Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2961
“And if children, then heirs; heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ.” Romans 8:17.
THIS chapter—the 8th of Romans—is, like the Garden of Eden, full of all manner of delights. Here you have all necessary doctrines to feed upon and luxurious Truths of God with which to satisfy your soul. One might well have been willing to be shut up as a prisoner in paradise and one might well be content to be shut up to this one chapter and never to be allowed to preach from any other part of God’s Word. If this were the case, one might find a sermon in every line— no, more than that, whole volumes might be found in a single sentence by anyone who was truly taught of God! I might say of this chapter, “All its paths drop fatness.” It is, among the other chapters of the Bible, like Benjamin’s meal which was five times as much as that of any of his brothers! We must not exalt one part of God’s Word above another, yet, as “one star differs from another star in glory,” this one seems to be a star of the first magnitude, full of the brightness of the Grace and Truth of God! It is an altogether inexhaustible mine of spiritual wealth and I invite the saints of God to dig in it and to dig in it again and again. They will find not only that it has dust of gold, but also huge nuggets which they shall not be able to carry away by reason of the weight of the treasure!
I notice, in this chapter, and also in many other parts of Paul’s writings, that it is his habit to make a kind of ladder—a sort of Jacob’s ladder, let me call it—which he begins to climb. But every step he takes leads to another, and that one to another, and that again to yet another. You see it here. “As many as are led by the Spirit of God”—there is the leading of the Spirit—“they are the sons of God.” And when he gets to sonship, then he says, “And if children, then heirs.” So he gets to heirship and he climbs still higher when he says, “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” I think he means us to judge, by this mode of writing, that this ought to be the style of our Christian experience. Every measure of Grace which we receive should lead us to seek after something still higher! We are never to say, “This is the pinnacle of Grace—I cannot get beyond this.” Self-satisfaction is the end of progress, so we are constantly to cry, “Higher, and yet still higher! Onward and upward”—and still to ask to be filled yet more completely with all the fullness of God!
My text is far too large for me to attempt to preach from it in an exhaustive style, so I will just make four observations upon it. And even those observations will only give you a bird’s-eye view of the great Truths revealed here. May God grant that in each of those four things, there may be food for your souls!
I. These first thing that I see in the text is THE GROUND OF HEIRSHIP—“If children, then heirs.” The children of God are heirs of God and they come to be heirs through being His children, and in no other way.
Mark that we are not heirs of God as the result of creation. I cannot say what we might have been by creation had the Fall not ruined us, but that fatal disobedience of our first parent robbed us of any inheritance that might have come to us in that way. And now, by nature, we are “children of wrath, even as others,” but certainly not heirs of the promise or heirs of the Grace of God. No, beloved Friends, Nature will never entitle you to be a joint-heir with Christ. Whatever you may think of your human nature—and you may suppose that it is not so depraved as the nature of others—you may even get the notion that yours is a very superior sort of human nature—well, let it be what it may, it will not entitle you to this inheritance! For as it was not the children of the flesh who were necessarily the heirs of the Old Covenant, even as Ishmael, born after the flesh, was not the heir, but Isaac, born after the spirit—and not Esau, but Jacob—so is it now. It is not what you are by nature—not that which is born of the flesh, but what you are by Grace—that which is born of the
Spirit that is the ground upon which heirship may be claimed before God. So, my dear Hearer, if you are in a state of nature—if you have never passed out of that state into a state of Grace—this text has nothing to do with you.
And, further, as our heirship with God depends upon our being the children of God, it does not depend upon our natural descent. I have already shown you that it does not depend upon our nature, but there is another phase of that Truth which needs to be mentioned. There were some, of old, who said, “We have Abraham to our father,” but being born as sons of Abraham after the flesh availed not to give them any part in the inheritance which was according to the Spirit. And, today, there are some who say, “We are the children of godly parents. We were born in a Christian land, so, of course, we are Christians.” Not so, you are no more Christians, on that ground, than if you were the children of the Hottentot in his kraal! You need as much to be born-again as does “the heathen Chinese.” You need to be regenerated by the Holy Spirit as much as if you had been taught from your childhood to bow your knee to a block of wood or stone. O you who are the inhabitants of this so-called Christian country, you stand before the living God in no sort of preference to the heathen except that you have the privilege of hearing the Gospel! But if you reject it, it shall be more tolerable for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah and the inhabitants of heathen lands, in the Day of Judgment, than for you! Did not our Lord Jesus Christ say that “many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the Kingdom of Heaven; but the children of the Kingdom”—the favored ones of His day, or of our day— “shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”?