Good morning everyone. Today's scripture reading comes
from Ephesians chapter 6, verses 10 through 19.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.
Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand
against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against
flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the powers of this Dark World, and against the spiritual
forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Therefore, put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of
evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you
have done everything to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt
of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of
righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the
readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.
In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which
you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil. 1
Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which
is the Word of God, and pray in the Spirit on all occasions with
all kinds of prayers and requests.
With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all
the Saints. Pray also for me that whenever I
open my mouth, words may be given, may be given me, so that
I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel for which
I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it
fearlessly as I should. One of the earliest Christian
writers to take on the inner life seriously was a man named
Evagrius Ponticus. If you can say it, 10 gold
points for you. Evagrius was a 4th century monk.
He was highly educated. He lived near Constantinople,
which was one of the capital places for the early church.
He was brilliant. He was connected, he was
respected. He was like on his way up in the
church world, right? If there was someone that's
going to get a promotion, it was probably going to be him.
And then, like many of the early desert Christians, he left the
city for the wilderness. Now, you and I, we tend to
romanticize, like, going off maybe to the beach or off by
ourselves for a while. Like, we think like, yeah, he
probably, like, went on like, a nice little retreat, right?
Like, no Wi-Fi or anything. Maybe some good books, a good
sweet drink, just sitting out, looking out at nature alone,
maybe sing a couple songs. But what the desert fathers and
mothers discovered was that when they left the noise of the city,
they did not leave the battle. They finally just got quiet
enough to hear it. Evagrius began to notice
something about the human soul. He noticed that temptation was
not random. Temptation had patterns.
It had strategies. It had what Paul in Ephesians
would call schemes. And he wrote about these as the
8 evil thoughts. Later writers would adapt these
into the seven deadly sins. These would be patterns like
gluttony, lust, greed, sadness, anger, Acadia, Vainglory and
pride. They were disordered desires.
They're false scripts. They're spiritual forces that
are bent towards getting us away from God.
And of all of these temptations, Evagria said that the most
dangerous, dangerous of them was Acadia.
Now Acadia. It's hard for us to translate.
We don't have like a one for one translation on it.
Sometimes it's called sloth, but that's honestly too weak because
it's not just laziness, right? It it's more like spiritual
apathy. It's listlessness, it's
restlessness, it's a loss of heart.
It's the inability to stay present to to your
relationships, to your calling, to your work, to your home, to
God himself. And so Evagrius called this the
noonday demon. He said it attacked the monk in
the heat of the day, around late morning into the early
afternoon, when the sun seemed to barely move, when the day
fell unbearably long, when prayer felt pointless, when the
monk would look out the window and imagine that life must be
better somewhere else. If we're honest, if we didn't
know that this was a vagarius written back in the 4th century
as you knew when I said it, it could have been written today.
That strange moment in the middle of the day when you are
not doing anything obviously sinful, but if you're honest,
you're not fully alive. You're restless.
You're picking up your phone and turning it on and scrolling and
then turning it off again and turning it on again.
You're you're going to your fridge and looking for nothing
to eat. You're bored with your own life.
You begin to feel kind of like irritated.
You might have like a low grade sadness or anxiety.
You have this, this desire to just be anywhere except for
where you are. And then this thought begins to
pop up, an almost animated idea that you need a different job.
I need a different house, I need a better body, I need a
different spouse, I need a different life.
And maybe sometimes that could be your own intuition or wisdom.
Maybe sometimes that's the spirit.
But sometimes Evagrius would say that this is war.
Not dramatic war. Not horror movie war, Not Lord
of the Rings giant epic battle War.
No, this is a quiet war. A war over your attention over
desire. A quiet war over whether you
will stay rooted in love or drift off into escape.
This is spiritual warfare. If we're honest, the idea of
what we call spiritual warfare just raises all kinds of
different questions and and opinions in US.
Like, how does spiritual war really affect me?
Should I be afraid of it? How do I defend myself?
