The Witness of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:16-17)
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God is not a Scrooge when it comes to the believer’s enjoyment of salvation. You know the story A Christmas Carol, that in it Ebenezer Scrooge treats his employee, Bob Cratchit, very badly, making him work with low pay, in harsh conditions (he didn’t want to spend the money on coal to keep the place warm), and with little time off (only one day off for Christmas). But God is not like that. He gives generously. What James says about the gift of wisdom (“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him,” Jam. 1:5) is true of all God’s gifts. He gives us “all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3). He has “given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue” (2 Pet. 1:3). He is our Shepherd and we shall not want (Ps. 23:1).
You see that here in these verses. Behold the liberality of God! He not only saves us, but he wants us to know it. He not only loves his children, but he wants them to enjoy it. And like a good Father, there are several ways in which he communicates his love to them. There are the promises of Scripture, promises like, “Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed” (Rom. 10:11), and “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (13). There are the evidences of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, which are signposts to the work of God in our hearts, things like love for those who share our faith in Christ, good works, the rejection of error, and so on. The apostle John wrote his epistle giving these evidences in large part so that his audience would “believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God” (1 Jn. 5:13).
And then there is Romans 8:14-17. The promises of God assure us. The evidences of the new birth assure us. But God does not stop there, does he? Through the Holy Spirit, he witnesses directly to the believer in the heart that he or she is a child of God. And though we should not separate this from the word of God, and we should not separate it from a life of obedience to it, neither should we out of fear of fanaticism or the fear of being called a Charismatic deny that there is this very real and personal witness of the Holy Spirit, assuring believers in their hearts of the love that God has for them. This is the pinnacle of assurance, and an earnest of our eternal inheritance which we have in Christ (Eph. 1:14).
So this is what we want to talk about today. My hope and desire both for you and for me as we consider this text together is that it will inspire us to seek more of this blessing in our lives so that we will persevere and endure through suffering in hope and joy in the love that God has for us. In order to get at the meaning and application of this text, I want to look at the generosity of our gracious God in three steps: first, in the receipt of the Spirit’s witness, second, in the result of the Spirit’s witness, and third, in the resolve of the Spirit’s witness.
The Receipt of the Spirit’s Witness
First of all, let’s consider the receipt, the reception, of the witness of the Spirit. What is it that is received? Paul writes in verse 16, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.” Lloyd-Jones, in his sermons on this passage (he preached nine sermons just on verse 16!) argues that what Paul is describing here is something different from what he has been describing in verses 14-15. He claims that the witness of the Spirit is something which communicates an unassailable assurance of the love of God to the soul of the believer, that it usually happens subsequent to one’s conversion to Christ, and that, though it is a blessing open to every believer, yet only some are privileged to experience it. However, I want to argue that verses 15 and 16 really are describing the same blessing, but from different angles, and that not only is it open to every believer, but that every believer has some measure of this witness.
That verses 15 and 16 are describing the same experience but from different angles is clear to me from the parallel verse in Gal. 4:6, which we mentioned last time. Let me remind you what the verse says, beginning back in verse 4: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.”
Here is what I want you to notice in that verse. In Gal. 4, we receive the spirit of adoption, and because we have received it and are now sons, God sends the Spirit of Christ into our hearts crying, “Abba, Father.” I want you to notice who is doing the crying, the praying, here. It is the Spirit of God. The grammatical structure of the verse makes this unmistakable: the one who cries is the Spirit who is sent. But in Romans 8:15, we are the ones who cry: “ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” So the question is, Which is it? Is it the Spirit who cries, or the believer who cries?
The answer, of course, is both. In verse 15, we cry out or pray to God as Father because we have been given this disposition of children that testifies to our adoption into God’s family. God not only makes us sons and daughters of God, but he also gives us a nature (the spirit of adoption) that corresponds to our new status as sons and daughters of the Most High. But in verse 16, you have the Spirit joining our cry and enabling it by bearing witness with our spirits that we are the children of God. In other words, the Spirit is said to cry in our hearts, “Abba, Father,” because his witness in our hearts creates the disposition of sons from which we approach God as our Father. In verse 15, Paul is telling us that we learn to relate to God as Father because we have been given the disposition of children. But in verse 16 he is telling us where this disposition comes from: it comes from the Spirit of God bearing witness with our spirits and in our hearts.
Now the bottom line here is that these verses teach us that God communicates to his children the certainty of his love to them in drawing them to himself by giving them a filial consciousness (which is the point of verse 15), which is created by the communication of his own love to them through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit (which is the point of verse 16).
