Romans 8:14-17 Commentary

No one should be surprised that the Revised Common Lectionary’s editors included Romans 8:14-17 in their “rotation” of Pentecost Sunday Epistolary Lessons. After all, on this Sunday on which the Church celebrates God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to all of God’s people, it speaks of the Spirit four times.

In The Heidelberg Catechism Answer 23 Reformed Christians profess that God graces God’s adopted children with the Spirit in order to give us a share in Christ and his benefits, as well as comfort and remain with us forever. What’s more, many Christians profess that the Spirit also gifts Jesus’ friends with wisdom, guidance, courage and faith. On top of that, some of Jesus’ followers profess the Spirit in addition graces Christians with gifts for speaking in tongues and healing.

Few “catalogues” of the Holy Spirit’s gifts include the gift of the absence of fear. However, in light of Romans 8:14-17, that seems like a noteworthy oversight. After all, the Spirit’s removal of fear is an important part of its great news. In verse 15 Paul insists, “The Spirit [pneuma*] you received [elabete] does not make you slaves [douleias]; so that you live in fear [phobon] again.”

This is gospel for a 21^st century that fear seems to relentlessly stalk. A 2024 study on fear conducted by Chapman University suggests that Americans’ fears center on five main topics: corruption in government, economic crises, war and terror, the harming or death of a loved one, and the pollution of drinking water. While this surveyed American fears, there is likely overlap with fears among citizens of other countries.

Preachers might let the Holy Spirit help us reflect with our listeners on the prevalence of fear among our neighbors and ourselves. We might even consider reflecting, further, on fears that are somewhat unique to Christians, including fears about the future of the Church, as well as about the faith of the next generations.

In this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson Paul alludes to such fear as a kind of slaveowner. That suggests fear naturally has the power to control how people act, talk and even think.  When fear is our master, it strongly influences how we view both the present and the future, as well as both ourselves and our neighbors.

Paul insists the Spirit has liberated us from such slavery. Interestingly, however, English translations of the Bible don’t always agree on which pneuma he refers to in verse 15a. The most recent NIV renders its first reference to pneuma as the “Spirit,” a reference to the Third Person of the Trinity.

However, the 2014 translation of the NIV reports Jesus’ followers did not receive “a spirit that makes” us “a slave again to fear.” This implies its translators interpreted Paul to mean that the “spirit” to which he refers is a human outlook. While debate about verse 15a may seem like an esoteric topic for “Greek freaks,” attentive hearers may sense a clash between translations’ understandings of pneuma that preachers want to at least briefly address.

Yet as we speak to that confusion, we might note that it doesn’t in some ways matter how we choose to translate verse 15a’s pneuma. After all, the banishment of fear is always the work of the Holy Spirit. While fear naturally serves as a cruel master, the Spirit takes away its dominance of God’s adopted children’s “spirits.” So Romans 8:15a serves as a kind of Emancipation Proclamation: the Spirit has freed us from all slavery, including slavery to fear. Fear no longer controls how Jesus’ friends act, talk and think. The Spirit graciously controls us.

In fact, professes Paul in verse 14, “those who are led [agontai] by the Spirit of God [Pneumati Theou] are the children of God.” People whom not fear but the Holy Spirit leads are no longer slaves. but adopted children. We’re no longer the property of the evil one, but members of God’s family.

Of course, citizens of the 21^st century may chafe against the responsibilities that come with that new status. Paul’s claim that the Spirit leads us may sound to our contemporaries not like gospel, but just another form of slavery. After all, we like to think of ourselves as masters of our own choices. We don’t like to think of ourselves as controlled or led by anything or anyone.

But God’s people understand that there is no such thing as complete human autonomy. We have been created to serve something or someone. Some of our “masters,” like fear, are downright cruel. Jesus’ friends are no longer its slaves. We now serve a different Master.

But Paul insists we have not fled slavery to fear on our own or somehow purchased our freedom from it. God has, in fact, as he goes on to write in verses 15b and following, graciously wrought that dramatic reversal of fortune: “The Spirit [pneuma] you received [elabete] brought about your adoption to sonship [huiothesias].”

