Lesson 113 – When the Spirit Declares the Son

Romans 1:1-4

"Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. "

    Here, Paul tells the church at Rome that Jesus Christ was declared to be the Son of God according to the Spirit of holiness. With the resurrection of the dead, Jesus was declared and proven to be God. To see one is to see the other. To worship one means you worship the other. You cannot reject Christ and accept the Father. It is an all or nothing thing.

    This was a difficult message for Jews living in Rome. They rightly worshiped the Father as the only God, and as such, struggled to understand that in worshiping Jesus they were not rejecting the Father. Both were one. The Bible is not a call to worship a duplicity of gods. In fact, if there is one thing it is clear on, it is that there is only one true God. All others are idols.

    To make this better understood, Paul tells us the Spirit declared Jesus to be equal with God when in holiness Christ was raised from the dead. While I'm not entirely sure on this point, it seems to me it was the Spirit who was used by the Father to raise the Son. In this act, Jesus is validated as God and declared to be equal in holiness, though he had lived as a man.

    You and I are also declared by the Spirit's touch to be holy, though our holiness is not really of our own. Instead, it is imputed or accounted to our lives by the Spirit's presence, made possible by Christ's death in our place on the cross of Calvary. In a real sense, our unholiness was removed by Christ on the cross, and then a new holiness is provided to us through the living as God's gift of the Spirit.

    The Bible teaches that the trigger for this great substitution of unholiness for holiness is a saving faith or belief. This is not faith in our own worthiness, but in God's love for us through Christ. In this belief, we turn from an old way of life to commit to living according to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

    For those who believe, the Spirit declares the Son in us, living in holiness!

LORD JESUS

Lord, I thank you for the testimony of your Spirit to declare Christ as God and my life as now holy according to your grace. Amen.