GOD'S GREAT NEWS for MAN'S GREAT PROBLEM - Romans 1-8

Judy's Security

I know a pastor who once taught a class and wanted to get to know each student. He asked each one to write him a letter giving testimony to how they came to know Jesus Christ. Here's one woman's letter:

Hi Ron,

One thing you can know about me from the get go is that writing about myself is a hard task. My growing up years were painful, and I tried hard to put them behind me for good -- with no looking back. God had other plans for me however. God has indeed given me a great future and hope, but also has been working in my life to get me to trust Him with my past as well.

I grew up in Menlo Park, and was raised by my mother. Single parent households were very rare then, and employers were not very supportive, so my mother worked very hard to make a meager living. I was on my own a lot as a child, and in order to meet my need for a family I adopted my friend's families as my own. This helped me meet some of my need for family, but I always felt on the outside as well. I never was able to meet my father. My mother told me about him (none of it true), but there was so much anger and secrecy surrounding their story together that my inquiries were quickly squelched. I had an incredible experience with the mercy of God when I was preparing a teaching, as my homework for [a] New Testament Exegesis class. I had come to the verse which reads, 'just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love.' It was right at this point when my cousin called me and said she had run across letters in my grandmother's home (she had just died) that told that I was illegitimate, and that the name my mother had written on my birth certificate was not my father's name at all. So I had grown up as Judy Donnelly, but a Donnelly I never was. Just when I could have felt unplanned, unwanted, etc. God writes 'I planned you before the foundation of the world!' I cannot believe how gracious God was to me in this. ...

Judy Donnelly

I read that letter and was moved at the contrast in it: at the very moment revealing her illegitimacy in a very broken family, God our Father showed Judy how secure she was in His family. Her stability in His family reached much further back than her checkered past, beyond the lie written on a birth certificate, beyond the ache of missing an absent father, revealing a very present Father who had planned for her to be His daughter before the foundation of the world. Her heavenly Father not only chose her, but He chose to speak His word of fatherly love for her at the precise moment she needed most to hear from Him. At that most insecure moment, when her world was rocked to its shaky core, she found security in the only place it can be found -- in God Himself.

That is what Paul confirms for us in Rom. 8:16, 17. Having just explained the process whereby each believer is officially adopted into the inner circle of the family of God in vs. 14, 15, Paul lets out the stops in vs. 16, 17 and proves the absolute commitment of our Triune God to each adopted child. This is the coronal passage detailing the eternal security of the believer who is forever placed into the family of God.

When A Father Won't Give You His Name ...

These things we are studying speak to the deepest yearnings of the human soul. One of the most popular Christian books of recent years is the book entitled The Blessing, by Gary Smalley and John Trent. In this book the authors share about how often young people grow up without a sense of public, unconditional acceptance by their parents. Here are the opening lines from the book: "All of us long to be accepted by others. While we may say out loud, 'I don't care what other people think about me,' on the inside we all yearn for intimacy and affection. This yearning is especially true in our relationship with our parents. Gaining or missing out on parental approval has a tremendous effect on us, even if it has been years since we had any regular contact with them. In fact, what happens in our relationship with our parents can greatly affect all our present and future relationships." Certainly these modern day Christian psychologists identify the deep chord within the human heart that Paul strums beautifully in this great image of adoption as adult sons.

And we are surrounded by so many who so desperately need this public affirmation from their parents. Most will not get it from their earthly parents, and the great ache in their lives will go on and on. In a Pulitzer Prize winning novel entitled Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry explores the non-relationship of a father with his son, a young man so deserving of love and affection that his character fairly cries out for it on every page. The story goes like this: Woodrow F. Call, one of the heroes of the novel, is a hard driving, hard working cattle man and former Texas Ranger who hates to show any weaknesses. Yet at one point in his life he sought solace in the town whore, a woman named Maggie. While Maggie was with him, she became pregnant and bore a baby boy, named Newt. About eight years later, Maggie became sick and died, so Woodrow and his partner Augustus McCrae took little Newt to live with them. As the years passed, it became more and more apparent that Newt was Woodrow F. Call's son. Newt had the unusual skill with horses that Woodrow possessed; Newt had the gift of leadership his father had; Newt was a hard worker who never shirked a task. And Woodrow himself knew Newt was his son. But no matter what happened, Woodrow refused to recognize Newt publicly as his son. Even the dying wish of his best friend that he finally give Newt his family name fell on deaf ears.