But I think that if we're really honest, most of us ask the
question, is this even real? Thankfully for us, Scripture
does have some to say about it. It's not a lot, but it's not
nothing. And this morning's passage is
one of the most important spirit spiritual warfare passage in all
of Scripture. And it's at the end of the
letter of Ephesians, which is the book that we've been
teaching through through this year and a little bit of last
year. So here's the plan.
We're going to talk about spiritual warfare.
I'm going to kind of sum up the book of Ephesians, OK?
Because we cannot understand the armour of God in spiritual
warfare without understanding what Paul said before.
And then we're going to just go verse by verse and talk through
it because this is what I found as I was studying it.
When you, when you have a passage of Scripture that you're
going to preach often, you kind of begin in the back of your
mind going, yeah, I'm going to talk about this.
I'm going to talk about this and I'm going to talk about this.
And as I sat down and I studied this, it became completely
different than what I thought. I found that my ideas about the
armor of God in warfare are dramatically different than like
how I was raised in my culture and stuff.
So I'm kind of excited to be talking about that.
So if you have your Bibles with you, whether paper, which we
encourage, or you have it on your phone, go ahead and go to
Ephesians 6 verse 10. It's also going to be up on the
board. OK, so where do we start?
We start at the beginning, right?
We start with the idea that what is Ephesians, but it is a letter
written by the Apostle Paul to a group of churches in Ephesus.
OK. It's the only one of Paul's
letters and Scriptures that's more encouraging than not.
Most of the time Paul is saying like, Hey, I heard you guys were
doing this. Stop, please do this.
Instead. This letter is much more of a,
hey, I hear that you're doing a really good job.
Here's how we begin to like continue to live into that.
And so at the beginning of the letter, Paul starts with
literally this like worship song about how great God is since the
beginning, how Jesus came and he he died and rose again and
defeated the powers of of darkness and death and is now
King Jesus sitting on his throne above all of heaven and earth,
all authority is. And now he is taking his church
and he is uniting all people together under himself as a new
humanity. Ephesians one through 3 is just
this beautiful teaching about who Jesus is, what the gospel is
and what it means for us. Now often we like we like that
part, but we really want to get to verse to chapter 4, which is
like the how do I then live? And you have this like rapid
fire of Paul saying like, Hey guys, you should be united.
He talks about life in light of the gospel for our sexuality and
our and our money and our attitudes towards one another.
He talks about what does the gospel mean for my marriage?
What does it mean for my family? What does it mean for my work?
And then we reach the end of the letter, chapter 6, verse 10, and
Paul's going to summarize everything he's talked about.
Let's go ahead and start reading it.
Finally stop. The whole letter has LED up to
this moment where Paul is going to tie all of the themes
together and he's going to talk about how we are to live in
light of this letter. OK, so a couple things that we
need to remember as we read this passage.
First is that the you's are all y'all's, right?
You've heard, you've heard Pastor Ben talk about that a few
times. Paul's not writing to one
person, He's writing to a group of people.
So anytime you see a you, it's a y'all.
It's the y'all of it all. Second thing I'm going to let
Stephen Fowl say for us, there is one further important point
to make about this passage. It is very easy to read the
discussion of the armor of God and then to assume that this is
a set of instructions to individual believers.
Sorry, that is not the way the text reads.
Rather, the commands Take up the armor of God is a summons to the
community as a whole. Taking up the armor of God is a
communal practice tied to the unity of the church and the
church's witness to the powers. In this respect.
This passage continues the emphasis on the common life of
the church that began in four one.
So we end our sermon series on Ephesians with Paul's word
summoning up the book and telling us what it all is about.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his
might. Now, often I feel like what we
hear about the gospel is like, now you can rest now, you can
have peace now. Like, don't worry about
anything. Good vibes on everybody, right?
That's not what Paul's saying at the end of the letter.
No, Paul is saying that we are to be strong in the Lord and in
the strength of his might. Or as Eugene Peterson gives in
his a paraphrase, God is strong and he wants to make you strong.
Yeah, but what listen to what is important though, what is
important for us to understand is the how God wants you to be
strong. OK?
It's not just that God wants you to be strong.
