The Spirit Of Our Assurance

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April 7/2024 | Ephesians 1:13-14 | Expository Sermon by Shayne Poirier

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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.
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If you would, please turn with me in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 13.
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Ephesians 1 and verse 13. Today we will be looking at verses 13 and 14.
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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?
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Dear believer, does God want you to have a confident assertion of your right standing with God today, before eternity?
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If we were to look into your doctrine of salvation, what theologians call your soteriology, does
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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
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God want you to have a bold, confident assurance that you are saved and kept secure for all of eternity?
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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.
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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.
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I think of our brother who is in the law profession. Sworn affidavits, surety bonds.
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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.
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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
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Christianity, there is a characteristic lack of assurance in the hearts of people.
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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.
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Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Where will
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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.
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If we were to examine, for instance, the secular humanist perspective, we find that it offers no assurance.
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Voltaire, if you know that name Voltaire, he was one of the most prominent figures of the
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Enlightenment, an agnostic Enlightenment thinker. He once declared in these fatalistic words, he said,
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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.
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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
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Muslim neighbor of ours, and ask him, do you have assurance of God? Sorry, assurance of salvation.
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Almost certainly, he would say that he does not. But if he did, he would be doing better than Mohammed himself.
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In the Quran, and this you might want to write down, if ever you encounter a Muslim, in Surah 7, in verse 158,
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Mohammed confessed, by Allah, although I am the messenger of Allah, I know not what will happen to me, just like you.
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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.
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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.
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Translated, if you are amongst the 1 .2 billion Catholics in the world, and have a hearty, resolved, confident assertion of your salvation,
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Roman Catholic doctrine teaches that you are to be accursed. It is tantamount to preaching a different gospel.
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In that economy of salvation, such assurance is nothing more than sinful presumption.
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To be certain that you are right with God is to be wrong with God. And even in some
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Protestant Christian circles, the assurance that the human heart longs for is nowhere to be found.
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John Wesley. We've talked a lot about John Wesley over the last number of weeks. I'll mention him one more time.
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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.
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A Christian can be assured of their present standing in Christ, but that standing, at least according to Wesley, was subject to constant change.
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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.
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Because a believer could, on Sunday, be assured of their faith on that day.
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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.
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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
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Christ all of their lives long. Brethren, our souls, your soul, my soul, longs for certainty, and certainty before God.
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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?
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Or does God want us to live with a sense of suspense until our dying day?
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To keep us on our toes, to keep us holy, to keep us chasing after the prize.
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Does he want us to hang over the precipice? Well, I had us turn to Ephesians 1.
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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
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Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
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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.
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That the same God who sent his Son to die for our sins, the same
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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
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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.
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And I would suggest he's going to show us how to attain that confident assertion.
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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.
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Not just assurance of faith, but assurance of our salvation in the
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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.
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And so with our attention turned to Ephesians 1 verse 13, I want us first to look at the ground of our assurance.
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In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed.
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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.
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But this certainty, this assurance that we are all after does not appear out of thin air.
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It is not something that finds its basis in the storm -tossed swells of human emotion and subjective feeling.
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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.
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And this sincere faith must be firmly rooted in the soil of a spirit -enabled understanding of the gospel.
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Many professing Christians today lack assurance. And I say professing
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Christians because they have no assurance because they have no knowledge of the gospel.
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And they are Christians in name only. There might be some in this room that fall into that category.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Many of us have experienced this, like the tide, the rise of assurance, and then the descent of assurance.
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Maybe you're sitting here today and you're asking yourself, I don't even know if I am a genuine
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Christian. But I want to know. Or maybe you're sitting here and you're saying,
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I have believed in Christ, but I almost never feel assured that I am accepted in Christ and the beloved of God.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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And Paul answers the question to both people who are asking, am
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I truly saved? Or the scriptures say
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Whether Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, neat and tidy sinner or debauched and openly wretched sinner.
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And in our reading of this verse, we might read over those first few words. You also.