It is true that when we say that God is communicating his love to us through the Spirit (you can’t divorce witness from communication), we are not imagining God whispering in our ears the audible words, “Thou art a child of God.” Nor are we imagining that this occurs apart from conscious faith in Christ through the gospel. But it is more than just the fruit of reasoning and intellectual exercise. It’s one of those things that if you you’re not a believer and you haven’t experienced it, it will be quite impossible for me to tell you what it is. It’s like describing the colors to a man who was born blind. This witness of the Spirit and the assurance of God’s love that it brings is not the process of deductive reasoning. It is not the conclusion of a logical process. It is an immediate and direct effect of the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart. It is something God gives to the believer directly through the work of the Holy Spirit. It is God pouring out, or shedding abroad, his love in our hearts through the Spirit (Rom. 5:6). I think Tom Schreiner has it right when he says, “Ultimately the text describes a religious experience that is ineffable, for the witness of the Holy Spirit with the human spirit that one is a child of God is mystical in the best sense of the word.” He goes on to write that “the confident articulation that God is one’s Father stems from a certainty in the heart that transcends human comprehension.” In other words, I think it is similar (though not identical) to something Paul describes in his letter to the Philippians when he talks about the “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding” (Phil. 4:7). It passes understanding – not that it bypasses the intellect, but that it is not something God gives us because we’ve figured it out or found it out. It is something given directly to the believer from God, something which they receive (Rom. 8:15) in the sovereign grace of God.
And it is something that belongs to every believer. I think you can see this from the tight connection between the foregoing verses. Those who mortify the flesh will live (13). Why will they live? Because they are children of God, which is shown in the fact that they are being led by that Spirit in the mortification of sin in their lives (14). How do we know that those led by the Spirit are children of God? Because the Spirit who is in them does not create a disposition of slaves but of sons and daughters, causing them to cry out, “Abba, Father!” And then, as we have seen, verses 15 and 16 are mutually explanatory. They give the human and the divine sides of this assurance of God’s love to us as our Father.
However, though I disagree with Lloyd-Jones who said that only some believers enjoy the witness of the Spirit, yet I do agree that not all enjoy it with the same richness and depth. In fact, just because a person may struggle with assurance does not mean they are not saved. We can, through backsliding, or even perhaps through constitutional infirmity, sometimes fail to hear the witness of the Spirit as we ought. We may fail to act on the disposition of children that God gives us because we are believing lies about ourselves or God.
And so there is both an encouragement in that and a challenge. An encouragement in the sense that if you have trusted in Christ as your Savior and Lord then verses 14-16 really do describe you. These are not blessings that are out of reach. They have already been given to you. You are a son or a daughter of God in Christ, and you have been given this spirit of adoption by which you cry, “Abba, Father!” The Spirit is bearing witness in your spirit that you are a child of God. But the challenge is for us to get rid of all the noise pollution in our hearts that drowns out the witness of the Spirit. The challenge is for us to want more of this witness of the Spirit, to have more of God’s love poured out in our hearts.
Do you want more of it? I think sometimes we don’t want what we don’t know we’re missing. So I want to share with you some experiences that God’s saints have had of this outpouring of God’s love in his heart in order to stir up a fire in us to want more of this. The first person I point you to is Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician and apologist for the Christian faith. It was discovered after he died that he had sewn the following testimony into the inside of his coat. It read:
“The year of grace 1654, Monday, 23 November, from about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,
“FIRE. GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace. GOD of Jesus Christ. My God and your God. Your GOD will be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD. He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel. Grandeur of the human soul. Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.”
The sentiments expressed there are consistent with what I believe Paul is talking about. It clearly was an experience that was so holy that he never wanted to forget about, so he sewed it into his jacket and kept it with him to the day he died.
The Puritan John Preston describes this witness of the Spirit in this way: “it is a certain divine expression of light, a certain inexpressible assurance that we are the sons of God, a certain secret manifestation that God hath received us and put away our sins. I say that it is such a thing that no man knows but they that have it.”
There are many testimonies to this kind of immediate and wonderful experience of God. Let me add one more testimony, that of Sarah Edwards, the wife of the famous New England theologian Jonathan Edwards. She wrote of an experience that she had during the Great Awakening,
"I cannot find language to express how certain this [the love of God] appeared, the everlasting mountains and hills were but shadows to it. My safety and happiness and eternal enjoyment of God’s immutable love seemed as durable and unchangeable as God himself. Melted and overcome by the sweetness of this assurance I fell into a great flow of tears and could not forbear weeping aloud. The presence of God was so near and so real that I seemed scarcely conscious of anything else. . . . My soul remained in a heavenly Elysium. I think that what I felt each minute during the continuance of the whole time was worth more than all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my whole life put together."
The Scripture itself holds out for so much more than what we are so often content with, doesn’t it? How can we read Paul’s prayer in Eph. 3 and think that we have plumbed the depths of its richness? Do we really know what it means when Paul talks about being filled with all the fulness of God? And then what do we know of those who “rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Pet. 1:8), even as they are being persecuted and tried?
