Putting on the Armor [A]

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Ephesians chapter 6 tonight. Ephesians chapter 6. We started looking at this chapter last Sunday night.

And for the past few weeks on Sunday night and Wednesday nights, we’ve been talking about the darkness that we see in our society. The ugliness really is a good word for it. The things that we see encroaching on our little world.

And maybe we’ve just been the exception for a long time because the violence and the hatred and the hostility and the division, it’s been a way of life for most of the world through most of history. And we just have, I guess, felt immune to it for a little while. And I can tell you there are things that are happier to talk about, but I think it’s a mistake when the church looks at the great moral issues of the day and stays silent.

That’s happened for far too long and far too many issues, and I think it’s led the culture, and it’s led a lot of Christians to believe that the Bible has nothing to say about the problems that plague us when nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve looked at Romans chapter 1 and how the Apostle Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, outlines what happens when man separates himself from God and the downward spiral that happens not only in the life of the individual but in the life of a community. in the life of mankind as a whole.

And the recipe for correcting that is the gospel. And he starts out with presenting that fact because I think it’s a whole lot better to look and say, here, I’ve got the answer and here’s the problem before you just launch into a discussion of the problem without giving the answer because that’s just, all that is is complaining at that point if you give the problem without the answer. Well, how do we engage the culture with the gospel?

Instead of complaining about the darkness, How do we turn the light on is the question then. And that’s what we’ve been looking at in Ephesians chapter 6 because a lot of times our response is one of the flesh and one of looking at it from a merely human standpoint and we miss a big part of what’s going on. When somebody comes, when some disturbed individual comes and shoots up a church or a school or a shopping mall, But our first instinct is to pass more laws, which may or may not be helpful.

Or our first instinct may be to arm ourselves, which there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m grateful that there are any number of people in this room at any given time who are trained on their weapons and know how to use it. Grateful for that.

But that really misses the heart of the problem. When we see society around us going downhill and we see things that we don’t like, our first instinct is, well, we’ve just got to vote for this group and we’ve got to vote against that group and we’ve got to segment ourselves as a society into these different groups and it’s us versus them. And this really misses the whole point of things because there’s a spiritual dimension behind all of this stuff, behind all of the ugliness that we see in society.

There’s a spiritual dimension that comes from the fact that man has rejected God. It’s nothing new. It’s been going on since the earliest days of humanity.

It’s just that we have new tools and technology to use as we try to pursue life without God. And so Paul made this point in Ephesians chapter 6, talking about the spiritual battle that’s going on behind the physical battle, and saying that we as believers need to get into this spiritual battle. And the point I made last week from this chapter is that we’ve got to understand that it is a spiritual battle, more than political, more than physical, more than life and death.

It is a spiritual battle going on, not us versus them, but the kingdom of God versus the kingdom of Satan and mankind, who we like to think this person or this group is our enemy. They’re really the ones caught in the middle, just like we have been, in the ongoing battle between God and Satan. And so we’ve got to rethink where the sides are, where the lines lay, and who the enemy is.

And he says we battle not against flesh and blood. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, verse 12, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. The point being, this is a spiritual battle, and if they bleed, they’re not really the enemy.

The enemy is the one who likes to get in and twist the minds of the people, who likes to turn the hearts of people away from God and likes to ensnare people in sin and violence and wickedness. And I see I’ve got help this evening. He might just. Probably rather listen to him anyway.

And so we’re told there in verse 13, Wherefore, he said that word wherefore means because of this, take unto you the whole armor of God. He starts talking about the armor of God and says, put the whole thing on. And I talked to you last week about how ridiculous it is to just partially prepare yourself.

You know, and I gave the example if I’d gone out deer hunting and put on camo here and camo there and orange and everything I’m supposed to have. But I went out dressed in pants that had jingle bells attached up and down the legs. That wouldn’t have made a whole lot of sense, right?

If I’d prepared all but that one area for deer hunting, I would have scared them off worse than I did with the hacking cough, right? No, so you don’t want to put on part of your preparation. You don’t want to put on part of the armor of God.

You don’t want to partially prepare yourself because the Bible does say, and Peter writes, that our adversary, the devil, is like a lion stalking about seeking whom he may devour. He’s like a roaring lion. He’s like a lion who’s found his prey and he’s ready to pounce on it.

They’re pretty stealthy until they’re ready to pounce. They don’t want to let the prey know that they’re there. So when they roar, they’re ready to go.

And so God is warning us that the devil is just looking for somebody to tear up. So why would we want to go out partially prepared into this battle? Now he says, put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand.

