Saturday, July 23, 2022
ROMANS 8 ARE YOU A CHILD OF GOD?
Sanders, J. Oswald. Spiritual Maturity
"In our day, the greatest lack in the life of the individual Christian and of the church is the fire of God, the manifested presence and mighty working of the Holy Spirit. There is little about us that cannot be explained on the level of the natural. Our lives are not fire-touched. There is no holy conflagration in our churches to which people are irresistibly drawn as a moth to a flame. It is the absence of the fire of God which accounts for the insignificant impact the church is making on a lost world. It never had better organization, a more scholarly ministry, greater resources of men and means, more skillful techniques. And yet never did it make a smaller contribution to solving the problems of a distraught world. Our prayer should be, 'Lord, send the fire.'"
Greg Norman, a famous Australian golfer, was designing a golf course over near Oakhurst, when he was asked, "What is in your mind when you look at this rough terrain and begin planning to create a golf course of it?" Norman said, "I look at the rough terrain and think, I'll remove everything that isn't golf course." That is what the Holy Spirit does in us; He comes to remove everything that isn't Jesus from our lives. He comes to help us put to death the deeds of the body. Mortification of sin is the spiritual equivalent of uprooting and killing all of the weeds that threaten to overwhelm us and kill the flowers in our gardens. Without mortification, sin would overrun our lives and choke us to death.
Owen, the great Puritan writer, said: "Let not that man think he makes any progress in holiness who walks not over the bellies of his lusts. He who doth not kill sin in his way takes no steps towards his journey's end…. Be killing sin or it will be killing you." Owen was stating in his own way what the apostle Paul tells us here: "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."
Paul makes at least three points in this statement. First, in saying, "ye shall live," he is telling us that the fullness of spiritual life, an ever-deepening fellowship with God, and the glorious liberty of the children of God are all impossible apart from mortification or putting sin to death in our bodies. As Owen wrote, "The vigour, and power, and comfort of our spiritual life depend on the mortification of the deeds of the flesh."
Second, Paul is telling us that our usefulness to God and His church depends on our putting sin to death in our lives. He says, "But if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." In 2 Timothy 2:21, Paul says, "If a man therefore purge himself from these he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work." If we purge ourselves from all that is dishonorable, sinful, and base, we shall be useful to the Master.
Robert Murray M'Cheyne wrote: "Do not forget the culture of the inner man, I mean of the heart. How diligently the cavalry officer keeps his sabre clean and sharp. Every stain he rubs off with the greatest care. Remember, you are God's sword, His instrument. In great measure, according to the purity and perfections of the instrument will be the success. It is not great talent God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus." The Holy Spirit comes to us to help us remove everything that isn't Jesus. Fullness of spiritual life and ever-deepening fellowship with God are impossible apart from mortification.
Third, Paul is reminding us that if we fail to mortify sin, we will cast a dark shadow over our profession to be children of God. Those who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God. If we are not led by the Spirit of God to put sin to death in our bodies, then our bodies will become the very instruments that sin uses to disseminate its heinousness, egregiousness, and wickedness.
ROMANS 8 ARE YOU A CHILD OF GOD?
J I Packer wrote a book about Holiness. "One of the titles I proposed for this book was With Christ in the School of Holiness. That was a deliberate echo, almost a steal, of With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray, a much appreciated South African devotional author of two generations ago. I adapted Murray's title in this manner in order to highlight three truths that to me seem basic to all I propose to say. Holiness, like prayer (which is indeed part of it), is something that, though Christians have an instinct for it through their new birth, as we shall see, they have to learn in and through experience. As Jesus "learned obedience from what he suffered" (Heb. 5:8)—learned what obedience requires, costs and involves through the experience of actually doing His Father's will up to and in His passion—so Christians must, and do, learn prayer from their struggles to pray and holiness from their battles for purity of heart and righteousness of life. The process of learning to be holy, like the process of learning to pray, may properly be thought of as a school—God's own school, in which the curriculum, the teaching staff, the rules, the discipline, the occasional prizes and the fellow pupils with whom one studies, plays, debates and fraternizes, are all there under God's sovereign providence.]
Charles Wesley wrote: O for a heart to praise my God, A heart from sin set free;
A heart that always feels thy blood So freely shed for me;
A heart resigned, submissive, meek, My great redeemer's throne,
Where only Christ is heard to speak, Where Jesus reigns alone;
A heart in every thought renewed And full of love divine,
Perfect and right and pure and good: A copy, Lord, of thine.
