Ephesians Study 3: Evidence of God’s Spirit

Introduction

Hello again to everyone who is joining me today. My name is Sarah Bradbury, and this is Garden to Glory: The Mystery of God.

This is the third installment of our study in the book of Ephesians. In our last study, we asked, “Who are the people of God?”

Today, as we pick up the discussion in Ephesians 1:12-14, we will ask another question that is deeply related to the previous one: “How do I know that I am truly one of God’s people?”

Let’s begin our discussion with a recap of what we have learned so far in our Ephesians study. This will lead us to today’s question that we will begin to answer in Ephesians.

As we read in Romans 1 in our first study, the nations of the world saw God’s revelation in creation. However, instead of honoring God for that creation, they made up stories about who God was that were not true. They worshipped gods of their own imaginations that resembled the creation instead of the creator. In doing this, the people claimed to be wise and know God, but instead, they proved themselves to be foolish.

In our second study, we learned that the nation of Israel was set apart from the rest of the world by being given greater and more direct revelation from God. God gave them the law. God gave them direct instructions for how to recognize and honor Him in the time and place they lived.

However, like the Gentile nations around them, the Jewish people took the information they had been given about God and also chose to trust in the creation instead of the creator. They placed their hope and security in their race and their own ability to follow the law they had been given.

While claiming to be wise because of the knowledge God had given them, they proved themselves to be foolish by disregarding God’s commands and trusting in themselves.

This is the pattern of all humanity. We take whatever revelation we have about God – whether from creation or scripture – and turn it into a false version of God. We instead trust in ourselves or some other imagined power. This is the most foolish and dangerous when we justify our false worship by claiming it to be what God Himself commands.

The People Jesus Criticizes

During the time Jesus spent on Earth, His harshest criticisms were not given to the Gentiles who didn’t follow the law or to the sexually immoral within Israel. The object of Jesus’ condemnation was not even the unjust Roman government of His day. Instead, the words of Jesus’ condemnation were almost universally reserved for the religious teachers of His day.

The people Jesus singles out for judgement are primarily those who claim to be righteous and wise about God while misleading people who come to them for guidance.

We can see an example of this condemnation in Jesus’ words in Matthew 23:13-15 and 27-28:

What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either.

What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are…

What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.

The apostle Paul himself, who was chosen by God to be an evangelist to the Gentiles and wrote a large portion of the New Testament, began his life’s work as one of these false teachers.

Galatians 1:13-14 tells us:

You know what I was like when I followed the Jewish religion – how I violently persecuted God’s church. I did my best to destroy it. I was far ahead of my fellow Jews in my zeal for the traditions of my ancestors.

The Believers

We may be tempted to think, “Thank God for the end of the Jewish age! What a relief to be in the time of Christianity when the true people of God are finally revealed and made clear.”

After all, 1 Peter 2:9-10 tells us:

But you are not like that, for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for He called you out of the darkness into His wonderful light.

“Once you had no identity as a people;
now you are God’s people.
Once you received no mercy;
now you have received God’s mercy.”

And Galatians 3:26-29 says:

For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are His heirs, and God’s promise to Abraham belongs to you.

The nation of Israel failed to become God’s kingdom of priests and His holy nation, but those of us who have believed in Jesus are that chosen, holy nation, the kingdom of priests, God’s very own possession.

Phew! Time for the sigh of relief. All things are settled now… until we read a few more passages.

True Believers?

In Galatians 1:6-7, Paul speaks to the churches in Galatia. He says:

I am shocked that you are turning away so soon from God, who called you to Himself through the loving mercy of Christ. You are following a different way that pretends to be the Good News but is not the Good News at all. You are being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning Christ.

And again, Paul speaks to the church in Corinth in 2 Corinthians 11:1-4:

I hope you will put up with a little more of my foolishness. Please bear with me. For I am jealous for you with the jealousy of God himself. I promised you as a pure bride to one husband – Christ. But I fear that somehow your pure and undivided devotion to Christ will be corrupted, just as Eve was deceived by the cunning ways of the serpent. 

You happily put up with whatever anyone tells you, even if they preach a different Jesus than the one we preach, or a different kind of Spirit than the one you received, or a different kind of gospel than the one you believed.

What is happening?!? These are supposed to be the true people of God! The believers in Jesus!

