Ephesians 1:13-14
Date: September 29th, 2024
Speaker: Sam Crites
Scripture: Ephesians 1:13-14
Exegetical Outline
MIT: The Ephesians have been sealed in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, guaranteeing their future inheritance to the praise of God’s glory.
13: When the Ephesians heard the Gospel and believed in it, they were sealed in Christ with the Holy Spirit.
14: The Holy Spirit is the guarantee of the inheritance that Ephesians have received from the Father.
Homiletical Outline
MIS: Every Christian has an inheritance in Christ, guaranteed by the Spirit, that glorifies the Father.
Every Christian has a future inheritance because they are united to Christ.
The Spirit guarantees that we will receive it.
Introduction:
Ephesians 1:13-14
13 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, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
What do we get out of our union with Christ? We have seen that, from eternity past, God has chosen us in Christ. Meaning he chose us to be adopted to himself through Christ. Christ paid the penalty, we get the benefit. Our sins are forgiven, his life was sacrificed. But do we merely escape the consequences of our sins, or is there something more that we can look forward to?
Paul tells the Ephesians in Ephesians 1:13-14 that there is something far greater that we stand to gain from our relationship with Christ than merely the forgiveness of our sins. In fact, we get all the rewards that a sinless life is worthy to receive. Once our sinfulness has been washed away by the blood of Christ, our newfound righteousness is rewarded as if it was something we earned for ourselves. This is a great mystery. Not only because we stand amazed that we receive this great gift in God, but because by being generous to us in this way, the Father glorifies himself. The main idea of our sermon is this: Every Christian has an inheritance in Christ, guaranteed by the Spirit, that glorifies the Father.
Our sermon will have two points that come right out of the text. First, every Christian has a future inheritance because they are united to Christ. This is the universal reward for all those that put their trust in Jesus to save them from the consequences of their sins. You will be rewarded, and in our first point, we want to consider what that reward is. What is the reward that we can look forward to because we have been united to Christ through our faith in the Gospel?
Second, we will see that the Spirit guarantees that we will receive this inheritance. This inheritance is by definition future. We have not received it yet, but it is being kept for us until a future day when we will be able to take possession of it. Until that day, the Spirit does two things: he seals us and authenticates our worthiness to receive the gift, and he guarantees that we will make it to the end to receive it. He is our deposit slip. He is the promise that a day is coming when we will receive what Christ purchased for us, what is our right because we are sons and daughters of the king. The Spirit is our guarantee that one day we will make it to the end and receive the inheritance we were promised.
There is a great prize that awaits us at the end of this life. The glory of salvation is not merely seen in the fact that we are rescued from the consequences of sin. If it was, that would be enough. David said, “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” But we have not been purchased out of the slavery of sin in order to continue to be slaves, rather, we have been purchased in order to be sons and daughters. Every Christian has an inheritance in Christ, guaranteed by the Spirit, that glorifies the Father.
Every Christian has a future inheritance because they are united to Christ.
One thing that makes Christmas magical is a child’s anticipation of the gifts that they will receive. Throughout the year, my kids dream and plan about what they want to ask for from their parents. It might change 10 times, but there is something sweet as a father, to watch my children look forward to the generosity they will receive from the people in their life that love them.
I think the same thing is true of our Father in heaven. He enjoys that we enjoy thinking about and hoping in the inheritance that we have been promised in Christ. He is glorified by our anticipation of his generosity. In this first point, let’s think about the great inheritance that every Christian stands to inherit in the future. The first thing we can learn from verses 13 and 14 is this: Every Christian has a future inheritance because they are united to Christ. Look at verses 13 and 14 one more time:
Ephesians 1:13-14
13 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, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
Who is the him at the beginning of verse 13? I feel like I have been asking this question every week, but identifying pronouns is a crucial part of interpreting these verse.
