You can turn your Bibles to Ephesians chapter one for our
time together tonight. And while you're turning there,
I want to admit to you I used to believe some things differently
about the Bible and about my Christian life than I do right
now. I grew up in a man.
I'm thankful I grew up in church.
I grew up in a place where I heard the Bible.
I believed in the fear of the Lord but I did not have a good
comprehension of that. I used to think that every time
I would sin, I had to get re saved again.
And this is a result of the teaching I had as a probably 8
or 10 year old asked questions about this and God answers like,
yes, if you sin and don't repent, you go to hell.
And there was a real life example in that church when I
grew up, a prominent person committed suicide and I asked,
hey, did they, they were in church for a long time.
Did they go to heaven or hell? And they said definitely hell.
And I was like, whoa, I mean, if that person's in hell, I mean,
there's no chance for me. And so I began to live my life
thinking that the next misstep was total condemnation.
And that eventually, in my teenage years, led me to say,
well, I'm just going to go have a good time.
It's all going to the same place.
This thing's going downhill fast.
And I just could never get caught up.
Or at least I'm going to go have fun for a while, and then I'll
repent later. And this is a distorted way of
thinking. This is not the gospel of the
Bible. I'm confessing this to you.
But we all have things that we believe that may not be true.
Do you have something like that? Have you ever felt this way that
what if I mess up like am I, am I going to go to hell or does
God still love me? Or is is he always dangling
something out in front of you? So today what we're going to see
in our last message in the gospel course is that you are
secure in the gospel. There is security in believing
the gospel. You can know for sure that you
are secure. So let's read.
If you're in the book of Ephesians, chapter one, verse 13
and 14, the Bible says in whom you also trusted.
After that you heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your
salvation, in whom also after that you believed, you were
sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of
our inheritance until the redemption of the purchase,
possession unto the praise of his glory.
That might seem like a bunch of jumbled up words, but we're
going to spend some time breaking it down to figure out
how the gospel gives us security.
But before we do, let's take just a moment and pray.
Let me lead us in a prayer. God, we come before your word
tonight and we ask for your wisdom.
Anything that good that comes out of our Bible study time is a
result of your Spirit teaching us.
And so tonight we give you permission to search us out,
show us if we're truly believing what's right and give us
security in the gospel. God change us that we would be a
people that invite others into that security that we have.
I pray in Christ's name, Amen. Well, if you're taking notes in
our time of Bible study, we're going to see that you are secure
in the gospel and we've got 3 reasons today why you're secure.
First is that you're secure in the gospel because of your
salvation. This is going to take all the
pressure off of you and any kind of works you maybe want to go
back to last week and you could see in Ephesians 28 and 9 that
it's not by works. This is going to take all the
pressure off of us. It's also going to take us back
to that moment whenever we heard and chose to believe the gospel.
There's a point in time that we gain this security.
So you you get this security. First you had to to hear when
you heard the gospel. It says in verse 13, Ephesians
chapter 1. After that you heard the word of
the truth. When you heard the word of the
truth. I love this place in the
Scripture. I go here regularly.
You've probably heard me cross reference it for what some would
call the Ordo salutis. What are the order of events for
a person to be born again? And this is the proper Ordo
salutis you hear you cannot be saved without hearing.
So hearing is the first step to believing.
If if we are unsure in our faith, we can go back to at
least having an open ear to what does the Bible say?
What is that Jesus thing? Romans 10/17 says faith comes by
hearing. This is why when we're
evangelizing, we have a tract. We're trying to get the Word of
God out into people's hearts and lives, letting it do the work to
produce faith in them or give them something to put faith in.
But you know as well as I do that sitting in a room doesn't
mean that you actually heard what was said.
Maybe you're like me and you can remember sitting in church, I
was a young boy writing like stick figure pictures and
drawing things and playing games with the person beside me.
Or when I was older, I was in church falling asleep.
So just hearing the message is not what saves you.
Jesus says you have to have ears to hear.
And we're trying to discern this when we're sharing the gospel
with other people. We're not just trying to thrust
it upon people that don't want it.
We're trying to discern how open is this person.
I'm looking for people that have ears to hear.
Could I share this with you? It doesn't mean they'll be
saved, but they at least need to hear it.