The important thing is how he wants you to be strong.
And it's, it's masked in our English language, but in the
original language, we see that this verse is mostly written in
the passive, not the active. How many of my English teachers
in the room know what I'm talking about?
Got a couple English teachers that are like, yeah, what that
means is it means that this passage is not about what we are
doing, but what God is doing to us.
It means that this passage is about God's activity, not our
activity. So another way of saying it
would be let God make you strong or I like better abide in Christ
and his strength. What Paul is saying is that we
are to have faith, faith in God's strength to care for us.
The word might in this verse also is the word Kratos OK,
which means power, strength. And This is why I want you to to
know that word because Paul has used it earlier in the letter as
well. He uses it in verse 119.
And what is the boundless greatness of His power towards
us who believe these are in accordance with the workings of
His strength of his Kratos? OK.
In the first part of the letter, Paul is making an invitation to
know God's strength, right? He wants you to know God's
strength. At the end of the letter, Paul's
invitation is to live into that strength.
It is knowledge versus wisdom. It's orthodoxy versus
orthoproxy. It is knowing how to play the
game versus playing the game. Do we have any armchair
quarterbacks in the room? What Paul is saying is stop
being an armchair quarterback. Some of you have a lot of
opinions about how to live the Christian faith and are not
living it. So Paul is saying that it's not
just about wanting to know God, but it is knowing God
relationally. OK.
This is the essence of faith. Dallas Willard, one of my
favorite teachers, talks about that belief is not faith.
Anybody can believe. The demons believe, right?
It becomes faith when you begin to act into your belief.
That's the essence of faith. God is not looking for you to
only be strong on your own. He is looking for you to have an
abiding strength. Paul beats this drum all through
his letters, right? This idea of it's not on you
when you get saved. It's not on you to develop these
abilities. OK, he wants you to lean into
the Father have faith as he gives you it.
OK, Second Timothy 21 you therefore my son, be strong in
the grace that is Christ Jesus. Notice it.
It's be strong what he doesn't stop it there with a period.
He says in the grace that is in Christ.
Other verses talk about have joy.
Is it a period there? No, it's in the Lord, my
friends. The reason He does not want you
to have strength on your own is at the end of the day, your
faith may fail. At the end of the day, your joy
may fail. There is a limit.
He doesn't want you living off of the stream of your own
strength and joy. He wants you living out of the
deep well of His own. OK, it's like this.
My daughter is is learning how to cross the street right now.
But we park at daycare across the street and every time we
have to say stop, don't go because she doesn't know about
cars, she doesn't know about the danger, she doesn't know about
looking both ways. And so my instruction to her is
stop and hold dad's hand, right? I don't want my daughter to just
know how to cross the street right now.
I want her to know that I need to help her cross the street.
God is not looking for you to know all of the problems in the
world, to handle all the problems in the world.
He's looking for you to take His hand and to walk alongside him.
So how are we to do this? How are we to have this abiding
strength with Jesus? Well, Ephesians 611 gives us
some instruction. Put on the full armor of God.
Why? So that you will be able to
stand firm against the schemes of the devil.
Now, before we go any further, I, I want to acknowledge
something. For a lot of us, the moments a
preacher or a teacher or anybody really starts talking about
devils, demons or spiritual warfare, we get a little bit
uncomfortable. Nod your head if you you agree,
kind of get a little uncomfortable about the subject,
right. And I get it right.
Like for most of my walk in the last 30 years, I did not have a
a theology for it. I didn't have a way of like
connecting my life to it. Most of the time I had like my
walk with Jesus and my discipleship in spiritual
warfare was over here. Like I know it's real, but I
don't know how it connects. And the reason is, I think, is
because most of us have had a schizophrenic relationship with
the demonic. What do I mean by that?
I'm gonna let CS Lewis say it for me.
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can
fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their
existence. The other is to believe and to
feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.
So what he's saying is, is that you and I, we live in a modern
age, right? You have an iPhone in your
pocket, you drive a car. You're able to get any
information you need in a, in a moment's notice.
