The Spirit Of Our Assurance

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

The Assurance of Salvation in Ephesians 1:13-14

If you would, please turn with me in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 13. Ephesians 1 and verse 13. Today we will be looking at verses 13 and 14. And as you turn there, I want to pose this question to you.

Does God want us to have a confident assurance of our salvation in Jesus Christ? Dear believer, does God want you to have a confident assertion of your right standing with God today, before eternity? If we were to look into your doctrine of salvation, what theologians call your soteriology, does God want you to have a fulsome, certain, intrepid assurance?

Not only that you have been justified by faith in Christ today, but more than that, does God want you to have a bold, confident assurance that you are saved and kept secure for all of eternity? It seems that if we were to go into the depths of each of our hearts, each of your hearts this afternoon, the hearts of all of our neighbors in this city, that more than almost any other innate desire, the human heart longs for assurance.

Do you believe that? One theologian has observed that, he writes, because the promises of man are so often unreliable, in our day, we demand oaths. I think of our brother who is in the law profession.

Sworn affidavits, surety bonds. When you go to the store to buy electronics, they ask you, do you want the warranty, guarantees, and many other such means to assure that what is promised will in fact be received.

Our hearts long for assurance. And yet it seems that no matter where we go in the world, no matter what world view a people group subscribes to outside of biblical Christianity, there is a characteristic lack of assurance in the hearts of people.

And a characteristic lack of assurance, not just pertaining to trivial things, like the manufacturer's warranty on a toaster, but a lack of assurance related to the most important questions of life. Who am I?

Why am I here? Where am I going? Where will I be when I die? And if we were to go and to travel to different parts of the world and look at different world views, what we would find is that across the broad landscape of the earth, everyone, it seems, is seeking for assurance, and yet cannot seem to find it.

If we were to examine, for instance, the secular humanist perspective, we find that it offers no assurance. Voltaire, if you know that name Voltaire, he was one of the most prominent figures of the Enlightenment, an agnostic Enlightenment thinker.

He once declared in these fatalistic words, he said, I don't know where I am going, but I am on my way. That the fastest growing religion today, in size second only to Christianity, in Islam, there is no assurance of salvation.

Assurance alluded even the founder and the chief prophet of their religion,.

Mohammed.

If you were to go to a street corner this afternoon and find a Muslim neighbor of ours, and ask him, do you have assurance of God? Sorry, assurance of salvation. Almost certainly, he would say that he does not.

But if he did, he would be doing better than Mohammed himself. In the Quran, and this you might want to write down, if ever you encounter a Muslim, in Surah 7, in verse 158, Mohammed confessed, by Allah, although I am the messenger of Allah, I know not what will happen to me, just like you.

Meanwhile, in the world of Roman Catholicism, which comprises about 50 of what the world defines as Christianity, there, even there, there is no meaningful hope on this topic of having peace with God.

The Roman Catholic Council of Trent concluded, when they met for their sixth session, they said, if anyone says, think about this, if this was a doctrine that we decreed from our church, from this pulpit today, if anyone says that he will, for certain, of an absolute and infallible certainty, have that great gift of perseverance to the end, let him be anathema.

Translated, if you are amongst the 1 .2 billion Catholics in the world, and have a hearty, resolved, confident assertion of your salvation, Roman Catholic doctrine teaches that you are to be accursed.

It is tantamount to preaching a different gospel. In that economy of salvation, such assurance is nothing more than sinful presumption. To be certain that you are right with God is to be wrong with God.

And even in some Protestant Christian circles, the assurance that the human heart longs for is nowhere to be found. John Wesley. We've talked a lot about John Wesley over the last number of weeks. I'll mention him one more time.

The 18th century founder of the Methodist Church, he taught that a believer ought to have, ought not, excuse me, to have full assurance that they are saved. A Christian can be assured of their present standing in Christ, but that standing, at least according to Wesley, was subject to constant change.

And so he preferred the term assurance of faith, which can be found in Scripture, but the expression assurance of faith, over and above the expression assurance of salvation, and he said it is because of this.

Because a believer could, on Sunday, be assured of their faith on that day. But by Friday, they could be destined for the eternal flames of hell. And therefore they could not, they must not, believe with certainty that they have possessed eternal life.