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I'm not sure how many of you even thought about that as we read it. In him, you also. Those seem, to some of us perhaps, like filler words.
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And as I was studying this, I thought to myself, I have filler words. You have filler words.
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But there is nothing in the Bible that is a filler word. Proverbs 30 in verse five says, in fact, every word of God proves true.
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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.
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The gospel comes to those who don't deserve the gospel. I want you to see this and understand this with me.
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Assurance, the certainty of assurance can even come to those who don't deserve assurance.
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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
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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.
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Are you sitting here going, I could never have assurance because I know who
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I am behind closed doors. I know who I am at work when I'm not amongst the saints. I know who
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I am in my private thought life. And here, what Paul is giving us, inspired by the
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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.
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It is a broad sowing of assurance, you could say.
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There is hope for each one of us. And this hope is rooted in something far greater than our awareness of our own unworthiness.
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There are some people who think that Christianity consists of knowing that we are unworthy.
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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.
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But they must keep going back again and again to cleanse the conscience once more because they know that they are unworthy.
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To have assurance of salvation needs to start at a sense of our own unworthiness.
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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.
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That they grasp the gospel of their salvation and they believe on Christ.
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This is the only way that we can be saved and experience true assurance.
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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.
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Now each one of us, we need to understand just how much we need to be students of the gospel.
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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.
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I had the blessing last week, our brother Sam, Scott and I sat at the kids table over here for the fellowship meal.
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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
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God? How do you know there is a God? And the children were being posed. It was excellent.
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It was informal catechizing. How do you know, Noah, if there is a God? How do you know,
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Elise, if there is a God? And we looked at each child and looked for that answer. And then by God's providence,
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I love God's good and strange providence. This week in our family worship, we reached a catechism question that asks exactly that question.
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And I thought, there's a part of me, the parent that wants to be really proud of my kids.
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It's probably not a good desire, but I really wish we would have done that catechism question before last week's conversation.
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But as we came to it, the question that is posed to the kids, this is the Baptist catechism from the
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Second London Baptist Confession. It asks, How may we know there is a God? And there's a song we sing.
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The light of the nature in man and the works of God fully proclaim there is a
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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.
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But the answer actually to this catechism goes a bit further. Does plainly declare there is a
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God, but it continues, but his word and spirit only do it fully and effectually for the salvation of sinners.
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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
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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.
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But it will never teach us what we need to know to believe on Jesus Christ as our substitutionary sacrifice for our sins.
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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.
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And dear friends, how often do we neglect that word of truth, that gospel of our salvation, and again, and again, and again renewed our faith in Christ?
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I'm convinced that the vast majority of people who have no assurance of salvation and yet so desperately desire it,
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I'm convinced almost entirely that the first remedy, the first prescription I'm going to give you when you come into the doctor's office is this.
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It's not saying Hail Marys. It's not offering confessions at the cathedral.
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It is this. I want you to preach the gospel to yourself. Every time you eat, preach the gospel to yourself.
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Not as a beating, but as a blessing. To feed your body, yes, and feed your soul with the gospel.
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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.
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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.
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We only have one child who can really imagine this vividly, so I'm going to direct it at you for a moment.
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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.
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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.
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That there is an asteroid, I couldn't believe it, but it is true and in five minutes this world will be gone.
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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?
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Would you go to your colleagues and say to them, well,
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I suppose this is a good time to tell you about my love for Tupperware. You would go,
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I hope, by God's grace and you would say to your colleagues, to your peers at school, to the people around you, there is 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,
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I would have you be ready to meet Him and to preach the gospel to them.
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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.
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It is the message that we must seek to master and to be mastered by, the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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So often, Christians speak about how they don't know how to share the gospel with their colleagues.
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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.
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And I've never said this, but perhaps this is the best way to put it. Then how do you preach the gospel to yourself?
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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?
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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
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Christ alone. We need to hear it again and again that while we are still sinners,
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Christ died for the ungodly. Even me and even you also, though we are, each one of us, somehow, the chiefs of sinners.