Paul goes on to add more good news: “And by him [en ho] we cry, ‘Abba, Father [Pater]’.” The Spirit didn’t, in other words, just free us from slavery to sin. The Spirit also graciously transforms freed slaves to sin into adopted children of the living God who God has freed to profess our love for God.

Yet it’s as if Paul also recognizes that Jesus’ friends sometimes wonder about our status as God’s dearly beloved children. Sin, Satan, death and fear sometimes partner to make us question our membership in God’s family.  So verse 16 is gospel: “The Spirit [Pneuma] himself [autou] testifies [symmaterei] with our spirit [pneumati hemon] that we are God’s children.”

In other words, God doesn’t leave it to God’s dearly beloved people to somehow generate our own confidence in our membership in God’s family. Instead the Spirit of God graciously partners, as it were, with our spirit to convince us that we belong to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ in life and in death, as well as in body and soul. As The Message lyrically paraphrases verse 16, “God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are.”

In fact, Paul even goes so far as to insist the Spirit equips us to cry out to God, “Abba, Father.” We don’t just know we’re God’s beloved children. Jesus’ friends also call out “Daddy!” or “Papa!” when we respond to God’s grace with things like our praise and prayers.

On top of all that, marvels the apostle, people who are not sin’s slaves, but God’s adopted children are heirs to an unimaginable fortune. After all, as he goes on to celebrate in verse 17, “If [ei] we are children [tekna], then we are heirs [kleronomai], heirs of God and co-heirs [synkleronomai] with Christ.”

This is, frankly, a mind-boggling assertion. Paul, after all, professes that God’s adopted children don’t inherit the punishment and eternal separation from God that we deserve. We, instead, “inherit” God’s grace and forgiveness, as well as eternal life and a place in the new earth and heaven.

In fact, the apostle may even at least imply that God’s adopted children also somehow inherit God himself. After all, to those whom Paul calls co-heirs with Christ God bequeaths what God grants to our adopted Elder Brother. This is a guaranteed inheritance that no stock market tumble or economic depression can take away or even shrink.

Of course, Paul places a somewhat mysterious condition on that inheritance. In verse 17 he says, “We are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed [eiper] we share in his sufferings [sympaschomen] in order that [hina] we may also share in his glory [syndoxasthomen].”

Preachers might note a couple of things about this assertion. The repetition of syn (“with”) points to how closely God links Christians’ fate with our adopted Elder Brother’s fate. Paul insists that what Jesus experienced we also experience. In that way Jesus’ followers might almost say we’re “joined at the hip” to our Leader.

What’s more, while Christians relish the prospect of being glorified with Christ, Paul closely links that glorification to what we’re less excited about: our suffering for Jesus’ sake. He at least seems to suggest to Rome’s Christians that only people who suffer with Christ will also, by God’s amazing grace, be glorified with Christ.

But this leaves the question of what “suffering with Christ” means. Is it, in fact, a kind of works righteousness that we must do in order for God to adopt us as God’s children? While God saves us by grace alone that we receive with faith, that’s not an easy question to answer.

But preachers may need to say little more about it than this: some Christians suffer deep persecution for their faith. However, all Christians whom the Spirit graces with a relationship with Christ suffer the death of our natural selves and desires. As a result, while some of Jesus’ friends suffer for their faith more deeply than others, all of Jesus’ friends suffer with and for him. So all of us can be confident that we are, by God’s amazing grace, on our way to our glorious home in the new creation.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

In his book, The Pope at War, David Kertzer writes about Pope Pius XII and the Vatican’s silence in the face of German and Italian fascism. He notes how “The prevailing attitude toward Germany in the Vatican, reported [French ambassador to the Vatican Vladimir] d’Ormesson, was fear: fear of German power and the fate of the church in Europe under the thumb of a triumphant Germany …

“’One gets the strong sense,’ reported the ambassador, ‘that the Pope has such a fear that a phrase, a word of his might be repeated and escape the walls of the Vatican City that he prefers to remain silent, and merely nod and look up, raising his eyes to the sky’.”