So it’s a warning here that we’re going to face all sorts of opposition. We’re going to face all sorts of trouble. And that’s not just opposition and the fact people don’t like us, people are against what we’re trying to do.

We just live in a world where we have trouble, right? And if you’re not having trouble, you’ve probably just had trouble, or you’re about to have trouble. We’re in one of those three places usually.

Either in the middle of trouble, just got out of trouble, or just about to be in trouble again. Trouble, we don’t even have to look for it. It finds us.

And this world is a hard place to live sometimes. And so with all the things that are thrown at us, all the things that we struggle with, all the things that we struggle against, all the fights and the trials and the bad days and the spiritual warfare, I mean, you can take it from the little annoyances of daily life all the way up to the big cataclysmic spiritual warfare type things, that no matter what comes to us in the evil day, that having done all, that we can withstand all of those things and having done all to stand. Now, when I read this, I think of the many tornadoes I experienced growing up in Moore.

And you’d hear this, you’d be underground and you’d hear this rumbling, and some of you have been in tornadoes and know exactly what I’m talking about. They say it sounds like a freight train. That’s just because there’s no other word to describe it.

But you hear this rumbling and this shaking, and you think, gee, if it doesn’t suck the cellar out of the ground, when I come up, I don’t know what I’m going to see. And fortunately, I’ve never been in an experience where I came up out of the cellar and my house was gone. I’ve come up out of the cellar and seen my house damaged.

I have come up out of the cellar and seen neighbor’s houses destroyed. I have walked down my street and seen where just rows and rows of houses have been leveled. They’re just gone.

But it seems like there’s always that one house or sometimes that one tree. There’s a picture that I put on Facebook a while back of this just pile of houses splintered and tree limbs and everything else that goes with it. And everything’s just destroyed.

And in the middle of it, there’s this one tree that’s still standing. And it’s been stripped bare of most of its leaves, most of its greenery. But somebody has gone up there and they’ve nailed an Oklahoma flag to it.

And that thing’s just flapping in the breeze. And I love that picture. I actually went and made it black and white except for the Oklahoma flag.

I love that picture. and that’s what comes to mind when it’s talking about the evil day and withstanding everything and having done all to stand that what he’s telling us here is to put on the whole armor of god so that we’re kind of like that tree I mean he doesn’t say anything about the tree there that’s just the picture that comes to my mind where we’re kind of like that tree when the evil wind comes through when the when the evil day when satan attacks he comes through and he may level everything around us but But we’ve withstood, and having done all, we stand. We’re still there.

And you know what? We may have been stripped of some leaves, and we may have lost some limbs, but we are there, and we’re still standing. It tells us to put on the whole armor of God that we can stand.

And so he says, we’re not going to get through the whole suit of armor tonight. That’s by design. We’ll talk about it more again next week.

But we’re going to look at the first few things here tonight, and what he tells us, and what these things are. Verse 14, he says, stand therefore having your loins girt about with truth and having on the breastplate of righteousness and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. And he says, above all, taking the shield of faith where which you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, praying always with all prayer and supplication in the spirit and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for the saints and for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds, that therein I may speak boldly as I ought to speak.

So he goes through this whole thing and says it’s all about being able to withstand and being able to continue serving God and to continue preaching the gospel and doing what God’s called me to do. And you’ll notice as we go through this that most of these are defensive weapons. It’s not that God calls us to be on defense all the time and just always reacting to what the world throws at us.

But we’re not called here to be aggressive. We’re not called to go out and slaughter the infidel, even if these were talking about literal weapons and a flesh and blood war. God’s not calling us to go out and slaughter the infidel.

He’s calling us to put on the armor of God to stand against what Satan throws at us as we go forward sharing the gospel that Jesus Christ loved us enough to die for us when we were yet sinners. And that he loved us to give up his own life to pay for our sins in full so that we could experience eternal life with God in heaven which we didn’t earn or deserve. It’s a message of peace that we take to the world.

But we’ve got to be able to defend ourselves to do it. We’ve got to be able to defend ourselves spiritually to do it. And so he says in verse 14, stand therefore.

He said, you want to withstand and having done all to stand, you want to be what’s left standing when everything else is devastated. And he says, so then stand. Stand having your loins girt about with the truth.

He said, you stand there and the first thing you’ve got to do is wrap the truth around yourself. Secure yourself with the truth. Secure yourself with the truth is the first thing you need to know tonight.

Because this belt that they wore, it wasn’t necessarily like this belt tonight that I wear, which some people today wear belts for looks or the appearance of the outfit. I wear it so if I lean over the wrong way, the button on my pants doesn’t fly off and blind somebody. But they would wear a belt for a functional reason.

