2011-07-17am Sermon Romans 8

110717am Romans 8:12-25 Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

I have something really exciting to show you!! Can you guess? A POTATO! You might not think a potato is very exciting, but it is to me, because this is these are the first potatoes from my garden. The other day I carefully dug them up to see if they were ready. I just dug up a couple of plants, but I have about 100. Now I can be confident that there are loads more to look forward to, and they are really tasty. So because of what I have in my hand now, I have good reason to hope for lots more to come in the future.

St Paul says that what we have of God now gives us good reason to hope and be confident of an even more wonderful future. We have the firstfruits of the Spirit. This is part of the big story that the Bible tells us. God made the world, and because we all turned bad and followed bad ways he sent his own Son Jesus: we killed him on the cross, but God raised him from the dead. He went back up to heaven and poured out his Spirit on people. He is going to come back to make the world new and give eternal life to all who follow him.

He pours out his Spirit, that means that God himself, his own life and love and power, come to live inside us, and the Spirit makes us into God's children. Just as Jesus knew God as his own heavenly Father, we can call God Father too and live good lives full of freedom and joy and forgiveness.

I wonder what you think of when you think of your father/dad?QUESTIONS: tell me something nice about your dad: what's the best thing he can cook? Does anyone's dad ever do anything funny that makes you laugh...? What the most embarrassing thing about your dad...? [!!!]

God is like the most wonderful, perfect, happy Father you could imagine. We know what it's like to have God as your Father, because we can read all about Jesus, the Son of God. And we can have that too in our lives, because he sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts. ...You received the Spirit of sonship, and by him we cry 'Abba, Father'. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. QUESTION: what are some of the first words that a baby learns to say? [Mama, dada] This word Abba is like that, these words are the same in lots of languages, and in Jesus' language this is what a child calls their father. When we come to believe in Jesus, one of the first things we learn is to say 'Father' to God, to know that he loves us personally and smiles on us and cares for us.

But hang on, you say, this is all very sweet and nice and cute, but as you grow up you learn that the world isn't like that. The world can be hard and tough and people do bad things and bad things just happen. How can we be any different, and how can we hope that things are ever going to be any different? What difference does being a Christian make? Why hasn't the world become any better, and why should we hope that it ever will?

The fact is, the world did change when Jesus died and rose again, and when he poured out his Spirit. That made it possible for every person to know God and live a better life, and billions of people since then and all over the world today have this better life. They may not be rich and famous and powerful, they are certainly not perfect or free from problems, but they are learning to be what Paul says here: not living according to the sinful nature, for if you live according to the sinful nature you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. Millions of people are doing that now, some of them are here today.

And God promised that this will lead to a new world. The world did go very wrong, the whole creation was subjected to frustration... but the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. St Paul says that the whole creation has been groaning – so much pain and wrong and death! And we who have the firstfruits of the Spirit also groan - we know there's a lot wrong with the world and with us. But the firstfruit is a promise that gives us hope – like my potato! We groan, but we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. I only have a few potatoes now, but I am confident that I will have a wonderful harvest, it's almost ready! If we know God now, even if our faith is a bit weak, we're not very good at being good, we don't always feel as close to God and as happy in him as we should – but that is the firstfruit, and we are confident of a wonderful future. We know Jesus was raised from the dead (all the evidence says that's true), and the Bible calls him the firstfruits of the new creation, the promise that all his children will be raised to live for ever in God's new world. Don't you want to be part of that?! For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

So be a potato! Open yourself to God's Spirit, come to God as your Father through Jesus, and enjoy the firstfruits of the wonderful new life.