I went to seminary with Steve's dad and mom back in the 70s and it was an enormous pleasure to reacquaint myself with him. He was always very studious as a student, always sat in the front taking notes, asking all sorts of profound questions. I remember I was always in the back of the class. And it's such a joy really to, I'll pay you afterwards Steve for that introduction, but it's such a joy to see a fairly unique relationship between a father and a son in ministry. And I've watched these two men with great fondness and great admiration. Before I begin, I wanted to recommend a book about a theme that I'll be addressing a little later this afternoon. Spiritual Desertion by Gispertus Voetius and Johannes Hornbeek. Is that close? Give it the Dutch rendition. Voetius and Hornbeek. Voetius and Hornbeek. You know, I've never called him butchers. Now I'm going to be embarrassed. Joel and others, Richard Muller and others, have been translating and bringing into English these marvelous works on behalf of the Dutch Reformed Translation Society. And this one, I have to say, I was looking for for the last 30 years and would recommend it alongside, I think, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones's wonderful little book on spiritual depression, which had a very profound impact on me, oh, 25 years ago, but I thoroughly recommend this volume. It's most accessible and comes from that rich vein of reformed experiential theology. And there are two treatises, obviously, one by Butchus, and one by Hornbeak in here and thoroughly, thoroughly recommend that. Now, turn with me in Paul's letter to the Romans and to the eighth chapter. And I was somewhat hesitant, I have to say, to speak to you on the 8th chapter of Romans only because it is so familiar and what could I possibly say that you hadn't heard a thousand times before. And I held my breath a little bit as Joel took us to the closing section of Romans 8 and that's not the section I want us to look at this morning. Romans 8 is one of those marvelous key passages in the New Testament dealing with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. At several points in the 8th chapter of Romans, Paul brings the changes, as it were, on aspects of the Spirit's work in an experiential fashion, the way in which the covenant of grace, as it were, comes home within our own existential experience. And at various points in this eighth chapter, he begins to expound on what is a marvellous taxonomy of the Spirit's engagement with us, in our hearts, with our souls. witnessing with our spirits in and through the ministry of prayer. Paul implying at one point a word that I'm almost convinced he made up, the Spirit helping us with our infirmities, aiding us in our infirmities, coming to our side. And Paul, almost as in the German language, Paul puts two prepositions together to an otherwise fairly common verb and makes up a word. It certainly looks like that, giving us a marvelous insight into the operations of the Holy Spirit in and through the ministry of prayer. Well, let's turn our attention now to the eighth chapter of Romans before we read the passage. Let's pray together. Father in Heaven, this is your Word. You breathed it out. You caused it to come into being, every jot and tittle of it. But apart from the spirit of illumination, we are unable to understand it. We can read the words and utter the vocables, A cloud remains over our understanding and over our hearts. So come, Holy Spirit, and illuminate our minds. Blow away the mists. Help us to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. And all for the sake of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. This is God's Word. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh. But those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death. But to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is sat on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law. Indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if, in fact, the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brothers, we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. But if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 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 Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. 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. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved, Now, hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we'll pause in the reading. at that point and may God add His blessing to the reading of His holy and inerrant word. Now here, as I said in Romans 8, all that has been planned by the Father and accomplished by the Son is effected in us Ultimately, in the cosmos, as we see in particular in verses 18 and following, not just personal salvation here, but how the purposes of God in redemption ultimately have in view the renewal of the cosmos itself that at present groans and travails in birth, as it were, waiting for, as Paul puts it, the regeneration of all things. And that is part of what Paul wants to say, that what God has planned and what has been accomplished in the life and death and resurrection and ascension of Christ is effected in us and ultimately in the cosmos by the Holy Spirit. And here you view, and if we had time, we could go down this pathway, as it were. Here we view the essential Trinitarianism that so qualifies everything that Paul says, that apart from the Trinity, apart from the relationships within the Trinity, that God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons, yet one God. that redemption could not be possible apart from the doctrine of the Trinity. And here you glimpse part of the way in which, in the economy of the Trinity, what theologians