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The Holy Spirit Sealing
Ephesians 1:13 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.”
A Christian is a person whose life is not that of a religious isolated loner. Every Christian’s life is included in the life of Christ. Our family, our friendships, our leisure time, our home and money, indeed everything about us is inseparably linked to the Lord Jesus Christ. The flavour of the Saviour affects everything about the lives of his people. In our text Paul tells us that a Christian is a person who’s been included in Christ. “Then how,” a seeker asks, “can that happen to me? How would I get included in Christ?” According to our text there are three things that have to happen.
i] Firstly, you must hear the word of truth. The great claim of Christianity is that it is true. Why should you become Christians? Because Christianity is true. There is scarcely a better reason is there? The Christian religion is not a myth or an elaborate hoax – or as the New Testament says, ‘a cunningly devised fable.’ In other words, it is not a forgery, its message is absolutely true. So before you can become ‘included in Christ’ you have to hear this truth. If you want to hear it preached you have to go to one of those churches where all the Bible is explained and the consequences of what it says are applied to your life. You must hear that word of truth because there is nothing like it. It is utterly indispensable to the experience of our salvation. There is no way you can become a Christian without meeting the truth. It is described here by Paul as “the gospel of your salvation.” The word of truth is good news about sinners like you being saved - saved from your guilt and God’s holy condemnation of your sins. Have you heard the word? If not then how can you dismiss or even rubbish what you’ve never thought about? Its blessed message speaks about your salvation.
ii] Secondly, you must personally believe what you heard. In other words, you must trust the message about Jesus Christ, and entrust yourself to him. A woman in entering the marriage state knows that, from that moment on, her life will be included in the life of her husband. The two will become one, and he will care for her and for the children God will give them. She trusts in him and in all he has told her, and her husband trusts in her. That is the sort of faith being written about in our text, belief in someone you love, the belief that leads to committal. So, firstly you heard the word of truth, and secondly you believed it for yourself; you entrusted yourself right into the Lord Jesus.
iii] Thirdly, you must be sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. Prophets like Ezekiel and Joel had promised that the Holy Spirit one day would be poured out on every single person who believed, and since the day of Pentecost the Spirit has come upon every Christian. We are born into this new life of the Spirit of God. In fact, that is the reason we believe that the word is true. That is the reason we have entrusted ourselves to Jesus Christ; that is the reason we have been included in him. The Holy Spirit is the seal that we belong to God.
So there are those three events and they are all united, in other words they are describing some of the things that define a person as a Christian. My concern today is to isolate this third act, this sealing by the Holy Spirit and ask what it means. Now the Authorized Version translates this verse, “after that ye believed ye were sealed with the holy Spirit of promise,” and so in the light of that some have claimed that a man can be a believer and yet years and years may go by without his being sealed with the Spirit. I cannot accept that interpretation and simply want to make two comments, firstly that there is indeed a close relationship between faith and sealing in that it is believers alone who are sealed. There is no sealing for unbelievers. I also want to say secondly that the translation of the Authorized Version is not the best. There is a precisely similar construction that often occurs in the gospels. We are told that “Jesus answering said . . .” and it is an identical construction here, “you believing were sealed.” You wouldn’t say, “After Jesus had answered he said . . .” Certainly you would never think that the phrase from the gospels meant that many years after Jesus had answered he said something. I am saying that it is equally unhelpful to translate the construction here as the A.V. What Paul is saying is well captured in the New International Version, “Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.”
1. WHAT DOES THE APOSTLE MEAN BY THE SEALING OF THE SPIRIT?
What kind of experience is the apostle referring to? There is no doubt that there are times after we have become Christians when we experience memorable blessings from God. The strange thing is that many Christians cannot pinpoint the actual time when they became followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. They may be unsure of the year when they knew regeneration by the Holy Spirit. Consider how astonishing that is because it is teaching us that you cannot measure the importance of an experience by how powerfully it zaps you. Regeneration is the greatest change a person can know, he is given the life of heaven, the old heart of stone is replaced by a heart of flesh, his sins are forgiven and the righteousness of Christ is imputed to him, he is adopted into the family of God, he is joined to Jesus Christ, and yet, quite astonishingly, he is unaware of precisely when this extraordinary transformation had taken place. “I once was blind, but now I see,” is all he is able to say.
