Putting on the Armor [B]

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Transcript:

But we’re going to be in Ephesians chapter 6 tonight and look at the full armor of God, continue what we’ve been studying. And we started looking at it a few weeks ago as really practical application. I know for us it sounds spiritual and it sounds doctrinal, and we think, you know, what application would it possibly have to our everyday lives?

But when it was written, it was written to people who would have been familiar with the Roman army how they did things. Most of the, well, a lot of the believers would have been Romans or they would have been people who were conquered by the Romans, so they’d be pretty familiar with the Roman army. And so when Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says you need to gird your loins with truth, they would have understood what that meant, and that would have been practical advice for them.

So our goal in this is to look at what the Apostle Paul says, try to understand what they would have understood in their context, and then go from there and applying it to our lives, Because as we’ve been talking about on Wednesday nights, the problem that we see around us in our world with things growing darker and things growing seemingly more out of control, the problem is not political, the problem is not economic, the problem isn’t even moral, the problem is spiritual, that this is just what naturally happens the more a person or a community or a country, the more whoever it is rejects God, the more things tend to go in a downward spiral, and it just accelerates until you hit rock bottom. The answer for that is the gospel. The answer to that is not more legislation.

It’s not more programs. It’s the gospel of Jesus Christ. Well, how do we go out and take the gospel? How do we go out and take this light into a darkened world? God says, put on your armor and go.

And so we’ve been looking at this with that in mind. And we’re going to read the whole passage again. Don’t worry, we won’t study the whole passage in depth.

We’ve already been over some of that, but we’re going to read the whole passage again just to get the context. It says, starting in verse 10, And finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. 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.

Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye 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 all 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 asks for them to pray for him as he does his part in furthering the gospel, but also explains to them how they can be prepared to go and do their part in the furtherance of the gospel.

And I think this is something that far too often is lost in churches today. We assume that we have a paid clergy to go and do ministry on our behalf. We assume that, hey, we pay the preacher, we pay the music minister, we pay, you know, that’s why we have deacons.

That’s why we have, whether it’s paid or not, we tend to look as though we have put a special class of people in charge here, and that’s their job, that’s what we send them for. And, I mean, maybe that worked somewhere at some time. I’ve never seen it work.

I’ve never seen that be the paradigm and the church be everything it was supposed to be. Because the bottom line is that even in a church as small as ours, there’s a lot of ministry to be done. There’s a lot of people within the church and outside the church that need to be reached.

And if all the ministry falls on me, and this is not just me saying I want less work. Okay, I love what I do. But I’m saying if all the ministry of the church falls on me to do, there’s going to be a lot of ministry that doesn’t get accomplished.

And even broaden that a little bit and say, if all the ministry falls on me and the deacons, and we’ve got Brother Ken and Brother Ralph and Brother Greg and Brother Terry and Brother Doyle, and as competent as they are and as godly men as they are, there’s still a lot of ministry that doesn’t get done. Now, this is a fight that God has called all believers to enlist in. Doing his work and doing his ministry is something that he calls all believers to enlist in.

So yes, at the end he’s saying, pray for me, pray for the Apostle Paul that I can be the kind of ambassador that I need to be to carry the gospel forward. But the whole point of the putting on the armor of God before this is him explaining to the church at Ephesus, not the leaders of the church at Ephesus, but the church, the people at Ephesus, how they too are supposed to put on the armor of God and join the fight. And we looked at the first three parts of the armor last week, and tonight we’re going look at the second three because there are six pieces of armor here.

And I remember when the ladies were doing a study on this in their Bible study a while back, and I saw something on the internet with a lady making this really disgusted face, and it says, when you realize the armor of God doesn’t have any pants. I don’t understand why there are no pants in the armor of God. But I guess maybe that’s having your loins girt about with truth.

You know, it’s got the belt, and apparently they would take the bottom of the shirt and pull it up into the belt and tuck it under there. So maybe there’s your pants. But the point is, maybe there were pants in the Roman uniform and Paul said, yeah, they pretty much got to put on their pants before they go do ministry anyway.

I think that’s good advice for us. But he doesn’t cover the pants. He covers what’s absolutely necessary.

