xiii. 11; 1 Pet. iii. 18; 1 John ii. 2;
iv. 10.

[5] ii. 15.

[6] Verses 2, 9, 11.

[7] Verses 4, 5, 6, 9, 10.

[8] Verses 9-11.

[9] Eph. iii. 14-19.

[10] John xiv. 16, 18, 23, 26.

[11] Rom. xiii. 9.

[12] Ezek. xxxvii. 9; Rev. xi. 11.

{288}

DIVISION III. Sec. 8. CHAPTER VIII. 12-17.

_The life of sonship._

We are now in the Spirit. The divine Spirit dwells within us, and
restores our nature to its proper balance by giving us control over our
lower nature. The moral meaning and obligations of such a condition
are plain, and St. Paul proceeds to enforce them. When our impulses
and appetites solicit us to let them have their own way, we must give
them to understand that they are making a claim which we cannot
recognize and which, if we did, would lead us the way of death. On the
contrary, it is these merely physical tendencies--the practices of the
body when left to itself--that we must put to death by the power of the
Spirit. And if we do this we are on the way of life. Why so
certainly? Because we are sons of God--nothing less. Those who thus
act under the Spirit's guidance are all of them sons of God. Further,
{289} if we ask ourselves what sort of spirit we received when we
became Christians, we know that it was not a spirit appropriate to
slaves and calculated to bring us again into a condition of terror
under a law. It was a spirit appropriate to those who have been
adopted for sons of God, and it is in the power of that spirit that we
cry out to God by the name of Abba, Father, in our familiar
supplication. We have thus in our own spirits the sense that we are
sons; and behind that and reinforcing it, the divine Spirit, by putting
the word Father into our lips, bears the same witness. Well then, if
we are thus children of God, we have the child's prospect of entering
into our inheritance. Christ, our elder brother, has already entered
into it, and we shall enter into it with Him, if we are content to take
the Christian maxim for true, and suffer with Him on this side of
death, that we may share His glory beyond.

So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the
flesh: for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the
spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as
are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For ye received
not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit
of adoption