The Person and work of the Holy Spirit, Lesson 9 continued
JD McCulley · Jun 20, 2021
Holy Spirit (2021-23), No. 18
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261923164050

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Let's look at, I got through one question. That's like probably the worst job ever. Courtney has now been relieved of that title. I feel pretty good actually. Can't believe how long that verse was so rich. We just went forever and the verse was Ephesians 1 13 through 14 Somebody grabbed that again. Let's read it.

It'll get us into the next three questions at least If you don't mind Jim you're always there Russ is there pretty quick to I'll start timing you guys. Russ, you're breaking up. Thomas, who has given us a pledge of our inheritance. That's probably the most important part. Next week's prayer request is this faster internet for Russ. You broke up a little bit. I'm just going to repeat it. Thank you. Sorry about that.

In him you also trusted after those you heard the word of truth. I'm trying not to use the ye's and thus's and such. Heard the word of 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 purpose purchased by the possession unto the praise of His glory.

So, question number two is, what is the word used to show the divine mark that a believer belongs to God? What are we looking at here? seal what what would be the opposite of being sealed and sealed not sealed unsealed not sealed that's right so one of the questions is he gives us a promise of a seal How does that affect your day-to-day? Because there's a lot of people that feel like the Holy Spirit comes and goes, and there's a good portion of worship music that speaks to that. Come Holy Spirit, fall down on me, etc. etc. So, where are we with that?

What does this ultimately have to do with your daily life? uh... acknowledging christine you don't hope and glory it's okay there's definitely an acknowledgement piece to it for sure uh... yeah let's just mentioned uh... the idea of security verses uns uncertainty if you ever been uncertain about the holy spirit still upon your life in terms of a believer? This goes into a lot of different questions, but just keep it simple in terms of your thinking, but how certain are you of the sealing of the Holy Spirit?

Is it temporary? Can it be removed? These are things that believers deal with every day. J.D., I would think that one of the issues here is actually knowing that you were sealed. It's not a topic that's talked about very much. The sealing of the spirit is something done to you as a believer. I was talking to a guy this week, and that's the question he asked me.

He said, what do you do with doubts about your salvation? I'm pretty sure I'm saved, but the lack of scriptural understanding is one of the biggest barriers to settling down, because I think the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God to persuade us, and this is one of the places where the persuasion goes on. Yeah, I think you're right. One of the, I guess, exercises I've done over the course of trying to understand the Word of God and learning through these verses, if you look at these, a promise, what would God have to do to undo His promise?

So we've got the word promise. We've got the word earnest. What would be the opposite of that? What would he have to do to not be earnest of an inheritance? He has to take away our inheritance. He has to take away his promise. He has to take away his purchase and his possession and then remove the seal and then not be glorified by it. Right. That's a lot you have to undo.

And sometimes that's what people need to maybe hear is just what would have to be done that we never see in the scripture itself to remove all of those things. And you know, J.D., that presupposes that you know what all those things are. And I would dare say there are a lot of believers who are not Bible-based that don't know what that stuff is. They're basing their salvation on how they feel about it, rather than the facts of the Word about, as you just described, five or six things that are from God's perspective, here's what He has done, rather than how I feel about it.

Yeah, and I think that one of the other important parts of this deal of the Holy Spirit is what is it based upon? Yeah. Not just a promise, although that's true, but what is it based upon? A person. That's right. And who's that person? Jesus. The work of Christ, a person. That's right. And what did he do? That's right. He took care of the issue. All the way. Saw it all the way through. Number three, what is the first thing a saved soul gets?

Let's read 2 Corinthians 1.22. 2 Corinthians 1.22. Hey Cheryl. That's right. So what's the first thing? The seal. The seal. That's the first thing the saved soul gets. It's a guarantee. And that's maybe another word that we should start taking advantage of in terms of our understanding is that it's a guarantee that we now are saved and belong to who? We're part of the family. Now you're part of the family.

That's what 2 Corinthians 1.22 has to say.

Between Ephesians 1.13-14 and 2 Corinthians 1.22, if you've ever got kind of that question around eternal security, go back and read those verses. They are purchases. They are promises. They are seals. They're earnests of the Spirit to us based on the work of Christ. So those are really important parts of this lesson. Go ahead.