And what did this do, but created a culture within Methodism, even today, where Christians live in a state of continuous dread, with this notion that they hang on the precipice of a cliff, just one slip up away from losing hold of the gospel, and careening into an eternal abyss, to dwell with those who have rejected Christ all of their lives long.

Brethren, our souls, your soul, my soul, longs for certainty, and certainty before God. And the question then is, does God want us to possess that certainty? Does God want us to know that we are in Christ, truly saved, for all of eternity?

Or does God want us to live with a sense of suspense until our dying day, to keep us on our toes, to keep us holy, to keep us chasing after the prize? Does He want us to hang over the precipice? Well, I had us turn to Ephesians 1.

What does our text say? Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 13. In Him, that is in Christ, in Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His glory.

Today, in this God-breathed text, the Lord wants us, I put before you, He wants us to be assured and confident in our eternal standing before Him. That the same God who sent His Son to die for our sins, the same God who bought us by the precious blood of the Lamb, that He wants us to know with certainty that we are His children, and that He is our Father, and that we have been saved to the uttermost, and those of us who have eternal life today will have eternal life for eternity.

And I would suggest He's going to show us how to attain that confident assertion. So today we're going to, it's a very simple layout, you can find it in the inside of your bulletin, we're going to look at three different aspects of what it means to have assurance of salvation.

Not just assurance of faith, but assurance of our salvation in the Lord. We're going to look at the ground of our assurance, the seal of our assurance, and the guarantee of our assurance. And how all three of these things are biblical.

The Ground of Assurance Is Hearing and Believing the Gospel

And so, with our attention turned to Ephesians 1 and verse 13, I want us first to look at the ground of our assurance. In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed.

Make no mistake about it, God wants every single one of us to be satisfied, to be at peace, to rest assured in our longing for certainty. But this certainty, this assurance that we are all after does not appear out of thin air.

It is not something that finds its basis in the storm-tossed swells of human emotion and subjective feeling. We need to appreciate, for all of us who seek to have assurance of our salvation, that true assurance is, and this is foundational to this first point, that true assurance is the fruit of a sincere faith.

And this sincere faith must be firmly rooted in the soil of a spirit-enabled understanding of the gospel. Many professing Christians today lack assurance. And I say professing Christians because they have no assurance because they have no knowledge of the gospel.

And they are Christians in name only. There might be some in this room that fall into that category. But perhaps more prevalent and perhaps more relevant to most of us here in this room are those genuine believers in Christ who find themselves always wavering in their assurance.

And maybe you have been in this place, I know that I have, where you can feel saved. If I might say it, very saved one day. And then over the course of perhaps a bad evening or a bad night or a bad morning the following day, the next day, feel almost hopelessly lost.

Many of us have experienced this, like the tide, the rise of assurance and then the descent of assurance. Maybe you're sitting here today and you're asking yourself, I don't even know if I am a genuine Christian.

But I want to know. Or maybe you're sitting here and you're saying, I have believed in Christ, but I almost never feel assured that I am accepted in Christ and the beloved of God. I know from my experience personally, I remember being a believer for five, six, seven years and talking to a friend one day and saying, I have no idea if I am saved.

Not because I did not know the gospel, but as I mentioned last week, it is completely possible to have a true and a genuine and a sincere faith and yet to lack that assurance. That our salvation is not dependent on our assurance, but it is our faith.

But what we seek to have is a true faith and a true assurance. And Paul answers the question to both people who are asking, am I truly saved? Or the scriptures say I'm saved, but I don't feel saved. He answers both of those in verse 13.

And I want you to see the context with me. In verse 13, Paul welcomes now that the Gentile Christians of Ephesus and by us, and thus, excuse me, by extension, into the promise of salvation, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the guarantee of our inheritance.

And what he has been doing is he is framing it against the apostles and the early Jewish Christians of Ephesus. And we know he is doing that because in verse 13, he starts with these four words, in him, you also.

The starting place of Paul's understanding of assurance and of the free offer of the gospel is that it has not only come to the deserving or what we might think as those who were the intended recipients, i .e. the Jewish nation.

