A Pentecost sermon, preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, June 8th 2025
Watch the whole service on YouTube
‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.’ (8:14)
What does it mean to be led by the Spirit of God, and where might that be taking us? It’s taking us into the future and many of us will not be too comfortable about that.
Most of are more comfortable with the past. After all, we know what has happened – or at least we think we do – but the future is uncertain. I can remember 1975, when I was a teenager, but it’s hard to imagine the world of 2075, when I will celebrate my one hundred and fifteenth birthday! Maybe I should concentrate more on how the Church might look in fifty years’ time, rather than how I will be looking.
So, let’s start with where we are now: we are children of God; ‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God,’ wrote the Apostle Paul in his letter to our fellow Christians in Rome all of those years ago. We are children of God. Let’s think about that for a moment, lest we take it for granted.
God has decided what sort of relationship to have with you and me. God could have chosen to regard us as mere property, in the way that many people in the Apostle Paul’s time were treated as property; slaves to be bought and sold at the will of their owners. And when you consider the gulf in status, power and holiness between us and God, you can see why the God might choose to regard us little creatures as property.
But that’s not how it is at all. God regards us, God treats us not as property, but as family: ‘For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear,’ writes Saint Paul, ‘but you received a spirit of adoption.’ (8:15) God makes us “family.” So when, for example, we address God as ‘Father’ in saying the Lord’s Prayer; when on any sort of occasion, as Paul puts it, ‘we cry, “Abba! Father!”’ (8:15); when we call upon God as Father, Parent, Mother; when we recognise God is the ‘womb of [our] life, and source of [our] being,’[1] then that’s Holy-Spirit-inspired language and belief. It is, Paul goes on to say, ‘that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.’ (8:16)
Put that insight into the context of thinking about the coming years and it turns out that our journey to the future is one big family day-out with God: “Are we there yet?” Well, no, we’re not there yet. The future has not yet arrived, but being God’s children, being part of God’s family, does tell us something about what’s ahead.
Paul writes that this sense of being family is the ‘very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and […] if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.’ (8:16, 17) It’s a true spiritual insight to recognise the good news that we have been accepted as God’s children – not God’s property; we are brothers, sisters, siblings of Jesus.
And so God’s Spirit alerts us to the reality that our journey to the future, as God’s children is not going to be all “plain sailing”, for, ‘we in fact suffer with him [with Christ] so that we may also be glorified with him,’ as Saint Paul puts it. (8:17) And that should not be a surprise to us, should it? We who look back upon our past experience of the life of the church know that there were downs as well as ups, disappointments as well triumphs, suffering as well as glory.
If we dispense with rose-tinted lenses we can see that’s how it’s always been with Church, so that’s what we should expect in our journey to the future. What the Spirit reveals to us though, is that the struggles and setbacks of being a Church do not only arise from our failings, but from our successes in following in the steps of Jesus Christ. Paul writes, ‘we in fact suffer with him [with Jesus] so that we may also be glorified with him.’ (8:17)
In other words, Jesus did what he did – created a family reconciliation between us and God (2 Corinthians 5:19) – through his suffering for the world on the cross. If, as a Church, we insist on following the Jesus-way of love, justice, and reconciliation then it’s quite likely – inevitable I think – that our future journey will feature a few bumps on the road. The trick will be to accept any Jesus-inspired suffering that comes our way, while at the same time avoiding problems that arise because we have fallen short in following the way of Jesus.
So what does the Spirit tell us about our future journey? There will be highs and lows, just like the journey up to now. And what will the Church look like in fifty years’ time, when we get there? I don’t exactly know and neither can you, though there are some things we can be confident about. First, God will still be around, which means that Jesus will still be around in a mere fifty years’ time. So something called “Church” will still be around, and I am confident about that because God’s Spirit tells me that we – God’s living Church today – are not property that God might discard, but family, reconciled with our loving parent through the work of our brother/sibling, Jesus Christ.
‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God … heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.’ (:14, 17)
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] From the hymn by Ruth Duck, ‘Womb of life, and source of bring.’ CH4 118