Reading for Thursday, 4th Week of Lent

Romans 8:12-27

“The Spirit you have received is not a spirit of slavery, leading you back into a life of fear, but a Spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Rom 8:15 - Revised English Bible)

I wonder if fear is the original sin? Of course, fear is a perfectly good emotion for our self protection. But fear also leads to mistrust. And as we have already seen, “faith” for Paul is just a synonym for trust. And when it comes to our relationship with our Maker, fear leads to mistrust of God, and so leads to a lack of faith, and so to sin. And in these first 8 chapters of his letter to the Romans, Paul has been speaking to the fears of Jewish Christians. They feared that without the Jewish law, Gentile Christians would simply use the “freedom” of the Gospel to justify anything. Without the “old letter” of the law (Rom 7:6), the Christian community would have no clear guide for future decisions.

Paul’s answer in today’s reading is this: Trust the Spirit by whom you have been adopted, not as fearful slaves of an angry God, but as sons and daughters of a loving Father. Trust the Spirit when you can’t find the words to express your convictions, your sadness, your fear. For “in the same way the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness. We do not even know how we ought to pray, but through our inarticulate groans the Spirit himself is pleading for us, and God who searches our inmost being knows what the Spirit means, because he pleads for God’s people as God himself wills.” (Rom 8:26-27 - REB).

In the Greek in which Paul wrote, the word we translate as “Spirit” could also mean “breath.” So, whatever fear you have this Lent, trust in the loving Spirit of God, who is as close to you as your own breath.