THE GIFT OF SONSHIP
Roland H Brown
Galatians 3: 26; 4: 4-7
Romans 8: 14-17
I seek divine help, dear brethren, to say something about the glory of the gift of sonship. The second section that I read says that “God sent forth his Son … that we might receive sonship”. Mr Darby has a very helpful note to that word: ‘It is receiving the position of sonship as a gift’, because the Jew was under bondage of law and the Gentile had no right to anything. God has given many things. If we know God at all, we know hHm as a Giver and a Blesser. So much so that the apostles could say, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Paul says that in his epistles and so does Peter, 2 Cor 1: 3; Eph 1: 3; 1 Pet 1: 3. I think those men had a great sense of the blessedness of the nature of God through their knowledge of Him, through His dealings with them. They said, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”.
But among the many things that God has given to us as believers is sonship. That is what the first verse that I read brings out, that “we are all God's sons by faith in Christ Jesus”. It is not a question of whether we feel like it or whether we feel up to it; it is what we are as having put our faith in Christ. And it reminds us that faith in Christ Jesus has more in mind, much more in mind, than simply the relief from sins and security from judgment to come. Many professing believers stop there. You might say they live in the gospel. Now of course the forgiveness of sins is essential; it could not be more essential. I hope it is the property of all in this room that they know as a certainty that their sins have been forgiven and that they can look ahead. John says, “they may have boldness in the day of judgment”, 1 John 4: 17. They can look ahead without fear because, as John says, “as he is, we also are in this world”, as He is the Saviour in glory above, as He is in all His acceptability to God as a Man. What a statement that is, is it not? What thoughts God has, far exceeding our thoughts. He said that a long time ago, “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”, Isa 55: 8. God is going to be praised eternally for the greatness of His thoughts and the glory of His ways, the way that He has taken, often not understood by us because we are poor limited creatures. But the way that God has taken, as well as what He has done, will redound to His glory eternally.
Now I think this verse brings that out. You see that faith in Christ Jesus is not simply a question of what I am saved from, important as that is. It is not an end in itself; the forgiveness of sins is a means to something much greater, and that is that God wants to confer, sonship. That is a most blessed thing, as I hope to convey, and not just blessed, but it is a glorious thing that God has done.
Brethren are familiar with the passage in Romans 8. It speaks of those that God “has predestinated to be conformed to the image of his Son”. “But whom he has predestinated, these also he has called; and whom he has called, these also he has justified; but whom he has justified” - that is persons whose sins have been forgiven, and they have been justified in another Man - “these also he has glorified”. It is not simply that He will glorify them, but He has glorified them. And I have felt for myself recently that I have not thought enough about that. God “has glorified his servant Jesus”, as one of the early preachers said (Acts 3: 13), but He has glorified those whom He has justified, and He has glorified them by giving them His Spirit. Persons that are indwelt by the Spirit of God have been glorified already, and they have been called through divine grace to sonship.
Now sonship is not a difficult word to understand, is it? We understand that it means a relationship, brought into the family of God. That is how John speaks of the assembly - not formally as the assembly, but he speaks of the family, the family of God. He speaks of Christianity in its essence. So when he speaks of fellowship, he speaks of having fellowship with God. We can so easily perhaps get over-occupied with externals and what is formal and so on, but the very essence of Christianity is that we are brought into the family of God, to have a relationship with Him that is of the most intimate and blessed character, and to have relationships with those that are His. I do not think sonship is presented in the scriptures in relation to us exactly in the singular, because if you have received the Spirit of God and have been brought into the family of God, you have been numbered among a most exalted company. God is “bringing many sons to glory”, Heb 2: 10. That is something that He is committed to. They have been glorified already by the gift of the Spirit, but they are being brought to glory from all sorts of backgrounds and circumstances, some of the most unusual people. You might say, ‘Well, I do not think that they deserved it’. No, none of them deserved it, but they received it as a gift and they received it through faith in Christ Jesus. I trust everyone here in this room has faith in Christ Jesus, not only for their eternal security, but that you might be awakened to the glory of what God has conferred upon you.