And it wouldn’t have been just a little thin strip of leather either. It would have been a long, I’m sorry, a wide piece of leather or something like that that they would wrap around themselves because this belt forms the basis, at least in my understanding of what the Roman soldiers of their day would have done. The belt forms the base for everything else.

It’s sort of like the foundation you build the house on. You’ve got to have a strong belt there to hold everything else together. Because we talk about the breastplate, that would attach to the belt.

We talk about the sword of the spirit, they would have attached the sword to the belt. The belt holds everything together. And you’ve got to start by holding everything together with the truth.

The belt held everything else together. And so we’re supposed to wrap ourselves in the truth because the truth holds everything else together. Before we go out and battle Satan, we need to know what the truth is.

We need to make sure that we are studied in God’s word and we know what God has said. because what Satan’s first attack always is, is to begin to twist and question the word of God. Look back at Genesis chapter 3 and he asks Eve, Hath God said that stupid snake knew very well what God had said?

It wasn’t a question, did God really say that? It wasn’t a question, did he really say that? It was more of a statement, I don’t believe God when he says that.

It wasn’t a question of did he say that, it was a question of his authority. And then he begins to say, well, God said if you looked at it, if you got near it, you’d die. Well, that’s not what God says.

So he’s twisting things to where Eve’s thinking, is that what he said? No, he didn’t really, that’s not what he, you know, before long, you know the end of the story. She ate the fruit, Adam ate the fruit, they were toast. And it started with them not being really firm on their understanding of the truth.

Satan tried to do the same thing with Jesus, didn’t he? When he took Jesus out to the wilderness to tempt him, or when Jesus was led out there and Satan showed up and tried to tempt him, he went immediately to make these stones bread. And Jesus said, Jesus answered with the truth of Scripture and said, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

He said, you know, I’ll give you, throw yourself down from the top of the temple. And he tried to twist scripture, tried to misquote and misapply what God said. And said, because God said he’ll give his angels charge over you.

And Jesus said, thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. He said, that’s what the word really teaches. But what’s interesting to me is, well, that’s pretty clearly an attack on God’s word, or trying to twist the truth of God’s word.

But he starts out with, on the bread thing, if you really are the son of God. If you really are the Son of God, command those rocks, those stones to be bread. So he’s appealing to the fact that Jesus has been fasting all these days.

He’s got to be hungry. He’s also appealing to say, oh, if you’re the Son of God, then prove it. But the last thing we see recorded in Scripture right before that is Jesus’ baptism.

And in that story, the Son is being baptized. The Holy Spirit comes and lands on him like a dove. And we hear the voice of the Father say, this is my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased.

Hear him. So the last thing that we have recorded in Scripture before that is the Father saying, this is my Son. What’s the first thing Satan comes and tries to question?

If you really are the Son of God. So Satan always begins with trying to twist and undermine the truth, and we’ve got to be prepared for that. Because you get to a moment of weakness.

if you’re not grounded and rooted in the truth, we can convince ourselves of anything. And we do that all the time, don’t we? Oh, it’ll be okay.

Oh, it’s just this one time. Oh, it’s not that big a deal. I do that with myself and pie all the time, which is not necessarily a sin until you probably you’ve had your third slice or fifth or whatever. I shouldn’t say that because I plan to make more pie this week.

But we talk to ourselves that way. Oh, it’s not that big a deal. And we can convince ourselves that anything’s okay if we’re not rooted and grounded in the truth. I was reading an article today, or reading a book actually, on the Trinity and the arguments for the Trinity, and we talked some about that this morning.

And in the early days of America, in the Northeast particularly, there were groups of churches called the Congregationalists, and these grew out of what we know as the Pilgrims and the Puritans. They eventually called themselves Congregationalists, meaning they were totally independent congregations. That was sort of their claim to fame in that day when they had established churches.

One of the problems that the Congregationalists experienced around Boston, I’m trying to remember dates here, and I’m a little fuzzy on it. I want to say around 1800-ish, give or take a few years. One of the problems that they experienced was there was a preacher named Joseph Priestley who came in and said, you know, some of this stuff about the Trinity is really confusing, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

So what if we looked at this and said, you know, we just focus on the oneness of God? Because the Bible’s clear there is only one God. Well, that’s true.

Well, these churches weren’t rooted enough, some of them weren’t rooted enough in Scripture to say, no, this is why we believe in the Trinity. Yes, it’s hard to explain. Yes, it’s hard to define.

Yes, we lack a perfect analogy for it, but we believe the Bible teaches that there’s one God, but the Bible also teaches that the Father’s God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and that they’re all God at the same time, and they’re all co-equal, co-eternal persons. This is what Scripture teaches. There were some churches that went along with this and said, well, yeah, there’s just clearly just one God, one person.

