they say to themselves, ’I do not feel anything that corresponds with my idea of what such a grand, supernatural voice as the witness of God’s Spirit in my spirit must needs be; and therefore I doubt whether I am a Christian at all.’  I should be thankful if the attempt I make now to set before you what seems to me to be the true teaching of the passage, should be, with God’s help, the means of lifting some little part of the burden from some hearts that are right, and that only long to know that they are, in order to be at rest.

’The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.’  The general course of thought which I wish to leave with you may be summed up thus:  Our cry ‘Father’ is the witness that we are sons.  That cry is not simply ours, but it is the voice of God’s Spirit.  The divine Witness in our spirits is subject to the ordinary influences which affect our spirits.

Let us take these three thoughts, and dwell on them for a little while.

I. Our cry ‘Father’ is the witness that we are sons.

Mark the terms of the passage:  ’The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit—.’  It is not so much a revelation made to my spirit, considered as the recipient of the testimony, as a revelation made in or with my spirit considered as co-operating in the testimony.  It is not that my spirit says one thing, bears witness that I am a child of God; and that the Spirit of God comes in by a distinguishable process, with a separate evidence, to say Amen to my persuasion; but it is that there is one testimony which has a conjoint origin—­the origin from the Spirit of God as true source, and the origin from my own soul as recipient and co-operant in that testimony.  From the teaching of this passage, or from any of the language which Scripture uses with regard to the inner witness, it is not to be inferred that there will rise up in a Christian’s heart, from some origin consciously beyond the sphere of his own nature, a voice with which he has nothing to do; which at once, by its own character, by something peculiar and distinguishable about it, by something strange in its nature, or out of the ordinary course of human thinking, shall certify itself to be not his voice at all, but God’s voice.  That is not the direction in which you are to look for the witness of God’s Spirit.  It is evidence borne, indeed, by the Spirit of God; but it is evidence borne not only to our spirit, but through it, with it.  The testimony is one, the testimony of a man’s own emotion, and own conviction, and own desire, the cry, Abba, Father!  So far, then, as the form of the evidence goes, you are not to look for it in anything ecstatic, arbitrary, parted off from your own experience by a broad line of demarcation; but you are to look into the experience which at first sight you would claim most exclusively for your own, and to try and find out whether there there be not working with your soul, working through it,