What’s absolutely necessary for us to go and do battle. And he talks about the belt of truth that holds everything together, as we talked about last week. He talks about the breastplate of righteousness.

Excuse me, how our heart needs to be covered in the righteousness of Christ. Not my own, there’s not enough of it. But the righteousness of Christ. And he talks about our feet being shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. That those are basically our cleats that when we need to dig in on the battlefield, it’s with the gospel.

It’s not on my opinion. It’s not on, well, this is the tradition of our church. This is what we historically believe as Baptists.

Where we dig in is on the gospel of Jesus Christ. When we go out to really, there’s nothing wrong with our church having traditions, as long as we don’t elevate them to be equal with scripture. There’s nothing wrong with believing what we have historically as Baptists. But when we want to go out and join the fight, our preparation is not, I have this understanding of baptism.

Our preparation is not, this is how we do the Lord’s Supper. Our preparation is not every fifth Sunday of the month we do this. Our preparation is the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s where we dig in.

That’s where we take our stand. That’s where we put our feet down and say, I’m not backing up from this spot. There was an order, and I can’t remember the number of it.

There was an order that Stalin gave to his troops during the Second World War. It was the no-retreat order. You dig in here and you don’t give up a foot of ground.

You stand there and die if you have to, but you do not retreat. And any of the Soviet soldiers who were captured by the Germans, if they were returned later to the Soviet Union, they were imprisoned and maybe executed. Now, that’s a little extreme there.

I’m not suggesting that. I’m not suggesting we execute people who take a step backwards. But folks, we ought to have at least that same kind of commitment that says, not because somebody’s threatened me, not because I’m afraid for my family’s life, but because I believe so strongly.

Here in the gospel, I stand here, and I don’t take a step backwards. It should be our commitment to say, I don’t retreat from this. This is the gospel, and this is the hill we fight and die on.

Well, tonight, we start in verse 16, where he says, Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And in their day, they didn’t have guns. They didn’t have armor-piercing tanks.

They didn’t have any of these armor-piercing tanks. I think the tanks are the armor that are referred. They didn’t have tanks.

They didn’t have guns. Forgive me, I’ve never been in the military. I’ve just watched Patton and a lot of the History Channel.

But they didn’t have all these fancy weapons. They had their swords. They had bows and arrows, which, believe me, now that I’ve shot both, a gun and a bow and arrow, bow and arrow is a lot harder.

It takes a lot more skill. That’s why I gave up on the crossbow at least temporarily and said, I’m going after the deer with a shotgun. The bow and arrow takes, I mean, you’ve got to be practiced up, but they would fire arrows and you’d go to war.

And sometimes the archers would be so numerous. A phrase comes to mind and I can’t remember who said it, but there was an ancient battle where somebody said, we’re coming at you. And if you don’t surrender, we’re coming at you with so many archers that we will block out the sun.

This may have been a battle between the Greeks and Persians at Thermopylae. We’re going to come at you with so many archers that the arrows will blot out the sun. And the response was, very well, then we’ll fight in the shade.

And I’ve always loved that statement. But they would come at you with these archers, they would fire arrows, and you had very little defense against them. And if they hit you in an area that was not protected, I mean, that arrow’s going in you and probably not even straight through.

because those arrows were meant to go in and be impossible to pull out to inflict the maximum damage. And oh my goodness, it got even worse when people learned how to do flaming arrows. Because then not only could you injure people, but you could panic the horses, and you could set stuff on fire.

It was great if you’re into destruction. And guess what? We fight an enemy who is a big fan of destruction.

We fight against an enemy who has come to kill and to steal and to destroy. He wants nothing more than to destroy us. See, it’s not personal towards you.

It’s not that Satan looks at you and says, oh, that Julie, I can’t stand her. It’s Satan. What, do you want him to like you?

Okay. It’s not that Satan wakes up in the morning and says, I hate that, Greg. Satan, well, normally I pick two or three of you.

It’s that Satan hates God. Satan hates God because he wants to be God and he can never be God. And so he’s hated God from the very beginning and he realizes he can’t do a thing to God.