But hear me on this. The gospel of Jesus Christ and all of its benefits have now come to all who hear, understand, and respond to the gospel by faith. Whether Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, neat and tidy sinner, or debauched and openly wretched sinner.

And in our reading of this verse, we might read over those first few words. You also. I'm not sure how many of you even thought about that as we read it. In him, you also. Those seem like to some of us perhaps like filler words.

And as I was studying this, I thought to myself, I have filler words. You have filler words. But there is nothing in the Bible that is a filler word. Proverbs 30 in verse 5 says, in fact, every word of God proves true.

And so you also. The gospel and all of its benefits have come to those who apart from God's sovereign inclusion would have been altogether outside the scope of such blessings. The gospel comes to those who don't deserve the gospel.

I want you to see this and understand this with me. Assurance, the certainty of assurance can even come to those who don't deserve assurance. And why is that? Because God has sent his son to die on the cross that if I can say it this way, you also might hear and understand and believe and be sealed with the promised Holy Spirit as a guarantee of your inheritance.

Even the most wretched sinner is neither beyond Christ nor beyond the hope of assurance in Christ. Are you sitting here going, I could never have assurance because I know who I am behind closed doors.

I know who I am at work when I'm not amongst the saints. I know who I am in my private thought life. And here, what Paul is giving us, inspired by the Holy Spirit, is this, that the gospel and the accompanying assurance is not only to the people that we would expect, but to you also.

It is a broad, a broad sowing of assurance, you could say. There is hope for each one of us. And this hope is rooted in something far greater than our awareness of our own unworthiness. There are some people who think that Christianity consists of knowing that we are unworthy.

I think Roman Catholicism is probably a prime example of that. They speak at length about the need for the mercy of God and the need of the grace of God and all of the different mechanisms to achieve some kind of pardon, some kind of clarity of conscience.

But they must keep going back again and again to cleanse the conscience once more because they know that they are unworthy. To have assurance of salvation needs to start at a sense of our own unworthiness.

But it needs to move beyond that. And Paul gets at that. That you also, he says, when you heard the word of truth, to know the spiritual blessing of assurance necessitates that one also hears the word of truth.

That they grasp the gospel of their salvation and they believe on Christ. This is the only way that we can be saved and experience true assurance. There are many who have false assurance, but I would have you have true assurance.

And the only way that we can be assured that we are saved is to follow this pattern. To hear the word of truth. To understand the gospel of our salvation. And to respond by believing in Him. Now each one of us, we need to understand just how much we need to be students of the gospel.

And for those of you who don't know if you're right with the Lord, then you as much as ever need to understand the gospel. I had the blessing last week, our brother Sam, Scott and I sat at the kids table over here for the fellowship meal.

It was a great blessing, great fellowship with each other and with the children. And as I arrived late to the conversation, the conversation that was taking place at the table was this, how do we know there is a God?

How do you know there is a God? And the children were being posed, it was excellent, it was informal catechizing. How do you know, Noah, if there is a God? How do you know, Elise, if there is a God? And we looked at each child and looked for that answer.

And then by God's providence, I love God's good and strange providence. This week in our family worship we reached a catechism question that asks exactly that question.

And I thought,.

There's a part of me, the parent that wants to be really proud of my kids, it's probably not a good desire, but I really wish we would have done that catechism question before last week's conversation.

But as we came to it, the question that is posed to the kids, this is the Baptist catechism from the Second London Baptist Confession. It asks, how may we know there is a God? And there's a song we sing.

The light of the nature in man and the works of God fully proclaim there is a God. That is Romans 1, verbatim almost. The light of nature. His invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature are clearly perceived in everything that has been made.

But the answer actually to this catechism goes a bit further. Does plainly declare there is a God, but it continues, but his word and spirit only do it fully and effectually for the salvation of sinners.

What this means is that the book of nature, God's general revelation, if I were to take you and we were to look at the most beautiful sunset you have ever seen, or even a mediocre sunset, if we were to go stand on the edge of the ocean and watch the roaring waves lap in, and to look at even the smallest mountains in the Rockies, and to admire the waterfalls and the way that the rocks face and cast shadows in the sun, there is enough in God's book of nature to reveal enough about God that we might be accountable to God.