So, verse 13 opens with “in him you also,” who is the him? It is the same him that verse 11 was looking back at. In fact, it is the same him that has been the means of all that the Father is doing in verses 3-14. In 11 short verses, the phrase “in” or “through him” is used nine times. Every time it is used, it refers to the way the Father is using the Son as the instrument of his purpose. As the paintbrush by which he is crafting this beautiful portrait of grace.
In this particular case, over the last two weeks, we have had two really important “in him” phrases: verse 11 and verse 13. These two “in him” phrases explain a particular part of the work of the Father that we see in verse 9. Look back at verse 9 and 10 real quick:
Ephesians 1:9-10
9 making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
The Father has made known a mysterious plan, namely, through the redemption of Christ, the Father is going to unite all things together, some things on earth and some things in heaven. The Father has the great and eternal plan of reconciliation that he is working our through the Son.
Which means, “in the Son,” verse 11, we have obtained an inheritance, and “in the Son,” we have received the promised seal of that inheritance until we acquire possession of it. This is God’s great plan for those that are in Christ. The Father does the work of salvation and the Son is the tool in his hand to accomplish what he has decided to do.
Which means, God is uniting us to himself through Christ by bringing us into his family and making us sons and daughters. He has adopted us at great personal cost and that adoption comes with all the rights and privileges that you would expect from sonship, particularly, an inheritance.
The inheritance looms large in verses 11-14. We saw last week that it is given according to the predestining purpose of the Father and this week, we learn more. So, what do we learn about the inheritance in verses 13 and 14. I want to know who gets it and what is it.
First, who gets the inheritance. If we skip over the descriptive things in verse 13, we could read the main clause of verse 13 like this, “In him (the Son) you also were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.” And we know from verse 14 that the one that the sealing being described by the Spirit guarantees that we will receive the inheritance. So one way to answer the question, who gets the inheritance, is to say those that are sealed by the Spirit.
But then we should ask, who are those people? Paul clarifies in verse 13. Those that are sealed with the Holy Spirit are those that have heard the gospel of salvation and who have believed in Jesus Christ. These are the ones that are sealed with the Spirit and thereby receive the inheritance offered in Christ. So if I want to receive the inheritance I better have heard the Gospel and I better have believed that message.
One of the clearest articulations of the Gospel in Scripture is found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. Turn with me to 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 to be reminded of the Gospel.
1 Corinthians 15:3-8
3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
According to 1 Corinthians 15, the Gospel is the story of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the salvation of sinners. This message is the message that every single person must personally encounter and wrestle with. It is not enough to merely believe the historical reality of Jesus life, death, and resurrection. Paul says in Ephesians 1:13 that the Ephesians heard this message and they believed. They trusted. They clung to this message as their only hope to escape the consequences of their sin.
Therefore, those that receive the inheritance that Paul is describing in Ephesians 1:11-14 are those that have been sealed by the Holy Spirit because they have personally put their trust in Jesus to save them from the consequences of their sins.
But what is this inheritance? Here in Ephesians 1, Paul doesn’t really give us much to go on. We can learn a couple quick things, like, the inheritance is a product of our sonship. God is giving it to us because we are his adopted children as we see in verse 5. The second thing we can see is that it is a future reality. Whatever it is, we don’t get it right away. It is something that comes to us at some point in the future, hence, the need for the Holy Spirit to guarantee our acquisition of it in the future. But aside from that, we do not get a lot of data points in this text for what it actually is. So, we need some data points from elsewhere in Scripture.
The first thing we can say about our future inheritance is that it refers to our future salvation. Peter explains this in 1 Peter 1:3-9. Listen to what Peter has to say about our inheritance.
1 Peter 1:3-5
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
According to Peter, the inheritance being guarded for us is the ultimate salvation of our souls. This is the outcome of our faith. This is one aspect of our inheritance.
