there are heavenly lights too that wax and wane; they are lights, they are in the heavens though they change.  You have no reason, Christian man, to be discouraged, cast down, still less despondent, because you find that the witness of the Spirit changes and varies in your heart.  Do not despond because it does; watch it, and guard it, lest it do; live in the contemplation of the Person and the fact that calls it forth, that it may not.  You will never ’brighten your evidences’ by polishing at them.  To polish the mirror ever so assiduously does not secure the image of the sun on its surface.  The only way to do that is to carry the poor bit of glass out into the sunshine.  It will shine then, never fear.  It is weary work to labour at self-improvement with the hope of drawing from our own characters evidences that we are the sons of God.  To have the heart filled with the light of Christ’s love to us is the only way to have the whole being full of light.  If you would have clear and irrefragable, for a perpetual joy, a glory and a defence, the unwavering confidence, ’I am Thy child,’ go to God’s throne, and lie down at the foot of it, and let the first thought be, ‘My Father in heaven,’ and that will brighten, that will stablish, that will make omnipotent in your life the witness of the Spirit that you are the child of God.

SONS AND HEIRS

   ’If children, then heirs; heirs of God, and
   joint-heirs with Christ.’—­ROMANS viii. 17.

God Himself is His greatest gift.  The loftiest blessing which we can receive is that we should be heirs, possessors of God.  There is a sublime and wonderful mutual possession of which Scripture speaks much wherein the Lord is the inheritance of Israel, and Israel is the inheritance of the Lord.  ’The Lord hath taken you to be to Him a people of inheritance,’ says Moses; ’Ye are a people for a possession,’ says Peter.  And, on the other hand, ’The Lord is the portion of my inheritance,’ says David; ‘Ye are heirs of God,’ echoes Paul.  On earth and in heaven the heritage of the children of the Lord is God Himself, inasmuch as He is with them for their delight, in them to make them ‘partakers of the divine nature,’ and for them in all His attributes and actions.

This being clearly understood at the outset, we shall be prepared to follow the Apostle’s course of thought while he points out the conditions upon which the possession of that inheritance depends.  It is children of God who are heirs of God.  It is by union with Christ Jesus, the Son, to whom the inheritance belongs, that they who believe on His name receive power to become the sons of God, and with that power the possession of the inheritance.  Thus, then, in this condensed utterance of the text there appear a series of thoughts which may perhaps be more fully unfolded in some such manner as the following, that there is no inheritance without sonship, that there is no sonship without a spiritual birth, that there is no spiritual birth without Christ, and that there is no Christ for us without faith.