Transcription
As we were sitting there, I asked my friend Steve Lawson what the first sign of being filled with the Holy Spirit is. Uh, which has become a very favorite trick question of mine among, uh, students for the ministry. And Steve answered correctly, speaking the word with boldness. But it wasn't the answer I was looking for. And, uh, I said to him, "Well," I said, "Paul says the first sign that you're filled with the Spirit is that you sing Psalms." Or Psalms. And he said immediately, "This is why, if he were not a man of grace, he would be one of the most irritating people I know." He said immediately, "Ephesians 5:18." And, uh, of course, that is absolutely right. We are, uh, I was prompted to ask him because we began with a Psalm, um, and then Chris prayed for the slothful listeners. Um, and, uh, we need to sing Psalms with energy. More important, we need to sing Psalms, um, that sounded like a Baptist "Amen" from the front pew. There, um, there is a, don't you find it an amazing thing that many men now who are going into the ministry have never sung a Psalm in their lives in worship? Um, and that does not bode well for the future of the Gospel Ministry. Um, so that's related to the Holy Spirit, but let's turn to Romans chapter 8. I didn't intend to begin with a lecture. And, uh, we're going to read just a few verses here, although I'm going to cover the bulk of the chapter this morning. But let's begin to read in, uh, Romans chapter 8, verse 1. And then I'll pick up again in verse 9 and read through to verse 17.
"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. Verse 9: 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. For 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 received the spirit of adoption of sons, by whom we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are 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."
I have two challenges this morning as we turn to think about the Holy Spirit. One is, um, very reminiscent of an experience I had as a youngster. I was sitting listening to the late Professor John Murray speak, uh, when I was, I think, a late teenager. And Professor Murray, who by that time had retired from Westminster Seminary, had a habit of examining his fingernails as he spoke, as though he had, uh, microfished his notes onto his fingernails. And he began his address by saying, uh, in his very distinctive Highland Scottish accent, "I find it very difficult to speak on a subject to which I have given a great deal of attention for 15 years." I thought the man had got his opening sentence wrong. It took me another 15 years to have given a great deal of attention to anything. And then when I had, I realized it just dawned on me one day, he really meant what he said. That when you've given a great deal of thought to something, it really is a challenge to give a relatively brief exposition on that theme. So I do face a challenge because the ministry of the Holy Spirit is something to which I have tried to give a certain amount of attention in my life.
Second challenge is this, that, uh, my wife has two words of exhortation for me. Uh, one, "You're tired, so don't speak so long." And, uh, I say to her, like a helpless little boy, "The reason I speak so long is because I'm tired." And the second thing she says to me is, "Keep it simple." That's great counsel, actually. Keep it simple. It's amazing how profound you can seem to people if you keep it simple. And so, following my wife's counsel, I thought, well, the simplest thing to do in speaking about the ministry of the Holy Spirit is to turn to Romans chapter 8. And this was where I encountered my second challenge, uh, when one of our elders said to me on, uh, Sunday night recently, he said, "I'm going to be at the Ligonier conference and I'm bringing all my boys." So I think three or four of his sons and his son-in-law are here with him. And it just so happens on Sunday nights, I'm preaching through Romans, and I've arrived at Romans chapter 8. And so my challenge is to expound Romans chapter 8 without giving away anything to him and his boys of what I'm going to say when I go back to Columbia and expound Romans chapter 8. So if you think Ferguson missed out the really important things in Romans chapter 8, the reason is I'm keeping them for my beloved elder and his family when I get back to Romans chapter 8. But Romans chapter 8 is perhaps supremely, there are one or two other passages of which we would instinctively think of as the diamond passages on the ministry of the Holy Spirit, but perhaps for most of us, Romans chapter 8 is supreme among those diamonds. It's the Koh-i-Noor diamond of diamonds in expounding the glorious ministry of the Holy Spirit.
