Men We Are In Battle

Men’ We’re In Battle

Joshua 1:6-9 Ephesians 6:1-18 November 26, Men’s Day

There is a reason that we live, and we act the way that we do as men. We do what we do because of what we believe about the world and about life. Have you ever believed a lie and acted upon it. I have. In college I was playing strong safety. I was to cover the slot back man to man. The quarterback took the ball and passed it to the wide receiver. I immediately came up to make the tackle, because I believed that was the best course of action for me to take.

Everything was going according to plan until the wide receiver, stopped and began to pass the ball. The ball sailed over my head toward an open receiver who had no one anywhere within 15 yards of him. I had believed a lie that someone deliberately set me up for. I was the leading tackler on the team, and someone knew that my strength could also be my greatest weakness. They laid a trap just for me and I took it.

Chances are I’m not the only person who has been set up by somebody else so that they could take advantage of me. But the price you may have paid , is far greater than the price I was to pay on the field. Some of you were set up by a lie a in business deals and was taken advantage of and landed in bankruptcy. Some of you were taken in by a lie about the street life and what you believed about it and spent time in jail. Some of you were taken in by the lie of what seemed like easy sex and discovered baby mama drama like you would not believe. Some of you were taken in by the lie of the lure of drugs or alcohol and have been beaten by its addicting power robbing you of those you truly love. It’s all because we believed something that was not true.

All of us here either living by the truth or by a good lie. Now no man says, “I’m going to live my life by a bad lie or a good lie.” It just happens, because the man does not know the truth. We like to think that we know the truth and we’re living our lives accordingly. But there was a guy by the name of Jesus who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” What he was saying was, “nobody gets in good with God unless they know me.” Now we are all on our way to meeting God, I don’t care what you believe or what you might think. We are all on our way to meeting God.

I’ve watched enough Mason funerals to see guys who never come to a church try to use fancy religious language to get into a Mason type heaven. They will even throw in the name of Jesus once in a while. But Jesus never said, that was the way to meet God and if that’s all they know about God, they’re believing a lie and a deception.”

Now some of us may want to argue over how many different ways there are to God. Let me ask you this, how many ways are there to win a football game. Some may argue to have a powerful offense. Others may argue for a great defense. Some would say its having a great players on the team. Others would say you need a great coach. You can argue these points over and over again, but the only way to win a football game, is to have more points than the other team when the game is over. It doesn’t matter how many yards you gained, how many yards you allowed, how much time you had the ball or anything else. Bottom line, who was ahead at the end of the game. Having Jesus in your life when you live and when you die, is the equivalent of having the most points at the end of the game.

Whenever you go to a game, if you look around you will find somebody with a sheet of paper writing down what the team playing is doing. What are they doing. They are scouting. They are getting to know this team that’s playing because, they will be playing them next week. Your enemy wants to know all they can about you, so that they can come up with a plan to neutralize your strengths, and to take advantage of your weaknesses.

When we look at where we are as men, particularly as African Americans, we need to do some real evaluating of what’s going on. In December’s Ebony issue, it stated that when it come to HIV/Aids, the hardest hit racial or ethnic group is African Americans, who experience more illness, shorter survival times and more deaths. The article state that nearly half of the more than 1 million Americans estimated to have be living with HIV/AIDS are Black, nearly 70% of the new AIDS cases among women are Black, and Blacks represent more than 56% percent of the new AIDS cases among youth.