18. “Sons of God” (Romans 8, Part 3)

Should Christians be pessimistic about the present? 

A few weeks ago, we started looking at Romans 8 noting that Scripture calls us to hope: that even though things are hard right now, we can know that the happily ever lies with certainty in our future. 

But does that mean that right now, Christianity doesn’t really make a difference? That even as we can expect the best in the future that we should expect the worst in the present? Should Christians be pessimistic about the present? 

A friend of mine, Chris Colquitt, who used to be the RUF pastor at Northwestern, wrote an interesting essay a couple of years ago for the Gospel Coalition about this. As a millennial, he says, he was part of a generation filled with self-esteem and confidence about the future. “The world had big problems, but they were solvable, and we would be the generation to finally get it done… Early millennials may have been entitled, but we were confident, energized, and excited to do good.”

And yet, Chris writes, this is not the attitude he finds in college students right now.  “Among the most common observations about Gen Z is an alleged fragility. They are said to lack grit and resilience, to be weak in the face of trial and unprepared for adulthood. Though a caricatured version of this critique can go too far, my own experience confirms there is something here. The dominant chorus of “you are strong” has been replaced with the subtle dirge of “you are weak.””

There are, says Chris, a number of reasons for this change: parenting styles have shifted to being more protective. Smartphones correlate with an increase in anxiety and loneliness. Recent understandings of justice that divide the world up into the oppressors and the oppressed invite everyone to either feel guilty about their power or without agency as the victims. And the increasing emphasis on mental health, while providing much benefit, has also led to people defining themselves by their disorder: “This is who I am, and I can’t change.” 

However we understand the reason, we find in our day is a pervasive pessimism. The feeling is that we are weak, and the malignant forces in this world are too massive and powerful for us to do anything really to change them. It doesn’t seem there’s a good reason to be hopeful about the present.

And I want to ask, is that basically right? Is that essentially the Christian teaching? That you are weak and that this world is evil, and there’s no reason to be hopeful about the present reality—that our only real hope is that, even despite all of this mess, we are forgiven and someday Jesus will return to fix it all–is that the attitude we should have as Christians? Should we be pessimists?

In the opening verses of our passage, Paul tells us, yes, we should, if we’re talking about what he calls “life in the flesh,” a phrase he uses to speak of humanity trying to live apart from God, where at the core of who we are is, “It’s up to me.” 

At its heart, the life of “it’s up to me” is about fear. Verse 15 says that in becoming Christians we did not receive a spirit that would cause us to “fall back into fear,” telling us that fear is what our old way of the flesh was all about. And that’s because its destination, as verse 13 reminds us, is death. If it’s all up to you, it is impossible to save your own life. You can’t take away your sins and judgment. You can’t stop yourself from dying. And deep down we all know this. And because the way of being on your own, “it’s up to me” is ruled by fear, that means it’s the way of slavery. Nobody ever was made to feel free by responding to fear. Fear constrains us, diminishes us, controls us. 

This is the way of the flesh: fear, slavery, and death. When we’re talking about this way, then yes, we should be very pessimistic.  

But what I want us to notice here is that Paul’s whole point in these verses is that this precisely is NOT the life that followers of Jesus have now. The life we now have is NOT the life that leads to death, verse 13 says. We have NOT received a spirit of slavery that falls back into fear: that’s our past reality. Instead, our present—not just our future, but our present, right now, has fundamentally changed. Why? Because our identity has changed. Because now, if you are a believer in Jesus, you are a child of God. Verse 14: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” 

In the past couple of months, we’ve spoken teaching of the gospel that those who believe in Jesus become united with Christ, so that what is his becomes ours. Jesus is righteous and took the penalty for our sins, and now we before God are righteous in him. He endured our death and conquered death, so that in him we might experience resurrection power of eternal life. Now, as amazing as these gifts are, there is even a greater gift that comes through being united with Jesus, something that J I Packer in his classic Knowing God calls the “highest privilege that the gospel offers.” And that is that in Jesus, we now are beloved sons and daughters of God.

If you are a believer in Jesus, you have been adopted, as verse 15 says. God has chosen you to bring you into his family, so that you now have the full status of sons. Paul specifically in 14 and 15 uses the word “sons,” because sons were the heirs within the household. You have the status as sons within the divine, royal family, and you too are royal, heirs of this world. We have been chosen by God to be his children and we are born again into his family. When you believe in Jesus, you become a permanent member of the family of God.  

And that’s not just something that is good news for the future. It makes a difference in our life right now. While a person could easily write an entire book on the glorious freedom that comes in being a child of God, perhaps we could focus on one simple word. Because you are a son of God, you now can be confident—life-changingly confident. Confident in relation to God. Confident in relation to yourself. And confident in relation to this world. 

