God is mighty in salvation

(The following is an excerpt from the message preached on May 20, 2018.)

As you read through the letter to the Ephesians, you can’t help but get an overwhelming sense of how mighty God is in salvation. God did everything to bring you eternal life. He did it all. Salvation is completely, fully, totally the work of God. You did not get saved by human choice or by human chance.

It wasn’t by human choice, because any person who gets given a choice, hates God. The bible tells us that there is no one who is righteous, no one who does what is good, no one who seeks God. We all hated God. We were dead in our sins.

Nor was it by chance. It wasn’t luck or chance that you were born into a Christian family. It wasn’t chance that your best friend became a Christian and took you to church for the first time. It wasn’t chance that you heard a preacher or read a book or talked to a Christian and then heard the gospel and believed it. None of that was luck.

You were not saved by choice or by chance. You were saved by the almighty work of God, completely and totally. And this is spelled out very clearly and plainly in this passage here. 

Firstly, God the Father chose you. It says in verse 4: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ , in accordance with his pleasure and will.”

Your salvation was decided before the world was created. God had you in his mind, God knew you, before he put the stars in place, before he created the sun and the moon. And God planned to make you his child.

God the Father chose you. And God the Son redeemed you. Verse 7: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace.”

God the Son died on the cross, and through his death, through his blood, our sins were completely forgiven. And we have so many sins. We haven’t respected our parents. We’ve grumbled and complained about the people we work with. We haven’t loved God the way that we should. We haven’t loved the people around us.

And all of those sins were put on Jesus on the cross, and we’ve been completely forgiven.

So God the Father chose you. And God the Son redeemed you.

And God the Holy Spirit sealed you.

In bible times, people often wore a ring with a word or an image on it, which was like a signet ring. Or else they might have worn a similar ring on a cord around their neck. And they would use that to seal letters or documents or things like that. 

We don’t use seals anymore in the West. Instead, if we have a document or a contract or something, we just sign our name. But as you know, seals are used all the time in Japan. They’re called hanko.

It drove me crazy when I first arrived. It seemed like whenever I wanted to get anything done at the bank or at the city hall, I had to bring my hanko with me. But usually I’d left it at home, so I’d have to go all the way back again … Why couldn’t these places just accept a signature? It just drove me nuts.

But just like they did in bible times, the hanko in Japan fulfils a pretty important function. There are basically three main functions, which are the same as in bible times.

Firstly, a hanko is used to safeguard something. I’m building a house right now, and I had to make a contract with the construction company. There is my hanko up the top there, and the hanko from the architects is down the bottom. This protects the contract. It stops anyone from taking out the pages and changing them with other pages. No one can just take out a couple of pages and try and knock off 5 million yen from the price.

This is how seals in the bible work as well. In Rev. chapter 7, we read about how the angels from God are going through the world and causing all this disaster. So many people are being killed by the sword, famine and plague. But it says in verse 3:

“Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.”

When you believed in the Lord Jesus, you were marked with a seal by the Holy Spirit. And that seal protects you. Nothing can harm you, nothing can hurt you, unless God allows it.

Secondly, a hanko is used to authenticate something. To prove that something is real. For example, on a doctoral degree. A seal on a university degree tells everyone that this is a real PhD degree. It wasn’t just made on a computer at home and printed with a colour printer. It’s genuine.

When you have been sealed with the Holy Spirit, it’s a sign that your faith is genuine. It’s real. It’s not fake. This is a sign for you. When you have the Holy Spirit in your heart, you love God, you love coming to church, you love praying and hanging out with brothers and sisters in Christ, you have this great peace and joy in Christ. And that’s a sign that your faith is real, you’ve been genuinely saved, and that you have eternal life.

Thirdly, a hanko is used to show you belong to a family. Our family all uses the same hanko, when we need to stamp something or fill in some kind of form, this is the stamp we use. We all belong to the same family.

When you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit, it shows that you are part of God’s family. You belong to the Lord.