One of the final scenes describing this non-relationship broke my heart. When Woodrow and Newt are parting from one another at the end of the book, Woodrow gives Newt his horse, his rifle, and even his own father's gold watch. But Woodrow could not bring himself to give Newt his family name. He couldn't publicly call Newt the one-syllable word Newt needed most to hear: "son." He just stood in front of the boy, trying to call him his son and give Newt his name, but the words never came. He just choked. Finally, Woodrow just mounted up and rode away from the ranch. One of the other cow hands, Pea Eye, looked at Newt and said, "'Dern, Newt, he gave you his horse and his gun and that watch. He acts like you're his kin.' 'No, I ain't kin to nobody in this world,' Newt said bitterly. 'I don't want to be. I won't be.'" Newt was doomed to be a lonesome dove at the end of that novel.

But praise be to our God and Father that we are not left like orphans, like lonesome doves sitting on a wire while the wind moans across grey prairies. That is not our destiny in Jesus Christ. In Christ, we are publicly called adult sons in the family of God. Last week, we studied the very public nature of the adopting father in Roman culture: he initiated two public steps to make the adoption legal. The first was the buying/selling of the son to be adopted, the "mancipatio." The second step was the adopting father's public argument before the Roman praetor proving why the son should be adopted into his family, the "vindicatio." In Roman adoption, the father publicly WANTED the child, yearning to look into his eyes, craving the day when he could call him: "son." With God as adopting Father, his yearning for sons matches our desire to hear Him call us "son."

Let's pick up Paul's next description of this adoption process in vs. 16, where he tells us of the divine and ever-present witness to the adoption, our indwelling Holy Spirit.

Security of the Spirit: He Himself Witnesses Our Adoption as Sons - 8:16

Paul tells us of the Spirit's role in this adoption ceremony in vs. 16: "The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." The key to understanding this verse is to unlock the meaning of the verb "bears witness with." In the papyri records of business dealings in the Greco-Roman world, a witness to a business or legal document would sign his name, with the words "I bear witness with and I seal with ..." by the signature. This term implies that the Spirit's indwelling presence is God's signature and seal, His personal endorsement and witness, that we are indeed children of God. In a mysterious but wonderful way, the Holy Spirit of God affixes God's signature on my spirit, saying, "I bear witness with Dorman's spirit that Dorman Followwill is a child of God." It is a marvelous thing when you insert your own name in this verse, because if the Spirit dwells in you, the stamp and seal of God's approval of you as His child rests on your spirit for all eternity.

William Barclay describes how this idea fit into the Roman rite of adoption: "He uses still another picture from Roman adoption. He says that God's Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we really are children of God. The adoption ceremony was carried out in the presence of seven witnesses. Now, supposing the adopting father died, and then suppose that there was some dispute about the right of the adopted son to inherit, one or more of the seven original witnesses stepped forward and swore that the adoption was genuine and true. Thus the right of the adopted person was guaranteed and he entered into his inheritance. So, Paul is saying, it is the Holy Spirit Himself who is the witness to our adoption into the family of God." And since the Holy Spirit is invested within us as a certain downpayment of our eternal inheritance in Jesus Christ, this witness to our adoption will never leave. Our eternal security in the family of God is guaranteed by this internal witness, our indwelling Spirit of God who will never leave us nor forsake us.

Thus, the Spirit of God is Himself our security, our personal guarantor of our position in the family of God. He is indeed the key: the key to our eternal security in the family of the beloved.

But there is an even deeper relational truth that undergirds the legal truth of the Spirit's witness of our adoption. Paul could have written, "The Spirit Himself bears witness that we are children of God." That would have pinned down the legal reality of our adoption, as witnessed and sealed by the Spirit. But Paul includes a layer of real intimacy and relationship between the indwelling Spirit of God and our human spirit. Paul says the Holy Spirit bears witness "with our spirit" that we are children of God. In other words, this witness of the Spirit is not just some cold stamp put on by some spiritual notary public; the witness of the Spirit is a deep communication of our sonship in God's family, a constant whisper of our position of value and honor as the beloved of our Father.

This is perhaps the single sweetest aspect of the Spirit's ministry within us as our great Comforter. I was in a conversation some time ago with a brother of mine who is wading through some very deep waters in his life. Things are at the point that he has been forced to review his entire Christian life, to see if he really is a believer. Shaking his head, my brother said, "I've looked back over everything, and this one thing I know for certain: I know I am a child of God ... that witness is there." I sat there beside him, beside this brother I love, and my heart was full for him. Through all the deep waters of doubt and despair, through the pain of the great heartbreak of his life, one thing stands clear: the Spirit of God within him has witnessed with his spirit that he is a child of God. This witness of the Spirit with our spirit is the anchor of our souls: it is the basis of our eternal security as much-loved children in the family of God.

