©2001 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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5/27/01 |
Proofs Of Sonship Pt. 1 |
Romans 8:12-14 |
5/27/01 Proofs of Sonship Pt. 1
We are returning to our study
of the 8th chapter of the book of Romans this morning,
and returning, too,
to Paul’s summery comments
at the end of his 2nd major section of the book.
You will probably recall
that Paul wrote the book of Romans
to provide his readers with the answers
to the 4 major questions about Christianity.
1. Why was it necessary for Christ to come?
2. What is a Christian?
3. What happens to the nation of Israel now that God has established the church?
4. What is the church and how does it operate?
He answers the first question in the first two and a half chapters of the letter
by painting for us
a painfully vivid picture
of our relationship with God without Christ.
He answers the second question in Romans 3:21 through the end of chapter 8,
a section in which he describes for us
both the truths
and the principles that govern our walk with God through Christ.
He then talks about the relationship between the church and the nation of Israel
in chapters 9-11,
and finishes the letter in chapters 12-16
by sharing with us
the 6 foundation principles
of life in the Church.
We are now near the end of that second section of the letter
in which Paul describes for us
those principles that describe the true nature of the Christian life.
It is a section that began
with Paul’s bold affirmation
that now, through faith in Christ,
we stand righteous before God
apart from any works of the law.
It is a section in which Paul then reveals to us
the amazing birthday presents
given to us by our Heavenly Father
the day we enter His family -
peace with God forever,
a relationship with God based not on our works, but on His grace,
the Holy Spirit given as our guide to lead us into our own personal discovery of the love of God for us,
freedom forever from the wrath of God,
and several others as well.
This was also the section in which
Paul then explains to us
the ongoing battle between our new holy inner spirit
and the rebellious physical body
that continues to house that spirit
while we remain on this earth.
He has told us
that the normal Christian life
is one in which our inner spirit is filled with the new life of Christ,
and one in which we are consistently seeing the Spirit of God
enabling that holy inner spirit within us
to express itself through our rebellious and severely mistrained bodies.
Paul called this ongoing process
that of “...giving life to our mortal bodies through His Spirit who indwells us.”
And then, most recently in our study,
we heard Paul tell us
that, if we are attempting to live the Christian life,
and walk the Christian walk
on the basis of our flesh efforts to produce for God,
it is an approach that will never work,
and one to which we must die
before the life of Christ
can be effectively expressed in us and through us.
Now, as we move through these final verses of this second section of Romans,
I want to prepare you for what we are going to find here.
These verses from 8:12-39
are the verses in which Paul condenses and summarizes
the key truths he wants us to take away
from the past 5 chapters of Romans.
And if you find outlines helpful tools
in studying Scripture,
I’ll give you a three statement outline
of what we’re going to see Paul do in these verses.
1. In 8:12-17 Paul talks about the family likeness,
giving us the 5 characteristics of the true believer.
2. In 8:18-30 he gives us 5 powerful sources of encouragement
for those of us who live with the family likeness.
3. And then in 8:31-39
he gives us 5 things we must never forget
about the Father of the family.
We will only look at the first of those 3 sections today,
but those divisions will tell you where we’ll be going the next couple of weeks,
and may be of value to you in your own study.
But first let me prepare you a bit
for what Paul does in the first of these three sections.
Or more correctly,
let me allow our Lord Himself to prepare us
through several of the parables
He shared with His disciples when He was here.
You see, for the past 5 chapters of Romans
Paul has been defining and clarifying for us
how a person enters the family of God
and what changes when he or she does.
And given what he has been saying,
we should not be surprised to find
that he concludes this section
by handing us a clear snapshot of the Christian
in the form of 5 identifying Christian marks that confirm our union with Christ.
Knowing who is
and who is not a Christian
is not nearly as easy a question as we might at first expect.
We do all sorts of interesting things with this troublesome question in the Christian world.
More often than not
we write for ourselves some sort of religious list
with which we then evaluate those around us
to see whether they are in or out of the family.
Some of the most common entries on those lists include things such as:
Have you prayed a prayer asking Jesus into your life?
Have you been baptized?
Are you actively involved in some church?
Do you avoid certain types of immoral behavior?
