How are we doing? Church. Are you guys doing good this morning? All right. Well, it's a joy to be with you guys. My name is Ian. I'm one of the pastors here. Uh, I hope that if you took your kids trick or treating last night, that you also took the opportunity to teach them about taxation, and you were able to keep a little bit for yourself. Um, we, we teach that in my household. That's all I know. All right. Uh, but I hope you guys are ready to go this morning. We are back in our Ephesians study. Uh, we've been in for a little bit and we're going to be in it for quite a while longer. And so we're excited to be in this book together, but we're about halfway through Ephesians chapter one. And for the last three weeks, we've been in a part of Ephesians one that is just one long run on sentence. And so from Ephesians one, verse three, all the way through our text in verse fourteen this morning, it is just one long sentence that Paul is giving out. It's an overflow of his praise to God for the blessings of God. And we see that all the way from verse thirteen or verse three, all the way through verse fourteen. It's this overflow of praise to God for the blessings of God. And there's many things to be thankful for. There's a lot to praise God for in these verses. If you're to go back, starting in verse three, here are some of the wonderful blessings that we see from God in these verses says that we're blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. In verse three it says, we're chosen by God in verse four, adopted to God in verse five, blessed again in verse six, redeemed and forgiven in verse seven. We've had grace lavished upon us in verse eight have had the mystery of God's will made known to us. In verse nine. We've been united to Christ in verse ten and have an inheritance in verse eleven. Those are great blessings, right? Yet you should be more excited than that for the For like, these are great blessings that we have in Christ. These are beautiful blessings that Paul is just thanking God for. Blessings galore. But how do you know you'll get these blessings? These are great blessings, to be sure. How do you know you're going to receive them? How do you know you're going to partake in them? What's your confidence in that? Where does your confidence in that come from? And when I think about confidence, I think about two ditches that people can fall into. On one side of the ditch, you have like an ungrounded or an unfounded confidence. And I'd say these are people who it's like, man, I grew up going to church. I know the things. I prayed a prayer with my mom when I was five on her kitchen counter. But I have no fruit that I've been saved. I have no fruit. That I've been given a new heart. There's nothing about my life that is different because I'm a follower of Jesus than if I actually didn't follow Jesus at all. And there's an unfounded confidence in these blessings to come to you. But then I think there's the other side of the ditch. And I think there's unnecessary doubters, people who it's like, man, I am a Christian, but I just don't know. AM I going to stay that way? I believe in God, but man, I'm not as far along as I want to be. I don't know all the stuff that I want to know. I still struggle with sin and I don't want to struggle with it anymore. I'm just like, join the club, right? And you have one side that is unfounded confidence that you'll receive these blessings. Then the other side, that's unnecessary doubt. But where where should we find our confidence. Where should we find our confidence that we will receive these blessings? How can you be certain of these things? And maybe your answer is, well, I'm a Christian, so I get these blessings, present and future of being a Christian. And that's great. But how do you know you're going to stay that way? How do you know you're going to stay a Christian? How do you know you'll wake up tomorrow still a Christian? How do you know you'll wake up in ten, fifteen, twenty years? Still a follower of Jesus? How do you know that? You'll wake up on the day you take your last breath, still following Christ. Where is your confidence? Church. This morning I want us to have confidence in the right place of all these blessings. I want us to have confidence that we will receive these blessings. Yes, but I want us to have confidence for the right reasons. I want us to have rightly founded confidence in the right place. Because when you have confidence in the wrong things, it's foolish. It's unstable. But when you have confidence in the right place, it leads to a confidence that's unshakable, that nothing can change. And as Paul closes out this run on sentence in verses thirteen and fourteen, we're going to see the confidence that we have. If you are in Christ, you're going to see the confidence that you have, that you will remain in Christ, that you will remain a follower of Jesus, that you will get these blessings. And so let's read these verses together. This is Ephesians one thirteen and fourteen. It says 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. These two verses are packed with beautiful truths. They're packed with the reality of who we are, how we became that way, and how we know we're going to stay a Christian. And so this morning, as we go through these verses, slowly, as we kind of walk through it bit by bit, I want you to be encouraged, and I want you to have confidence in the right place. And so we're going to go back through and we're going to just work through this kind of bit by bit and see where our confidence lies. So let's start back at verse thirteen. We're going to make it four whole words into it. All right. In him, you also, we want to pause here because we see a couple of phrases that are important for us to know. First one is in him, in him, or in Christ has been repeated around six times in these several verses. And so we start to see the importance of what Paul is talking