The Holy Spirit the Seal of God's Heritage and the Earnest of our Inheritance.
I. In the early Church the access of the Spirit of God to a man was commonly associated with the mysterious gift of tongues, with the power of prophecy, or with other manifestations of a miraculous kind. It seems to be a law of the Divine action that the beginning of a new movement in the religious history of mankind should be signalised by supernatural wonders which bear emphatic testimony to the new forces that are revealing themselves in the spiritual order and illustrate their nature. These wonders gradually cease, but the loftier powers of which they are only the visible symbols remain. The miraculous manifestations of the Divine Spirit have passed away, but it was the promise of Christ that the Spirit should remain with us for ever.
II. That for the most part we are so indifferent to the presence of the Spirit of God is infinitely surprising. We repeat in another form the sin of insensibility of which the Jewish people were guilty when our Lord was visibly among them. The past was sacred to them, but they were so completely under its control that they failed to recognise the nobler disclosures of the righteousness and power and love of God to themselves. And is it not the same with us? We look back upon the days when the Son of God was teaching in the Temple and in the cornfields and on the hills of Galilee; and we feel in our hearts that those were the days in which heaven and earth met, and in which God was near to man. The presence of the Spirit, which Christ Himself declared was to be something greater than His own presence, was to bring clearer light and firmer strength and completer access into the kingdom of God, does not fill us with wonder, with hope, with exulting thankfulness.
III. Paul has spoken of us in ver. 11 as being God's heritage; in ver. 14 we are described as anticipating an inheritance for ourselves. Our hopes are infinite. If by His Spirit God dwells in us now, we shall dwell in God for ever; and His Spirit dwells in us that He may redeem us completely from all sin and infirmity and raise us to the power and perfection and blessedness of the Divine kingdom.
R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians,p. 109.
References: Ephesians 1:13. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. x., No. 592; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 4; J. H. Evans, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 61.