If you need to talk to an expert, you have ChatGPT right
there for you. OK, so the idea of like a, a
spiritual evil kind of sounds like primitive, right?
Embarrassing or, or something from a less educated age.
It's this idea that CS Lewis would call chronological
snobbery. But on the other hand, when we
do think of the demonic, even if we don't believe in it, when we
think about it, we've allowed things like Hollywood to inform
our imagination. We have this idea that like
demons are possessing people in beds and causing them to spit up
pea soup. Or maybe the demon is the yellow
eyes I see in the dark corner of my room.
Or maybe the demons are like throwing people and stuff all
over the place and causing great harm and I need an exorcist
immediately to stop it from destroying my house.
Our imaginations, if we're honest, have been formed more by
Hollywood about this subject than what Jesus has to say.
The worst one of all, honestly, for most of us is the idea of
Satan as a red guy with horns. All of those are bad pictures.
And so we need to have a better idea if we're going to be able
to fight this battle. OK, so honestly, when I was
studying for this, I was more and more realizing this is a
sermon series, not a sermon. There is so much to talk about
on this subject, but we only have an hour because I'm going
to preach for an hour. We got like 20 minutes.
So what I'm going to do instead is I am going to talk to you
about what are a few of the basic things that Scripture have
to say. And then at the end of the
sermon I'll give you a couple of resources if you're interested
in learning more. Does that sound good?
OK, so first thing, where should you and I get our source of
truth? Well, for me, as a disciple of
Jesus, I believe Jesus is our creator, our sustainer.
He knows everything there is to say about the universe.
He's the source of wisdom. So the place we should start is
probably what he has to say about the devil.
Agree. Is that scientifically, would
you guys agree it's probably good?
Yeah. Thumbs up.
OK, so John 848 is where we are going to begin.
He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in
the truth because there is no truth in him.
Whenever he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature
because he is a liar and the father of lies.
OK, so two things that we're going to talk about.
First that Jesus has to say. First, he is a murderer, OK?
He's bent on destruction. His whole goal is to tear God's
creation down. And John Mark Comer says in his
book Live No Lies, the devil is the archetypal villain who is
hell bent on destruction. He just wants to watch the world
burn. His motto is tear it all down.
Marriages, tear him down. Trust, tear it down.
Joy, tear it down. Love, peace, happiness, tear it
down. Your ability to abide with
Christ, distract them and tear it down.
But the way he does this, OK, is really specific according to
Jesus. And he says that Satan is the
father of lies, which means the primary strategy of the enemy is
not usually dramatic possession. It is deception.
OK, The enemy's primary weapon in your life is lies.
And I, I would agree with this because how to say and operate,
we can look at John 3 and Matthew 4.
We're not going to turn there, but just real quick, go look on
it on your own. Genesis 3, the serpent comes to
Eve and he doesn't have like this giant weapon.
He doesn't have like magic spells or something.
He begins with just a question. Did God really say he begins to
bend reality? He's distorting God's word, He's
distorting God's character. He's distorting the meaning of
freedom. And then in Matthew 4, when
Jesus is tempted in the wilderness, that same pattern
shows up. The devil comes to Jesus not
mainly with like brute force, but with ideas.
Hey, if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.
The angels are going to catch you.
Hey, bow down and worship me. Every temptation is a false
story about reality. Satan is giving false stories
about identity, about appetite, about power, about trust.
Satan is giving false stories, lies, or ideas.
And here's why this is important.
Ideas are the building block of how you and I live, Dallas
Willard says. We live in a world of ideas and
everyday we navigate the world by faith.
OK, so let me give give an example.
OK, our ideas build mental maps that we live out of, right?
OK, yes, we'll talk about more. So for example, you need to go
to work in the morning. You have a mental map of how to
get there. You have ideas of how it's going
to work. You're going to drive down Main
Street, turn right at the light and then pull into my parking
lot. You have ideas about that and
it's formed a mental map of how you will get there.
You have mental maps about how you're what you're going to do
about when you get home to relax.
