Well, brethren, let's turn in our Bibles to Romans chapter 8. As you do so, I am sure I am speaking on behalf of my fellow speakers at this conference as I say thank you, not only to the leadership of this church, but to the membership as well for the hospitality that we have enjoyed the friendship, the fellowship, and all the positive feedback that we have received. while we have been among you. I mean, they've been here a few times before, and so this may not have been very special, but for my wife and for myself, this has been a good send-off after spending the time that we spent in your country. We are going away with good memories. When I was a kid, I think the children in here probably do the same thing, I always, as I tasted my food, always took that which was like paradise to my test buds and put it in a corner somewhere so that I don't consume it before the end. And then when I have finished with the vegetables and everything else that I have to eat because mom's gun is against my head. Finally, I went into that corner so that even as I leave the table, my test buds are dancing away. So in many ways, I feel something of that as later on today, we begin our journey back to Zambia. So I don't say that lightly in saying we are most grateful for the time that we have spent here with you. The passage that we'll be considering is Romans 8 verse 15 to verse 17. I will read that section if you are there. Romans 8 verse 15, which is really where Pastor Kidd finished his last message. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received the spirit of adoption as 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. The words that we have just read are part of the eighth chapter that, as you have heard from the other speakers, deals with this whole subject of assurance of eternal salvation. It comes on the back of Romans chapter seven, where the apostle shares something of the experience of wrestling with remaining sin. He says there in verse 21 of chapter seven, that I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. That's something that frustrates any child of God. He says there, I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law. wedging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. In other words, left to myself, I would want to glorify God every second of my life. But I tend to find this gravity that pulls me downwards and causing me to sin against the very God whom I love. And so you find finally this cry in verse 24, wretched man that I am. Not that I was, but that I am. This is what I feel, the sense of frustration. Who will deliver me from this body of death? And so he speaks about the state in which he is when he concludes this way. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, and he will open that up in chapter eight. But then he says, so then, I myself save the law of God with my mind, the me that makes me me. But with my flesh, he says, there's this reality, I save the law of sin. So chapter eight really answers that. That thanks be to God is what he picks up when he says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. That's what he picks up there and then begins to open it as we've already seen with respect to the assurance based on sanctification and a number of other areas, but I will be dealing with this sense of assurance that is immediately applied by the Holy Spirit, immediately applied. In, John Bunyan's classic, Pilgrim's Progress, he speaks of an occasion when Christian finds himself in the Doubting Castle, where he is at the mercy of giant despair. And anyone who's been a Christian has been locked up in that prison, in that castle, for either a short time or a long time. And when you learn of Christian being assaulted by that giant, You identify with the extreme emotional suffering that you go through when you are doubting your salvation. Non-believers know nothing about that. But for you as a child of God, it's a period of depression. And those of us who are pastors have to handle God's people often that way. We have to learn to be physicians of souls. Because you want God's people to be rejoicing in their great salvation. But every so often, they end up being locked in that place. They shake against the doors, the iron bars to get out and they can't. and hence they come crying for help. We saw that you can point them to what God has begun to do in them by way of defeating sin. You can say to them that look, that's not your doing. It's the spirit of God who is at work in you changing you around. But you can also point them to the glory of the Spirit in assurance. This is something that God himself is concerned about and dealing with. And so that's what we find in this text, this physician of souls, the master at it, the Apostle Paul coming to deal with this subject. And as he moves from the aspect of sanctification being led by the Spirit in terms of our sanctification, he now says that we did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but rather we have received the spirit of adoption as sons. Now that contrast is important because it points to the position that we have with respect to our relationship with God. Speaking negatively there, he is speaking in terms of the spirit of slavery or the spirit of bondage. It's the kind of attitude that the prodigal son had when he was still in the far country and now he was imagining himself getting back home. He knew that he had blown any hope of being treated as a son back home. And so he thought to himself that this is what I'll do. I'll get back home because I've really blown it. My back is against the wall. I've no choice here but to get home. And then I'll say to dad, yes, I've sinned against heaven. I've sinned