There isn’t much that’s guaranteed in this life. We’re not guaranteed health, wealth or prosperity this side of Heaven. In the blink of an eye our health can fail. In a split second, someone we dearly love can become deathly ill. There’s no guarantee that the paycheck we’re working for today will be there tomorrow. We’re not guaranteed to succeed in marriage, vocation or education.
Every one of us has experienced or will experience the pain and confusion of failing health. Every one of us from the wealthiest person to the poorest person understands what it’s like to face a shortfall of wealth. Some of us face that shortage of wealth more often than others. But the truth is that we all face it.
And we’ve all tasted the pain and confusion of failed plans in marriage and relationships and in our jobs and life goals. There isn’t much that’s guaranteed in this life. And in fact, sometimes it seems like we’re guaranteed more pain and hardship and suffering than anything else right?
When the wheels fall off the bus we long for a guarantee that things will get better. When our plans fail, when our dreams get crushed, when we learn that our expectations haven’t been met, we dream of new ways to guarantee success in the future.
When a loved one dies or when we get seriously sick we try to find new ways of guaranteeing prolonged health. When we lose our jobs we look for guaranteed job security. When that marriage fails or when we learn that we’ve entered into a relationship prematurely we try to establish a guarantee that the new relationship will work out in the future.
When a storm rolls through and destroys our home or when the car breaks down on the highway we hope our insurance will provide what it guaranteed to provide. When our friends hurt us we enter into future friendships a little more timidly while looking for some guarantee that our new friend won’t hurt us. Every one of us longs for the security and assurance of a guarantee.
When we hire a contractor to build our dream home we ask for his signature on the plans so that we have a guarantee for his present and future labor. When we put a down payment on a new home or a new automobile we’re sealing a deal that guarantees that we will obtain that new possession in the near future.
When we order something online we pay the purchase price for it, we enter our address for the delivery guy and we wait for the confirmation email so we can count the days until the deliveryman shows up at the door with our highly anticipated item.
So we live in a world that doesn’t offer much in terms of guarantees that we can trust but we work diligently to organize our lives in ways that give us the strongest sense of guaranteed assurance. And this deep desire for guaranteed assurance in our lives is really an echo of the truth we’ll study today in our passage. Let’s look at it together…
Ephesians 1:11 – 14…
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.
Here’s a video with a reading of the text we just read…
The simple truth of this passage is that we are guaranteed that God has signed the plan of our salvation; he has sealed our redemption with the promise of the Holy Spirit; and he will deliver us to the doorstep of his mansion in Heaven where there is no more pain, no more tears, no more heartache, no more sin and no more brokenness. You and I are simply guaranteed that God has signed the plan and he has sealed us with a promise and he will deliver us completely.
Guarantee #1: God Has Signed Your Plan… (11-12)
Signatures don’t always hold the power we wish they would. We sign our marriage licenses signifying that we’ve taken our vows to our spouses seriously and then we experience the pain of divorce sometimes because of our spouse’s failure to be faithful or our own failure to be faithful.
We sign documents for a loan and we make the commitment to make the payments faithfully until some disaster hits or we get negligent and default on our plan to pay the money back. The bottom line is that we struggle to trust the guarantee of other people’s signatures and our own signatures because of unfaithfulness.
But the good news from this passage is that our salvation is guaranteed because God, who is faithful, signed the plan with Christ’s blood before the foundations of the earth were laid. Paul says that “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.” Paul is simply saying that we have the guarantee of God’s signature on our plan of salvation.
If our salvation was dependent upon our own signature we would be doomed from the start. The plans we make sometimes end in failure because we are broken and we struggle with following through on our commitments. We struggle with faithfulness.
But again, that’s the good news of this passage. Our inheritance (eternal life with God) is a result of the truth that if we have heard the gospel and believed the gospel then we’ve heard it and believed it because God, who is faithful, made a plan for us to hear it and believe it.
The phrase “having been predestined” simply means “God pre-planned” our salvation. He planned to rescue us through the shed blood of Christ at the cross and the purpose of that plan was to take all of our failures and all of our suffering and work them out for our good and for his glory.
