“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”  What a powerful statement!  If there’s one thing I hope people can say about us here at Lima UMC, it’s that we are led by the Spirit.  At the start of the summer, I wrote a newsletter article about seven spiritual pathways that can help us deepen our relationship with God.  Pastor Karen has been talking about them in her weekly Thoughtful Thursday videos.  We’re asking folks to send us the scoop, a snapshot and a sentence or two about how you’ve stepped out in faith to draw closer to the Spirit of God.  I love this idea, “Lima UMC, Led By the Spirit!” We got the idea for these seven spiritual pathways from a book by John Ortberg called, “God is Closer Than You Think.”  He said people are different, so it should be no surprise that we gravitate toward different practices in our relationship with God.  Some folks feel closest to God when they are in worship.  Others feel their faith energized when they advocate for justice.  Some need to be out in creation in order to best experience God.  I think this is true of me.  Here is a photo of Freckles, a humpback whale Phil and I were privileged to see on our recent whale watching cruise.  I don’t know how you can be side by side with a 50 foot, and estimated 50-ton whale, and not be in awe of our Creator!    Whether it’s hiking to see a waterfall, or just watching birds out my window, I always feel my faith renewed in nature.  The Creation spiritual pathway just comes naturally to me. In contrast, the Contemplative pathway does not come naturally to me!  When I was in seventh grade, one of our vocabulary words was “loquacious”, which means talkative.  Our teacher said, if you have trouble remembering the meaning of this word, just think about Dorry!  I was pretty chatty in school.  Maybe I became a preacher because I always feel like I have so much to say!  I don’t think anyone would have ever pegged me for a contemplative person who connects to God through being quiet.  But I am always trying to expand my horizons, and turns out, maybe I do have a contemplative bone or two in my body.  Here’s a photo of me walking a labyrinth while on vacation in June.  Over the years, I have frequently found labyrinths while we’re on vacation, and it’s works for me because I’ve worked on it, sensing God on the path.  This summer I am trying something new:  using a paper labyrinth for quiet prayer at home.  Instead of walking the path with your feet, you can use your finger, or a metal stylus, or I sometimes use a colored pencil to trace the path in and then back out again.  I am finding it very soothing and grounding. Reading Romans this summer has me thinking that the Apostle Paul’s main spiritual pathway might have been the intellectual path.  We know that before he became a Christian, he was a student of Gamaliel, one of the most prominent Jewish scholars of his day.  Paul’s writing style encourages deep thinking.  He isn’t afraid to tackle paradoxes and mysteries.  And he often goes from thinking about a spiritual issue, to suddenly praising God, in his writing.  I think for Paul, the line from his soul to the Spirit of God travelled through his brain.  His emotional appeals to the Romans were fleshed out with many rational arguments. In our scripture lesson today, Paul is making the rational argument that since we are all children of God, we should act like children of God!  We should stop sinning.  And instead of falling into a spirit of fear about the future, we can have confidence, because we have been given a spirit of adoption.  It might seem to us to be a no brainer—of course, we are children of God.  But Paul is contrasting this idea with one he brought up earlier, that we are all children of Abraham, people in need of salvation, people who had a faith legacy of staking their lives on the trustworthiness of God.  And we are all children of an even older spiritual ancestor than Abraham:  Adam, the first sinful man. Paul has taken care in previous parts of his letter to show the diverse members of the Church in Rome that they share common spiritual ancestors.  But in our passage today, we find him shifting gears a little bit, showing them that not only do they share a common spiritual ancestry, they will also share a common spiritual inheritance.  Regardless of which “on ramp” you use to get to faith in Christ, all who are led by the Spirit of God to believe in Jesus are children of God, and will inherit everlasting life!  That is an amazing inheritance.  But Paul wants everyone to know, if they are going to claim membership in this new family of God, that means letting go of their attachment to their old family.  He’s not talking about literally leaving your earthly family.  No, he means something much older:  membership in the human family, a family of people who are prone to sin.  Paul, intellectual that he is, uses several different terms for talking about this one concept. Sometimes he calls it the “flesh”.  Sometimes he calls it “the body”.  He is not trying to denigrate having a physical body.  He is referring to our old, old nature—the part of ourselves that is still caught in sin.  