But we see here that even those who claim Jesus are not immune to the human tendency to distort the revelation of God. 

In fact, just like the Pharisees at the time of Jesus, some of the worst offenders of God are counted among the most esteemed teachers of Jesus.

In Acts 20:28-30, Paul says to the elders of the Ephesian church:

So guard yourselves and God’s people. Feed and shepherd God’s flock – His church, purchased with His own blood – over which the Holy Spirit has appointed you as leaders. I know that false teachers, like vicious wolves, will come in among you after I leave, not sparing the flock. Even some men from your own group will rise up and distort the truth in order to draw a following.

This is a shocking passage! Paul is talking to the leaders of the Ephesian church. He says they were appointed as leaders by the Holy Spirit, yet some men from among this group will themselves be distorters of truth, seeking people to follow their lies.

If you’ve ever looked at the witness of Christians in your life, the world, or history and thought to yourself, “How can this be the witness of God?” you are not alone, and you are not wrong.

The people in the world who claim the name of God have always included the biggest distorters of His name.

In 2 Corinthians 11:13-15, the Apostle Paul says:

These people are false apostles. They are deceitful workers who disguise themselves as apostles of Christ. But I am not surprised! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no wonder that his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. In the end they will get the punishment their wicked deeds deserve.

Jesus also warned us about this when He said in Matthew 7:21-23:

Not everyone who calls out to me, “Lord! Lord!” will enter the kingdom of heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter. On judgment day many will say to me, “Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.” But I will reply, “I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.”

Notice that these people who claimed to follow Jesus were not passive believers who were too lazy to do anything. These people were active. They at least claimed to have been prophesying, casting out demons, and performing miracles in the name of Jesus, but they were wrong. It wasn’t true.

And again Jesus warns us in Matthew 7:15-23:

Beware of false prophets who come disguised as harmless sheep but are really vicious wolves. You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act. Can you pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit. So every tree that does not produce good fruit is chopped down and thrown into the fire. Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions.

If the biggest distorters of the truth of God do not come from secular culture but from some of the very people assigned to teach the way of God, if believers in Jesus are prone to believe these false teachers, and if the tendency of all mankind is to distort the truth of God, how can we be certain that we are worshipping the one true God?

So, How Do We Know?

I propose two ways. Let’s look at our passage in Ephesians to find them. Ephesians 1:12-14 says:

God’s purpose was that we Jews who were the first to trust in Christ would bring praise and glory to God. And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the good news that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, He identified you as His own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom He promised long ago. The Spirit is God’s guarantee that He will give us the inheritance He promised and that He has purchased us to be His own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify Him.

The first way to determine if we are worshipping God as He truly is is to look to Jesus.

Our passage in Ephesians tells us that it is faith in Christ that brings praise and glory to God, and it is when we believed in Christ that God identified us as His own. We cannot believe in Jesus if we don’t look at who He is.

1 John 3:2 tells us:

Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but He has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see Him as He really is.

Here we can see the principle that seeing Jesus as He really is will result in us being like Jesus. We will be fully united to Him when we see Him fully.

Unfortunately, we also see a problem in this passage. We have not yet seen Him fully, so we are not completely like Him even though we are already God’s children.

Having full and complete knowledge of God is not something that we can fully accomplish before Christ returns. We need to remain humble and recognize that all of us will lack some degree of true and complete worship of God, but we do have the ability to see Jesus to some extent even now.

1 Corinthians 13:12 says:

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Though our knowledge here is only partial, and though we cannot currently set our physical eyes on Jesus, we have been given a record of His life in the New Testament that shows us His character.

Colossians 1:15a tells us that:

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.

Jesus is the part of God that is visible to us. It is faith in Jesus that makes us the people of God. If we want to make sure our vision of God does not become corrupted, we should frequently immerse our minds in who Jesus was and what He did.

The Holy Spirit

The second way to determine if we are worshipping God as He truly is, is to look for the evidence of the Holy Spirit.

Let’s go back to Ephesians 1:13b-14:

And when you believed in Christ, He identified you as His own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom He promised long ago. The Spirit is God’s guarantee that He will give us the inheritance He promised and that He has purchased us to be His own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify Him.

When we believed in Christ, God made clear that we are His chosen people by giving us the Holy Spirit. That gift is God’s promise that we are the people of God and that His promises to us as His people will be fulfilled.

