"The Word and the Spirit"

The great American preacher, Dwight L. Moody, was scheduled to launch an evangelistic campaign in England. Hearing of Moody's plans, an elderly English clergyman complained to a younger colleague, "Why do we need Mr. Moody to come here and preach to us? He's an uneducated former shoe-clerk--and he's an American, for goodness' sake! Who does Mr. Moody think he is, preaching to us? Does he fancy he has a monopoly on the Holy Spirit?"

"No," the younger pastor replied, "but the Holy Spirit seems to have a monopoly on Mr. Moody."

D. L. Moody himself once observed, "I believe that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride, selfishness, ambition, and everything that is contrary to God's law, the Holy Spirit will fill every corner of our hearts. But if we are full of pride, conceit, ambition, and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God. We must be emptied before we can be filled."

Many people today miss a simple but profound truth about the Holy Spirit, which we find in Ephesians 1: When we placed our trust in Jesus Christ, we were sealed by the Spirit, and our inheritance of God's riches was guaranteed. We already have all there is of the Holy Spirit. The issue that confronts us is: Does the Spirit have all there is of us?

The Word and the Spirit

As we return to Ephesians 1, we should remind ourselves that verse 13 and 14, dealing with the work and blessings of the Holy Spirit, are actually the closing phrases of a single sentence that begins in verse 3 and doesn't stop for a breath until verse 14. In the original Greek this one unbroken sentence in which Paul gathers up in a single vast statement all the tremendous themes which he will return again and again in his letter to the Ephesians.

This is the normal structure of Paul's letters—they begin with a summary which express the broad principles and then those principles are developed in detail. Paul wants us to see the forest and the trees, the broad sweep and the minute details, of God's truth for our lives.

In the past studies, we looked at the first and second aspects of God's threefold work -- the work and blessings of the Father and the Son. The Father chose us and called us before the creation of the world to be part of His family (vs. 3-6). The Father made a decision concerning us before the foundation of the world. Then the Son accomplished the Father's decision (vs. 7-12). He took our place on the cross and set us free from sin and death. Through Him, God's grace continues to be lavished upon us again and again. In Christ, God breaks down divisions, destroys the old, raises up the new, and brings all things into unity under the lordship of the Son.

Now, in verses 13 and 14, we come to the work of the Holy Spirit.

Notice two areas of emphasis that are always found together in Scripture--the Word and the Spirit. Both are absolutely essential. There is no salvation without both of these instruments of God's eternal purpose. It is always a mistake to emphasize one to the exclusion of the other.

Some groups and individuals emphasize the Spirit and ignore the Word. They say, "We don't need the Word. All we need is the Spirit within. All we need is to trust our feelings--the indwelling Spirit will lead us." This almost invariably leads to error and heresy as people drift away from the revealed truth of the Bible and into all sorts of confused, mystical, cultic views and practices, all in the guise of "following the Spirit within." Many a cult has begun with earnest, sincere believers who fell under the spell of a false messiah who claimed to speak for the Spirit of God, even while contradicting the clear teaching of the Word of God.

Yet, there is an equal danger in following the Word and rejecting the ministry of the Spirit. There are many churches that are orthodox in their adherence to the Word, but completely devoid of the freshness and vitality of the Spirit. In such churches, worship has become mechanical and perfunctory--a ritual that enshrines the form of the Word while denying its life-changing power. Such churches are orthodox to the core, but they are also sterile, dull, and lifeless. The result of emphasizing the Word to the exclusion of the Spirit is a kind of clenched-teeth piety in which the people resolve to do their "Christian duty" while demonstrating no motivation, satisfaction, love, or joy.

In Scripture you find the two together, the Word and the Spirit. The Spirit interprets the Word, and the Word becomes fresh and vital where the Spirit of God is present. Through the ministry of the Spirit, Jesus Christ steps out of the pages of the Bible and stands in our presence as a living, breathing, life-changing Man. By the light of the Spirit, we can see the Lord's face, we can touch His nail-pierced hands, we can hear His voice and sense His heartbeat. That is the job of the Spirit--to take the words of the pages of our Bible and make them come alive in our daily experience.

