The Spirit of Sonship

We live in a world, and you know what is what I do.
That is increasingly at work trying to marginalize
a Christian witness and a Christian experience.
The world wants to push us into a little corner
so that we cannot do our Christian thing.
I was reminded of that yesterday as a number of people
from this church participated in the March for Jesus
in Kingston.
At least two dozen or more people from this congregation
were involved in that March.
They had about 1,000 people marching in Kingston,
and we gathered in the, if you're familiar with that area,
in the park across from the general hospital.
And a number of us had some business to do
in the hospital, Pastor Dale, wanted to see Andre
at about 9.15 in the morning.
My wife and I had to be there for some reason.
And we found it most intriguing and not to mention upsetting
that when we got into the main entrance to the hospital,
there stood a policeman.
I had never seen a policeman there before.
And he was quizzing everybody that was coming into the hospital.
And the first question that I asked was whether you were
with the March, you know, what business of yours is this?
But it takes you so, it's not until afterwards
that you think of all the good answers, you know?
And then he, in no uncertain terms,
told everybody that what that admitted to being associated
with the March to leave the hospital immediately.
And he wasn't very nice about it either.
Pastor Dale tried to explain that he was a pastor
on his way to see some, didn't make any difference.
He wasn't getting in there, the hospital was closed.
And we had the same experience,
and so did a number of other people.
In the meantime, other people with flowers for other patients,
they just got whisked on by.
More I thought about that, the matter I got, I must confess.
I'm not sure it was all holy anger,
but some of it was holy.
And I got to thinking, what in the world
is the problem of these people?
And I decided it only could only be one of two things,
either they didn't want this whole crowd
using their washrooms.
You know, I could understand that a little bit,
although it is a public place,
and our tax dollars do support it, as I recall.
Or else, they thought the March for Jesus
was a pro-life rally.
And that they were going to be invaded
by all kinds of pro-life radicals
who were going to do strange and crazy things
in the hospital.
Now, I want to find out because I'm still prepared.
But what had illustrated to me,
'cause Pastor Dale and I,
we're in and out of there all the time,
especially in recent weeks.
But what it illustrates to me is how our society
wants to marginalize Christians and Christian influences.
I couldn't help but think that had we been
a gay demonstration, would they have reacted
in the same way?
Maybe not like that.
Because you see, the world doesn't want our light to shine,
and they're getting more and more determined
about letting secular values hold sway
in our culture and in our society.
And the danger of Christians is that we just sort of
allow that to bowl us all over
and to lose the boldness and the courage
that we need as children of God
to stand up against all that pressure of the powers
that be and to proclaim a foreritative learning.
Jesus Christ is Lord, and that he is a reigning king.
And I believe the only way that we can do that,
the only way that we'll have the courage
to buck increasingly the tide within our culture
is to be sure that we have the spirit of sonship.
You did not receive the spirit of slavery
to fall back into fear, but you have received
the spirit of sonship.
Let's talk about that a little bit this morning
as we prepare for communion.
And as we do, please notice right away
that the spirit of sonship stands in contrast
to another spirit.
For Paul says you did not receive the spirit of slavery
to fall back into fear, but rather he says
you have received the spirit of sonship.
Not a spirit of slavery, but a spirit of sonship.
To understand the difference between those two,
you have to understand the difference
between a slave and a son.
And remember now that when the Bible talks about a son,
it talks about it in a technical term,
and as far as God is concerned for his children,
it includes females as well as males.
What is a slave?
Well, a slave is a person whose relationship to the master
is determined by his value to the master.
And as long as the slave is an able-bodied man or woman,
able to do his or her work, able to produce,
then the master has room for the slave.
Might even look after him, not too badly,
the volume down, just to touch, please.
Should however the slave become ill,
or weak, unable to perform,
then of course what happens to the slave
is the slave becomes marginalized in terms of the owner.
He'll get traded off sometimes, not much different,
really, than the wallplayers of the hockey players, is it?
When you see, talk about, well, we'll get into that.
Modern version of slavery, they get well-paid,
but boy, you gotta have an ego that is tougher than nails
to be able to live under that kind of pressure in my book.
I wouldn't want to draw the money in the wild.
But a slave's value disappears
if the slave cannot measure up to the expectation.
And so a spirit of slavery is always a spirit of fear.
It is always a spirit that says,
if I stop producing, if I no longer measure up,
if I don't live up to the full potential
of what the boss demands of me,
then I'm going to be the victim of his anger,
he's going to punish me, he's going to reject me,
he may sell me off to anybody else
that wants to take me in total disregard of who I am
and what my needs are.
That's a spirit of slavery falling back in a fear.
Now, you need to understand there are a lot of believing people
that have a spirit of slavery
because Paul uses it here in the context of the law.
And a person who has a spirit of slavery sees God,
not as a loving Heavenly Father,
we'll talk more about that in a few moments,
but they see God as a cruel tyrant and a master
who makes the demands up here
and whose anger you're going to experience
if you cannot measure up to the requirements that he has.
And people that have a spirit of slavery,
you can always swap them.
Very often they are a striving people.
