Deo Gloria
May 30, 2021
Sermon for Trinity Sunday
Pastor Martin Bentz
Text: Romans 8:14-17
Theme: How Can I Be Sure?
- Because the Spirit leads you
- Because the Father has adopted you
- Because the Son suffered for you
I remember talking with a lady once about an experience she had in Bible Class. The topic of discussion that day was heaven and some of the wonderful blessings God has in store for us in heaven. At one point one of the other ladies in class expressed her confidence in going to heaven. What a wonderful comfort it was, she said, to know that when she died, she would go to heaven. The first lady looked at her in disbelief. “How can you be sure?” she asked. She had never been sure about going to heaven. “How can you be sure of your standing with God? How can you be sure that you’ll actually go to heaven?”
It’s an important question, isn’t it? How can I be sure? How can I be sure of where I stand with God? How can I be sure that I really am a child of God and that when I die, I’ll go to heaven? This morning the apostle Paul provides us with the answer. In fact, he provides not one, not two, but three reasons why you and I can be completely confident that we are children of God and that we will go to heaven: 1) because the Spirit leads us, 2) because the Father has adopted us, and 3) because the Son suffered for us.
Several weeks ago I was driving up in the Cities when I noticed a group of young children who must have been on a preschool field trip. There were probably 15 or 20 of them, walking down the sidewalk. They were divided up into little groups of 3 or 4, with a helper in each group. And there at the head of the pack was their teacher. She was leading the way to the place they were going to visit.
As children of God, you and I are being led by someone too: by the Spirit of God. “Those who are led by the Spirit of God,” Paul says, “are sons of God”(v. 14). The Holy Spirit leads us in our daily walk with God to do what’s good and right. He leads us to produce good fruit out of faith and love for Jesus: to be patient and loving and kind and gentle, to live a life of self-control and obedience to God’s commands. As Paul states in Galatians ch. 5, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control”(vv. 22+23).
The Holy Spirit also leads us to avoid sin and evil, to put off our sinful nature, to resist the influence of the world and the temptations of the devil. If only we did a better job of following his lead! All too often you and I have chosen to follow a different leader. We have chosen to follow the devil and fallen for his temptations. We have chosen to follow the world and its evil desires. And we have chosen to follow the desires of our own sinful nature. We have allowed greed, for example, to fill our hearts with envy and jealousy toward others, perhaps even led to us steal from others or take advantage of others so we could have more. We have allowed anger to run away with us and lead us to say mean and hurtful things to our spouse or our children, to hurt them verbally or maybe even physically. We have allowed lust to fill our hearts and lead us to look at sexually explicit pictures on the internet or perhaps play around sexually with our boyfriend or girlfriend. Yes, at times we have chosen to ignore the Spirit of God and do just the opposite of what he would have us do. And the punishment we deserve for that is death. As Paul says in the verse right before our text, “If you live according to the sinful nature, you will die”(v. 13). May God forgive us for being so foolish, for failing to follow the lead of his Spirit and living according to the sinful nature instead! May he forgive us for the sake of Jesus Christ our Savior!
The Holy Spirit is also the one who leads us to repentance. He is the one who works through God’s Word to lead us to see our sins, to confess our sins and to ask for God’s forgiveness. And he is the one who puts the desire in our hearts to turn away from our sins and to strive to do what’s good and right.
So if you are looking for assurance, I guess you need ask yourself some soul-searching questions. Do you want to follow the Spirit of God, or don’t you? Do you want to follow his lead in your life and do what he wants you to do, or don’t you care? Are you sorry for the times you ignored him and chose to follow something or someone else instead? Are you thankful for God’s forgiveness, that he has paid for all your sins with the blood of his Son, Jesus Christ? And do you want to express your thanks to him by keeping in step with his Spirit and doing what’s good and right? Then you can be sure. You can be sure that you are a child of God, because that’s exactly what the Holy Spirit would want you to do and is leading you to do. “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.”
A second reason you can be sure is that the Father has adopted you. Paul says it this way in v. 15: “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship.” Prior to becoming Christians, the people to whom Paul was writing had been slaves—not slaves to some earthly master, but slaves to fear. They lived in fear because their religion was a religion of fear. The gods they worshiped were not known for their love and mercy and kindness. They were known for their awesome power and their terrible anger. In fact, they were always angry. And they supposedly displayed their anger at times in the disasters they sent: droughts and floods and fires and earthquakes. So they were forever trying to appease the gods, forever trying to please the gods with their sacrifices and their offerings and their devout lives. But they never knew if the gods were satisfied, if their sacrifices were acceptable to them, if they had done enough to win their favor. So they were always living in fear, afraid the gods might not be happy, afraid the gods might send another disaster, afraid the gods would not accept them when they left this life and crossed over into the spirit world.
