Reality & The Relationship

How Do I Cooperate With the Spirit in Everyday Life?

Before I could understand my role, there were quite a few abstract concepts I needed to try and grasp.

The Bible says I have “died to sin” and am now “alive to God in Christ.”

But what does that actually mean?

The idea of being “in Christ” was hard for me to understand at first.

Passages in Romans, Corinthians, and Hebrews helped me understand it a bit better.

Ancestral representation means that a forefather can represent those who come from him. Descendants can inherit the consequences of an ancestor’s actions. Hebrews describes Levi as being “in the loins” of his ancestor Abraham before Levi was born, allowing the author to speak of Levi participating in something Abraham did generations earlier.

Humanity is like a single unit bound to its head, Adam. In the first birth, I was born physically into the line of Adam through the “loins” of my human ancestors, receiving a physical body made from dust that ages and dies as a result of his failure.

We couldn’t simply escape the old existence we inherited in Adam—under the reign of sin and death.

When Paul says sin reigns, he means sin acts like a king. Apart from Christ, sin isn’t merely something I occasionally do; it is a ruling power that shapes my desires, thoughts, and choices, pulling me toward selfishness, pride, and self-preservation.

And death reigns right alongside it. Because of Adam, mortality entered the human story and spread to everyone. No amount of trying harder could free me from the death-bound existence I inherited from him. I needed more than improved behavior. I needed a way out of the old humanity altogether.

That helped Paul’s marriage analogy make more sense to me.

He uses marriage to show a larger principle: death changes a binding legal relationship with what previously had authority over you.

So God united us with Christ in His death.

Then, raised with Christ into new life, we are legally free to belong to Him and live as part of the new humanity He has begun.

God became flesh in Jesus and became the head of that new humanity, creating a new family line.

In this second birth, I was born spiritually: God brought me into His family, joined me to Christ, and gave me His Spirit and eternal life. I always wondered what Jesus meant by being born again.

Paul says that through the first Adam, death reigned, but through Christ, those who receive grace and righteousness will “reign in life.”

Another biblical picture helped me understand how being joined to Christ changes the source of my life: grafting.

I started picturing it like a branch cut from an old, dying tree and grafted into a healthy one. Once it has been joined to the new tree, its life no longer comes from the old root. It now receives nourishment from the root it has been joined to.

Scripture’s grafting imagery gave me the basis for that concrete picture: a branch sharing in the life and nourishment of the root it has been joined to.

That helped me picture something I had struggled to understand.

I was born into Adam’s humanity, under the reign of sin and death. But in union with Christ, the old person I was in Adam died with Him on the cross. I was raised with Christ into new life and given His Spirit.

My identity and final destiny are no longer determined by Adam.

I belong to Christ.

And whatever is true of the root determines the life available to the branches joined to it. Christ has been raised from the dead, and death no longer has dominion over Him. The life I now share in Him is resurrection life—eternal life.

I finally had a picture for it:

I hadn’t been given instructions for making the old tree healthier.

God had joined me to a new source of life.

And that is what makes the Christian life possible in the first place.

I’m not an unchanged person standing outside Jesus trying really hard to copy Him.

I have been joined to Him, given His Spirit, and made spiritually alive to God.

God giving me new life produces something the law—or information alone—never could:

I begin to desire Him.

Thanks to the Holy Spirit, I can actually be in a relationship with God now. I can know Him and learn His ways.

He reveals truth.

He empowers obedience.

He produces change.

These are things I could never manufacture by learning more rules or trying harder.

So what exactly is my role in all of this?

That was the part I kept getting hung up on.

If the Spirit is the One doing all of that, am I just along for the ride?

After A LOT of questions, I learned the answer was no.

My role is to turn my attention toward God. I learn who God is, what He has done, who I am in Christ, and how He says reality actually works.

I read Scripture. I meditate on it. I pray. I remember. I allow His truth to increasingly shape my mind.

And then I trust Him.

Trust is more than believing that something God says is factually correct.

It is putting my weight on it.

God says my worth is settled in Christ.

Okay.

Will I actually put my weight on that?

Or will I go looking for someone else’s approval to settle it for me?

And when the Spirit’s desire conflicts with the old instincts of my flesh, I surrender my claim to lead and I follow Him.

Then I actually do what follows from that trust.

Forgive.

Apologize.

Give.

Wait.

Tell the truth.

Stay quiet.

Serve.

Walk away.

Whatever obedience looks like in that particular moment.

I take the next step.

And then I do it again.

And when I drift, I return.

This is what it looks like to be in a relationship with God.

Suddenly, some of the phrases I had heard my entire life started making a lot more sense.

“Walk by the Spirit.”

Live in dependence on the Spirit, responding to the truth He reveals and the desires He produces.

“Deny yourself.”

Say no to the competing desire of the flesh and my old instincts of self-rule.

“Take up your cross.”

Go His way when obedience costs me something.

“Abide in Me.”

Remain dependent on Him as the source of this new life.

As I repeatedly cooperate with the Spirit in daily life, He transforms me.

Each time I choose His way, the Spirit is doing something much deeper than behavior modification.

He is forming the character of Christ in me.

Over time, the choices that once felt completely foreign can begin to become more natural and characteristic of the way I actually live.

A life that increasingly looks like Christ begins to emerge.

I remember teaching my boys one of their first Bible verses when they were toddlers. Now, a few years later, I finally understand just how much was packed into those words.

Jesus says in John 15:4:

“Remain in me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.”

A branch doesn’t produce grapes by studying grapes and trying really hard to become more grape-like.

But the branch isn’t irrelevant either.

It remains connected to its source of life, and the life of the vine produces fruit through it.

That distinction finally makes sense to me.

My repeated choices to follow where His Spirit leads aren’t attempts to manufacture Christlike behavior. They are places where the new life He has given me is being expressed—and where, over time, the Spirit is forming me into someone who increasingly behaves like Jesus.

The law can tell me what fruit should look like.

The vine gives me the life from which fruit can actually come.

It doesn’t appear instantly.

It grows.

And apparently, so do I.

But there was a phrase from Romans 5:17 that caught my attention.

“Reign in life.”

What does that mean?

I had a feeling Paul was talking about more than what happens after I die.