And I think in order to understand it, we need to understand what Paul is doing as he expounds the gospel, what he calls twice in Romans, "my gospel," the gospel that he preached. He has, he has enunciated his theme, the saving power of God in the gospel, because in it the righteousness of God is revealed. And as you know, from chapter 1:8 to chapter 3:2, he speaks about the reason why we need the righteousness of God revealed. We are under the wrath of God. We are guilty sinners. There is none of us who is righteous. Every mouth is shut before the judgment throne of God. We have no appeal to make. We are lost, condemned sinners. None of us pleases God. None of us seeks God. But the good news of the gospel, chapter 3:21 through chapter 3, verse 26, is that in Jesus Christ, the wrath of God has been exhausted. And Jesus Christ is the one who provides for us, first of all, justification by faith, and second, redemption in himself. And so from chapter 3:26 through to the end of chapter 4, Paul takes up the notion of how it is that justification is by faith and not by works. It is in order that it might be by grace. Faith is the empty hand that receives the fullness of God's grace. And then from chapter 5, verse 1, through to the end of chapter 8, he expounds to us what it means that there is redemption for us in Christ. Chapter 5:12-21, he explains to us how it is that in Adam sin reigned in our lives unto death, but now in Christ, grace reigns unto righteousness. And what he does then in chapter 6 and 7 and 8 is to walk around this notion of what it means for us to be in Christ Jesus. These chapters do not describe the successive progress of the Christian life. These chapters describe for us the plenitude of the Christian life. And it's very important for us to understand that Paul is not describing to us the steps of advance we take in the Christian life. He is opening out to us the plenitude of grace and experience that is ours simultaneously in Jesus Christ.
So in chapter six, we have died to the dominion of sin, but we are not yet free from the presence of sin. And therefore the exhortation not to yield the members of our body to sin, but to yield the members of our body to God, to Christ, to grace, and to righteousness. In chapter seven, we have died to the law, but we are not yet made perfect according to the standards of the law. Hence the sense in Romans chapter 7 of inner tension and contradiction. That I long to do what pleases God to the maximum, but sin continues to dwell within me. And so I find myself, not constantly, but from time to time, as I become conscious of this tension within, that I am in Christ, and yet I'm living in Orlando. That I'm in Christ, and yet I have the same body that has been addicted to sin. And even although its dominion has been broken, the addictive tendencies have not been eliminated from my life. I am an individual in whom Jesus Christ dwells, and yet in whom sin continues to dwell. And so there are seasons when I cry out, "Oh, wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me?" But thank God, I know Jesus Christ will finally deliver me. And I, who am dead to the dominion of sin, but not free from the presence, will one day be free from the very presence of sin. I, who have died to the law, but am not yet made perfect according to its standards, will one day be perfected according to its standards through Jesus Christ.
And then, of course, in chapter 8, there is another aspect to being in Christ, and that is that I'm indwelt by the Holy Spirit. But as I live indwelt by the Holy Spirit, I live in a world that is groaning under the burden of sin. And so says the Apostle Paul, "Those of us who have received the Holy Spirit as the first fruits of final redemption groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our body." So he is describing what it means to be in Christ from a variety of different perspectives. He's not saying, "Once you're through Romans 6, you go into the experience of Romans 7, and once you're through the experience of Romans 7, you go into the experience of Romans 8." No, he's saying these are, as it were, concentric circles of the sheer largess of Christian experience. Because one of the things that God is doing to us through the gospel and by the ministry of the Holy Spirit is not shutting us down so that we become narrow and shriveled up individuals who live, as it were, in an emotional constant of neutrality. But he is stretching us, filling us. And because he does this, the Christian life can never be described in what the grammarians would call a simple sentence, but always, because we are in Christ and yet living in this world, the Christian life can be described only in a complex sentence. So we are simultaneously those who have died to the dominion of sin, those who have died to the condemnation of the law, and yet fight against sin, seek to be conformed to the character of God revealed in the law. And we are those who are destined for a glorious, resurrected, perfected life, but we are not yet there.
Dr. Lawson and I were talking yesterday about a famous statement of Alexander Whyte, whose name some of you will know, a famous late 19th-century Scottish preacher, who had a standing order for commentaries on Romans. And the first thing he would do would be to turn to Romans 7:14-2. And the commentator, if the commentator said, "This is not Paul the Christian," he would wrap the commentary back up. He would send it back to the bookseller and he would write him a little note saying, "This is not the commentary for me." And on one famous occasion, he leaned over his pulpit in Edinburgh to his highly significant congregation and said to them, "As long as I'm your minister, you'll never get out of Romans 7." And you understand what he was saying. That higher life teaching that you progress, you see, out of Romans 7 into Romans 8. And in our own church, when we were coming to the end of Romans 7, I said to the congregation, "I think I can go one better. As long as I'm your minister, you'll never get out of Romans 5, or Romans 6, or Romans 7, or Romans 8." And that's how we learn to live.
