Life in the Spirit versus the Religious Life in the Flesh

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. (Romans 8:5-8)

by Brian Shilhavy

In the summer of 1979, I was living the “dream life” of a 19-year-old in the Milwaukee area of Wisconsin. One year out of high school, I was earning great money and even driving my dream car, a red Mach 1 Ford Mustang, with the earlier 302 V8 engine. There wasn’t a car in town that could beat me off the line, unless I pressed the gas pedal too hard and spun my tires, which was all too easy to do.

I was living in a very nice condominium with another guy who worked at the same factory where I worked, and was a bit older than me and wealthier. Throughout high school I had been a small-time marijuana dealer, but this guy who became my roommate had direct connections to the Italian mob who ran the drug trade in Milwaukee back then, so I never had to buy weed again as it was plentiful in our house, with many people coming and going as they purchased the best marijuana available in the area from my roommate.

I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. I was miserable. I had excelled at almost everything I did in high school. I was the layout editor of my school’s newspaper in my junior year, and my high school was the largest in the state. I was a good writer, and was set to become the head editor of the student newspaper in my senior year.

But I didn’t want to go to college, so in my senior year I enrolled in a special program that was the result of mandated desegregation back then, and I took business classes in the mornings at a different high school in a mostly black neighborhood, before returning to my home school in the afternoon.

I excelled in that also, wining local and statewide awards for business, math, marketing. I was all set to go out and become rich without having to go to college.

And I did all this while also being a “dope head”, someone who smoked marijuana every day.

So as I have recorded in my personal “testimony” called “How I Found Peace with God” which I have always had links to when I began publishing on the Internet years later, and has now been read by tens of millions of people over the past two and a half decades, I stopped getting high and started to just read the Bible every day, trying to find out what exactly God wanted me to do with my life.

I had been miserable, and had tried committing suicide two years before that in 1977.

And that’s when God met me, and completely changed my life, filling me with his Holy Spirit. I was not in a church, or part of any Christian religious organization. It was just me, God, and the Bible. And I was honest with God, because I had enough Christian upbringing and teaching to know that God knew everything about me anyway.

So I became totally honest and transparent before God, and told him that I was not going to move forward with my life until he told me what to do. I apologized to him for living my life for so long before asking him why he put me on earth, and what exactly he wanted me to do with this life.

Since I knew what it felt like to be high on marijuana and what it felt like to be not high on it, I experienced a new kind of “high” that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I felt a flood of emotions and feelings that words could not express, and I experienced a new kind of “joy” that I did not even know existed.

It was a joy that was not dependent upon my circumstances or anything else, and it did not come from smoking pot. I no longer feared the future.

I spent the next several days reading the entire New Testament to try and understand what had just happened to me, and of all the books of the New Testament, the book of Romans, written by Paul, seemed to be the most concise description of what I had just experienced.

Going Back to School

Needless to say, becoming rich was no longer my goal. My goal was to understand God more, and I just could not get enough of the Bible, and literally read it for hours every day.

I decided to go back to school and study the Bible. I was from a Lutheran background, and the particular Lutheran church in Mequon, Wisconsin that my mother belonged to, had a “renegade” pastor who was not well-liked by that particular Synod.

He had been the chaplain for the Green Bay Packers during the Lombardi championship years, and would often bring “celebrities” to his church in Mequon who would give their personal “testimonies” about how Jesus Christ changed their lives, going through the “born again” experience.

I can remember when he invited Terry Anne Meeuwsen to speak at the church to talk about how God changed her life, a few years after she had won the Miss America pageant in 1973. She later went on to co-host the 700 Club with Pat Robertson.

So this pastor was someone I could identify with, and I knew he would understand what I had just experienced.

I told him I wanted to go back to school, and that I wanted to go to the same school he went to, which was Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a Lutheran College.

This man tried to dissuade me from going there, warning me that the people at the school would probably not accept me, and that I would find out that their beliefs were very different.

But it didn’t matter to me. I was ready to take on the world, and literally feared NOTHING. If that school was good enough for him, I reasoned, it was good enough for me also.

2 Years at a Christian Liberal Arts College

So I enrolled that fall at Carthage College. I was full of the Holy Spirit, and shared my testimony about how God changed my life every chance I got.

I was assigned to one of the two boys dorms, and put on a floor called the “MukPhuggers”. Yeah. And this was a “Christian school.”

My roommate was another freshman who was a tall guy and was there on a track scholarship.

One of the first nights we were there, just before classes started, the upperclassmen rounded up all the freshman and said it was time for “freshman orientation.” They wanted us to march over the girls dorm, pull down our pants and “moon” them.

I told the guy who was our “dorm captain” that there was no way I was going to do that, because I was there to study God’s word. I was the only freshman who said no, as they put a lot of pressure on us to do this, as if we had no choice.

But I didn’t care. I didn’t do it, and that was my first experience in learning that if one was to truly follow Christ, and walk in the Spirit, most everyone else, including Christians, will oppose you.

When I woke up the next morning and opened my room door to go to the bathroom, someone had sprayed shaving cream all over our door. My poor roommate. He didn’t sign up for that.

The dorm captain quickly transferred me to another floor that was reserved for the “serious students”, and most of them were pre-seminary students who planned on going into the “ministry” as pastors or other Christian leaders.

It was much better there. The pre-seminary student I was assigned to as a roommate, was gay, I found out later after I left the school and met him one day on the subway system in Chicago. He was nice to me though, and we were good friends. He was always astounded that I spent so much time studying the Bible on my own, outside of class.

The reason I had to study the Bible on my own, was because Carthage was not a “Bible School”, but a Christian Liberal Arts school, and they only offered two classes on the Bible: New Testament and Old Testament.

