The Present and the Future Inheritance: God's in Us, and Ours in God

Ephes. i. 14

“Which la the earnert of oar Inheritance until the redemption of the p«rnhe«l

poeaesaion.” Ephos 1. 14.

I HAVE chosen these words this morning, and ventured to isolate them from their connection because of their bearing upon the subject of our last two sermons. You will observe that the Apostle here is evidently intending to bring together the two aspects of the reciprocal possession of God by believers, and of believers by God, which has occupied us in these discourses.

“The Holy Spirit of promise,” given to all who believe, iB here declared to dwell in and to seal believers as the “earnest” of their “inheritance “; whilst, on the other hand, that sealing is declared to last until — or, as seemB more probably the rendering of the proposition here, to be done with a view unto — the full redemption of God’s purchased “possession.” So that the two halves of the thought are intentionally brought together in these words of our text. And about both of them — God’s possession of as and our possession of Goil — it is asserted or implied, that

2M THE PRESENT AND FUTURE INHERITANCB.

they are partially realised here, and are to be realised more fully in the future.

An “earnest” is a portion of the estate which is paid over to the purchaser on the completion of the purchase, as the token that all is his and will come into his hands in due time. Like that part of a man’s wages given to him in advance when he is engaged; like the shilling put into the hand of a recruit; like the half-crown given to the farm-servant at the hiring-fair; like the bit of turf that in some old ceremonials used to be solemnly presented to the sovereign on his investiture; it is a portion of the whole possession, the same in kind, but a very tiny portion, which yet carries with it the acknowledgment of ownership and the assurance of full possession.

So, says my text, the Spirit of God is the “earnest of the inheritance,” a small portion of it granted to us to-day, and the pledge that all shall be granted in the future. And the same idea of present imperfection is suggested in the corresponding clause, which speaks about God’s entire purchase (for such is the emphasis in the original) of His possession as also a thing of the future.

So then here are the three points that I purpose to consider; first, the imperfect present; second, the present, imperfect as it is, still a guarantee and pledge of the future; and lastly, the perfect future which is the outcome of the imperfect present.

I. — First a word about this imperfect present, which is put here as being on the one side the earnest of our inheritance, and on the other side as being God’s partial acquisition of us as His Possession.

Now, you may remember, perhaps, that in the former sermons I said that we possess God in the measure in which we know Him, love Him, and have communion and sympathy with Him. These things, knowledge, love, communion, sympathy, make a very real and a very precious possession of God, and he who has God thus has II im as truly, though not as perfectly, as the angels in Heaven that bow before His throne.

But though that is true, there is yet another aspect of this possession of God suggested in the words of my text. The Holy Spirit of promise comes to every man that believes in Jesus Christ, and enters into his heart and becomes his. That is the truest way in which man possesses God. The greatest gift that my faith brings down to me from Heaven is the gift of an indwelling Spirit — of an indwelling God. For the Spirit of God is God. He that has God in his heart by the dwelling there, in mystic reality, of the Divine Spirit, possesses Him as truly as he possesses love or memory, imagination or hope.

There can be no possession deeper, none greater, none more real than the possession which every one of us may have of an indwelling God for our life and our peace. It passes all human analogy. Love gives us the ownership, most really and most sweetly, of the hearts that we love; but after all the yearning desires for union, and experience of oneness in sympathy, the awful wall of partition between spirits remains. Life may, and death must, separate, but he that has God’s Divine Spirit with him, has God for the life of his life and the soul of his soul. And we possess Him when, by faith in Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God dwells in our hearts.

But most real and most blessed as that union and pessession is, my text tells us it is incomplete.

