The Jesus Family (part VI) – “The Future of the Family”

The sixth and final sermon in a series called “The Jesus Family.” The sermon title is “The Future of the Family” and addresses the theme of the inheritance God has provided for his children through Jesus Christ. The sermon is an exegetical treatment of Romans 8:17 and was originally preached October 14th of 2007 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA.

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:: The Resolved Church :: October 14th, 2007 :: Pastor Duane M. Smets

The Jesus Family Series
Part VI – “The Future of the Family”

Romans 8:12-17
12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Introduction
I. The Inheritance
II. Suffering & Glory
Conclusion

Introduction

Read text and pray. I like reading the whole passage. Today is our last day of the “Jesus Family Series” looking at these five verses, after five weeks of working through this passage doesn’t it seem so much more full to you? I look at these words now, and I am just amazed. Today we focus on verse 17, so let’s pray over it. Father God we have been learning that you are Father, and we, as believers in your Son are your children. You love us, lead us, and continually bless us. You are a good good father. May we learn today, be moved with feelings of thanks and adoration to you, may we be convinced to further turn away from other things we find ourselves continually worshipping instead of you, and may be inspired with a hope for what you have prepared for your children through Jesus. Illuminate your Word by your Spirit as we put our minds and hearts to work. Amen.

I. The Inheritance

Last we focused on who God is as our Father, the week before that was who we are as children, today we focus on our future in the family…what our Father has ahead for us. The first thing we want to look at today is our inheritance as children. In verse seventeen, we read this word, “heir” three times: “heirs, heirs of God, and fellow heirs with Christ.”

    heirs

So first, what’s an heir? What does that mean? An heir is the recipient of the goods and property of one’s father when they are dead and gone. One is an heir while they father is still alive but they do not receive the goods until their dad is dead. The term really becomes announced when you talk about a king and a kingdom. Because then an heir inherits a lot of stuff and also a seat of power, a position within the kingdom.

It doesn’t work like that here where we live. The president is only the president for four years and he can get re-elected for four more but after that he is done. He doesn’t get to stay president until he dies and his son or daughter does not inherit the white house and become the next president. But that is how government was when this was written. That’s why when invading nations came if they conquered they would kill everyone in the family, so there were no heirs.

What is unique here is that the heir is not just one person. Notice it’s plural. It’s not singular, heir, it’s heirs. That is because of what Paul already said about adoption. When we talked about adoption we said that all children are not by nature children of God but children of wrath, children of the devil, because every single person has run away from the God of all glory as our father and have sought a home and family in other things and people that are not God and do not come close to providing what he does for his family. That’s our story, all our stories. But the story of the gospel, says that God sent his only unique son, Jesus into the world, to die for our rebellion against God, for leaving the family and committing treason against the family Jesus died. And Jesus rose again and because of that, through believing in the person and work of Jesus, we can be adopted into the family and really become one of his God’s own children.

So on the basis of Jesus, many, many people become heirs. But heirs of what? For the ancient Jewish readers, it was always land. Land was and Israel today is still the most valuable possession. The ancient promise of God to his people was of land. God shows up to Abraham in Genesis 12, tells him to follow him and God says “to your offspring I will give this land (Gen 12:7).” Indeed this is much of the story of the book of Genesis. God creates everything and he creates mankind, but man rebels and turns away from him and from that point on the story is the story of God redeeming his people and taking them to a land where his people will be his people once again, where they will love and adore and worship him. Genesis begins in the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve get themselves kicked out, and then God creates and gathers a people which is where the Torah ends in Deuteronomy, with the people ending up in the promised land, where they will worship God.

But as we continue to read through the Bible we discover that God’s vision and his promise to Abraham was much bigger than just a little slice of land in the Middle East. Psalm 24:1 David acknowledges that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness there of, the world and all those who dwell in it.” And then he says “I will make the nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession (Ps 2:8).” And in case you thought I’m just importing things into our text in Romans that Paul might not necessarily have meant, listen to one final verse from Romans 4:13 “The promise to Abraham and his offspring (is) that he would be the heir of the world…through the righteousness that is by faith.”

So the first thing I think our passage of Romans is intending when it says we become heirs, is the promise that we will inherit the earth. This world and all that is in it will become ours. Now I realize that might seem weird to you. So just so we don’t misunderstand let me clarify. I don’t think Paul here is appealing to our sinful desires for money and riches and power and things. Some of us think that if we just had the right job, or made just enough money…then we would be happy.

