Preached on Sunday, March 22, 2026, the Fifth Sunday in Lent, at St. George’s Episcopal Church, Anderson.

The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. (Romans 8:7)

Those are strong words from Paul. They are not softened or qualified in any way. Paul does not say that the mind set on the flesh is distracted from God, or uninterested in God, or merely forgetful of God. He says it is hostile to Him. That is a striking claim, because hostility implies opposition. It implies resistance. It suggests that something deep within the human condition does not simply drift away from God, but fights back against Him.

Now, to understand what Paul means, we have to be clear about what he does not mean. When Paul speaks about “the flesh,” he is not talking about our physical bodies. The Christian faith has never believed that the body is not a bad thing. God created the body and called it good. In Jesus Christ, God Himself took on a human body. And the hope of the Christian faith is not escape from the body but its resurrection. So, the problem Paul describes cannot be physical existence itself.

Instead, Paul is describing a way of thinking and a way of living that places the self at the center of everything. The mind set on the flesh is a mind oriented entirely around our own desires, our own fears, our ambitions, and our need for control. It is a life organized around the assumption that we are our own final authority. And that sort of self-centered life fights back against anything beyond human life. Or as Paul puts it, that sort of self-centered life is hostile to God.

That hostility doesn’t usually look dramatic. Most people are not consciously shaking their fists at heaven. The hostility Paul describes is usually much quieter and much more ordinary than all that. It appears whenever we quietly assume that we know what will make us whole better than God does. It appears whenever we arrange our lives around control, security, reputation, or success––as if those things could ultimately save us. It appears whenever God becomes something we acknowledge occasionally but rarely allow to reorder our priorities. In that sense, hostility to God can look very polite and respectable. But it is still resistance.

If we want to see what that hostility looks like when it reaches its full expression, we are about to see it again. Next week is Holy Week. We will walk again through the final days of Jesus’ life. We will watch as crowds gather, as accusations multiply, as fear and power and self-preservation begin to shape every decision at every level. We will hear religious leaders defend their certainty. We will watch political leaders buckle under cheap pressure. And we will see how easily human beings can convince themselves that they are doing the right thing even while they are rejecting––crucifying!––the very presence of God in their midst.

The hostility Paul describes is not an abstract theological idea. It is a force with real consequences. The cross is what happens when human minds are set firmly on self-preservation, control, and fear. And it’s not only a hostility of distant characters in a Gospel story. It’s the same impulse that lives quietly in every human heart––preacher and congregation included.

Paul pushes the point even further by saying that the mind set on the flesh cannot submit to God’s law. It is not simply unwilling; it is unable. Left to ourselves, we remain curved inward on our own lives. The gravitational pull of self-interest is stronger than we imagine. If the Christian life depended entirely on our own ability to reorient ourselves toward God, we would remain trapped exactly where we are.

But Paul does not leave us there. In the very next breath, he says something remarkable: “You are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” In other words, the Christian life does not begin with our ability to fix ourselves––that’s the stuff of the flesh. The Christian life begins with something God does first. God places His Own Spirit within us.

That changes everything.

The Spirit begins to reshape the mind that once resisted God. Slowly and patiently, the Spirit loosens the grip of that old way of thinking that revolved entirely around ourselves. The mind that was once governed by anxiety about control begins to discover trust. The mind that once sought constant self-justification begins to discover forgiveness. The mind that once assumed that life belongs to us begins to recognize life as a gift received from God.

This is not an instant transformation. The Christian life is not a sudden escape from the struggles of the human heart. But it is the beginning of a new direction. The mind once set on the flesh begins, little by little, to be set on the Spirit.

And that is why this passage matters as we approach Holy Week. The Spirit Who dwells within us is the same Spirit Who raised Jesus from the dead. The story we are about to walk through is not only the story of human hostility toward God. It is the story of God refusing to abandon a hostile people—because they are His people. It is the story of God entering the very depth of our resistance and answering it not with death but with life.

Which means that, when we arrive at the cross, we are not simply witnessing the tragedy of human blindness. We are witnessing the place where God begins to unravel our hostility—lovingly, and graciously, and definitively.

And the Spirit of the risen Christ is still doing that work in us even now. Amen.