Well, J.D., one of the things, thinking about the verse ahead of that, and what I always have the basis is the identification, the co-crucifixion, and that being placed into Christ. The one verse before that, now he who establishes us with you in Christ and anointed us is God. So I think the sealing, the important part of the sealing is what are we sealed in? In Christ, yeah. In Christ. That's first. You know, it's great that we're sealed, but what are we sealed in? In Christ. And then the Colossians, we're hid in Christ, in God. That's what we're sealed in. And that's incredible. Boy, no, that's a really good point, Courtney. Yeah, being sealed in to a relationship is the most important piece of that. So it's not just having a promise, it's the promise of who we are sealed in, right? It's really key.

Does that have any historical, like the phrase sealed in, like a person sealed in, I mean, it sounds figurative in the English language, like we can think of a letter or a package or whatever that's sealed, but I was just thinking like the concept of inheritance is taken and applied to us as believers. Is this idea of being sealed in something as a person, is that, was there a use of that? Like historically that, or is it, or are we just kind of taking, are they just applying that concept from, uh, I don't know if that makes sense. Does that make any sense? Um, like, would there be like, like, would there have been a use historical use of that phrase for a person to be sealed in something? So we don't normally seal a person in something. I don't know. Or, or are they just taking the, the, that word, the use of that word, and making an application of it to a person in a figurative sense. Or is that? I don't know if I'm communicating my question very well. You are. Yeah, I think, I mean, we have the concept of, and maybe I'm not going to answer your question completely, and I'll let Mike or Courtney or whomever simmer on this a little bit too.

But it's an identification thing. it's hard to break apart all the things the Holy Spirit does at the point of belief, right? So we're looking at one little small part, and I say little, but I don't mean little by virtue of what it accomplished. It's very important, but we can't take away the rest of the things that are happening at that time.

So we've got regeneration, indwelling, baptism, sealing. We've got all these things that are going on. And they're happening in concert with one another. So to kind of pull apart them, it's helpful because we get a sense of what they are. And these verses really do touch on certain aspects of them individually. But we need to see them in whole.

And I think that the baptism portion that we've covered already is kind of the big part of, yes, there is a seal, but what happened, I mean, there was also the baptism portion that happened where you were immersed and identified, and you became something that you were not any longer. You have a new birth, and now the Holy Spirit comes in and upon the work of Christ seals you in that state, right? So there's all of these things that are happening at the same time and it's hard to break them down. I mean, this write-outs book is, I mean, to be able to write on something like this and break it down like he has, interesting so I'll leave it at that but I think that I don't know of a historical example of where you're sealed in a person but that's the uniqueness of the scripture I suppose here JD yep I think if you look at it from a contractual standpoint that God has made a contract with us with it through the covenant through the eternal covenant on the cross between he and his son and that if you become a man and die for the sins of the world, I will raise you up.

So that contract has been fulfilled. And now he's offered it freely to mankind. And you get the entire elements of the contract at the time in which you believe, but you haven't entered into all of it yet. It's like when you purchase something under contract and you put up earnest money. And you say that I guarantee by putting this up that I'm going to complete every element of this contract that I've entered into with you. So God's entered into a contract with us, and to earn us money is the Holy Spirit himself.

He guarantees that all the elements of the contract will be fulfilled. And so as you're describing the elements of salvation, all of the positional truth things that we know, the guarantee is not a cashier's check or based on your performance, it's based on the person and work of the Holy Spirit alone. He's the guarantee that the entire fulfillment of what He's promised will be done. And, you know, that's why he's so important as the earnest of the inheritance. Also, Rite Out says the Spirit comes in this way upon every believer, as the divine mark that he belongs to God.

And God is not going to unmark us. He's marked us. And in the same way, in Revelation, that the scroll was sealed, and no one was worthy to unseal that scroll except Jesus Christ himself. So, we belong to God, and the proof that we belong is His seal, His mark on us. So, you know, the seal is very important.