But there is something wonderfully climactic about Romans chapter 8 because it gets us to the very heart of what it is the Holy Spirit is doing in the life of the believer. And listening to the wife's voice at this point, all I want to do is to put my fingers into Romans chapter 8, which is a marvelous tapestry, and draw on some loose threads that are sticking out, threads of different colors that are woven into this marvelous tapestry of the ministry of the Spirit, and say, "Do you see that? And do you see this? And do you see that?" And so there are essentially six things that I want to say. The first of them is this: That when the Holy Spirit comes to us, he comes primarily, or primarily to mediate to us the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the point that Paul is making in verses 9 through 11, isn't it? When he says to us, "We are not in the flesh, we are in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you." Just pull on that thread and see what Paul does with it. He begins by saying, "You know, we're not in the flesh, we're not dominated by the flesh, we are dominated by the presence of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us." But then it's almost as though he's saying, "But you do know who the Holy Spirit is, don't you?" Look at what he says: "If in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit." And as a matter of fact, he says, "Anyone who does not have," now notice the way he describes the Holy Spirit now, "anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you." Now, these are three parallel statements. The Christian is indwelt by the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God comes to us as the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. And as he comes to us as the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, he mediates the very presence of our Blessed Redeemer, as it were, right into our hearts. "If Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness."
Now, Paul calls the Holy Spirit here the Spirit of Christ, not only because Jesus, our Savior, ascended and glorified, now sends the Holy Spirit to us. He calls him the Spirit of Christ, not only in the sense that Christ sends him to us, but that when Christ sends him to us, he is sending himself to us through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And of course, the locus classicus of that is our Lord's teaching in the farewell discourse, isn't it, in John chapter 14? Turn there just for a minute, because it makes wonderfully clear, I think, what it is that the Apostle Paul is saying when he says, "The Spirit of Christ dwells in you, and therefore Christ himself dwells in you." This is very mysterious, but it's also very glorious, and it's so important to grasp hold of. He says in chapter 14:3, "I am going to prepare a place for you." So here is the picture: the Lord Jesus is going into the presence of the Father, and he is going to prepare a place for you. But then in the rest of the chapter, he says, "I am going to send the Holy Spirit in the reverse direction." I am going to the Father to prepare a place for you, but the Holy Spirit is going to come in the reverse direction, and what he is going to do is prepare a place in you for the Father and for the Son. Do you notice how he says that here in, uh, verse 23? Jesus says, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him." Jesus goes to heaven to make a home for us. The Spirit comes from heaven to make a home for the Father and the Son in the lives of believers. And this is so marvelous. It means, do you notice in what he says in verse 15, 16? "I will ask the Father, he will give you another Counselor, someone like myself, the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him." And then these words, you know him, for he dwells with you, and he will be in you.
Now, I think it's important not to interpret these words, not to interpret these words the way they're often interpreted. In the Old Covenant, the Spirit was with believers. In the New Covenant, the Spirit is in believers. You probably often heard that. In the Old Covenant, he's with believers. In the New Covenant, he's in believers. I don't think that's what Jesus is talking about at all. For this reason, he says, "You know him because he is with you." What's he saying? He is saying, "You know the other Counselor, the other Helper, who will come to you, and who will do everything in you that I have done for you. You, you know him because he has been with you." Where has he been with them? Well, the answer is, he's been with them in the Lord Jesus. And what Jesus is saying is, "The Spirit whose ministry you have seen in my life during these three years, you have known me, where you have come to know who the Holy Spirit is through my life and ministry. That is the Holy Spirit who will be in you." Now, that's a staggering idea. That's a revolutionary idea, if we can take it in. I, I sometimes put it like this, that may help some of us. How many Holy Spirits are there? Well, who knows the answer to that question? How many Holy Spirits are there? Put your hand up if you think there are five, or three, or two. One. Put your hand up if you think there is only one Holy Spirit. Should be more hands than this. Haven't you read R.C.'s book on the Holy Spirit? There is only one Holy Spirit. There are not two Holy Spirits, or 10 Holy Spirits, or a thousand Holy Spirits. There is only one, third person of the Godhead. Where was the Holy Spirit? When the Holy Spirit was on the Lord Jesus, that's where he was. Now, which Holy Spirit does Jesus give to his disciples? Number 2, subsection B, clause 1. My dear friends, the only Holy Spirit who comes to dwell in the hearts of believers is one and the same Holy Spirit who for 33 years accompanied the Lord Jesus every moment of his life, from the moment he was conceived as an embryo in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, right through that moment when, in his ascended humanity, he said, as Peter says on the day of Pentecost, he says, "The explanation for what you are seeing here now is that Jesus has gone to the Father." And said to the Father, "Father, you promised me." And Peter makes very clear the significance of the day of Pentecost is that the Son has gone to the Father and said to the Father, "Father, you promised me, if I did all this, then the Holy Spirit who ministered in my life, I could send to them, that he might dwell in their lives." That's why Paul is able to say in these verses, "If the Spirit of Christ dwells in you, it is it is Christ dwelling in you." Because he comes into your life, as it were, with all the resources of the Lord Jesus' blessed ministry throughout the whole course of his humanity. That's the Spirit who dwells within you.