But it will never teach us what we need to know to believe on Jesus Christ as our substitutionary sacrifice for our sins. What we need, as Paul calls it, is the word of truth, the written word of God that clearly articulates the gospel of our salvation.

And dear friends, how often do we neglect that word of truth, that gospel of our salvation, and again and again and again and renewed our faith in Christ? I'm convinced that the vast majority of people who have no assurance of salvation and yet so desperately desire it, I am convinced, almost entirely, that the first remedy, the first prescription I am going to give you when you come into the doctor's office is this, it's not saying Hail Marys, it's not offering confessions at the Cathedral, it is this.

I want you to preach the gospel to yourself. Every time you eat, preach the gospel to yourself. Not as a beating, but as a blessing to feed your body, yes, and feed your soul with the gospel. To be students, as I've said many times, of the gospel all the days of our lives and then for the rest of eternity.

The gospel must be for our souls, and as we minister to each other's souls, the most pressing, urgent, and liberating message in the world. We only have one child who can really imagine this vividly, so I'm going to direct that you for a moment.

Imagine for a moment being in school, and through some channel that none of your peers have, you discover that there is an asteroid coming towards Earth, and it is going to destroy the whole Earth in five minutes time.

You don't have to answer this, but what would you tell your peers? Or you're at work, and your wife sends you a text message, or your husband sends you a text message, and it comes through, and that exact message is on the other line, that there is an asteroid.

I couldn't believe it, but it is true, and in five minutes this world will be gone. What is the most urgent, pressing message? Would you go to your colleagues and discuss the possible strategies for surviving a cataclysmic impact from the asteroid?

Would you go to your sibling, or sorry, would you go to your colleagues and say to them, well I suppose this is a good time to tell you about my love for Tupperware. You would go, I hope by God's grace, and you would say to your colleagues, to your peers at school, to the people around you, there's an asteroid coming in five minutes, and while it is important to be prepared for that impact, there is going to be a greater collision in about five minutes and one second, and that will not be between this world and an asteroid, but it will be an interaction between you and Almighty God, and he is bigger, and he is greater, and he is far more fearful than that asteroid that is barreling towards the earth, and in these next five minutes, I would have you be ready to meet him and to preach the gospel to them.

This is our message. It's a message to preach to the world, yes, but it's as much a message to preach to ourselves. It is the message that we must seek to master and to be mastered by, the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So often Christians speak about how they don't know how to share the gospel with their colleagues. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say to my family. I don't know what to say to my neighbor, and I've never never said this, but perhaps this is the best way to put it.

Then how do you preach the gospel to yourself? If you are not preaching the gospel to others because you don't know how, then how are you feeding your own soul with that same gospel? And the best way for you to preach the gospel to your neighbor is to become a master at preaching it to yourself in every domain, on the good days and on the bad days and on the in-between days, that my only hope in life and death is Christ alone.

We need to hear it again and again, that while we are still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. Even me and even you also, though we are each one of us somehow the chiefs of sinners. It's like the Lone Rangers.

We are the Lone Rangers of sin, that we are the chiefs of sinners, and yet we have a gospel to believe and to preach and to hear. Then we must preach this gospel to ourselves until we hear it, until we have understood it, until our souls soar to God with such assurance that our feet nearly lift from the ground.

The 18th century Scottish preacher Ralph Ernskine, he said, I love this, a rigid matter was the law, demanding brick without straw, but when the gospel tongue sings it, sorry, when the gospel tongue it sings, it bids me fly and gives me wings.

Why does a person fly? Why does a person get wings from preaching the gospel? Because when they receive the gospel, they realize it is well with my soul. Happy are those who embrace the gospel. There's a man named C .J. Mahaney, you've probably heard of him, he's a pastor and author, Sovereign Grace Church in the United States, and I love something that he says.

This kind of church that he talks about, I want this to be our church. He says, we are a same thing church, a same thing church. What does it mean to be a same thing church? He says, if you come back next week, you're gonna be hearing the same thing, the same gospel every week, because our assurance depends on it, because our walk with God depends on it, because our power in life, our vitality in ministry, your strength as a husband or wife or parent or single person is dependent on it.