As that, no doubt, is the case with many Christians who cannot pinpoint the time of their regeneration then certainly all subsequent experiences of God’s blessing on their lives are bound to be more memorable than the total silence of when they became Christians. A believer is going to know when his spirit moved under certain sermons; sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings; there will be prayer meetings when he will know the presence of the Lord in a special precious way; a woman will enjoy peak experiences of the glory of God as she watches the sun go down; a Christian farmer may sometimes stop the tractor as he’s overwhelmed with the love of God for a sinner like himself. One night he may experience an enormously vivid dream the details of which seep away afterwards but the impression of radiance and splendour live on. It may be in a camp or in a conference or on a Sunday evening in his church he feels the Lord is near. He may be preaching or praying and feel overwhelmed. Such experiences can be the benison of a believer, when he knows that God is right there with him, to be humbly sought and accepted with joyful thanksgiving.
What will the Christian call them? What label will he attach to them? He may say in that charming way Reformed people have of being slightly disparaging about themselves, “I had a good time in my room that day.” He may call it a visitation from God, a blessing, a baptism, a sealing, a filling, a coming upon him. Let me tell you of one man’s experience and all those phrases attach to it. Alvin Plantinga is one of the world’s leading philosophers. He’s been president of the American Philosophical Association. He’s taught at Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Calvin, Notre Dame, and elsewhere. His powers of logic are staggering. Dr. Plantinga tells how, as a young man, he left home and went off to Harvard University. He says, “I was struck by the enormous variety of spiritual and intellectual opinion at Harvard, and spent a great deal of time arguing about whether there was such a person as God . . . I began to wonder whether what I had always believed could really be true. At Harvard, after all, there was such an enormous diversity of opinions about these matters, some of them held by highly intelligent and accomplished people who had little but contempt for what I believed.”
But it was there on the campus at Harvard that something happened. Plantinga writes, “One gloomy evening I was returning from dinner. It was dark, windy, raining, nasty. But suddenly it was as if the heavens opened; I heard, so it seemed, music of overwhelming power and grandeur and sweetness; there was light of unimaginable splendour and beauty; it seemed I could see into heaven itself; and I suddenly saw or perhaps felt with great clarity and persuasion and conviction that the Lord was really there and was all I had thought. The effects of this experience lingered for a long time; I was still caught up in arguments about the existence of God, but they often seemed to me merely academic, of little existential concern.”
Plantinga goes on to say, “Such events have not been common subsequently, and there has been only one other occasion on which I felt the presence of God with as much immediacy and strength. That was when I foolishly went hiking alone off-trail in really rugged country, getting lost when rain, snow, and fog obscured all the peaks and landmarks. That night, while shivering under a stunted tree in a cold mixture of snow and rain, I felt as close to God as I ever have, before or since. I wasn’t clear as to his intentions for me, and I wasn’t sure I thought I approved of what his intentions might be (the statistics on people lost alone in that area were not at all encouraging), but I felt very close to him; his presence was enormously palpable.”
Please do not sniff at that kind of experience as a mere emotional spasm. It is unforgettable. I believe that I can give you some verses from the Bible in which I can set such experiences. For example, we are told that the disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit. Surely that is saying much more than that they were regenerate. Or again, King David said. “God restores my soul.” He had been conscious of some spiritual disintegration and coldness and had been delivered from it. Again, Jesus promised to manifest himself to his disciples. Again, Peter speaks of an experience of joy unspeakable that is full of glory. A lot of people have had moving religious experiences, but we should not call them a seal or sealing of the Spirit because it is certain that people can have such experiences and still go to hell. They are not the sole prerogative of evangelical Christians; all kinds of Protestants and Catholics and the cults have religious experiences, whereas those who have had the seal of the Spirit never perish. Jesus says that many will say to him in the last day, “We ate and drank with you” (Luke 13:26). They claimed communion with Jesus Christ, and they had it, yet he will say to them, “Away from me all you evildoers” (v.27).