against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me like a hired servant. I will be happy enough. And he would not have held it against his father if upon arriving home, he found his dad sitting by the porch and giving him that look. You understand? The look that says, what are you doing here? And then he had already rehearsed what he would say, so he goes through it all, treat me like one of your hired servants. And if his father just said to him, okay, go and sit in that corner, and I don't want to hear you coughing. Count yourself lucky that I've allowed you in. You get your share of food, and that's it. You're blown. Now that's a spirit of bondage. That's a spirit of fear. That's a spirit that says, let me be very careful here. That's a spirit that makes you walk on eggshells as you are relating to someone who has authority over you. It's the fear that the moment I do anything wrong, I will be shown the door. What Paul is saying here is that our relationship with God is not like that. Now that needs to be clarified in our minds. The author of the letter to the Hebrews makes that contrast in Hebrews chapter 12. First of all, negatively, he puts it this way. Hebrews 12 and verse 18, it says, you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given. If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned. Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear. He's saying, that's not our position with respect to God. the position that the Israelites were in as they were at the foot of Mount Sinai, trembling all the way to their sandals. Rather, ours is, as he puts it in verse 22, you've come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to innumerable angels, notice, in festal gathering, joyful gathering, and to the assembly, there it is, of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and on and on he goes. But that's where we need to begin, as we are dealing with a child of God who is wrestling with the fact that I am not what I ought to be. That I've realized that remaining sin still dwells within me. That I often have wrong thoughts, sinful thoughts. that every so often my own weakness overwhelms me with respect to sinfulness. It is to say, your relationship with God right now is one that doesn't say, since you have failed the standard, you're going to be kicked out. That's not the relationship that you have with him. What is the relationship? Well, it is that of the spirit of adoption. Back to our text. The spirit of adoption. You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you've received the spirit of adoption as sons. The spirit of adoption as sons. The point that is being made there is that we have in actual fact received this same blessed Holy Spirit who has come into our lives and what he has come to do is to assure us that we are now the sons of God. Now. Yes, there is a glorious future that awaits us. but we have, in actual fact, by an act of God, been brought into the family, the family of God, through a process of adoption. In other words, although Jesus is the one who is the begotten of the Father, God, if we can picture it in human adoption, has gone into the judge's presence, put our name on those documents as being adopted into his family. And where it says son or daughter, he has removed put a line across the word daughter and brought us in as sons. We'll open that up in a moment. And then he has appended his signature. The God who cannot lie, the God who's not fecal and changes his mind has put a signature there and said, You are now my child. Now yes, we know that that's hard to believe, especially because of where we're coming from. That even before our conversion, we were rebellious. We were individuals that sinned against God with a high hand. Life was about me, myself, and I, and God came into the picture if he was convenient to me. And now add to that, having become a Christian, having realized what he's done for me, I'm still not perfect. It's hard to take this in, that God has taken his worst enemy and brought him to his banqueting table in his home and said, you are my child. You're not just my creature that is going to miss out on hell and find himself in heaven in some corner somewhere, but I'm bringing you in as my very child. In other words, when you have sinned against me, you've sinned against a loving father. When my spirit is grieved with what you have done, fellowship is broken, no doubt about it, between yourself and me. But the relationship is not broken. You are still my child. There are issues I will have to deal with over this, but your position before me does not change because of this position that is true because my spirit is now in you, the spirit of adoption. I want you to notice the way in which this is further argued out. It says, you've received the spirit of adoption as sons, and then it says, by whom we cry, Abba, Father. What does it mean by that? Some people teach that this is referring to some special ecstatic experience that you may have or may not have as a kind of maybe third wave level assurance. I don't think so. What Paul is talking about there is the sense of intimacy. the sense of affection, the sense of emotion that you have with God that is very, very real. Those of you in the U.S. tend to function in one language, and the illustration that I would have used here is more applicable back home because home we function in two, three, four, five languages at the same time. And so Abba, father, Aramaic and English, or in this case it would have been Greek, added together means a lot to me. Because back home, although we may be speaking English, English is not my heart language. My heart language is my mother's language, which is also my wife's language, and