For some of you, you want to take off your shoes and turn on
the office and just veg out for a little bit.
For some of you, it's it's getting a hug from your spouse
or maybe getting a good drink from the fridge.
Those are all ideas, but they're forming a mental map of how you
are going to be restful at the end of the day.
But these can be really simple, like how we drive to work.
But they can also be more complex, like I need to be in
control in order to be safe. That's going to form a mental
map of how you live. OK.
I need to always be on call, willing to do whatever the other
person wants in order for me to be loved.
That's an idea that forms a mental map of how you can live.
OK, we have mental maps about money, about our own bodies,
about what love requires, about what successes, about your
identity. We all have mental maps that
lead us to live in certain ways that are built on ideas.
Willard would go on to say. We truly live at the mercy of
our ideas. And if that's true, if you and I
are living at the mercy of ideas, if the mental maps are
made out of them, we want to live out of the true ones, not
the lies, right? So think for a moment.
If you are on your way to work and you have an idea of how to
get there, you want to have the right way, right?
You don't want to turn left at the at the light.
If you have that idea, are you getting to work?
No, you need to have right ideas.
And so guys, This is why lies are such a problem.
Lies are not just incorrect statements, they are a false
version of reality that will begin to live inside you and
affect the way you live life. You will begin to live at odds
with what actually is. The problem is not just the lies
we tell, it's the lies that you and I live on a daily basis.
I am what I accomplish. I am what people think of me.
I'm defined by my desires. If I forgive that person,
they're going to win. God is disappointed in me.
I'm too far gone. I am alone.
These are more than thoughts. These are what Paul and
Ephesians call flaming arrows. This means that spiritual
warfare is not Lord of the Rings.
It's not the Battle of Helms Deep with us standing on the on
the wall, sword ready armor on the enemies at the gate.
It's raining, it's dark, there's epic music, and I'm surrounded
by my brothers and sisters ready to fight the battle.
Maybe sometimes it's a little like that, but what it's much
more like is a Russian spy spreading disinformation online,
causing some people to believe lies and the rest of us to
question what is even true. Often it is an invasive animated
thought. Have you ever experienced that
before, where you're sitting alone, maybe reading, maybe
watching TV or something, and if you are honest, a thought comes
into your head that you were not even thinking about and it
doesn't even sound like you. This is why John Mark Comer also
says and live no lies. Jesus sees our primary war
against the devil as a fight to believe truth over lies.
Our battle, my friends, is over the very ideas in which we live
over truth and lies. Let's continue verse 12.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the
rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this
darkness, against the spiritual forecasts of wickedness in the
heavenly places. Here's here's the deal, my
friends. There's one idea we have to get
really right, and that is who is my enemy.
Because who you decide your enemy is, is going to define who
you're going to treat as a human and who you're not going to
treat as inhuman. Because you and I naturally
treat our enemies with disdain. We want them removed.
Some of us want them dead. We treat them as objects.
This is the definition of dehumanisation.
This is this is the idea that got in Nazi Germany right back
before World War One. Germany was a happening place.
It was a height of culture. It was a height of the church.
There was so much super good Christian information, biblical
studies and stuff coming out of the German church.
But this one idea slid in that was the Jews are always coming
on top. Why do the Jews always have what
I don't have? Why are the Jews always getting
in my way? And that idea it it may have
started small, but it spread through the culture.
And that's why someone like Hitler was able to get to power
and to change the way of a nation to kill millions of
people with just an idea of who my enemy is.
This idea effects how we treat people today.
It it affects how we treat immigrants that come into our
country. Do we look at them as lost
people looking for hope? Or do we treat them as invaders
that need to be sent away? It's how we talk about our
political our political rivals, about people on the opposite
side. You had Donald Trump this week.
Call them Democrats again. Or Democrats.
You have Hillary Clinton refer to Republicans as a basket of
deplorables. Pew Research found that the
growing shares of Republican and Democrats describe people in the
following ways. close minded, dishonest, immoral and
unintelligent. Just listen to those ideas and
think about like our nation was built on the idea that we were
to come together, even if we disagree, to be able to to find
middle ground that would that would cause prosperity for us
all. How do you and I live into that?