So we would do well, as Paul brings to remembrance before the Ephesians, to be reminded that we also heard the word of truth and the gospel of salvation, and we have believed and will believe. And I want to talk next about our seal, the seal of our assurance.

The Holy Spirit Seals Believers with Security, Ownership, and Authenticity

We were sealed, it says, with the promised Holy Spirit. Now what does it mean that we were sealed with with the promised Holy Spirit? Well to seal, to be sealed with the Holy Spirit, one commentator says, is an action that involves all three persons.

And our brother Sam and I were speaking about this just a few minutes ago, how it seems that the Trinity appears in this first 14 verses of Ephesians, in the Father having been adopted, in the Son having been redeemed, and in the Holy Spirit having been sealed.

And in a historical context, what would happen when someone would seal something is this, that they would place a maybe a dab of melted wax or some other material, and then with their own seal, the seal that belonged to them, they would stamp the wax.

It conveyed a number of things, and we see imagery of that in the New Testament, when we see that Christ went into the tomb, and after Christ went into the tomb, the Pharisees and the chief priests came to the Romans and they said, the disciples said that, or he said, he claimed he was going to raise, and we are concerned that the disciples are going to steal his body.

And so what did the Romans do? But they came and they sealed the tomb. Now when I was a new believer, I'm not sure what I thought, but I pictured somebody there with some kind of silicone sealing the tomb, you know, as if to close it up so that it's watertight, airtight.

I'm not sure that that is going to stop anything if you can move a gigantic boulder, but that is not the kind of sealing that it's talking about. But they would place, perhaps it was the wax seal with the Roman stamp, and with that seal came a myriad of messages.

That seal, having studied it more this week, reminding myself of what that seal signifies, is a number of things. That that seal signifies security. That by putting that seal on, the Romans are saying, it is secure.

If someone tampers with it, we will see the seal is broken. In Daniel 6 and verse 17, there was a similar situation where it says, and the stone was brought and laid on the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet ring, and with the signet of his Lord, that nothing might be changed concerning Daniel.

This is something that I wish that our brothers, John and Charles Wesley, understood. That when something is sealed, as we see in Daniel 6 and verse 17, it means that nothing might be changed. That it is secure.

That nothing might be changed with respect to those who have been sealed by the Holy Spirit. But it means more than just security. It means authenticity. When the Romans came, they didn't come with a seal that they bought off wish .com, that a hundred thousand people ordered last week.

That is the same thing. It comes in the same order with every person, but they came with their own seal. Their own authentic seal. A seal that, I didn't research this, but I'm sure there was great punishment if you tried to manufacture a seal that looked just like it.

It would be counterfeit. A counterfeit seal. And so it comes with the authenticity of the one doing the sealing. And here we see that God the Father sent not just a wax stamp, not a not a generic seal, but sent the Holy Spirit of God.

The third person of the Trinity. Authentically. To authenticate that not only are you secure in Christ, but you are authentically secure in Christ. Authentically protected from change. A seal also signified ownership.

That to put a seal on something meant that I own this item now. That if you touch this, that rock in the garden, that boulder in the garden, when Rome sealed it, they owned that rock. If you tamper with this, you are tampering with me.

And we see this in Jeremiah 32 10, where it says, I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses weighing the money on scales. Why would he seal it? Because he is paying for it, and in return it is his, and he is sealing it as his own.

But also it comes with authority. Security, authenticity, ownership, and authority. In Esther 8 8, it says, but you may write as you please with regard to the Jews in the name of the King and seal it with the King's ring.

For an edict written in the name of the King and sealed with the King's ring cannot be revoked. So when we have been sealed in the Holy Spirit, it means that we are we are unchangeably secure. That we have received an authentic seal in the in the Holy Spirit of God.

That we now belong to God as his possession, which we will look at in a moment. That we we are owned by him, and to mess with us is to mess with him. And it comes with the authority, not of the Roman powers that be, not with the Emperor, but with the living God.

And so Paul says, not only are we preaching the gospel to ourselves, but you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. Now that word promised, isn't it amazing? I don't know, maybe you have lost sight of this.

I know that I have more often than I would like to admit, but the fact that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit ought to blow our minds. We ought to erupt like the most violent volcano in the world. That the Lord has has sealed us with the promised Holy Spirit.

