Big Healing Book - What Romans 8:9 Really Means

What Romans 8:9 Really Means

Romans 8:9:
But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.

This important verse about the Holy Spirit is the source of great controversy in Christian circles. It is typically used to attempt to “prove” that you get all of the Holy Spirit when you get saved and do not need a subsequent “baptism with the Holy Spirit.” One group even claims that this verse proves that only people who are baptized with the Holy Spirit are saved! A lot is at stake here, so we need to figure out what to do with this verse!

Here are our candidates:

A. You have all there is of the Holy Spirit the instant you are saved.

B. The Holy Spirit comes to live within you when you are saved, but power for ministry and the ability to speak and sing with tongues only come when you are subsequently baptized with the Holy Spirit.

C. If you do not receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit and speak with tongues, you do not belong to Christ yet – you are still on your way to hell.

D. The Spirit of Christ is different from the Spirit of God and refers to Christ living in you, not the Holy Spirit living in you.

E. No one has the Holy Spirit at all until he is baptized with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of Christ refers to your new born-again spirit and not to the Spirit of God.

F. The Spirit of Christ only refers to the attitude of Christ, not to a literal person.

Let’s go through these one at a time and examine the strengths and weaknesses of each argument. Then we’ll go into more depth and see what we find. This should be interesting!

A. You have all there is of the Holy Spirit the instant you are saved.

It seems rather straightforward in this verse that if you don’t have the Holy Spirit, you are not saved! So this seems to be a good argument that being saved means you already have the Holy Spirit – unless we can prove below that the “Spirit of Christ” means something other than its seemingly obvious meaning of being synonymous with the “Spirit of God.” The question would still be whether there is a separate “baptism with the Holy Spirit” that accomplishes something else.

After all, claiming that you get only “part of the Holy Spirit” when you’re saved raises difficult questions.

First, how do we square that with the idea in John 3:34 that God does not give the Holy Spirit by measure, which is the correct interpretation of that verse? (For proof of that, see Objection: We Cannot Heal as Jesus Did Because He Had the Spirit Without Measure, While We Have the Spirit Given by Measure.) Would not saying that you only have a “measure” of the Holy Spirit when you are saved but not yet baptized with the Holy Spirit blatantly contradict this verse?

Second, the Holy Spirit is a Person, not a commodity. How exactly could you have “part of” that Person living in you? Would that not be like being married to part of a person or being descended from part of a person? Persons are indivisible.

Third, the verse below appears to indicate that you are sealed with the Holy Spirit immediately upon salvation:

Ephesians 1:13:
In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise,

Most, but not all, translations say that you are sealed “with the Holy Spirit.” Young’s Literal Translation agrees. If that is true, you MUST “have” the Holy Spirit if you are sealed with Him, which happens when you get saved. It would be different if you were sealed by Him. So it’s time to check the Greek – does the word with actually appear in the Greek? The verdict: It doesn’t, but neither does the word by. There is room for disagreement here. You could be sealed by the Holy Spirit without having the Holy Spirit inside you.

There is a similar verse to this one:

Ephesians 4:30:
And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.

It certainly seems like the Spirit is given to you when you are saved, though we don’t have an airtight case for it yet. But the more we think about this, the more problematic the typical charismatic understanding of the matter becomes, and the more it seems like we might have to “dodge” the issue by redefining the term “Spirit of Christ” to not mean the Holy Spirit, if we can support that with other Scriptures.

We’ll revisit these matters later.

It is beyond dispute that something transformative can happen after you are already saved if you “receive the Holy Spirit” or are “baptized with the Holy Spirit” (synonymous terms). People who weren’t speaking in tongues or prophesying suddenly did. The main Scriptures that prove an after-conversion event are in Acts 2, Acts 8, Acts 9 and Acts 19 and are documented in the article How to Be Baptized with the Holy Spirit. (There are other passages as well, and they are also mentioned in that article.)

So there is definitely something to being baptized with the Holy Spirit subsequent to salvation. The question is what your relationship with the Holy Spirit is if you are saved but not yet baptized with the Holy Spirit. (I don’t recommend that you stay in that condition, and neither does God.)

At least we know that you are definitely not “baptized with the Holy Spirit’ upon salvation. If you were, Peter and John would not have been sent to water-baptized believers in Samaria to get them baptized with the Holy Spirit, and Paul would not have laid hands on the water-baptized believers in Ephesus so that they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit, speak in tongues and prophesy. And Jesus surely would not have ordered His born-again followers to remain in Jerusalem until they were baptized with the Holy Spirit if they were already baptized with the Holy Spirit automatically because they were saved! (Do we know that for sure that they were saved? Yes, Thomas believed that God raised Jesus from the dead and confessed Him as Lord (John 20:28), so he was saved according to Romans 10:9. There is no reason to doubt that the rest of them were in the same condition.)

Furthermore, Luke 11:13 would make no sense, because the Father would never have to be asked to give the Holy Spirit if He were “given” to everyone who was saved automatically as part of the new birth.

So this explanation has a lot going for it too.

C. If you do not receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, you do not belong to Christ yet – you are still on your way to hell.