I mean, he’s God. That’s pretty much in the name. There’s nothing he can do to God.

So he comes after what God loves. He decides to hurt God by hurting us. He wants to hurt God by destroying us.

You go for the weakest part. And so Satan, in order to try to get God, would love nothing more than to destroy God’s people. That’s why we’re warned that he walks about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Devour doesn’t mean he just wants to chase us. He’s roaring because he’s about ready to pounce, and devour means eating somebody up. Satan wants nothing more than to destroy us because he wants to hurt God.

And so we battle this enemy who is in love with destruction, who wants to see lives ruined, who wants to see families ripped apart, who wants to see churches in chaos, and wants to see people so beaten down by their circumstances and by their own failures and everything else that he can throw at them that they are of no practical use to the kingdom of God at that time. That is his goal. And his idea here is to take whatever fiery dart he can throw, substitute the word dart here for arrow, whatever fiery arrow he can, and fire it right into wherever your weakest point is, where you have no defense, and set you on fire and burn you down. That’s Satan’s goal for you.

We talk all the time about God’s plan for your life and God’s goal for your life. Let’s talk about Satan’s goal for your life. That’s it.

He wants to destroy you and burn you down. So what’s our defense against this? The Bible says, take the shield of faith, wherewith you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.

See, I may not be able to get out of the way of the arrow. I may not be able to run fast. I’ve come out here sometimes on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning or something to practice with the crossbow because I’m less likely to shoot somebody or something out here at the church than I am at home. And so I’ve come out here, and those arrows go so fast that some of them I haven’t even been able to find.

I dread, I hope that Jim doesn’t find someone with the lawnmower come spring. I’ve looked and looked. And if they’re not painted orange, I’m not going to find them.

Those things go so fast you can barely see them. And if they’re coming at you, you probably won’t have a chance to get out of the way of it. And especially if you’re facing something like an opposing army where they’re just coming from all over, you can’t get out of the way of the Shower of Arrows.

But you can take the shield of faith and put it in front of you. And what happens, those arrows hit that shield, and they stick in that shield, and probably don’t go all the way through that shield, but they’re there, and they don’t come through that shield and hit you. And our faith is like the shield that we put up.

Forget like. Our faith is the shield that we put up that blocks those arrows. See, like I said, Satan wants to fire any arrow at you that he can get.

And that may be a temptation. That may be where he burrows in there and says, you know what would be fun? When Satan says, oh, you know what would be fun?

He doesn’t tell you, oh, that’ll be fun for a few minutes. And then the aftermath, not so much. But it could be temptation where Satan says, hey, you know what would be fun?

It could be the reminders of what you’ve done in the past where Satan says, you think you’re such a good little Christian now. I know who you really are. I know what you did.

Those could be the fiery arrows. It could be the fiery arrows of feeling like we’re not good enough. Surely God would pick somebody better than you.

I feel that way all the time. Satan knows just what button to push, just where your weaknesses are. It could be doubts.

As I’m doing research on various things, I keep running across websites online that are run by former Christians, some of them former pastors who now have embraced atheism and make it their mission to, and somewhere along the line, doubts entered in. Now, I’m not going to paint all these guys with a broad brush. Each one of them have got their story.

But somewhere, there was a moment of uncertainty, and that fiery arrow didn’t get extinguished. See, these fiery arrows take all sorts of forms. But it’s that shield of faith that blocks them from getting through. And by the way, this is not about, oh, just have faith and don’t use your brain.

I believe God gave us the ability to use our brain. Because we can put our faith in the wrong things, right? If this were a cult, I’d say, put your faith in me and I could tell you, and you could have really strong faith and it’s not going to do you any good because I’m a really bad object of your faith.

I believe God’s word tells us to have faith. I believe God’s word also encourages us to use our brains and have discernment. It talks about that.

So it’s not about never having questions, never asking questions. It’s about not letting the fiery darts of Satan through. He will attack us with these flaming arrows of doubts and fear, and they can only be combated by meeting them with faith.

What is faith? It’s confidence in God and his promises. And there are questions sometimes that I can’t answer.

