Chapter # 8 Paragraph # 2 Study # 4
March 5, 2017
Humble, Texas
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<075> Thesis:   God's most significant initial grace to us in the giving of His Spirit is the "persuasion" that we have become children of God. Introduction:   In our last study we saw that the most fundamental impact of the gift of the Spirit of God is His entrance into our hearts with the impact of identifying God as The Father. This is the Spirit of Freedom as the One Who generates our expectation for eventual "adoption" by That Father into the actual position as "lords" over all. But, in our context we have some tension. On one hand we are told that the "sons" of This Father are those who follow the leadership of His Spirit. This means that "sons" go about generating what Paul told the Corinthians was "an aroma of life unto Life and of death unto Death" (2 Corinthians 2:14-16) that has the impact of making God known in every place. But on the other hand, we are told that for the "children" of This Father, He has given His Spirit so that we might have a legitimate conviction that we are "children of God". This, on the face of it, means at least a couple of things. One is that being convinced one is a "child of God" is, apparently, no small issue; and Two is that one cannot count on the things accomplished as "sons" to qualify us as "children".