03-The Freedom of Sonship

III. THE FREEDOM OF SONSHIP.

Rom 8:15. “Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”

THERE is a danger against which we in these days have some special need to be put upon our guard, described by St Paul under the name of bondage, or a servile condition, in things relating to God. Our tendency at the present moment is to shrink from irreligion, and to rejoice in the spread of all religious feelings and practices. There are many, I believe, to whose thoughts it has scarcely occurred that there is such a thing as a spirit of bondage by which the most religious persons may be oppressed, and from which it is the glory of the Gospel to set men free. Such forgetfulness is not due to any lack of warnings and explanations in the New Testament. No ’doubt the kind of bondage most familiar to us, and of which none but the utterly careless can be unmindful, that of lawless desire and a perverse will, is constantly kept in view in the New Testament as opposite to Gospel liberty. But the Apostles, and especially St Paul, are often speaking of a bondage expressly associated with religion. And the two forms of bondage are in their view connected in kinship or close alliance. DeatJi, Sin, the Law, are three oppressors in league together. There is a whole world of practical theology in these few words, “ The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law; but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” Here “the law” might be explained as the religion which brings into bondage. It is impossible that the danger of such a bondage can have passed away from the world. I fear rather that we may have too little knowledge of that liberty of the Gospel which makes the bondage also known and felt.

You Christians, St Paul says, did not receive a spirit of slavery again unto fear, but what you received was a Spirit of sonship, in which we cry Abba, Father! That they had received some kind of spirit was to the Christians of that age a fact of experience, which no one doubted. The entrance into the Church was marked, as a general rule, for every believer, by an access of new spiritual emotions prompting him to unwonted utterances. So that a Christian defined himself no less as a partaker of a Spirit from above, than as a believer in a risen Lord.

St Paul therefore takes the receiving of a spirit for granted; the question is what kind of a spirit it was. He tells his readers emphatically that it was not one suitable to slaves, generating a habit of fear; they had not simply exchanged a heathen or a Jewish spirit of bondage for a Christian spirit of bondage; the Spirit received by the Church was he does not here use the formally opposite phrase, one of freedom, but an equivalent and more instructive term one of sons/tip. From the day of Pentecost onwards, the true Spirit of the Church had always prompted the believers to cry to God with trust and hope as to their Father. That impulse declared the nature of the Spirit; it was evidently a filial Spirit; if its cry was one which God inspired, then they in whom it moved were God’s children. God was himself claiming them as his children, by teaching them to call him Father. “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are sons of God,” otherwise, how could they call God Father? And the Spirit of sons/lip is essentially the Spirit of freedom. In no other way can men attain to the highest kind of freedom, and be permanently secure against every kind of bondage, than by living the inner life of children of God.

If you wish to see how much slavery there may be in religion, you have but to glance at some of the heathen religions. They have not been all equally oppressive; where nature has been bright and free from terrors, there religion has generally had its cheerful and joyous elements. But how frightfully have some races been tormented by their religions! Having experience of arbitrary rulers and cruel enemies in the visible world, they have peopled the invisible with principalities and powers far more cruel and capricious. Their worship has been devil- worship. Imagine how the fear of their false gods must have harassed the souls of a people, before they would make their sons and their daughters pass through the fire, to propitiate them! This seems the last extremity to which the spirit of bondage could drive human beings; but, short of that, the lives of men have been filled with misery and darkness in various degrees by the malevolent powers which they have placed in their heaven.

Whilst much of this dread, and of the servile temper nourished by it, prevailed in the world to which the first preachers of Christ offered their Gospel, there were some in that age who congratulated themselves on having found emancipation from superstitious terrors in philosophy. “ Happy he,” says the Roman poet, “ who has been able to learn the causes of things, and who has put all fears and inexorable Fate and the noise of greedy Acheron under his feet! “ We cannot forget how many in our own day are seeking freedom in the same path. It would be anything but Christian to fling reproaches at those who, whilst they persuade themselves that all the region which bounds this visible life of ours is an impenetrable blank, still hold by a high moral standard, and endeavour to live so as to serve their generation. Looking back to the time of the Roman Empire, we see the same experiment being tried. There were then also men. who believed in no God, who despised the superstitions of the vulgar, who pursued knowledge so far as it was within their reach, and whose tone of mind was sustained by philosophical dignity. But we Christians of to-day are followers of men in the first century who did not pretend to be philosophers, but whose far higher pretension was that they had a calling of God. They also were lovers of liberty, though their doctrine of liberty was a different one from that of the philosophers who despised superstitions. They valued liberty even more, they longed for it more earnestly, they were enthusiastic I do not say more so than the philosophers, for they hardly had this enthusiasm at all, in desiring to make other men partakers of it.