Do you do good to those around you?
Do you read your Bible and pray?
But the truth is
none of those things in themselves
can either prove
or disprove the true nature of a person’s relationship with God.
I found it fascinating to discover
that a significant number of Jesus’ parables
were given for the one purpose
of preparing us for the presence of counterfeit “Christians” in the organized church.
I’ll mention just two of them
to show you what I mean.
MAT 13:24 ¶ Jesus presented another parable to them,
saying, "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good
seed in his field.
MAT 13:25
"But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed tares
among the wheat, and went away.
MAT 13:26
"But when the wheat sprouted and bore grain, then the tares became
evident also.
MAT 13:27
"The slaves of the landowner came and said to him, 'Sir, did you
not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?'
MAT 13:28
"And he said to them, 'An enemy has done this!' The slaves said to
him, 'Do you want us, then, to go and gather them up?'
MAT 13:29
"But he said, 'No; for while you are gathering up the tares, you
may uproot the wheat with them.
MAT 13:30 'Allow both to grow together until the harvest;
and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, "First gather up
the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them up; but gather the wheat into
my barn."'"
Now, Jesus gave this parable at a time
when His disciples were just beginning to learn about this parable thing,
and how each little story
had eternal truths imbedded inside.
And so, to get them use to this process,
Jesus took His men aside
and explained the parable to them.
MAT 13:36 ¶ Then He left the crowds and went into the
house. And His disciples came to Him and said, "Explain to us the parable
of the tares of the field."
MAT 13:37 And He said, "The one who sows the good
seed is the Son of Man,
MAT 13:38 and the field is the world; and as for the good
seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil
one;
MAT 13:39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil, and the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are angels...”
And I want us to notice two things in this parable.
First of all, a lot more ends up growing in God’s field than God intended.
Christ is picturing His planting the church throughout the world.
God sows His seed.
He brings His people into His field.
But then Satan sows weeds
right in next to the wheat,
weeds that look so much like the wheat
that it is very difficult to tell them apart,
especially when they first sprout up.
And second,
I want us to notice the way in which Christ instructed His angels to handle the situation.
They wanted to jump in
and rip out “the sons of the evil one”.
But Jesus makes it clear
that telling the difference between the true and the false
is far more difficult than we might at first believe,
and if we try to tell the difference now
we will make some mistakes.
Some sons of the evil one are going to look very much like kids of the kingdom,
and some kids of the kingdom
are not going to look at all like we think they should.
And His solution is to let both “grow together until the harvest”.
In other words,
don’t waste your time trying to tell who REALLY is and is not a Christian.
And the very next parable Jesus tells
takes this same theme
and expands upon it.
MAT 13:31 ¶ He presented another parable to them, saying,
"The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed
in his field;
MAT 13:32 and this is smaller than all other seeds, but
when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree,
so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches."
In this parable Jesus describes His kingdom,
His work on the earth
as being like a mustard seed planted in the garden.
The seed begins to grow,
and if it would have grown correctly
it would have grown into a little herb,
a little garden plant.
But then something goes terribly wrong with this growth process
and this little garden herb begins to mutate,
to grow way beyond its correct size.
It grows into a bush,
and then a small tree,
and then a huge tree,
big enough for the birds
to come and make their home in it.
From Christ’s own interpretation of other parables in this same passage
we know that the birds
picture Satan himself and his followers.
And through this parable
Jesus wants us to know
that as His message spreads throughout both time and space,
eventually the organizations that grow in the wake of that message
will expand into a twisted distortion of what He intended
that is so monstrous as to actually provide the home base
for much of Satan’s most hideous work.
I mention all of this at this point in our Romans study
because it will help us better understand
what Paul is doing at this point in his letter.
You see,
there are two distinctly different questions we are dealing with.
One of them is the question of how I can know for certain
that another person is a Christian.
Jesus answers that question for us through these parables
by saying we can’t.
We can usually have a pretty good idea,
but the truth is, rarely will we ever know another person well enough
to be able to see into their heart.
But there is another question
to which we can know the answer -
how can I know for certain
that I am a Christian?
And this is the question Paul is answering for us in Romans 8:12-17.
