Abba, Father

Observe the two spirits in Romans 8:15. There is a spirit that leads back into slavery and fear, and there is the Spirit who brings about adoption. Paul says the Romans did not receive the first. They received the second. The Christian life is not meant to run on fear of a master but on the confidence of a child.

Interpret the cry. Abba is an Aramaic word for father, intimate and ordinary, the word a child would use at home. Jesus used it in Gethsemane in Mark 14:36. That the same word is now placed on the lips of Gentile believers in Rome is astonishing; the Son's own address to the Father has become the family's. Paul adds that the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Assurance, in this passage, is not something we produce by examining ourselves. It is a joint witness, ours and the Spirit's, and his voice is the steadier of the two.

Verse 17 adds the inheritance. Children are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. The sufferings are not a condition of earning the inheritance; they are the path the firstborn walked, and the family walks it too.

Apply it by listening to your own inner speech about God. Does it sound more like a slave reporting to a master or a child speaking to a father? When was the last time you said Abba, or its plain English equivalent, and meant it? And how does knowing you are an heir change the way you hold the sufferings of this particular week?