My friends, we are not talking about self-actualization here. We’re not talking about discovering yourself. Nor are we talking about a mere emotional high. You can get that in a Taylor Swift concert, and you don’t need the Holy Spirit for that. We are talking about the experience of God. We are talking about a personal experience, by the work of the Spirit in our hearts, to those who have faith in Christ as he is revealed in the gospel, of the living God. Do you want that? I would submit to you that if that bores you, if you’d rather go home and watch television, then you are not saved. Eternal life is to know the true God and Jesus Christ whom he sent (Jn. 17:3) and those who know him are going to want to know him better and more. And though those who know him can get discouraged and think that we are perhaps stuck in a certain position, we need not be. We can climb higher and go deeper, and this text and these truths are an invitation to do so.
How do we do so? How do we press into this blessing? Well, I think we start with where I ended last time: gospel, holiness, prayer. Gospel: We embrace Christ as he is revealed to us in the gospel of grace, as the one who gives us a righteousness, without which no one can become a child of God. Holiness: we by the Spirit put to death the sin in our lives. We get serious about it. We don’t make excuses for our sins. We don’t conveniently define sin into something else. We deny ourselves and take up our crosses and follow Christ. Another way to put this is that we don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God who seals us and gives us this earnest of our inheritance. Prayer: then we pray for it. We cry, “Abba, Father! Grant us that we might see your glory!”
However, let me add another consideration this morning: spiritual mindedness. By that, I mean a frame of mind and heart that is oriented towards heaven rather than towards the world. I was convicted of this very thing this week when I read an account given by Lloyd-Jones about the Puritan John Flavel. Here is the way Lloyd-Jones describes his experience:
“… one day, on a journey, he began to meditate on ‘objects of faith and hope’. Ere long he felt as if he was lifted up into heaven. He was taken out of the world and out of time. He says that he even forgot his wife and children, and longed to be taken immediately into heaven. He was given a glimpse of the glory; the love of God was shed abroad in his heart in such a manner that he did not know whether he was in time or eternity.”
Lloyd-Jones goes on to remark, “Flavel was a typical Puritan; not an excitable, emotional person at all, but a quiet, studious, pensive kind of man. But he says that as a result of that experience he ‘understood more of the light of heaven by it, than by all the books he ever read, or discourses about it’.” How was it that I was convicted by this account? Well, just this: it was how Flavel’s experience came about in the first place. It came about through meditating on “objects of faith and hope.” But how often do we allow our minds to wander off into useless thoughts, or even evil ones! How often the lusts of the flesh and the desires of other things enter in and choke the fruit of God’s word in our hearts! Is it any wonder then that we are strangers to a deeper and richer experience of the Holy Spirit in our lives? May the Lord grant that we all diligently put into practice a habit of heavenly mindedness.
The Result of the Spirit’s Witness
Though I do believe that the witness of the Spirit is given directly in the heart and does not sit at the end of a syllogism, yet the result of the witness of the Spirit in our hearts is to reason out its implications and to conclude certain things. True religion is not an excuse to stop thinking. We are to reason out the consequences of our salvation in a way that is consistent with the testimony of Scripture. Some of those things are mentioned in the first part of verse 17: “And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” You see the logic, don’t you? The Spirit gives us the axiom: we are children of God (16). But from that axiom we are meant to deduce certain things: “if children, then heirs.” That’s the main thing. But what kind of heirs? “Heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.”
Again, we see the generosity of God. We all know stories of the wealthy who end up disinheriting their children. But not so God. He has made us heirs. Yes, of heaven and eternal glory. We are heirs “To an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:4). However, what makes this truly something to be desired and hoped for is the fact that the enjoyment of God is at the center of this inheritance, so that Paul can say we are heirs of God himself. Yes, heirs of God in the sense that he is the one who gives us our heavenly inheritance. But the heavenly inheritance gets its glory, all of it, from the fact that the presence of God is there to bless in ways that are inconceivably great and wonderful. This is how John sees it in his final vision: “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Rev. 21:3-4).
Furthermore, we are “joint-heirs with Christ.” As Paul will say in a few verses, Jesus is by the decree of the Father “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29) and as our Elder Brother he shares his inheritance with us. It is also a reminder that there is no heavenly inheritance apart from Christ. There is no heavenly inheritance apart from faith in Christ. This is why God gave the apostle Paul the commission “to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me” (Acts 26:18). We receive the inheritance along with the forgiveness of sins among those who are set apart by faith in Christ. As our Lord said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6).