God’s will (or decision) before the foundation of the earth was laid, was to draw us who have believed in Christ to the hope of the guarantee of Christ so that we would become people who praise God in all of his glory. What glory would God get from making a plan that depended on our unfaithful signatures?
God made this plan for our salvation and he signed it in the blood of his son Jesus that washes away our sins so that we could live with the reassurance and guarantee of our salvation. This truth is difficult for me to believe at times. But it’s a truth that I need to hear and believe over and over and over again.
When my plans fail I need to remember and believe that God’s plans never fail. When I struggle with sin I need to remember that God signed my plan of adoption with his son’s blood and nothing can erase his signature that declares that I am his.
When I experience the hopelessness of suffering in this life I need to remember that God has signed the plan of my redemption. I now have hope in the life to come with him in Heaven. I no longer need to live in fear of what I may suffer, lose or gain in this life because, I am guaranteed that God has signed my salvation plan and he has sealed me with a promise and he will deliver me completely.
Guarantee #2: God Has Sealed You With A Promise… (13)
When I was a young boy my grandma would send me packages of Christmas gifts in the mail and she always taped up the boxes really well to guarantee that the contents would stay safely inside until they were delivered. And to top off her ruthless duct tape job she would place stickers all over the seams as tiny little seals to ensure that no one had gotten into the box when I received it. In a way these tiny little sticker seals guaranteed the promise of unbroken gifts.
This is exactly what God has done with each and every one of us who has become a Christian. God has sealed you (if you are a believer) with the presence of his very own Spirit. This is why Paul says that, “In him [in Christ] you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promise of the Holy Spirit.” In other words, when you became a believer you were guaranteed that God would seal you with the promise of the presence of his very own Spirit.
The Christians in Ephesus would definitely question whether or not they were actually Christians and if they didn’t, the people around them definitely would. Ephesus was known to be a city that was full of perversion and wickedness and the people that Paul is writing to, were being saved out of that culture into a brand new life of following Jesus.
So what we need to hear the most from God is that he doesn’t break promises because he is faithful and his seal ensures that we will one day come into Heaven, preserved by the work of the Spirit in us. If you are a Christian, you will come into the Father’s perfect presence unbroken on the day of redemption. In the gift of salvation or new life God has sealed you with the proof of his promise, which is the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Think about this for a minute. How do you know if you are saved? What guarantee do you have? How can you rest assured that God has saved you? Paul’s answer is that we can know we are saved if we have the seal of the Holy Spirit just like my grandma’s stickers on my box full of Christmas gifts.
In other words, the presence of the Holy Spirit is the proof of your salvation because the Holy Spirit is the seal that protects you and preserves you until the day you are delivered into your Father’s presence in Heaven.
But how do you know if the Holy Spirit is present in your life? What’s the proof? According to Paul, we can know that we’ve been sealed by the promise of the Spirit of God if we “hear the word of truth, the gospel of [our] salvation, and [if we] have believed in him”. In other words, you can rest assured or be guaranteed that the Spirit of God is present in your life if you are convicted of your sin when you hear the truth of the gospel and if you turn in repentance from your sin as you trust or believe in the work of Christ at the cross to remove your sin and change your life.
Conviction, belief and change are the supernatural proofs of the seal of the Holy Spirit in your life. All throughout the gospels and in some portions of the Old Testament, God promised to send his Spirit to take up residence in his children. And on the Day of Pentecost in the book of Acts the Spirit of God came in some very miraculous and breathtaking ways. And my charismatic or Pentecostal friends would say that the proof of God’s Spirit abiding in a believer’s life is partly proven by the gift of tongues.
But I think the truth according to this passage (as well as passages in the book of Acts) is that if someone has received the promised seal of the Holy Spirit it is proven in the physical realm by their authentic repentance, which leads into a transformed life. This is exactly what happened on the day of Pentecost when 3,000 people were added to the church. They were convicted of their sin, they believed the gospel and they’re lives were radically changed.
In other words, if you’re wondering whether or not you’ve been saved and sealed by the Holy Spirit then look for the physical proof or physical evidence of the Holy Spirit working in your life. And the best way to discern whether or not the Spirit of God is at work in you is to look and see if you are convicted of sin and if you are responding to that conviction by believing the gospel in repentance and if your life is radically different from yesterday.