The Word of God identifies the Spirit and validates His voice within us. The Spirit of God would never urge us to violate the teaching of God's Word. So we can be assured that if some inner urging runs counter to God's Word, it does not come from the Holy Spirit. There are many spirits abroad today, many voices talking to us, many sources of information and ideas that bombard us daily. How do we know which of these voices and sources are true and which would lead us into error? The Word of God points to the true Holy Spirit, while detecting all false spirits. We must have together the Word and the Spirit for balance and sanity in our Christian lives.

The Three Essential Experiences of a Believer

Next, notice in verse 13 that there are three experiences Paul says every Christian should have in the course of the Christian faith: First, "you heard the word of truth;" second, you "believed" in Christ; and third, you "were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit."

Let's examine each of these experiences in closer detail:

1.   The "word of truth”.

Paul begins by saying, "You have heard the word of truth." The world in which Paul lived and wrote was a world like ours today--filled with all kinds of distorted ideas and godless philosophies. Then as now, there were many delusions and illusions abroad. The gospel is a return to reality, it is truth, the end of illusion. By hearing and receiving the Word of truth, we get back in touch with reality.

For example, the gospel describes the true condition of the human heart. It punctures our human denial, our false and self-deceptive desire to insist that there is nothing seriously wrong with the way we live, the sinful habits we tolerate, the wrongs we perpetrate. We all want to see ourselves as "good people," as being "okay." Sure, we sin and fail like everybody else, but we're really not so bad.

The gospel comes crashing into our denial, rubbing our noses in the fact that our condition is so bad, so desperate, that our sins literally nailed the Son of God to a cross! Our problem is so desperate that it is truly incurable, from a human perspective. We cannot save ourselves.

But the good news of the gospel is that God loves us, He hasn't forgotten us, and He has entered human life to share in our sorrow and pain. God, through the Son, has personally taken the penalty for our evil upon Himself. It is an impenetrable mystery, far beyond our imagining and our reasoning--but even though we cannot grasp it, we can accept it and receive God's pardon, deliverance, and freedom from bondage as God's own adopted children. That is "the word of truth" that we have received, the first essential experience of a believer--the gospel of salvation.

2.   Belief in Christ.

The second essential experience of the Christian, says Paul, is that we believed in Christ, we placed our trust in Him. "And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation," says verse 13. "Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit."

Belief is an essential prerequisite to a relationship with Jesus Christ. Paul stresses this fact: We must not only hear the word of truth, but we must also respond to it in faith. We must believe it. And to believe it means to accept it as truth, and to act accordingly. You haven’t believed unless something is changed in your experience. If you say that you believe something to be true, but you go on living in the old, unbelieving way, then you haven't really believed it. You are only kidding yourself. Belief results in change, in conforming yourself to the reality of what you believe.

What's more, our belief must be focused in a Person--the Lord Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul never lets us forget this. In the first fourteen verses of Ephesians, he mentions the Lord Jesus Christ fifteen times. He is constantly bringing Him before us because God wants to drive home this great fact--that we cannot experience blessing in our lives apart from a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

3.   Sealed by the Spirit.

The third essential experience of the believer is described by Paul with a rather strange phrase: "you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit." What does it mean to be sealed with the Spirit? This is undoubtedly a reference to the ancient practice of sealing letters or other official objects with sealing wax and impressing the wax with a raised seal worn on a ring, bearing an identifying image. The use of the seal always denotes two concepts: ownership and preservation.

The seal on the letter made it clear that the letter was owned by the individual who had sealed it. And the seal of the Holy Spirit makes it clear that the life that is sealed by Him belongs to God. As Paul says elsewhere in the New Testament, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price" (1 Corinthians 6:19-20); and, "The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children" (Romans 8:16). The Spirit who seals you is God's mark of ownership upon you.

