About this series:

The Holy Spirit is fully God, eternally existing with the Father and the Son. Throughout the Old Testament, we see glimpses of the Spirit’s presence and work, but it is through the teaching of Jesus and the events of the New Testament that the church’s understanding of the Holy Spirit is revealed more fully.

About this talk:

Life has two defining identity questions: Who is God (or: Who is the ultimate being / thing?) And who am I?

And the second question can only really be answered in light of the first. To the first question - Who is God? - the Bible tells us God is many things: personal, holy, king, Lord, transcendent, immanent, a consuming fire, alpha & omega, etc. But glorious as all those terms are, the one Paul uses here in v 6 is perhaps most wonderful of all: God is Father.

And to the second Q - Who am I? - the Bible tells us we are many things in our relationship with God because of Christ: servants of Christ, friends of Christ, brothers of Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit, a royal priesthood, etc. Yet in the entire range of New Testament terms describing our new identity through faith in Christ, who we are in relation to God as Father is the pinnacle. So, v 5, we are adopted as sons (and daughters); we are children of God! It’s a concept we’re familiar with, but it’s taken here from the Greco-Roman world of granting the full rights of sonship (status, name, privilege and inheritance) to those who by nature do not belong to the family. We who by nature are enemies of God, strangers to God, guilty and condemned, who are not naturally his children, are adopted, chosen, called into his family as sons / daughters with the full rights of sonship - v 7,

“God has made you also an heir”! So J. I. Packer writes, ‘To be right with God the judge is a great thing. But to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater.’ he continues, ‘If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all...Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.’

All of which is not only a status conferred on us by our Father, but also a status we experience through the life of the Holy Spirit within us: “Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father’” (Galatians 4:6). As Paul writes to the Romans, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” - the Spirit makes real to us what the Father has declared of us because of what the Son has won for us. ‘He sent His Son that we might have the status of sonship, and he sent His Spirit that we might have an experience of it’ (John Stott).

Which is what Paul writes in Romans 5:5: “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” Whatever questions the child of God has, he or she knows deep within that they are loved by God the Father. Whatever challenging situations may come, whatever may be taken from us, we know that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).

The Spirit of God brings us to new birth, he fills us with his presence, he empowers us to live and to go. And he ensures that at every point along the way we have an experience of knowing without a doubt “that we are God’s children” (Romans 8:16).