So it says in chapter 4 that “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, come of woman, come under law”; that is what God did. But what was the purpose of Him doing that, sending forth His Son, “come of woman, come under law”; that amazing wonder that we were speaking about in the reading, what was the purpose of it? The purpose, no less, was that we might receive sonship. So great was the divine desire that we should be brought into this holy and intimate relationship that God sent forth His Son in such a lowly way. I have said before, the ways of God are not our ways. We might have thought that this was a strange way to impart sonship to many sons, but this is the way that God chose. And eternally, He will be glorified in the way that He did it, as well as the result of it. And it says that He sent Him forth that we might receive sonship, might receive it as a gift from God. Do you treasure that, dear brother, dear sister? Does it enter into your thanksgiving to God that He has made Himself known to you; that in the sovereignty of His grace, you have been brought to know Him, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent (John 17: 3), and not only brought to know Him, but to receive from Him the gift of sonship?
Well, now there is something else. The writer says first, “because ye are sons” - that is what we are, dear brethren, as having faith in Christ Jesus. We are nothing less than that. May our hearts be stimulated to walk worthy of it. It struck me recently that we have many relationships. Some of us are married, we have husbands or wives, we have children, we have parents, all sorts of relationships. We go to work; these relationships are all covered in the scriptures. We may be the master at work, or we may be an employee; that is a relationship. We enter into all sorts of relationships, but there is one relationship that is supreme to every other, and is to give character to every other, and that is the relationship of sonship. As a husband, I should be marked as one of God's sons in the way I behave. And we have to acknowledge, as Mr Eric Burr once said, that we may speak of the testimony, but our testimony begins where we are known best; that is in our home. If I am known as a husband who is impatient or loses his temper with his wife or children, how is that to be characteristic of a son of God? In my household and in the relationships of nature into which through God's ways I have been brought, what is to characterise every inferior relationship is the dignity and grace - and I say the glory - of the relationship of sonship. It is to mark everything that I touch, the way I treat my wife, the way I treat my children, the way I treat my employer, or my employee. Every inferior relationship is to be marked by that, that God has conferred upon me the glory and the dignity of sonship and brought me into this most intimate of relationships with Himself.
Well, now he says, “because ye are sons” - that is what you are as having faith in Christ Jesus - “God has sent out Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”. Now we are the sons of God by adoption and we all know that a child that is adopted may come readily to love the persons that have adopted them, and feel grateful to them for having adopted him. They may get on well with the natural children of the family, but they are not a blood relation. They will express in their appearance perhaps features of the family from which they came, not the family that they have been adopted into. But God has done something very wonderful: He has imparted to those that He has adopted as His sons the Spirit of His Son. Now no natural or earthly father could do that to an adopted child, but God has done it. And you may ask, ‘Well, why has he done it?’. He has done it that you might not simply have the status of sonship, but that you might have the feelings and affections and emotions that are proper to the sons of God. How affecting that is, is it not? And only God could do it; that you might see things as God sees them and feel them as He feels them, and be an integral part of the divine family as having the Spirit of His Son.
That is to convey to us the consciousness of sonship, that it is not just a doctrine, it is not just a verse in the Bible, but it is something that is to enter into my spiritual consciousness. God sheds His love abroad in my heart through the Spirit that He has given to me in order that I should know at its most basic level that I am loved. It is a wonderful thing to be loved When you read and see some of the things that go on in the world, you pity men. There are men and women on the earth who never seem to have experienced love, even natural love, abused and deserted and abandoned from infancy, falling into a life of criminality, coming under the severity of the law, ending up in prison, brutalised there; persons passing through life having never experienced what love is. What a wonderful thing it is to be loved and to know your love; to know that you have a place in someone's heart is a very precious thing, but how much greater to know that you have a place in God's heart.
Who could measure that? And God wants you to know that. He has given us a spirit of adoption in order that sonship may not simply be a doctrine or a truth, but as you get up in the morning and go to work, you are doing so in the consciousness that you have been supremely blessed. God has blessed you with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ, and He chose you in Christ before the world's foundation, and He marked you out. Notice this, He marked you out beforehand for adoption. He marked you out for that, long before you knew anything about it. Mr Bert Taylor used to tell us when he was local with us in East Finchley that it is like a door, and on one side of it is written, ”Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16: 31), and you go through that door and you look back and written on the other side of it is ”chosen … in him before the world’s foundation”, Eph 1: 4. These things to me are very wonderful, that God should not only bestow the glory of sonship, and the Lord spoke of it as that. He said to the Father, “And the glory which thou hast given me I have given them”, John 17: 22. The glory of sonship was set out in all its perfection in the Son, who went His way through this world. He was doing good; He was healing those that were oppressed; He was giving sight to the blind, making the lame to walk, raising the dead, healing the leper, giving hearing to the deaf. But He went through in the consciousness of sonship. He could say, “I do always the things that are pleasing to him”, John 8: 29. It was not just that He was the Son - He was, but He lived in flesh and blood conditions on this earth in the consciousness of sonship, the consciousness that He was loved, the consciousness of the place He had in the bosom of the Father. We too, dear brethren, are to be conscious of it.