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It's like the lone rangers. We are the lone rangers of sin.
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That we are the chiefs of sinners. And yet, we have a gospel to believe and to preach and to hear.
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And 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.
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The 18th century Scottish preacher, Ralph Earnskyne, he said, I love this, a rigid matter was the law, demanding brick without straw.
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But when the gospel tongue sings it, sorry, when the gospel tongue, it sings, it bids me fly and gives me wings.
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Why does a person fly? Why does a person get wings from preaching the gospel?
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Because when they receive the gospel, they realize it is well with my soul.
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Happy are those who embrace the gospel. There's a man named
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C .J. Mahaney. You've probably heard of him. He's a pastor and author, Sovereign Grace Church in the United States.
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And I love something that he says. This kind of church that he talks about, I want this to be our church.
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He says, we are a same thing church. A same thing church.
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What does it mean to be a same thing church? He says, if you come back next week, you're going to be hearing the same thing.
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The same gospel. Every week. Because our assurance depends on it.
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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.
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So we would do well, as Paul brings to remembrance before the
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Ephesians, to be reminded that we also heard the word of truth and the gospel of salvation.
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And we have believed and will believe. And I want to talk next about our seal.
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The seal of our assurance. We were sealed, it says, with the promised
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Holy Spirit. Now what does it mean that we were sealed with the promised
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Holy Spirit? Well, to seal, to be sealed with the Holy Spirit, one commentator says, is an action that involves all three persons.
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And our brother Sam and I were speaking about this just a few minutes ago. How it seems that the
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Trinity appears in this first 14 verses of Ephesians in the
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Father having been adopted, in the
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Son having been redeemed, and in the Holy Spirit having been sealed.
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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.
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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.
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And after Christ went into the tomb, the Pharisees and the chief priests came to the Romans and they said, the disciples said, or he said, he claimed he was going to raise and we are concerned that the disciples are going to steal his body.
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And so what did the Romans do? They came and they sealed the tomb. Now when
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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, as if to close it up so that it's watertight, airtight.
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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.
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But that they would place, perhaps it was the wax seal with the Roman stamp.
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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.
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That that seal signifies security. That by putting that seal on, the
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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,
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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.
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This is something that I wish that our brothers, John and Charles Wesley, understood.
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That when something is sealed, as we see in Daniel 6 and verse 17, it means that nothing might be changed.
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That it is secure. That nothing might be changed with respect to those who have been sealed by the
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Holy Spirit. But it means more than just security. It means authenticity.
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When the Romans came, they didn't come with a seal that they bought off Wish .com,
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that 100 ,000 people ordered last week. It is the same thing.
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It comes in the same order with every person. But they came with their own seal.
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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.
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It would be counterfeit. A counterfeit seal. And so it comes with the authenticity of the one doing the sealing.
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And here we see that God the Father sent not just a wax stamp, not a generic seal, but sent the
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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.
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Authentically protected from change. A seal also signified ownership.
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That to put a seal on something meant that I own this item now. If you touch this, that rock in the garden, that boulder in the garden, when
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Rome sealed it, they owned that rock. If you tamper with this, you are tampering with me.
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And we see this in Jeremiah 32 .10, where it says, I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses weighing the money on scales.
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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.
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But also it comes with authority. Security, authenticity, ownership, and authority.
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In Esther 8 .8, it says, But you may write as you please with regard to the
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Jews in the name of the king, and seal it with the king's ring.
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For an edict written in the name of the king and sealed with the king's ring cannot be revoked.
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So when we have been sealed in the Holy Spirit, it means that we are unchangeably secure.
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That we have received an authentic seal in the Holy Spirit of God. That we now belong to God as His possession, which we will look at in a moment.
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That we are owned by Him. And to mess with us is to mess with Him.
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And it comes with the authority, not of the Roman powers that be.
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Not with the emperor, but with the living God. And so Paul says,
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Not only are we preaching the gospel to ourselves, but you are sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.