The same is true of us by nature. By nature we too are slaves of fear because our consciences tell us that we’re not in a right relationship with God, but we don’t know how to fix it. So we’re always afraid, afraid that God is not happy with us, afraid that God is out to get us, afraid that when we die, God will not accept us, but will slam the door of heaven in our face. But all of that changed when we became Christians, when God brought us to faith in Jesus as our Savior. He set us free from such slavery to fear and gave us a new spirit, the Spirit of sonship. Literally Paul says, “the Spirit of the adoption of sons.” Yes, God has adopted us into his family. He has made us his very own sons and daughters through faith in Christ Jesus. We aren’t outsiders anymore. We aren’t separated from God because of our sins. We enjoy a close, personal relationship with God. He is our dear Father. We are his dear children.
And look at the wonderful privilege that gives us. We can call God, “Abba, Father.” Remember that little prayer your mom and dad taught you, perhaps the very first prayer you ever learned: “Abba, dear Father. Amen”? That’s actually a pretty close translation of the words Paul uses here. Abba is the Aramaic word for “Daddy.” It’s the word a little child would use in speaking to his father. “Daddy, can I sit in your lap? Daddy, can you push me on the swing? Daddy, can we go get some ice cream?” That’s the kind of relationship you and I enjoy with God. We can actually call God “Daddy.” And he loves it when we do. He loves it when we come running to him in prayer and say, “Daddy, please help me. That bully, the devil, is after me again. Daddy, please watch over me and protect me because I’m afraid. Daddy, please be with my friend, Jimmy, because he’s really, really sick.” What prayer of ours would he not listen to? What prayer of ours would he not answer, as he knows best? We are his children. He is our Daddy, our Abba, Father.
And being his children also makes us his heirs. “Now if we are children,” Paul says, “then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ”(v. 17). An heir gets the inheritance, right? So what is our inheritance? What do we have to look forward to receiving some day as children of God? An old car? Your mother’s china cabinet or your grandmother’s wedding ring? 40 acres of land on a lake somewhere up north? No, the inheritance we have to look forward to is nothing earthly, because earthly things are temporal and perishable. The inheritance we will receive from God is imperishable. It will last forever and ever and ever. Our inheritance is eternal life in the Father’s house, a place where there is no more sin or sadness, no more grief or pain—only life and peace and joy forever. So can you be sure? Can you be certain that when you die, you will go to heaven? Absolutely, because the Father has adopted you as his child, and that makes you his heir.
A third reason you can be sure is that the Son has suffered for you. We pick it up in the middle of v. 17: “…if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” The words “share in his sufferings” can be a little misleading. You and I could get the impression that by our sufferings we somehow share in Jesus’ sufferings and thereby contribute to our salvation. And that isn’t the idea at all. The words Paul uses simply mean that we will suffer too. And we will.
As followers of Jesus Christ, we too will suffer. Remember what Jesus told his disciples? “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily [there’s the suffering] and follow me”(Luke 9:23). Or remember what Paul told the believers in Lystra and Iconium and Antioch? “We must go through many hardships,” he said, “to enter the kingdom of God”(Acts 14:22). As followers of Jesus we will experience suffering and hardship in this life. At times we will experience rejection and persecution because of our faith in Jesus. And when that happens, we can look to Jesus for comfort and courage and strength, because he was treated that way too and he experienced those things too. But that isn’t what gives us confidence.
What gives us confidence is not the suffering we may experience, but the suffering Jesus experienced, that he suffered for us. As I mentioned earlier, there have been many times when we have failed to follow the Spirit’s lead, times we have followed the devil, the world and our own sinful nature, and we have sinned. And the punishment we deserve for that is death–not 3-5 years in prison, not 2 or 3 months of probation, not 200 hours of community service—death, unending death in a place of unending suffering called hell.
But that’s the joy, that’s the peace, that’s the comfort we have in Jesus Christ our Savior. You and I don’t have to suffer the punishment for our sins because someone else already did. Remember when you were younger and you accidentally broke one of your mom’s favorite dishes and you blamed it on your little brother. He got sent to his room. He lost his allowance for a week. He had to do extra chores around the house, because of you and what you did. That’s what Jesus, our brother, has done for us. He got blamed for what we did. As our Savior, Jesus willingly took our place and suffered the punishment we deserved. He paid the penalty for all our sins, so that we might be forgiven, that we might be at peace with God and might live with him in his glorious home forever. That’s what gives us confidence. That’s what gives us comfort and peace and assurance—not anything we have done, but what Jesus has done for us, that he suffered for us and paid the penalty for all our sins.
Can a person be sure of where they stand with God? Can a person actually say, as that lady did in Bible Class, that they’re sure they will go to heaven when they die? Absolutely. God doesn’t want us to wonder or doubt. In fact, in these verses our triune God gives us a triple assurance. You and I can be sure that we are children of God and will live with him in heaven some day because the Spirit leads us, because the Father has adopted us and because the Son suffered for us. Amen.