We’ve all experienced the pain and the suffering of broken promises. And truth be told, we’ve all broken a few promises too. When life gets tough we promise God we will shape up if he gets us out of this mess. And then when life straightens out we sometimes go right back to our sin because of our struggle with faithfulness.
But the good news of this passage is that God’s promises are true and trustworthy because he is faithful. We cannot bargain our way into the presence of God and we cannot purchase our own redemption. Our redemption is guaranteed because God has sealed us with the promise of the Holy Spirit who convicts us of sin, empowers our repentance and causes our transformation.
I need to hear this truth especially when I’m struggling to overcome a sinful pattern in my life. I need to hear this truth when I play outside the boundaries of the safety of God’s laws and someone corrects me. I need to hear this truth when I’m struggling with the hard work of obedience to God. I need to hear this truth when my growth process is slower than I wanted it to be. I need to hear this truth when I am struggling to be faithful.
I need to be reminded that God has guaranteed that he has sealed me with the promise of the presence of his Spirit and that I am held secure in the love of Christ by the faithfulness of God himself. I am sealed for the day of redemption when my Heavenly Father receives me into his perfect loving presence.
And not only that, but when the Spirit of God convicts me of my sin, he’s doing this so that he can help me to trust in Christ as I turn away from my sin in repentance and because of his work (not mine) in me I am becoming a new person.
I am not who I once was. I will come out the other side of this broken life as an unbroken person into eternal life with God in Heaven. I am guaranteed that God has signed my salvation plan and he has sealed me with a promise and he will deliver me completely.
Guarantee #3: God Will Deliver You Completely… (13-14)
We struggle with the effects of sin in this life. Relationships are broken, our loved ones die and we struggle with health issues. But our complete redemption (freedom from the brokenness of this life) is guaranteed because God has promised to deliver us into his own possession at the doorstep of his mansion in Heaven.
This is why Paul says that we can be assured by, “…the promised Holy Spirit, [who] is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory”. In other words, God guarantees that he will completely redeem us and set us free as his own possession so that we can enjoy the riches of his presence in Heaven. And the proof that God has redeemed us is the down payment he made for us.
God chose to save us and Jesus paid the price of our salvation and the Spirit of God is the down payment that secures us until the day God takes total possession of us. This principle is very much like the down payment on a brand new house that secures it as my possession until the day I walk through the doors as the proud complete owner of that house. God will deliver us completely one day and His Spirit is the guarantee of this truth.
When pain knocks on your door… when loneliness seems as though it will overcome you… when your health fails… when your job security goes down the drain… when your marriage ends in painful divorce… when your battle with sin seems to overtake you… when your loved ones die or forsake you… you can rest assured in the guarantee that God has signed your salvation plan and he has sealed you with the promise of the Holy Spirit and he will deliver you completely on the day you run into Heaven.
If you are struggling to believe this today I pray this video will help.
Conclusion…
When suffering and sin knocks on your front door what you need is a guarantee that it will all be ok… a guarantee is what enables you to say, “It is well with my soul”. And in these moments… the only way you will be able to say that it is well with my soul is if you have the guarantee that God has signed your salvation plan and he has sealed you with the promise of the Holy Spirit and he will deliver you completely on the day you run into Heaven.
Don’t hear me wrong; your life won’t magically be better. You and I will struggle with the effects of sin as we suffer and cry out to God. And sometimes you will wonder if it is well with your soul. But in the midst of your pain and suffering and striving against sin you can hold onto this guarantee with everything you’ve got and you can be provoked by verses 12 and 14 where Paul says that God’s signature on your plan of salvation and his sealed promise of your redemption and your complete future deliverance should provoke you “to the praise of his glory”. You can praise God because he has guaranteed that you are signed, sealed and will be delivered.
If you have trusted in Christ then you are guaranteed that God has signed the plan of your salvation. If you have trusted in Christ then you are guaranteed that God has sealed your redemption with the promise of the presence of his Spirit. And if you have trusted in Christ then you are guaranteed that God will deliver you completely from the pain and the suffering of this life when he delivers you into his perfect presence at the doorstep of his mansion in Heaven.
You are guaranteed that God has signed the plan and sealed you with a promise and he will deliver you completely.