Now, I have one further question just to ask. So now let's ask the question and answer the question. How many Holy Spirits are there? Well, apparently there are 700 people registered for the conference. So there are 700 Holy Spirits, aren't there? No, no, no, no, no, no. There's only one Holy Spirit. Now, why is this so revolutionary? Well, you see, the Apostle Paul says, doesn't he, "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, whom you are." If you're a Christian believer, he dwells in you. But he also says, "We're all the temple of the Holy Spirit because one and the same Holy Spirit of Christ who dwells in me dwells in you." That's why, for all his idiosyncrasies, Steve Lawson and I managed to get on. Do you see how revolutionary I thought this would be in your life and in your church life, particularly if you began to think about those Christians who really get up your nose, but they are real Christians, as those in whom the Lord Jesus was not ashamed to dwell in the person of the Blessed Spirit who accompanied him through the whole course of his ministry. This is absolutely astonishing what Paul is saying. But it actually is only the first point.
So let's move on to the second point. The Holy Spirit, he says, mediates to us the presence of Christ. Secondly, the Holy Spirit leads us in the way of holiness. Notice the language he uses here, uh, when he says, "You are not in the flesh, but you are in the Spirit." He's saying you're no longer dominated by the flesh, you are liberated from that, you are dominated by the Holy Spirit. And he begins to explain what this means. He says to us, "Now, this gives us a great motivation for a life of holiness because we come to realize, verse 12, that we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh, but by implication, we are debtors to the Spirit to live according to the Spirit." And you see his logic. If it, if it grips me that the Lord Jesus has given me his own blessed Holy Spirit, then I am laid under tribute to live for that Holy Spirit, to keep in step with the Holy Spirit, not to grieve the Holy Spirit. And that means, says Paul here in verse 13, "If we live according to the flesh, we will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live." Because "those who are led in this way are the sons of God."
Now, you see what he's saying. You know how we often speak about being led by the Spirit? But the only context in which Paul is speaking here about leading of the Spirit is not what we call guidance, it's sanctification. We are led by the Spirit in order to deal with our sin. And of course, the reason we want to do that is because we are the children of God. That is a great motivation, isn't it? I hope that's a great motivation for you. That the Spirit who dwells within you is the Spirit who belongs to the children of God. You must have said that to your own children if they've been gone out somewhere without your supervision. You've wagged your finger at them and said to them, "Remember, you're a Ferguson." Well, you wouldn't have said that, but I would have said that. "Remember, you're a Ferguson." That's a, the family honor is a huge incentive to those who belong to the family and love the family and love the Father. Paul is saying this is something that the Spirit begins to breed into us. This is why there's such a radical transformation takes place in our lives when we become believers. Why these new desires to please God? The new sensitivity to what might grieve our heavenly Father, because his smile upon us is everything to us. This is what the Bible means when it speaks about fearing God. That means so becoming sensitive to who he is and what he has given you by giving you the Holy Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, that you would do anything to keep him smiling down upon your life, and you would avoid everything that would grieve him and bring a frown to his face. So the Spirit who comes to us to mediate the presence of Christ is the very Spirit who leads us in the way of holiness and gives us all the power that we need to do that, because he is the Holy Spirit. And all the incentive to do it, because those who are thus led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God.
