+I. The nature of the assurance.+--The voices of promises in the Christian's soul--the longings, aspirations, hopes, rising from the Spirit of God within us--are more than promises; they are earnests, _i.e._ most certain assurances of the inheritance to come. This inheritance of spiritual life consists of three great elements--love, power, blessedness. +II. The necessity of the assurance.+--The inheritance is given, but not reached. Between the gift and its attainment there lies a long path of conflict in which the old struggle between the flesh and the Spirit reveals itself in three forms: 1. Sense against the soul; 2. The present against the future; 3. Steadfast work against the roving propensities of the heart.--_E. L. Hull._ _The Holy Spirit and the Earnest of the Inheritance._ +I. The character of the inheritance.+--The teaching of the passage is that heaven is likest the selectest moments of devotion that a Christian has on earth. Heaven is the perfecting of the life of the Spirit begun here, and the loftiest attainments of that life here are but the beginnings and infantile movements of immature beings. +II. The grounds of certainty that we shall ultimately possess the fulness of the inheritance.+--The true ground of certainty lies in this, that you have the Spirit in your heart, operating His own likeness and moulding you, sealing you, after His own stamp and image. 1. The very fact of such a relation between man and God is itself the great assurance of immortality and everlasting life. 2. The characteristics that are produced by this Holy Spirit's indwelling, both in the perfectness and imperfection, are the great guarantee of the inheritance being ours. 3. The Holy Spirit in a man's heart makes him desire and believe in the inheritance.--_A. Maclaren._ _The Faith of the Early Christians._ +I. The object of their faith.+--The Word of truth and the Gospel of salvation. It is the Word of truth. It contains all that truth which concerns our present duty and our future glory. It comes attended with demonstrations of its own Divinity. It is the Gospel of our salvation. It discovers to us our ruined, helpless condition, the mercy of God to give us salvation, the way in which it is procured for us, the terms on which we may become interested in it, the evidences by which our title to it must be ascertained, and the glory and happiness it comprehends. +II. The forwardness and yet the reasonableness of their faith.+--They trusted in Christ after they heard the Word. They acted as honest and rational men: they did not trust before they heard it, nor refused to trust after they heard it. They did not take the Gospel on the credit of other men without examination; nor did they reject it when they had an opportunity to examine it for themselves. Their faith stood not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.