Just as the seal on a letter preserved it from tampering, the Spirit's presence speaks of God's preserving seal upon our lives. We find this concept richly described for us when Paul writes, "Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession--to the praise of his glory." As Paul puts it here, God has guaranteed our inheritance by means of the Holy Spirit.

The New International Version renders Paul's concept of the Holy Spirit as "a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance." In Greek, the word deposit is arrhabon, which means "a down payment." If you've ever bought a car, you know what arrhabon is all about. You sign a paper and pay a down payment, a deposit, and that is the arrhabon, the guarantee that there is more to come. The presence of the Spirit in your life--the joy and the peace He gives--is the guarantee that there is more yet to come from God. The Spirit is the down payment on a much greater, fuller, richer experience of God than you have ever known before. The Holy Spirit is just the beginning of the blessings you will receive in Christ.

Paul goes on to say that this deposit or down payment guarantees our inheritance "until the redemption of those who are God's possession," as the NIV puts it. In the original Greek, this phrase is literally "until the redemption of the walk-around." Huh? Say that with me, “Huh?” It sounds strange to us, but the first century readers of Ephesians instantly understood this phrase as a reference to the custom of buying a piece of property and then going out and walking around it to symbolically establish your ownership rights. By walking around the property, you made it yours. It was a sign that the property was now in your name.

That is what Paul says God has done with us. It is not we who acquire God, but He who acquires us. He has made the down-payment on our lives, the Holy Spirit, and that preserves us as His possession until He returns to claim his purchased possession--your life and mine, which is now in His name.

When Paul talks of the "promised" Holy Spirit, he refers to the promise made to Abraham. Some 4000 years ago--2000 years before Paul's day--God told Abraham, "I will surely bless you . . . and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me" (Genesis 22:17-18). God was promising Abraham that all who would exercise the faith of Abraham would receive the Holy Spirit. And that promise has been fulfilled, because that is how you and I receive the Holy Spirit today--by faith. Paul makes this same point in Galatians 3:6-8 and 13-14:

Consider Abraham: "He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham. The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: "All nations will be blessed through you." . . . Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.

You don't have to plead with God to send the Holy Spirit. You don't have to wait and hope for a second experience after salvation. It is impossible to have salvation apart from the indwelling Spirit. The promised Spirit is received simply by faith in the Lord Jesus. The minute you believe in him, you receive all you will ever have of the Holy Spirit. As you grow and mature in your faith, becoming progressively more obedient in your walk with God, the Holy Spirit gains more and more of you.

To the praise of His glory

The Spirit is God's seal upon your life. He marks you and identifies you as His own. He guarantees that he will perform every word he has promised, until the moment you stand in God's presence, overwhelmed by all that God has done for you--to the praise of His glory.

That is a crucial phrase Paul uses at the end of verse 14--"to the praise of his glory"-- it is the third time Paul uses that phrase in the passage (cf. vs. 6, 12, 14). Each Person of the Trinity -- the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit -- accomplishes His work so perfectly that it always produces praise and glory. When we see the work and the blessings that each of the Persons of the Trinity has performed in our lives, we can't help but glorify God for all He has done.

We have been sealed by the Holy Spirit, who was promised to Abraham. Here is where we find our identity and our purpose in life. Here is where we find the power and resources to cope with the problems that come to us each day. This is not mere theological gobbledegook. These are practical truths that enable us to handle the difficulties, pressures, problems, stresses, uncertainties, and disappointments of living out our lives. Knowing that we are sealed and possessed by God is the greatest, most life-changing truth of our existence.

We should awake every morning and say to ourselves, "I am a child of God. I have been forgiven of my sins. I am accepted in God's family. He has marked me out as his own. He has put his Spirit within me, releasing in me the full life of the Lord Jesus Christ. All the power that Jesus Himself relied upon is now mine through the promised Holy Spirit. I am equipped to handle whatever comes today. I can take whatever life throws at me because I have the Spirit, and all the fullness of His life."

That is our identity. That is the truth which transforms our lives.