14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!"16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,17 and if children, then heirs---heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
Robert Haldane puts it like this: Here and in the following verses the apostle exhibits four proofs of our being the sons of God. The first is our being led by the Spirit of God; the second is the Spirit of adoption which we receive, crying, "Abba, Father," verse 15; the third is the witness of the Spirit with our spirits, verse 16; the fourth is our sufferings in the communion of Jesus Christ; to which is joined the fruit of our sonship, the Apostle saying that if children, we are heirs of God, and then joint heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.
4 PROOFS OF YOUR SPIRITUAL BIRTH
1.Are You on An Upward Path ?
14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.
What does the Holy Spirit do internally in Christians to lead them?
He renews our minds. The first area in which the Holy Spirit works is the intellect, and he does this by what Paul will later call "the renewing of your mind." This comes out very clearly in Romans 12. There, having laid down the great doctrines of the epistle, the apostle begins to apply them to the believer's conduct, saying, "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will" (Rom. 12:1-2).
The person who discovers, tests, and approves what God's pleasing and perfect will is obviously is being led by God. But the key to this, according to Romans, is the mind's renewal.
How, then, are our minds to be renewed? There is only one way. It is by our reading and being taught by the Spirit from the Bible. That is what God has given the Bible to us for—to inform us, enlighten our minds, and redirect our thinking. I hold the Bible and the Holy Spirit together in this, however, as the Reformers were particularly astute in doing. For alone, either is inadequate. A person who considers himself to be led by the Spirit apart from the Bible will soon fall into error and excess. He will begin to promote nonbiblical and therefore false teachings. But a person who reads the Bible apart from the illumination provided by the Holy Spirit, which is true in the case of all unbelievers, will find it to be a closed and meaningless book. The Christian is led by the operation of the Holy Spirit and the Bible together.
Here is a test for you. Has the Holy Spirit been leading you by enlightening your mind through Bible study? Have you discovered things about God, yourself, the gospel, and the ways of God that you did not know before? Do you realize that they are true? Are you beginning to live differently? Unless you are crazy, you will begin to live differently. Because a person who realizes that one way is true and another is false and yet takes the false path must be out of his or her mind, irrational. If your mind has been renewed, you will show it.
2. Are You Experiencing An Assured Relationship With God?
15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!"
The Greek word for adoption is derived from the word huios, meaning "son," and the word thesis, meaning "placement." It is a legal term that in this context indicates that believers have been given the full privileges of sonship in God's family. Concurrent with this placement into sonship, God places the Spirit of His Son into our hearts so that we become, in effect, His natural-born children. As such, we are not just "adopted" (in the sense the word now conveys) but genuinely "begotten" by God. God makes children of men into children of God, just the reverse of what happened to Christ when the Son of God became the Son of Man.
8:15 Believers are sons of God because they received the Spirit of adoption. In ancient Rome, an adopted son would possess all the rights of a son born into the family. Christians have been adopted into God's family, receiving an eternal inheritance. Abba: Jesus Himself prayed to God using this Aramaic word for Father (Mark 14:36). Adoption is the procedure by which a person is taken from one family (or no family) and placed in another. In this context, it refers to removing a person from the family of Adam (or Satan) and placing him or her in the family of God.
"Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out 'Abba, Father'" (Gal. 4:6).
Paul has been talking about the Christian's former state—in which, being in Adam, we were enslaved to sin—and he has argued that we have been delivered from that former bondage by the Holy Spirit. Now he adds that this new state, which conveys freedom from bondage, also contains the privileges of sonship.
The word adoption is not common in the New Testament, being used only by Paul and that only five times (three times in Romans), and it does not occur in the Old Testament at all, since the Jews did not practice adoption. They had other procedures, polygamy and Levirate marriage, for dealing with the problems of widows and orphans and inheritance.
It is important to recognize that our authority to call God "Father" goes back to Jesus Christ. It goes back to no less important a statement than the opening phrases of the Lord's Prayer, which begins, "Our Father in heaven..." (Matt. 6:9). Today we take the right to call God "our Father" for granted, but we need to understand how new and startlingly original this must have been for Christ's contemporaries. No Old Testament Jew ever addressed God directly as "my Father." (1) the title was new with Jesus; (2) Jesus always used this form of address in praying; and (3) Jesus authorized his disciples to use the same word after him. The early church fathers, Chrysostom, Theodor of Mopsuestia, and Theodore of Cyrrhus, who came from Antioch, where Aramaic was spoken, and who probably had Aramaic-speaking nurses, unanimously testified that abba was the address of small children to their fathers. The Talmud confirms this when it says that when a child is weaned "it learns to say abba and imma" (that is, "daddy" and "mommy"). Packer wrote "What is a Christian? The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father.