Something that people looked forward to for millennia. In Ezekiel 13 36 and verse 26, Ezekiel is speaking about the new covenant that the people would enjoy with their God. He says this, and I will give you a new heart and new spirit I will put within you and I will remove your heart of stone from your flesh and give you, sorry, remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

In Joel 2 28, a similar promise, and it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out again my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.

We saw how this was fulfilled in the book of Acts. We've been sealed, not with just anything, but with the Holy Spirit of God. And that sealing has not just been something on us, but something in us, that we now enjoy the indwelt spirit of God.

In John 14 through 16, I would encourage you this week, go home and read John 14 through 16 and ask yourself, is my relationship with the Holy Spirit, is it consistent with the reality that has been laid out in John 14 through 16?

In John 14, Jesus answering, he said, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him. Or in 1 Corinthians 13, sorry, 3 and verse 16, my apologies.

Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him, for God's temple is holy and you are that temple. Or one more, Romans 8 and 9, you however are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if in fact the spirit of God dwells in you.

And anyone who does not have the spirit of God does not belong to him. Now you will hear in charismatic circles, and I believe it has confused so many Christians, it has robbed them of their enjoyment of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

That there is, some charismatic groups will say, that there is a second blessing to be achieved and that is the baptism of the Holy Spirit that is distinct from conversion. I think of a criticism that has been leveled against John MacArthur when he did the strange fire conference.

There was one charismatic individual that said to him, I'll leave it there, one charismatic individual that said to him, he said, you have had a very faithful and fruitful ministry, it would be so much more fruitful if you had the Holy Spirit.

In light of what we just read in Romans 8 and 9, anyone who does not have the spirit of Christ does not belong to him. Brethren, my heart's desire, my prayer, I say that every week I think about something new, my heart's desire and prayer is that you would know that baptism of the Holy Spirit.

But if you are in Christ, that baptism of the Holy Spirit is not some future occasion that you are longing toward, looking for, working for, but simultaneous with your conversion, you were baptized with the Holy Spirit and that Holy Spirit came into you and if the Holy Spirit is not in you then you are not a Christian.

But if you are a Christian, then that Holy Spirit, he is in you and he is alive in you. One theologian writes about this, he says about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, it is a sovereign, single, hear this, unrepeatable act on God's part.

On God's part. You will see throughout Ephesians that the emphasis is always on God's part, on Christ's part. How many times have we read in him, in him, in him again, in him again. It is an unrepeatable act on God's part and no more an experience than its companion justification and adoption.

Although some wrongly view the baptism of the Spirit as the initiation into the ranks of the spiritual elite, he writes, nothing could be further from the truth. The purpose of the baptism of the Spirit is not to divide the body of Christ.

Can we agree on this? The purpose of the baptism of the Holy Spirit is not to divide the body of Christ. As if to say, you have been baptized with the Spirit, but you have not. But it is to unite the body of Christ.

So how then can we know that we've been sealed with the Holy Spirit? You can preach the gospel to yourselves all day long and you can find comfort in that, but if you read this passage and you say, but it accompanies the sealing of the Holy Spirit, how am I to know that I've been sealed with the Holy Spirit?

I think you need to know the answers to that question also. To be sealed with the Holy Spirit is not some type of emotional experience. It is not, as we often hear, we hear brothers and sisters who have radical conversion experiences, who, I think of one brother who, when he shared his gospel, I was encouraged by his gospel and at the same time weary that, as we went through, we were going through Indonesia, in areas that were very heavily influenced by the Charismatic Church, I was encouraged by his conversion, his testimony, and yet weary that I did not want people to believe that they had to have the same experience that he had in order to know that they are saved.

It is not crying all night, weeping at your bedside, coming to this experience where you experience the whole range of human emotions in a few hours. Nor is it breaking out in laughter, or rolling on the floor, or as some churches would necessitate, the speaking in tongues.

But what it is, is this. To be sealed with the Holy Spirit is, first of all, to have an experience of what I am calling Spirit-enabled conversion. That the Holy Spirit, John 16 and verse 8, let's turn there, let's go to John 16 and verse 8, because we're going to be in John here and there.