In church communities, they're often the ones
that are at every committee
and that are on the forefront of all the good things
that need to be done.
But the good things they do, they do not do out of
a place of being accepted by God
and out of a heart of gratitude that says,
God has given these gifts to me
and now I must use them as good stewards of his grace.
No, they do it and hear me well
to try to prove their right to be.
Do you understand that when I say that?
People who do things hoping that if they do them
and they do them enough and they do them right,
then they will be loved and they will be accepted
and everything will be okay.
They strive to produce and you can tell that
because when you criticize their work,
you devastate their personhood.
Because to reject all the things that I'm doing
is to reject me.
People with a spirit of slavery that throws them back
into fear can also be identified
because oftentimes their lives are filled with anger.
An anger that flows out of having to live up to
a thousand in one different levels of expectations,
all of which are very wearying and very hard work
and there comes a point then where my anger is unleashed
because I can't live up to all of the demands
that are being made upon me.
Spirit of slavery produces anger.
All sorts of produces in people are real ambivalence.
You don't know if you're going to be hugged
or slugged when you're around them
because you see on the one hand they want love
and they want approval and they desperately do whatever it is
that they can to obtain approval.
But when you get so close, then they begin to draw back
because love is very threatening, it knocks down their defenses,
they feel they're going to be taken advantage of
and so they have this love-hate relationship.
They try to draw close but in the process of drawing close,
drawing close they retreat
because they are ambivalent in their relationship
and you never know quite what's going on
and still another characteristic
is that people that have a spirit of slavery become great actors.
They learn how to give you the right appearance.
You remember now they think their acceptance lies
in the fact that they are being what they think
other people want them to be.
Problem is everybody wants them to be something else.
So after a while their own personhood gets completely destroyed
because they learn to put on airs
and they learn to pretend so long and so hard
that it becomes their very identity.
A spirit of slavery falling back
and if you're having many people almost every week
that live under a spirit of slavery, they don't know who they are
because they've prostituted themselves, they've sold themselves
for somebody's love and for somebody's favor
and they found it's never enough.
Now Sis Paul here in this particular passage,
"You, if you are in Christ, did not receive the spirit of slavery
to fall back into fear?"
But he says, "You have received the spirit of sunshine,
a spirit of sunshine."
Wonder if you've ever thought about this.
What's the difference between a slave and a son or a daughter?
Well, as I said, a slave's value is determined
by his production for the master.
A son or a daughter's relationship
or value to the father or to the mother
is not determined by their production or their productivity
but rather by the unique relationship
that they have with the parent because you see,
you are born or you are adopted into a family
and you become part of that family
and you are part of that family whether or not you deserve it
or whether or not you live up to one of those expectations.
Any of us here that are parents,
looking at it from a parent's point of view,
sometimes probably aren't all that happy with what our kids do.
I know kids aren't always happy with what the parents do either
so I guess it makes it fair.
But just because we're not happy with one another
in family relationships doesn't mean we can sell each other
or give each other away.
They'll sometimes were tempted, right?
If you're born into the family,
there is a commitment to one another that says,
"I am a child of my parents."
And my parents love me unconditionally
and they're going to carry me.
If I get out of line, they're going to discipline me,
straighten me out, but they've got a vision in the back
of their mind of what it is that I can be
and what it is that I should be
and a good parent takes his or her child
and tries to leave them by God's grace
into the fulfillment of that vision.
And so a spirit of sonship is a spirit of security.
It is a spirit that says, "I belong, I matter.
I have value not because of what it is that I'm producing
because I'm clever, talented, smart, beautiful,
and some whatever it is that the world might price."
No, I am valuable to my parents simply by virtue
of my being their child.
A spirit of sonship says, "You are okay,"
the way that you are as we lead you forward
into the things that God has for you.
It is a spirit of security out of which flows
a keen sense of self-identity.
And so in Paul here in this passage as God
has not given us a spirit of slavery
to fall back into fear, but a spirit of sonship.
What he is really saying is God through his Holy Spirit
bears witness with our spirit that we are his children.
That God is my God and God is my Father
because of Jesus Christ and that because God is for me,
nobody can ever be against me.
That's why he goes on to say, when we cry Abba Father,
it is the spirit himself bearing 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.
Abba Father, I understand that was part of the formula
of when in Roman households people were adopted
into the family.
When a slave or somebody else would become adopted
into the family, they would become air of course
to all that which that man owned.
And part of the formula for adoption was crying out,
Abba Father, you are my daddy.
We stand now in the relationship of father and son.
And a son is much different from a slave because a son
belongs and is air of all the things that God has
for his children.
That's what God promises to you and to me.
If we're in Christ, the wonderful understand that
sometime and we're in Christ, we're children of God.
We're heirs of God and coheirs with Christ,
and someday I want to preach on that.
Do we understand what it means to be a coheir with Christ?
And air is somebody who inherits.
Jesus Christ, at the right hand of God the Father,
has inherited all the universe as his treasure
for his pleasure.
And we could join by faith to Christ.
We become crown princes and crown princesses with him
because God shares with us in ages to come
the immeasurable riches of his glory.