I need not dwell upon that in order to prove it; I only want to apply and urge the truth for a moment. We have an Infinite Spirit to dwell with us; how finite and little is our possession of it 1 The Spirit of God is set forth in Scripture under the symbol of “a rushing, mighty wind,*’ and you and I say that we are Christ’s, and that we have Him How does it come, then, that our sails flap idly on the mast, and we lie becalmed, and making next to no progress? The Spirit of God is set forth in Scripture under the symbol of “flaming tongues of fire,” and you and I say that we have it; how is it, then, that this thick-ribbed ice is round our hearts, and our love is all so tepid? The Spirit of God is set forth in Scripture under the symbol of “rivers of water”; and you and I say that we possess it. How is it, then, that so much of our hearts and of our natures is given up to barrenness, and dryness, and deadness? Oh, brethren, with an Infinite Spirit for our Guest and Indweller, any of us that look at our own hearts must feel that my text is too surely true, and that the present possession of God by the best of ns is but a partial and incomplete possession.

And the same facts of wavering faith, cold affection, and imperfect consecration which show how little we have of God, show likewise how little God has of us. We say that we are His, and live to please ourselves. We profess to belong to another, and to that other we render fragments, of ourselves, and scarcely even fragments of our time and of our efforts. His! and yet all day long never thinking of Him. His I and yet from morning till night never refraining from a thing because we know it is contrary to His will, or spurred to do a thing that is contrary to ours because we know it is His. His! and yet we wallow in selfishness. His I and yet we live Godless. Christian men and women I it is only a little corner of your souls that really belongs to God. Alas, alas I for the imperfections and incompleteness of our possession of God, of Whom we hold but the merest shred, and of His possession of us, Who has conquered such a little strip of the whole field of our nature.

Now, do not forget that this incompleteness of possession, looked at in both aspects, is to a certain extent inevitable »ncl must go with ud all through life. And bo do not let any of us rush precipitately to the conclusion that we are not Christians because we find what poor Christians we are. Do not let us say — “If there were any reality in my faith, it would he, not a dotted line, but one continuous and unbroken.” Do not let us write bitter things against ourselves, because we find that we have only got “the earnest of the inheritance,” and that the Inheritance has not yet come.

And, on the other hand, do not make a pillow for laziness of that most certain truth, nor, because there must always be imperfections in the Christian career here, apply that as an excuse for the individual instances of imperfection as they crop up. You know, when you are honest with yourselves, that each breach of continuity in your faith and obedience might have been prevented. You know that there was no inevitable necessity for your doing that piece of badness that rises in your memory; that there was no reason that could not have been overcome, for any failure of consecration or wavering of faith or act of disobedience and rebellion which has ever marked your course. Granted, that imperfection is the law, but also remember that the individual instances of imperfection are to be debited not to law, but to us, and are not to be lamented over as inevitable, though painful, issues of our condition, but to be confessed as sins. “My fault, 0 Lord 1 my fault and mine only.”

Many Christian people forget that if our present condition be, as it certainly is, necessarily imperfect, it ought also to be, and it will be, if there be any vital force of Christian principle within us, constantly and indofiiiitely approximating to the ideal standard of perfection that gleams there ahead of us. Or, to put it int. plainer English, if you have life you will grow. If there be any real possession of the inheritance, it will be like the rolling fences that they used to have in certain parts of the country, -where a squatter settled himself down upon a bit of a royal forest, and had a hedge that could be moved outwards and shifted on by degrees; till from having begun with a little bit big enough for a cabbage garden, he ended with a piece big enough for a farm.

And that is what we are always to do, to be always acquiring, “adding field to field” in the great inheritance that is ours. But a mournfully large number of professing Christians have lost the very notion of progress; and content themselves with saying: “Oh 1 we shall always be imperfect. As long as we are here in this world we cannot make ourselves different.” No I you cannot make yourselves perfect, but if you are not growing at all, I would pray you to ask yourselves if you are living at all. Do not be content, as so many of you are, to be like invaders, who, after years of occupation, are unable to advance beyond the strip of shore which they seized at first, while all the interior lies unconquered and in arms against them.

So remember that if we have any real possession of God or God of us, it will not only be an imperfect possession, but an imperfect possession daily becoming more complete.

II. — Now turn to the second thought here — that this imperfect present, in its very imperfection, is a prophecy and a pledge of a perfect future. The “earnest of our inheritance’* points on to the full “redemption of the purchased possession.”