To be saved, we must be saved from something. Well, I don’t know about you, but I have not yet been held to account for my sins. One day, I will stand before the throne of God and give an account. The only hope I have to escape the consequences of my sin is the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. When I stand before almighty God and give that account for my soul, namely, I have no hope for salvation other than Jesus Christ, my current faith in Jesus and my future faith in that moment will save me. I will be pardoned because my trust is in Jesus. So, part of our inheritance is the promise of future salvation.
The second thing that we can say about our inheritance is what Jesus teaches in Matthew 5:5, namely, that the meek will inherit the earth. In the future, when the world is remade, we will be elevated to a priesthood of kings that will rule over God’s creation as God originally intended. This is what the Apostle John saw in the throne room scene in Revelation chapter 5. When the lamb takes the scroll from the Father, the saints around the throne sing a new song in Revelation 5:9-10. The say:
Revelation 5:9-10
“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
10 and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.”
Did you catch it there at the end of the song? All these people that the Lamb has ransomed from all the nations are made into a kingdom and priests. They will reign with Christ on the earth, fulfilling the ministry that Christ has been given as the second Adam. So as children of God and co-heirs with Christ, we will receive the world as our inheritance to rule and reign over as priests-kings with Christ.
But probably the most profound thing we can say about our inheritance actually comes from later in Ephesians Chapter 1. Look over at verses 15-23. Our future inheritance is Christ.
Ephesians 1:15-23
15 For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might
So, up to this point, Paul is simply praying that the Spirit would enlighten their eyes to the hope God has given them and what are the riches of his blessings to the saints. So in some ways, that is backward looking at all that Paul has said, but it forward looking to what he is about. So what powerful work did the Father do for his people. He continues in verse 20.
20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
God elevate Christ to a place of greater authority than all other authorities and he gave him to the Church as its head. After Christ finished his work, the Father glorified him above all names and then he gave Christ as a gift to his people to be the head of the body. So he, himself, is our inheritance and the Church is the vessel for the fulness of his glory.
This is a present reality in the sense that each individual church is headed by Christ and he is caring for us now. But there is a day coming when we will physically be with him again. Hebrews 9:27-28 says:
Hebrews 9:27-28
27 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
Christ is Emmanuel. God with us. Today he is with us through his Spirit, but one day, he will be with us physically again and in that day we will know the great treasure that God has given us in Christ.
This inheritance is a universal gift for all believers. We have been given a great gift in future salvation, as inheritors of the world to come, but most importantly, in the fact that we get God. We will be united to Christ and through Christ to the Father. We will know the eternal, intra-trinitarian love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we will be with Christ for the rest of time. That is a future worth looking forward to. That is a future that will put hope in your heart, and that is a future that must be protected.
The Spirit guarantees that we will receive it.
Which brings us to our second point: The Spirit is the guarantee that we will receive it. With a treasure that precious and valuable, how can we be confident that when we get to the end, that we will receive it? Hope is a tricky thing. Could we be putting our trust in a false hope? Or, even worse, once we have put our trust in Jesus, is it possible to fall away from Christ, to lose the salvation we have found? Let’s read the passage again and see if Paul answers these questions.
Ephesians 1:13-14
13 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, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
This is the first time in the book of Ephesians that we have considered the work of the Spirit. We have been focusing on the work of the Father in salvation. How his salvation has rolled forth from eternity past into time and space through the instrumental work of the Son. But now we see that a third Person is involved in the process. The Spirit has a crucial role to play in the work of salvation that the Father is doing, and we see two things here in these verses.
First, the Spirit, himself, is a seal. What does a seal do? A seal authenticates a transaction or a document. It is a higher authority’s physical indication that this document or transaction is authentic, that it is authorized to be binding on all parties. The Spirit is the Father’s seal, his official, authoritative authentication that someone is actually in Christ.
