“You have received a spirit of sonship”
We are by grace to be what Christ is by nature – sons or children of God. That alone guides and directs our lives with God in Christ. Who and what we are inwardly is to be expressed outwardly in bringing forth good fruit not evil fruit, to use the imagery of the Gospel. What is that good fruit? Doing what belongs to who and what we are as the “children of God” who “have received a spirit of sonship, in which we cry aloud, Abba, Father.” Our life in Christ is very much about our being imago Trinitatis as well as imago Christi, our life as ordered like his to the Father in the eternal bond of the Spirit. We have received a spirit of sonship.
Providence, “who from end to end/ strongly and sweetly movest,” as the poet George Herbert remarks, is the overarching idea. It “never-failingly ordereth all things both in heaven and earth.” God’s “never-failing” providence is the charity [that] “never faileth.” Our vocation is to write out the providence of God in our lives. For “only to Man thou hast made known thy wayes./ And put the penne alone into his hand,/And made him [us] Secretaries of thy praise.” Who we are as knowing and loving beings, and especially through what we know and learn through revelation, is to be lived out in our lives in and through all of the ups and downs of human experience.
But alas, we are often mistaken about providence. It is not just how “everything’s going my way,” as the old song puts it, nor is it our endless illusions with progress, as if things are always and endlessly getting better in our techno-utopian exuberance. Neither fits with human experience. Our identity as “children and heirs of God, and fellow-heirs of Christ,” is predicated on the reality of suffering; we are “heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” Our sanctification in seeking to bring forth the fruit of holy lives is always grounded in our justification through Christ’s saving work on the Cross. His suffering for us gives meaning to our suffering with and for him.
The word ‘providence’ perhaps misleads us. It seems to imply the idea of foreseeing, or foreknowledge but that imparts a temporal dimension when in truth God doesn’t foresee or foreknow, he simply and eternally knows all things, as C.S. Lewis observed in his commentary on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. “What is, what has been, and what is to come,/In one swift mental stab he sees,” Lady Philosophy sings.
This past week marked the great summer festival of Christ’s Transfiguration which is the vision of glory in anticipation of Christ’s Resurrection and the hope of our transformation. John notes that while “we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” As Paul says, we shall know even as we are known in Christ.
The Epistle reading from Romans argues for the nature of our spiritual identity in Christ, as “children” and “heirs of God, and fellow-heirs with Christ.” The Gospel warns us about the divide between the inward and the outward aspects of our lives, “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” while exhorting us to be and do what we say and believe. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” Actions often reveal intentions. Good fruit and bad fruit from good and bad trees respectively. Our agency matters. It’s not just about what happens to us but about how we think and act and react or deal with things; in short, how we learn.
This is where the question of providence comes into play. Good and evil seem so black and white, so absolute. They are, but with this qualification, that one may change from one to the other, from good to evil and vice versa. How? Either by grace or by sin. By grace means through our wills in concert with God’s will; by sin, simply on our own. Such is the dynamic of the morality of rational persons as distinct from mere nature. Evil cannot bring forth anything good but “it can happen that he who was evil is not now evil, but it cannot happen that he who is evil does good.” Yet by the grace of God, good can come out of evil and this is an aspect of providence. Augustine notes that “though at times what the evil person does is useful, this is not due to him, but to the providence of God that makes use of him.” God rules in and through us and in spite of us.
God alone makes good out of evil. This profound concept has entirely to do with the transcendent nature of God and acts as a check upon our presumptions and follies. The providence of God teaches us that creation is not a static event, a once-off, as it were, but a continuing activity. God sustains and upholds the being of all things including our being. Everything has its truth and meaning in him, in his will and purpose. It is the metaphysical corrective to all the forms of a merely instrumental reason. Providence is not the ideology of endless material progress; that is our illusion, a human conceit.
Far from a denial or denigration of free will, God’s providence is presupposed in the freedom of all our acts and actions. The world is more than a chaotic mess of random events out of which, somehow, an intelligible order emerges. How can something intelligible arise out of what is, in principle, non-intelligible? It can’t unless there is something intelligible that is prior; such is the active reason of God at work in all things.
The reason and will of God moves in and through the events of our lives. We are often blind to the movements of God’s providence but this is precisely what has been written out for us to read in the story of Christ. In him, the mind of providence is writ large, we might say; the λογος of God has entered full bodily into the mess and morass of human sin and evil. In him we see the utter nothingness of evil. In every way, it is negative, that is to say, it depends entirely upon what truly is.
“Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily and sweetly doth she order all things,” fortiter et suaviter (The Wisdom of Solomon). We may not always see this – such are the limitations of our finite minds, let alone our sinful wills – but it shapes the very meaning of the prayer to God “to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things that be profitable for us, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Our sanctification in bringing forth the good fruit of holy lives is our participation in the eternal goodness of God made known in Christ. Prayer is about “the transformation of our hearts.”
The 17th century Anglican divine, John Hackett, in a series of seven sermons on the Transfiguration, draws on Bernard of Clairvaux’s insight that “there are three things that abide to direct us in the right way” of life, “Verbum, Exemplum, and Oratio – the Word proclaimed, the Examples of holy people” (he has in mind Peter, James and John and Moses and Elijah in the story of the Transfiguration), “and Prayer; but the greatest of these is prayer,” he says, playing with Paul’s expression about the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Prayer in its truth and purpose is about our participation in the charity that never faileth, the never-failingly providence of God.
“O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason.” Everlasting reason – divine reason. The rule of God’s reason is always more and greater. In the wonder of providence we are privileged to participate in God’s reason at work so strongly and sweetly in our lives. The Epistle reminds us of our essential identity as the sons of God and the Gospel recalls us to the freedom that belongs to our actions. We bring forth the good fruit only out of our awareness of the providence of God so that his mind and will may move in us. Only so may we be in him and he in us. The providence of God is at work in our lives and all because “you have received a spirit of sonship.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 8, 2025