But I don’t think Paul is very American. He knows better than that. I don’t think he is saying, “oh, you want to have a lot of stuff and the freedom to do whatever you want and not work and buy whatever you want and go wherever you…Than just believe in God and you can manipulate your way into getting to that place by appeasing him.” I don’t think that is what he getting at and I’m afraid sometimes that sort of Christianity is the one we slip into living…that we just do our God thing, then everything will go well for us, we’ll get what we want, and what we want isn’t God himself, it’s something he made…whether it is the love of a relationship or something physical like a house. It comes from him.

You see it is something deeper. The world is intended to cause us to have wonder and praise toward our God who made it. But we don’t do that do we? Instead, we get caught up on the things themselves or our own notion of having power over them or the ability to use them for our own means. And that is idolatry. We are all idolaters. We worship other gods. We worship what we love. And you can tell what what we love by what we give our time, talent and treasure to. What we give our time thinking about and pursuing and doing. What we use our natural abilities and talents for. And where what we spend our money on. You look at those three things in your life and you can easily see who your God is.

So when God promises us the riches of the world and says it will all be ours I think it is a promise to each of us individually that we will all together, without division and strife, without class and disproportion, will equally live in the land and own it and use it for it’s intended purpose, to propel us into worship of our God. And when that happens we will be satisfied as we long to be. It will be a return to the garden of Eden where the provision of the earth is plenty, life is full, and we walk with God in the mid-day talking with him and being delighted by his company and sharing of himself with us.

    heirs of God

I think this is the reason why Paul immediately qualifies himself in Romans 8:17. Notice he says, “heirs” but he doesn’t stop there, he realizes he better tell us what he means so we don’t get the wrong impression…so he says first, “heirs of God.” I do take this as a subjective genitive, if that means anything to you, basically, I think it is clear here that God is identified as that it is God himself, his very being, which is identified as what we get, not just the gifts of God. We do not receive just the gifts of God, all the things of his earth, but we receive God himself, his very being, the all-satisfying, infinite God becomes our own unending pleasure and delight.

I couldn’t help but quote Jonathan Edwards here. He wrote a book titled, “The End for Which God Created the World” where Jonathan Edwards takes up this very subject, how God and our enjoyment of him is the appointed end of all things. Jonathan Edwards writes, “There is an infinite fullness of all possible good in God – a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty and of infinite happiness…God’s last end in creating the world, is the creature’s knowledge of HIM…God’s glory is the object of this knowledge…whereby his excellency is seen…(thus) the happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, joy or the exulting of the heart in God’s glory…(which is) where the very honor, exaltation and praise of God consists.”

God is a creative God and he is an infinite God as well which what leads me to believe that heaven is an ever unfolding of God showing us new dimensions of himself and life with him as our God, where we will be continually dazzeled and overjoyed at what he allows us to take part in out of his very self. My conception of heaven is not one of some state where we are just fixed forever singing or something like that…but it is life, heirs of a certain type of life, a life where we live and breath and eat and work and play and God is ever our joy and worship.

This is the glorification our verse speaks of, to have redeemed bodies and hearts that can fully glorify God, without the corruption of sin. Heaven is to be like this life only free from sin, with God as our God. So the basic features of life, eating, drinking, working, playing, will all be present but be present perfectly as worship.

    fellow heirs with Christ

We get a clearer picture of what that is like when we begin to consider Christ, our savior. Paul says in our verse that as heirs of God we become fellow heirs, or joint-heirs, or co-heirs with Christ. We started out talking about the picture of an heir being predominantly clear when we consider a prince, who is heir to the throne, taking over as king in his father’s place. This is what we have in Jesus. Jesus is God’s unique son.

The well known verse John 3:16 is translated well as “For God so loved the world that he gave his only unique son.” Colossions 1:15-16 speak even clearer about what kind of son of God Jesus is, listen ” He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” Jesus, is a unique son, he is the son of the King of the Universe.

You see Jesus is a king. And not just a king that rules for a brief period of time in history. He is the king over all of history. In his last coming, he showed he was worthy as the king of all of history, he was humble and restrained his divine power all the way to the end, even acknowledging to Pilate that he was a king. When Jesus comes again, as he promised he would, he said that next time he will come in the full array of his divine power, with lighting and thunder and angels blowing trumpets, and his name will be declared “king of kings and lord of lords (1 Tim 6:15).” Jesus is King and we inherit all that his and that he has earned, simply through belonging with him through faith.

