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Updated: May 23, 2025
When the life has been wholly surrendered to God, and Christ, the crucified and risen Savior, is enthroned in the heart and confessed before men, then the blessed assurance of our sonship with God will be clear and joyous. No longer shall we say, "I hope I am a Christian," or, "I am trying to be a Christian;" but, like Paul, we shall exclaim, "I know whom I have believed."
The voice which Matthew represents as speaking of Christ, Mark represents as speaking to Him. The baptism of Jesus, then, was an epoch in His own consciousness. It was not merely His designation to John or to others as Messiah, but for Himself the sense of Sonship and the sunlight of divine complacency filled His spirit in new measure or manner.
And this punishment is so surely entailed to the transgressions that we who believe shall commit, that it is impossible that we should be utterly freed therefrom; insomuch that the apostle positively concludeth them to be bastards, what pretences to sonship soever they have, that are not, for sin, partakers of fatherly chastisements.
Further, we cannot, according to Jesus, be in sonship with this Father save as we are in true brotherhood with all His children. In Jesus' summary of the Law He combined two apparently conflicting obligations, when He said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thou shalt love thy neighbor."
The Divine Sonship existed in the beginning before He was the child of Mary, the seed of the woman. He was the Son of God before the birth of Abraham: "before Abraham was I am." Though John the Baptist was older than Jesus, and preceded Him in His ministry, Jesus was yet preferred in honour before him, "for he was before him."
Possibly what we have is only the fragments that reached the three before they fell asleep. In any case, Jesus was absent from them on each occasion long enough to allow of their doing so. Three elements are distinguishable in our Lord's prayer. There is, first, the sense of Sonship, which underlies all, and was never more clear than at that awful moment.
Notice when it is that the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. We have the order of experience in the order of the verses in Rom. viii. There are many seeking the witness of the Spirit to their sonship in the wrong place.
But when pain comes, when the immense misery and evil in the world are borne in upon us, we too often stumble, or fail utterly, just because we do not understand our sonship; because we forget that Christians must be sin-bearers like their Master, pain bearers like their Master; because we will let ourselves be blinded by the mystery of evil and the mystery of pain, instead of fixing our eyes as Christ did, on the joy that those mysteries are sure to bring.
Is your sonship proved by the depth and sincerity, the simplicity and power, of your throbbing heart of love to your Father in heaven? Or are all these emotions empty words to you, things that are spoken in pulpits, but to which you have nothing in your life corresponding? Oh then, my friend, what am I to say to you?
When at last the children have arisen and gone to their Father; when they are clothed in the best robe, with a ring on their hands and shoes on their feet, shining out at length in their natural, their predestined sonship; then shall the mountains and the hills break forth before them into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
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