Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1759
“For you have not received the Spirit of bondage again to fear, but you ha ve received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit, Himself, bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.” Romans 8:15,16.
THESE two verses are full of the word “spirit,” and they are also full of spiritual truth. We have read in previous verses about the flesh and of the result that comes of minding it, namely, death. But now, in this verse, we get away from the flesh and think only of the work of the Holy Spirit upon our spirits—and of the blessed privilege which comes of it— “that we should be called the sons of God.” We cannot enter into this except by the power of the Holy Spirit, for the spiritual Truths of God must be spiritually discerned—our eyes need God’s Light and our spirits need the Holy Spirit’s quickening. We breathe our prayer to the Great Spirit that He would make us feel the full meaning of His Words.
I think that I see in the text the fourfold work of the Spirit. First, the Spirit of bondage. Secondly, the Spirit of adoption. Thirdly, the Spirit of prayer—here it is, “Whereby we cry.” And fourthly, the Spirit of witness—“The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.”
I. Consider, first of all, THE SPIRIT OF BONDAGE. Much of the bondage in which we are plunged by our fallen nature is not the work of the Spirit of God at all. Bondage under sin, bondage under the flesh, bondage to the fashions and customs of the world, bondage under the fear of man—this is carnal bondage, the work of the flesh, of sin and of the devil. But there is a sense of bondage to which, I think, the Apostle here mainly alludes, which is of the Spirit of God. Before the Spirit of God within us becomes the Spirit of liberty, He is, first of all, the Spirit of bondage. The Spirit is not, first, a quickening Spirit to us, but a withering Spirit—“The grass withers, the flower fades: because the Spirit of the Lord blows upon it: surely the people is grass.”
The Divine Spirit wounds before He heals, He kills before He makes alive. We usually draw a distinction between Law-work and Gospel-work, but Law-work is the work of the Spirit of God and is so far a true Gospel-work that it is a frequent preliminary to the joy and peace of the Gospel. The Law is the needle which draws after it the silken thread of blessing and you cannot get the thread into the stuff without the needle—men do not receive the liberty wherewith Christ makes them free until, first of all, they have felt bondage within their own spirit driving them to cry for liberty to the great Emancipator, the Lord Jesus Christ!
This sense or Spirit of bondage works for our salvation by leading us to cry for mercy. Let us notice that there is a kind of bondage which is, in part, at least, the work of the Spirit of God, although it is often darkened, blackened and made legal in a great measure by other agencies which do not aim at our benefit. That part of the bondage which I shall now describe is altogether the work of the Spirit of God. That is, first, when men are brought into bondage through being convicted of sin. This bondage is not the work of Nature and certainly never the work of the devil. It is not the work of human oratory, nor of human reason—it is the work of the Spirit of God! As it is written, “When the Spirit of Truth is come, He shall convince the world of sin.”
It needs a miracle to make a man know that he is, in very deed, a sinner. He will not admit it. He kicks against it. Even when he confesses the outward transgression, he does not know or feel the inward heinousness of his guilt in his soul so as to be stunned, confounded and humbled by the fact that he is a rebel against his God. Now, no man can ever know a Savior without knowing himself a sinner—even as no man can value a physician while he is ignorant of the existence and evil of disease. By the killing sentence of the Law of God we are bruised, broken and crushed to atoms as to all comeliness and self-righteousness.
This, I say, is the work of the Spirit of God. He works a necessary sense of bondage within us by putting us under a sense of sin. The Spirit of God is always the Spirit of Truth and, therefore, He only convinces men of that which is true. He puts them into no false, or fanciful, or needless bondage. “When the Spirit of Truth is come, He shall convince the world of sin”—because it is sinful. When the Spirit puts men into bondage because they are sinners, He only puts them into their right place. When He came to some of us by the Law, He made us feel what we were by nature—and what we felt and saw was the truth. He made us see things as they really were. Until He came, we put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter, darkness for light and light for darkness! But when the Spirit of Truth was come, then sin appeared as sin. Then we were in bondage and it was no fancied slavery, but the very truth.