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Now that word promised, isn't it amazing? I don't know, maybe you have lost sight of this.
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I know that I have, more often than I would like to admit. But the fact that we are sealed with the
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Holy Spirit ought to blow our minds.
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We ought to erupt like the most violent volcano in the world. That the
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Lord has sealed us with the promised Holy Spirit.
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Something that people looked forward to for millennia. In Ezekiel 36 and verse 26, as Ezekiel was speaking about the new covenant that the people would enjoy with their
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God. He says this, And I will give you a new heart and new spirit
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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.
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And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
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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.
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Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions.
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We saw how this was fulfilled in the book of Acts. We've been sealed, not with just anything, but with the
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Holy Spirit of God. And that sealing has not just been something on us, but something in us.
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That we now enjoy the indwelt spirit of God. In John 14 -16.
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I would encourage you this week, go home and read John 14 -16 and ask yourself, is my relationship with the
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Holy Spirit, is it consistent with the reality that has been laid out in John 14 -16?
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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.
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Or in 1 Corinthians 13, sorry, 3 in verse 16, my apologies. Do you not know that you are
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God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys
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God's temple, God will destroy him, for God's temple is holy and you are that temple.
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Or, one more, Romans 8 -9. You however are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if in fact the spirit of God dwells in you.
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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
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Christians, it has robbed them of their enjoyment, of the indwelling of the
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Holy Spirit. That there is, some charismatic groups will say, that there is a second blessing to be achieved.
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And that is the baptism of the Holy Spirit that is distinct from conversion.
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I think of a criticism that has been leveled against John MacArthur when he did the strange fire conference.
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There was one charismatic individual that said to him, yeah,
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I'll leave it there. One charismatic individual that said to him, they said, you have had a very faithful and fruitful ministry.
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It would be so much more fruitful if you had the Holy Spirit.
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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.
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Brethren, my heart's desire, my prayer, I say that every week
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I think about something new. My heart's desire and prayer is that you would know that baptism of the
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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.
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But simultaneous with your conversion, you were baptized with the
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Holy Spirit. And that Holy Spirit came into you. And if the Holy Spirit is not in you, then you are not a
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Christian. But if you are a Christian, then that Holy Spirit, He is in you and He is alive in you.
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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.
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On God's part. You will see throughout Ephesians that the emphasis is always on God's part, on Christ's part.
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How many times have we read in Him, in Him, in Him again, in Him again.
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It is an unrepeatable act on God's part and no more an experience than its companion justification and adoption.
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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.
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The purpose of the baptism of the Spirit is not to divide the body of Christ. Can we agree on this?
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The purpose of the baptism of the Holy Spirit is not to divide the body of Christ.
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As if to say, you have been baptized with the Spirit, but you have not. But it is to unite the body of Christ.
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So how then can we know that we have been sealed with the Holy Spirit? You can preach the gospel to yourselves all day long and you can find comfort in that.
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But if you read this passage and you say, but it accompanies the sealing of the
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Holy Spirit, how am I to know that I have been sealed with the Holy Spirit? I think you need to know the answers to that question also.
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To be sealed with the Holy Spirit is not some type of emotional experience.
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It is not, as we often hear, we hear brothers and sisters who have radical conversion experiences.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Nor is it breaking out in laughter or rolling on the floor or as some churches would necessitate, the speaking in tongues.
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But what it is, is this. To be sealed with the Holy Spirit is first of all, to have an experience of what
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I am calling Spirit -enabled conversion. That the Holy Spirit, John 16, verse 8.
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Let's turn there. Let's go to John 16, verse 8 because we are going to be in John here and there.
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John 16, verse 8. As Christ is speaking about the ministry of the
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Holy Spirit and when He comes, He says, He will convict the world regarding sin and righteousness and judgment.
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This happens all to varying degrees. But one sure mark that you have had an experience of the sealing of the
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Holy Spirit is this. That you have experienced a conviction of your own sin.
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That I am undone. I think of the Philippian jailer on his knees with his sword ready to take his own life.
