I saw him 20 years later when his name was on everyone’s lips. I heard him preach and I noticed that he quoted a lot of scriptures, but he never picked up his Bible.
I noticed he had a theory and a philosophy of redemption instead of a simple old-time exposition of the word. And I saw that man whose name was known in every part of the world with something like 60 churches sponsoring him in a building that seated only a few thousand.
And the building wasn’t even half full. He had the greatest gospel singer that this country had ever produced. But the meeting was as dry and dead as any formal service imaginable.
I said to the singer who left that field and came with me for a campaign or two, Charlie, what’s the matter with him?
Well, he replied, I don’t know, but he’s no more like the man he used to be than anything in this world.
There had been no sin come into that man’s life. He was just as clean as he’d ever been. But it happened because somehow he had starved his spiritual life, which hungered for the Bible, the food of the spirit.
And the second thing, He used to have the most marvelous prayer life. He didn’t have it anymore.
And the third thing in that whole sermon, I didn’t hear one personal confession. Because he was preaching in a place where personal confession was taboo.
People criticized it. If you said anything about yourself and your own experience, the ministers would say, he’s just bragging about his own life, isn’t he?
But brother, you will brag about your own life if you have power with God, and you can’t help this bragging. You have something to brag about. You really do. You walk in the fullness of the life and fellowship of your spirit with His Spirit, and you actually have something to talk about, don’t you?
Fresh new experiences are coming into you all the time. You’re walking in the realm of miracles.
I knew that man when he walked in the creative realm of faith. Then I knew him later when he moved down into the purely intellectual realm.
Healing is fundamentally a spiritual thing. The power that heals the sick comes from God down through your spirit and out through your hands into that man or woman.
If you’re having the right kind of spiritual fellowship, you will have power with God, and there’s no escaping it.
But listen, you can’t get a powerful current of divine life from a tiny little wire, can you? And you can’t get it when the wire where it connects with you is corroded with worldly cares.
Now we call on the electrician and say to him, I want you to wire my spirit up with God, and I want fresh equipment the whole way through. Hallelujah.
You say, I’ll tell you what I want, to be able to stand about 10,000 volts. I want to be wired up to God so that the fullness of His power can pour down through me, through my soul, out through my hands, and voice to the people.
How does that come to you? Simplest thing in the world. Your spirit interlocks with His spirit without any foreign substance intervening.
One day my car stopped right in traffic. A young lady sat with Mrs. Lake and she said, Let me try it. She worked the accelerator and it wouldn’t work. She said, Wait a minute. I jumped out of the car and I raised the hood. She said, I can tell you where it is. She just opened the distributor. She said, one of those points has got a fleck of dirt on it. She brushed it off with her handkerchief and put it on again. The car started right up.
That point of the distributor had a little something under it, some corrosion that just broke the current and it was a delicate little thing. Didn’t take much.
It doesn’t take much to break the connection of your spirit and his. God is a spirit. You are a spirit. Something breaks the connection, and the power no longer flows through.
Let’s say you want me to pray for you, and I pray for you, but there’s no power. What’s the matter?
Something has broken the connection. Or there may be something in my spirit, and his spirit wants to communicate with your spirit, but it’s hindered by something in my spirit.
But suppose you and I are both right in our spirits. You’ll get your healing as sure as God sits on the throne. But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall send healing through your spirit and into your mortal flesh, as sure as God is on His throne.
The second thing that must be done continually is that after you’ve fed on the Word and your spirit is open to the truth of confession, you can’t bottle up God.
You can’t lock Him up. It’s been God’s method throughout all the ages to speak to people through those that are in right relationship with Himself.
And when you’re in right relation with Him, the most normal and natural thing is that He will use you to communicate Himself to others.
And so you act as the medium through which He is to pour His message, by song or by testimony or by prayer or by some other means. But you are His medium. You are his testifier. You’re his spokesman. You are his instrument through which he’s going to work. Beautiful, isn’t it?
Now you can see how that keeps you in perfect communion because you have to get new messages continually from him. So you live in perfect fellowship with him, feeding on his word and telling of the things he does for you.
No Christian is safe that doesn’t have a now experience with the Lord because sickness can come on you, and you have no power to throw it off.
You have your now experience in your spirit and you are continually in contact and the spiritual power is coming down and going back and forth continually.
Things are coming down and going up, from Him to you and you to Him, down through your spirit. You have a beautiful picture, like angels ascending and descending. It’s the thoughts of God coming down and your thoughts going back. He’s feeding on you and you are feeding on Him.