have often referred to as the doctrine of appropriation, that each individual person of the Trinity assumes a part, an essential part of the application of redemption in the lives of God's people. And yet, in such a way that theologians have also wanted to say opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, which you all said before breakfast this morning, as essential to what you understand about the doctrine of God, namely, that the individual operations of the Trinity cannot be divided. In other words, that there is a coherence and there is an integration of how Father, Son and Holy Spirit work together in our lives to bring to pass the grand and glorious purpose of God to bring us home, to bring us to the fullness of redemption in a regenerated new heavens and new earth in which righteousness will dwell. And Paul is now ringing, as it were, some of the changes on that. And especially here in the eighth chapter of Romans, he wants us to glimpse, as it were, the way in which the Holy Spirit in particular works in the economy of redemption. And in a sense, it is encapsulated for us, having begun in that section in the opening verses of Romans chapter 8, where he is referred to the Spirit as the Spirit of life, having set us free in Christ from the law of sin and death, There is the law of the spirit of life in opposition and in contrast to the law of sin and death. And that we live as it were in the realm of the spirit, minding the things of the spirit. And Paul is urging us to the duty and privilege and benefits of spiritual mindedness. And as I was reading this section with you this morning, some thoughts of one of the volumes of John Owen came back to me on spiritual mindedness. I spent about six months back in the late, no, middle 1970s with a friend of mine and known to all of you, I'm sure, Jeff Thomas, to whom I'm not related, even though when I'm asked, I usually like to say, that he's my father, but he's not, of course, old enough to be my father. But I lived in his manse for about a year or so as a young student. And every morning, we would get up and read together out loud. And we read through that marvelous volume of John Owen on spiritual mindedness, the entire volume based on what Paul is saying in these opening verses of the eighth chapter of Now, what I want to do this morning is to capture, as it were, what is in many ways the main thought of the Apostle as we find it in verses 12 through 17. Conscious as I do that, that Paul has already said some hugely significant things about the Holy Spirit in the opening 11 verses, and conscious too that he goes on to say two or three more hugely significant things about the Holy Spirit in verses 18 through 30, not least the role of the Spirit in the regeneration of the cosmos and not least in the way in verses 26 and following the Spirit helps us in our infirmities in the whole ministry and privilege of prayer. But I have no time to consider those particular areas as much as I would love to, but I want us to focus our thoughts now almost entirely on this section from verse 12 through verse 17. And what we see here is Paul addressing not just the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit as, and he seems to give the Holy Spirit a title here, as the spirit of adoption or of adoptive sonship. Especially, you see that in verse 15. You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the capitalist spirit of adoption as sons. Paul is using some very technical language, I think, at that point. The spirit of adoption or the spirit of adoptive sonship. And the whole section is weighed with, you notice, the language of family and sonship. In verse 12 he refers to them as brothers. In verse 14 he refers to them as the sons of God. 15, how the Spirit enables us to call God Abba, Father. And in verse 16, it is the children of God. And in verse 17, children and the way in which children are heirs and heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, so that Christ is, in essence, our elder brother. So the whole section is suffused with the language of family. I wasn't raised in a Christian home. I never actually attended church until I was 18. I didn't possess a Bible. I don't think I'd ever read the Bible, not a page of it, not a line of it, until I was 18. My best friend in school sent me a copy of John Stott's Basic Christianity. I was studying physics and applied mathematics. I was in another world. And this book came in the mail with a little note from my best friend who had been converted. And I thought this was just strange and weird and definitely not for me. But because he was my best friend and we were both obsessed with classical music. In fact, it came to mind as a friend was playing Schumann's Tramarai at the beginning and all sorts of memories came back. He was a pianist and I remember listening to him playing that on several occasions. It was in God's providence that that introduced me to Christianity. But I remember my very first occasion when I walked into a church building. It was Geoff Thomas' church in Alfred Place, in Aberystwyth, a reformed Baptist congregation. And I remember it vividly. It was in 1971, over 35, 6, 7 years ago now. And I saw men and women and I saw young folk and they were carrying Bibles and they were singing as though they meant it and they talked about Jesus. And I remember vividly, my parents had just gone through a divorce and I would not want to be 16 for all the tea in China. I'm just glad those days are behind me. But I remember thinking, this is my family. These are my brothers and sisters. These are my fathers and mothers and children. In a sense, and I love my family and I don't misunderstand what I'm about to say, but in a sense, I remember vividly