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And when he sees that the prisoners have not escaped, he says, What must I do to be saved?
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He had an awareness that he needed saving. And he was told,
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Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. A conviction of sin. A conviction of the righteousness of God.
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There was that song on the radio a number of years ago. What if God was one of us?
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Just a slob like one of us. That is not the articulation of a
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Christian perspective. But the Christian perspective articulates this.
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Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips. And I dwell amongst a man of unclean lips.
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It is to know that we are sinful and that He is righteous. And it is to be convicted even of the coming judgment.
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Whenever someone shares the story of their conversion, I look for these things.
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Did they experience conviction of sin? Or did they say, I went to a youth group rally and they asked everyone to come to the front.
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And all my friends went to the front. And so I did too. To be sealed by the
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Holy Spirit is to be convicted of this sin and of righteousness and of judgment.
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And to respond to that by faith in Christ. But it is more than that.
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To be filled with, to be sealed with the Holy Spirit necessitates a changed relationship with God.
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Romans 8 is one of my favorite chapters in all of Scripture. Romans 8 verse 15 says,
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For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry,
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Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.
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You might not have a fantastic conversion story. You might say, I was raised in a
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Christian family and as much as I can seem to view it, I don't remember being saved.
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I don't remember that day. I don't remember that prayer. Just that I know that I heard the gospel and I believed it.
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Let me ask you this then. Has your relationship with God changed?
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And is it marked as a relationship between a father and a son?
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Or a father and a daughter? Where God is no longer a distant judge that you give very little thought to.
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But has God, has
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He become your Father in the first person? When God's Spirit dwells within us, our hearts cry,
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Abba, Father. And He's no longer simply God. Just generic God. But He is my
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God. And He is my Father. He is my Lord.
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He becomes my greatest friend. My first love. The object of all of my dreams and affections and hopes.
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When God becomes my everything. That is a sign of the sealing of the
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Spirit. And sometimes when I describe this, even in my own heart
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I go, it still isn't what it needs to be. But by God's grace it is.
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It necessitates to be sealed with the Holy Spirit. A changed relationship with believers. It says in 1
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Corinthians 12, For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is in Christ.
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For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. Whether Jews or Greeks or slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one
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Spirit. I know I've told this story before, I'll share it again briefly. But when the
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Lord saved me, and I began to understand what it means to live a Spirit -filled life.
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I had my Bible. I remember going to church, and there was not a Bible study. If there was,
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I would have been there. But there was a choir practice. And I was at that choir practice with my Bible looking for fellowship.
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Looking for opportunities to open the Word of God with other Christians and to enjoy fellowship around His Word.
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To be sealed with the Holy Spirit. To be baptized by the Spirit into one body. It means that we don't just attend church.
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We don't just want to attend a church. We must belong to Christ's church.
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And not just in the universal sense, but we want to be with the people of God in a local church.
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To know and to be known. To love and to be loved. To long, just like we long for certainty.
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To long for the people of God to have fellowship with them. That our souls crave it.
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1 John, which was written that we might know that we have eternal life, speaks this over and over again.
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If anyone hates a brother or sister, he is not in the Lord. But if he loves a brother or sister in Christ, then that is evidence that he is in the
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Lord. It changes our relationship to the Word of God when we are sealed with the
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Holy Spirit. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance what
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I have just said to you. The Holy Spirit, albeit imperfectly in our unsanctified state, changes our relationship to this book.
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Do you want to know how much I thought about the Bible before the Lord saved me? And this is probably true of you too.
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Almost never. And yet, for some of you, for most of you
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I trust, when the Lord saved you, not only, you developed a new sense.
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Before the Lord saved you, all you needed to live, and this is evidence of the
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Lord's sealing in your heart. See this. See this for yourself. Before the
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Lord saved you, all you needed to live was food and water and air.
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But after the Lord has saved you, imagine for a moment what it would be to be locked in a cell with all the food and water and air that your heart desired.