The relation of your body to your spiritual life is an almost unexplored reservoir of possibilities. In Romans 6.12, Paul says, Therefore, don’t let sin reign in your mortal body. Don’t let sin reign. What is sin? It’s a disease. He isn’t talking about sin, because if there’s any sin in you, it’s not in your body.
If there is any sin, it’s in your spirit or in your soul, isn’t it? It’s somewhere active in your thinking processes, but he says, don’t let sin reign as God in your mortal, death-doomed body.
Sin is a broken, physical law in your body, just like sickness. If I have a boil, that boil gains the dominion and runs my body, my mind, and my spirit, and all I do is nurse that miserable, aching enemy that’s in there. I’m raising the devil. That is sin in my flesh. And sin has been condemned in the flesh. God condemned the thing, and now sin has broken out in there.
What’s arthritis? Sin in the flesh. And sin shall not have dominion over you. In your body, For you are no longer under law, but under grace, when your body has become the temple of God.
Don’t you know your body has become a member of Christ? Shall a member of Christ be made the member of a prostitute? That doesn’t necessarily mean a woman who’s a prostitute, as we commonly use the word. It may be money, it may be gluttony, it may be 1000 things, but I have taken my body away from the Lord and the Lord’s use. And I’ve committed it to some other use that should not be. Let not sin reign in your mortal body as king. Hallelujah. Neither present your members as weapons of unrighteousness. But you turn your body over to be used by doctors to make money off of? And surgeons chop you up for a splendid fee?
A woman said to me recently, my daughter’s determined to have an operation. I asked, what’s the matter with her? She answered, the doctor doesn’t know. But he thinks he ought to explore in there.
Did you hear that? So, he’s going to cut her open and go exploring. She’ll go, and after she’s all wrecked and ruined, can’t get any healing, then she’ll turn to the Lord. Then she’ll expect to get her healing without asking the Lord’s forgiveness for turning her body over to some man for examination and experimentation.
Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit? Should I take the temple of God then and turn it over to idols and demons? That body of yours is God’s holy house, God’s sanctified dwelling place. It’s the most sacred thing on earth.
Now the tabernacle that God designed and gave to Israel in the wilderness held the Holy of Holies, the inner place.
And within the temple that Solomon was allowed to build for God was the Holy of Holies, for the Shekinah presence dwelt there.
The Shekinah presence now dwells in your body. Picture this. There’s a beautiful church that costs half a million dollars, a dream of architectural beauty. Everything’s in perfect harmony. Wonderful carpets, furniture, wonderful decorations, and the most up-to-date sound and lighting system. Everything is perfectly beautiful and artistic. It’s a beautiful dream.
They dedicate it to the Lord on a Saturday, and they all go home. Sunday, they go down to hold their first service, and when they open the door, they make the most awful discovery. A horrible stench rushes out to meet them. What happened?
I’ll tell you. A blasphemous man opened the door last night and drove in a herd of hogs, and the hogs have been staying in that beautiful place all night. It’s a horrible thing.
That is just what we do with these bodies of ours. We’ve dedicated them to God. Then we let a flock of unclean thoughts come in, and we let diseases come in and settle in these bodies of ours until these precious bodies that belong to God are filled with the children of these unclean things.
Tuberculosis is the child of a thought. It is the product of a mental and spiritual condition. But it’s true that when we are in right communion and fellowship with the Lord, there’s not power enough in all hell to put disease upon your little finger.
And we’ve allowed the flock of that dirty, devilish herd of swine to come into our bodies and fill them with disease. The real healing of your life begins in your spirit, doesn’t it?
Hebrews 7:25 says, Therefore He is able to save to the uttermost those who come unto God through Him, because He always lives to intercede for them.
Now if God is able to save and heal to the uttermost, then there are no healings that are impossible, are there? Absolutely none.
It doesn’t make any difference how sick you are. There is healing for you if you are in contact with the healer. I don’t care how beautiful your lamps are. If outside a fuse is blown out, you won’t get any light. And the fuse that lets the light of God into you is your spirit.
And if that thing is diseased, weak, and sickly, you can’t get much of a current through it, can you?
A man had a vision and saw a strange sight. He saw a piece of desert land and sickly flowers and trees growing on it. He came to but couldn’t get the image out of his head.
The next night, he had the same picture come before him again, and it persisted for three nights.
He said, Lord, what’s this?
A voice answered, don’t you know what it is? He said, no, Lord, I don’t know. He sat looking carefully again, and he finally could see it so vividly. He said, Lord, that’s me. That desert is me.