The facts of Christian experience are such as that they inevitably lead up to the conclusion that there is a life beyond. All that is good and blessed about religion, our faith, the joy that comes from our faith, the sweetness of communion, the aspiration after the increase of fellowship with Him; all these, to the man that enjoys them, are the best proof that they are going to last for ever, and that death can have no power over them. “Like thoughts whose very •weetness yieldeth proof that they are born for immortality,”

To love, to know, to reach the hands out through the shows of time and sense, and to grasp an unseen reality that lies away beyond, is, to any man that has ever experienced the emotion and done the thing, one of the strongest of all demonstrations that nothing belonging to this dusty low region of the physical can touch that immortal aspiration that knits him to God; but that whatsoever may befall the husk and shell of him, his faith, his love, his obedience, his consecration, are eternal, and may laugh at death and the grave. And I believe that even to the men who have not that experience, the fact of religious emotion, the fact of worship, ought to be one of the best demonstrations of a future life.

But I pass that with these simple remarks, and touch another thing; the very incompleteness of our possession of God, and of God’s possession of us, points onwards to, and, as it seems to me, demands a future. The imperfection, as well as the present attainments of our Christian experience, proclaim a coming time. That we are no better than we are, being as good as we are, seems to make it inconceivable that this evidently half-done work is going to be broken off short at the side of the grave.

Here is a certain force acting in a man’s nature, the power of God’s good Spirit, evidently capable of producing effects of entire transformation. Such being the cause, who, looking at the effects, can doubt that sometime and somewhere there will be less disproportion between the two? The engine is evidently not working full power. The characters of Christians at the best are so inconsistent and contradictory that they are evidently only in the making. It is clear that we are looking at unfinished work, and surely the great Master Builder who has laid Buch a foundation-stone tried and precious, will not begin to build and be unable to finish. Every Christian life, at its best and noblest, shows, as it were, the ground plan of a great structure partly carried out — a bit of walling here, vacancy there, girders spanning wide spaces, but gaping for a roof, a chaos and a confusion. It may look a thing of shreds and patches, and they that pass by the way begin to mock. But the very fact that it is incomplete prophesies to wise men, of the day when the teadstone shall be brought with shouting, and the flag hoisted on the roof tree. Fools and children, says the proverb, should not see half-done work — certainly they should not judge it.

Wait a bit. There comes a time when tendencies shall be facts, and when influences shall have produced their appropriate effects; and when all that is partial and broken shall be consummate and entire in the Kingdom beyond the stars. Wait! and be sure that the good and the bad, so strangely blended in Christian experience, are alike charged with the prophecy of a glorious and perfect future.

III. — Then, lastly, my text in the one clause asserts, and in the other implies, that the future is the perfecting of the present.

The “earnest” points onwards to an inheritance the same in kind, but immensely greater in degree. The “redemption of the possession” is a somewhat singular expression; for we are accustomed to regard the great act of redemption as already past in the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross. But the expression is employed here, as in several other places, to express not so much the act of purchase, the paying of the price of our salvation, which is done once for all and long ago, as the historical working out of the results of that price paid in the entire deliverance of the whole nature of man from every form of captivity to anything that would prevent his full possession by God.

A very essential part of that entire deliverance is that which the Apostle calls the redemption of the body (Rom. viii, 23), and which he there puts in contrast with the present possession of the ^’first-fruits of the Spirit,” as here the redemption is contrasted with the earnest of the Spirit. That full deliverance takes place, according to this Epistle (iv. 30) at a definite future period, called therefore, “the day of redemption,” which is, I suppose, the time when the whole man, body, soul, and spirit, in the Resurrection-glory shall be delivered from every form of evil, limitation, and sin; and shall be lifted up into the full light and knowledge of God. Then God will possess men, when the whole man is capable of holding or possessing God. Then redemption will be completed in effect, which was completed in cause and in purchase when He said: “It is finished,” and bowed His head and died.

Time will not allow me to dwell upon the many thoughts involved here. One is that the main hope and glory of that future is the perfect possession of and by God.