I enrolled in Old Testament as a freshman, and it was taught by a Lutheran Seminary graduate. On the first day of class, this teacher literally tried to destroy such naive faith that students had in the Bible, and made it clear that the Bible was NOT inspired, and that it was just like every other book of literature written throughout history.

Well I could not accept that, because I had experienced firsthand how it had changed my life, making me stronger in the Holy Spirit.

So I objected, right there in class. He ridiculed me, but how could I debate someone with so much knowledge and academic training as he had?

I couldn’t. Not at that time.

But he gave me time in class to talk, so I did. I simply told my “testimony,” about how God had miraculously saved me from trying to kill myself, and that reading the Bible had completely changed my life.

That was probably the only class session that semester that the entire class heard the Good News about Jesus Christ! And he had no response. How could he? He either had to call me a liar, or just shake his head and say, “well good for you,” which is what he did.

So I went to the campus pastor and complained. I told him I wanted to study the Bible, but how could I study it if the professors didn’t even believe it was true, but was just allegory and literature and no more special than any other book?

He told me that there was a small group of students on campus who believed like I did, and referred me to the one who was head of the group that year.

It was a group called “InterVarsity Christian Fellowship” (IVCF). It was 100% student led, with only a staff member from the organization that would visit once in a while to offer guidance. Their focus was on Bible study, and that was my first exposure to Evangelical Christianity.

It was a small group of students from a wide variety of backgrounds, and it was great! They believed in the authority of the Scriptures, and the power behind them.

There were other Lutherans, Methodists and other mainline denominations, as well as Pentecostals and Baptists. But our common bond was that we strived to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit, and teach the Bible to others.

I quickly became well-known on campus, because I was not afraid to stand up for my faith at a Christian school, and oppose the evil things that were being done on campus. Honestly, it was no different from a secular school. Sex was rampant, and when the fire alarms went off at night, you could see how many of the female students came out of the rooms of the boys dorms, especially the Greek Fraternities.

But because I was so vocal about my faith, I became very well known on campus, and other students sought me out who had problems, and we were soon dealing with drug addictions and demonic oppression with so many students, who had no where else to turn.

I stayed there for two years and became part of the leadership of IVCF, before transferring to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where I went on to graduate with a BA in Bible and Greek.

Romans 8: Life in the Spirit

One of the great habits I learned in those early years with IVCF, was developing daily habits of reading the Bible, and also memorizing much of it. I actually memorized the entire 8th chapter of the book of Romans, and later when I attended Moody, I took a class on the book of Romans, and the professor gave the students the option of memorizing and reciting the entire first 8 chapters of Romans, in lieu of taking a final exam.

I was the only student who did so.

I have continued these habits my entire life, and so when I was reading through Romans 8 again this morning in my daily devotions, I knew that the Holy Spirit was leading me to write an article about “life in the Spirit” and “life in the flesh.”

I struggled with how to present this to Health Impact News and Created4Health.org readers, and then the idea came to me to just tell my story again, like I did in those early years before I could debate so-called “biblical scholars.”

Oh, to be sure, I can walk into any church today, especially Evangelical churches, and probably put their pastor to shame in any debate, as I have been studying the Bible for over 45 years now.

When I attended Moody, it was easy to see which professors really knew God and walked in the Spirit, and those who simply reproduced what they learned in seminary, with Dallas Theological Seminary being the most common one professors at Moody back then (and probably still today) attended.

I learned that the average Evangelical pastor switched churches on an average of every two years, because that was how long it took them to prepare sermons and Bible studies based on their seminary education. After that, they had nothing original, and usually moved on to the next church that “called” them.

Romans chapter 8 is the crown jewel of Paul’s treatise of what the “Good News”, or “gospel” is, as he so eloquently argues in the first 7 chapters.

The first 7 chapters clearly show how the Jewish people have no special privileges just because they received the Law of Moses and the Old Testament prophets, and are no more special than the Gentiles (non-Jews).

The Law of Moses is righteous, but in our own flesh, we are powerless to obey the laws and keep them.

It is only when the Spirit of God comes into our lives, that we can truly be free.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.

By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.

For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.

Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you.

Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.

But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. (Romans 8:1-11)

That’s it. That’s everything. You either have the Spirit of God living in you, or you do not, and you try to be a good person through religion and obeying all the teaching of that religion.

And that includes Christianity. In fact, I think Christianity is probably the most dangerous religion in the world, because it claims to follow the teachings of the Bible, and uses a lot of biblical terminology, but in the end, they are no better than any other religion.

What matters is to be “in Christ”, and have his Spirit dwelling in you.

How does one know if they have the Holy Spirit living in them?

Oh, that’s easy. The world will hate you, including most everyone in your own family. You will always be going in the opposite direction of anybody and everyone you know. And only those who are strengthened by the power we have in the Spirit of Christ, will be able to do that.

It is a life just like the one Jesus led. A life of persecution, difficulties, hardships, and even physical death.

We don’t live for this life. This life is WORK and hardship. The rewards and the “Good Life” are yet to come.

Peace! (Shalom, Salam.)

P.S. I forgot to mention that the guy at Carthage who was my first roommate and was there on a track scholarship, looked me up online several years ago, and told me that years later, he too gave his life to Christ and began walking in the Spirit, and he said that he never forgot what I did that first week in freshman orientation.

The guy who worked at the same factory that I did in 1979 and was my roommate, was on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal shortly after I started Carthage, because he and others were arrested for “kidnapping” a woman who owed them drug money.

But for the Grace of God, I too would have probably been in that picture, and my life would have taken a far different course.

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This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)