Adopted children through the Spirit. - Romans 8:11-19

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow children of the father. When I was a child, I loved to read Harry Potter. My favorite one of these books was the first one. This book begins with Harry as an orphan. He is dropped off at the doorstep of his aunt and uncle and lives with them until his teenage years when he becomes a wizard. This type of story that begins with an orphan child is something that we all love. We see it also in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker doesn’t know his parents and thinks that they are dead. In Rapunzel she is taken as a baby away from her parents, In the Lion King, Simba grows up without his parents. It is all over in our story telling. We love seeing characters who grow up and are able to overcome the adversity of being separated from their parents. They start with next to nothing and have to work themselves into something great. But what if they weren’t able to get themselves up? What if they had no ability to make a better situation for themselves. Well, they would be left with nothing. No inheritance, no home, no happy ending. They would die with absolutely nothing. In our text for today Paul speaks about us using this picture of an orphan. We were dead without any chance in the world; until through the Spirit we were made adopted sons of God.

“I’m going to try and achieve immortality by 2039. One year of time passes and I remain the same biological age. I invite you to join me.” This is a quote from tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, a man who truly believes that through medical innovation, humans will one day not have to face death. He’s already trying his best to do whatever he can to slow the aging process as much as possible. Through some normal things like eating healthy and working out, partnered with some seemingly crazy aging treatments, he will claim that he has been able to drastically slow the aging process and hopes that in the near future he will be able to eliminate it entirely. He will try to sell you his program online, but I have some bad news for all of you. Death is coming for all of us.                

Now I don’t think that this is the type of news that will shock anybody. Death has been promised to mankind since the time of the first sin in the garden in Genesis 2 God said to Adam and Eve, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” And while Satan’s lies tried to convince Eve that eating from this tree wasn’t really going to bring death, our holy God does not lie. And yet when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from this tree, they did not immediately fall over. Instead, because they did not trust God’s word, sin entered the world and has infected all of us. Earlier in Romans, Paul wrote, “just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” The result of this original sin that has been passed on from Adam to all of us was that all of God’s creation, that he had created in holiness so that it would never die, was now one day going to have to face death. The natural result of sin is death.

But this is not just something we are told is true, it is something that we witness ourselves while we are here on earth. I’m sure that most of us here have experienced death in some way. We can all testify to the effect that sin has had on this world. Last summer my grandfather passed and it was the first close death that I have had to experience. It’s often difficult for us to see those around us come to their earthly end. Witnessing death like we do should serve as a reminder of the cause of death which is the sin that dwells inside of all of us. Because of this sin, death is something that impacts all of us.

Paul says it as simply as this in our verses for today. “If you live according to the flesh, you will die.” That sounds like it for us. Because we all know the way that we struggle to resist the desires of our flesh. This sinful nature that is inherited to all of us from Adam dwells so deeply in us that we all might as well be dead already. If the result of sin is death, then we all know what the outcome of our lives is. Except this is what we were, it is not who we are.

Those who are led by the Spirit are children of God, Paul says. We were lost to sin and dead to all of our desires. We were hopeless, lifeless forms unable to do anything for ourselves. Orphans with no home and no inheritance. But now through the faith given to us in the Spirit we are made adopted heirs of the kingdom of God. We who were as good as dead are given hope. Paul says “if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” We now have the Spirit, and the Spirit gives us life. We are raised up with Christ from the dead to receive our inheritance from the God who is made our true father through the Spirit. This Father, son relationship means that everything which God has which is good will be given to us as his children. In his love Jesus paid off our debt of sin so that we are co heirs of the resurrection with the son of God. Because he first was raised from his death, we also in our true flesh, will rise from the dead.

In our resurrection we receive the gift of the Glory of God. We will be raised up into his holy presence to experience the fullness of his glory. Even though we live a life where we are often face to face with death, we can be confident that because we are children of God our death does not mean the end for us.

But our identity as adopted sons of the father is not something that begins for us when we die, it is something that Paul says has happened for us already. We are already princes and heirs of God’s kingdom. How well are you serving God in your role as prince?

Well Paul tells us that we have an obligation. An obligation  to put to death the failures of our sinful flesh. But for us who are ingrained with sin to our very core, that can be easier said than done. Our sinfulness desires to suppress the work of the Spirit in us. It can make us view the Spirit as a virus that we would much rather get rid of, then follow the ways of. Our desires do not line up with the desires of the Spirit that lives in us and each day we struggle to follow the commands of our God.

When we look at the demands that a Holy God has given to us, they can often appear to us like a burden we are unable to carry. How could we possibly follow all of the desires of God all of the time? Especially when our own desires seem to contradict God’s in so many ways. We can often beat ourselves up with the law and use it to show ourselves that we will never be able to measure up against it. It can cause us to fear because we know the consequences of breaking the law, which is something we do every day and the devil convinces us is something that we will never be able to stop doing.

We have to remember, that the Spirit has not called us to be slaves of the law, but he has called us to be sons. The Spirit makes us strong to put to death the misdeeds of our sinful desires and live according to what God commands from us. Because we have the Spirit living in us, we are able to live like children of the father. We are not slaves of Satan but free sons of God. With the Spirit living in us, what once was an impossible task, becomes a blessing for our lives. We know that in the Spirit, our father loves us as his own dear child and desires only what is best for each of us.

And yet, from our viewpoint here on earth, life does not seem to be one we would expect for the children of God. With God as our father, we may expect a life free from any troubles. But what we often experience instead seems to be a life of suffering and pain. Even when we put to death our flesh and live according to the Spirit, things don’t seem to always be going great for us. A prince should be dressed in fine garments and gold jewelry but I’m no millionaire. A child of God should be free from pain and disease but you’re not healthy all of the time. Actually it can look to us like the wicked people are often the ones who seem like they are being blessed.

But this is just for a time. God has promised that judgment is coming for the wicked. The evils things of this world will not go unpunished.  The many things that we suffer here are just a fraction of the suffering that Jesus faced on the cross. If we are going to share in the resurrection with Jesus, then we will also share in his suffering. The same enemies that Jesus faced heave become our enemies. This is what our lives are. We carry the burdens of life on our shoulders because that is what Jesus did for us when he went to the cross. He took up all of our failures and was forsaken by God on the cross to atone for us, receiving the punishment which we deserve for all of our sin. So while we do face many difficulties while we are here, Paul tells us that they are only the smallest fraction compared to the eternal glory that is in store for the children of God.

As adopted children of the almighty God we have the promise of an inheritance. We are not left as orphans without hope. But we are given the promise that Christ’s glory will be inherited by all of us. Through the Spirit we were made into a royal heir of the kingdom of God. We live according to our status as children of God, facing the suffering of the world as Christ did for us. We can do this through the Spirit, because it is his life in us that makes us heirs of Christ’s resurrection.