And so we have to ask ourselves, “How do we know if we have the Holy Spirit?”

When we think about the giving of the Holy Spirit, we often think about signs like speaking in tongues and performing miraculous healings. Various places in the New Testament have lists of different gifts of the Spirit that include these things.

Like the experience of Jewish believers at Pentecost in Acts 2, the common experience of Gentile believers in the New Testament was miraculous abilities given by the Holy Spirit. But what about the experience of Christians today?

While there are certainly church leaders today who emphatically state that miraculous gifts are still the normative experience for all Christians, many other churches believe that these gifts were only given for a short time to the earliest believers. They see these gifts as confirmation to the world that this new message of Jesus was, in fact, the truth coming from God.

So, what are we to make of these claims? Should we conclude that – since miraculous gifts don’t seem to be the norm anymore – we no longer have the Holy Spirit?

Or instead, should we assume that Christians who claim miraculous gifts are correct? Therefore, are they are the only true believers due to their apparent evidences of the Spirit?

What about the words of Jesus in Matthew 7 when He warned that people He never knew will claim they have performed many miracles in His name? Should we see miraculous gifts as proof of the Spirit or the lack of these gifts as evidence that we do not have the Spirit?

I have many things I could write about spiritual gifts (whether or not they exist today and in what form is something of a hobby interest of mine). However, in our current study, I don’t think it is necessary to lay out all the evidence and arguments involved in the spiritual gifts conversation.

Instead, I will point us to a passage the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church. The church in Corinth was very enthusiastic about acquiring and exercising spiritual gifts, especially the gift of tongues. This is also the primary focus of many churches that emphasize spiritual gifts today.

All You Need is Love

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Paul contends in these verses that it isn’t the exercise of spiritual gifts that is the most important aspect of the Christian life. It is love.

This is a sentiment that Jesus also shared with Paul.

In Matthew 22:37-40, we read:

And He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Additionally, in John 13:34-35, Jesus says:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

It is not the gifts of the Spirit that show you have been given the Spirit. Rather, it is the fruit of the Spirit, and the greatest of that fruit is love.

Galatians 5:6 tells us:

For when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being circumcised or being uncircumcised. What is important is faith expressing itself in love.

Again we read the list of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23:

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!

It’s interesting to note that all of the fruits of the spirit could be defined as different nuances of the expression of love.

I know that many Christians would caution against simply saying that the Christian faith can be summed up by expressing love. It sounds too simplistic, and what it means to love others can be defined differently by different people. However, the Bible persists in emphasizing love as the main characteristic of the Christian life.

1 John 4:7-20 says:

Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

God showed how much He loved us by sending His one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through Him. This is real love – not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.

Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and His love is brought to full expression in us.

And God has given us His Spirit as proof that we live in Him and He in us. Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. All who declare that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in His love.

God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face Him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world.

Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced His perfect love. We love each other because He loved us first.

If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a fellow believer, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? And He has given us this command: those who love God must also love their fellow believers.

If what we read in Ephesians is correct, then the presence of the Holy Spirit is the promise that you are, in fact, a child of God. And if the most important fruit of that Spirit is love, then we ought to pay close attention to how love is defined in the Bible, how it is expressed in the life of Jesus, and how that compares to the expression of love we show in our own lives.

What is Love?

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 is a passage frequently read at weddings because of its definition of love. However, the love described here was not meant to be limited to marriage. This is the type of love that all Christians are supposed to show to all people, especially other believers. The passage states:

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

This is not a simplistic love. This is not a love that ignores the hurt caused by another. Rather, it is a love that chooses to bear the hurt while hoping and pleading for truth to win out in the life of the other person.

This is a self-sacrificing love. As sinful humans, we struggle to show this kind of love to the people we choose to marry, let alone to our enemies. However, Jesus commands us to do just that.

In Matthew 5:43-48, Jesus says:

You have heard the law that says, “Love your neighbor” and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For He gives His sunlight to both the evil and the good, and He sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. 

If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Who could possibly love like this?