Now, it’s a little compromise, it sounds like. Maybe not to y’all. y’all might be saying, you say that, you’re gone.

And rightly so, I should be. But some of these churches bought into this, and it was just a little bit of change. It was just a little bit of compromise.

But when they started teaching that there’s just one God and just one person to God, they began to teach that God the Father alone is God. Well, that means Jesus is not God. Jesus is just a good man and moral teacher.

So before long, we’ve sidelined Jesus because we weren’t rooted in the truth. And then the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force. And we start to, as we deny the Trinity, we start to call ourselves Unitarians.

And the Holy Spirit is a personal force. Well, Jesus is no longer the only way to heaven, even. He’s just a good moral teacher.

We’ve downgraded him more. The Holy Spirit really is just the feeling of the community. God the Father is not sitting up there as lawgiver, because we’ve already compromised on this, And most of these Unitarian churches began to embrace what we call panentheism, the idea that God and the universe are connected and are kind of the same thing.

It’s just like the universe is the body and God is the mind. And if that’s confusing to you, it should be. It makes as much sense to me as the Trinity does to them.

And eventually, these churches that started out as congregational churches, because they compromised on the Trinity, because they weren’t rooted in the truth, they embraced what we call universalism. The idea that there are many paths to God and God will eventually save anybody. And you’ll see Unitarian Universalist churches around America today, usually in college towns or large cities.

But it started with one little compromise on the Trinity that led them to totally sideline Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And then, by the way, we’re going to change our view of God over here. We’re going to take all the supernatural stuff out of Scripture because you start picking it apart, you start taking that belt apart, and nothing else holds together.

That belt, that belt of truth is so important because it holds everything else together. If we want to know what the truth is, we go to God’s Word, and we dig into it, and we study it. We make ourselves students of God’s Word, and we don’t believe it just because I said it.

I tell you that all the time. Don’t believe it just because I told you. You know what?

I’ll tell you this. Even that story about the Unitarians, don’t believe it just because I told you. It’s in chapter 7 of The Faith by Charles Colson.

You can go read it for yourself and go do more research from there. See that I’m telling you the truth about how one little compromise led to all of this. Don’t believe doctrine just because I tell you.

Believe it because you see it in God’s Word. Believe it because you see it in black and white in what God has written. But the truth holds everything together and we’ve got to be rooted and grounded in the truth.

Second of all, we’ve got to cover our hearts with the righteousness of Christ. We look at what he says here about the breastplate of righteousness. Now, I think when they translated this, they were looking from a standpoint when they had armor, when they had plates of armor in the 1600s. No, the Romans didn’t have plates.

They didn’t have plates of armor. What they had was mail, little pieces of metal that were little rings intermeshed that they would wear over them. But they used this as a protective thing to cover their vital organs, their hearts, their lungs.

They wanted to make sure that those things were protected when they went into battle. I mean, there are some parts of the body that are more important than others when you go into battle. If you go into battle and somebody lops off a finger, I mean, it may cause you some trouble, but you can still win.

Somebody plunges their lance through your heart and the battle’s pretty much over, right? So they wanted something to cover the chest, to cover the vital organs. And he gives this idea of the breastplate of righteousness.

And we’re being told here to cover our hearts with the righteousness of Christ because God’s word tells me I don’t have any righteousness of my own. If I want to cover my heart in my own righteousness, I’m not sure I could cover one of those little nasty Valentine’s candy hearts with my own righteousness, right? You know what I’m talking about?

Those with the little messages, misspelled messages on them. I don’t think I’ve got enough righteousness to cover one of those. He says, cover yourselves with the breastplate of righteousness.

Well, God’s word is clear. I don’t have any righteousness of my own, but God’s imparted the righteousness of Christ to me. And so as they would cover their heart and their other vital organs with this breastplate, with this suit of chain mail that was held in place by the belt.

Well, so we also need to protect and cover our hearts with the righteousness of Christ because we know ours is insufficient. And we secure it with the truth that his righteousness alone is sufficient. And here’s where the knowledge of the truth comes in.

Because religion very easily becomes about what I can do, doesn’t it? How many people are there in churches tonight, or maybe in churches this morning, tonight too? How many people are there out there thinking, if I just try a little harder, God will love me.

If I just work a little harder, God will let me into heaven. I hope God will forgive all my sins. Maybe if I just do this and whatever their list of boxes are that they want to check off.

And if I just try a little harder, God will love me and forgive me. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t have enough righteousness to even get the meeting with God, let alone get him to forgive me.

