Romans 13:14

ἀλλὰ ἐνδύσασθε τὸν Κ. Ἰ. Χριστὸν, ἀλλὰ emphasises the contrast between the true Christian life and that which has just been described. The Christian puts on the Lord Jesus Christ, according to Paul's teaching, in baptism (cf. Galatians 3:27), as the solemn deliberate act in which he identifies himself, by faith, with Christ in His death and resurrection (chap. Romans 6:3). But the Christian life is not exhausted in this act, which is rather the starting-point for a putting on of Christ in the ethical sense, a “clothing of the soul in the moral disposition and habits of Christ” (Gifford); or as the Apostle himself puts it in Romans 6:11, a reckoning of ourselves to be dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Every time we perform an ethical act of this kind we put on the Lord Jesus Christ more fully. But the principle of all such acts is the Spirit of Christ dwelling in us (chaps. 6 8), and it is the essential antagonism of the spirit to the flesh which determines the form of the last words: καὶ τῆς σαρκὸς πρόνοιαν μὴ ποιεῖσθε εἰς ἐπιθυμίας. It is to inquire too curiously if we inquire whether σάρξ here is used in the physiological sense = the body, or in the moral sense = libidinosa caro (as Fritzsche argues): the significance of the word in Paul depends on the fact that in experience these two meanings are indubitably if not inseparably related. Taking the flesh as it is, forethought or provision for it an interest in it which consults for it, and makes it an object can only have one end, viz., its ἐπιθυμίαι. All such interest therefore is forbidden as inconsistent with putting on the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.