“We shall know even as we are known.” “Through a glass darkly, but then face to face,” says Paul, suggesting great changes in the degree of our knowledge of, and friendly communion with, God, but also seeming to imply some unknown changes in the manner of our beholding, which may be connected with the new powers of that “body of glory” like our Lord’s which will then be ours. It is quite conceivable that the physical universe may have qualities as real as light and heat, and scent and sound, which we could appreciate if we had other senses appropriate, as we have sight and touch, and smell and hearing. And so it is quite conceivable that when clothed upon with our “house which is from Heaven,” which will have a great many more windows in it than the earthly house of this tabernacle, which is built for stormy weather,

B there will be sides and aspects of the Divine nature that we do not know anything about to-day which shall be communicable and communicated to us.

Be that as it may, a deeper knowledge, a fixed love, an unbroken communion, with all distractions and interruptions swept clean away for ever, so that we shall dwell for evermore in the House of the Lord, these are the plain elements which make the very Heaven of heavens, and which ought to make the joy of our hope. In the measure in which we know and love Him, in that measure shall we be known and loved by Him. He and we shall be so interwoven as that we shall be inseparable. We shall cleave to God and God shall cleave to ub.

Oh I how small and insignificant all other notions of a future life are as compared with that I The accidents of locality and circumstance should ever be kept subordinate in the pictures which imagination may draw of what is beheld through “the gates ajar “by” little pilgrims in the unseen.” The representations which seem to aim at making another world as like this one as may be, dwarf its greatness, and tend to obscure the conditions of entering into its rest. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be “is as much a revelation as “When He shall appear we shall be like Him.” As a great painter concentrates finish and light on the face of his sitter, and purposely keeps the rest of the picture slight, there is one face that should fill the dim, dark curtain of the future — the face of Christ, and all else may be thrown in in mere sketchy outline. We know that future chiefly by negations and by symbols, and the one positive fact is that we shall have Him and He will possess ns. It is enough for the disciple that he be as, and that he be with and have, his Master.

It is a solemn thought that this ultimate perfect posseB-Bion of and by God is evolved from a germ which must be planted now if it is to flourish there. “The child is father of the man.” Every present is the result of all the past; every future will be the result of the past and the present. Everybody admits that about this lif e but there are some of us that seem to forget it with regard to another world.

We know too little of the effect that is produced upon men by the change of death to dogmatise; but one may be quite sure that the law of continuity will go on into the other world. Or, to put it into plainer English, a man on the other side of the grave will be the same as he was on this side. The line will run straight on; it may be slightly refracted by passing from an atmosphere of one density to another of a diJierent, but it will be very slightly. The main direction will be the same.

What is there in death that can change a man’s will f I can fancy death making an idiot wise, because idiocy comes from physical causes. I can fancy death giving people altogether dilTerent notions of the folly of sin; but I do not know anything in the physical fact of death, or in the accompanying alterations that it produces upon spiritual consciousness, in so far as they are known to us, that can alter the dominant bias and set of a man’s nature. It seems to me more likely that it will intensify that dominant bias, whatever it is; that good men will become better, and bad men worse when the limitations of incomplete organs are gone. At all events, do not run risks with such a very shaky hypothesis as that death will change the main direction of your life; but remember that what a man sows he shall reap, that the present is the parent of the future, and that unless we have the earnest of the inheritance here, and pass into the other world, bearing that earnest in our hands, there seems little reason why we should expect that, when we stand before Him empty-handed, we can claim a portion therein.

I was passing a little town garden a day or two ago, of B2 which the owner had got a young weeping willow that he had put in the plot in front of his door. He had bent down its branches and put them round the hoop of an old wine-cask to teach them to droop. And after a bit, when they have been set, he will take away the hoop, but though it be gone the branches will never spring upwards, wherever you transplant the tree.

Are you doing that with your souls? If you give them the downward set they will keep it, though the earth to which you have fastened them be burnt up with fervent heat, and the soul be transplanted into another region.

Let me beseech you to yield yourself to God in Christ, and by faith, love, and true submission, to take Him for your treasure and your King. Then Heaven will perfect the partial knowledge and incomplete seivice of earth, and will be the consumnation and not the contradiction of your life here. Let it be true of you that there is none on earth whom you desire beside God, and it will be true thftt He will be for you the very Heaven of heavens!