about. Paul wants his people to know. He wants the people that are reading this letter to know that how important it is that you are in Christ. How important it is that you have been saved, that these blessings that he has just been talking about for all these verses only matter if you are in Christ. And church, we need to be reminded often that our blessing is tied only to being in Christ. Then you'll notice the next two words. You also. You also. If you remember from last week, Danny looked at verses eleven and twelve and as we unpacked verses eleven and twelve, we saw who Paul was writing to, who he was talking about. He says in him we. You'll notice the word we instead of you. In verse thirteen, we have. We in verse eleven says, In him we have obtained an inheritance, having 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. So in the previous two verses Paul is talking about we. And he says, and the we that he is talking about is the first who are to hope in Christ. He's talking about Jewish Christians. Those who were the first to hope in Christ as the Messiah. He's saying the Jewish Christians. They are to the praise of the glory of God. They are the ones to receive this inheritance. And that's really good news. If you're a Jewish Christian, if you're not a Jewish Christian, you might get to those verses and be like, what about me? Like, do I have any of this blessing? Do I have any of this inheritance? And so then in verse thirteen, when Paul says, in him you also post talking and turning his attention to the Gentile believers, saying you also get this inheritance. You also are looped into the blessing of God because this is an amazing reality that these blessings, this inheritance isn't just for the Jewish Christians. It's not just for the people who have historically been God's people since Abraham and now continue to be God's people through Christ. This is an inheritance that's for all of God's people, all of those who would come to faith. All of those who belong to Jesus. We see this amazing mystery more in chapter two. But what we ultimately see is that it's in Christ that there has been broken down the hostility between Jew and Gentile. Paul writes of something similar in Colossians three. When he says this, he says, do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. So he's essentially saying, hey, you're in Christ, stop doing these things and do these things. And he's saying, here or in Christ, there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free. But Christ is all and is in all. Paul, showing the beautiful reality that Gentile believers are brought into the same family of God, that they're brought in to the same blessings. Guys, these two words. You also should blow our minds because they're written about us too. It should blow our minds that God's promise and blessing given to Israel is now ours in Christ Jesus. It should completely blow our minds. So Paul is making sure the Ephesian Gentiles know that they're looped into this blessing. They're brought into this blessing of God. And then Paul is going to say, why? Because of their salvation. Paul is going to go into their salvation because understanding salvation is vital to having confidence. Understanding salvation is vital to your confidence in your salvation. It's vital to your confidence in the future that awaits you. And so let's understand the salvation that we have, the salvation that Paul is wanting to make sure that they have a clear understanding of. Look again at all of verse thirteen. It says, 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. Paul reminds them of their salvation. He reminds them of what happened that they heard, that they believed and that they were sealed. And so the the main verb in this verse is sealed, that they were sealed. That's the main thing that Paul is getting at. But he's saying these other two aspects you heard and believed. They serve the purpose of the sealing. They're about the sealing that happens. And so let's go through and let's make sure we understand the salvation that Paul is pointing to here. He says that they heard the word of truth, or you could translate it a little bit more literally. There is an article before the word truth in the Greek New Testament, and so you could translate it a little more literally the word of the truth in him. You also, when you heard the word of the truth. And so just a quick quiz. Who is Paul talking about here? Sunday school answer. Come on guys. Jesus. Because who is the word? Jesus. John one fourteen. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. That's Jesus who is the truth. Jesus. John fourteen six. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. So Paul is wanting them to remember what they heard and what they heard was Jesus. They heard the truth about who he is. They heard the truth of his message that there is no way to get reconciled back to God except through Christ. They heard the truth about Jesus and to double down on this, his next phrase here is the gospel of your salvation. So they heard the word of the truth, the message of Jesus, which is the gospel of their salvation, the good news that there is salvation offered to them. It's good news because it's salvation. And salvation from what? Salvation from sin and the wrath of God. Up in verse seven it says that in him we have redemption through his blood. That word redemption is this idea of being released by payment. So we have been released by payment through the blood of Christ, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace. We've been saved from our sin. We've been saved from the penalty of our sin. We've been given forgiveness. We've been redeemed. That's what we've been saved from. We've been saved from our sin. Bought with the blood of Christ. But it's not just what we have been saved from, but who we have been saved to. Paul talks about this a lot, but we see it explicitly in Romans five, verses