"Satisfaction Guaranteed" - But Not Necessarily Yet!

I just returned home from a shopping trip to Home Depot - the giant of the hardware and builder’s business. As I arrived there and entered the door, there was a large sign which read:

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED
If you find a better price than ours
at any of our competitors,
we will beat their price
by 10% off their price!

You have to be BIG to make a guarantee like that! The “little guy” might be put out of business if he tried to make such a guarantee.

As I thought about their guarantee, my mind began to focus on God’s promises, God’s “guarantees” to those who accept Him.

Everyone likes the satisfied feeling, and many companies today thrive on the concept. So confident are many that their advertisements read, “Satisfaction guaranteed” or “Complete satisfaction guaranteed,” implying that if for any reason you don’t like the product you purchased, you may return it for a full refund.

But have you ever read the fine print and found that you didn’t qualify for the “satisfaction guarantee” - because you hadn’t taken the right steps in the right order? It might be as simple as saving a cash register slip. But without it, no guarantee. If the purchase was an automobile, you might have to change the oil at a certain mileage. If it was a machine, you might have to use a certain brand of supplies to validate the warranty. None are unreasonable requirements, but each meant that you had to think ahead to make good on the warranty.

When God first made His offer of salvation to our race, He put His total satisfaction guarantee on it. But there are conditions to be met.

The first and foremost condition to be met is: “BELIEVE on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31). This is having the faith and confidence in the first place to take God up on His offer - to commit to the “purchase”. SALVATION is a “product” created by the death of Jesus Christ to take our punishment for sin.

But are we fully satisfied right from the start with what we have “bought into” to become a Christian child in God’s family? No, we can be sure that everything WILL NOT be to our liking. Christ didn’t even suggest that His gospel would immediately satisfy. In fact, His salvation for us may even create temporary dissatisfaction.

Why? Because our salvation is designed to develop and improve, not coddle and accommodate. Our salvation is not meant to keep us as we are but to make us better, more upright, stronger in principle and in character.

OUR SALVATION IS GUARANTEED WHEN WE MEET THAT FIRST CONDITION OF BELIEVING ON THE LORD JESUS CHRIST - BUT OUR SATISFACTION IS NOT GUARANTEED! There is still another condition to be met to have satisfaction.

Dissatisfaction must precede satisfaction because Christ’s offer overturns our natural self-satisfied feelings. We are born with a nature that likes ourselves as we are. Christ’s message comes to tell us how we can be remade - reborn - into something of infinitely greater worth, so much more that we can scarcely comprehend the difference. As we come to know Christ after our rebirth and His coming to indwell us, we want to learn more, hear more, do more, so that we can BE MORE. . .satisfied as God’s child.

The ministry of the Holy Spirit is to show that there is something more to life than the humdrum, something more than living to satisfy “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). God calls us to live on a higher plane, and guarantees satisfaction in the knowledge that good will always triumph.

In the meantime what do we do with the problems? Do we feel that sometimes we have more than our share? Christ shows us that there is another condition to be met after conversion and new birth which can turn these problems into possibilities - possibilities for inner growth, moral excellence, and spiritual achievements.

The second condition for God’s “satisfaction guaranteed” is CONTINUED TRUST in the indwelling Christ. As we live this human life among the world, the flesh and the devil, we can temporarily lose sight of who we are in Christ and slip into self-will and lack of trust in Jesus as Lord. It’s easy to do with our human weaknesses. But it temporarily voids our godly satisfaction warranty.

But it does not void our salvation! The Father uses the consequences of this slip into sin as a correction to a wayward child to bring us back to trust and to the satisfaction He has guaranteed.

The apostle Paul talked much about satisfaction. Here was a man who had been through some of the greatest trials and adversities that a person could endure. Read 2 Corinthians 11:23-27 for a blow by flow description of the troubled life of Paul. Here was a great man of God who, by all Bible indications, lived the condition of continued trust as fully as anyone we know of. But did he receive “satisfaction guaranteed”? Was God’s “warranty” in place in his life? Let’s let him tell us:
“I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content [satisfied]!...I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:11,13).

Paul met the first condition of BELIEF in Jesus Christ as Lord - and he had obtained salvation. Paul never questioned his salvation. He knew who he was in union with Christ and that it was forever. Speaking to his Christian brothers and sisters of the new birth, he said, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble, or hardship, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. . . For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 8:35-39).

But Paul also knew that in order to have the “satisfaction guarantee” warranty in effect, there was another condition to be met – CONTINUED TRUST in the indwelling Christ. He said that he could “do all things” - that is, have satisfaction in being used by God in the things which he accomplished, “through Christ who strengthens me” - that is, whenever Paul chose obedience rather than trying to do his own thing.

Such a one is humanly satisfied, and he is eagerly looking, longing, preparing for the full spiritual satisfaction, even a life where he will experience more than eye has seen, or ear has heard, or the human mind has imagined (1 Corinthians 2:9). He is looking for the fullest rewards in exchange for a life of faithful trust and service.

This is what God has promised. No traps, no surprises, no loophole conditions that God can wiggle out of, just conditions to be met and then we will be satisfied - humanly now and fully spiritually later.

Again, the upfront, forthright conditions for entering the family of God are:
(1) BELIEF in Jesus Christ as Lord - that purchases the “product” of salvation forever and, on that day of new birth, activates the “Satisfaction Guarantee”.
(2) CONTINUED TRUST to the indwelling guidance of the Spirit of Christ. As each Christian child of God commits himself on a daily basis to live by trust in God, he will have the guarantee of satisfaction or contentment. There will be times when his human soul mind, emotions and will cause him to lose perspective and temporarily try to live life by his own human steam and power, and fail - that is, sin.

God doesn’t wipe out the fact of his salvation as a child in God’s family. He receives the built-in correction for his sin and is led back in whatever unique way God chooses to a new awareness of his eternal union with Christ. He learns a lesson. His dissatisfaction with his action leads to trust and satisfaction again.

The dissatisfaction is only for a moment in time. Just beyond this point the recognition of the new Life in Christ (which has been there all the time) is renewed and strengthened. It is a Life filled with the eternal realities which God has planned for every believing and trustful child.

And that is where it ends.
IN TOTAL SATISFACTION.GUARANTEED!

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