The Healing Word

Pastor Jack Morris: I belong to Jesus. Now I belong to Jesus. I have the seal of the Holy Spirit upon me.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Healing Word. Today, Pastor Jack Morris continues the study of Christians living in the world and the struggle to not conform to earthly ways. Friend, if you've been doubting where you are in a relationship with Christ today, then stay tuned for the next 30 minutes as Pastor Morris unfolds the beauty of God's plan and the work he's accomplishing in and around you right now. Let's go to the introduction of today's message: Signed, Sealed, and Delivered.

Pastor Jack Morris: I'm Pastor Jack Morris, and again we're going to go to the book of Ephesians chapter one, but today we're going to be focusing on verse 13, where it says, "And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked with a seal, the promise of the Holy Spirit." So, you were blessed with God's great blessing upon you. He cares for you. He has sealed you with the Holy Spirit of promise.

Friend, what I'm trying to say is you are safe today. There's nothing to fear. There's no cause for fear because of Jesus. Call that name. That name that is above every name will protect you and bless you. You don't have to fear. Believe and express your praises to the Lord, and he will impart hope and peace to your life. I want you to hear this message. It's the word of God that will bring faith and security to your heart and will drive out all fear. Signed, sealed, and delivered.

Amen. We're only passing through this world, dear friends. This world isn't our permanent dwelling. There's another place. Jesus said, "I go to prepare that place for you." It's a prepared place. It's not going to be developed after we get there. It's going to be all ready for us. Just beautifully designed that only heaven could imagine. It's far beyond anything we can imagine or think. But while we're here on this earth, there's going to be some difficulty, some trial, hard places, sickness, disappointment.

We're traveling through a world that is fallen, a world that has sinned, and sin is rampant, and it's touching our lives also. We can't avoid it, but we must keep remembering that we belong to the Lord Jesus, and he is with us, and he is in us. Hey, did you hear that? He is with us, and he is in us. Hallelujah. That means we're going to make it. We're going to make it. Do you know that each believer, that each Christian is predestined to success?

God planned it that way, to bring you through successfully to the land of glory, to the land of promise, called heaven. You're going to make it. Sometimes you feel, I'm sure, that you're not going to make it, that you're falling, that you're in a free fall and you're never going to hit bottom. But I want you to know that the Lord is with you, the Lord is in you. And you and I need to remind ourselves of that, and that's one of the reasons we come to remind, do in remembrance of me what the Lord has done for us at Calvary through his precious shed blood.

So, we're going to make it. I want you to turn to your friend and say, "Neighbor, you're going to make it." Now, all week long, I want you to say to yourself, "Christian believer, you're going to make it, no matter what's happening, whatever the difficulty." God has predestined you to succeed, to success. The Apostle Peter said in his book, 1 Peter 2:11, that we are strangers and aliens here. So friend, don't get too comfortable.

You say, "Oh, I've got to get my house paid off. I've got to get my..." Hey, you're only going to live in it a little while, and it's in the stage of decay, just like you and I are in the stage of decay. So, it's all going to go. But you need to know where you're going to go when this life is completed and what's going on right now until this life is completed. We're with the Lord, and the Lord is with us. Now I want you to look at the screen.

We're going to read together Ephesians 1:13. You see it? Let's in unison read it. "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." Now notice I have three words underlined: heard, believed, sealed. Now that's the story of God to every believer, and if you're a believer, that's God's message to you.

You heard the word of God, the word of truth. We heard about the cross. We heard that he died on the cross, shedding his blood, taking our sins in his own body on that tree. We heard that. Remember hearing that? That's a story that never grows old, and I want to tell it again and again. It's the most precious story that has ever been heard, the sweetest words that have ever been heard. That depth of truth has embraced me and touched my life, and I have embraced it.

The Lord Jesus has done great and mighty things, and he continues to do these great and mighty things for us, the cross. Now I'm not an early childhood educator. I know very little about early childhood training. When I trained in education at Maryland, I was in the philosophy of higher education. But I think I'm right, and those of you who are in early childhood training, you can correct me after the service. Afterward, not now.

But ever since the baby is born, words are spoken to that baby. Now that baby can't understand those words. We coo and we talk. And then at about maybe age two, I'm not sure, maybe a little bit earlier than that, that baby then starts speaking words. Words that that baby has heard the mother and the father say and heard others say. That child then begins to speak words. I remember my mother telling me my first word was the name of my uncle.

He came walking in the house. Many babies, they'll say "dada" or "mommy" or something like that, but my uncle came in and everybody called him Ike, and that was the very first word I ever said: Ike. I don't know why I did that, but I did. And then words, words have always been important. They're important to us now. And then at about what, between four and five years old, we start reading words. And then we started singing words.

Words have always been important, and they're important now. And you're hearing words, and we read words. Fanny Crosby wrote a beautiful hymn. She wrote a lot of beautiful hymns. This blind Christian lady who was blind between ages of three weeks old and six weeks old by an incompetent doctor. She was blind all her life. She never could see, but she could hear, just like you're hearing the word of God today. And she wrote a beautiful hymn, and listen to these words, just part of it.