nine through eleven where it says, since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. So we see what we're saved from. We're saved from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more. Now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. That word reconcile pops up several times in those couple of verses, pointing us to the beautiful reality that our salvation isn't just that we're saved from something. We are. We're saved from sin. We're saved from our trespasses. We're saved from the wrath of God because of our sin, but we're also saved to someone. We're saved to God. We're reconciled to him. We have union with him again. We are bought with the blood of Christ to be saved from our sin and be reconciled to our God. Church. And that is good news And that should be beautiful to us every single time we hear it. And if ever gets to a point where it's not beautiful to us, that's a problem with us that we've grown calloused and hard to the reality of the good news that we have been saved from our sin and to our God. And if you're in this room this morning and you're not a follower of Jesus, if you're not a Christian, this is what's held out to you. This is what you need to hear. You need to hear the word of the truth. The truth about who Jesus is, that he is the way, the truth, and the life. You need to hear the message of your salvation. The gospel of your salvation is that you can be saved from your sin and brought back into into a reconciled relationship with God Almighty. If you're not a Christian, you need to hear that you are separated from God by your sin. But God, because of his great love, has made a way for you to become right with him again. Has made a way for your sins to be forgiven. Has made a way for you to be reconciled to him. That's the message of the gospel, the good news of the gospel of your salvation. That there is a way to be made right with God. And you need to hear that this morning. But it's not good enough to just hear the word of the truth. You need to believe it. And that's what Paul moves on to next. He says, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation and believed in him, you believed in it. You believed in Jesus. You believed in the blood of Jesus to be the only thing that can redeem you from your sin to reconcile you back to God. You need to not just hear the message of the truth. You need to believe it. And we've talked about this before, but it's not just an intellectual knowledge. It's a true belief. There's a kind of belief that doesn't save you, that isn't a right response to the gospel. And we see these warnings in James chapter two. You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe and shudder. We see that when Jesus casts out demons in the Gospels, that there's times where the demons pronounce who God, who Jesus is, that he is the Son of God. So the demons know the truth about who Jesus is, but it doesn't save them. Jesus also warns in Matthew seven twenty one through twenty three, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do mighty works in your name? And then I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. That there is a type of belief in Jesus that doesn't save. So what kind of belief needs to accompany the hearing of the gospel? It's not just knowing that Jesus is the Christ, but treasuring him as the Christ. This is how Paul describes it in Philippians chapter three. He says, but whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, in order that I might gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. True saving faith. True saving belief that accompanies the preached word of God. The message of salvation is a treasuring of Jesus Christ. It's believing that nothing compares to him. That everything else is rubbish, trash, garbage in comparison to the beauty of Jesus. John Piper said it like this that saving faith or real belief is a glad receiving of Christ for all he is and does and promises as our trust for salvation and treasure of our life. So Paul is telling them, your salvation is what gives you confidence that you heard the message, you heard the true word. You heard the gospel of your salvation and you believed it. You trusted it. You treasured Christ. Paul is saying, this is what salvation is. Hearing the Word of God and believing it, hearing the word and believing it. And it leads to the last verb that Paul mentions here, the main verb that Paul wants them to know what happens when they believe. He says, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and you believed in him, you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. You are sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. Guys, this is where our confidence comes from. If you're a Christian, this is where your confidence that all these blessings that Paul has been talking about are yours. This is where your confidence that you'll reach the end as a follower of Jesus comes from. It comes from the ceiling work of the Holy Spirit, of the promised Holy Spirit. And we see that word promise. That's an important word. The Holy Spirit being given to God's people isn't plan B. It was something that God had been promising his people. We see Jesus promised his disciples this. But we also see this promise to God's people through the prophet Ezekiel when he's prophesying about the new covenant. This is Ezekiel thirty six, starting in verse twenty six says, and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. Guys, our confidence that we will remain followers of Jesus, our confidence that all these blessings are ours come from the ceiling work of the Holy Spirit who is promised to us. Now, anytime we talk about the work of the spirit, we want to take a couple of minutes to make sure we're all on the same page. Because sometimes when we talk about the Holy Spirit, there's a couple of different camps people can find theirself in. You get the people who are like really