From Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening for the Evening, June 23rd:
Even in this world saints are God’s children, but men cannot discover
them to be so, except by certain moral characteristics. The adoption is
not manifested, the children are not yet openly declared. Among the
Romans a man might adopt a child, and keep it private for a long time:
but there was a second adoption in public; when the child was brought
before the constituted authorities its former garments were taken off,
and the father who took it to be his child gave it raiment suitable to
its new condition of life. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it
doth not yet appear what we shall be.” We are not yet arrayed in the
apparel which befits the royal family of heaven; we are wearing in this
flesh and blood just what we wore as the sons of Adam; but we know that
“when he shall appear” who is the “first-born among many
brethren,” we shall be like him, we shall see him as he is. Cannot you
imagine that a child taken from the lowest ranks of society, and
adopted by a Roman senator, would say to himself, “I long for the day
when I shall be publicly adopted. Then I shall leave off these plebeian
garments, and be robed as becomes my senatorial rank”? Happy in what he
has received, for that very reason he groans to get the fulness of what
is promised him. So it is with us today. We are waiting till we shall
put on our proper garments, and shall be manifested as the children of
God. We are young nobles, and have not yet worn our coronets. We are
young brides, and the marriage day is not yet come, and by the love our
Spouse bears us, we are led to long and sigh for the bridal morning.
Our very happiness makes us groan after more; our joy, like a swollen
spring, longs to well up like an Iceland geyser, leaping to the skies,
and it heaves and groans within our spirit for want of space and room
by which to manifest itself to men.
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