So for you, do you remember? Do you remember when you heard
the gospel is clarified for us, the death, burial and
resurrection of Jesus and when we put our faith in him, we're
saved from our sins. Do you remember when you heard
that? I honestly cuz I grew up in
church, I struggled to find the first time that I heard that.
But I know there was a time when I would say I had ears to hear,
to actually hear what it said, what it meant.
And I decided then I chose to believe.
You can't believe in something that you don't hear or
understand. So we had to choose to believe
if we're talking about security, that we're secure in the Gospel,
there's words in verse 13 like trusted and believed.
And if you're going to talk about relationships, like if we
have a relationship with God, trust is a big deal in
relationships. Is it not belief?
Like I believe you when you say you're going to, that's a really
big deal for a relationship. And this is the kind of faith
that we need to have in the gospel to be able to be saved.
So let me give you some definitions for these words.
First, trust is to place confidence in.
It's to say like I can lean on this thing.
I know that it's there. It is reliable.
So trust, trust in God means it's not on you.
This is how we gain real security in the gospel is that
we know it's not about my actions.
I have decided to put my reliance in something that's not
me. This is a kind of saving faith.
The word belief is also used. I don't know if I have a
definition for you, but I I put it to there's the blank for you.
Belief in the gospel is all that's required.
You have to acknowledge that it's true and then decide to
place your faith in it. I think I have the slide in
here. Let's see.
Nope, belief. Belief is a persuasion of the
truth. Noah Webster, that basically
wrote the English Dictionary, would say that belief is opposed
to knowledge. They're not the same thing.
I can know a lot of things. That doesn't mean I'm relying
upon them. And honestly, belief does not
mean something is true. We all believe things we
probably shouldn't. We can believe a lie, right?
I can put my reliance and my trust into something to say this
is how I'm making decisions and that thing not be true.
I have an old friend who would always say we make every
decision in our life based on what we believe to be true, and
if it's not based on the truth, we're going to not have great
outcomes for our life. Can you think of any kind of lie
that you might believe like I'll never be good enough, I'll never
get it done. There's no way God could ever
love me. There's no way.
The gospel is that simple. Saving faith requires that we
put our trust in what verse 13 calls the word of the truth.
I'm choosing to not just know something, but to act upon it as
if it is true. And that's what's required.
We see in the Bible, Abraham all the way back to the book of
Genesis believed God, and that's what God said.
I got you. He gave him righteousness
because he simply believed what God said.
We Fast forward all the way to Jesus's time in the book of John
and he says whosoever believeth should not perish but have
eternal life. This is what's required.
It's not action, it's not religion, it's not endurance.
That's why your security, it's based on your salvation.
And whenever you do this, when you hear the gospel and you
choose to believe it, then you're actually saved.
Like that's actually what happens.
You can rest for sure. Verse 13 in Ephesians, one says
the gospel of your salvation, the good news, and it is the
best news. There is no better news.
We may at times have to remind ourselves of that, but there is
no better news that Jesus paid it all.
All to him I owe. I'm no longer left trying to
keep up with my sin debt. It's all been totally paid for.
Romans 10 says it's so simple that whoever calls in the name
of the Lord would be saved. Ephesians 289 as we saw last
week. For by grace are you saved
through faith. This is that saving faith to
place your belief in the Bible. It when you do that, man,
there's a radical change that happens.
I know that for the last five or six weeks I've been saying
basically the same things over and over 30 different passages,
but it's so important that we get like our hands absolutely
around how this works. We believe and then we receive,
and you're secure in the gospel because God gives you His
Spirit. You hear, you believe, and you
receive. That's what Ephesians chapter 2,
chapter one, verse 13. You were sealed with that Holy
Spirit of promise. You were sealed with that Holy
Spirit of promise. So you were sealed.
Let's talk about this word. You were sealed with that Holy
Spirit of promise. This is another word that's
going to give us incredible security of what happened
whenever we chose to believe in the gospel.
You know, it's a seal like a seal.
No, you not know who that is. That's a seal.
OK, well, you know that seal. But no, not, not that kind of
seal like a well, that's a different kind of seal.
You know, let me just show you from the Bible.
I think I have it in your notes, an example of a seal protecting
from tampering. So that's what the seal does.
It it closes something up, it seals it within.
And this is what happens when you choose to believe God seals
you up. He's the one that does that.
It's not something that we're keeping the seal going.