excited about the Holy Spirit. We all know some of those like different denominations of churches where they're all about these manifestations of the Holy Spirit. And then you have the other side where it's like, I don't really know about this Holy Spirit thing. You hear about works of the spirit. You hear about gifts of the spirit. You hear about all these things. And it brings up a little bit of fear, brings up a little bit of unclarity. Get freaked out a little bit. And so we want to understand who the Holy Spirit is. We want to understand what's going on. And so here is a baseline understanding of who the Holy Spirit is, The Holy Spirit is the eternal third person of the Godhead, and eternally proceeds from the father and the son. As the agent of God's working in people and the world. That's straight from our statement of belief. And in this we see who the Holy Spirit is, that He is God, that he is eternally God. He wasn't created. He never didn't exist. He is always existed eternally God. He is not in it. He is not a force. He is a person. He moves. He is active. He crowns Christ the Son as Lord. In eternity. He crowns Christ the Son and as Lord in history at the baptism of Jesus. And he crowns Christ as Lord in our heart. When we believe upon Jesus in faith. We see the works of the Holy Spirit all in our world. I'm going to have a list on the screen. You can feel free to try to write down all the passages, but. Or you can just listen to it. But this is the work of the Holy Spirit that we see in the world, and this is just a glimpse of it. This is just a cursory overview. John sixteen seven through eleven, the Holy Spirit, he convicts the world. Titus three five. He causes rebirth. John fourteen seventeen. He dwells in believers. Romans eight sixteen. He seals us as sons. Romans eight thirteen in Galatians five twenty two through twenty six, he kills sin in us and bears fruit in our lives. John fourteen twenty five through twenty six. He continues to teach us the way of Jesus and remind us of the words of Jesus. First Corinthians twelve through fourteen and first Peter four ten through eleven. He gives gifts to glorify God and build up his church. Romans eight twenty six through twenty seven he intercedes for us. The Holy Spirit applies the work of the son according to the plan of the father. This is the work of the Holy Spirit in our world. And this isn't even all of it. But this is who the Holy Spirit is. He applies the work of the son according to the plan of the father. And we see this even explained in Ephesians one through the beginning part of this chapter. In verses three through six, you see that the father plans, he chooses, he predestined, predestined, and seven through twelve we see that the son accomplishes the work of the father, redeeming and forgiving. And then in verses thirteen or fourteen, our text for this morning, we see that the spirit applies this to believers. Guys, the Holy Spirit isn't some force that we ought to be wary of. He is God Himself who works in us and through us, who opens up blind eyes to the beautiful reality of Jesus. The Holy Spirit is God Himself. He is God that we need to be thankful for. He is God. That leads us to praising God. If you're interested in more of a deep dive on a study of the Holy Spirit, there's a short little book in the bookstore called The Trinity An Introduction, and it's by Scott Scott Swain, and it just gives a good short but great, like more comprehensive understanding of the Trinity. And I promise you, if you get it and you read it, it will lead to a greater understanding of who God is, which will ultimately lead to a greater worship of God. So that's the Trinity and introduction. It's in the bookstore, but that's who the Holy Spirit is. And we look back at our text here in Ephesians, we see one of the markers of the Holy Spirit. One of the works of the Holy Spirit is that he seals the people who have heard the gospel and believed the gospel. And so what does it mean to seal? What does it mean that the Holy Spirit seals? Because when we think of sealing, we can think of a few different things, right? We can think of like when you're at the store and there's a seal over something to show that it's fresh. Uh, you can think of Ziploc bags, you zip it, you keep it sealed so that it stays fresh or that it doesn't spill out everywhere. You can think of flexible. Any of you ever see those flexible commercials where they cut the boat in half and then just flex tape it like you can think of that. Like it seals it like rebuilds. Like there's a lot of different ways that we can think about sealing. But back in these biblical times, a seal was something given by a king to show that whatever he was sealing was guaranteed. It was authentic, that it belonged to him, that it was protected. We see an example of this in Esther chapter eight. At this point, Esther is working to try to save her people, save the Jewish people, And this is what the king says to her. But you may write as you please with regard to the Jews in the name of the king, and seal it. So put a seal on it with the King's ring for an edict written in the name of the King and sealed with the King's ring cannot be revoked. So what this seal does is it's showing. Hey, this is mine. It is from me. I'm authenticating it. It belongs to me. It's as good as done. It's proof that something belonged to the king. Came from the king, and it's a guarantee of its authenticity. A seal would show ownership, authenticity and security. A seal says it's mine. It's real. It belongs to me. And it's safe and protected. If you've tuned out for a minute, tune back in because this is important here. When you hear the word of the truth and you believe it that very moment, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit. God has placed his seal on you, saying that you are authentically his. You belong to him. You are a child of his. It's a guarantee. You are