All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. 15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “ Abba, Father. ” 16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 17 But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.
In this book, Claus Westermann argues that Israel's early wisdom literature grew out of an oral tradition reflecting an agrarian setting. Dealing primarily with Proverbs 10-31, Westermann demonstrates how the wisdom literature evolved into a form of poetry that had greater universal appeal as the people of Israel became more urbanized. A distinctive feature of "Roots of Wisdom" is Westermann's use of other wisdom sayings, particularly those from ancient Africa, to illustrate the logical progression of wisdom poetry being simply observational in character to becoming more universal in character.