"Tell me the story of Jesus." Now notice, tell it. Tell it so I can hear it. She can't see. "Tell me the story of Jesus, write on my heart every word." There it is, word. "Tell me the story most precious, sweetest that ever was heard." And then she goes on. She says, "Tell me about the cross. Tell me about the tomb. Tell me about him who lives again." Somebody asked Fanny Crosby years later when she was an adult.

She said, "And Fanny, if you could see, if somehow you could regain your sight, wouldn't that be wonderful? Wouldn't you like that?" And she said, "No." She said, "I would turn it down." She said, "Because I've heard the word of God." And she said, "If I could see, I would see things, beautiful things in this life that God has made and I would perhaps become distracted by the things I see. I want to hear the story. Tell me the story of Jesus, write on my heart every word. Tell me the story most precious, sweetest that ever was heard."

Hey, is this message still sweet to you? Do you get turned on? Do you feel that zing inside you when you hear about it, how you're loved with an everlasting love and how the Lord Jesus took your sins away? You heard the word of God. Secondly, you believed what you heard. Having believed. That word came to us. We heard it. We had the option of turning it down and saying, "I don't believe it."

But when we believed, something happened with our values and our imagination somehow came together and we heard and our value and our imagination grasped the word that we heard, applied it to our hearts, and we became believers. Children of God, children of the redeemed. At that moment, a transformation of phenomenal proportions took place. It can only be described in two words: born again. It defies language, it defies description, what happened in my heart, what happened in your heart, if indeed this has happened.

But sometimes we can hear the story and we don't get excited anymore about it. We can sing the hymns and it doesn't really turn us on all that much. We have sung them over and over. We've heard the story over and over, but listen, I can't hear it enough. Tell it to me again. I want to hear it again. But that transformation that took place and every time I come to the Bible to read it in private devotions or preach it from the pulpit or come to this table to the living word, there he is touching my heart, bringing joy and happiness.

All the trials, temptations, sickness, disease, families dying, disappointments, on and on I could go. But there is something about that name, the name Jesus, the word, the living word of God, brings living and life to me, and it's happening to me right now and I can hardly stand it up here. The Lord has been so good to me, and I know he's been good to you. I can see it in your countenance how God has wonderfully blessed you.

A life-changing experience, an experience that was life-defining. It happened. I wish I could tell you what it means to really be born again. You have to experience it, you have to taste it, you have to receive it. That's the greatest of all gifts. Oh, we want to learn how to socialize, we want to learn how to live and work and earn and develop, and all these are good things and we need to do that.

But there's an experience that transcends all experiences. Nothing can compare to it. It's the experience that will last for an eternity to the person who truly believes on the Lord Jesus Christ. So, you heard. You believed what you heard. And then you were sealed with the Holy Spirit. That's what I'm saying. We're sealed. We've been locked into the grace of God. We're traveling through a wicked, fallen, sinful world, but we've been sealed to our destination, which is heaven.

And we're going to make it all the way. Having believed, you were sealed. Now, a seal implies ownership. That means God owns me. I've given myself to the Lord. He bought me with his precious blood. He owns me. Now notice we read out of Ephesians. The people at Ephesus understood ownership, the seal of ownership, very clearly because in the harbor of Ephesus, there was timber, big logs, timber floating. There was a great trade of timber.

That was one of the main trades of Ephesus. And the owner would go out, the merchant with his seal to buy timber. And he would look at all of these masses, massive logs, and he would say, "Oh, that's a good one," and he would take his signet over and impress it, make an impression in the wood. "That, I want that one." He'd look over that log. "No, no. Oh, I want that one." He'd go over and make an impression in that one.

And he kept on until he knew how much money he had, how many pieces of timber, how many logs he needed, and he made all those impressions. And then he would leave and go home, and then he would send back his trusted agent with the workers, and the trusted agent would take that seal, and the seal would fit right into that groove in that impression. And when it would fit in, he'd say, "Hey, this belongs to my master, take this one."

He'd look around, he'd see a mark, try to fit it in. That doesn't fit. Oh, over here it fits. That belongs to my master. And he would take it back. So friend, you are sealed with the seal of the Holy Spirit. You have the mark of Christ upon you. I can imagine the nail prints in his hands as I was reading this and going over this. I thought he took that print, that seal, put it on my mind and stamped it into my heart.

Now I belong to Jesus. Now I belong to Jesus. I have the seal of the Holy Spirit upon me just as you have the seal of the Holy Spirit. You belong to him. You do not belong to this world. You do not belong to this world. You are a stranger and an alien. You don't own nothing because you're going to leave it all behind, and you're going to go out as poor as you came in.