protected as such. Nothing can break the seal that God puts on his people. That is what the Holy Spirit does. He seals his people as his people. It's God saying, I guarantee that they are mine. I own them, they belong to me. I have bought them. I have redeemed them. They're true. Guys, this is where our confidence comes from. Our confidence doesn't come from what we do. Our confidence doesn't come from how we act. It doesn't come from what we say. Our confidence comes that the Holy Spirit has sealed us as gods. That God has sealed us with himself and there is no. There is no power, no entity, no authority that can break the seal of God because there is no power, no authority or entity that is greater than God. Our confidence that our. That we will wake up as a Christian tomorrow is that we have the seal of God in us and upon us. And that seal is God Himself. By God giving us His Holy Spirit. He is saying that this person is really my child. This person belongs to me and there's nothing that can change it because there's no authority greater than me. If God has sealed you with His Spirit, there is nothing that can break that seal, which means that there is nothing that can shake your confidence because you being sealed until the day of redemption isn't on you. It's not on other people. It's on God himself. He has sealed it and he will see through to it. And when God seals his people with himself, there's no authority that's higher and no power that's greater than him. That's where our confidence comes from. That's where our confidence comes from, that we will wake up as a Christian tomorrow, that we will receive these blessings that God has promised to his people. It's that if you are in Christ, it means you have heard the message of the truth. You have believed the message. And in believing the message of the gospel, you have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of God. You making it to the end and belonging to God is not your own doing, but God's doing. He gives you belief in Jesus and then he seals you with His Holy Spirit And that should give us great confidence that there is nothing that can take us away from what God has sealed. So the Holy Spirit gives us a great assurance that we belong to God. It gives us a great assurance that we will make it to the end, that we will be kept by God. But it doesn't just give us a great promise. It doesn't just let us know that we'll make it to the end. But it's also a great promise of our inheritance as we keep going in verse fourteen. This is what we see. It says that we 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. Not only is the spirit the seal given to us by God Himself, but the Holy Spirit is the guarantee of our inheritance. That word guarantee you can think of it like a down payment or an earnest payment. So think about it like a mortgage, if you will. When you buy a house, you give a down payment. You're putting a down payment on that house saying, hey, I promise that I'm going to keep paying what I owe on this house. So you're giving a guarantee that you're going to continue paying into this house, that you're going to own what you have put this down payment on. But it also means that you get to treat this house as your own. And so when the spirit is the guarantee or the down payment of our inheritance, what's really happening is God is saying, I am giving you my Holy Spirit as a down payment, saying, I'm going to complete the work of redemption that I have started in you. I'm going to see this through to the end. It's a guarantee that we will get what he has promised, because he is good on his promise, because he's given the spirit as a down payment. As you keep going through the verse, there's a little bit of a disagreement on the middle portion. Everyone agrees that the Holy Spirit is a guarantee or a down payment of our inheritance. But until when? The ESV translates it until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory. But a lot of other English translations, like the CSB or the KJV, they'll say, until the redemption of the possession or the King James, they clarify that even a little bit more. They say the redemption of the purchased possession. And you can see the difference between these two things and the ESV that the emphasis is more on. It's a down payment on what we will receive until we acquire possession of it, until we get what is promised and the other translations, it's more of about what God is doing. It's about it's a guarantee until God redeems his purchased possession, which is us. And I think we I personally read it more in that CSB KJV way. And here's why, because I think the primary emphasis that Paul is placing throughout the entire letter letter so far is that it's a work of God. The emphasis is on God's working. We see that verse three through twelve. It points to God choosing, predestining, forgiving, redeeming, and now sealing and guaranteeing. But we also see this same language show up of seal and redeem in Ephesians chapter four, verse thirty. Uh, that word acquire in verse fourteen, it's actually the same word as redeem that we see in Ephesians four, verse thirty and it says, uh, it says this. