Assurance
About this series
The aim of this series is to present some of the Bible’s teaching about The Holy Spirit in order to raise expectations of life in the new covenant. If Jesus said, “It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7), we want to ask: In what ways do these Scriptures show that The Holy Spirit being with us is “for your good”? Our expectations should certainly be raised!
Hopefully this series will help us grow in both our understanding and our experience of The Holy Spirit - personal, powerful presence of God with his people.
About this talk
In the Book of Acts, Luke uses a host of phrases to record instances when people encountered the Holy Spirit: “poured out,” “received,” “came on,” “baptised with,” “filled with.” It is probably helpful that, with such a range of terms, we cannot ‘bottle’ or define too precisely what an encounter with the Spirit looks like.
The New Testament makes it clear that everyone can expect to produce various outcomes from encountering the Holy Spirit: power, fruit, gifts, love and assurance. Galatians 4:1-7 (cf. Romans 8:14-17) makes it clear that assurance of God being our Father and of us being his children is a significant aspect of the Christian experience. We could add to this: assurance that our sins are forgiven, assurance that we are righteous in Christ and assurance that we have an inheritance (see Ephesians 1:13-14), but they could all be wrapped up in the idea of assurance of adoption.
The New Testament uses a range of terms to describe what it means to be “in Christ” - we have been forgiven, redeemed, justified, reconciled and regenerated. All of these terms are crucial for understanding who we now are, It could be argued that the pinnacle of Christian identity is adoption. J. I Packer writes, ‘To be right with God the judge is a great thing. But to loved and cared for by God the Father is greater.’
And while what Packer sates is a fact to be known, it is also an experience to be felt - at our deepest level the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we are loved, wanted, adopted children and that nothing we do will undo that status. We look at the following:
How is that God has adopted us?
What practical difference does adoption make to everyday life?
How can we deal with some of the lies that fight against this true?
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