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But the Word of God was on the other side of the bars and you could not reach it.
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And you could not read it. And you could not read about your God and read of the gospel that He has given us in this book.
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We love God's Word not because we're just dead religious people and this is what
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Christians should read, but we love God's Word because He has spoken to us and we have a whole new sense in our existence that yes,
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I need water and food and air but I need the Word of God more.
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And it changes our relationship with sin. And let me relay this very imperfectly.
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When the Holy Spirit dwells in a man or woman, He brings about not only their conversion, not only their regeneration, which
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Titus 3 .5 speaks about, but He brings about what is often called initial sanctification.
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That is that the believer goes from living for this thing in life, the world, and my own pleasure, and my own sin, and all the things that will feed me in an instant, in a 180.
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Maybe sometimes it feels more like a 120. But it is a turn to all that which pleases
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God. And even when we do wrong, when we sin, our conscience testifies against us, not because we think we're going to get in trouble, but because we know that we have grieved the
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Holy Spirit of God that has been put within us. Before, you were sealed with the
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Holy Spirit. You sinned and you sinned boldly. But now that you've been sealed with the
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Holy Spirit, He has given you an innate desire to please
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Him, to walk with Him. In 1
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Corinthians 6, And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the
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Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. There's a brilliant story that demonstrates this from the journals or one of the biographies on H .A.
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Ironside that there was a group of men attending a conference and after the teaching was done, you know how this works sometimes, especially in, this story would not work very well in egalitarian circles,
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I will say this. In complementarian circles, we get this. This is how it works.
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But after the conference was over, after the teaching was over, the men and the women were together and the women said, it's time to prepare the meal.
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And the women left to prepare the meal, leaving the men alone to converse.
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And as the men were sitting there, one of the men said, he said, well now that the women have left us,
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I have a great story that I would love to tell all of you. And you know how this is.
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This is a juicy morsel. Everybody is leaning in to hear, okay, what is this story that could not be told in the presence of the women.
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We want to hear this. And a friend of H .A. Ironside, he looked at the man squarely in his eyes and let me say, brothers and sisters, be this man, be this woman, if I can say it that way, in these circles.
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He looked at this man in his eyes and he said, just a minute, brother. There are no ladies here, but the
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Holy Spirit is here and he is far more fastidious, far more sensitive than the most fastidious lady.
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Is your story fit for him? And it was as if just a blanket of humility fell on the room.
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And the man who was about to tell the story said, thank you. I accept your reproof.
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I will never tell such a story again. That is evidence of the working of the
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Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians that even we are about to do stupid things.
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We do stupid and sinful things and yet when the reproof comes, we love
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God more than our sin and we are responsive to the reproof in all of this then with the gospel and with the spirit.
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In our final brief point, we see that we have the guarantee of our assurance.
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We're told, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory.
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Now there is some debate about what is meant here about the guarantee of our inheritance.
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If you have an ESV at least, you'll see there's a footnote. Mine's number four or down payment it says.
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Some say that it could be a pledge and what is a pledge? If you think of the story of Judah and Tamar, how he gave his, interestingly enough, his seal as a pledge but when he couldn't find her, he just let her have the seal.
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That could be what this means by the guarantee of our inheritance but the theologians think actually it means something far more than just a pledge.
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You can make a small pledge and like Judah and Tamar, you can say, well, didn't find him, gonna leave the pledge there.
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It is what it is. I'll get a new seal. But what most theologians think this is actually is this, culturally speaking, was a large payment that would constitute a significant portion of the whole.
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What it means is that when God gives us the Holy Spirit, this is why getting the Holy Spirit is so profound.
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He could have, and it would have been great to get just the Bible but he has given us his
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Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity dwelling within us.
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That is a larger sum than any down payment that has ever occurred in the history of the world.
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You find the biggest down payment and I will find you one that is infinitely greater in the
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Holy Spirit given to believers on this side of eternity. And it made me think, doesn't the
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Spirit empowered life? As we are living, we are with the saints, we are singing hymns.