And notice that Paul calls him the “promised” Holy Spirit. This is not an unexpected reality. In fact, what he is saying here is something that every Jew at that time would have understood as one of the key promises of the New Covenant that the Messiah was going to inaugurate. Listen to what God promised through Ezekiel the prophet:
Ezekiel 36:26-27
26 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. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
When the New Covenant was promised all the way back in the Old Testament, one of the central promises was that God was going to fix our spiritual deadness by giving us a new spirit, and not just any spirit, he promised to put his very own Spirit within us. The Spirit’s job is to cause you to walk in ever statute of the law. He will make you careful to obey every rule that has been laid down.
How does that work? It sounds like the Holy Spirit is working us like a puppet master, forcing us to do what we do not want to do. That is not what is taking place. He is not working us like a puppeteer working a marionette. No, he functions as a letter of credit that has been purchased by another.
As Christians, when we sin, we debit out of our account of righteousness with God. Perfection is required and we go negative on our account. But when you trust is in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, the Spirit comes behind us and immediately credits us the righteousness we need to stay in good standing with God. As the Spirit of the Father, he moves righteousness into our account, satisfying any requirement to keep the law. And this is the coolest part, please pay attention.
Where does that credit come from? The answer tells us something essentially true and important about the Spirit, the most mysterious person in the Trinity. Where does the credit of righteousness come from that keeps us walking in every statute of the law so that the Father see us as righteous? It comes from the account of Christ. The Spirit moves the work of the Son into each of our accounts, so that Christ’s work becomes our work; and he has the right to do this because he is not just the Spirit of the Father, but he is also the Spirit of the Son.
And so, the first thing we see the Spirit doing is sealing us with an authentic letter of credit from the Son, so that he can keep us walking in every statute of the Father’s law, so that we who put our faith in Christ will be righteous in this life. I want this point to resonate loudly and clearly in everyone’s minds this morning. The uniqueness and veracity of Christianity is found in this reality: you could never save yourself; you needed Christ to save you. There is no other religion that teaches this. Not Roman Catholicism, not Eastern Orthodox, not Islam, not the Prosperity Gospel, not Mormons, no other world religion tells you that your good works are meaningless, that you need someone else to save you from your sin. Only the Gospel tells the truth about the human condition and offers the only solution in Christ.
So the first thing we see about the work of the Spirit as he participates in the great saving work of the Father is that the Spirit seals us. The second thing we see the Spirit doing comes in verse 14 as he guarantees our inheritance. This great inheritance that is going to be given to you in the future and is secured by the credited work of Christ through the Spirit must be held in escrow for you until the day you are able to receive it, and the Spirit is not only the seal on the letter of credit, he is the deposit slip to your safety deposit box. Those who make it to the end with the Spirit will have the spiritual paperwork necessary to claim their inheritance.
Now that might sound like I have to hold onto the Spirit until the end so that I can turn him in to receive the inheritance that is my right, but that is actually the exact opposite of the way that it works. We do not hold onto the Spirit so that we can claim our prize at the end, the Spirit holds onto us so that he can preserve us until the end.
Notice the logic of the passage. The Father elected and predestined those that would be his people from eternity past. He accomplished his eternal plan in time by sending his Son to be the payment for our sins and calling us from death to life through the regenerating work of the Spirit. And then, he gave us his Spirit as a divine seal to guarantee that we will continue to walk in righteousness and holiness until the day when we could be truly united to himself in glory. Therefore, the guaranteeing work of the Holy Spirit is not effective if we make it to the end by our own effort and present him to God to claim our prize, rather, he is the preservative that keeps us righteous.
For a Christian to not persevere to the end, one of two things would have to happen. The Father would have to fail to accomplish his eternal plan that he decided upon before the foundation of the world or we would have to exhaust the righteousness of the Son. Neither one of those things is possible. By nature, the Father is all-powerful, all-knowing, in all places at all times. In order to fail, he would have to cease to be who he is. And by nature, the Son is infinitely valuable to the Father. The Father could not treasure anyone or anything more than he treasures the Son. Therefore, we will make it to the end because the Spirit of the Father and the same Spirit of the Son dwells within us sealing us and guaranteeing that we will make it to the end and when we do, we will receive the great inheritance we were promised.