Your salvation is sealed
dad make the absolute best homemade soup.
A while back, I was sitting in my living room with a young man that was saved that morning; he made the comment, “I just never want to be lost again.” I know I’m opening up a can of worms here, but just suffer through this if that’s what it takes. I asked the young man a question that most new believers give a wrong answer to, including myself right after I was saved. I asked him who was responsible for keeping him saved. In a flood of anxiety, he replied that he was. In the greatest most liberating day of his life, this guy was terrified at the thought of being lost again. How could he enjoy his salvation, in the fear as he was experiencing? The truth, according to scripture, is that we are not responsible for keeping our salvation. Ephesians 2: 8- 9 reads... For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. It’s by the grace of God that we are saved, and NOTHING else.
Saying we could lose our salvation is the same as saying we could be good enough to keep it. How good would be good enough? It would take us living without sin until the day of redemption, which will be the day Jesus returns for us.
At this moment, I went and got a jar of my parent’s soup from a kitchen cabinet, and sat it on the coffee table in front of him. I then instructed him to read Ephesians 4: 30. This verse reads, “And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.” After he read it, I explained to him the process that Momma completes in “canning” the jar of soup. I explained that after she cooked the soup, she placed the jar in boiling water until she heard a small, ping sound. I told him that when you hear the “ping,” you knew that the lid on the jar was sealed. I showed him that the jar had a 15 on the lid, saying that it was canned in 2015. Furthermore, I promised him that if I went to the kitchen and heated the soup, that it would taste like it was canned yesterday. How could that be? Because the jar was sealed. Another word for sealed is “kept.” The soup had been “kept” by the sealing of the lid on the jar. A seal, in biblical times as today, is used to guarantee security or indicate ownership. That should make a Christian shout. When the Holy Spirit “sealed” this young man, He guaranteed his eternal security!
Our late Pastor, Dr. Woody Lee, used to say that the only way a man could live above sin would be to live in the upstairs of a honkytonk. If we were in charge of securing our salvation, Heaven would be empty except for the angels and God Himself. Spend some time today thanking God for your salvation, then enjoy sharing an old jar of soup with someone. Be Blessed.