that is Bemba. And if I am in a moment of danger, I won't cry in English, although I would have been speaking English most of the time. I just go into my vernacular language. It's just automatic. I don't even think about it. A very well-educated Zambian seeing a car coming and about to hit into him or her will cry, Mayo, rather than mom. Although he may have been speaking English up to that point. It's the heart language. It's where the emotions are. And you'll find often that when, in the gospels, there is reference to an emotional moment, the writers tended to go into the Aramaic, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That was a cry of dereliction, a cry that was emotional. But let me try and illustrate it a little differently. Between the last service and this service, I spent a few moments in Pastor Hardy's office, and I found his grandchildren there. And his daughter-in-law said to one of them to greet me, and she came very well behaved to me, and greeted me. I accepted it. Then the grandfather came in. Grandpa! And off he went to go and grab him. Yeah, those were not just words. There was affection there. There was intimacy there. There was emotion there. You couldn't miss it. It goes beyond the legal document. it goes into an actual experiential level. And that's what the spirit of adoption does. His soul makes the things of God real to us at an experiential level that I can say I am his and he is mine. He's my father, Abba father, at a very deep emotional level with intimacy that others know nothing of. In our African culture, we generally don't tend to have orphanages, although they have been introduced over the more recent past. But when a child loses at least the parent that earns the money, or sometimes both, they are brought up by the father's brother or the mother's sister. And I often say that your mother's sister is not your aunt. She's your older mother or younger mother. It's your mother's brothers who are your uncles. And then the other side is equally true. Your father's brothers are not your uncles. your uncles, they are either your older or younger father. It is your father's sisters who are your aunts. And it's so much part of life back home that it's just the way we live. When my mom died, I was only nine. immediate elder sister took my two sisters and myself and brought us through our teenage years. We've also had to bring in half of the children that we've had have been raised that way. They've come in from the wider family. But one of the things that is the first task is to make them cross this same barrier. that you are not in this home because you are perfect. You will break the laws in this home. You've been brought in on the same terms, conditions, that we are raising our own children. And so initially you find that they are extremely well-behaved, but really they're just being hypocritical. And it takes quite some time to get them out of that state, to make them feel that this is dad, this is mom, going forward, that the way Dick or Bob is being treated is the way I am also being treated and will be treated in this home. I've been brought in as a real child in this home. That's what God has done for us by His Spirit. And we need to realize that, that he knows we are not perfect until the work of sanctification turns into glorification. He knows he's got quite some work to do in us. But at the entry point, not at the finishing point, at the entry point, he has put his signature and says, I'm your dad. I'm your dad, live here as you would live in a home where you have been raised. You are my child. So the prosopos says there, by whom we cry Abba Father. In other words, the Spirit of God working in us enables us to speak in those terms with respect to God. It is the Apostle John in his first epistle who says at the beginning of chapter three, see what kind of love the Father has given to us. I love that King James. Behold! What manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God. And then he makes the point, and so we are. We're not just called His children, we are His children. And when you're dealing with a child of God who's wrestling with remaining sin, you can see this look that is basically saying, are you sure? Are you sure? And hence, John is saying, that's what we are. Now, verse two, beloved, we are God's children now. And what we will be has not yet appeared or has not yet been made known. There's still a work of sanctification that's going to continue as we see in the remainder of chapter 3. But now we are the children of God. That's something that's special about the Christian faith. It's the fact that, therefore, when you talk about heaven, you're basically talking about going home. I'm going home. To finally be in the presence of my father and my elder brother, Jesus Christ. I'm going home. And part of that is built up by way of logic. But before we come to that logic, We learned earlier from Ephesians chapter one and verse 14 about the spirit being a deposit, deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. And this is what Paul develops further when he says in verse 16 there, the spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And then he says, and if children, then heirs. If children, then heirs. God by his spirit makes us transition from simply seeing him as our creator but now seeing him also as this is my father, I am his child. But then there is a biblical logic that he now takes us in. And it is this logic that that child of God sitting in front of me who's messed up by the beatings of giant despair, It is this logic that he needs to fix in his brains. It's spiritual logic. It is one that the spirit mediates in the heart of the