It's not like back in the day whenever I used to live a lost
man's life and we would be partying and drinking things we
shouldn't. We, we used to call it breaking
the seal whenever you have to use the bathroom for the first
time. It's not like that.
It's not a thing that you get to choose to break the seal, right?
This is a seal that God's sets upon you like a seal of
security. You know that you feel really
safe. It's for your protection, no.
Here's maybe a more practical example that if you ever order
something from Uber Eats, I think even Little Caesars does
this now. They put a little seal over the
thing to say nobody has tampered with this particular thing,
right? And if you actually go online,
you can find examples of Uber Eats drivers that have put
poison and other things in people's food.
So we're glad when we understand that the seal is there to
protect things from tampering. And this is what happened.
The Bible uses this word for Jesus.
When they made the sepulchre, sure, they sealed the stone
instead of wash. This is so that they could
ensure that he was really dead and going to stay in the grave.
They wanted to authorize it in some way.
So I don't know exactly what it looked like, but in some way
they, they put something over the tomb that they would know if
it's been tampered with. And this is what God does for us
when we're saved. He, he protects us from
tampering. You're not going to be
possessed. You're not going to be taken to
hell. You're not going to be
overtaken. He made a change in you.
But this is there's also another use, I put it in your notes as
well, of a seal that validates from a royal source, like a seal
of approval or I've got these seals keep showing up in my
notes. Maybe more like the seal of a
king. No, I don't know where these
seals keep coming from. I don't know who was messing
with my slides, but maybe another Bible example, right.
The book of Esther says for the writing, which is written in the
King's name and sealed with the King's ring.
May no man reverse. This is another kind of seal
that the king would put wax on something and he would have a
signet that he would press upon it and it would be the seal of
his authority. Like this is a legitimately
signed document instead of a forgery.
This is what God does for us. He seals us up and he puts his
authority, his divine royal source on us and says you're
mine. So you are secure in the gospel
because God gives you his Holy Spirit, and that's a job of the
Holy Spirit. It is to seal you and reveal to
you that you are God's, you're his, you're sealed up.
He also has promised you. He sealed you and He promised
you. Verse 13 says the Holy Spirit is
called the Holy Spirit of promise.
Now this, this is an interesting phrase, the Holy Spirit of
promise. So a promise is I, I grew up in
church and there was this thing back in the probably the 90s
called promise keepers where men and fathers and sons would go to
these conferences about how to be better men to keep their
promises and stuff. But you know what a promise is
right? Whenever you're like, no, I'm
really, really, really good for my word.
Like trust me, I promise you, and it's supposed to be a
declaration or assurance that one will do or will refrain from
doing something specified. So if I promise you that I'm
going to do this, then I'm I'm going to come through.
Or if I promise you that I'm going to stop doing that, then
for sure, like I'm going to stop doing that.
That's how we use the word promise.
And the Bible uses this word for the Holy Spirit.
He's the Holy Spirit of promise. Check this out y'all.
God keeps his promises. I think that is your next blank.
God keeps all of his promises. When he makes a promise, it is
based on the truth. Galatians also uses the same
phrase to say that we might receive the promise of the
Spirit through faith. So the way we receive the Holy
Spirit is when we hear the gospel and we believe, then we
receive and it is by faith. It's not by wafting the air or
works or baptism. We're trying to be a super
Christian. You receive the Spirit when
you're born again. If you want to look into that,
Romans chapter 8 is a great place to go to help you figure
out, am I saved? Am I not saved?
What is the Holy Spirit's role in my life?
Particularly Romans 8 and verse 9 will say that if you don't
have the Holy Spirit, you're not saved.
So you either are or you aren't. And if you are saved, God makes
a promise to you. He keeps all of His promises.
In fact, He has promised to us eternal life.
So how could God promise eternal life to those that would believe
and then dangle it in front of you to say, we'll see if you
measure up to where you can get that.
That's that's not how the gospel works.
We are secure because we can trust God for his promises.
My security isn't based on how I feel You, you ever do that?
Do you ever make your decisions based on how you feel?
I can speak from experience this weekend that that does not work
out very well. Our feelings are not always
true. So if you're born again, if you
trusted the gospel, you have the Holy Spirit.
Whether you feel like it or not, whether you're listening to
Maverick City or you're here in our worship experience, the Holy
Spirit is with you. You're also secure in the gospel
because of his purchase. There was a purchase that was
made at the time that you were saved.