So what happens between now and the time when we fully receive our inheritance? To answer that question, let’s look to our next last major thing mentioned in our verse, suffering “(WE are) fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

II. Suffering & Glory

Now, a couple of things before we talk about suffering. One is, we are going to talk a lot about suffering when we move on to our next series and start dealing with the second half of Romans chapter 8. Christian suffering is a big topic and one that we as a community here at The Resolved Church and the Christian community has a lot to learn about. So what I say today is going to be brief. Verse 17, is really a transitional verse, most all English translations break the paragraph after verse 17, which makes sense…but it could almost be includeded with the next paragraph as an introduction because suffering and glorification are the main subjects of the next 22 verses. So just know, what I am saying is brief. We’ll deal a lot more with it later, so stick around.

What I’m going to do is just assume suffering and tell you why and how that works with the gospel. So, without showing you yet, I’ll just tell you that I believe suffering includes all persecution, calamity, disease, death, and hardship that you face while being a Christian…anything that on the road to heaven might destroy your faith and lead you away from God. And I want to mainly just want to mention two things about suffering today, I want to deal with that word “provided,” “(the inheritance) is provided we suffer” and I want to talk about the suffering of Jesus, since we are fellow heirs with him.

    provided we suffer

So, provided…I’m always trying to teach us to read the Bible in context, that means read the things that come before a verse and the things that come after it. That is one of the reasons why we do things in series and deal with paragraphs at a time and why when we come to a new series I always review where we are in the whole of story in the book of Romans. That is because context is important. And with this phrase here and this word “provided” context is important. Because, you are reading correct if when you read this sentence it sounds like a condition…that if you want the inheritance and you want God himself and hiership with Jesus and to be glorified then you must suffer. That is correct, suffering here is a condition. There is no easy road into the kingdom of God. Jesus himself said, wide is the road that leads to destuction and narrow is the way that leads to life and few find it (Mt 7:13).

What I want to clarify for you is the misimpression you could easily get by isolating this verse and not considering the rest of Romans. Because if you isolate it by itself then to me, it sounds like Paul might be saying you have to earn Jesus. You have to do some hard things for God and then he will reward you with salvation. Do you guys see that?

But that is a misread. It does not say that. It is not saying that suffering earns, merits, or counts as a work for anything. That would nullify everything Paul has said so far in the book and even in this direct passage. He says here in this paragraph, that it is the Spirit who bears witness in us, after giving himself to us and leading us and enabling us to fight sin. It is all his gift that we receive and we do not earn that gift. The burden of Paul’s heart throughout Romans so far is to put the gospel on display as something different than any religion of the world because you don’t earn Jesus. He says just two chapters ago, “The wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23).”

So the first thing I wanted to say about suffering is that it is not a work that earns you God. Rather, it is an evidence of a work already done in you (repeat). Did you get that? The theology here is that those who love, truly love God, are truly adopted into the family, those whose spirit’s truly do bear witness and call out “Abba Father”…those people will suffer and do more than suffer but die out of the joy of having God as father and Jesus as brother. Suffering is evidence of being in the family. You know you are in the family when you will die for them.

This is the theology of the entire Bible when it comes to who is truly a Christian and who isn’t. Those who leave, those who give up, those who run at the slightest hardship or give in to temptation with hardly a fight…those did not have a real faith…a faith that reached their soul. It was just a flimsly faith with no substance. I’ll give you a verse that hopefully helps. The apostle John, it sounds like almost with tears because of the love he had for some who left, he says this in his first letter, ” They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us (1 John 2:19).” So remember that, think of your heard and dig deep and plead with God for a faith that is real that can withstand the test of suffering.

    we suffer with him

The second thing about suffering and the final thing I want to address today is the last few words of our verse, ” we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” These are weighty words…when we commit to follow Jesus we are signing up for suffering. Perhaps when we deal with this in depth and not just as one point in a sermon, I’ll title it “Is is worth it?”

During the summer, exactly three months ago in the middle of July, I preached a sermon titled, “The Resolved Church must Die” and we studied Jesus’ words in Mark 8 where he said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” Those are strong words.