Another thing, the New American Standard says He gave us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge. That pledge is based on God's character. And God's character is holy and righteous and just. And if He pledges something, He's not going to renege on that pledge. So our salvation is secure because of that.

You know, on the Greeky-geeky stuff, the word for seal is generally set a seal or a mark upon a thing as a token of its authenticity or approveness. And then in this one, for the second Corinthian seal, the Christians who got a test and confirms by the gift of the Holy Spirit as the earnest pledge or seal of their election to salvation. So again, the mark, but it's a token of authenticity and approvingness. I thought that was good. The authenticity of God putting us into Christ. Absolutely. I like that word, too. The authenticness of it all. Well, I have a question. Yeah.

If I'm sitting and talking to a believer, who isn't sure of his salvation. Is it because the Holy Spirit didn't put that pledge in his heart or didn't persuade him? Or is it because either ignorance or his thought process is going against what he knows? I think the latter two. Ignorance or just refusal to believe it.

Yeah, I mean, ignorance maybe falls into the factor of you've been taught that you can lose it. I mean, we've got a lot of ways that mankind has chosen to shackle you to the pew. Mike's up by where the plaque is, the facts and the tracks and the whatever. Again, knowledge too, whether we call it ignorance or not.

The important fact is, Regardless of what we think or know, it's true. We can be misled, we can be not knowing, we can go in a different direction. But if we are in Christ, it's true of us. So the feelings or the facts or whatever, it still remains true that we're sealed forever in Christ by the Holy Spirit.

Yep. I think when believers stop reading the Bible or avoid the Word and fall out of fellowship, that the sin nature becomes stronger. in your daily life, and it starts convincing you that maybe you're not saved. And I know that I cling to the word for that very reason, you know, just to keep the truth washing me, because the sin nature is so strong. Yeah. I also think that's why you need fellowship with other believers. Well, and I think, Jimmy, you're talking about kind of the focus on the Word of God.

Once you lose that focus, you start looking at yourself, right? And that's where you start, that's where doubt starts to really creep, because what do you have, you know? And I'm not speaking directly to you in that sense, but what do I have? But when I start focusing on myself to do the living, I got nothing. And you start losing hope. You start getting frustrated. You start getting doubt.

There's a lot that goes on there. But like you said, when you're focused on the truths that we're talking about even here today, in terms of the seal and the commitment that the Lord has made to you, it changes your way of thinking about things. It really does. I mean, that's where faith is executed. unless you put it back on yourself. And that's where the sin nature can... just come right up and roar like a lion and get you right off track. Also, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. I think that's part of it. It's not an easy road all the time and the word of God is so critical and that's part of working it out, I think. Yeah, I agree. You know, JD? Yeah, hey Russ.

I was gonna mention My brother is going to the Catholic Church, and they teach in the Mass, they teach a gospel and Psalms or Old Testament. They won't really teach Paul's epistles. And he's taught that to believe, to say that I'm saved is the sin of presumption, that you cannot know you're saved. They're literally taught, you can't know that you've been sealed and placed in a place and that you're eternally secure. So, there's also a man-made teaching to keep you in the pews, like you were saying.

That's really interesting. Mike, you were kind of agreeing alongside those comments. Well, if you think about it, the Baptists kind of do the same thing with the perseverance of the saints. That you can't really know for sure that you're saved until you show up in heaven, you know? So how do you really know? And I think God's word is designed specifically to persuade us that we are sealed and secure and that we, you know, that there's a guarantee.

Yeah. Yeah. For me, JD, it was God put a hunger in my heart and that hunger just leads me to Him because I'm separated from this world. Thank God for the hunger, but between the acknowledgement and the receiving, It was years for me and it's something you grow into. Sure. And you know, there's all the failure of Adam, the old man, the believer has to go through.

Yeah. And God doesn't give in on this stuff. He's got a purpose for you. That's right, yep, I agree. Yeah, Mike, totally. So, as far as, we'll try not to take a real deep, long track down the eternal security side of things, but I do think it's a really important point to recognize those terms and what it would take God to reverse all of them. Because when you believe that you can lose your salvation, you're removing that seal in your mind, even though God doesn't remove it. and you're reversing every one of those words that we talked about. So I think it's worth noting that. Let's look at question number four in the last five minutes here.