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I think of one of the sweetest moments of my life being at Alex Malta's house.
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I think it was last, around last resurrection day, weekend. And for those of us who were there singing around the piano in Alex Malta's living room.
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And if you've never been there, oh, you must come to these where we might sing a few hymns and maybe it feels a little bit forced but then we sing more and then we sing more and eventually we start losing our voices and it is like a small taste of heaven.
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It is like this is what this is what eternity with God must be like.
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To sing until our voices are crackling and we have to just stop because we can't sing anymore.
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Do you want to know why it tastes like, it's a small taste of heaven? Because it is.
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Because it is. Because we have received a significant portion of the whole in that Holy Spirit.
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He has put a seal on us. He has given us His Spirit as a guarantee.
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Even we, even we might make in our own folly a $200 ,000 down payment on a $300 ,000 house and then walk away.
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But the immutable God who never changes, never will. The Lord wants us to have assurance.
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That is why He has given us His Holy Spirit and not something far less. That is why the third person of the
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Trinity dwells within us. Not so that we can go and say
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I don't know my standing before God. But so that we can say I have the
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Gospel. I have the Spirit. I have eternity. 1
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John 5 .13 Write these things. I write these things. He says to you who believe in the name of the
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Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.
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Assurance of salvation. While our salvation does not depend on it.
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It is not too much of a stretch to say that eternal salvation the assurance of that eternal salvation it belongs to you.
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It is like having some kind of medical device that can preserve your life and it's sitting there in the living room as someone is choking or dying and you don't use it.
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It belongs to you to be enjoyed. John 10 .27
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and 28 We prayed this prayer. My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me.
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I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand.
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Matthew Henry says the sanctifying and comforting influences of the
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Holy Spirit seal believers as the children of God and heirs of heaven. These are the first fruits of holy happiness.
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And he says this for this we were made. For this we were redeemed.
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This is the great design of God in all that he has done for us. Let us ascribe unto the praise of his glory.
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And that is the remainder of that verse. When we have assurance oh then we praise
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God best. And so the command is this go and get assurance that you might praise
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God better. That you might be more assured that your praises might be more concentrated more continuous more sanctified.
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God has given us this. So contrasting this reality of our assurance in Christ with what the world has like we started so we will finish.
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The closest disciple of Mohammed we will say the prophet
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Mohammed according to Islam he possessed no assurance that he would ever be saved.
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He is quoted as saying he said that if one of my feet was in heaven and the other side on the outside of it
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I still would not trust the ingenuity of Allah. That Allah might change his mind and cast him out for all of eternity based on his ingenuity.
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And so for this reason Abu Bakr was his name he received the nickname the weeping because everywhere he would go as he prayed his prayers he would go praying and weeping.
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But not for the reason that we might weep when we pray. When someone asked him why do you weep when you pray?
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He said every time I begin to pray I imagine Allah standing before me and the king of death behind me paradise on my right hand and hell on my left hand and I do not know what my
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God will do to me. That is not the
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Christian experience. The Christian experience has far more in common with I think
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John Owen's experience that in the last hours of his life on his deathbed he spoke faintly to his secretary who recorded his words some of you know the first half of this story you'll remember this from about almost exactly two years ago.
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As he was dictating this letter to his friend he said I am yet in the land of the living but and he stopped himself he said no no stop alter that right
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I am in the land of the dying but I will soon be in the land of the living and then on another in another deathbed letter oh that we could be as productive as this on our deathbed maybe that's what you should ask for when you are on your deathbed say bring someone who will read the
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Bible to me bring someone who will pray with me and bring someone an amanuensis who will write my dying thoughts to all of my friends that they might be strengthened in life he said
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I am going to him whom my soul hath loved and rather hath loved me with an everlasting love which is the whole ground of my consolation and then pressing his friend he said live and pray and wait patiently and do not despair the promise stands invincible that he will never leave nor forsake thee that is the way we should die and that is the way we should live let's pray we pray that you have been blessed by this recording