I would prefer to use a term like the ‘presence of God’ for such experiences, but unless they are structured by such biblical motifs of ruin, redemption and regeneration, or grace alone, faith alone and Christ alone, then they can give religious unbelievers false grounds of hope. The great word in our text is the word ‘seal.’ So what does a seal signify? In the New Testament a seal is first and foremost ownership; it is a means of attestation; it is an authentication; it is a guarantee of the genuineness of some particular article or of a document. It says that it is authentic; this particular thing is ‘for real.’ The seal on the stone of the tomb of our Lord said, “This tomb is now under Caesar’s authority; back off.” We find Paul saying to the Corinthians, “You are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord” (I Cor. 9:2). The apostolic gifts he had bestowed on them and the life of Christ which they displayed were together a seal that Paul had genuinely been called to be an apostle and preach to the people of Greece by the Son of God himself. The lives of these Corinthians were accreditations of Paul’s ministry. They were the guarantee of his divine authenticity.
So here in this text the sealing of the Spirit was a divinely given guarantee that henceforth they were included in Christ. The Holy Spirit was God’s authentication that they were his sons and heirs. The seal showed that their status as forgiven and accepted men and women was real. It was not that they were noisily claiming it for themselves but the Spirit of God was affirming it about them – “back off; these are God’s.” In other words, here is a person who is asking, “How can I know that I am a real Christian? What is the mark I should be looking for?” Paul answers you have been sealed by God, and the seal is the Holy Spirit himself who is now in you. The seal is not what the Holy Spirit does, that he makes you cry, or he makes you laugh, or he makes you jump for joy, or you produce glossalalia. The seal of the Spirit, in fact, is not a particular experience emanating from the indwelling of the Spirit. The seal that God gives to every Christian is the Spirit himself. The seal is not a second blessing. The seal is the person of the Holy Spirit indwelling each individual Christian believer, and by it God is saying that he is satisfied with you, that your profession of faith is authentic, that the Spirit has come into your life.
Then we have to go a step further and ask the question how we know that we have this seal, this indwelling of the Spirit. I would reply like this;
i] I enjoy the ministry of the Spirit in my life. I am happy in the presence and conversation of others who have the Spirit; I love them. I love the Lord’s Day, the time of worship, the activities of preparation and contemplation, and the whole structure of the day. I love hearing the Bible preached with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven. If there is a meeting in which the Word of God is going to be taught by a man who has been called by God I will be there. I believe the Bible to be inspired by God. I find myself praying for myself and praying for those I love and praying for friends and acquaintances. I pray that they will come to know God, and that their lives will glorify and honour God. I’m sorry when I sin; I feel guilty and I need to confess my sin to God. I want to please God in what I do; I present my body a living sacrifice to him; “Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.” I believe that all of that is the mark of the seal; it is the result of the Holy Spirit in my life. There is no other explanation for behaviour so contrary to what the world appreciates other than God has worked in me.
ii] I know something of the fruit of the Spirit in my life; “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gals 5:22&23). I want to emphasize that I do not see those fruit perfectly; I do not produce those fruit to the extent that I could wish. When my mother in old age lived with us and lost her composure and continually asked the same question every few minutes for several hours night after night I should have been far more patient and gentle and kind and good. I should have displayed self-control, but though I do not possess such fruit in abundance I cannot say that they are totally absent. I do have this divine love, and joy, and peace that Paul lists, even at times of deep distress. I would be today a mean-hearted son of a gun, far more unpleasant, selfish, unforgiving and hard were it not for what the Holy Spirit has done in my life.
iii] I know something of the gifts of the Spirit in my life. I knew a call into the ministry in 1963, and for 43 years I have been a preacher of the word of God. Has all that been one long ego-trip? I am not denying the possibility. Standing in front of a hundred people and pontificating week after week can satisfy some little men, but I have known again and again help beyond myself in preparing and preaching from the Bible. We have seen many wonderful men from this congregation going into the ministry in this country and overseas. People of very different backgrounds and personalities write to tell me how they are being helped by my sermons. All that is only possible through gifts of the Holy Spirit in teaching, and in inspiring people, and in leadership.
iv] I know something of the leading of the Spirit throughout my life. He has led me in paths of righteousness. That has been the overwhelming direction of my life. I have sinned every day, of course, and I have had some big falls, but it has been while I was walking in the direction of heaven. Every day I have known forgiveness. I have never experienced a day when I did not know that Jesus Christ was my Saviour and that I should be walking close to him. He has led me in the ways of serving others, of turning the other cheek, of self-denial, of worshipping the King of heaven.