thinking this was the family that I'd never had. It was like coming home. Even though I'd never been in this building before and didn't know any of them, I felt as though I was coming home. And I often think that's what heaven is like. You know, what will you experience in the first 10 seconds after death? And I think the answer I always want to give is you'll experience coming home. You'll say, I recognize this place. You'll say, this place is where I've always meant to be. And these people are my brothers and sisters. Well, this section is suffused then with the language of family. It's interesting that Calvin in book three of the famous Institutes, which he tinkered with the whole of his life and the final edition published in 1559, some five years or so before his death. He speaks here in the third book of the Institutes with considerable eloquence on the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And he calls this particular title in verse 15 that is given to the Spirit as the first title of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of adoption or the spirit of adoptive sonship. It's his chief title. It's his principal title, Calvin says. And it seems to me that it has a sort of primacy, not just in chronology, but theologically, that adoption is the, what does Murray say, adoption is the apex of redemptive grace, and therefore the Holy Spirit is engaging here in a work that brings us from a law of sin and death into a relationship whereby we can call God, Abba, Father. And it seems so often to me to be part of the newness of the new covenant. You know, if you're asked what is new about the new covenant, what is the change that takes place as you turn the page from Malachi into Matthew, as it were, and you come into the light of the dawning of the new age and the coming of Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. And I often want to say that part of the newness of the new covenant is that we are no longer, as the Jews were, so terrified about naming the name of God that they actually never named the name of God. And we're not clear, despite what Some of my friends and colleagues and especially my students think that we now know exactly how to pronounce the tetragrammaton, the divine name as Yahweh. Paul wants to say, I think, on so many occasions in the New Testament that God's name is Father. He is our Father. He enables us to cry, Abba, Father. the way in which the gift of the Holy Spirit that renders us conscious that we are sons, sons of our Heavenly Father, who realizes in our lives what it means to say, I am a child of God. It's not great poetry by any standards, but I often find myself repeating to myself, I'm a child of a king. I'm a child of a king with Jesus, my savior. I'm the child of a king. And those simple, very simple words, and not the best of poetry by any standards, but they seem to encapsulate what it means to be a Christian, what it means to have our sins forgiven and to be in union and communion with Jesus Christ, that I am a child of God and that God in all His glory is my Father in Heaven. I want to know deep down what the disciples felt. Not just what they thought, but what they felt when they asked Jesus to teach us to pray. And He taught them to pray saying, Our Father who art in Heaven. And I have a suspicion that even though the concept of God as Father was known in the Old Testament, it was so far removed from the consciousness of even true disciples, that I think the disciples were taken aback. I think you could have heard gasps of the intake of air as Jesus began to teach them to pray, saying, Our Father who art in heaven. Now, Paul brings the changes on this title of the spirit of adoption along three lines of thought. And in verses 12 through 14, he elaborates on the way in which the Spirit of Sonship brings us, as it were, into dimensions of holiness and Christ-likeness. So then, brothers, we are debtors not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death or mortify the deeds of the body, you will live. And it's important for us to understand here, as this crucial text, verse 13, and again, I suppose many of you are thinking again of John Owen and that marvelous volume 6 of his writings, which every Christian ought to read, not just those who are readers, but dip into that. You know, those sermons were preached to pubescent boys in Oxford. You know, they went to Oxford much younger than they would now, of course, and those boys would have been 14, 15, 16 years of age, and volume six of Owen, On the Mortification of Sin, they are essentially sermons, and they read like sermons that have been stitched together with bits and pieces of Owen's own subsequent editions, but you can sense and feel the semanic structure of those pages, but they were delivered to teenage boys. How appropriate, by the way, for teenage boys with genes and hormones coming out of their ears and pores. that they should be given a series of sermons on the mortification of sin. But we can so easily misunderstand, too, what Paul is actually doing here, that he's not giving us here an isolated imperative. But actually, it's not an imperative at all. It's actually a conditional clause in the technical sense of the first order. And what he's saying here is that those in whom the Spirit dwells mind the things of the Spirit. Because if you are not minding the things of the Spirit, but are in fact minding the things of the flesh, then that is indicative of the fact that maybe the Holy Spirit is not in you. In other words, He is dealing with sin in such a way that we can only be engaged with dealing with this sin as it were by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and one of the consequences of being indwelt by the Spirit, of