If the idea we have is the other side is dishonest, immoral and
unintelligent? When we believe that another
person is not human, will will gossip about them, will become a
voyeur of their story, Not considering their story causes
them pain and hurt themselves, but instead use it for our own
gratification, a type of pornography.
And let's talk about pornography for just a second.
Pornography only happens because the person on the screen is not
a person but an object for your desire.
So you need to consider how do you talk about your neighbors?
How do you talk about Co workers?
How do you talk about family? Who are the enemies in your
life? Paul is saying that no flesh and
blood human is an enemy. In fact, you have one enemy and
it is Cosmo Kratos, the world powers spiritual beings, those
spiritual beings that we find in Genesis 6 on through to to the
book of Daniel, right In Daniel, they have the weird story where
Daniel is praying on the floor for his people and himself and
he's praying for help and rescue.
And it takes a couple weeks and then an Angel comes to him and
says, I am so sorry that I am late, but I was stopped by the
Prince of Persia. What a little weird, right?
It's those same spiritual beings that Paul was referencing
earlier in the, the the book. And look at where the battle
takes place in this passage. It's not, it's, it's the
heavenly realms, which is not to say up in the sky like it does
not affect us. But Paul when he talks about the
heavenly realms earlier in the letter, he was talking about
that's where Jesus rules and influences your life and
empowers you and loves you. It's, it's everything that's
around you, the spiritual realm around you.
And that's where the battle is happening.
Is it in a spiritual world right around you that is affecting
things? I know it's a little weird.
Do we all just like acknowledge it is a little weird?
I think Jesus knew that and that's why he didn't have a lot
to say about it. It's like this.
My final example, do we have him up on the screen?
This is Gollum. This is Gollum in The Lord of
the Rings. Gollum is a miserable, terrible
person, right? He is obsessed with the ring and
is willing to lie, cheat, and steal anyway in order to get the
ring. In Frodo, one of the main
characters is trying to carry the ring to Mordor.
He says what he thinks about Gollum to Gandalf the wizard.
He says I hate him, I wish he had never been born, and Gandalf
reminds him that Gollum is to be pitied because Gollum is not the
bad guy, the bad guy is the ring.
The Ring is what did it to Gollum, and it's later on in the
story that Frodo encounters the ring in terrible ways that
almost begin to deform him. You and I need to have a good
definition of what our enemy is. So what are we to do?
Take up the full armor of God so that you will be able to resist
on the evil day and having done everything to stand firm.
OK, we tend to get stuck when studying the armor of God
because we get lost in studying the individual pieces.
OK, how many of you went to Sunday School and think you
could name a few? A few of you, right?
And it's not bad, but we get lost in what the functions of
the pieces of the armor of God are instead of the illustration
that Paul is using. OK, Paul is using a really
specific illustration for an abiding relationship with God.
Let me show you some scripture to show you that that the armor
of God is an illustration, not a individual practice you're
supposed to just do everyday. OK, so Paul uses same language
in Ephesians 424 and to put on the new self.
It's the exact same phrase as the armor of God, which in the
likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of
truth. The same image is used in Romans
1312. The night is almost gone and the
day is near. Therefore, let's get rid of
ourselves of the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of
light. OK, both of these are an
illustration. It's not about the armor itself.
Now you want something that will really blow your mind is that
Ephesians is not the first time the armor of God shows up.
But in fact, Paul is referencing something in the Old Testament.
It's like if you look down at your Bible and it was a web
page, you had a little blue font on the word with the nice little
underline. You could click on the pieces of
the armor of God and you get a passage like Isaiah 11/5.
Also righteousness will be a belt around his hips and
faithfulness the belt around his waist.
Or Isaiah 52, seven how delightful on the mountains are
the feet of those who bring good news or the gospel who announce
peace and bring good news of happiness, who announce
salvation and the says to Zion, your God reigns.
What all of those are saying are those pieces of the armor of God
are the pieces that God wears himself.