And that brings us quickly to the third thing that Paul mentions here. The Spirit brings to us the presence of Christ. The Spirit leads us in the way of holiness. And then in these marvelous words in verses 15 and 16, he says to Christians who struggle in the battle against sin, that the Holy Spirit also brings us a real assurance that we are God's children. For he says, "You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons." Or adopted sonship. You see how he's layering this? Do they speak in your part of the world of a layer cake? I'd never heard of a layer cake until I came to the United States, where there are layers in the cake. I mean, I should have been able to understand that, shouldn't I? That a layer cake was a cake in which there were layers. And there are layers here. The Apostle is laying down layers as though to help us to see the richness of the identity and ministry of the Holy Spirit. He is the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit of God. He is the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he is the Spirit of adoptive sonship. Now, that does not mean that we are adopted into the family of God by the Holy Spirit. We are adopted into the family of God by the Father. In the family, what Paul is speaking about here is the way in which the Spirit of God does that which is most appropriate to his ministry as the ministry of the Father and the Son. He is the one who comes to seal it in our hearts, the reality of our adopted sonship. And how marvelous this is. What this says about the heavenly Father. Very strange and sad thing in the history of the Christian church that there have been long-standing traditions that it's not a good thing spiritually to be sure you really are a child of God. How many self-respecting fathers, earthly fathers, would live on that principle? "My great goal in the life of my child is that he will never have confidence in me." That would be a perversion of fatherhood. And where it happens, it is a perversion of fatherhood. And there are all kinds of destructive effects on the life of the child. No, this is not true fatherhood, because it's not the fatherhood of the heavenly Father. The heavenly Father's desire is that we should have a quiet, settled confidence that we are his children. Now, yes, the child of light may walk in darkness. Yes, the Father may have his own mysterious purposes, as a father might have, in order that his children would grow up and walk before him as grown-up children. But Paul is saying the blessed ministry of the Holy Spirit is this: that he indwells the believer in order to assure the believer that he or she really is a child of God.
Now, the reason, of course, Paul speaks about adoptive sonship, not being adopted as children, but being adopted as sons, which includes both male and female in this instance, was because in the Roman world in which he lived, the only kind of child you would adopt would be a son, because your purpose was to make that child your heir. By and large, in the Roman world, parents did not adopt children because they wanted to have children, but because they wanted to pass on the inheritance within the family. And of course, as those of you who, uh, even those of you who have read Jane Austen know, that until relatively recently, female children were not in the line of inheritance. Only male sons were in the line of inheritance. So this is the reason why Paul speaks about adoptive sonship rather than adoptive childhood. But that apart, look at what he's saying. He's saying the ministry of the Spirit is to assure us that we really are God's children. Now, look at what he goes on to say, because this is so important. He says, "We have not received the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but we have received the spirit of adoption as sons." And here is his illustration of how it is that the Spirit ministers in this way. "We've received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, 'Abba, Father.'"
Now, hold on to this, because this also is a statement that has sometimes been misunderstood. Paul is not saying there are, there are some Christians, rather a select set of highly mature Christians, who may reach the apex of such spirituality that with a fully rested spirit, they say, "Abba, Father." How do I know that? I know that because of the verb Paul uses. You don't need to know a word of the Greek language to have a sense, when you hear the verb that Paul uses, that this isn't what he's saying. It's an onomatopoeic verb. It's a verb that sounds like what it means. It's the verb "krazo," and the very sound of that verb indicates what we're speaking about here is not a, is not a gentle, resting assurance. "My, the Christian life is just so wonderful, it's lovely to, isn't it lovely to have this peace?" Now, this is a cry for help. This is a baby's cry when the baby doesn't have any words, but is hungry. Or your child has been running and has, has fallen in the sidewalk, banged his head, and his, his knees are bloodied, and you hear this, this squelch and the bang, and you run out of the house, and he's crying out, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" That's what he's saying. This is not, "Oh, Abba, this is wonderful." This is, "Abba, Father!" Now, that's why this is so wonderful, because this means that the ministry of the Spirit, who assures us we are children of God, is not a ministry in which the Father is saying, "Once you have reached a certain stage in the Christian life, I think I'll let you enjoy a measure of assurance." That wouldn't be fatherly. When does a father most want his child to have a measure of assurance that he or she is absolutely safe and secure with his or her father? When they are in need. This is, this is actually the verb that's used in the Gospels of people crying out to Jesus, "Bar-timeus, Jesus!" This is the verb that's used of Jesus crying out on the cross. This is the verb that's used in the Greek version of the Old Testament, "This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him."