I say these things, not because they are not known - I am sure that what I am saying is better known to the brethren than it is to me - I am going over things that have been said before, but I have felt for myself the need to be awakened as to it, awakened to the glory of what God has done in order that I might walk practically here in the dignity and grace of it.
That brings me on to this final passage, because in Romans 8 the apostle says not only that those that have been justified have been glorified, but he speaks of those that are led by the Spirit of God. I find that quite an exercising verse. You see, it is one thing to have received the Spirit from God because I am one of His sons, but am I led by Him? That means, am I prepared to give up my own will? Am I prepared to be guided? The Spirit of God is a guide: “he shall guide you into all the truth”, John 16: 13. He is a Teacher; “he shall teach you all things”, chap 14; 26. But He is a Leader too. I just wanted to close with a reference to that. He is a Leader that has taken up His abode in the believer. He gives a prompt as to the way to go. You will find in life that there are choices to be made. You will find that something looks very attractive, but is it the will of God for me? Is that what God would want me as one of His sons to do? You may say there is no harm in it; it is not wicked, but is it worthy of me as one of God's sons? Perhaps there is another choice and a voice that I should hear behind me. The prophet says there is a word saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it”, Isa 30: 21. And you hear that voice and you wish perhaps it would go away because you really want to do the other thing, but there is that insistent voice, the voice of the in-dwelling Spirit giving the prompt. What are you going to do? I can tell you from bitter experience that if you ignore that voice, if you take the path of self-will, perhaps self-pleasing, self-indulgence, it will be to your loss. Whereas if you take the path at the fork in the road that comes into all our lives, if you take the pathway of the will of God, you will prove blessing.
But this verse is not just that you will have proved blessing, but you will become visible as one of the sons of God. There will be a testimony. I go back to where we began. We are all God's sons through faith in Christ Jesus, but you cannot see my faith. My faith is inside: you cannot see that. What you can see, and what others can see too is that, when confronted with decisions in life, I may follow my own tastes like Isaac. He “loved Esau, because venison was to his taste”, Gen 25: 28. He loved the man that God hated. It is a solemn thing, is it not? Whereas Rebecca, who had been to God and asked him about these two children she was about to give birth to, had had it revealed to her that Jacob was the man of God's choice, v 23. Now, Isaac was governed by his tastes. And, if when I reach that fork in the road, what prevails with me is my tastes, I am a slave to my own tastes. That can be taken account of. Whereas if am led by the Spirit of God, it will be seen even in testimony, that I belong to the divine family and that I am not here to please myself but I am here to please Him who has given me that inestimable gift. I have received it from Him. He sent forth His Son in order that I should receive it. He has imparted His own Spirit so that I should have the feelings and emotions that are proper to the sons of God, that I should have a divinely given ability to minister to God's heart. You think of the immensity of that.
If we gather together tomorrow to serve under the leadership of Christ in the praise of God, it is all with a view that God's heart should be gratified. And that passes my comprehension, that I as a creature of God should not be a mere creature, but that I should be brought into this relationship with Him and invested by Him with the ability to minister to and gratify His own heart. Could there be anything more exalted for man? It is the most exalted portion that man could have to serve God with reverence and fear, but to be conscious in the joy of sonship that you are gratifying His blessed heart. Is He not worthy of it? The heart of God has been told out in the giving of his Son, in the giving of His Spirit, in the giving of sonship. Is He not worthy to receive a response that is so gratifying to Him, because it is the fruit of His own work and ways? It is all of Himself. As David said, “for all is of thee, and of that which is from thy own hand have we given thee”, 1 Chron 29: 14. Everything is going to return ultimately to the God who gave it and rightly so, but may we be helped, dear brethren, to get some impression of the glory of what God has conferred upon us and to seek the grace that He would give to walk here in a contrary scene worthy of such a high calling.
May it be so for His Name's sake.
Sunbury
22nd June 2024