There was a transaction. Read verse 14 in Ephesians
chapter one, it says which is the earnest of our inheritance
until the redemption of the purchased possession unto the
praise of His glory. And if you read Ephesians
chapter one, there is some dense language.
There's a lot of really good stuff in there.
So we're going to take some time to break this down, but we see
that there is this earnest of the inheritance.
God did something, He did something to purchase us at what
time He sealed us with his Spirit and first he made a down
payment. God made a down payment on you.
This might sound strange, so let me explain.
In verse 14, the Bible uses the word earnest in earnest.
It's not a word that you probably use everyday.
You could say I'm doing it earnestly, like with a lot of
effort, but here it's not a verb.
It is the earnest of our inheritance.
And so I want to explain. And earnest is that which is in
advance and gives promise of something to come.
That is why I called it a down payment.
That's probably the way we would say it today.
God says here, I'm giving you this, but I'm coming back for
more. I'm not done.
We we would use this in the sense of like buying a house.
This is the favoritest house I've ever lived in.
In 2017, that's when I moved to Cartersville, GA and I was
terrified to buy a home. I never had a mortgage before.
There's bang. He's 1.
Watson is inside of Amber right there in that picture.
And to buy this house, I think I only had to give like $400.00 in
earnest money. Maybe it was 1000, but it wasn't
much because I'd never done this before.
And I was like, it's, that's all you want.
I don't, I don't understand. But the earnest money you place
down to say, I'm interested, don't give it to anybody else.
But I have time, 30 days to do due diligence and ensure that
we're actually going to follow through with a contractual
obligation. So I put like 400 down on a
house that is worth way more than $400.00.
And this is how the earnest works for us.
He says, I I'm, I'm securing a deposit in you for me with this
house. It wasn't eternal because in
2024 we left this house and we moved to to Oregon.
Well, we kind of lived around for a while and we came to
Oregon, but you can see my family expanded.
I've got three sons now and man, life changes and we move on.
So welcome to my story. But that's the earnest.
That's how it works. You place a down payment to say,
I'm coming for this, secure it for me.
And God does that for us. The earnest of our inheritance
is the Holy Spirit. A good idea for Bible study is
that we corroborate multiple witnesses.
The Bible says in in two or three words, let every witness
be established. And so this same phrase is used
in the book of Second Corinthians where it says
basically the same thing that God has sealed us and given us
the earnest of the spirit in our hearts.
I already told you that I've I'm obviously using Webster a lot
tonight with definitions, but Webster said in a non
definition, he said it this way. This sense of the word is
primary denoting that that which goes before or in advance.
Check this out you you want to get your definitions from a guy
who would say something like this about the word.
Thus the earnest of the Spirit is given to Saints as a pledge
or assurance of their future enjoyment of God's presence in
favor Don't go to the modern Webster by the way, the modern
ones overtaken with new definitions, but this is the guy
who assimilated all of the many much of the vocabulary that we
have and he was a believer. He would use that or say that of
the of the word earnest. So God makes a down payment.
He says I'm coming for you and then he is coming to redeem it.
He will be there to redeem what he calls in verse 14, the
purchased possession. Now in most cases we probably
don't want to consider ourselves a purchased possession, right?
That feels a little like maybe we wouldn't like that, but in
the sense of the gospel, if you're looking for security with
who I am, am I saved? To know that you have been
purchased says I got an owner, somebody owns me, this isn't me.
Somebody else has taken ownership, but the purchase
possession has not been fully redeemed.
You are saved and sealed with the Spirit.
But we await a day that we would call glorification where we
actually see the Lord in the air.
I think about this. I don't have any pictures of
this because this was pre smartphone.
But I used to work at GameStop and I don't have a single photo
of my my time working game at GameStop.
That's when I met my wife. There was a Co worker that I had
that she also worked at Lowe's. And our, those Co workers were
married and they said, let's put these two people together.
And we met on a blind date while I was working at GameStop.
But in that world, we would have to sell video games, right?
And this is before you just download everything.
You'd have to go buy a disk. And it was my job to get people
to buy things, right? And so we would, we would track
numbers, we were tracked on how many pre-orders we would get,
like the new call of whatever is coming out.
And so we need to sell more of it.