So I would confess that the Holy Spirit is in my life because God says he is in the life of everyone who believes in his Son, and through such marks as those. That is what I know to be the seal of the Spirit of God, and each of us should ask ourselves whether we bear the hallmark of a Christian. Are we ourselves the sons of God? That is not an unintelligible question. It is something that is too crucial to delay in seeking an answer. Have you been marked in Christ with this seal? Do you enjoy the ministry of the Spirit in your life? Are the fruit of the Spirit visible in your life? Do you know something of the gifts of the Spirit? Are you being led along year after year by the Spirit?
Such questions are not about your evangelicalism and orthodoxy. They are not even about your feelings and emotions. They are about your spirituality. It is a very common contemporary word. Young people will claim that they are into ‘spirituality’ and they generally mean by that that they are not materialist in their values, though I wonder about that too. I have defined for you the spirituality that is pleasing to God that is the result of the Spirit at work in our lives. There is holy fruit; there is a narrow path which we keep walking along; there are the gifts of serving others in the name of Jesus Christ. That is true spirituality created and sustained by the Spirit of God. So have you been marked in Christ with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit?
2. TO WHOM DOES THIS SEAL BELONG?
What does the verse say? “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit” (v.13). Who is this ‘you’ to whom Paul is writing? They are the entire believing congregation at Ephesus, all who have made a credible profession of faith; all who are included in Christ. They all heard the word of truth, they all believed and they were all marked with a seal. The ‘you’ that Paul is addressing here consists of the whole congregation. He does not say that they all had heard and believed but only some of them had been sealed. All who heard and believed were also sealed. Paul does not say that they were unlike other congregations in the world at that time who merely heard and believed, but that the Ephesians were super-Christians that they were all marked with a divine seal. No. This is the mark of the mere Christian. They all heard, and all believed and all were sealed. God has put his hallmark on every single Christian by giving them the Holy Spirit, and he is the seal. That is the mark that they are owned by God. They all possessed this guarantee. Without it they were not simply unsealed Christians, they were not Christians at all. The whole point is that you can tell the true Christian by looking for the seal.
Now if we say that many true Christians are not yet sealed then this criterion of being sealed is of no use whatsoever in concluding if someone is a true believer. It is the Spirit of God, the third person of the Godhead in his ministry, in his fruits and in his gifts who is the mark that distinguishes the real believer from the atheist, the agnostic, the humanist, the religious person. The presence of the Spirit is how you know a son of God. In the world of commerce you look for the hallmark, you look for the signature, you look for the guarantee, you look for the label, you look for the watermark, you look for the imprint. When you see it then you know that the article is genuine. That is the whole idea here. We know that this person is spiritually the real article, a true Christian, because in his life there are attitudes and actions, words and deeds which are only explicable by the presence of the third person of the Godhead in his life. If a man does not bear God’s seal then he is none of his. Now I want to look at three pairs of words in this verse to cast some light on this.
i] Firstly, I want to look at those two tiny words that you can so easily miss, the words ‘in him.’ “You were marked in him with a seal” (v.13). Paul is saying that the great mark of the Christian is that he is no longer the loner, Camus’ L’Etranger, the outsider, the stranger, the outcast, but now, “you also were included in Christ.” You have been joined together with Christ; you are a branch in his true vine, and his life constantly enters you. His status is also yours; you possess chosen-ness in him, sonship in him, acceptance in him, redemption in him, forgiveness in him, provision in him and sealing in him.
