8:15 The Spirit of Sonship

There has to be the work of the Spirit showing that that man, without Christ, boasting in his freedom – “not like poor religious suckers who are all slaves” – is in fact in bondage to sin, a slave of sin, and utterly unprepared to meet God, ready only for the flames of hell. That work of the Spirit results in making men and women afraid. What the Spirit does is to touch their consciences. He takes them to the Scriptures; they must go to the Bible; there they see the law of God; there they’re convicted by the commandments of God; there they hear the injunction: “Do this and live!”  It was the experience of Martin Luther as he began to try and find out the answer to the question “What must I do to be saved?”  What he discovered, of course, was that the more he did, the more he got into failure and bondage and slavery. By doing, doing, doing, by trying to obey the commandments of God, he discovered how strong a grip his Master Sin had over him and he knew himself to be its slave, and he became depressed and afraid. How could he be saved? He learned that it was by Jesus Christ alone.

In Scotland, there might be a question asked by an elder when somebody was being interviewed for membership in the church. Not my question of why God should let you into heaven but rather this unusually phrased question: “Have you been to Sinai?” That was the question they asked.  “Have you been to Sinai?”  The elder was not, of course, asking had they been to the peninsula of Sinai in the Middle East on a Holy Land bus tour, but had they been to the place where God made them feel the power of his law, touching their conscience with the searching inward probing of the Ten Commandments, and making then feel they were fearful slaves to sin. Have you understood that by the works and deeds of law-keeping no one can be saved, and you are no exception?  Then, what is left for you to do? You can only flee for salvation to the one who perfectly did all that God’s law required in order to take him as your Saviour. Do you know what it is to experience conviction of sin?  Have you been to Sinai?  What do we see when we go to Sinai?  We will see thunder and lightning. We will see a blinding glow coming from Moses’ face. We will see the threats of the covenant God against those who don’t obey the works of the law.  Now, what Paul is saying here is that the Holy Spirit gives men and women a spirit that makes them slaves, that make them feel like oxen being driven by pointed goads and the vanity and pain of kicking against them.

But, says Paul, as in the letter I read you, that humbling was not where it all ended. That was not the terminus of receiving the Spirit, that he came into your life and you felt a slave, end of story. No. That is where it began for Saul of Tarsus and for many of you, but that was only the first rung on the ladder. That was the beginning of grace, discovering your need of a Saviour. It was a staging post on an ongoing pilgrimage. You did not receive the Holy Spirit as a Spirit of bondage, full stop, and then you were a scared slave for the rest of your life and for eternity. “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear,” (v.15). That is never where it ends for the children of God, showing a man his sin but not his pardon, teaching a man his weakness but not where divine strength comes from, thundering his misery and condemnation but speaking with no still small voice God’s mercy. Paul does not end with their receiving the killing, convicting spirit.

You must get away from that Spirit. You must leave that work of his behind you. You must move on. You must not think, “I’m not worthy to be one of the children of God. Perhaps I can struggle on through life as one of his hired servants.” You are losing sight of the magnificence of God’s grace when you think like that. You are forfeiting the blessings you can enjoy when you reason in that way. Salvation is never something we have done enough to earn. The Son of God has earned it all for us and this salvation is commensurate with Christ’s achievement and status. You are now a child of the King. It is a sin to consider yourself a hired servant. Wouldn’t the Queen be disturbed if Prince Charles began to behave like a royal chauffeur and dismissed all her exhortations to him to accept his status and duties by rolling his eyes and hanging the head and saying, “Unworthy, unworthy . . .” He is the monarch’s son, not a servant on the payroll.

