'The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit,
that we are the children of God.'--ROMANS viii. 18.
The sin of the world is a false confidence, a careless, complacent
taking for granted that a man is a Christian when he is not. The
fault, and sorrow, and weakness of the Church is a false diffidence,
an anxious fear whether a man be a Christian when he is. There are
none so far away from false confidence as those who tremble lest they
be cherishing it. There are none so inextricably caught in its toils
as those who are all unconscious of _its_ existence and of _their_
danger. The two things, the false confidence and the false
diffidence, are perhaps more akin to one another than they look at
first sight. Their opposites, at all events--the true confidence,
which is faith in Christ; and the true diffidence, which is utter
distrust of myself--are identical. But there may sometimes be, and
there often is, the combination of a real confidence and a false
diffidence, the presence of faith, and the doubt whether it be
present. Many Christians go through life with this as the prevailing
temper of their minds--a doubt sometimes arising almost to agony, and
sometimes dying down into passive patient acceptance of the condition
as inevitable--a doubt whether, after all, they be not, as they say,
'deceiving themselves'; and in the perverse ingenuity with which that
state of mind is constantly marked, they manage to distil for
themselves a bitter vinegar of self-accusation out of grand words in
the Bible, that were meant to afford them but the wine of gladness
and of consolation.
Now this great text which I have ventured to take--not with the idea
that I can exalt it or say anything worthy of it, but simply in the
hope of clearing away some misapprehensions--is one that has often
and often tortured the mind of Christians. They say of themselves, 'I
know nothing of any such evidence: I am not conscious of any Spirit
bearing witness with my spirit.' Instead of looking to other sources
to answer the question whether they are Christians or not--and then,
having answered it, thinking thus, 'That text asserts that _all_
Christians have this witness, therefore certainly I have it in some
shape or other,' they say to themselves, 'I do not feel anything that
corresponds with my idea of what such a grand, supernatural voice as
the witness of God's Spirit in my spirit must needs be; and therefore
I doubt whether I am a Christian at all.' I should be thankful if the
attempt I make now to set before you what seems to me to be the true
teaching of the passage, should be, with God's help, the means of
lifting some little part of the burden from some hearts that are
right, and that only long to know that they are, in order to be at
rest.
'The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the
children of God.' The general course of thought which I wish to leave
with you may be summed up thus: Our cry 'Father' is the witness that
we are sons. That cry is not simply ours, but it is the voice of
God's Spirit. The divine Witness in our spirits is subject to the
ordinary influences which affect our spirits.
Let us take these three thoughts, and dwell on them for a little
while.