having been brought into the family of God, and having been brought to the place where we can say, Abba, Father, is that we now deal with that remaining corruption of sin. Only as a child of God, minding the things of the Spirit, am I empowered to deal with sin. And it's an important dynamic, of course. Paul isn't giving us here a kind of moralism. He's not setting us on another treadmill of self-denial. at the end result of which we may then begin to entertain an assurance of saving faith. No, Paul is saying, because you are the children of God, because you already know God as your Father, because of who you are and what you are, because you are indwelt by the Spirit, and on that basis, on the indicatives, these imperatives, begin to operate, not through any strength of our own, but by the strength and energy and power of the Holy Spirit. Only in the context of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the power of the Holy Spirit are we in a place to mind the things of the Holy Spirit. And the goal, you see, of The goal of sanctification is not mortification. The goal of sanctification is Christlikeness. The goal of sanctification is to become, as Paul puts it in verse Those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be what? Conformed to the image of His Son. Because you are sons, live like sons. One of my most vivid memories It's hard to put it into words. I still shudder even when I tell this story. It's just a vivid memory. I was a teenager in school, high school. And my older brother was four years older than I was. And you know, when you're a teenager, four years, you mean you might as well have been 70. You know, I was 13 or something and he was 17 and that means he was He was an adult as far as I was concerned. He was so far beyond me age-wise, and I know it was only four years. I still think of him that way, by the way. And when he calls me on the telephone, I still sort of want to stand up straight when I'm talking to him. He was in the military for 25 years. And I remember I did something in school, and it wasn't that bad, and I'm not gonna tell you what it was because I think it would set you off on a tangent and I'd never get you back again. I did something that was bad in school, and I remember being called in to see the headmaster and being given a dressing down. And that was bad enough, but it wasn't even in the same page as what my older brother did. Because he caught me in the corridor of the school and took me outside behind a shed. I mean, literally, in the proverbial sense, behind the woodshed. And he gave me such a dressing down, and I don't remember a lot of it now, but I just remember these words. He said, as though he was a Sicilian mafia member, he said, you've let the family down. And it wasn't so much what I had done, it was the sense of absolute horror that I had let the name of my family down by what I had done. And Paul is addressing us here along those lines. Remember who you are. That you are Christians. That you bear the name of Christ. That you are members of the household of God. That God is your Father. That Christ is your elder brother. You are in the family now. And never forget that. And on that basis of who you are, not of what you want to become. Sometimes I think we engage in mortification in order to become something that we are not now. But Paul actually reverses the dynamic. Because when we sin, we sin as the children of God. When we sin, we drag Jesus and our Father into that sin. And Paul wants us to see here this enormous blessing, this phenomenal blessing of what it means to be a child of God, a child of God. And then in the second place, if the spirit of adoption brings us into a relationship whereby we fulfill, as it were, our family obligations, And that's basically what he's dealing with in verses 12-14. In verses 15 and 16, he says the Spirit brings us into a relationship in which we enjoy the testimony of the Spirit. And he puts it in this way, 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 Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. And if children, then heirs, and so on. God's ordinary purpose is to lead us into joyful assurance. That is God's ordinary purpose. Now, there are exceptions. And there are times when, as Joel will be expounding again this morning and this afternoon, there are times when we walk in darkness and have no light. But that's the exception and not the rule. We're meant to be assured. I've met Christians who, I think, see it as a mark of piety not to be assured. It's a kind of reverse psychology. That those who are not assured are the more mature ones. Because they have the deep thoughts about sin. And they have the deep thoughts about God. And they are the ones who really examine themselves. And if you have assurance too quickly, it means that you haven't thought about these things enough. But actually, that seems to me to reverse all that the New Testament seems to be saying. that one of the consequences, the fundamental consequences of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is that He witnesses with our spirits that we are the children of God. So that the spirit of sonship is given in order that we might be conscious of the reality of adoption. And Paul is emphasizing this role of the Spirit here in this way, that the Spirit witnesses with our spirits in the mystery of the divine indwelling of the Spirit, that it issues in this single cry, Abba, Father. Now, you know, of course, you know your New Testaments well enough Paul addresses this exact same issue in his epistle to the Galatians in chapter 4 and verse 6, but there it's a little different. Here he's saying that the Spirit witnesses with our spirit so that we cry, Abba, Father. But in