Now, why should that be the ministry of the Spirit bringing us assurance? For this reason: that the deepest instinct of the real Christian believer, under stress and pressure and in bewilderment, is to cry, "Father." Whereas the highest, even a right-living, morally, apparently impeccable religious person, and those of you who are pastors have seen this again and again, the highest their vocabulary ever reaches is to say, "I don't know why God is letting this happen in my life," or, "Oh, God." They don't have the instinct to cry, "Father." But you see, here is the beauty of the Spirit's work, that when I'm at my least, and my lowest, and my most damaged, and in my greatest need, and in points of despair, the instinct of my soul is to call him Father. And in that very cry, I'm giving expression to the fact that he is my Father. This is why Jesus died on the cross, my friends, in the way he did. And when he cried on the cross, he cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And not, "My Father, my Father, why have you forsaken me?" Because he went to that region where he seems to have lost all consciousness that God was his loving heavenly Father, in order that when you go to the darkest regions of your experience, you might be able to call out to him, "Abba, dear Father."
So he mediates the presence of Christ. He leads us in the way of holiness. He assures us that we are God's children. And you can see where Paul is leading. You can see how the inner logic of his mind is working. Because he ends this by saying, "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." Now, this statement is absolutely parallel to the statement that Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 12, when he says, "No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Spirit." Now, who is saying Jesus is Lord there? I am saying Jesus is Lord. But Paul is saying the only way I can say Jesus is Lord is because of the testimony of the Spirit in my life. So he is not saying here, "The Spirit witnesses to our spirit that we are to hear little voices saying, 'You are a child of God.'" The way in which the Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we are the children of God is when we cry, "Abba, Father." Just as the way in which the Spirit witnesses with our children that we believe in Jesus Christ is when we cry, "Jesus is Lord." But you notice that Paul puts a condition in this. He says, "And you know the marvelous thing is that if we are children, the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God." What a blessed thing to know! If we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
Now, do you see the inner working? The inner working is, you're in the family. You're in the family. And the style of the heavenly Father's governing of his family, expressed supremely in his governing of our elder brother, the Lord Jesus Christ, is that the way to glory is along the pathway of suffering. If I can put it this way, he brought the elder brother up that way. He learned obedience through the things he suffered. By what he suffered, he was brought to the glorious fullness of his human person as our Savior. And since, if I can put it this way, if God's child-rearing of the Lord Jesus, incarnate in our humanity, involved this discipline, then that's the discipline that he will use in all who belong to the Lord Jesus. It cannot but be, for those who are united to the Lord Jesus and indwelt by the Spirit of Jesus, that the Spirit will produce in the lives of God's children some of the same characteristics, yes, in minor ways, but some of the same characteristics that characterize the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the point that Paul is making here is that the Spirit who reassures us that we are children of God is the Spirit who works glory into our lives by means of suffering. "We will be glorified together with him if we also suffer with him."
Now, Paul is not designating for us the extent or measure of that suffering. That's going to be entirely the sovereign purposes of God in each individual's life. What he's saying is that there is this common strand in the lives of all Christians. But because we are united to Jesus Christ through the Spirit, we do experience suffering. We groan inwardly, as he says in verse 23, as we wait eagerly for our final adoption as the children of God. Now, notice this, and then we'll pass on to point number five. When Paul speaks about the relationship between suffering and glory, there is clearly a chronological element to that. We suffer here below, we shall experience glory then. But that isn't the connectedness that he focuses attention on here, is it? He says, "We suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him." Is he saying we need to amount a certain amount of suffering in order to, as it were, trade that in at the end of the day for glory? No. What he means is this. He means that the relationship between the suffering and the glory is only partly chronological. It's largely causal. That is, that God uses the suffering, the Spirit employs the suffering as the raw materials in the Christian's life out of which he is forging the glory of their lives. And we see that in some measure here and now when we meet Christians who have really been through the fires of life, whether they've been persecuted for Christ, or whether they've known great suffering and privation in their lives. Don't you constantly feel that there is a, there's almost a sheen, a shine, a polish about their lives that makes you feel slightly either uncomfortable or even dirty? You know, you meet, you meet Christian pastors from, from countries of privation, and perhaps they're brought across for your missions conference to the United States, and you can tell by the cloth of the suits that they're wearing that they don't have much in this life. And you hear about what their people have gone through, and how they've put their own bodies at risk in order to care for their people, and you don't feel fit to shine their shoes. There is a, there is a touch of glory about this moral glory shining out. Or you go and visit elderly people, perhaps in a care home, who really love the Lord and have been through much, and and day you go in order to minister to them, but you come away feeling that the blessing has been entirely yours, because there's been a sense of, of glory about it. That's actually the difference between visiting some kindly old person who isn't really a Christian, but who may have all of this world's goods and have absolutely nothing to look forward to, and they're complaining about the food and talking about the past, and there's no sense of the glory breaking into their lives already. The transfiguration of the Christian's life, yes, is consummated in the final resurrection, but it's pressed into our lives now. One of the things the Lord uses to do that is the friction of suffering to polish our graces.
