The Seal of the Holy Spirit
Notes
Transcript
In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
As we continue to look at the introduction to the book of Ephesians, we can see that Paul highlights the three persons of the Trinity in the work of our salvation. We have been chosen, predestined by God the Father to be His adopted children even before the foundation of the world. Then Jesus, the Son of God, redeemed us through His blood according to the riches of His grace. (He is our kinsman redeemer) We’ll talk more about grace for Easter service which is a wonderful message for both believers and non-believers alike so please invite your family and friends to either join us or watch our service. Finally in this section, we have the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit who is the seal that guarantees our glorious inheritance in Christ.
Two questions that we want to answer in this message:
What is the seal of the Holy Spirit?
How do you know personally if you have experienced this?
There has been some debate over the years regarding what the seal of the Holy Spirit is but virtually anyone who has experienced a profound renewal or a revival of the soul has defined it as an experience of the Spirit subsequent to your salvation that dramatically deepens your relationship with God and fills you with His power. Seals are not as common in our day and age but historically, seals were placed on documents and other personal possessions for a few reasons
To convey authenticity and authority. When you placed you personal seal on a document, it signified that this contract was authentic and not a forgery and whatever action needed to be taken according to the letter, you gave your authorization to confirm it.
A seal was used to convey ownership. This was a practice generally used for livestock or other possessions. You would brand your animal with the image of your seal and this would let everyone know that this property belonged to a particular person.
A seal could be used to secure items in a package or letter from being tampered with. This was used to dissuade corrupt messengers and other bad players from looking through your mail because if the seal was broken, the recipient would know that the contents had been breached and had been tampered with.
And we can see this idea of Christians being sealed by God in other notable passages:
Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true.
Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.”
This idea of the seal of the Spirit has huge ramifications on us as Christians. We are all messengers of God, our lives were meant to be His open letter to the world. Does your life authentically reflect the Word of God? Do you carry the authority of God as you serve and minister to others as Christ did? I know that when I am not filled by the Spirit, I feel like an impostor, that I am not authentic nor can I walk in His authority. I’m fearful of sharing the gospel and offending others. Which then begins to bleed into the question of who I belong to? (Remember what we learned about redemption in the last message. Redemption means that your life has been bought with the precious blood of Christ, you are no longer your own! Do you sense God’s ownership of your life?
Finally do you feel absolutely secure in God’s love for you? Do you feel like there is nothing that the enemy can do to tamper with you nor destroy the treasure that is within you even though you may feel like you are nothing more than a jar of clay? Last year was a reminder that even those who seem like the strongest Christians are not tamper-proof, we can all easily fall into the lies of the enemy and end up compromising the plain truths of Scripture or to fall away in our faith.
The questions that I asked are not easy to answer and reminds us that not only is the Christian life difficult, it is impossible without the power of the Holy Spirit at work in you!
This deeper work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer is often initiated with a powerful encounter that some would call the baptism of the Spirit or the seal of the Spirit. The great English pastor and theologian, Martyn Lloyd Jones, equates the seal of the Holy Spirit as being the same as the baptism of the Spirit. I don’t want to get into a theological discussions about terms and definitions. My greater concern is whether or not you have encountered the third person of the Trinity and that you know that His power is available to every Christian.
Many of the greatest evangelists, preachers, and theologians in the history of the church have testified to this deeply personal experience of the Spirit that changed the course of their lives, some times years after they made a confession of faith to follow Christ. The gap in time is not important, for some people it’s shorter in duration, for other’s its much longer in duration. This is not just a process of natural maturation, this is a supernatural encounter. The important thing is the experience itself. ( I’ve placed some quotes which I found to be encouraging in our outline but I’ll highlight Thomas Goodwin.)
Jonathan Edwards - “I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust and to be full of Christ alone; to love Him with a holy and pure love...”
DL Moody - “…it is almost too sacred an experience to name. I can only say that God revealed Himself to me, and I had such an experience of His love that I had to ask Him to stay His hand.” (We know that after this experience, Moody’s preaching caught fire)
Thomas Goodwin - “There is a light that comes and overpowers a man’s soul and assures him that God is his and he is God’s, and that God loved him from everlasting. It is a light beyond the light of ordinary faith.”
