Today we are giving our attention to the great crisis of Pentecost: the advent of the Holy Spirit, and the supreme significance of the Holy Spirit’s coming.
From the several passages which we read earlier, I want to take, for the moment, that paragraph in the letter to the Romans.
Romans 8:15:
Ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.
The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God:
and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ;
if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified with Him.
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward.
For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God.
For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of Him Who subjected it, in hope
that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.
And in like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity:
for we know not how to pray as we ought;
but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
This, amongst other things, says this main thing: that there is in the whole creation a groaning, a travailing.
But there is a particular groaning in the children of God. We ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit—that is why we groan, groan within ourselves. And the Spirit is groaning.
Three groanings: creation, children of God, and the Holy Spirit.
And what is it all about? What does it mean?
It is all centred in one thing: the manifestation of the children of God. That is, bringing right out from limitation, bondage, and frustration into full realisation and emancipation of sonship.
We said this afternoon that the end of all things—from the creation, through redemption, the advent of the Holy Spirit, and the coming again of the Lord—the end is that which God designs and determines concerning man: sons of God in full expression.
The Holy Spirit is here in the Word shown to be the Spirit of sonship. The Spirit beareth witness with our spirit that we are children of God. We receive the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, “Abba, Father.”
That is the all-governing and dominating thing in creation, in salvation, and in ultimate restitution.
That is a statement—a wonderful statement. It is a tremendous thing.
But it is very important, dear friends, that you and I, and the Lord’s people, should be able to grasp something of the implications and the significance of such a thing.
It is, if really grasped, calculated to make some tremendous revolutions in our whole way of thinking, and perhaps acting; completely turn upside down and inside out our conception.
For a few minutes, I want to give myself to that very thing. Let us again say it: the end with God, set in the creation of man, the work which He has been working through all the ages, for which He sent His Son into the world, for which God came Himself in Sonship—for which the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost and is here at work in the world—the object of it all is that there shall be, eventually and ultimately, a peopling of God’s created universe with children of God, sons of God, in that essential nature and relationship to Himself.
You got that?
If we really do grasp it, it will help us a lot in many things. It will correct us in many things. Of course, it will make its own demands upon us, and they will not be easy to meet.
The thing that matters to God—the only thing that matters to God—is the measure of sonship in the believer.
Man puts a tremendous amount of weight upon means. Means.
God puts all the weight upon the end served. The means, for Him, will be acceptable, blessed, and used only in the measure in which they are really contributing to that end. Make no mistake about it.
Man thinks in terms of big movements, or many institutions, organisation, wonderful machinery, or the outward framework of things. And everything is big.
Man’s conception is that it is successful if it spreads, spreads, and becomes very impressive. The man of this world calls that a success.
God looks at things altogether in the other way. Now, I am keeping very close to the Book in what I am saying.
What do we see in the consummation of all things in the Book of the Revelation? The one test of everything—churches and everything else—is the measure of Christ, of sonship: the real spiritual measure.
And when we speak of spiritual measure, we just mean this: the measure of the Son of God. That is where the Book of the Revelation opens, and everything is brought to judgment on that.
Not that you have a name, not that you are wealthy, not that there is this and that, and so many churches. It is: how much is there of intrinsic, spiritual sonship for God?
He is quite prepared to ignore, pass over, or abandon a thing which has ceased to serve that original and all-governing purpose of producing sons, increasing sons, and increasing the measure of sonship.
That is the purpose of everything with God from creation onwards. The whole Bible bears down upon this.
And so, it is not the number of churches, or institutions, or the movement, or any of the things. The thing that governs with God is this essential, spiritual sonship. How much is there of the reproducing of His Son?
For at the end of the times, God hath spoken in His Son. Son-wise, He is speaking in your experience. He is handling you son-wise, dealing with us son-wise. With all our works, He is dealing son-wise.
What a lot this explains. Look at Paul; look at John. At the end.
Paul had been used to bring into being these many companies of God’s people all over Asia and elsewhere. There they are—many of them, some very large, some very small.
But here is Paul now in prison, his liberty of movement taken from him, unable to continue his active missionary work or apostolic work among the churches.
And he writes, “All they that are in Asia turned away from me.” Only Luke is with me.
Then, is this the failure of a man’s life work? Closed down on him; he has spent his life, his time, his strength, everything, and now things become so small.
That is how man looks at it, and that is how man judges. Any man with a worldly mind, looking at a situation like that, would pronounce the verdict: “His life is a failure. His work is a failure. The whole thing has ended in ignominy.”
Is it true? What does God think of it?
There is an essential and intrinsic value that is infinitely more than all the range of distances, number of communities, and worldly judgment as to success or failure. There is something that is going to appear in eternity as altogether outweighing that which is given the name of failure.