That’s the whole premise behind Stump the Preacher on Wednesday nights. There are some questions I can’t answer right now, and I’ll have to research and get back to you. There are some questions that after years of research, I still can’t answer.

There are some things that I’ve wondered in my mind about God and what he does, and why he does it and why he allows it that I still can’t answer. But in the face of those things that I can’t answer, I turn to the things that I can answer and the things that I do know and the things that I am certain about, and I remember God and his character and his promises. And faith is not certainty that I know everything and I understand the reasoning for everything.

Faith is simply confidence in God and his promises. Do I know how he’s going to fulfill his promises? I don’t, but I know who he is and I know that he always does.

Sometimes that’s enough for me. It’s got to be enough for me. And I’m telling you, and I’ve told you before, there are a lot of unanswered questions in my mind.

I’m going to spend more time on this shield of faith tonight and not get to the other two. That’s all right. We’ll save them for next week.

There have been a lot of unanswered questions with two miscarriages and a stillbirth and being abandoned by an unfaithful spouse and going through tornadoes and floods and job losses and all these things. There are so many unanswered questions still in my brain about why did this happen? Why did this happen to me?

God, why wasn’t I warned? God, will I see them again? God, how are you going to fix this?

There are things that I still don’t understand. But in the loss of one of those children, I had a breakthrough. And I’ll tell you, I never was to the point where I was angry with God.

And I don’t say that to sound spiritual. I don’t say that, I’m so much better than some of you who have gone through things and have been angry with God. That’s a totally, God understands that better than we do. And God will love you through your anger and God will comfort you.

I’ve never been to that point. And I think that was a gift from God. That’s not that I’m so wonderful.

That was God preparing me for it. But still going through these questions, I came to the point of saying, I’m not angry with you, God, but I do want to understand. And I do want to, and I said to somebody in my family, after the loss of one of these kids, that I know God has a plan in mind.

And I know God is doing something. And I’ve had to come to the realization, I may never know what that is. On this side of eternity, I may never understand what that plan is.

Because a lot of times we talk about God has a plan for this and one day you’ll understand. I may never understand, but I know that he’s doing something and that has to be enough. For right now, that has to be enough.

That’s all I have. And so that has to be enough. And I’ve seen people go through struggles like that and get angry at God and walk away.

And it’s not that the suffering that they went through, it’s not that the trouble they went through was one of the fiery arrows. You know, we live in a fallen world and bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people and bad things to bad people and good things to good people. It’s just the nature of the world we live in.

What happened was not the fiery dart, but it’s the questions later that start to pierce through the brain and say, well, if God really loved you, you wouldn’t have gone through that. Well, if God loved you, he’d explain this to you. That’s not true.

Nowhere in God’s word are we ever promised an explanation for the things that we go through. It has to come back to faith. It has to come back to confidence in God and his promises.

It has to come back to, I may not understand what he’s doing, but I know who God is, and I know what he’s promised, and so that’s what I’m going to stand in. And for years, as a new Christian, I had questions about my salvation. I won’t go so far as to say I doubted my salvation, but I’ll go so far as to say I questioned, did I believe enough?

Did I have strong enough faith? It was almost like I was determined to make faith into a work, something that I, this belief into something that I did strong enough that I could earn salvation. Well, did I believe enough?

Did I believe exactly the right thing? Was I so firmly convicted? Was I without doubt?

And I just racked my brain saying, is it possible that I’m not saved? And I would come back to, and many of you have probably doubted your salvation at some point or another. Maybe not for the same neurotic reasons that I did of overthinking absolutely everything, But maybe it was, well, if I was really saved, I wouldn’t have done this.

I wouldn’t have acted this way. Is it possible that God saved me after he knows what I did when I was younger? There’s all sorts of reasons that people come back to and say, and question salvation and doubt salvation.

For me, it was, did I believe right? Did I believe strong enough? And eventually, what snapped me out of that, I read a few different passages in Scripture, and some that I preached on just recently, where God says that he gives to those who work not.

That grace is not given to those who work, but he justifies the ungodly. He justifies us of all things that we could not be justified by in the law of Moses. A couple of verses there, and I feel like I’m mixing them up here because I hadn’t planned to go this direction with the message tonight.

