od's infinite love and
fatherhood in Christ the Son, that God is my Father; from which
direct conviction I come to the conclusion, the inference, the second
thought, Then I may trust that I am His son. But why? Because of
anything in me? No: because of Him. The very emblem of fatherhood and
sonship might teach us that _that_ depends upon the Father's
will and the Father's heart. The Spirit's testimony has for form my
own conviction: and for substance my humble cry, 'Oh Thou, my Father
in heaven!' Brethren, is not that a far truer and nobler kind of
thing to preach than saying, Look into your own heart for strange,
extraordinary, distinguishable signs which shall mark you out as
God's child--and which are proved to be His Spirit's, because they
are separated from the ordinary human consciousness? Is it not far
more blessed for us, and more honouring to Him who works the sign,
when we say, that it is to be found in no out-of-rule, miraculous
evidence, but in the natural (which is in reality supernatural)
working of His Spirit in the heart which is its recipient, breeding
there the conviction that God is my Father? And oh, if I am speaking
to any to whom that text, with all its light and glory, has seemed to
lift them up into an atmosphere too rare and a height too lofty for
their heavy wings and unused feet, if I am speaking to any Christian
man to whom this word has been like the cherubim and flaming sword,
bright and beautiful, but threatening and repellent when it speaks of
a Spirit that bears witness with our spirit--I ask you simply to take
the passage for yourself, and carefully and patiently to examine it,
and see if it be not true what I have been saying, that your
trembling conviction--sister and akin as it is to your deepest
distrust and sharpest sense of sin and unworthiness--that your
trembling conviction of a love mightier than your own, everlasting
and all-faithful, is indeed the selectest sign that God can give you
that you _are_ His child. Oh, brethren and sisters! be
confident; for it is not false confidence: be confident if up from
the depths of that dark well of your own sinful heart there rises
sometimes, through all the bitter waters, unpolluted and separate, a
sweet conviction, forcing itself upward, that God hath love in His
heart, and that God is _my_ Father. Be confident; 'the Spirit
itself beareth witness with your spirit.'

II. And now, secondly, That cry is not simply ours, but it is the
voic