Romans 8:16-17

Please turn over to Romans 8, verse 16. When a person becomes a saint, he gains all the privileges and responsibilities of a child in God's Family. The most important privilege is the gift of the Holy Spirit. We may not always feel like we belong to God, but His Spirit is our witness to this truth. His inward presence reminds us who we are and encourages us with His love. And because we are God's children, we inherit great treasures as joint heirs, and God is already giving us His best gifts: His Son, His love, forgiveness, and eternal life.

It does not matter what the world thinks of us, all things are ours. We are joint heirs with Christ.

We have no reason to have anxiety over this because we share Christ's inheritance, His possessions. He puts these things into our hands.

And I will add to that dignity. The foolish man lacks unrivaled allegiance to God since wealth is his god.

So the Kingdom of God itself is compared to an immense treasure that is worth securing at all costs, as Matthew 13:44 tells us.

The rich man has replaced genuine trust in God, and his reward, that is, treasure in heaven, with worldly riches. He thus breaks the first commandment, You shall have no other gods before Me.

This does not mean that every disciple of Christ must sell all he owns. Instead, the heart should be focused on God, and every possession should be yielded to God, with the result that possessions will be handled as a form of stewardship.

Everything is God's and everything we own is God's, and so we are stewards of it. The path to eternal life lies in turning away from reliance on self-achievements and worldly securities, and instead trusting in Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom.

Romans 8:14-17

So Paul teaches here something very positive. That God's gift of the Holy Spirit adopts us, if you will, into the God Family. And when we receive it, we become not only children of God, but also heirs with Christ of the Kingdom and all things. We are joint heirs with Christ. Whatever Christ inherits, we inherit with Him. Fantastic! What a wonderful hope!

But at the end, Paul mentions that we become like Him through suffering. We do not get the prize at the end without going through the same process that He went through to be the heir of all things. If we suffer like Him, that is, for living godly in this world of sin—it does not say necessarily that we have to go through the same things that He went through or to the extent that He went through, but it does say that we have to suffer for being a righteous person or a person trying to be righteous and live righteously in this world. And so if we do, if we suffer with Him, then we will be glorified with Him. That is the program that we have joined and need to graduate from. That is the goal. The glorification is the goal because we have gone through all of this sanctification to be like Christ. And Paul puts the road or all the process into one simple word: suffering. Fantastic, right?