Well, that leads us to the fifth point. The Spirit, therefore, and you see how he's developing this. It's as though, you know, when we hear the word suffering, we go all a-tremble. In the modern Western world, we're not accustomed to suffering. We complain about suffering. We actually think it's strange, strange that we should suffer as Christians. And we think it really strange that Peter says it isn't strange that we should suffer as Christians. And so we go all a-tremble, all a-jelly, when we hear about suffering. And so Paul comes to our help and he says, "But listen, while the Spirit uses suffering in order to put glory into the lives of Christians, verses 26 and 27, the Spirit is also the one who comes to our aid in seasons of weakness." Likewise, verse 26, "The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We don't know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." The Spirit helps us in our weakness. Sometimes Paul's language is like the German language, you know. He will, he will use a word just by throwing a few words together. And the verb he uses here is a very interesting verb, because in, in a way that's very unusual to us, it has two prefixes. One of those prefixes means "along with," and the other prefix means "as it were, standing over against." And what he's saying is this: in our weakness, the Spirit does not minister in our lives in the following way: "Get out of my way and I will do it." The way the Spirit ministers in our lives is to so strengthen us that we will be able to do it along with him. The Christian life is not some form of automatic transformation. The Spirit works in our lives in order that we may be able to serve the Lord.
Let me, let me put it this way. I am, I am the ultimate hopeless do-it-yourselfer. And, uh, my family, uh, every member of my family does everything they possibly can to prevent me ever trying to make anything. And so if I'm going to make something, everyone in the family needs to be out of the house, and even better, out of the country. And as it so happens, everyone in my family at this moment is out of this land mass. And so I can do it myself to my heart's content. And on one occasion, very adventurously, I decided I would make a table. Well, not make a table, I would buy a table-making kit. And so I, uh, it was a very simple table-making kit. The booklet had only 24 pages, although it hadn't been written by somebody whose native language was English. It was fairly understandable. And I, 6:00 at night, I thought, "I'm going to make the table. The family will be so impressed by this table I make." So I, uh, I'm in my shorts now, that's a sight, and in my t-shirt, which is an even more, uh, extraordinary sight. And I'm, I'm, uh, for 6 hours, I perspire trying to follow the instructions, make the table. And I think I've done absolutely everything. The, the table is in a certain form. And I turn over page 24, and at the top of the page it says, "Now, very carefully, with the help of a friend." I think, "Why did the first page not say, 'Among the things needed are these little funny tools and a friend'?" And actually, it was to, it was the table was upside down. It was quite a long table. It was to enable you to lift the table over so that you had, you had the table, and you waited for the family applause. So I'm kind of up against the wall. And, you know, well, I was able to do it without totally destroying the table, but I really needed the, the help of a friend. And that's the language that's used here. John Owen actually describes this. He says, "A man goes into the forest, and there's this great long tree lying in the forest, and already the branches have been cut off, and the man says, 'That is going to make terrific firewood.'" So he goes to one end of the tree, huff, he goes to the other end of the tree, huff, he goes to the middle of the tree. And then a friend comes along and says, "Paul, I'll take the heavy end, you take the light end." And they manage to carry it home. The Holy Spirit does not come into your life so that you don't do anything. You've heard that kind of teaching. The Holy Spirit comes on, he just takes over, and you're kind of no. The Holy Spirit comes into your life and says, "You can't do this in your own, but when I minister, I will enable you to do it."
