He said you were sealed with the Holy Spirit - which is the earnest of your inheritance. Our inheritance is the Holy Spirit. God Himself is your inheritance. You say: well I kind of wanted silver, and gold, and jewels and promotion… Listen, in Christ you get everything you need. Colossians 2:10 – “you are complete in Him”. So when you're in Christ you have access to all you need. If you don't feel like that, it’s because your perspective and way of looking and thinking and speaking is not right.
Most people, they say: yes, oh that's great preaching, oh that was good; but actually the reality doesn't become established in their life. You are sealed with the earnest of your inheritance, the Holy Ghost.
Notice the word ‘earnest’. It means simply this… Say you go and buy a house, and you decide: that's the house - I want to own it. They say: that's good, but you have to front up with a deposit. The word ‘earnest’ means ‘a deposit’, something given as a guarantee that there's more coming. There will come a day when they will ask you pay the full price, and the house will then be yours - that is the language of this passage.
You are sealed with the Spirit of God, the earnest of your inheritance, until the day of redeeming of the purchased possession. God wants to stamp you, and mark you, and distinguish you from every other person in this world. The way He does it is, He stamps you with the anointing and presence of His Holy Spirit; and what you get is just the down-payment, of all of the rest of the payment, which is more of what you got.
So if we paid a deposit on a house, and its $1,000 then he's got to front up with the balance, which is all the rest of the money. So he gave money; but there's more money to come. That's what the scripture's saying - when you got the Holy Ghost, you got the pledge, you got the down payment, the first instalment.
If there's a ‘first instalment’, then there's got to be second, third, fourth - and then one great final pay off. This is what God wants you to be excited about!
For most people, their baptism in the spirit happened years ago, and it's not very relevant to what they're doing now, because they don't understand the value of what you have, and how to draw on what you have, so you overcome in life.
Jesus was so excited about giving you the Holy Spirit, because He said: this is what you will need to win in life. Greater is he that is in you, than he that's in the world. You don't have to live fearful of devils and demons and beasts and marks and all kinds of stuff…. This is just a lot of nonsense, coming out of Christians who ought to know better - breeding fear in the sale of books.
What is needed is that we capture God's vision for a people arising, filled with the Spirit of God! You've got to get a hold of what this is. In the Old Testament, you read about Moses, and we say: man, I'd love to go back there, the glory came down and filled that tabernacle with shimmering glory of God. Isn't that amazing! Oh - and they couldn't stand up, they all fell over - but that wasn't God's plan, that's only a bit of it. That's just a heads-up that something better is coming.
David had a tabernacle, and it was tent. They had worship going on all around it, and the presence of God like a shimmering glory came into it, and people fell over and got touched by the presence of God. And God said: that's pretty good isn't it aye? But He said: that's not it... But wait, there's more!
Solomon's temple, they put the temple up, they began to pray, and oh the glory of God came out of heaven, came into that temple. There it was. They fell over. How wonderful. They were impressed; and God said: but wait, there's more. This is not it! This is just to give you pictures, so you might get it.