So how are we supposed to understand this?
Snodgrass wrote a commentary that post both Pastor Ben and I
used throughout this sermon series.
We love it. We'd highly recommend it if
you're looking to do a more in depth study.
And he says that the ways we look at the armor of God are
three. Either the armor God provides,
the armor that God himself wears, or the armor as God
himself. OK, all of that is to say, the
Armor of God is an illustration for our abiding relationship
with God. OK, so let's look at the pieces
with that in mind. Verse 14 Stand firm, therefore,
having belted your waist with truth, and having put on the
breastplate of righteousness, and having strapped on your feet
the preparation of the gospel of peace, in addition to all taking
up the shield of faith, with which you will be able to
extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil. 1 And take
the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is
the word of God. Again, this is not about the
mechanism, OK? Because if we treat it that way,
we begin to think, if I can just believe hard enough, then I'll
be protected. If I can just quote enough Bible
verses, then I'll be safe. If I could just muster up enough
spiritual discipline, then I can stand.
But that's not what Paul is talking about.
The armor of God is not primarily primarily a list of
things you can do for God. It is a picture of what God has
done for you in Christ. Each pieces of the armor is
relationship language about your faith in Him, your trust in Him.
You are going to Him and knowing He is in control.
For example, the shield of faith does not mean that your
subjective ability to believe is what protects you.
That would be crushing because some days your faith feels
strong and other days your faith feels thin.
It's not A Great Grass puts it this way.
The faith protect that protects is not to suggest that humans
protect themselves by the power to believe.
To speak of faith is not to focus on human belief, but on
the faithfulness of God. What protects us from the arrows
of the evil 1 is our relationship with God.
This is what's important. What protects you is not the
strength of your grip on God, but the strength of God's grip
on you. The shield is not ultimately I
believe enough. The shield is I belong to the
faithful. 1 So when the arrows come, accusations of shame and
fear and condemnation and despair, you don't answer them
by saying, Do I have enough faith?
You answer them by looking outside of yourself to Christ
and saying He is faithful. He has died for me, He has rose
again for me, He intercedes for me, and I am his.
This is the shield. And the same is true of the
sword of the Spirit. When Paul says the sword of the
Spirit, which is the word of God, he is not simply saying
memorize a bunch of Bible verses and throw them at your problems.
That would be like Harry Potter with like incantations and
spells. Now of course the Scripture
matters. Jesus himself uses it in his
resisting the enemy. But the word here, the word here
Paul uses is Rhema. Which always is used in the New
Testament for a a word about the gospel.
So the sword of the Spirit is not merely religious
information, it is the gospel announced, believed, prayed and
spoken into the lies of the enemy.
When the enemy says you're condemned, you say there is no
condemnation in Jesus Christ. The enemy says you're alone.
You say I have been adopted through Jesus Christ.
When the enemy says sin defines you, you say, listen, I have
been washed, sealed and made alive in Christ.
You see, the the armor is not mainly about self-defense.
It is about union with Christ. So Paul is not saying go out and
become strong enough to fight the devil.
He is saying put on Christ, stand in Christ, speak Christ,
rest in the faithfulness of Christ.
Because in the end, the only thing that can withstand the
eyes of the enemy is not your resolve, is not your strength,
is not your willpower, is the faithful, finished, unshakable
work of Jesus Christ. Now you are instructed to do one
thing in verse 18 with every prayer request, pray at all
times in the Spirit. And with this in view be alert
with all perseverance, with every request for all the
Saints, and pray in my behalf that speech may be given to me
in the opening of my mouth. To make known with boldness the
mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains,
that in proclaiming it, I may speak boldly as I ought to
speak. When you're reading a passage in
Scripture, a really good skill to develop is looking for the
repeated phrases, right? So when the writers of Scripture
or writing Scripture, they don't underline, they don't bold, they
don't highlight, they repeat phrases.
So when you see a repeated word, you can take your highlighter
out and say, oh, look, that is an important word.
And the word prayer here appears four times.
