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Because you are his children, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts. He is the Holy Spirit. By his power we call God Abba. Abba means Father (Galatians 4:6).

As noted last week, the Holy Spirit was already present at Creation, actively involved in God\u2019s activity to put the cosmos together. The creation account encourages us to be awestruck by the simplicity and ease with which God causes the university to come into being. The endless debates regarding exactly how and how long it all took have obscured this invitation to be amazed by our God. For Christians, observing the universe propels us to witness his intricate creativity and vast power.

When we Christians reflect on the Holy Spirit, I think we do well to begin here, with his creative work. The Belgic confession tells us that God makes himself known to us through two means: creation and the scriptures. Regarding creation the confession says, \u201cwe know God, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: God's eternal power and divinity\u201d (Article 2).

Throughout the long centuries of the church, Christians were encouraged to pay close attention to the natural world. It gives us insight into spiritual realities because God is displayed in it. But somewhere along the line, the spiritual and physical became separated. We no longer trusted our eyes and ears and noses and fingers and tongues to teach us anything about God. Spiritually became a thing of the mind. Its time to go back. God gave us two hands, with one we hold the Bible, with the other God\u2019s creation. Together, these two books will teach us about our God.

As many of you know, I love gardening. Helena and I bought a small corner lot, up here on the mountain. We are growing trees, flowers, shrubs, and vegies. They have much to teach us. But there are also various plants that grow uninvited. We call them weeds. We pull them up, we hoe them down. We torture them as much as possible, but they do not seem to mind. They keep coming back.

These weeds teach me much about sin. Its like those weeds, extremely difficult to get rid of. In the spiritual realm, we may be tempted to think that we are the gardeners who need to get rid of the weeds. But that would be wrong. God is the gardener. We are the garden, and much more than His garden. We are his children. Each one of us. And each one of us has been granted the gift of the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit we call God, Abba, father.

To call God, father, is one of the astonishing realities of the New Testament. We do not find much of that in the Old. But Jesus showed up calling God Father. And John makes the case that through Jesus\u2019 work of redemption, we call God Father as well (John 1:13). For many reasons, we tend to forget that God is our Father, the best Father ever. The Holy Spirit is there to remind us, and to work out in us all the other benefits of Christ\u2019s redemption: to pull out the weeds and cause the fruit of God to grow in us.

As we all know, this is no easy task and not easily accomplished. Sin has a tenacious grip on us and is roots have dug deep in our souls. The fruit of God tends to be rather tender and easily uprooted. How often are we not in places where it feels like we are starting over? If it were up to us, we would give up. But the Spirit is there, hauling us back onto our feet, encouraging and nurturing us to keep going. This is the same Spirit who was present at creation. He now works in each one of us, cultivating the things of God and pruning away the things of darkness. That is the good news of the gospel.