Because You are Sons, You Can Be Confident in Your Relationship With God

In the gospel of Mark there’s this moment, right before the cross, when Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. And as he cries out to God in this moment of anguish, he calls him “Abba.” “Abba” was the word Jews used when talking to their father; it wasn’t a childish term, like, maybe “Daddy” would be, but it was intimate. Slaves were not allowed to speak this way to the head of the household, only sons and daughters. Perhaps the closest equivalent in our day would be “Dad.” And the reason Mark so carefully records that detail is that no Jew in that day would speak to God like that. “Lord of hosts,” “God Almighty,” even my God, but not Abba, not Dad. To speak to the creator of the universe with that level of confidence and familiarity would be presumptuous. 

But that is exactly how Jesus cried out to him. Because the most basic reality that defined Jesus’ identity was his knowledge that the God is his Father who loves him. Jesus was utterly secure in the knowledge that he was God’s Son and could come to his Dad whenever he wanted, crying out to him whenever he needed to. And if you want to understand Jesus’ resilience in love; his strength in the face of resistance; his gentleness—here it is. By the power of the Spirit he knew he had this intimate loving relationship with God, his Abba.

Now look at verse 15: “You” Paul says, “who believed in Jesus. You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, because you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit teaches us to cry out to God just like Jesus did. The Spirit of God’s Son is teaching us to relate to God in the very same way that Jesus did—because that’s the relationship we now have with God.

I honestly don’t know the words to use to help us to take this in. Think of what we know about how the Father loves the Son—how unimaginably deep, powerful eternal that love is. Now God loves you and me in the very same way; we are his sons and daughters. Which means we don’t ever need to be afraid when we pray that God doesn’t want to hear from us—we’re his children. We don’t ever need to say just the right words, to mind our p’s and q’s—we call him Abba. We don’t ever need to do anything to make God be on our side: he already loves you with the love that he has for his Son. 

Do you see how lifechanging this is? A few weeks ago we spoke of the tremendous damage that entering into this world without the security of knowing that God loves us has done on us. I called it flesh personality disorder, because this is not how we were meant to be. Not experiencing the love and security of God has made us fearful, self-protective, defensive. But all of this has changed: our life has begun again as sons and daughters of God deeply loved by God. And now, throughout our lives, this knowledge of the love of God is knitting back together all those parts of us that were torn apart by sin.

Did you notice that this is one of the primary works of the Holy Spirit? He is teaching us to learn to relate to God in this way, helping us to cry out “Abba” to him, so that we can feel the reality that God is our Dad. Tim Keller puts it this way:

Part of the mission of the Spirit is to tell you about God’s love for you, his delight in you, and the fact that you are his child. These things you may know in your head, but the Holy Spirit makes them a fiery reality in your life. Thomas Goodwin, a seventeenth-century Puritan pastor, wrote that one day he saw a father and son walking along the street. Suddenly the father swept the son up into his arms and hugged him and kissed him and told the boy he loved him—and then after a minute he put the boy back down. Was the little boy more a son in the father’s arms than he was down on the street? Objectively and legally, there was no difference, but subjectively and experientially, there was all the difference in the world. In his father’s arms, the boy was experiencing his sonship.”

That’s what the Spirit does: he is at work to help you know that you are loved by the Father in the very way he loves Jesus. Do you see how life-changing that can be? You can be utterly confident in your relationship to God, because in Jesus you are his Son.

Because You are Sons, You Can Be Confident About Yourself.

This might sound strange, playing into the whole “self-esteem” movement. But I want you to notice how your becoming children of God now frames your reality. Your new life is now begun in the knowledge that you are loved by God. And your end is also defined: verse 29 says that we who love God have been “predestined.” There is already a fixed and certain outcome for what we are becoming: we are predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” You Will be like Jesus. That’s not a vague hope. That’s the reality. It’s your destiny, guaranteed by God. 

And then also, between our beginning in the love of God and concluding in perfect Christlikeness, we in our present can know that everything we experience is moving us toward that end. When verse 28 famously tells us that for those who love God all things work together for good, it’s telling us that we don’t need to be afraid of anything—not in the ultimate sense. Because as painful and as grievous as something might be in the moment, God is able to use everything that happens in our life, even things where Satan intends to harm us—he is using each and every thing to move us toward that Christlikeness. 

These are the realities of being sons of God: we are born anew in his love, we are destined for being perfectly like Jesus, and our Father is working in every moment to make us like our older brother. And do you know what that means?  It means that the work God calls us to of becoming like Jesus is entirely worth the struggle.

Imagine someone challenged me to try to become a world-class marathoner. “Come on Geoff, see if you can maybe win the Boston marathon.” I would never, ever take that person up on that challenge. Why? Because I know with the utmost certainty that I absolutely cannot do that. No matter many inspirational YouTube videos I watch about training, no matter how hard I work or how disciplined my diet is, I am not going to be running alongside the Kenyans at next year’s Boston Marathon. There is no universe where that’s likely to happen. And the futile act of even trying to compete would be exhausting. Why in the world would I kill myself to try for a goal I cannot possibly achieve?

