The Power of the Holy Spirit – part two: 8:12-17

Recap and Background

Welcome to this episode of Romans 8 as we continue the study of this incredible chapter. It is probably the most popular chapter in the New Testament. I can’t be sure about that but the number of people I speak to who say, ‘Romans 8 is my favourite chapter’, is enormous and there are good reasons for it. There are so many phrases in Romans 8 that are popular and quotable. We have already looked at one, ’There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’ We looked at that verse in Romans 8: 1 last time. In this episode, we have the wonderful expression, ’the Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children’. We are going to examine this in more detail in a moment. How about this: “if God is for us who can be against us” Romans 8:31 or “No, in all things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Romans 8:37.

Probably the most important themes about effective Christian living in Paul’s writings in Romans, are mostly in this chapter. He brings to a climax many things that he has been talking about earlier, especially in Series 2. Series 2 has been magnificent up to this point. We have discovered all sorts of amazing things. We discovered, at the very beginning, in Romans 5:1 - 2, how salvation deals with our past, gives us God’s grace and his peace in the present, and secures our future. We found out in Romans 6 how, if you think correctly about your salvation, it will transform your Christian living and in Romans 7 about the power of sin and Paul’s own terrible battle with sin, as described in the latter half of Romans 7, and the way that Christ came to deliver him from the power of sin when he met him on the Damascus road and he was converted to Christianity.

In the last episode, Paul introduced us to the theme that we are going to look at today, ‘The power of the Holy Spirit’. Paul’s passion, all the way through Romans, is to help Christians understand the resources available to them. His belief is that most Christians live a very weak experience of the Christian life because they don’t truly understand their salvation, and they don’t take fully on board the power of the Holy Spirit. We spoke about the Holy Spirit in the last episode, and I encouraged you at the end to think of the Holy Spirit as a person, indeed as a friend - someone who lives inside you in a special and a wonderful way, and who wants to change and empower you in remarkable ways.

Paul goes into much more detail about the work of the Spirit in this amazing passage that we are going to study together.

Obliged to Serve God

”Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation - but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.”

Romans 8:12-13, NIV

Paul understood how we were under the power of sin in the old life, and he wanted us to replace that in our thinking with being under an obligation to serve God - not just free to do whatever we want. Sometimes Christians feel that they have received salvation and then they can do what they like. They are not very focused on pleasing God. They are very vulnerable to falling back into the ways of the past.

I remember once, many years ago, knowing a man who had a strong Christian upbringing and he knew the Bible very well. He told me that on one occasion he entered into a sexual relationship with a woman that was wrong. It was a secret that he kept. Then he found that he kept doing the same thing with different women. He had a number of different relationships over many years, until eventually it was all discovered, with catastrophic effects on his wife and family. He told me that all the way along he knew what the right thing to do was, but he never followed it. He gave in to a way of behaving and thinking, and justified it to himself for many years. Paul is guarding against that here, by saying we have an obligation to live by the Spirit and to put to death the misdeeds of the body. Again, we are back to the same point that Paul has mentioned earlier. It is in Romans 6:11, which is “Count yourself dead to sin.” Calculate it. Decide, ’I am not going back to that old life’. This man unfortunately went backwards. He didn’t make the calculation, ‘That was the old life, that is not the way I should be living now’, and it ended up in a disastrous situation.

Paul encourages us here to be absolutely wholehearted. When we become Christians we have started a completely new life. He is always worried that people will want to have Christianity on top of their old life, just a superficial gloss on their old life, and not be fundamentally changed. He believed that Christianity was a fundamental change within us.

In the next passage, which we are going to focus on mostly in this episode, we are going to look in much more depth at the relationship we have with the Holy Spirit, because this is the key.

Relationship with God the Father

“For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs - heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.”

Romans 8:14-17, NIV

Paul now speaks about a great miracle. This is something truly astonishing that happens within a Christian. The Holy Spirit enables us to enter into a relationship with God as Father. We know throughout the Bible, that God is revealed as Father. Paul explains here that we become adopted into his family through conversion, through believing in Jesus. Something fundamental happens within our hearts, and we begin to pray to God as though he is someone who we know, and instinctively we call him Father.

All the way throughout the Christian Church, all the way through history in every major denomination, the Church has used the title ‘Father’ in prayers, and in speaking about God in heaven. This is taught very clearly by Jesus, when he tells his disciples when they pray that they should pray, “Our Father in heaven.” But this isn’t just something in the mind. Paul says it is going to happen in your heart. The Spirit is going to make that reality for you, so you actually feel connected to God as if in a family relationship. You have joined his family. He who previously appeared to be far away, distant and hostile, is now close to you - is now your Father, spiritually. This is an incredible miracle that Paul describes here. He describes something very similar in the book of Galatians. It is obviously his own experience. He had worshiped God as a Jew for all his life. He had been at the synagogue every week and said all the Jewish prayers but he never had an experience quite like he had when he became a Christian, when suddenly he felt intimately connected to God. He could call out, ‘Father.’

I remember on my conversion when I was a teenager, about the age of 15, one of the major changes that took place at that point was being able to pray to God as Father and really felt that I meant it, and it meant something to me. Previously I had said those words, but they didn’t mean anything. There was no connection, there was no relationship. But now there was a relationship, there was a connection. Paul says it is the Holy Spirit who makes this happen. You can’t do it in your imagination just by thinking it, it happens right there in your heart as you become a believer. You become adopted in his family.