He stirs the heart. Figuratively, the heart is the seat of the emotions, and the Holy Spirit works upon it by stirring or quickening the heart to love God. In the verse that follows our text Paul speaks of an inner response to God by which we affectionately cry out, "Abba, Father." This verse does not actually mention the heart, but in a parallel text in Galatians Paul does, showing that he is thinking of the operation of the Holy Spirit upon our hearts explicitly. He writes, "Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, 'Abba, Father'" (Gal. 4:6). In other words, the Spirit of God leads us by making us affectionate toward God and his ways. It is the Spirit who causes us, as Jesus said, to "hunger and thirst for righteousness" (Matt. 5:6).
"Adoption is the highest privilege of the gospel. The traitor is forgiven, brought in for supper, and given the family name. To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater." -Dr J I Packer. "Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that." - Dr J I Packer. "How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! . . . When he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 Jn 3:1-2). Packer continues "If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. "Father" is the Christian name for God. (Evangelical Magazine 7, pp. 19-20)
"Behold! what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called the sons of God. And such we are!" (1 John 3:1) (pp. 276-77)
1John 3:1 See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.2 Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.3 And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.
CH Spurgeon: Am I a child of God? Then listen: I have a love to my Father. If you are truly born from above, your heart goes out in longings after him to whom you owe your heavenly birth. If you are no child of God, you can live without him; indeed, you will try to do so. To the most of men God is virtually non-existent. They look up to the skies, and view the wondrous lights of heaven, but they never think of him who shines through them. They do not believe that there is such a Being; or else they own that there must be a design and a designer, and there is an end of the matter with them. Whether there is a God or not is no matter of importance to them. How different is it with the regenerate! To us God is all in all. To love God is the great fact of my life. The tears run down my cheeks when I think of him. He is everything to me. It cannot long be a question with the child of God whether he loves his Father or not. It may occasionally happen that he has to make the enquiry, for times and circumstances will test him; but before long he comes to the solemn conclusion, "Thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee." More than that — if I am a child of God, I learn to trust my Father. I do not know a more delightful act of childhood than trustfulness in a parent. And how often if we trust God we shall be rewarded!
3. Are You Experiencing An Inner Peace Witness?
16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,
We come finally to the third verse in this four-verse section, a verse that gives another reason for knowing we are in God's family.
There is such a thing as a direct witness of the Holy Spirit to believers that they are sons or daughters of God, even apart from the other "proofs" I have mentioned. In other words, it is possible to have a genuine experience of the Holy Spirit in one's heart.
Experience of the Spirit? I know the objections. I know that no spiritual experience is ever necessarily valid in itself. Any such experience can be counterfeited, and the devil's counterfeits can be very good indeed. But the fact that a spiritual experience can be counterfeited does not invalidate all of them.
I also know that those who seek experiences of the Holy Spirit frequently run to excess and fall into unbiblical ideas and practices. Every such experience must be tested by Scripture. But in spite of these objections, which are important, I still say that there can be a direct experience of the Spirit that is valid testimony to the fact that one is truly God's child.
Haven't you ever had such an experience? An overwhelming sense of God's presence? Or haven't you at some point, perhaps at many points in your life, been aware that God has come upon you in a special way and that there is no doubt whatever that what you are experiencing is from God? You may have been moved to tears. You may have deeply felt some other sign of God's presence, by which you were certainly moved to a greater and more wonderful love for him.
When Charles Wesley found Christ on Whitsunday 1738, his experience overflowed into some marvelous verses ("The Wesleys' Conversion Hymn," Methodist Hymn Book, #361) in which the transition from slavery to sonship is the main theme.
Where shall my wondering soul begin? How shall I all to heaven aspire?
A slave redeemed from death and sin, A brand plucked from eternal fire,
How shall I equal triumphs raise, Or sing my great Deliverer's praise?
O how shall I the goodness tell, Father, which thou to me hast showed?
That I, a child of wrath and hell, I should be called a child of God,
Should know, should feel my sins forgiven, Blest with this antepast of heaven!