But imagine if it was different. Imagine if—well, imagine first that I was around 30 years younger and I somehow came to understand that I had through some freak of nature the very best genes one could have to be a marathon runner. But more than that, imagine if the top marathon trainer in the world offered to personally work with me and provide funding so that I had all the time and resources I needed. But, more than that: imagine if “Doc” from Back to the Future came back in time to tell me that if I kept training I was absolutely definitely going to win the Boston marathon. Do you think I would work hard at training for the marathon? You better believe I would—how inspirational is that? I would know that every ounce of energy I gave to this would be worth it.

So here’s my point in this: when you hear the Bible calling you to seek to become like Jesus—to, as it says here in verse 13, put to death the former way and, as it says elsewhere, to put on Christ’s love and patience and kindness, it might feel to you a bit like someone asking 50-year-old Geoff to win the Boston Marathon. It’s ridiculous, and frankly not worth the effort. We’re hopeless sinners. 

But see the reality is far different. The reality actually is the strange hypothetical I gave you. You are loved by God, born again, with the Spirit of Jesus at work in you. God is working every detail in this life to promote your growth to move you toward Christlikeness. Your destiny, guaranteed with complete certainty, is that you will be like Jesus. You will be like Jesus! You will be loving, patient, kind, gentle, just like him. That is your future. And if this is where you know you are going, doesn’t that make the struggle worth it? As you depend on God and seek to become like Jesus, you will not fail. Yes, you will likely stumble, many times. But God’s Spirit will keep moving you forward. Before, you were weak. But now, you have the power of the Spirit. 

Through Jesus, you can be confident in your relationship to God—you are his Sons. Through Jesus, as his Sons, you can be confident about yourself—that the struggle to grow in Christlikeness is worth it, because by his Spirit you are becoming like Jesus. And finally,

Through Jesus, because You Are Sons, You Can Be Confident toward the World

As we mentioned before, verse 17 says that because we are God’s children, we are also heirs with Christ—heirs, that is, of this world.

In our day where everyone seems anxious, it certainly seems to me that there’s a lot of anxiety in the church. With the feeling that culture is increasingly losing its way, it seems to me that the most common responses we see some Christians making is either to hide or to yell. The hiders pull back from engaging with people outside of the church, and when they do interact, they try to keep mentioning their Christian beliefs to a minimum, knowing how offensive it might be for people to hear that Jesus is the one true king. 

The ”yellers” on the other hand, have decided to fight. To take control, to stem the tide by force, to make people hear.

And while the “yellers” might feel and even look stronger than the hiders, they actually both have the same problem. Most of us know that when someone is in an argument, if they begin shouting, it’s not because they feel confident; it’s because they, like the hiders, feel threatened.

So, I want to let you in on a secret. We have already won. To be more specific, Jesus has already won. Our king has already conquered sin and death and, whether or not people know this, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to him. We are on the winning side.

More than this, because we are children of God, we are royalty. Jesus our older brother, is the king, and in him we are princes and princesses who also have been given authority and who are to rule on his behalf. That certainly isn’t how it feels now, which is why Scripture uses the metaphor of “heirs” for us. An heir is someone who is waiting to take possession a position of authority, and that is what is true of every believer. We are heirs. At the end of all things, this world, all of it, is ours, and we will be given dominion to care for and rule over it. And the end of all things, all of us who belong to Jesus will stand on the right side of history, and all who rejected the royal proclamation of the gospel will tragically come to see that they were terribly wrong.  

Here’s the simple point. 

• Royal sons of the Almighty God, brothers of the Reigning King don’t need to hide. We can be bold, because we know we have been given authority by our king to live out his rule in our lives and pronounce his royal message. Whatever people might seek to do in us in response—they might hurt us, but they can’t defeat us, because our king has won. 
• And royal sons don’t need to yell. Like Jesus, we can be gentle and patient as we bear witness to our king, because we can entrust ourselves to his power and we know he will prevail. 

In our posture toward this world, we can be confident, because we are royal sons of God. 

Conclusion

This confidence is not just something that some of us can have—it is a birthright of all children of God. And I believe that one of the ways Satan is at work today is to hide that truth from our eyes.

There is a misunderstanding among Christians that God doesn’t like us, he just tolerates us because he loves Jesus. I want to ask you not to believe this, for it’s a lie.

There is a misunderstanding among Christians that in this life Christians are so overpowered by sin that we can’t really expect to change. We can just hold on to the knowledge we’re forgiven and wait for Jesus to return. Don’t believe this; it’s a lie.

There is a misunderstanding among Christians that we are in grave danger; that the world is overpowered by evil, and unless we use the world’s weapons, we will be crushed. Don’t believe this; it’s a lie. 

The truth is that if you are in Christ, you are Sons and daughters of God and are entitled to all of the confidence that this is meant to give you.

The truth is that we can as a congregation pursue being Christ’s beautiful church for the good of the world and believe that our king, who has won, is able to do great things through our ordinary efforts.

The truth is that the Spirit is at work in us, and we can pursue becoming like Jesus, knowing that we are growing in family resemblance.

The truth is that no matter what we have done or how we have failed, no matter how weak we might feel, we can come boldly to our God, to our Abba and bring our needs to him. Let’s do that now.