They held and taught that the God who sent them was offering freedom to men, and that every man who would come to the Father through Christ and accept the Spirit of sonship might become truly and consciously free.

Now in thus regarding spiritual liberty as a priceless gift from God to men, the Christian Evangelists were distinguished from mere propagators of a religion. They were raised above the passion of making proselytes. They quickly became aware that men might profess to be Christians without inheriting the liberty of the children of God. It must have been a very painful discovery. I am speaking now especially of St Paul, the greatest of the founders of the Church, in labours more abundant than all the others, but at the same time the one who made the lightest of a mere profession of Christianity, and the most watchful against influences which might mar the Divinely intended effects of the Gospel. It was the purpose of the Gospel to make men free; the grace of God was therefore frustrated if men, instead of coming with open truthful hearts to God, put themselves under the tyranny of a law or a ceremonial or formal works of any kind. That was to regard God as an Exactor rather than as a Giver, as a hard Ruler rather than as a Deliverer, as one who was to be shunned and to be put off with the barest fulfilment of a bargain or task rather than as one who was to be trusted and appealed to for help. And St Paul saw with true spiritual insight the servile dispositions which grow naturally out of the servile relation, and which threatened to degrade the Church of Christ. To be a slave almost implies as a matter of course to be deceitful. What slaveowner ever felt that he could trust his slaves?

Govern a child tyrannically, and you are responsible for breeding in him a reserved, suspicious, uncandid, temper of mind. So, those who cannot come to God in the Spirit of sonship, enjoying trustful access and freedom of speech before him, almost inevitably learn to lead a double life. Their aim is to close the secret recesses of their hearts for themselves, and to give a certain outward service to God. Formalism, legalism, asceticism, are always dangerous to the open, truth-loving disposition which the grace of God would cherish. Nor are they really powerful against the dominion of the senses. The “Law,” in Pauline language, is weak against the flesh, because it cannot give life; it cannot cleanse, brace, quicken the soul; that is the work of the Spirit, of the Spirit which is filial and makes free. So that whilst there was the world to conquer for Christ, St Paul thought it worth while to spend a great part of his labour in contending for freedom against bondage in the little societies of baptized believers. His doctrine is perfectly clear, but it needs to be insisted upon in every age of the Church as in the first. The Gospel, he taught, is the story of the Son of God who revealed his Father as perfectly fatherly towards men.

What is fatherliness? It is made up, we may briefly say, of the two elements of justice and goodness. To call God our Father is to say that he is altogether righteous and gracious towards us.

Well, the Father through Christ invites men to come to him. On their part, everything might keep them back, unworthiness, dread, want of desire. But by his free grace and by spiritual help God removes these hindrances. He appeals to faith, and shews himself to be such a one as may be trusted. The only way of going to God is with the inmost emotions of the soul. There must be confession without reserve, thankfulness for pain as well as for pleasure, the sense of dependence, the supplicating desire of the highest good. When the heart thus opens itself and allows itself to be drawn into the holy of holies which is the felt presence of the Eternal Father, there is freedom. No longer is there any constriction of the heart, no longer the pressure of any chain upon the soul, no longer a cowardly fear of the future, no longer a suspicion that the forces of nature may be wielded by a destroyer. This freedom, won and enjoyed, is what men want and what God desires for them; every thing else is comparatively unimportant. What pleasure can God who sees in secret find in any outward service, in any arbitrary self-infliction?

It is quite true that we creatures of flesh and blood have to live an outward as well as an inward life. This will not bear to be forgotten. The outward must serve the inward. But when the outward separates itself from the inward, when it ventures to come into competition with it, then it must be treated even with contumely. When the liberty of the children of God is in question, even Scriptures, sabbaths, almsgiving, denials of appetite, prayers, sacraments, may find themselves put aside with something like disrespect.