And I believe he does this
mostly to help arm us against the lies and accusations
that Satan so frequently flings at us,
lies designed to undermine our sense of peace and security with our Lord.
And with that as background,
let me just walk us quickly through these 5 characteristics of the true believer.
#1. The first one we’ve already looked at in our study. It is found in 8:12-13:
ROM 8:12 ¶ So then, brethren, we are under obligation,
not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh --
ROM 8:13 for if you are living according to the flesh,
you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the
body, you will live.
The true Christian lives with an ever-present internal conflict between the impulses of the flesh
and the leadership of the Spirit.
And before we go any farther with these
let me tell you what to expect.
With each of these 5,
when we correctly understand what Paul is saying,
the Christian will find himself or herself saying, “Oh sure, I know what Paul means.”
And let me just say that this first one on the list
is in no way the same thing
as that universal sense of guilt
brought about by the moral conscience within us.
Everyone feels guilty at times,
feels as if they should try harder
to be a better person.
That is not what Paul is talking about here.
He is talking about that hunger and thirst for righteousness
that only the Spirit of God can create within us,
a hunger and thirst that always exceeds our grasp,
yet one that encourages us forward
rather than defeating us in the process.
Before we come to Christ
we think we should be good,
after we come to Christ
we wish we could be good.
And every true growing child of God
lives daily with an ever-present internal conflict
between the righteous longings of our new holy heart
and the unrighteous impulses still imbedded in our physical bodies.
The presence of that conflict,
that spirit-level tension within us
is the first great confirmation of our union with Christ
offered to us by Paul.
#2. ROM 8:14 For all who are being led by the Spirit of
God, these are sons of God.
The true child of God lives with an ever growing awareness
of the life and leadership of the Spirit of God within.
John makes the most fascinating statement in I John 3:24.
He says, “1JO 3:24 ... We know by this that He abides in
us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.
He tells us that the presence of the Spirit of God within us
is one of the major proofs of our sonship.
Paul calls the Holy Spirit “the pledge”,
the down-payment,
the divine engagement ring given to us by our God
as proof of our eternal future with Him.
We do not have the time right now
to get into a big thing on role of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s life,
but at the same time,
given the degree of religious confusion about the Holy Spirit
that is floating around the Christian community
I do need to say at least a little more.
It is impossible for us to exist within the Church community for any length of time
without being confronted by some earnest,
but deeply misguided fellow pilgrim
bounding into our lives and asking us the question, “Do you have the HOLY SPIRIT?”
And the question will be followed immediately
with the assurance that the only way we can know for sure that we have the Spirit
is if we possess some specific “spiritual gift”
that “proves” He is present within us.
This is not
and never has been the Question our God has called us to wrestle with.
The Question He gives us is this:
“Do you have Christ?”
If you have Christ,
then you have His Spirit.
ROM 8:9 ¶ However, you are not in the flesh but in the
Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have
the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.
But, having said that,
it might be helpful for me to offer
just a few Biblical evidences of the presence of the Spirit within a person.
If you and I were talking personally,
and you were concerned about whether or not the Spirit was present in your life
I would ask you a question.
I would ask you to share with me
what changes you have noticed in your life as a result of your submission to Christ.
And I’ll tell you what, in your own words,
I would expect to hear from you.
You would tell me about how you have a whole new sensitivity to right and wrong
that you never had before. (John 16:8)
You would tell me about how the Bible has a life and a power and an authority you never experienced before. It actually feeds your spirit. (John 16:13)
You would tell me that you have an awareness of God’s love for you
in a way you’d never known before. (Romans 5:5)
You would tell me that you find yourself longing to live a life pleasing to your God,
a life that honors and glorifies Him. (Ezekiel 11:19)
You would tell me about your awareness of the presence of Christ with you constantly,
and about your desire to honor Him as Lord of your life. (John 14:26, I Cor. 12:13)
Everyone of those things exist in a person’s life
only because of the presence of the Spirit of God within them.
And in the same way,
if none of those things are present in people’s lives,
and yet they view themselves as being Christians,
it is very possible they are not really Christians at all,
but rather simply faithful adherents of the Christian religion.
We are out of time,
and I’ll need to save the remaining proofs of our union with Christ
until next week.