Frequently in our lives the devil’s fiery darts are aimed at destroying our sense of privilege that we are the sons of God. Satan will try to produce in us a ‘bondage frame of spirit’ – that is how our Christian fathers referred to it, but it goes back way before them to Adam. We can see traces of this bondage developing in the opening pages of the Bible, when the serpent came to Eve and said: ‘Did God really say, "You must not eat from any tree in the garden"?’ (Gen.3:1). His aim was to suggest to Adam and Eve: ‘Do you really understand the kind of God who has put you here? He doesn’t really want the best for you because he is restricting you. He has made you his hired servants to look after this garden, but he won’t allow you to enjoy it.’ As a matter of fact, they were free to enjoy every tree in the garden except one (Gen. 2:16-17). That was the very reverse of the serpent’s suggestion. God had set them in the garden as his children. It was theirs. But they fell for Satan’s lies. They were deceived into thinking they were hired servants and not children. Tragically, they actually became what Satan told them they were. Precisely the same kind of temptation faces us as children of God. That is why we need so much more than the Spirit that humble and convicts us and kills our proud selves.

You must have more than that work of the Spirit of bondage. If that is what we displayed to the world as a church how unappealing it would be – a congregation where everyone would be bemoaning their sin and failure, and trembling at the righteousness of the Creator. Would that draw the people of our town to God? Wouldn’t it drive them away? People in the congregation would be limping and fainting and lamenting under their burden of sin. Instead of sharing with one another our blessings we would be telling one another of our sins – “Let me tell you of my falls; they are far worse than yours.” What an unhappy fellowship! Only hard thoughts of God would come out of all that slavery. We’d never sing such hymns as, “Come let us join our cheerful songs with angels round the throne.” God never encourages that spirit to continue. He convicts the unbeliever and he humbles the proud, but that is just the beginning of grace. What does Paul go on to say in our text? He tells us that it was not that Spirit alone that you received. You also received, far, far more than that.

2. YOU RECEIVED THE HOLY SPIRIT AS A SPIRIT OF SONSHIP.

“For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship” (v15). This word that Paul uses here, ‘sonship’, means literally being placed as a son. It is the word for adoption, or perhaps better, sonship by adoption. Let’s take the Greek word apart. It is huiothesia. The first half is huios, the common noun for an adult son. The latter half is thesia, an installation, an induction, setting a person in its place. So the whole word means not so much adoption as the placing of a son. You have to understand adoption in the century Paul wrote this letter, against the background of its Roman and Greek customs. In the Jewish culture there did not seem to be an emphasis on adoption as in Greek culture. Understand that adoption for those living in Greece and Rome wasn’t taking into your home a fondling baby that had been abandoned on your doorstep, raising it as your own. The one who’d been adopted in that culture was a young man in his late teens, someone who had experienced an extraordinary change of status. Adopted, he then became the legitimate and necessary heir of the head of the household who’d adopted him. He was not the least inferior to a son later born in the house. He possessed all the elements of that man’s inheritance, not only getting his property when he died but also his name, all his rights, his dignities and his honours. Upon him fell the responsibility for all the younger children who’d been born subsequently to the father who’d adopted him.

Sonship was enormously important. At one time in the Roman Empire it became the custom for men to have a ceremony in which their own sons were acknowl­edged publicly, and this is the idea present here. There was a famous novel written 70 years ago this year called The Robe. Lloyd C. Douglas, the author, researched very accurately the customs of Paul’s day. One of the characters is a little girl called Lucia and there is a ceremony in which her older brother Marcellus became acknowledged as a Roman citizen on his seventeenth birthday. Lloyd C. Douglas wrote, “What a wonderful day that was, with all their good friends assembled in the Forum to see Marcellus — clean-shaven for the first time in his life — step forward to receive his white toga. Cornelius Capito and Father had made speeches, and then they had put the white toga on Marcellus. Lucia had been so proud and happy that her heart had pounded and her throat had hurt, though she was only nine then, and couldn’t know much about the cere­mony except that Marcellus was expected to act like a man now . . .”