Oh the glory of this!! God the Spirit, our ever-present gift from God, lives within us to witness to us that we are children of God! Who in all the world could have foreseen such love and comfort given to insecure children always doubting their spiritual pedigree? Paul's own mind is boggled by this. He says, "The Spirit Himself ..." God Himself, the Spirit of God Himself, has allowed Himself to be concealed and encapsulated in our finite bodies, to bear witness with our spirits that we are children of God. Jesus had the voice of heaven thundering, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased." It was a moment of fatherly affirmation such as the world had never known before. But each believer has known it since. Within the echoing halls of our own souls is the resonating voice of God's Spirit, telling our spirit "You are My beloved child." Our internal witness is no mere angel, nor some grizzled prophet, nor some voice calling out from heaven ... it is God's own Spirit, living and speaking within us, affirming our position in the family of God. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

In one of the great books about the Holy Spirit, John Murray's Redemption Accomplished and Applied, he too gets caught in the grandeur of all this on pg. 134: "Adoption, as the term clearly implies, is an act of transfer from an alien family into the family of God himself. This is surely the apex of grace and privilege. We would not dare to conceive of such grace far less to claim it apart from God's own revelation and assurance. It staggers the imagination because of its amazing condescension and love. The Spirit alone could be the seal of it in our hearts. ... It is only as there is the conjunction of the witness of revelation and the inward witness of the Spirit in our hearts that we are able to scale this pinnacle of faith and say with filial confidence and love, Abba Father." Amen!

Thus, the security we have as adopted adult sons in God's royal family is the security of the Spirit Himself. He Himself is our security, affixing on our spirit the seal and signature of God, but witnessing and affirming with our human spirits that we are indeed children of God forever. Our security is guaranteed by God's own Spirit. He is our eternal security.

Security in the Father: Children and Heirs of God - 8:17

So, the Spirit Himself is our eternal security. He is the personal guarantor of our unchangeable position as adult sons in the family of God. But just what does it mean to be a child of God? Paul answers this question for us in vs. 17.

Being a child of God means we are His heirs, and fellow heirs with Christ. Not only are we blessed with the ever-present witness of the Holy Spirit that we are God's children, but we are full-fledged sons guaranteed an inheritance from the God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. We have a moment-by-moment affirmation by the Spirit, and a future hope in terms of the inheritance we shall receive from Him. Knowing you have an inheritance coming is a sweet thing: it blesses us in the present with a secret hope, and in the future with a golden reality.

About two months ago, I got a phone call from my Dad. He had just heard from a cousin of his, Kenneth Followwill. Kenneth wanted to sell the old Followwill farm to my Dad at a discounted price. His reasoning went like this: Kenneth knew that my Dad had the last remaining son in the Texas branch of the family that still spelled our last name with the trademark "double w." When Kenneth heard that I had one son who would carry on the name, he was overjoyed. He told my Dad that he wanted to sell the farm that has been in our family since the 1850s to the last remaining Followwill sons, as an inheritance. My Dad called me to see if I wanted him to buy the 140 acres on the far western edge of the suberbs of Fort Worth, as part of my inheritance. That phone call stirred my heart: an inheritance passed from father to son for 140 years; an opportunity to buy beautiful land that may someday be worth something if Fort Worth spreads westward; to inherit something I could give my five children when I pass away. It was a heady phone call I won't forget.

But let me reflect: 140 acres west of Fort Worth and 140 years of family history is as nothing compared with the inheritance we will receive from our heavenly Father, owner of the universe, who planned for us to inherit His estate before the foundation of the world. So often we get caught up in valuing things by the world's paltry monetary system. The inheritance we have as heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ cannot be measured by earthly scales.

The security we have from God our Father is that our sonship guarantees us an inheritance from our Father. It is guaranteed, and if there is ever a question raised about our legitimacy, either from the infernal accuser or from our own fleshly fears, God's Spirit reminds us we are children of God. The Spirit reminds us we have a Father who has marked out an inheritance for us ... an inheritance so glorious our minds cannot conceive its magnitude. Paul tells us as much in I Cor. 2: 9, 10: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God." What the world cannot imagine, nor even begin to measure, the Spirit of God has revealed to us: that we are sons, children of God, and if children, then inheritors of the divine estate.

What security is offered the sons of God!! The Spirit Himself is our security, and the security offered us by God our Father is a guaranteed inheritance of unfathomable riches. We are children of God, and heirs of God. We have a very present comfort in the Spirit, and a future hope in our Father. In the last phrase of vs. 17, we find we have present suffering and future glory with Christ Jesus, our fellow heir who lives all of life with us, both now and forever.