And fascinatingly, Paul goes on to say there, do you notice? I think he's actually giving an illustration of this, perhaps the supreme illustration of this. "The Spirit helps us in our weakness." And then he says, "This is, this is prayer. We don't know. There are times," he says, "when we don't know what to pray for as we ought." Now, you see what he's saying? By definition, when we intercede, we are saying, "We cannot do this." That's what we're saying. We're saying, "This is beyond me, Lord. You need to come and help me." So intercession is itself an expression of our weakness. That's why we're asking the Lord to intervene. But Paul is saying, "What if that weakness is multiplied? And when you bow to pray, all you can say is, 'Lord, this is beyond me, and I don't even know how to pray about it.'" When somebody says, "There's a problem here, let's pray about it," and we bow, and we say, "Oh, Lord, this is the situation." And then, as some people do in prayer, they'll be saying, "Lord, this is exactly what you should do about it. I've decided what you should do about it." We bow there, and we both bowing there, and we've got nothing to say. And then we say, "Lord, we don't even know how to pray or what to pray for. This is totally beyond us. We're absolutely weak." The Spirit does not say, "Forget about it, I'll do it." Nor does he kick us out of the way and say, "How long have you been a Christian and you don't yet know how to pray and what to pray for in this situation, you idiot?" No, he says, "The Spirit helps us in our weakness." Because even when we don't know what to pray for or how to pray, he says, "The Spirit makes intercession for the saints in their hearts with groanings too deep for words." Isn't that something? I think it's like this. I have very dear friends. I was with them just a few weeks ago in England, and, uh, they have a severely mentally handicapped daughter. What a privilege it is to have watched them minister to that daughter over the years. And she's a grown-up girl now. And at breakfast, you know, we will, we will always sit opposite each other at breakfast time. I have no idea what she's trying to say. It's just noises to me, like like groanings, really. But our mom and dad understand every single word that she's saying. And that's what it is. The Spirit makes intercession for the saints with groans too deep for words.
Now, look at the next words that Paul uses. And he says, "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." Now, there's a deep mystery there, isn't there? But such a, such a wonderful ministry of the Holy Spirit. And then, finally, the Spirit comes and he mediates to us the presence of Christ. The Spirit comes and he leads us in the way of holiness. The Spirit comes and he assures us we are God's children. The Spirit comes and he works glory in us through suffering. The Spirit comes and he aids us in our weakness. And the Spirit comes and he gives us confidence in God's sovereign grace. Very interesting, actually, in verse 28, different Bible versions translate verse 28 in different ways. And actually, grammatically and syntactically, it's open to a whole series of translations. Here, in the English Standard Version, we know that for those who love God all things work together for good. But also possibly translatable, "We know that God works all things together for good." But the interesting thing is that the subject, the reason why this verse is difficult to translate and interpret, is because the subject of the verb is actually in the verb itself. So the subject of the verb could be the "all things that work together for good," or the subject of the verb could be "God works all things together for good." But as some commentators have noted, and they're very much in the minority, the antecedent of this verb is actually the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, verse 27, makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God, he works all things together for good. And it is possible, certainly a minority view, but it is possible that Paul is saying that as the executive of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit is the very presence of God in the world, orchestrating everything that takes place according to God's gracious purpose.
Now, whether that's true or not is, in a sense, secondary to this, that it is the Holy Spirit who creates within the believer this kind of confidence. Because, as they would say in Scotland, "This kind of confidence is not natural, it's supernatural." Because we've come to the conviction that he is our heavenly Father. And since our heavenly Father is the almighty God who has created the heavens and the earth and governs all things, as we've been already hearing in this conference, nothing can stand against his purposes. And the Spirit convinces us this is true, because his ultimate purpose, verse 29, is to conform us to the image of his Son. And the one thing that we really do know about the Holy Spirit is that's what he's in our lives to do. My wife said, "Make it simple." And I can't make it any simpler than this: the Holy Spirit is in your life to make you more like Jesus.
Heavenly Father, fill us, we pray, with a love for the Holy Spirit, that in loving him, we may love your Son, and in loving your Son, through him, we may love you as our heavenly Father, and live for your glory, and be more and more transformed into the likeness of our Savior, Jesus. We pray it in his name. Amen.