<p>8:9- see on Rom. 6:12.</p><p><i>But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit-&nbsp;</i>By status, by position. Note from 1 Cor. 3:16 that believers, even those who have the gifts of the Spirit, can still be &ldquo;carnal&rdquo; or fleshly in some aspects of their actual behaviour. Hence Paul must be talking here in positional terms.</p><p><i>If </i><i>the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone has not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his</i>- This could imply that Paul doubted whether some of his readership really were in the sphere of the Spirit. However, this would contradict the entire tone of this section and the argument so far- that all those baptized into Christ must be considered by us as unquestioningly &ldquo;in the Spirit&rdquo;.&nbsp; It would also jar with the otherwise positive tone Paul takes towards the Roman believers, speaking in 8:12 as if &ldquo;we&rdquo;, he and his readership, are all in the same status. &ldquo;If so be&rdquo; can be read quite comfortably as meaning &lsquo;Seeing that&rsquo;. This is how it is translated in 2 Thess. 1:6, &ldquo;<i>Seeing that</i>&nbsp;it is&hellip;&rdquo;. &nbsp;We can be assured that our status is &ldquo;in the Spirit&rdquo; rather than &ldquo;in the flesh&rdquo; by the fact that the Spirit dwells in us. If we don&rsquo;t have the Spirit of Christ, then we are not &ldquo;his&rdquo;- and the Greek for &ldquo;his&rdquo; would I suggest better be translated &ldquo;Him&rdquo;, or even &ldquo;He himself&rdquo;. We are reckoned as Christ Himself because we are in Him by faith and baptism into Him. His Spirit is counted as our spirit, in the sense that His character, His personality, His totally obedient mind, are counted as ours. So we aren&rsquo;t so much as reading that we had better ensure we are spiritually minded and have the mind of Christ; we are being assured that we can be sure we are &ldquo;in Him&rdquo; because we are counted as Him, His perfect mind and character, His spirit, are counted as ours. Hence Paul can write with such confidence that &ldquo;we have the mind of Christ&rdquo; (1 Cor. 2:16). We do not in fact think like Him, at least, our mind and spirit are not of themselves like His were and are. But His mind / spirit is counted to us, because of our status in Him. And &ldquo;the spirit of God&rdquo; is paralleled with the spirit of Christ in the sense that Jesus was perfectly like God in the way He thought, felt and acted. And this is counted to us. We thereby have also the mind of God counted to us- the family spirit is counted to us as we have been adopted into that family of Father and Son (Rom. 8:15).&nbsp;</p>