It should be noted that all of these Christian leaders described these profound encounters with God after their salvation and some of them were even pastors before they had these experiences. You can be a well-intentioned Christian without the sealing of the Holy Spirit but if you want the depth, power, intimacy, and the anointing of God on your life, you cannot do it without this secondary work of God’s Spirit upon your soul.
And this is exactly the point where I have found the greatest barriers in doing ministry here in Bay Area. There are many Christians that live out of their own strength, their own intellect, and their own capacities. Everything is well-thought out and processed and critiqued and although there is a place for these things, if it replaces or hinders the empowering presence of the Spirit, then you have lost far more than you have gained.
Then he said to me, “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.
What does it matter if our worship is musically flawless but it carries no anointing of the Spirit. If our preaching touches the intellect but it doesn’t have the power to shatter our hardened hearts. What difference does it make to do all this outreach but there is no salvation and deliverance for those in darkness. And the problem is, we think we can solve these area’s of weakness in our lives and in the church by planning better, by educating ourselves more, or through better strategy largely because it is hard to confess that maybe we are lacking the power of God within us.
In describing this secondary work of the Spirit, John Wesley writes something I think would irk most people here in the Bay Area, he says, “It is something immediate and direct, not the result of reflection or argumentation.” Christians leaders, like Wesley, were not anti-intellectuals but simply those who saw the limits of their own minds and came to fully understand that God’s ways are higher that our ways, his thoughts higher than our thoughts. In contrast, in our modern times we have to reflect on our reflecting, processing our process, and we have to rationalize everything we do and it robs us from seeking the one thing that might make a difference in our broken world, the fullness of God’s Spirit at work in the believer’s heart.
Now you might be asking, where do I find this phenomena in the Scriptures. Well, we find it in the book of Acts.
Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, for he had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit.
Phillip had gone to evangelize in Samaria and had brought many people to the Lord even baptizing them in His name but for some reason, the Holy Spirit had not fallen on them and so the Apostles, Peter and John had to go down and pray that these new Christians would be baptized in the Holy Spirit. This is actually a passage that wreaks our neat, boxed in theology about the Holy Spirit. After all how can anyone confess Jesus Christ as Savior even to the point of being baptized apart from the Holy Spirit? And the answer to that is you can’t come to Christ without the inner work of the Holy Spirit but often the Spirit is much quieter, even unnoticeable in the process of salvation. There is a gentleness to the Spirit and He doesn’t want to wreak your life from the very beginning of your walk with God because that might scare you off. But eventually He wants to take you into deeper waters!
In contrast, the sealing of the Spirit is the pronounced work of God’s Spirit in your soul that leaves you with no doubt of the depth of God’s love, the riches of His grace, and reality of eternal life with God. I love the way Martyn Lloyd Jones describes this experience:
“It is the biggest and the greatest experience which Christian can have in this world. It is faith elevated and raised up above its ordinary note and its ordinary reach. It is the electing love of God brought home to the soul.”
In a generation that always is out for bigger and better experiences, we neglect seeking the greatest experience, the very taste of heaven within our souls. This is an experience of God and a power that you cannot buy with all of your silver and gold, you cannot schedule it in your vacation days, you cannot fit it into your comfortable lives. When we think of the 120 disciples who waited to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, we assume that they had nothing better to do, they didn’t have children, they didn’t have worthwhile jobs like us, they didn’t have endless hours of netflix video’s to watch, and in their boredom they spent their time waiting on God’s Spirit? That is nothing more than our modern bias and our own prideful excuse, not to seek God while He might be found. Could it be that these early Christians, simply believed in the promise that Jesus made to them, “that not long from now, they would be clothed in power as you are baptized by the Spirit of the Lord.”