You understand how incredible we find the other interpretation, that whereas every single Christian is chosen and adopted and redeemed and forgiven in Christ, they are not all sealed, that just some are while others might go through life never attaining the sealing! That simply cannot be, because if you are in Christ, then our text says, “You were marked in him with a seal” (v.13). All these blessings stand or fall together; all the accepted ones and the united ones and the reconciled ones and the pardoned ones are also all the sealed ones. It is impossible to be in Christ without your being being predestined; it is impossible to be in him without having the righteousness of Christ imputed to you; it is impossible to be in him without everything working together for your good; it is impossible to be in him without God supplying all your needs gloriously, and it is equally impossible to be in him without being marked with a seal. No man can be in Christ but out of the seal.
Let me carry it further; we cannot possibly be in Christ without being in the Spirit for a very elementary reason and that is this; Christ and the Spirit are indissolubly one. A twenty pound banknote has the seal of the Bank of England; on one side of it is Adam Smith and on the other side is Queen Elizabeth. You cannot have a 20 pound note which has merely the picture of the Queen or one that only shows the picture of Adam Smith. If it is genuine it has both portraits. So it is with the Christian; he has Christ and he has the Spirit. You can’t have one without the other. They are so closely identified that Paul says to the church at Corinth, “The Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17). Of course he is not saying that the second person of the Godhead is the third person of the Godhead. He is not confusing the distinct identity of these different persons – the Holy Spirit did not become incarnate and die for our sins. Paul is stressing the utter identity of their work in the economy of redemption. The Spirit does exactly what the Lord does. The Spirit’s work is not an additional or a special work beyond the Lord’s. The Spirit is the Lord at work. So the seal of the Spirit and the Son of God both belong to every Christian. The person who is the weakest lamb in the flock of Christ has both Son and Spirit, and of course he has the Father too.
ii] I want to look at the two words at the beginning of the text, “you also” – ‘you too’. The phrase is looking back to the sentence that comes before our text, “in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also . . .” (vv.12 & 13). Paul is saying that ‘we Jews’ were the first to hope in the Messiah, but now you Gentiles also have been included in the Messiah. Once you were without God, without the covenants and promises, without the ten commandments and the Scriptures, without the Levitical sacrifices and the hope of the one coming to bruise the serpent’s head. You were in the dominion of darkness, ruled by the god of this world, aliens and strangers, but you also heard the good news, and you believed it, and you were sealed with the Spirit.
It is a reminder to us as Christians living in Wales that we must never lose sight of the glory and marvel of God’s grace with regard to ourselves. Recent archaeological examination of primitive sites in Wales confirm how horrific life was before the gospel came to the Principality with human sacrifice not uncommon. From such druidic barbarism the gospel delivered the Welshman. We too have heard the word of truth. In spite of all that we are, and in spite of all that we’ve been, and in spite of all that we know about ourselves (things that even those who know us best are ignorant of), and in spite of all that God knows about us we too have been marked with the seal of the Spirit. “They shall be mine,” says the Lord. And the day we cease to wonder about that then on that day the savour will have gone from our Christian lives. Indeed I am not sure whether a great deal of our lukewarmness and our worldliness in matters of religion, and the artificial excitements that are introduced into worship services, don’t stem from this precise failure that we have become used to the idea that God could have loved a sinner like me. Somehow this whole privilege of our sonship, and the glory of being sealed with the Holy Spirit of God is being taken for granted and is being picked up casually on the way to the music group’s rehearsals. Paul says to us, “You also . . .” who sometimes were afar off, alienated and enemies in your minds by wicked works, God has brought you near . . . “you also.” I say it to myself, “me too.” I am also loved with everlasting love by the maker of the universe. Chosen by him, adopted into his family, redeemed from the slavery of sin, forgiven for its guilt, kept from its power – “me too!”
iii] Thirdly, I want to look at the two words at the end of the text, “promised . . . Spirit.” I think that that is tremendously important for our understanding of this teaching. Why does every Christian have the Holy Spirit? Because God promised each one would. Why are we sealed? Because God has promised the patriarch Abraham that he would. As Paul told the Galatians of our Lord Jesus, “He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit” (Gals. 3:14). Why am I emphasizing this? Because there is a certain kind of teaching that says, “There are things you have to do in order to wrest this gift out of the hands of God.” The bottom line is that you have to earn the sealing, you do this by prolonged sessions of prayer; you do this by dealing with your sins, you renounce them all and you beseech the Lord earnestly, maybe for years, and when you have put your life in order and elevated yourself to a higher plane and amputated from your life all that is wrong then you can hope that this experience of being sealed with the Spirit can be yours.