It is by “putting to death the deeds of the body” that we can live, that we can receive our inheritance. In Paul’s day, adoption wasn’t only about making sure every child has a family to raise them and love them.  Adoption was mostly a means to pass along wealth.  There was an official process whereby an adult male could renounce his birth family, and be adopted by a different family, so that family could be ensured of an heir.  The process required that three times the birth father would symbolically sell his son.  The first two times, the birth father bought him back.  But the third time, he did not.  The birth father in essence set his son free to be “bought” by the adoptive family. The ritual for this was so formal, because it was such a big deal.  His old life was essentially washed away.  If he had debts, they were cancelled.  If he had siblings, it was as if they were never part of the same family.  He was regarded as a new person.  He became the son of the new father and thus had no rights as an heir in his birth family.  He became an instant heir in the new family.  What an amazing parallel Paul draws for us!  If we are led by the Spirit of God, we become children of God.  We receive a spirit of adoption, which makes us new people.  It cancels our debts and forgives all of our old sin.  It immediately makes us heirs in our new family.  We become people who will guaranteed inherit eternal life!  But that means we must also give up membership in our old family.  We are no longer children of the “flesh”.  We must put to death the deeds of the body—our old, sinful ways of living. We must claim our new family and be done being slaves to our old fears, temptations, and habits. This is, no doubt, a mystery, because just last week we read Paul’s words, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”  Because Paul’s spiritual pathway is the intellectual pathway, he gets invigorated by the mysteries of the faith! If there are puzzles, things about our relationship with God that don’t fully make sense, that’s all the more exciting to him!  He easily holds both realities in tension:  we are children of God with a divine inheritance, but we are also still children of Adam with a sinful nature.  Only he takes like two pages to say that instead of two sentences!  If plumbing the mysteries of the faith isn’t your thing, hang in there, because come September we are going to study the book of James.  James is one of the most down-to-earth theologians ever.  James said, what good is your faith if it doesn’t result in you being a better person?  James 2:17 says, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”  This is the practical wisdom of someone whose spiritual pathway is serving, who connection to God feels most energized, by hands-on service as opposed to Paul who feels most energized by intellectual rigor.  James and Paul—two men deeply committed to God and to helping the fledgling Christian Church—but men of very different spiritual styles.  If you haven’t already, I hope you will take a look at the list of the seven spiritual pathways from our June newsletter.  They are also available on our website.  Try something new this summer, and then give us the scoop!  Let us know what you experienced so we can celebrate that Lima UMC is Led By The Spirit! But in the interest of full disclosure, we need to look closely at what Paul says at the end of this passage. When we cry Abba, Father!—when we reach out to God by exploring the intellectual, serving, worship, creation, activism, relational, or contemplative pathway–that is the Spirit bearing witness that we are children of God.  And if we are children of God, then we are heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.  We are heirs of eternal and everlasting life!  All of that sounds good, right?  But Paul says, we are joint heirs with Christ ONLY IF in fact we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. In other words, when you make an effort to strengthen your relationship with God, you will reap rewards.  But having a deeper spiritual life has no correlation with having an easier life.  Paul gives us a warning label, that working “harder” at our faith will not necessarily make life “easier”.  Instead, when we allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit, we may find ourselves having to do some very hard things, like standing up to people who mistreat us.  Speaking up on behalf of others who are mistreated.  Sticking out as witnesses, people who do things differently than the world does them.  Putting ourselves at risk to defend and spread the truth.  This is the brave faith we are called to.  Ultimately, what Paul seems to be saying is, no matter what our unique spiritual pathways are, if follow the path of Christ closely, suffering will be a universal experience.  But take heart.  Suffering too is a pathway to God. Suffering is a pathway to God–that is a mystery for another time.  We will talk about that more next week.  Let’s close for today by taking a page out of Paul’s book.  Let’s shift from trying to understand God to praising God.  “For all who are led by God are children of God.”  What a powerful, worshipful statement.  For adopting us, for leading us, for caring for us so well:  We thank you, Lord.  We trust you, Lord.  We love you, Lord.  Amen.