In the spirit of sonship is a spirit that bears witness
with my spirit that no matter what happens,
no matter what I experience, no matter how tough life
may be, God loves me, God's for me.
God's gonna hold on to me.
If I get out of line, he'll straighten me out.
He's bigger than my sin.
He is training me.
He is equipping me for the day.
When with Christ I'm going to sit on crowns
and I'm going to rule over all of his creation,
basking in his eternal well and his eternal glory.
Let me ask you this one.
Do you know that spirit of sonship?
Do you know what it's like for God's spirit
to bear witness with your spirit
that you're a child of God
and that nothing but nothing will ever separate you
from the riches that he has laid out for those who love him?
I'm not asking you, if you're high all the time,
I'm not asking whether prayer reading the Bible
and all that Christian disciplines
just sort of naturally flow out of you
because we all have ups and downs
in a Christian life and in our experience
because we learn to walk by faith and not by feelings.
But I'm asking you,
has there ever been a time in your life
and in your experience where you knew that you knew
that you knew that God was really there?
And because of Jesus, all your sins are forgiven.
That because of Jesus you are acceptable,
you don't have to worry about God pulling
the last surprising sin out of his bag,
throwing it in your face on the day of judgment saying,
well, you know, I've been thinking about it
and weighing the scale and I'm afraid
they just kept this way, how'd you go?
Do you know that encounter with God
where God bears witness with the deepest of your insides,
the depths of your spirit,
he wraps his arm around you and he says,
it's okay, I'm here, I love you,
I'm gonna walk with you and nobody is ever
going to pluck you out of my hand.
That's an experience that God promises to his children.
We have not received a Spirit of slavery
to fall back into fear, but a Spirit of Sonship,
will we cry, Abba Father?
It is the Spirit of God bearing witness with our Spirit
that we are the children of God.
And if that's never been part of your life,
and if you would like it to be part of your life,
then by faith, press home the client.
And say, Lord Jesus, I understand from Your Word
that You promise Your Spirit to Your children
and that Your Spirit is a Spirit of Sonship.
And Lord by faith, I pray that Your Spirit
will just bear witness with My Spirit
that I am a child of God and an heir of God's kingdom.
I cannot tell you how God will answer that.
I cannot tell you when God will answer that.
But I can tell you, there will come a time and place.
Perhaps during a time of great difficulty
or often in preparation for times of great difficulty.
When you feel tossed and torn in your life,
doesn't begin to make sense
and you don't know which way to turn.
Oftentimes when you least expect it.
Oftentimes when you least feel that you deserve it.
God's there.
He's just there.
And you know that he's there.
It's not just a mind thing.
It's not just a game that you play.
It is His Spirit bearing witness with Your Spirit
that You are a child of God, a chosen heir of His kingdom.
And even if that only happens once in a lifetime,
it will revolutionize your life, revolutionize your experience.
Because out of that comes a certainty and a courage
and a boldness that enables us to stand up
for Jesus and to move out into life.
Knowing that if God's for us,
it doesn't matter what anybody else does.
God will carry me through
and I will accomplish the purposes that He's laid up
for my life and Spirit, a sonship.
This morning as we join in communion,
we confess our sins and receive His grace.
Let's stand in faith.
That because of Jesus, that's my rightful claim.
That God will minister to the deepest parts of my heart.
He will lift me up and He will make me strong.
And in a world where everybody wants to push me over.
In a world where all of us are afraid sometimes
of powerful people or situations or circumstances
that are beyond their control.
We know that we know that in Jesus Christ,
we can do all things for the praise of God's glory.
Let us pray.
Father, we live so many of us
for the approval of beings other than you.
For some of us it's our parents.
For many of us it's our friends.
For some of us, Lord, it's our colleagues or our bosses.
And we're afraid to stand up for what really lives within our hearts
because we know that when we do, we're not going to be popular.
We're going to be marginalized.
We're going to be rejected and we don't want to suffer shame or embarrassment.
And so we sort of go along the crowd with a crowd.
And Lord, for some of us, that's just sort of a thing
that we do every so often.
But for others of us, it's so in the fabric of our whole being
that it's a whole way of life.
And then we wonder how come we lose our soul?
We lose our identity.
We lose our personhand.
Oh, thank you, Father, that in Jesus you restore to us our personhand.
Thank you that in Jesus we are valuable, that we're your children,
that you're for us and that you're preparing us to share
with Christ the reign over all of creation.
And Lord, this morning we come to you with all of our needs
and with all of our fears and with all of our insecurities.
And Lord, we thank you that we've not received a spirit of slavery
to fall back into fear, but we have received a spirit of sunshine.
And we pray that even now by faith as we stand on your word,
your spirit will just bear witness with our spirit that because of Jesus.
We are who we are.
Help us Lord to know a deep within our hearts, help us to know it at a level
where nobody can ever take it away from us.
And then Lord send us out as flaming apostles of your grace,
declaring boldly to the nations that their needs to shall bow.
And they will crown as King Jesus.
Who died and rose again and ascended into heaven.
He's coming in glory to make all the nations of the world his kingdom.
Thank you Lord for hearing us, Jesus name.
Amen.