So this is the way we are to reason. We are to reason that if God has made us children, a reality to which the Spirit witnesses in our hearts, then we will certainly have an inheritance in which we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. The Spirit of God is the seal and earnest of our future inheritance (Eph. 1:13-14). We are to live in this world with our hearts in eternity. We are to live focused on the world to come.
And the point is not only that we have an inheritance but that it is certain. This is what sets the hope of the Christian apart from every other hope. It is a certain hope, and it is an everlasting hope. Can the world offer you anything like that? Can wealth give that to you? Can fame? Can earthly power and influence give that to you? No, of course not. The hope that this world gives is like the hope that drugs gives to a drug-addict. It strings you along, making you want more and more, but never actually getting what you really want. God alone can satisfy the human heart. And this is what we get by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
The Resolve of the Spirit’s Witness
The apostle does not stop there, and I am so thankful for that! He goes on to say something that is very powerful and helpful from a pastoral point of view. He says that we have this inheritance from God and in God “if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together” (Rom. 8:17).
Now why did the apostle say that? I think he said it because, as the apostles put it to some of the first churches to be established, “we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). Trials can and do cause us to question our faith and our hope in God. If God is for us, we reason, and if God loves me, then why does he make me go through this painful thing? Or why does he allow loved ones to suffer the way they do? Suffering can cause us to question God’s love and faithfulness and, therefore, the gospel itself.
What is the answer to these things? There are two answers. First, there is no promise in all the Bible that if we follow God we will not suffer in this world. Not one! Rather, as we have seen, the opposite is true. God promises that those who follow him will suffer in this world. If there is no suffering in your life, that’s a problem, not the opposite! The holiest saints are not exempt from tribulation and trials. Didn’t our Lord say, “In this world ye shall have tribulations” (Jn. 16:33)? Didn’t the apostle Paul say that all who live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution (2 Tim. 3:12)? As Matthew Henry put it, we are not got into heaven as soon as we are got through the gate. The strait gate is followed by a narrow way. The way to heaven is not easy; it is hard. It is a way of suffering. It is the way of the cross and self-denial. As the hymn asks,
And this is what the apostle is saying here. “If we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.” The suffering must come first. This verse introduces us to Paul’s next topic in verses 18-25, when he will talk about the saints groaning along with the physical creation. Groaning first and then glory. That’s the pattern. This is what God promised! So there is no need to question God’s faithfulness, for our suffering is actually a sign that God is being faithful to us.
But why, you might ask? Why do we have to suffer, especially since suffering is the result of living in a sinful world, and we have been redeemed from sin? Well, I cannot tell you the precise reason behind every specimen of suffering that you will have to endure. But the general principle is the principle that is found in 2 Cor. 4:16-18, where the apostle writes, “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” What is our suffering doing? The apostle says that it is producing for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. That is why it’s suffering now and glory later.
Again, this doesn’t mean that we by suffering merit the glory to come. But it could mean that in some mysterious way, God uses our suffering to increase our capacity for glory and joy in the age to come. They are not without purpose. God can and does use them in this world for our own good and the good of others. He uses our suffering sometimes to advance his kingdom in the world. But let’s not forget that even if we cannot see any good in this world, our sufferings are not without value. You can be sure that God would not allow one moment of suffering in the life of one of his children if it was not for their ultimate good. This is the point of Romans 8:28, isn’t it? “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” All things! Not just some things, but all things. It doesn’t mean all things are good, but it does mean that God works them for our good. There are no meaningless, no useless, sufferings in the life of the Christian. “If we suffer with him, that we may be glorified together.”
By the way, don’t miss the “with him” and “together.” With whom? And together with who? With Christ! Those who suffer with Christ will be glorified with Christ. This is what Paul means when he says that his great purpose is “that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead” (Phil. 3:10-11). Just as Christ’s death led certainly to his resurrection and glorification; even so the saint united to Christ will be certainly raised from the dead and glorified together with him.
So the two answers to the painful reality of our suffering is that (1) God has promised it, so it’s no threat to his faithfulness to us, and (2) God works it for our ultimate and eternal good, so it’s not threat to his goodness to us. Saint, resolve to persevere through your suffering! This is what I believe Paul intends to be the effect of this. We can endure the sufferings God has called us to walk through because we know that at the end of it is not just relief from the suffering, but much, much more than that: it is glory. So, as the apostle Peter put it, “Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator” (1 Pet. 4:19).
So believer, you can confidently draw near to God because he is your Father, and you are his son or daughter in Christ. You stand before him, not in your own righteousness, but in the righteousness of Christ. And as you draw near to him he will draw near to you.
Are you outside of Christ this morning? Then I beseech you to come to him, be reconciled to God through Christ, and in him you will find all that your soul needs: acceptance with God and an inheritance that cannot be taken away. Our Lord Jesus invites us: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt. 11:28-30).
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