But you have treasure on the other side. There's a mansion. There's treasure. There's a crown. There's glory that's awaiting you. You have been sealed with the Holy Spirit. That's why I said a little while ago, you're going to make it. You have the seal of God upon you. Hey, do you know you're part of royalty? Yeah, meaning royalty, meaning we belong to the king. That makes us prince and princesses before the Lord.

His royal blood now flows in my veins. You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, meaning priesthood, meaning you're a priest. You have access to God. No one need pray in your behalf. They'll pray for you and pray with you, but you have access right to the very throne of grace. Friend, listen to me. Do you know where you can go today? You can go to heaven every time you pray.

You leave earth and you enter the... come boldly to the throne of grace. Sometimes we pray so fast and so quick and we throw an amen in there and then we get right on about our business. Friend, I don't know that we've been to the throne of grace because there's not enough awe and humility that is over us. We've been to heaven. We are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people.

Harriet sent me a note the other day. Just yesterday it was. She said that we owe a debt we couldn't pay. Jesus paid a debt he didn't owe. He paid your debt. He paid for you. Let me get this before I go any more. Today is a special day for Harriet. She said March 1st, that's today, is the day of her son Glenn's birthday, who passed away when he was age 30. Today he would have been 48 years old.

But here's the part I want you to hear. But he was saved. Oh, hallelujah. He was saved. So I know that I'll be with him again in eternity, and that is why I'm so grateful to be able to celebrate communion service in remembrance of our Savior Jesus Christ. Because without him, we would have nothing to live for and nothing to hope for. Friend, you have everything to live for, and you have everything to hope for.

You are a chosen, adopted, a born-again child of God because you heard the truth, because you believed the truth that you heard, and because now you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit. You're on your way through a wicked world, but you're on your way and you're going to make it. Praise the Lord. Can everybody say praise the Lord? Praise the Lord indeed. Amen. Amen. Would you bow with me, please?

Thank you, Father God, for your holy word that we heard it. Thank you, Lord, that you helped us put it together in our heart and in our mind in our feeble human way through our imagination and through our value system and believe and receive it into our hearts, having our lives wonderfully transformed and now sealed by the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Lord, for your mercy, for your grace, and for your love. Praise be to the Lord.

Keep your heads bowed for just a moment. Friend, I want to see you saved. I want you to know the joy of salvation. You're going to have a lot of hurt and pain in this world, but you need Jesus as much as I need Jesus, and he is calling you just as much as he called me. You need Jesus. You don't need to put this off any longer. No, you need to be saved. You need to give your heart to the Lord.

You need to come confessing and believing. You heard the word. Do you believe the word? I want to pray for you, and I'll meet you at this altar. I will. I'm coming down to the altar right now. I want you to come. Friend, I'm as serious about this as I've ever been serious about anything in my life. I want you to come to Jesus. I want you to come to Jesus. Now you can put it off, you can resist.

God has given you that power of choice. But choose Jesus today. Come to the Savior. Won't you come down here with me and have a prayer with me, and then you can go back and be seated. It'll be something wonderful, life-transforming. Yes, thank you for coming down here. Thank you for coming. And I think there are others that are here that should be coming also. God loves us all, and he wants to help us and do something.

Anybody else? You want to come down and let me have a prayer with you? I won't delay long. Yeah, come on down. Come on down. That's it. Anybody else, just come right on down. Let me pray with you. This is serious. Nothing has ever been more serious. All eternity depends upon now. Depends upon now. Yes, just come right on down, dear one. Come on down. Anybody else?

Yes, this is wonderful. Transformations of phenomenal proportions are going to take place. Born-again experiences. Adoptions into the kingdom of God, into the family of God. You're going to have a Father that is near and dear. Anybody else? Okay, I won't wait any longer. If you're coming, please come now. It's your life, it's your eternity, dear ones. Dear Lord, I thank you for these dear ones, seekers.

They have heard the word of God touch them, the word of God embrace them. Today they embrace the word of God in a new way, in a living way. Lord, come to them now. Let that experience that you've written to us about in your word, that I have talked about in the message, let it come to their heart in the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus. Receive the Lord, receive the salvation, receive the renewal.

Be blessed, be encouraged, be made whole. Hallelujah. To God be the glory. We give him praise and we give him thanks. Tears of joy, dear lady, dear one, these are tears of joy. Praise be to the Lord. Praise be to the Lord. Now I belong to Jesus. Jesus belongs to me. Not for the years of time alone, but for eternity.

Guest (Male): We hope that today's message was a blessing and brought about a change in your life. If you prayed with Pastor Morris to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior and would like to know more about what it is to be a Christian, visit us online at thehealingword.com, a place where you can connect, share your prayer requests, and know that others are praying with and for you.

And while you're there, you can also listen to more messages from Pastor Jack Morris and learn more about how his ministry is reaching lives around the world with the hope of Jesus Christ. That's thehealingword.com where faith is strengthened, prayers are lifted, and hearts are healed through the power of God's word. Join us tomorrow for another Healing Word message. Until then, blessings on you.