He continued, I can see that the faith and love and peace and joy that should grow there are those weak, sickly plants.
The Lord said, what would you do if your garden was like that?
He said, I’d plow it, cultivate it, and water it. and the Lord left him to think it over.
Now, if your faith is weak and sickly, it’s because your spiritual connection with the Lord is faulty. Maybe there’s a blown fuse or a switch is out, but there must be a readjustment made of the soul to the body and of soul and body to the spirit.
If I want to put it this way, I’m A three-fold being. To get maximum results, my spirit must be dominant. My soul must be subservient to my spirit, and my body must be under the control of my soul.
Then when my body and soul and spirit are in agreement, when they are in perfect fellowship with each other, they can bring forth real results, can’t they?
Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit? When that happens, then there’s two spirits. There are two spirits in your body now, when there was only one before.
You had a renewed spirit, then the great, mighty Holy Spirit came in. Now you have two spirits in your body and one soul.
The Holy Spirit wants to dominate your spirit. He wants through your spirit to communicate the unveilings of the Father through the Word to your intellect and bring your intellect and your emotions into perfect harmony with His will so that you’ll yield yourself to Him.
And you’ll pour over the Bible and take it as your own. You’ll read it, feed on it, because it’s more necessary than your daily food. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word.
And you pour over it, meditate on it, get to the heart of the thing, and your spiritual nature grows and develops until it dominates your intellect.
But if you read just intellectual things, novels, and entertainment, then your sickly intellect will absolutely dominate your spirit life and break your communion with the Lord and leave your spirit life in darkness.
The way to health is to return to where we belong, isn’t it? So, what’s the way to health? I dare say that it’s possible to rebuild your spiritual life just like you can rebuild a weakened body.
This is something that we see with great athletes. I met one years ago who thought they would die at 18 with tuberculosis, but he ended up a great athlete and became an exceptional wrestler in America.
What a man can do in his physical body can be done in his spirit, and the same can be done with his intellect.
There’s absolutely no reason that our spiritual life should be operating at anything other than 100% efficiency.
I wish I were sensitive enough in my spiritual nature I’d have a blackboard put behind us and I’d invite an artist, and I’d look over the audience and take each one and I’d say to the artist, draw that man’s spirit and let me show him his spiritual condition.
And you would see your spirit up there. If it were a weak, sickly, puny thing, you would see it.
You’d see some people in the meeting that have their spirits on a stretcher. Emaciated, scrawny, with no flesh on them, just skinny, horrible-looking, living corpses.
They have big, muscular bodies, but their spirits are shrinking, feeble, emaciated things.
Some say, What’s the matter with me? I don’t seem to have any joy in the Lord.
Well, a spirit with TB will have no special joy. They say, I know that I have spiritual discernment. Imagine that.
I say, Brother, you have spiritual tuberculosis. Your spirit is emaciated. I don’t know whether it’ll survive the night.
Another one said, what’s the matter with me? I look at him carefully for a moment. Do you want me to diagnose it? Yes, sir. You have a cancer. It’s on your spirit. It’s laying siege to the jugular vein of your spirit, and I don’t think it’ll be long before it’ll finish your spiritual life, and it’ll kill you outright.
Another man said, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I’ll illustrate it. My son used to take his money to buy his lunch at the school. Instead of buying lunch, he bought candy and pop to drink, and he ate pie, cake, and candy until we found out.
The man said, I found out he wouldn’t eat meat or vegetables, and we thought there was something desperately wrong with him, and there was. So, we had someone follow him, and we found out he was buying candy and eating it.
Now, if your spirit has reached the place where it has no appetite for the things of God, you have been playing hooky. You’ve been feeding on things that you shouldn’t eat, and you’ve forced your poor spirit to feed on garbage, useless talk, and joking around.
You haven’t given your spirit any real healthy food for a long time, and the poor thing is dying of hunger.
There was a meeting down in Texas where the whole congregation had come, practically all of them, for healing. They were told, just sit there and listen to me preach, and I won’t pray for you at all.
And the largest percentage of that congregation were perfectly healed in just a little while. They came every day for 30 days. At the end of the 30 days, there was only about 7% of the whole congregation that wasn’t healed.
And all they did was get spiritually healed. When you get healed spiritually, the chances are 100 to 1 you’ll be healed physically.
I’ve discovered that quite a number of people come to be prayed for, and they’re healed over and over again. But the healing you really need is not physical, but spiritual.
You need to be in a position to get well. Get yourself back in communion with God. Get back to feeding on the Word and giving public testimony, and you will be well.
By John G Lake