"In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory."
Ephesians 1:13-14
With these verses we come to a transition in the apostle's thought. Up to this point he has been speaking in the first person plural - 'we', 'us', 'our' - it is we who 'speak well of our God' and this is the function of the church so to speak well of Him that we commend the gospel to all who will hear, and draw others into the kingdom. When the glory of the gospel grips a man it sets him on fire, and that fire communicates and spreads to others. There is always the possibility of this happening where the gospel is living and active, and the possibility of others saying 'We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you' (Zechariah 8:23). And this is how, in the case of the Ephesians, the 'we' changed into 'ye'. They heard the gospel from Paul, and they responded in faith. We should also note the parallelism between the words 'ye trusted' and 'ye believed' in 13 and 'you hath he quickened' in 2:1ff. These are two different ways of describing the miracle and mystery of salvation: both are needed for a full expression and exposition of biblical truth; and although we are concentrating on the first of these at the moment, we must never fail to have the other in our minds and thoughts along with it as 'the other side'. Paul's own experience of this is a good illustration: on the Damascus Road (Acts 9) he capitulated to Christ, saying, 'What wilt Thou have me to do?' but in Galatians he describes this thus: 'It pleased the Lord to reveal His Son in me'. We enter this new world, then, by trusting in Christ, and that trust is awakened and called forth in our hearts by hearing the word of truth, the gospel of our salvation.