So spiritual warfare is, again, not about you and I wishing
against the enemy, right? Paul's not saying, hey, guys,
wishing all things, be alert and wish it all away.
Wish that the enemy would stop attacking you.
Wish that that lust would stop, Wish that you know you'd stop
eating too much food. No, he says, pray.
The difference between a wish and a prayer is a wish is you
hoping something will happen. Praying is going to the one that
can make it happen. And so as children, we have an
abiding relationship with Christ, praying to him.
Father help me Father protect me.
So to sum up, I was struggling with an end for the sermon
because there's just so much there to say.
And this is what I think I want you guys to walk away with.
I want you to walk away with with let me rephrase this.
When Jesus taught, at the end of his teachings, he always gave
either a practice to go and do or a question to ask.
And so I want to ask the question, what lies are you
believing today? What are the ideas that are
driving your life? And whenever, whenever I preach,
I always sit down and I I try to say, where have I lived into
this? And so I had to sit down this
week and I had to say, what lies have I believed?
And I was taken back to being 8 years old, going to a birthday
party and, and being told I was the weird kid and having no one
want to play with me. And then taken to to 6th grade
when I I was homeschooled and I went to public school for the
first time and I heard the same thing again.
And you're kind of weird. I had a teacher say that to me
and you're kind of weird. And spent a lot of 6th grade
alone, which took me to when I was 14 and went to summer camp
and spent the time by myself. And I had a friend and I know he
meant it jokingly, but he said maybe no one likes you.
And I felt that at 18 years old. I felt that when I went to
college and I majored in theatre because of this idea that nobody
likes me so maybe I should go and be someone else.
I felt that in my dating life, no one really liked me.
The first six months of my marriage, my relationship with
my wife, I was waiting for her to leave me because people
didn't really like me. If I'm really vulnerable, church
planting the last year and a half was really hard, and there
was an idea that popped up over and over and over and over again
that no one really likes you. And man, it caused some real
heartache for me, just that idea, that mental map breaking
through into my life. And I said some things I'm not
proud of because of it, and I did some things I'm not proud of
because of it. And I got really wounded.
But what helped me was not praying the armor of God against
it. What helped me was finding my
way back to abiding with Christ, to resting in His arms, to, to
learning the phrase, I don't only like you, but I delight in
you. That's the truth.
And so my invitation for you is this practice.
I want you to sit down this week and I want you to to think about
what are the lies that I've believed?
What are lies that have caused me to live in unhealthy ways or
hurtful ways or ways that have hurt myself?
And then I want to invite you to go to Scripture and begin
reading it and seeing what's true, OK?
If you don't know where to begin reading, start reading the
Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
If you've read those, read them again.
And then read the New Testament and then read the Old Testament.
See, I fixed the problem for you.
You know what to read on Monday, OK, or Tuesday.
I know it's a holiday on Monday. And then I want you to pray that
truth. I am liked.
Not only am I liked, I am loved by my Father and he delights in
me more than any person ever could.
And my life lives out of that. OK, I said I'd give you a couple
resources on spiritual warfare. Live No Lies for me was the book
that helped me understand spiritual warfare in regards to
my daily life. It stopped being just out here,
but it gave me a frame of reference for what's what the
Bible actually says about it. Renovation of the heart is
really good if you want to learn more about ideas, OK, if you're
attracted to the idea of like my life is built on ideas.
What does that mean for me? And then deliverance is kind of
a a bigger view on spiritual warfare, kind of like an
academic view. Another resource that we always
recommend is Bible project podcasts, videos and stuff on
the subject that are fantastic search spiritual beings and
you've got it. But again, my, my will for you
today is that you stop living out of the lies that you
believe. We all have lies that we live
out of. Some of them entered into our
into our lives when we were 8, some of us 5, maybe even younger
than that. Sometimes they're spoken by
people, sometimes they're lived experience.
But Paul's invitation to the church is for you to learn how
to abide with Christ, not so, Not for you to be able to learn
to fight your own battles. It's so that you can rest in
Him. It's so that it's so that his
strength can hold you up. His joy can penetrate your life.