Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul's Greatest Letter

by Tom Wright

Please note, again, that Paul doesn’t talk here about the soul. When he refers to the deepest human interiority – we quickly run out of language at this point and have to use cumbersome phrases like that – he speaks of the human spirit. And here he declares that the holy spirit as it were gets together with our own spirit to tell us the same thing, that we really are God’s children. We have to be careful here at a pastoral level. People’s ‘experience’ varies widely according to personality. It’s easy to be fooled either way: either into imagining something is the case when it isn’t, or into imagining something isn’t the case when it is. There are many casual or ‘occasional’ church attenders who have a vague sense of God being around the place somewhere and so assume they are ‘all right’; and there are many devout, prayerful folk with sensitive consciences who agonize over whether they are genuine Christians. And there are many other possibilities too. Pastoral experience suggests that the only way through is by prayer and gentle active listening as we seek to help one another discern, as we say, ‘where we really are with God’.