What’s wrong with that? Certainly Christians need to pray more earnestly and humbly; all believers have to take up their cross and deny themselves and follow Christ. They fill up in their bodies the sufferings that come upon them because they are Christ’s - which sufferings have become the sufferings of Christ. If their eye causes them to fall into sin then let them pluck out that eye. Let them beat their bodies and keep them in subjection lest they become castaways. All those things are part of the Christian life, but they are all done by the power of the Spirit who has already sealed them. They are not done in order to obtain the sealing. We are raising the question how does someone obtain the seal of the Spirit? What must he do? The answer is to believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ. Look to him and be saved. Get in Christ by faith. That is the glory of the gospel. The conditions of the sealing of the Holy Spirit are precisely analogous to the condition of justification, that Jesus comes into our lives by grace alone through faith alone. You must be covered with the provision of the divine atonement. You must receive into your heart the Son of God and at that moment you will be marked in him with the seal which is the promised Spirit. These Gentile Christians had no need to fulfil certain other conditions in order to get him, because God has already made the promise of giving the Spirit to all those who believe in his Son.
3. WHAT OF THE INCONSISTENCY OF MANY CHRISTIAN LIVES?
“Look how that Christian behaves,” some would protest. “Are you saying that that person in his weakness, and failure, and utter ordinariness is sealed with the Holy Spirit of God?” I reply, what is the legitimacy of pragmatic arguments in the face of plain statements of the word of God? The same argument applies with equal force to the claim that a Christian is a “new creation in Christ Jesus” or that he is “blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus.”
Imagine your worshipping at the Antioch congregation and noticing the Spirit-baptized apostle Peter sitting in the midst of the Jewish section of the congregation, and then at ‘Fellowship Lunch’ sitting at the tables where kosher food alone was being served, and noisy comments being made about this in an atmosphere of Jewish triumphalism. It is clear to you that there is a crack running through this congregation and that Gentiles are being regarded as second class Christians, and that Peter has helped widen this crack by affirming it in word and life. Here is a man full of the Spirit acting in such a sub-Christian way. What are we going to say? “He has never had the sealing?” No. I shall not minimize the glory of each ordinary Christian. I shall maximize the glorious privileges and status of God’s people, and I shall charge them with living far below their privileges. “What are you doing Peter, by keeping yourself away from your Gentile fellow believers in this congregation? Both they and you have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. You are all indwelt by the Lord Jesus. You all have been chosen, justified, redeemed, forgiven, adopted, joined to Christ, definitively sanctified and glorified. Today - how unworthy, and ordinary, and inconsistent is your behaviour towards your fellow believers! Shame on you Peter!”
Our problem is this, that we have not become mastered by the glory and privileges of the Christian life. We are rarely lost in wonder, love and praise at what God has done for us in his free redemption. Are we excusing our conduct by our claim that God hasn’t baptized or sealed us with the Spirit? I have to realise that not for one moment of my life, even in the midst of all my temptations, my falls and my shame for my sin, am I dis-connecting with Jesus Christ. Never in a moment of backsliding, in the depths of Christian degradation and shame, do I cease to be a regenerate man, or cease to be sealed with the Spirit.
The Corinthian who took the young wife of his father was doing what? He was not proving that he had never been sealed with the Spirit, but rather that he was taking the body of Christ and uniting it to someone who was not his wife. The whole horror of that analysis lies in this, that a believer’s wickedness does not suspend even temporarily his status and privileges. He can try to excuse himself by claiming that he had not had the sealing but he is deceived. His sealing is rather an aggravation of his behaviour, that he, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, should have behaved like that.
My friends, if only we really believe what we say we do. If only we lived according to our privileges and under their power. If only we let the plain truth of the gospel be all the truth for our daily lives, ransomed, sealed, adopted, forgiven; who like we Christ’s praise should sing?
21st September 18, 2008 GEOFF THOMAS