Failure? No failure there. There has been sonship through that ministry, and sonship is an eternal thing because it is a work of the Holy Spirit—a work of Heaven.
Though all the frameworks and outward forms, the means employed, may break down, may even disappear, and may seem as nothing; though the world passes its judgment of failure—wait for eternity. Wait for eternity.
You and I, dear friends, in this hall today, are very largely the fruit of that ministry, and it has been so all through the centuries.
Oh, John. Now, John was very much bound up with the church in Ephesus. John was its leading elder. John lived and gave himself for Ephesus, amongst other things.
John is in Patmos, a prisoner in exile, writing at the dictate of the risen Lord to his beloved Ephesians, and saying to the church for which he gave his life:
I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love.
Think of a man who had given his life for a people having to pass on that from the Lord. Ah, and worse: “You are going to lose your place and your function as a lampstand in this world unless you repent.”
There it is: written on John in Patmos, written on the church in Ephesus. Is that all? If that is all, God is unjust.
It is written:
God is not unrighteous, that He should forget your work and the love which ye showed toward His name, in that ye ministered unto the saints, and still do minister.
If that is all, God is unrighteous. Let the framework go. Let the churches as such go. Let the means, the vehicles, the channels, the institutions go. That is not all where God is concerned.
You can have them, and you can have them in immense numbers and in great measure. Everybody says, “That is a success. That works.” And God may think very little of it indeed—very little indeed.
His standpoint is ever and always intrinsic value, or the essence of sonship.
Dear friends, if the Lord had His way, I believe that He would have a minimum of means and a maximum of spiritual content. A minimum of means.
It is sometimes a dangerous thing to help—I mean, to make the means easy. You can give money, money, to support, build up, and enlarge a means that does not really serve this ultimate purpose. You are making it easy for something to become big that is missing God’s end.
You may be passing through an extremely difficult time. God has stripped you down. It might be a very dangerous thing for somebody to come and make it easy for you.
That is why all our help, of whatever kind it should be, should be guided by the Holy Spirit and not by an impulse of compassion; not because we are sorry and sympathetic, but by the Holy Spirit.
The Lord, if He is in charge of a thing, will keep all means very closely related to spirituality.
To me, building any kind of instrumentality is not going to be something in itself. If the Lord is concerned, you are going to have a real discipline on every step of development, every fragment of progress. If you are going to take that, it will take conflict and travail and groaning.
Well, you can think about it and say, “Well, that is a very painful way. It is a very difficult way.” But would we have it otherwise? Do we want big, empty shells?
Or do we want, whatever the shell is, to let it be what is necessary—just what is necessary? What we really want is the content, that spiritual content of something.
This will interpret a great deal as to the difficulty of the way. Perhaps every penny that you get has to come through travail because the Lord is keeping everything so closely related to pure, spiritual life and spiritual growth.
If you really, really mean business with the Lord, He is not going to let you get on easily into something that is merely outward and framework. He is going to fill it, and fill it with His Son. That is coming through travail and groaning.
I will spend a few minutes with this groaning. What is it? What is it?
There is one thing, dear friends, which I think is unmistakable to all who are a bit interested in the Psalmist’s question, “What is man?”
That thing which is so unmistakable about man is that there is something in him which is a sense of significance—a sense of significance as to himself. That he means something, or was meant for something; that he is not just a thing coming and going.
There is a significance attached to him. He has that sense in him. It is manifested in many ways. Take alone the will to live—the will to live.
You have to go a very long way indeed before you come to the place where you lose the will to live. Is that not true? What will a man give for his life?
And it is an evidence that a man has lost all sense of life when he loses the sense of meaning in his being alive. The will to live—what a strong force that is.
We are naturally against the idea of death. Even the death of a criminal is repugnant to people of the world. Right out against death—death? No, cannot accept it.
Then there is the will to success. There is a driving force in man naturally toward success, to achieve something, and to be—just to be. Ambition is the expression of this sense that a man is meant for something.
Is that not true? Speaking quite generally of man, what is man? He is the embodiment of a sense of meaning, of purpose, of significance—that he has his being for something.
I have been reading the life of Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. In that, the biographer says that Sir Alexander Fleming was perhaps, next to Lord Roberts, the most humble man of the past century.
But presently the biographer goes on to say that Fleming was governed by a deep-rooted ambition to reach the top, and he was ever so pleased when honour came his way. The humblest of men.
Sounds like a contradiction, does it not? But you see, it is there in man. The humblest of men naturally has this.
Let us put it in another way. A sense of frustration is the most terrible thing that can come to us.
Abandonment to wickedness is so often—more often than not—the result of a sense of frustration. It is this instinct for achievement working in the wrong direction, along evil lines.