As shocking as this interpretation is, you have to give its proponents credit for being logical strictly within the confines of this one verse. If you take the position that a believer does not have the Holy Spirit at all until he is baptized with the Holy Spirit, and you assume that the Spirit of Christ means the Holy Spirit, you have just “proved” that only Spirit-baptized people are saved!

However, this is an easy choice to disprove. In both Samaria and Ephesus, believers were baptized in water, proving that they were saved before they were baptized with the Holy Spirit. The Ephesian believers spoke in tongues after they were baptized with the Holy Spirit, which was after they were baptized in water, which had to have been after they were saved. This proves that you can be saved without speaking in tongues, as the Ephesians were in that condition for a brief time. So we can close the book immediately on this choice and concentrate on the remaining five choices.

D. The Spirit of Christ is different from the Spirit of God and refers to Christ living in you, not the Holy Spirit living in you.

These remaining options are designed to resolve the difficulties with both choices A and B by asserting that the Spirit of Christ does not mean the same thing as the Spirit of God, though both phrases appear in the verse we’re studying.

This is not as ridiculous as it sounds at first. Why would Paul use the phrases Spirit of God and Spirit of Christ in the same verse if there is actually no distinction?

Another argument for this option is that Christ does not dwell in you with His resurrected body. Thus, you do not have Christ’s body living in your body; you only have the spirit part of Him living in you, and thus, the “Spirit of Christ” is tantamount to the part of “Christ” that lives in you. If we can support this, it could be a way to get out of the apparent contradictions raised by the first two options.

E. No one has the Holy Spirit at all until he is baptized with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of Christ refers to your new born-again spirit and not to the Spirit of God.

This is another attempt to redefine “Spirit of Christ” to solve the other difficulties. This time, the assumption is that Paul is referring to the born-again spirit that you are because of Christ. This is the first of the two options where a member of the Trinity is not said to indwell a believer, which definitely takes this outside the mainstream of Christian thought. But then again, mainstream Christianity (in many places) denies that there is a baptism with the Holy Spirit subsequent to salvation, so we’re not going to gallop off and take a poll to determine who’s right.

F. The Spirit of Christ only refers to the attitude of Christ, not to a literal person.

This is definitely outside the mainstream too, but it has going for it the fact that “spirit” in the Bible CAN refer to either a literal spirit being or to an attitude. The same Greek word for spirit (pneuma) used all three times in Romans 8:9 also appears in the verses below. (There are quite a few other verses where a spirit being does not appear to be the meaning, but these should suffice.)

1 Corinthians 4:21:
What will ye? shall I come unto you with a rod, or in love, and in the spirit of meekness?

Ephesians 4:23:
And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;

This does not mean that your mind has its own literal spirit! It is talking about the attitude of your mind.

So now we have to consider the implications of a statement that anyone not having the attitude of Christ is not a Christian. That breaks down on us. Paul rebuked plenty of churches (as did Jesus) for having un-Christian attitudes that needed to be corrected, but he did not assert that everyone with the wrong attitude was not really saved. I’m quite sure that you could think of people who are genuinely Christians but usually display un-Christian attitudes! (I hope you are not one of them.) So we can toss this option out of hand and be left with four choices to consider.

The Spirit of Christ in Scripture

Options D and E stand or fall together based on whether we can reconcile the alternative definitions of the Spirit of Christ with the rest of the Bible. It turns out that there is only one other explicit reference to the “Spirit of Christ.”

1 Peter 1:10-11:
Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:
Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.

According to this, Old Testament prophets had the Spirit of Christ in them, though obviously Christ did not dwell in anyone permanently back then.

We can be absolutely sure that these Old Testament saints did not have spirits that were born again because of Christ. If we can’t assume that here, we have no right to assume that “Spirit of Christ” applies to a born-again spirit in the only other place where that phrase appears in Scripture. Thus, we can knock out choice E and we’re left with choices A, B and D – and D is looking shaky right now given that Christ did not abide permanently in Old Testament saints. We won’t declare D to be knocked out yet, because one could argue that the Spirit of God didn’t live permanently in Old Testament saints either.

Now we have a thought. We only got one other match for “Spirit of Christ,” but what about “Spirit of Jesus Christ,” which should mean the same thing? And it turns out that there is such a verse.

Philippians 1:19:
For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

While I won’t cite this as absolute proof, it is looking like Spirit of Christ refers to the Spirit of God and is just another name for the same Person.

We’ll have to look elsewhere to decide this contest.

The Context of Romans 8:9

It’s always good to consider a verse’s context when determining its meaning. So let’s do that.

Romans 8:9-16:
But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.
And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.
Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.
For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.
For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.
The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:

The fact that the phrase “if Christ be in you” follows “have not the Spirit of Christ” could be used as argument that “Spirit of Christ” and “Christ” are functionally identical, as option D asserts. Thus, Paul would be saying that if Christ doesn’t live in you, you aren’t a Christian, which any evangelical Christian should agree is true.