But God isn’t asking you to do something that He is unwilling to do Himself. When Jesus was on Earth, He lived this out for us to see. In Luke 23:34, we read Jesus’ prayer for the people who nailed Him to the cross:

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

The presence of love – the kind we see in 1 Corinthians 13 and in the life of Jesus – is the clearest sign of God’s Spirit that we could ever see in the life of a believer. This kind of love is not natural to our sinful nature. It only comes from loving God, who is not like us. He is better. The more we love God, the more we become like God in our love for each other.

This Spirit-empowered love is the evidence that you truly are a child of God. As we read in Ephesians, this Spirit is God’s guarantee that He has purchased us to be His own people.

It may sound too simple. “All you need is love,” The Beatles song tells us, but if I were to attempt to explain every nuance of love and every scripture that references it, we’d be here for days. When it comes down to it, we all recognize love when we experience it, and deep down, we know if the actions and attitudes we have for others have their root in love or selfishness. 

Hopefully we will talk about love more in the future, but for now, I’d like to address some questions you might have about looking at your own life and evaluating whether or not you have this Spirit-empowered love and what to do if you don’t see this evidence of the Spirit in you.

What if I Don’t Have Love?

If you doubt that God’s Spirit of love is in you because you struggle to love people who have hurt you, I want you to know two things.

First, even if we have the Spirit, loving our enemies is genuinely hard. There is a reason that Jesus said loving our enemies makes us perfect. Many believers have struggled to do this very thing over the course of time, and it has not always been something they succeeded at on the first try.

We may need to wrestle a bit with ourselves and God to bring our hearts into true love and forgiveness toward our enemies. It helps to remember that this love is not given based on their innocence or their worth. We love our enemies because we love God and because God loved us when we were still His enemies. Also, loving others does not necessarily mean that we like them. Loving others is simply desiring their good, even if their good costs us something.

Second, loving our enemies does not require us to ignore their sins against us.

Jesus cried out from the cross for God’s forgiveness for those who nailed Him to it. God’s answer to that prayer involved sending the apostles to preach to the people that they were guilty of killing the Son of God. The apostles told the people to repent. Those who did were forgiven.

Part of loving our enemies is desiring for them to turn away from their sin and turn to God for forgiveness. This often requires that we point out the sins of others in order for them to see their need.

1 John 1:8-10 says:

If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to Him, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness. If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that His word has no place in our hearts.

The ultimate good for all of us is to acknowledge our sins and be cleansed of them. This is true of our enemies as well, and we should seek this outcome when it is possible.

As we just read in 1 John, none of us are without sin. When we read Galatians 5, we read about the fruit of the Spirit. However, that same chapter tells us we still have a sinful nature that wars against the Spirit. So if you are discouraged today because there are areas in your life that do not appear to be ruled by love, know that is true of all believers. Nonetheless, please don’t be satisfied with that.

Love is still the main characteristic of the Spirit-led life. As a believer, it should be the dominant sign that you belong to the people of God. If you are struggling to see that fruit in your life – or if you are simply anxious to see more of it – I have three suggestions on how to pursue this in your life.

1. Look to Jesus. 

Our passage in Ephesians tells us that the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life is a result of a gift given to you when you believed in Jesus. If you do not have this gift, or want more of it, then look to the person you are called to believe in.

Allow the weight of the love of Jesus to move you. Think about and dwell on His love for you. 1 John 4:19 says:

We love each other because He loved us first.

So, dwell in His love for you.

2. Pray and ask God to move in you and give you His Spirit.

Luke 11:11-13 says:

“You fathers – if your children ask for a fish, do you give them a snake instead? Or if they ask for an egg, do you give them a scorpion? Of course not! So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him.”

3. Ask God to send believers into your life who will model His love in real and tangible ways that will move you to experience and show this love to others.

Hebrews 10:4 tells us:

Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works.

The love of Jesus can be found in places outside of Scripture. It can be found in the people of God who have been united with Christ. If you are struggling to feel God’s love, seek the people who model that love for you in real life.

It can be hard to find the people of God at times, and because they are still plagued by their sinful natures, the love of God can sometimes be hard to see in them. However, love in the life of a believer is a beautiful and powerful thing, and this love grows and multiplies when believers embrace and encourage that love in each other.

Thank you all for joining me today. So, friends, as I end this study, I ask that God – who is love – would fill you with His Holy Spirit and cause you to overflow with love.

To help you meditate on the principles we have discussed today, I have made a short Spotify playlist that you can find here.