Does Ephesians 4.30 tell us that by sinning we can grieve away the Holy Spirit?

So we need to read Ephesians 4.30.

Don't grieve the Holy Spirit by whom you were saved. You were sealed under the day of redemption. So what are we talking about here? Is grieving the same as losing? No. No. No. If you're sealed but yet you grieve the Holy Spirit, what does that look like?

Well, there's no fellowship. It's like the spirit hangs out in the corner and waits for us to learn. Yeah, it's actually really, that's a good way of saying it. Patient to no end, right? But yet here we do. Here we grieve. And who are we really grieving?

I mean, it says grieve not the Holy Spirit, but we're really taking it upon ourselves to try to do something that we're not equipped to do anymore because we've been given a new nature. And you put that nature aside and you said, I got this nature and I'm just going to give it a go.

You know, like put baby in the corner type thing, like you said, Mike. And it's great. But. Is that the same as. So, yeah, I just want to get onto this word about grief real quick, I've got a few more minutes, but How do you know you're grieving the Holy Spirit? What is it that happens in your life when you're like, oh, totally doing this? Conviction. Conviction? What happens in conviction? You get sweaty? you cry? I don't know. How does it work? Is it a heart thing? Is it a spiritual?

It's kind of like a lack of communication. If you think in the natural life, when a father and a son, when the son grieves the father, there's this limited communication going on until the relationships are worked back out. The son comes back and says, I'm sorry, Dad. I screwed up. And then everything's perfect again.

So it's almost like there's this lack of of fellowship and communication. Not so much maybe being in the corner, but the fellowship and communication seems to cease to exist. I think that's a really good way of putting it. We talk about relationship versus fellowship. I think that's the key for this verse is the fact that we never lose relationship with the person of the Holy Spirit, because he's part of the triunity of God. So we never lose a relationship there, but we block it with fellowship at times. And then, like you said, the communication factor It's null until your heart has a change of mind, if I can put it that way.

It sounds a little... But yeah, you have a change of mind about how you want to operate in terms of your faith. You don't lose it, but you're stuck in the sense of the grieving side of things. You're grieving the Holy Spirit. And hey, greeky geek back there in the corner, you can maybe look up grieve and tell us something more about it.

The interesting part of it, I was just looking up the verb tense. It's present, active, imperative. That's kind of depressing to me. Not, it's grieve not, yeah. Well, we're continuously doing that. The present is kind of the scary part, and active means we're doing it, and it's a fact. It's like, that's not very good.

We just jump over to confession, and that solves it all. Right. You know, I was listening to Macaulay one time, and he basically said, the trick is that we just have to believe that 1 John 1 9 is true. If God is perfect, there's no falseness to him. If he says we're cleansed of all unrighteousness, it's true, and we need to realize we're back in fellowship. Even though it seems bad, that that would be true, because it's just true, and we have to believe it.

Well, the cool thing about it is when you do confess, you can sense your conscience being clean before God. You get it all out in the open, and when your conscience is clean, the fellowship's there. So it's not only believing it, but you can experience it at the same time. Well, the interesting thing about the word confession, it means to say the same thing. So in confessing, what you're doing is reviewing everything that God says he's done. Not that you neglect telling him about your sins, but the point is that confession includes acknowledging that what God has told you is true. Yeah, saying the same thing is a really important portion of it. Well, guys, I'm out of time. Let me just say happy Father's Day to all you dads out there. Thank you.

Well, let's pray and we'll get moving on to the next session. Father, how we thank you for the seal that you've placed upon us, that you've purchased us and made a promise that cannot be reversed. Lord, while so many people are in fear of losing their salvation and not knowing where they stand before you, we can rest assured in your word that you love us with a kind of nature and character that is It's irreversible. And so we thank you for the truths of what we've learned today and just continue to pray for those that are struggling through various different things and that we have a great rest of our Father's Day. And ultimately, Lord, we thank you for you as our Father. You're so gracious and good and you love us so much. And so we just want to thank you for that. It's in your name we pray. Amen.