Galatians 4, it is the Spirit who cries, Abba, Father. Well, which is it? Is it the spirit that's trying Abba, Father, or is it us who's trying Abba, Father? And you might as well ask the same question of what Jesus says elsewhere in first Corinthians 12 about no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the spirit. In other words, it's not it's not either or the spirit is not a son to the father, he doesn't have that relationship. But what Paul is saying is that the very cry, Abba, Father, is the product and the result of the work of the Spirit within our hearts. So that when even in the darkest moment, it is our reflex to say, Father. Unbelievers never say, Father. Unbelievers might say, oh, God, when they're in an accident and they know that something terrible is about to happen in the next second or two, they might cry out, oh, God, or some rendition of the name of Jesus, perhaps. But rarely, I think, would you ever hear an unbeliever say, Father. And out of the depths of our soul, the Spirit brings forth this confession. He is our Father. The word that is used there, we cry, Abba, Father. It's a very interesting word. Kratzen in Greek. It's a word that's used elsewhere in the New Testament for cries that are uttered in moments of great stress. Shrieks, loud cries, Son of David, have mercy on me. Jesus' cry on the cross. In other words, do you see why this is so glorious? It's coming not at the height of our assurance and joy, but in our lowest moment, in our cries that we utter in the midst of the most ravaging trials, the Spirit comes. in our weakest moments, in our moments when we are at an end of ourselves and at the edge of despair. At that moment, the Spirit enables us to say, Abba, Father. He witnesses with our spirits. Those groans and sometimes when you're in despair or at the edge of despair and you're passing through trials and you can't vocalize what it is that you want to pray. which leads Paul elsewhere in Romans 8 to say the Spirit helps us with our infirmities. He comes alongside and carries us if we need to be carried. At that moment, the Spirit comes and enables us to say, Abba, Father. Well, there's also another aspect of this and it's in the next section in verse 17, and if children then heirs, not only do we fulfill the family obligations and not only do we enjoy the testimony of the Holy Spirit, but thirdly and very briefly, we share, Paul says, in the pattern of the elder brother. We share in the pattern of the elder brother if children then heirs and heirs of God and, you know, It takes your breath away. Fellow heirs with Christ. How could that possibly be? How could that possibly be that God loves us in the same way with the same love with which he loves his own son? You almost want to say that can't possibly be true. You see, there is an inbuilt reluctance within us to believe the love of God. I don't think we believe in the love of God in the way that we ought to believe. There's always a residual skepticism within us that God can't possibly love us that much. And Paul is saying, not only does he treat you as heirs, but he treats you as joint heirs with his own son. And that takes your breath away. That He's brought you, not into a similar family, but He's brought you into the same family in which Jesus is also an heir, an elder brother, as it were, within that family. But it has consequences. 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. And that's so very Paul, isn't it? There's glory to come. There's unimaginable glory to come. There's a redemption of a heaven and an earth to come. There is the regeneration of all things to come. Nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Not life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all of the created order can separate me. We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. Provided we suffer with Him. Because as Paul has already expounded in the sixth chapter of Romans, we are in union with Christ in His resurrection. that we are also in union with Christ in His death. And that means that in this world of hostility and enmity of the world and the flesh and the devil, we will be the subject of the slings and arrows of what Shakespeare called outrageous fortune. But every single one of them within the orbit of God's decree. And nothing happens to us without Him willing it to happen. And without Him willing it to happen before it happens. And without Him willing it to happen in the way that it happens. And here is Paul then bringing the changes on the work of the Spirit in the application of redemption saying, in effect, this glorious truth that we are brought into the family of God with all the privileges that that entails and that we experience the witnessing of the Spirit with our spirits in the deepest, darkest moments, enabling us to cry, Abba, Father, and reassuring us that whatever the suffering and whatever the trial, we are in a family in which Our Lord Jesus is our elder brother. And there is no darkness through which he has not passed. That even in the darkest of tunnels below the surface of the ground where there is no ambient light whatsoever and you feel down into the sand that is below and you feel the impression of a footprint. And it is the footprint of Jesus who has walked this way before us as the one who blazes a trail, the author and finisher of our faith, and who sits at God's right hand and ever lives to intercede on our behalf. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for this time and ask now for the blessing of your Spirit with our spirits to witness that we are the children of God and heirs and joint heirs with Christ. If so be that we suffer with him that we may also be glorified together. And this we ask for Jesus' sake. Amen.