But a couple of verses in Acts and Romans, and I read those and I realized it’s not about me and what I’ve done or can do. It’s about who God is and what he’s promised. Did he promise me eternal life through Jesus Christ?

Yes, he did. Did he promise that it was by grace through faith and not something that I earned? Yes, that’s exactly what he promised.

Is God a God who keeps his word or is he a God I have to keep checking up on and saying, did you do it yet? Did you get this done? Did you really save me?

No, he’s a God who keeps his promises. And I had to go back to, yes, I have all these questions. I have all these things that I don’t understand.

But here’s what God promised, and I believe in him. I believe in his power to save. I believe that his promises are true, that he’s a God who keeps his word.

And so, yes, that day when I was five years old, when I realized I was a sinner and believed that Jesus died in my place, I believe he saved me that day. That’s faith. Do I have some stamped certificate from God?

That’d be really nice if he’d send down a piece of paper and it’s all filled out and it’s signed and stamped and we could frame it. and there’s your proof on the wall. I don’t have that.

But what I have is what God’s word says and confidence in him and who he is and what he said. And folks, that’s faith. When Satan fires the fiery arrows at you, that shield of faith is the response.

It’s not, well, Satan, I’m too smart to fall for this this time. It’s who is God and what does he say and what has he told me to do? Well, Satan, I’ve got a better argument than you do.

No, it’s got to come down to confidence in God. Because God doesn’t love you. There’s no way God could love you.

Look at you. And no, I’m not looking at anybody in particular. Satan can say that all day long and God on the other side says, I’ve loved you with an everlasting love.

God so loved the world. God loved the world in this way that he sent his son, his only begotten son, to die on the cross for us. That word so doesn’t mean how much, although that’s not wrong.

That’s just not what it means. It is how much he loved us. But 16 means he loved us in this way.

What’s the proof of how much he loved us? He sent Jesus to die on the cross. So Satan can say all day, God can’t possibly love you.

Yet we have over here God telling us, I loved you and proved it at the cross. So do we give in to the fiery arrows or do we have confidence in who God is and the promise that he made? God can’t possibly forgive you after what you’ve done.

And God says, I’ve chosen to remember your sins no more. It’s not that God develops amnesia. is that God says that’s under the blood of Jesus Christ, and we’re going to put that away, and we’re not going to talk about it anymore.

It’s done, it’s paid for, and it’s over with. And he says he puts our sins as far from us as the east is from the west, and I love that because I’m kind of a geography nerd. Charlie will walk into the room and say, oh, you’re playing on Google Earth again.

You’re looking at maps. Or she’ll walk in, I’ll have the Oklahoma State map out. I can get almost anywhere without GPS now.

I love maps. I love that whole concept. And one thing that I learned very early on, There’s a north pole and there’s a south pole.

And you don’t have To be a geography nerd to understand that. There’s a north pole and there’s a south pole. There’s a point where you can go As far north as you can get And no further.

Any direction you go Is going to be south. And there’s a place Where you can go As far south as you can get And that’s the end. Any way you go Is going to be north.

The distance between north and south Is finite. The distance between east and west Is not. There’s no east pole.

And there’s no west pole. I can travel around the world west continually from now until the day I die, and I will never arrive at west. I can do the same thing east and never arrive at east. The distance between east and west is infinite. And God says, Satan says, God can never forgive you.

God could never take that stain out of you. And God said, I’ve put your sins as far from you as the east is from the west. So we go out and do battle. Satan wants to destroy us.

He wants to ruin our effectiveness for the kingdom. And he’s going to do that by firing any arrow he can to try to undermine us, try to get through our defenses and burn us to the ground. We don’t stop that by reasoning with the arrow.

We don’t do that by ignoring the arrow. We don’t do that by pretending the arrow’s not hot or pretending the arrows aren’t out there at all. We do that by raising the shield of faith and saying, even the things I don’t understand, I know who God is and I know what he’s promised and I’m going to keep my confidence in that.

faith is simply confidence unshakable confidence in who God is and what He’s promised

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