Because if you put $5 down at my store, you're not going to just
go to Walmart and buy it later when it actually comes out
because you know, it's $5 off at my store because you already put
the $5 down. This is how pre-orders work.
On the day of the release though, you get the purchased
possession. The pre-order just signifies I,
I have one waiting for me and this is our relationship with
God. You are purchased.
There's a receipt. There was a transaction made and
God gave you the Spirit that says I'm coming, you're mine.
First John chapter 3, actually turn your Bible to 1st John
chapter 3. Let's read the whole verse first
John chapter 3 and verse 2. Beloved now are we the sons of
God and it does not yet appear what we shall be.
So if you're born again today, the Bible calls you a son of
God. You can say daughter of God, but
the Bible uses the the word son. It says we do not.
It does not yet appear what we shall be, meaning we shall be
something there is a future that we can't fully see yet.
We haven't been totally redeemed, but it goes on to say,
but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him,
for we shall see Him as He is. You have this hope, and this is
the hope that Ephesians is talking about when it says the
redemption of the purchase possession is the day whenever
you get to see Him face to face. And this might be strange to
think about, but the Bible says that we will put on immortality.
You duly, upon your right, will be given immortality because of
your faith in the gospel. So if you forgot this, you're
going to live forever. Did you guys forget that?
I mean, how many times do we forget that I'm going to live
forever? It's not always going to be like
this. I won't always suffer.
God is with me and it's going to be even better.
Whatever's after this doesn't compare.
That's what Paul said. I can't even compare life now to
life, what it's going to be like for eternity with Jesus.
So you have security because of your decision to believe the
gospel. You have security because God
has sealed you and given his Spirit that says, I promise you
have security, that you have a future that yet awaits you when
you're totally redeemed from the transaction that's already been
made. So how could we of all people
forget that? How could we go back to trying
to keep everything together because we think it's on us?
For me, honestly, when I was being discipled, it took me
about two years to fully accept this.
It was just ingrained in me from my childhood or just the way
that I thought about it, and it was hard for me to come to what
we commonly call now eternal security.
The fact that when you're saved, you're going to stay saved.
There's nothing that can separate.
Go read Romans chapter 8 before today.
Let's take a moment and settle ourselves down for where we are.
I would say it's probably safe that everyone in this room is a
believer tonight, but maybe there were some of those things
that we believe that aren't true.
What have you been basing your decisions off of?
Has it been your security in Christ?
Have you been listening to the Holy Spirit that's in you?
He's with you. He isn't going away.
Maybe you've forgotten about the hope of heaven.
We get distracted, focused on things that are right now.
How about for us as a church, six weeks of me just going over
the gospel with you. How are we going to steward it
better? Could you imagine sharing the
gospel with somebody and saying, hey, why don't you come get
saved and come believe this really thing, hard thing that I
feel like I can't even do very well.
Yes, come and wonder if you're saved too.
How ridiculous. We ought to be evangelizing out
of a heart that says, I have security, I have the Holy
Spirit, I know God, I have a future, I have a home in heaven.
What if our church were full of people like that?
When people came in the room, they just feel like, I don't
know, these people are really confident that God is good,
they're going to heaven, they're saved, and man, they do.
This thing is wonderful. Wouldn't that be like an
infectious audience to be in? So let's pray that God makes us
this kind of people, that people can come in, they can waver,
they can wander, and we can give them confidence.
Have you believed the truth? Can I show you the truth and
what it'll do to change you? Let's take a moment and pray,
Lord, we come before you tonight and we're thankful.
That song that Jay brought before us, this is more than I
deserve. None of us deserve to be saved,
to be secure. But You're so good that you died
for sinners, and because we believed, you made an
unchangeable change in US. God, would you help us to make
every decision in our life based on what is true in Your Word?
Would you help us to listen to Your Spirit inside of us that
reminds us that we're yours? Would you remind us of the hope
that we have to see You on that glorious and fateful day when we
put on immortality? And would you make our church a
place that you can trust, that you can bring people and we will
represent you well and walk in the Spirit and point people to
the solution? God, I pray that this time would
just dramatically affect us, that when we go out and
evangelize, that we would just recall to memory the things
we've learned throughout this time.
We'd be more equipped and more effective because we believe it
ourselves and we live it out. I pray in Christ stand.
Amen.