On the other hand, the passage above includes many references to the Holy Spirit – calling Him the Spirit of God, His Spirit, the Spirit of Him who raised Christ from the dead, the Spirit, and the Spirit of adoption. It seems to be pushing it to declare that the one place where “Spirit of Christ” is used refers to Christ Himself and not to the Holy Spirit when the Holy Spirit is clearly the Person being discussed elsewhere in this passage with any title including “Spirit.”

Now it occurs to us that Paul didn’t say, “if the Spirit of Christ be in you;” he said “if Christ be in you.” So actually, the use of two distinct terms in adjoining verses could dissuade us from concluding that “Spirit of Christ” and “Christ” are really identical. But then again, why would Paul use “Spirit of God” and several other titles for the same Person in the same passage? That doesn’t prove that there are several distinct Beings in this passage! So option D looks pretty dim, but so do the other ones! We now know some things that Romans 8:9 does NOT say, but can we ever prove what it DOES say when every explanation seems to have serious pitfalls?

Different Names in the Same Verse

Suddenly we get an idea. Are there other places where the Holy Spirit is referred to by different titles in the same verse? If this is a pattern, we can knock out option D, because we can safely assume that Romans 8:9 is just another verse where the same Holy Spirit is referred to by different names. And we find the verses below as well as Romans 8:11 (the third verse in the passage above)!

Luke 4:1:
And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness,

John 1:33:
And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost.

John 7:39:
But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)

Acts 2:4:
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

1 Corinthians 12:3:
Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.

At this point, we can eliminate option D, as it is consistent with Scripture for the same Holy Spirit to be referred to by different names in the same verse. At least we’re down to the last two choices. But now we’re back to our uncomfortable dilemma where it appears that someone who “has” the Holy Spirit because he is Christ’s needs to “receive” the Holy Spirit! Now what?

Joined with Someone You Don’t Have?

Let’s consider that when you get saved, you are “born of the Spirit” and you become “one spirit” with the Lord:

John 3:8:
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

1 Corinthians 6:17:
But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.

If your spirit is one with the Holy Spirit because you are born again, it makes no sense to state that you don’t “have” the very Spirit you are “one” with! And it would be really stretching things to claim that you are “one spirit” with Jesus and God the Father but not with the Holy Spirit.

Sealing the Deal?

We have already seen that you are “sealed with the Holy Spirit” (per most translations) when you are saved. As we saw, there is room to debate that this might mean sealed “by” the Holy Spirit, but that would mean that the Holy Spirit seals you and then takes off on you. This seems dubious.

Then we see that God has given us the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts. Does this not apply, as most people would assume, to ALL believers?

2 Corinthians 1:22:
Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.

Here’s another reference to being given the Holy Spirit when you are saved:

1 John 4:13:
Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit.

The difficulty here is the word of, which does appear in the Greek. Is there a difference between “of His Spirit” and “His Spirit?” As usual, we look to the Bible for our answer and we find it. Peter said that God’s pouring out “of His Spirit” fulfilled Joel’s prophecy that God would pour out “His Spirit,” so we have precedent for them meaning the same thing:

Joel 2:28:
And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:

Acts 2:17:
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:

Who Cries Abba, Father?

We saw above that we have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, “Abba, Father.” We know that God is Father to all believers, whether Spirit-baptized or not (John 1:12). So it makes sense that ALL believers “have received the Spirit of adoption.” This is yet another argument that you “have” the Holy Spirit if you’re saved.

Receiving Insight?

Does “receive” in the Greek mean something different than what we would normally think? Is “receiving the Holy Spirit’ really just welcoming Him when He is already there? For example, someone could be “in” your house without you “receiving” the person – greeting him or even acknowledging him.

That’s a nice try, but it won’t bail us out. The word for “receive” when used about the Holy Spirit is the same Greek word (lambano) that means “receive” as we would understand it everywhere else in the New Testament. It was worth checking out, though!

If You Have the Holy Spirit When You’re Saved, What Else Is There to Get?

So we conclude that if you are saved, God HAS given you the Holy Spirit.

But that doesn’t mean you can do the things you can do if you’re “baptized with the Holy Spirit,” which we have seen is subsequent to salvation.

So what does it mean to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, which is clearly separate from the new birth, if you already “have” the Spirit?

This act of immersion (that’s what baptism means) allows you to speak in tongues, flow in spiritual gifts, and gives you great boldness to be a witness. It is so important that Jesus told His disciples not to leave Jerusalem without this experience.

What Romans 8:9 Really Means

Given the facts above, we reach the conclusion that Romans 8:9 must be taken at its obvious face value when it says that if you have not the Spirit of Christ, you are none of His (and thus unsaved). In other words, the Holy Spirit comes to live inside you when you are saved. However, there are limits to what He will do through you until you are baptized with the Holy Spirit, which is definitely a separate experience unless you are like the people at Cornelius’s house who got saved and baptized with the Holy Spirit and started speaking in tongues all at once. (See How to Be Baptized with the Holy Spirit for that account.)

We also conclude that “receiving the Holy Spirit” is Bible language for being baptized with the Holy Spirit and not an indication that the Holy Spirit is not in you at all if you are saved.