Let alone get him to love me. Now, God loved me in spite of my unrighteousness and sent Christ to die for my unrighteousness and sent Christ to impart his righteousness to me. And if I try to cover my heart, I said, you know, here’s where knowledge of the truth comes in.

We can very easily make Christianity about what I can do and what I can achieve and what I can accomplish and what I can do for God and I can be the best and God will love me. If we’re not rooted in the truth of scripture, that all the righteousness is his and anything good within us comes from him and every good and perfect gift comes from above and we’re not working in order to be saved. We’re not doing good things so that God will save us.

We do good things and we love others and we serve others because God has served us and we want to show our gratitude. See, good works is the fruit of salvation, not the root of salvation. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got that truth down.

Otherwise, we’re going to be wrong about whose righteousness we’ve got wrapped around ourselves. We protect our hearts with the righteousness of Christ. We take his righteousness on ourselves and let him cover our hearts and let him remake our hearts, really, in his own image. And third of all, we move forward in the power of the gospel.

Verse 15 says, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Until this week, I really have not understood this connection that the Bible makes between the gospel and feet. Really, it’s been hard for me to understand.

When Romans says, how beautiful are the feet of those who bear the good news. Really? The feet?

Feet are not pretty for most of us. I mean, you may have perfectly lovely feet. I don’t like feet.

Okay. And this fascination, this, you know, when you come bearing the good news of Jesus Christ, how blessed, how beautiful are your feet, Romans says. And now it says that we should shod our feet.

We should chew our feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace. What is this connection between the gospel and the feet? Well, here’s what it is.

In their shoes, these ancient Roman soldiers would have had spikes on the bottom that would have acted like cleats. And cleats allow you to dig in when necessary. Now, I’ve never been an athlete and never will be.

But I remember when Benjamin was playing soccer last year, and he had little cleats that we had to go out and buy. And I remember one night we went over to practice, and shortly after we got there, it started raining like monsoon-type rain. And so we’re standing under an awning at First Baptist. We’re going to see, okay, is it going to let up?

Is it not? And these little boys are out there running around in the mud. And not knowing it was going to rain, I had worn leather loafers that were slick on the bottom.

Well, he’s out there running up and down these hills in the mud with his cleats having a wonderful time and no problem. Well, I’m slogging around back through the field to try to put our chairs back in the back of the vehicle. and I’m slipping and I’m trying not to fall on my back or my face.

I’m not sure which one would have been funnier. But in front of all these people, it’s because I had slippery shoes, but he had these cleats that allowed him to dig into this soccer field even when it was wet. They would have had these cleats that allowed them to dig in when necessary because sometimes fighting would be hand-to-hand.

I realize it’s not that way nowadays as much. They press a button, boom. But there are some people who still have to go out and do hand-to-hand, and they have to clear buildings, and they need to be prepared for that.

And in this day, they didn’t know what kind of field they were going to go out and fight on. They had to be prepared for anything. And so you’d have these spikes on the bottom of your shoes that would allow you to dig into the field.

So not only could you stand, but you could move forward. Because you didn’t want to give up ground that you’ve already fought for and that your buddies have already bled for. Why would you want to be pushed backwards because you can’t make it up the slippery hill?

No, you want to be able to stand firm on the ground you’ve already covered, and you want to be able to move forward in this battle. And those cleats would allow them to do that. Well, folks, the gospel is that for us.

The gospel is where we stand and do not give ground. The gospel is where we constantly move forward. That’s got to be our message.

That’s got to be what drives us. And it all has to come back to the gospel. That’s what’s important.

That’s what matters. You know, there are all sorts of churches and Seminole and Bolegs and some of them, you know, there are some of them that are wrong on some things, I think, which they probably say the same thing about me or the same thing about us. You know what?

Our brothers down at the assembly of God, I think they’re wrong on some things. But you know what? They are still my brothers and sisters in Christ. Why?

Because we might disagree over some things with the Holy Spirit. We might disagree with some things over baptism and over the Lord’s Supper, but when it comes right down to it, my assembly of God, brothers, believe that salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, that it’s not earned or deserved, but it’s entirely the gift of God. They believe the gospel.

By the same token, there are some churches in town that are confused about the gospel, and they may be my friend, they may be my neighbor. I may love them, but we’re not on the same page when it comes to the gospel. We can disagree about a lot of things and still be on the same side, but the gospel has got to be what moves us forward.

The gospel has got to be the message of the church. If the message of Trinity Baptist Church is, hey, come be a part of our church because you could be as good as we are, we might as well shut this place down. If our message is, hey, come be with us and have a great time, we might as well shut this place down.

Our message has got to always come back to Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross to save sinners. It’s got to always come back to Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay 

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