Later in the book Marcellus himself tells his friend Paulus of this ceremony. “When a Roman of our sort comes of age there is an impressive ceremony by which we are inducted into manhood. Doubtless you felt when you went through it as I did, that this was one of the high moments of life. Well do I remember it — the thrill of it abides with me still — how all our relatives and friends assembled that day in the stately Forum Julium. My father made an address, welcoming me into Roman citizenship. It was as if I had never lived until that hour. I was so deeply stirred, Paulus, that my eyes swam with tears. And then good old Cornelius Capito made a speech, a very serious one, about Rome’s right to my loyalty, my courage, and my strength. I knew that tough old Capito had a right to talk of such matters, and I was proud that he was there. They beckoned to me, and I stepped forward. Capito and my father put the white toga on me — and life had begun.”

That is what is in view in our text. Not the adoption of a baby into another family, but welcoming a grown up man as his son and heir, the one who was conscious of the wonderful privilege of adoption. There’d been a time when he was only a child or a young teenager, and he was still being educated. There had been an appointed slave called a ‘pedagogue’ who watched over him, protecting and guiding and accompanying him whenever he left his home and went into the city, always dogging his footsteps, saying, “No, not there . . . time to come home . . .”. Paul tells one Christian congregation it was the law of God that used to be their ‘pedagogue,’ but that it no longer continued to watch over them and protect them now that they’d grown up into Christian maturity. They now were adopted into the family of God. Once the pedagogue had escorted them and brought them into the presence of Christ then they no longer needed the pedagogue to dog their footsteps. So the law’s functions are over and the Son of God is our Shepherd and he leads us beside still waters and green pastures. God himself is our Father and we can ask him moment by moment for his help and advice and protection and support every day. Every single Christian can do that with the utmost confidence because we have received from God far more than his low. We’ve received the Spirit of Adoption.

Think of an adopted child today who is upset about whether she is really the child of her adopting parents. They show her constant affection. Her father gives her a hug as she goes off to school in the morning and tells her he loves her. He spends some time with her in the evenings; they play a game together and he listens to her talking abut school. He kisses her good-night and tells her again he loves her. He is always there for her, but if she still is worried whether he is really her father he can go finally to his bureau and unlock the drawer where his passport and the birth certificates and his will are kept, and he can bring out the adoption form and he can show her his name and her mother’s name as her real legal parents and her name and date of birth all recorded there. They cannot appeal to a big public ceremony like the ones Paul knew about, but they can show a very important document; “See what is written and signed and sealed here. It shows that you are truly our child. We chose you. When we saw a picture of you, before we met you, we fell in love with you and we have loved you ever since. We adopted you legally as our little girl. We love you with a love that will not let you go.” In every way they assure her that she is their child. Now you understand that God has not given a ceremony to the church with laying on of hands and certain formulae that are repeated that serve to impart the rights of adoption to the Christian. God has come so very close, and he has actually put within the Christian the Holy Spirit of adoption. Your heart tells you what God had done there, that he has made you his child.

You say to me that sometimes you are like that imaginary adopted girl whom I have just described, and that you also have a weak sense of being a child of God. It is not unusual. Every Christian is a child of God, but not every Christian constantly feels that he or she is. They don’t all enjoy the comfort of being a child of God. They enjoy him and his work to different degrees. Cult members may become virtually the same psychological type, but Christians come in different shapes and sizes. They don’t all enjoy their heavenly Father to the same intimacy of assurance. What should you do if you don’t enjoy the assurance that God is your loving Father?

i] Don’t pretend you have feelings of closeness that you don’t possess. There is a helpful word spoken by the prophet Hosea when he says to God, “In you the fatherless find compassion” (Hosea 14:3). Maybe I have chosen a hymn of the strongest assurance and all around you there are people in the congregation singing, “Mine, mine, mine, I know Thou art mine; Saviour, dear Saviour I know Thou art mine.” But you are experiencing a mini-winter time and your heart can’t go with the words. I’m suggesting that you say a little prayer when you hear what hymn you are going to sing, “Father help me to sing these words. If they are not from a heart totally consumed with love for Thee then take what love I have. I know you have compassion on the fatherless and so have compassion on me.” You want to be able to sing such words, and you trust in the God who knows how much you do love him. Peter said, “You know all things; you know that I love you,” but it is your chief complaint that you love is weak and faint. Don’t pretend it is otherwise.