And yet this is what we are called to, suffering…persecutions, calamities, disease, death, hardships, and anything else that will attempt to destroy our faith and lead us away from God on the road to our inheritance. Why? Why must we suffer? Didn’t Jesus suffer for us? Isn’t it odd to say that we inherit suffering from Jesus?

To these questions I can only answer yes. Jesus suffered far more than we can ever dream, not just physically but spritually in coming into this world and holding back his divine power to destroy all evil instantaneously, most of all taking on the wrath of God for the sin of the world on the cross and suffering an eternal punishment there. Jesus’ suffering is incomparible. Yes. Jesus suffered for us and our place in heaven is secure because of him and God’s love is eternally our and we are in the family. But yes, we must suffer for in suffering is the pathway to glory. Glory is always by the way of suffering. 1 Peter 4:13 says, ” Rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.”

That may not make much sense to you. It may sound ludicrous. The old, dead preacher (I like old dead preachers), Charles Spurgeon addressed this so well, so I’m just going to let him answer this for us and then I’ll conclude today’s message. This is Charles Spurgeon:

“If there were no affliction, difficulties and troubles and pain, our fallen hearts would fall more deeply in love with the comforts and securities and pleasures of this world instead of falling more deeply in love with our inheritance beyond this world…(thus) suffering is God’s appointed mercy to keep us from not loving him.” Spurgeon explains that it is as when two people marry and all their possessions are put together. Jesus married the church, he calls it his bride. In that marriage we receive all his kingly goodness and riches and with it the joys of his suffering which make his goods so rich. Spurgeon continues:

“Do not forget Christ had a cross and you must wear a thorny crown too. If you do not gladly bear one your heart is not right. If you would have the glory you must have the shame…When it goes well fo the ungodly…do not murmer, it is the joy to carry the crown. If you do not have a cross I pray you get one and suffer.” He tells the story of a carriage on its way to New York. We don’t drive carriages today but cars. He says suppose a man is on a trip, we’ll say in his Escalade, and he is on a trip to New York to take possession of a large estate he has inherited. But suppose his Escalade breaks down a mile before he gets to the city and forces him to walk the rest of the way. We would think him a fool if we saw him ringing his hands and screaming and crying and kicking his SUV and walking away cussing up a storm and saying “My Escalade, is broken! Stupid truck! I hate Cadillac’s! They always break! My Escalade is broken!” We would think him a fool would we not?

Conclusion

Let me conclude today’s message. It is almost like there are two halves to this sermon, a dark half and white half. Suffering is real. It is dark. From the slightest annoyance to life threatening abandon. Suffering is real and it is inescapable. You cannot escape it. But there is a difference to how you suffer. Jesus is king and he suffered immensly both physically and spiritually so that your suffering might not be a suffering with no hope or peace. When you suffer with Jesus you have a savior who knows what it is like and comes alongside and walks you through it. And in Jesus we have a savior who died on a cross so that your suffering might not be unending and ever increasing in hell. Jesus paid a price for suffering and if you put your faith and trust solely in him, Jesus will cover you and take you into glory as an heir with him in the inheritance of the kingdom.

You see there is a story here. The story is that history is not without a beginning and an end, it is not meaningless…it is going somewhere. There is a reality to this life. There is a God, he is real, there is a life of freedom and joy, the world as the way it should be, God is in the process of bringing that about right now. And those who are in his family are the inheriters of the new heavens and new earth he will make, and then all evil, all corruption, strife, disease and death will be undone and we will walk in the garden paradise once again. God will be our God, we will inherit the unceasing enjoyment of him and his glory, Christ will be our king, and we will work and play and enjoy his kingdom to the fullest extent.

So let us follow Jesus with all our might. This heavenly inheritance is far superior to any earthly one because it is one that cannot be lost and it cannot decay. The design of this text we have looked at today is as John Calvin said, “To extol inheritance for the purpose that we would love it and fully despise the allurements of the world and patiently bear whatever trouble may press on us in this life.”

Jesus is the king over all creation. For believers, he is our brother, we are adopted in his family and his God is our God and he has a rich inheritance. On the road to that inheritance we necessarily experience suffering. So let our suffering be an impetus to praise and repentance. That when we suffer we will turn from sin and press on further and harder toward the kingdom of God in Christ. Let’s do that today by going to Jesus’ table and praying.