believer. In Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan compares it to a key, and the key is God's promise that finally is used for them to escape. God's promise. In other words, being able to now think God's thoughts after him. In her text, you'll notice that Paul says, 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. It is to think like this. you have paid off your entire loan, surely it makes sense that you will get whatever was held as security, maybe it was retitled deeds, and then go home and simply show it to your wife and family, hey, it's finished. It's logical. You won't go into the bank manager's office trying to negotiate. Negotiate what? This matter has been dealt with. You walk in there with your head up high. You don't owe him anything. And you get that which belongs to you. This aspect of logic, biblical logic, spiritual logic, is vital. for assurance. God, by his spirit, does not simply bypass our minds and just give us goose pimple feelings. He wants us to think. So for instance, in chapter five, just giving you a few examples of biblical or spiritual logic, chapter five, And verse 10, verse 15, verse 17, you have what we call the how much more or the much more arguments or logic of the Apostle Paul. He says there, chapter five, verse 10. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, Much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. He's saying, look, if God was willing to give the very life of his son when you were enemies to save you, why would he not spare the life of his son to bring you to glory? Let that logic prevail. Verse 15, but the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more than it is. have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many. Again, it's the logic. And then lastly, verse 17 there, for if because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more. will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. So it's simply saying, make these comparisons and think, Christian, think, so that you may see how privileged you are now in Christ. He does the same in chapter six, doesn't he? Chapter six and verse five. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly, certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. And verse eight, now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. Biblical logic. Christian spiritual logic. Now here's the point. If God has put in you the deposit guaranteeing the end, what does that mean about the end? Let's go to 2 Corinthians chapter 1. I'll begin with verse 20. I just want us to process this logic and then I'll come back to the text itself. For all the promises of God find their yes in Jesus Christ, okay, in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our amen to God for his glory. And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us, and listen to this, and who has also put his seal on us. and giving us his spirit in our hearts as a guarantee or as a down payment. Now, here is a God who is faithful, a God who is true, a God who cannot lie, who has put his seal upon you, who has put down the down payment, which means he will finish the payment. Why are you sitting there as if the world has come to an end? because your conscience is saying to you, guilty, guilty, guilty. Why are you allowing giant despair to so whip you that you feel as if everything is now lost? The logic is this. If you are a son, You are an heir. God has secured that which is your final destiny, and he will get you there. That's what our text is saying there. Back to our text. And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ. provided that we suffer with him in order that we may be glorified with him. In other words, as long as we maintain something of that which he himself has brought us in, and we are simply going on to experience it. And that's what verse 18 downwards is all about. We consider our sufferings and so forth. So, let me quickly hurry on to wrap this up. There are two things there. As we consider the glory of the Spirit in assurance. First of all, it is the way in which the Spirit of God makes the things of Christ real to us. That Christ is my elder brother. God is my father. and I am therefore walking with him. The Spirit of God makes that real, real, real. But number two, he gives me his word in which are his promises, promises that are logical, not cold logic. but spiritually logical. That my brain is not left blank or empty, but I'm able to say one plus one is two. Whichever way you look at it, it's two. He who has begun a good work in me, will bring it to completion in the day of Christ. The Spirit of God makes even that logic to stare me in the face. And therefore, while I am in the midst of that position at the end of Romans 7, I can genuinely say There's now no condemnation for me because of the Spirit's work. There's no condemnation for me. Why? I am in Christ. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, thank you for what we have studied over this weekend, the glory of your Spirit. Thank you that you do not play hide and seek with the journey that we make in this life for all that is arrayed against us. Thank you that in you, and especially in your spirit, we have a very present help in our times of need. Thank you that we don't need to guess who we are before you and what our destination will be. Thank you for the deposit. Thank you for the seal of your spirit. Thank you, Lord, for the reality that makes us cry, Abba, Father. May that reality lead us through the dark days, the times in the valley, the periods of suffering, and trial and trauma, the moments when temptation is like all hell breaking loose upon our souls. Help us, oh God, to dwell under the sunshine of your love. By your Spirit's help, amen.