THE Lord Jesus Christ has come in human flesh that His people might “receive the adoption of sons.” What does this expression mean? Why, to feel, “Now I am under the mastery of love, as a dear child, who is both loved and loving. I go in and out of my Father’s house, not as a casual servant, called, in to work, and paid by the day or the week, but as a child at home. I am not: looking for hire as a servant, :for I am ever with my Father, and all that He has is mine. My God is my Father, and the light of His ,countenance makes me. glad. I am not afraid of Him, but I delight in Him: and nothing can separate me from Him. I feel towards Him that perfect love which casteth out: fear, and I rejoice to be owned as His child.”

Try and enter into that blessed experience if you are indeed a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, for this is why He has come in the flesh, — on purpose that you, His people, may be to the full the adopted children of the Lord., receiving and enjoying all the privileges which sonship secures to you.

Then, next, exercise; your heirship. One who is a son, and who knows that he is the heir of all his father’s estate does not pine in poverty, nor act like a beggar. He looks upon everything that his father possesses as being his own; he regards his father’s wealth as making him rich. He does not feel that he is stealing :if he takes what his father has made to be his own, but he makes free with it.

I wish believers would make free with the promises and blessings of their God. Help yourselves to all that He has laid up in store for you, for no good thing will the Lord withhold from you if you walk uprightly. All things are yours, you only need to use the hand of faith, and so to take possession of them. If you appropriate a promise of yore’ Father’s, it will not be pilfering; you may take it boldly, and say, “This is; mine.” Your adoption into the family of God brings with it large rights; be not slow to claim them. Paul writes to the Romans, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God- and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ:.”

Among men. sons are only heirs in anticipation so long as their fathers are alive; they only become heirs in possession when their fathers are dead. But our Father in Heaven lives, yet we have the full privileges of heirship in Him even now. The Lord Jesus Christ was made of a woman on purpose that His dear people might at once enter into their heir-ship.