And people make so many excuses not to receive this doctrine because it’s uncomfortable for us because it causes us to look at the deadness of our spirits, the lack of fruit in our ministry, the absence of love and passion for the things of God. There two most common arguments that I’ve heard regarding this doctrine:
Well, what we see in Acts is a unique circumstance for the apostles. It’s a different dispensation altogether. We shouldn’t expect that same experience as they did. (Ironically these were the same excuses used by the church for generation not to evangelize and do mission.) And I would agree, God works in unique ways according to the times but can you honestly tell me that we should not seek more from God After all, Jesus is described as being able to give the Holy Spirit without measure.
Doesn’t this create two tiers of Christianity, those who have been sealed by the Spirit and those who haven’t. If it does, so be it because what I see in the Scriptures is God gives all believers an equal opportunity to seek the deeper work of the Holy Spirit. It’s not like He is withholding the Holy Spirit from some people and then randomly giving the Holy Spirit to others.
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
If you ask in faith, with a pure heart God will give the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks? Why would He not? Is it wrong for God to search the whole earth so that He can show His strength to those whose hearts are completely His?
For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him. You have done foolishly in this, for from now on you will have wars.”
As the book of James reminds us in regards to our prayers, we don’t have because we don’t ask or we ask with the wrong motives, so God doesn’t answer. It’s time for the church to start asking especially as we begin to emerge out of our dormancy and our slumber.
Let me share my personal experience of the first time I was aware that there was even such a thing as the baptism of the Spirit. I had been a Christian for about two years after a very powerful encounter with God that left me in tears for hours, I recieved Christ into my heart, was assured of the forgiveness of my sins, and had even been baptized in waater. You would think that that would have been enough to secure my devotion to God. But it wasn’t! About a year into my walk with God, I started to have doubts, old sinful ways crept back into my life, and I stepped away from the faith. To make a long story short, after about a year of backsliding, God convicted me to return back to church and the Spirit of God was really moving in that church, and the pastor at the time asked me if “I had been baptized in the Holy Spirit and do you have the gift of tongues as evidence?” He mentioned that this would help in my prayer life and draw me closer to God.
I was new believer at the time and I didn’t have my theology on the gift of tongues ironed out but what the pastor suggested seemed reasonable enough. So I set myself to pray for the gift of tongues and I did so for the next month and lo and behold, while praying in my room, I felt the presence of God in a way that I had not experienced before and I had this inexpressible joy that could not be contained by my own words. From that point on, God’s Word seemed to come alive, my prayer life was somehow different, and there was a greater sensitivity to His voice. I would later learn in my seminary classes and study of the Scriptures that speaking in tongues is not the only evidence of being baptized in the Spirit and may not even be conclusive since there are false manifestations of the gift. But even after correcting my theology on this subject, I was encouraged by the teaching of Vern Poythress, a Reformed theologian, who actually doesn’t believe that the gift of tongues exists today. But he does acknowledge that the act of seeking a deeper encounter with the Holy Spirit still produces good fruit:
“Through this the one who speaks in tongues learns of the biblical doctrine of the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in believers and is taught the power of the resurrected Christ who comes to dwell in him and gives him joy and victory in the Holy Spirit.”
What I learned from my own experience is that God is gracious to override bad theology regarding the work of the Holy Spirit just as long as we desire to seek Him with all of our hearts. (This is when people’s perfectionism can get in the way of the Holy Spirit’s work.) When John Wesley was questioned about some of the messiness of revival, he simply stated, “I would much rather have a wild fire, then no fire at all.” I say amen to that. I would much rather have the messines of the church of Acts than to have a powerless, lifeless, ineffective church!
Conclusion
In the Old Testament, Ezekiel the prophet has a vision of a river that begins as a trickle from God’s temple and he is led by angel down the path of the river which begins to grow deeper and deeper.
Going on eastward with a measuring line in his hand, the man measured a thousand cubits, and then led me through the water, and it was ankle-deep. Again he measured a thousand, and led me through the water, and it was knee-deep. Again he measured a thousand, and led me through the water, and it was waist-deep. Again he measured a thousand, and it was a river that I could not pass through, for the water had risen. It was deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be passed through. And he said to me, “Son of man, have you seen this?”
Then he led me back to the bank of the river.
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