Security with the Son: Suffering Now, Glory Later - 8:17

Paul completes the verse by saying, "and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him." There is something striking about Paul's word choice in this verse. Each of the three key terms, "heirs," "suffer" and "be glorified" are made into compound terms with a prefix added: "with." In vs. 17, Paul binds us to Christ with his use of language: we are "heirs with" Christ; we "suffer with" Christ; and we shall "be glorified with" Christ. Paul is telling us something wonderful: our security with the Son is that we are with Him, tied to Him, identified forever with Him, with Him in the present and with Him in the everlasting future. Our identification with Him is so complete it is all-encompassing. We are secure with Christ in the now and in the not yet.

This verse cuts to the marrow of the Christian experience. We possess infinite security in our position as sons in God's family; yet in the present, we suffer. But although we suffer in this world, we do not suffer alone ... we suffer with Jesus Christ. And even though we suffer in this world of pain and sorrow, we thrill with hope and anticipation of the glory we will share with Jesus Christ in the heavenly realms. All the glorious paradoxes of the now and the not yet of the Christian life are summarized here in vs. 17.

This verse also reveals the shocking reality of the Christian life that most of us find so hard to swallow. This life is a life of suffering with Christ. Suffering should not surprise us, but authenticate to us the validity of our standing as sons in God's family. Paul knew from day one of his Christian experience that suffering was to be his lot. The resurrected Christ whose blinding glory had stopped Saul in his tracks on the Damascus road had specifically told Ananias that Saul was chosen by God to suffer with Christ. The dialogue is great in Acts 9:13-16: "But Ananias answered, 'Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he did to Thy saints at Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call upon Thy name.' But the Lord said to him, 'Go, for he is a chosen instrument of Mine, to bear My name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for My name's sake." Paul was marked out as an instrument to be used by God ... which translated into a life of suffering.

Paul details his life's afflictions in II Cor. 11:24-28: "Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep. I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren; I have been in labor and hardship through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. Apart from such external things, there is the daily pressure upon me of concern for all the churches." Paul's life was no party.

In fact, in a curious way, the suffering of the now takes us step-by-step up a spiral staircase into the heavenly realms. We suffer in this world because we live by the life of Christ within us, and the logic of our Christ is the logic of the cross. The "get ahead" logic of the world wants nothing to do with death. The logic of the world points to advancement, glory, fame, wealth and the pursuit of happiness. But for all who are in Christ, death always paves the way to life. The grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies before its fruit rises toward the heavens. This is the higher calling of all who are identified with Christ: we suffer with Him in the now, moving upward toward the heavenlies in order to be glorified with Him in the future.

This calling is described beautifully in a short writing by an anonymous Christian entitled The High Calling. When I read it, I thought about every single person in our body, called with a higher calling. Here is that writing:

If God has called you to be truly like Jesus, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility, and put on you demands of obedience that sometimes will not allow you to follow other Christians. In many ways He will seem to let other good people do things He will not let you do.

Other Christians, and even ministers, who seem very religious and useful may push themselves, pull strings, and work schemes to carry out their plans, but you cannot do these things. And if you attempt them, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent.

Others can brag about themselves, about their work, about their success, about their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing; and if you begin bragging, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.

Others will be allowed to succeed in making great sums of money, or having a legacy left to them, or in having luxuries, but God may only supply you daily, because He wants you to have something far better than gold -- a helpless dependence on Him -- that He may have the privilege of providing your needs daily out of the unseen treasury.

The Lord may let others be honored and keep you hidden away in obscurity, because He wants to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory, which can only be produced in the shade.

God will let others be great, but keep you small. He will let others do a work for Him and get the credit for it, but He will make you work and toil without knowing how much you are doing. And then to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work which you have done, and this will make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes.

The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch on you, with jealous love, and rebuke you for little words and feelings or for wasted time, which other Christians never seem distressed over.

So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign who has a right to do as He pleases with His own and needs not to explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealings with you.

God will take you at your word; and if you absolutely sell yourself to be His slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love, and let other people say and do many things you cannot do or say.

Settle it forever that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hand, or closing your eyes in ways that others are not disciplined.

Now when you are so possessed with the living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven.

That captures the curious suffering to which we have been called, tracing the path of suffering from the valley of darkness in this world to the vestibule of heaven.

But the key point Paul makes in this passage is the fact that through it all, no matter what, Christ Himself is WITH us. We are heirs WITH Him, we suffer WITH Him, we will be glorified WITH Him. We are never left alone: He is with us always.