Adoption

I have mentioned elsewhere, in different parts of the Word Online teaching, about the question of adoption. We need to go back to this again now and talk about it as something that was very real in the Ancient World. The Romans had a very clear understanding of the process of adopting children into families. One of the reasons why this is very clear to the Romans is, it happened amongst their imperial family. A few decades before Paul, the Roman leader Julius Caesar, a great military leader just before the time of Christ, had consolidated and expanded the power of Rome. He didn’t have a natural son, and he wanted his power to pass to his family. He adopted a young man called Octavian, who later took the name Augustus. When Julius Caesar died, Augustus became the Emperor of the whole Roman Empire, purely on the basis of adoption. That was the power of adoption. Everybody accepted that he would be the emperor because he was the adopted son of Caesar. As time passed, Augustus the Emperor, also had no son and he was very concerned that the Empire should pass to a member of his family. So he adopted a man called Tiberius and when Augustus died Tiberius became the Roman Emperor. Two adopted sons became the most powerful people in the Roman world. Everybody knew this. So, when Paul talks about adoption it is really meaningful to Roman citizens.

Adoption took place in ordinary families and when adoption took place, one of the key things was that you would have some of the inheritance of the family when your parents died. This experience of adoption that Paul is talking about for Christians, is not just a lived experience now, where we feel that God is our Father and we can pray to him, we can trust him, and we can share our lives with him, but it is also about the future. Notice here, in verse 17, ‘Now if we are children, then we are heirs - heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.’ Paul has the idea of adoption in his mind still, and he is thinking of what the future holds for us. He is not just thinking about our present experience, he is thinking about our life after our death. And he said, ‘If you are an heir of God and a co-heir with Christ that means you will inherit God’s riches when you die.’ This is a reference to eternal life, and all the blessings that are guaranteed to believers when they die: they will go straight to heaven; will escape condemnation in judgment; will experience the physical resurrection of their bodies; and they will experience a perfect world - an everlasting life. All these promises are there in the Bible in many different places including in Paul’s writings. All this is in Paul’s mind when he uses the word ‘heirs’. You are heirs; you have joined the family. When you join the family, you gain the family benefits. What a wonderful passage! It leads us to think carefully about whether we actually have this experience of adoption as a real experience in our own lives. Not everybody who claims to be a Christian has the kind of experience that Paul is speaking about here.

“Our Father”

Let us refer briefly to what Jesus says about prayer, to help us think about adoption. In Matthew 6:6 he says,

“When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

Matthew 6:6, NIV

Our relationship with God is secured through prayer, and Jesus says, when talking about prayer here, ‘Pray privately, get away from people, close the door, take time, and as you pray, pray to your Father in Heaven.’ He could have said, ‘Pray to me, Jesus’ because he is the Son of God. He could have said, ‘Pray to the Holy Spirit’ because the Holy Spirit is God. But no, he says, ‘Pray to the Father’ because that primary relationship with the Father is central to our Christian faith. That is exactly what Paul reflects when he is talking about the Holy Spirit’s work, leading us to know the Father.

Reflections

Let us start with the experience of adoption and what it means. My own personal life experience has involved the issue of adoption very significantly, and I have mentioned this in other episodes briefly. My mother had three children in her first marriage and then her husband was killed in a military accident. He was in the British army. And so she was a widow. About three or four years later she remarried my father, and I was born a little time afterwards. Then another brother followed and there were five children. My father’s attitude to those other three children was to adopt them into his family. That was a profound experience as two families came together, and he took them as if they were his own children. The real test of that was at the very end of his life when he died and his will was opened. Were they going to be heirs? I happen to be one of the two people who was there when the lawyer opened the will, and the will said that the property would be divided between all the five children, the adopted children and the natural children. That is the power of adoption. They became heirs of that will. That is what Paul means when he talks about adoption. You have the same rights in the family as other children who were born naturally into that family.

But there are some difficult questions arising from this teaching. One of the most difficult is that, when we hear this teaching from Paul, many of us have extremely difficult memories of our own family background, and the relationship that we have with our parents and particularly, in this case, with our father. It may have been a very difficult relationship. He may have left the home; he may have died; there may have been violence; there may have been emotional distance; there may have been rivalry between the children for the attention of the father. Maybe he was an alcoholic or someone who couldn’t find a job. There are all sorts of reasons why this could be very complicated for us. So, when we hear that God is our Father, sometimes there is a healing that we need inside us concerning our own human family background. I believe that in bringing this teaching, one of the most important things I can share with you, is the belief and the faith that God can heal those memories and those wounds and indeed, he wants to do that. We should pray to God to heal us of difficult memories of our own parents, and our own father, that then cause a problem in our Christian life, and make us think and feel deep down, ’God is against me. God isn’t really for me. God’s distant, he doesn’t listen to my prayers.’ All those kind of thoughts that can capture our hearts and minds. We need to pray. Maybe you need to pray, even after this episode, for God to set you free from those experiences and memories, and maybe even to forgive your parents, or your father, for the things that went wrong in your childhood. In that way, what Paul speaks of here, will become a much greater reality for you because undoubtedly, Paul had in mind that we should have an intimate relationship with God our Father. In fact, through the work of the Holy Spirit we should hear God speaking to us, encouraging us, guiding us, speaking to us through the Bible, on a regular basis. That is what Paul has in mind in the background, when he speaks to us about adoption, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

These two episodes of chapter eight, have been focused on the power of the Spirit in our lives. There are many themes there which we can think about, and hopefully understand much better. There is no condemnation as we are in Christ Jesus; the Spirit has set us free from sin and death; and the Spirit leads us and guides us, and teaches us how to relate to the Father in prayer. These were things that Paul knew and understood very well, and he wanted all his followers in Rome to have the same experience as he did.