No one—I have not found the person yet—takes kindly to being insignificant, and being allowed to feel that they are insignificant.
This thing that we now call an inferiority complex is only the defeat of this sense that we ought to be something, is it not?
Well, we could enlarge upon that very much, but it is all so much bound up with our subject. All that people will do to be noticed, to make an impression.
It would not be safe or kind to explore that very far. We are all more or less like that.
Humility or meekness is most precious because it is the most costly virtue.
What a commentary all this is upon that Bible word, “vanity.” We have read in this passage, “vanity.” What is vanity?
Well, it has two aspects. One is: all is vain, all is empty, all is nothing. We say, “We have laboured in vain—nothing for it.”
But there is the other aspect of vanity: make-believe, pretence, artificiality. Vanity.
That word is placed right at the heart of the groaning. Notice it? All right alongside of this groaning in every realm.
And the Bible opens that word “vanity” out along three lines. Firstly, God’s original purpose and intention for man. The Bible reveals very clearly what that was and is.
It comes out in a very clear way through the apostle: “Whom He foreordained, to be conformed to the image of His Son.” Sonship is God’s thought and purpose for man.
Man’s fall barred the way to its realisation. And in that fall came the change of his nature, so that, as such a being, he could no longer arrive at sonship.
No natural man, all in Adam, can ever be a son of God or a child of God. Paul has carried that hope away.
But then God intervenes in His Son, and in terms of sonship, to bring about the new birth: that which God originally intended—children of God, all from above, all of us.
So the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost with this whole thing in view: God’s intention and thought concerning men in terms of sonship.
Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.
By whom? By the Spirit we cry, “Abba, Father.” That takes right back to the beginning.
In introducing into this penitent and believing child the Spirit of sonship, that is the ground and basis of all the Holy Spirit’s work to the end. He is working in us on the basis of the Spirit of sonship, conforming us to the image of God’s Son.
Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God; and such we are.
It is not yet made manifest what we shall be.
We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is.
It was there in the divine mind. It has begun by the action of the Holy Spirit now, but it has a future. It doth not yet appear, but we shall be. When He shall be manifested, we know that we shall be like Him.
Conformed—that is the end. The beginning, the middle, and the end are all explained by the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of sonship.
Go back to your lonely place with a little handful of believers. And while seeking to find more, being devoted to building an increase if possible, remember this: that smallness of means and framework never means smallness of spiritual measure. And that is what weighs with God.
Go to your prison, where a great servant of God, who has been used over great areas to bring into being many, many churches, is now incapable of doing anything, shut in his prison year after year.
Is it all for nothing? Is everything lost? What waste, what loss, what a tragedy. If only he were loose, how much more would it mean?
If, dear friends, it is true that God is set more upon the intrinsic measure for eternity than upon the means, the outward ways of work, there is your explanation of the mystery of God’s ways. I see no other answer to a vast multitude of our problems.
What is God after in the end? What is He on? The manifestation of the sons of God. The groaning is that.
Now just step back for a moment. That groaning—what is it? It is this groaning for something that God meant, which has been lost in the fall, and yet the very instinct of which remains in man.
“I was meant for something. What? I do not know, but it is in my being. But I am not here for nothing. I must do something. I must be something. It cannot be good; it may be just bad.” It is an amazing thing—an amazing thing to express.
What distortions there are as the result of this instinct! What people will do rather than capitulate to nothingness. All the wicked things, as well as all the grand things—it is there. That is the groaning.
But note: the unregenerate man does not know what it is all about. He cannot explain himself. He does not understand himself. He has no interpretation of himself.
But the Spirit of sonship in the believer explains it all. He knows the mind of the Spirit. The mind of the Spirit is just this: He knows exactly what we were meant for.
And is it not true that when we are born again, we begin to sense a newness of purpose in our being alive? A new kind of urge in another direction.
It is taken up and poised and directed towards what God wants. It is taken up by the Holy Spirit and renewed and strengthened.
You and I, with all our discouragements, all our sufferings, and all our agonies, somehow or other are still carried on by this urge. We just cannot let go and give up, though we might often decide to do so.
We are kept going by an urge of the Spirit and not allowed to give up. What is it? It is nothing other than the Spirit of sonship moving toward sonship in its full, personal and corporate expression in the church.
I trust that this does throw some light on some of your difficulties and problems and situations.
I say, it is not easy to accept this way: outward reduction in order to have inward increase. It is not easy to be deprived of many helps that would make it so much easier for us.
But the Lord is not going to allow us to lose any degree of what He meant, and of that to which He has called us, and which He started in us by His Spirit in the way of sonship.
So Paul links this:
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward.
With the glory—what is it? The liberty of the glory of the children of God: sons in manifestation.
Lord, give us understanding. Lord, give us help.