Three days later, Charles tells us in his diary, brother John burst in with "a troop of our friends" to announce that he too was now a believer, and "we sang the hymn with great joy." Had you been there, could you sincerely have joined in? Can you make Wesley's words your own? If you are truly a child of God and "the Spirit of his Son" is in you, Wesley's words have already drawn an echo from your heart; and if they have left you cold, I do not know how you can imagine that you are a Christian at all.
Blessed assurance Jesus is mine oh what a foretaste of glory divine
Heir of salvation purchase of God born of His Spirit washed in His blood.
This is my story this is my song Praising my Savour all the day long!
1 John 4:13, 'Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us his Spirit.' That holy and charitable spirit; the gracious operations of his presence, are the argument whence we conclude.
He helps us to discern this work in our souls more clearly.
Rom. 15:13, 'Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing;' it is an impression of the comforting Spirit. Acts 9:31, 'They walked in the comfort of the Holy Spirit.'
4. Are You Experiencing A Sense Of An Eternal Inheritance
17 and if children, then heirs---heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
our adoption shows us the greatness of God's love.
The New Testament gives us two yardsticks for measuring God's love. The first is the cross (see Rom 5:8; 1 Jn 4:8-10); the second is the gift of sonship. "Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God!" (1 Jn 3:1 RV). Of all the gifts of grace, adoption is the highest. The gift of pardon for the past is great: to know that
Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood, Sealed my pardon with his blood
is a never-ending source of wonder and joy.
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, Who like me his praise should sing?
Wesley wrote: No condemnation now I dread,Jesus, and all in him, is mine; Alive in him, my living head,
And clothed in righteousness divine, Bold I approach the eternal throne And claim the crown, through Christ my own—
When you realize that God has taken you from the gutter, so to speak, and made you a son in his own house—you, a miraculously pardoned offender, guilty, ungrateful, defiant, perverse as you were—then your sense of God's "love beyond degree" is more than words can express. You will echo Charles Wesley's question:
Second, our adoption shows us the glory of the Christian hope.
New Testament Christianity is a religion of hope, a faith that looks forward. For the Christian, the best is always yet to be. But how can we form any notion of that which awaits us at the end of the road? Here too the doctrine of adoption comes to our help. To start with, it teaches us to think of our hope not as a possibility nor yet as a likelihood, but as a guaranteed certainty, because it is a promised inheritance. The reason for adopting, in the first-century world, was specifically to have an heir to whom one could bequeath one's goods. So, too, God's adoption of us makes us his heirs, and so guarantees to us, as our right (we might say), the inheritance that he has in store for us. "We are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ" (Rom 8:16-17). "So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir" (Gal 4:7). Our Father's wealth is immeasurable, and we are to inherit the entire estate.
Next, the doctrine of adoption tells us that the sum and substance of our promised inheritance is a share in the glory of Christ. We shall be made like our elder brother at every point, and sin and mortality, the double corruption of God's good work in the moral and spiritual spheres respectively, will be things of the past. "Co-heirs with Christ . . . that we may also share in his glory" (Rom 8:17). "Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him" (1 Jn 3:2).
Finally, the doctrine of adoption tells us that the experience of heaven will be of a family gathering, as the great host of the redeemed meet together in face-to-face fellowship with their Father-God and Jesus their brother. This is the deepest and clearest idea of heaven that the Bible gives us. Many Scriptures point to it. "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory" (Jn 17:24). "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God" (Mt 5:8). "We shall see him as he is" (1 Jn 3:2). "They will see his face" (Rev 22:4). "Then we shall see face to face" (1 Cor 13:12). "And so we will be with the Lord forever" (1 Thess 4:17).
My knowledge of that life is small; The eye of faith is dim:
But it's enough that Christ knows all; And I shall be with him.
If you are a believer, and so an adopted child, this prospect satisfies you completely; if it does not strike you as satisfying, it would seem that as yet you are neither.
So the conclusion?
Are you truly a child of God?
Are you on the upward path , putting to death the deeds of the body.
Are you calling upon God as Father? Do you know that there is now a special relationship of love between you and the Father? Do you know that you love Him because He first loved you?
Do you experience joy wrought by the Spirit of God in you?
Do you look forward to one day being with the Lord?
I remember on beach mission once I asked a group of boys "Do you want to go to heaven?" three of the five said yes. The other two said no. So I asked. Why don't you want to go to heaven? "Oh we do, but just not right now!"
Are you a child of God? Are you looking forward to heaven?