There is great security in this. To know we are not alone, to know that He is with us in the midst of our suffering and will see us through the end of our suffering and into the glorious beyond, is the security we have with Christ. And it is sweet indeed.

Over the past weeks, I have tasted the sweetness of Christ's companionship with me in a season of heartache. Three weeks ago last Sunday, my paternal grandmother died. On that Tuesday I flew to Texas to conduct her funeral service. It was a whirlwind tour, full of deep emotion and imagery of death I won't soon forget. It was the most intimate time I have ever spent with my Dad. It was an unspeakable privilege to preach about my favorite passage, having learned it was also her favorite passage ... Psalm 23. My Dad was served and blessed, and that meant the world to me. But a shadow of discouragement fell on me at the end of that trip. We had decided not to have a graveside service for my grandmother, having concluded everything in the service inside the church. As we fellowshipped in the church hall afterward, I looked out a back window and saw a lone workman shovelling dirt all by himself into my grandmother's grave. One lone figure on the heat-shimmering plains of Texas, shovelling dirt into a grave. If that is all there is to life on this earth, it is bleak beyond words. She is a Christian living in the heavenly realms now, but what my eye could see was a vision of death. On our return trip, we went through a string of towns that are slowly dying: shops boarded up and decaying on the main street, weeds growing up in abandoned school yards. Just in the years I have been driving past them, those towns are getting so much closer to being ghost towns. Then in returning home, I had almost no time to process all these emotions before the usual wave of spiritual warfare and discouragement flooded around me in the week just before Easter. The world felt very heavy to me. My heart ached.

But my Christ was with me, in a curious way. During the two weeks before Easter, my Lord raised up eight brothers from around the country who were led to pray for me. Each one called or wrote to me during that troubled time. One of them from Portland called at my lowest point, and he set a prayer chain in motion of friends and believers around the country and even around the world. Another friend here in Greenville had an intense dream about me, and he awoke with the deep conviction that he needed to pray for me. Another friend wrote me a letter saying how much he wants to support the ministry here, including some financial support. My Christ enwrapped me in His arms by gathering me into an embrace of eight men, all of whom expressed the love and care of Jesus Christ to me in a time of need. Believe me, He is with us in our dark hours, and He is carrying us home to be glorified with Him in the heavenly realms. With Him, there is security. In the darkness and in the light, Jesus Christ is with us always, even to the end of the age. What greater security is there?

Conclusion: Eternal Security -- Guaranteed by the Trinity

Our world today is very shaky. The new millenium is on our horizon, and doomsday cults arise with strange notions of joining UFOs to escape the collapse of this world. War is brewing in the Middle East again, as the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have degenerated into daily riots of rock-throwing and tear gas. Our President is a slippery liar who cannot be trusted. The future of our nation lies in the hands of a generation without any definitions: who have little clue of what a family is, whose schooling is based on the shifting sands of relativism, and whose single most consistent teacher is the television. Our world is teetering.

But we Christians are absolutely secure in the eternal commitment of the Triune God to make us eternally secure in His family. One of the great glories of Romans chapter eight is that Paul builds a crescendo of truth about the Trinity that convinces us that our God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is absolutely committed to love us and keep us in His family forever. Paul rooted our redemption in the orchestrated effort of Father, Son and Holy Spirit back in Rom. 8:3, 4: "For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God [the Father] did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." All the power and might of who God is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit was marshalled to cover our weakness before the Law, that we might be saved.

And here in Rom. 8:16, 17, all of who God is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit guarantees our security in the family of God, surrounding us with His commitment to us: "The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him." The Holy Spirit is given to us to be our indwelling security, witnessing with our spirit that we are children of God; the Father claims us as His own children, the heirs of His household; and the Son is with us through it all, through the suffering of the now time even unto the glory of the age to come.

But Paul will not stop here: the entire chapter builds to his grand finale of God's absolute commitment of love for us in Rom. 8:26-39, when we discover that God is for us: God the Spirit intercedes for us inside us; God the Father is for us across the ages; and God the Son intercedes for us as our heavenly Advocate.

Paul tells us three mighty truths about the Trinity and the individual believer: all of who God is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit has saved us from our sin, made us eternally secure in His family, and has loved us with an everlasting love. Small wonder this is the favorite chapter of the New Testament!

May we rest secure in our position in God's royal family, anchored by the security of the Spirit Himself, rejoicing in the security of a Father who names and claims us as children and heirs, and facing all suffering with the security of knowing our Jesus Christ will be with us through it all. Amen and amen!

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