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption or the day of acquiring. How the ESV would translate that in verse fourteen. And so it seems to me that when you look at Ephesians four thirty in the context of the day being God redeeming his people, it's best to read this as God is giving us the Holy Spirit as a down payment of our inheritance until he finishes his work of redeeming us. Until he finishes his work of redeeming us, he started a work of redeeming us on the cross where our sins were forgiven, and he's going to finish out his work of redemption in the last days when he does away with sin, Satan, and death completely and forever. And he establishes his rule and reign in the new heaven and the new earth, where we will have glorified bodies. But regardless of how you read this, the outcome is the same. It's two sides of the same coin. On one side, the Holy Spirit is a down payment of our inheritance until we require possession of it, until we receive what's been promised. On the other side of that same coin, it's a guarantee, a down payment from God, until God completes the work he has promised to do. And both end in the same place us fully redeemed, unencumbered by sin, undefiled by our flesh, with new resurrected, glorified bodies, and the presence of our God who has redeemed us. And what a day that's going to be. What a day that's going to be. What a beautiful future for us who are in Christ. A future with God, completely redeemed, living as co-heirs with Christ. And we can be certain that that is our future, because God has given His Spirit in us as a down payment, saying, you will get the inheritance. And when God gives the down payment, you can trust that the rest is coming. He can be trusted to give in full what he's given, in part by giving us the Holy Spirit. Now you can have great confidence because God has given us His Spirit to seal us as a guarantee of the inheritance that's come. The reason that you can have confidence in your salvation is because it was accomplished by God, not you. That's the only reason you can have confidence is that it was accomplished by God and not you. The confidence that you can have in your status as a child of God and your future inheritance with God is because you have been sealed for that day by God with God. That is our only confidence in this life. That is your only confidence in this life and the next. That our confidence in a future with God comes from the work of the Spirit of God. You can say it a little bit shorter if you wanted to. That confidence in a future with God comes from the Spirit of God. Church. That's your confidence. It's not in what you do. It's not in what you say. Those things can show that you have been redeemed. Those things can show that you have been sealed. But that's not where your confidence lies. Your confidence lies in the work of the Holy Spirit, who seals every believer until the day of redemption. And here's the beautiful reality of the spirit as a seal and a down payment. He doesn't just give you confidence in your future with God, but you get to experience in glimpses the eternal inheritance waiting for you now. Because when you make a down payment on the house, that down payment is applied to the house, right? Meaning that it bringing the amount you still owe down, that down payment is applied. You keep that money, right? Like you keep that value. This Holy Spirit is a down payment. He's earnest money of the inheritance, which means he's part of the inheritance, which is kind of crazy when you think about that part of your inheritance is actually God in you. Now that you get to experience closeness with God, you get to experience intimacy with God. You get to experience a reconciled relationship to God because the Holy Spirit is in you. He's been given to you as a down payment. You get to experience the goodness of having God in you. And that's beyond comprehension that we get to experience glimpses of eternity now because we have the Holy Spirit. We get little tastes of that future inheritance because we have the down payment of the Holy Spirit. Reminds me of the hymn, Blessed assurance. Blessed assurance. Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory. Divine. Heir of salvation. Purchase of God. Born of his spirit. Washed in his blood. There's a foretaste of our inheritance that's coming. Because we have a part of that inheritance now. We have God in us, the Holy Spirit with us and guys, all of this is to the praise of his glory. All of this is ultimately about God. It's not about us at all. Us being saved, us being predestined, us being chosen. It's not about us. It's to God's glory. It's to the praise of his glory, not our own. While we get the benefit of it, it's not ultimately for and about us. It's for and about God. That refrain for the to the praise of God's glory is repeated several times in this passage, showing us that all of this is about him. It's all about his glory, his name, his praise. By saving and sealing his people to himself, God is glorified. And our response is to praise the glory of God. We praise God because he's blessed us. Praise God because he's chosen you. Praise God because he's predestined you. Praise God because he's adopted. You praise God because he's redeemed. You. Praise God because he's forgiven you. Praise God. Because of the grace he has lavished upon you. Praise God because he's provided an inheritance for you. Praise God because he sealed you with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of your inheritance until you acquire possession of it. Church, we have an unshakable inheritance that is sealed by God Himself. So have confidence in your future. Have confidence that you will wake up a Christian tomorrow. Because if you are in Christ, the Holy Spirit has sealed you and he will keep you. Your confidence in your future is in God, and so have confidence in your future and praise him loudly because of it. Amen. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your Holy Spirit, your spirit that seals us, that seals us for the day of salvation. That keeps us, that gives us confidence that nothing can ever shake us. Nothing can tear us apart. Nothing can take us away from you. No heights nor depths. And nothing can separate us from your love because of the sealing work of the Holy Spirit, and that you have given him to us as a gift, as a down payment of what is to come. God, may the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives bring about confidence, confidence in our future, salvation, and the blessings that we have in you. Confidence that we belong to you. God, may we praise you for the work that you have done. It's in Jesus name, Amen.