Christian brethren, it is not easy for us to rise to the high spiritual level of St Paul’s teaching; but this, you surely know, is what he taught, and this doctrine, even if you have misgivings as to its being too lofty, your consciences must confess to be profoundly and gloriously Christian. Do not believe that it is in itself dangerous; only perversions of it are dangerous. Free thinking, free living, free love, have acquired bad associations; but the things which have become justly odious under these names have no right to connect themselves with St Paul’s teaching. You cannot make too much of spiritual freedom, so long as you understand by it what St Paul did, the free access of the soul, in the filial Spirit, to the righteous and gracious Father. This kind of freedom is very far indeed from setting people at their ease to do what they like.

It by no means tends to promote a free and easy, inconsiderate, habit of mind. Let any one try it, and see what the effect upon him is. Let him come to God with the utmost imaginable confidence, with the fullest assurance that there is nothing to debar him from intimate communion with God. But of course he must remember who and what God is, that he is true and just and loving, that he is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ who died for us on the Cross. Our freedom is to know God as he has thus been revealed to us. And is such a Father to be approached without reverence, without awe? Judge, if you please, by what you know of the mind of the most spiritual Christians. Was St Paul a light, irreverent, kind of person? Did he take life easily? Or were those who had known the Lord Jesus as a companion and friend and who had believed what he told them of God’s goodness and desire that they should be made free, distinguished by levity and unconcern? St Peter, in one of the most instructive passages of holy Scripture, urges that the consciousness of having been set free and of being admitted into filial communion with God will directly promote watchfulness and awe. “ If ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judges according to every man’s work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear; forasmuch as you know that you were not redeemed or set free with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation, or empty manner of life, handed down from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ... who was manifest in these last times for you who by him believe in God that raised him from the dead and gave him glory, that your faith and hope may be in God.” To put our trust and hope in God, this is the condition of freedom bought for us by the sacrifice of Christ. As the redeemed or freedmen of Christ we are entitled to call upon the just God as our Father. But therefore it is not for us to live carelessly, without purpose or aim, doing the first thing that routine or desire suggests. This is the very bondage from which Christ came to rescue us. No, the children of him who is known to us through Jesus Christ must feel reverence in their hearts for the Heavenly Father in the first degree, and then for their brethren, for the world which he creates, for the work which he has put us into the world to do. St Paul says even more than this; “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” You see that this extreme view, of God working in man both to will and to do, does not involve to St Paul the apparently logical consequence that man is irresponsible; on the contrary it produces a deeper sense of responsibility. Another of the Apostles, St John, does indeed say that perfect love casts out fear; but then by adding, “because fear hath torment,” he shews that he means by fear that kind of it which has torment. He also would have commended the fear that is consistent with love, the awe of profound admiration, the sense of unworthiness, the anxiety not to displease or to forget such a Father.

Yes, my brethren, there must be seriousness in the mind and the life of a Christian, a seriousness tempered by trust and hope and joy, but often not unmixed with sadness. The little use we make of our true freedom, the small value we set upon it, are enough of themselves to fill us often with sorrowful self-reproach. It is the will of our Father that our path through the world should be beset with difficulties and trials; we often cannot see our way clearly; at the very best we cannot always stand upright. But let our sins and our perplexities not drive us away from God, and make him distant to us and persuade us to seek help and comfort in rules that we can observe and works which we can perform, but bring us nearer in confession and prayer to him. May he never be transformed in our eyes into a Being from whom we should reasonably desire to escape; may he be always to us our supreme helper and friend.

Let us not approach him as those who have to deprecate his anger by grovelling before him. Even in the forms of our outward worship, Christian freedom, or in other words reverence for the true character of God, would disapprove of any acts appearing to symbolize the servility of a frightened offender. Let us ever keep our thoughts fixed on Eternal Righteousness shining upon us through Eternal Love. Let us bear in mind that the Sacrifice of the Son of God was intended to set us free, and that his glorious name is the Redeemer. Our deserts at God’s hands are indeed as bad as we can imagine them to be. But God does not give us only what we deserve. He gives us his Son to be our Head; and with him he gives us the Spirit of his Son. It is due to God that we should welcome into our hearts the Spirit of Jesus Christ and suffer it to work in us all filial affections.