Stand and Fight: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.
Ephesians 6:10-18
BTRAC
I heard the story of a boxer a few days ago. He was an older guy who had once been the champ, and he wanted to prove that he still had it and so he had gotten into the ring with a fighter that was in a whole other league. After five or six rounds of just getting the stuffing knocked out of him, he came back to his corner and sat down. He was cut several times, and both of his eyes were nearly swollen shut. But, his trainer was an optimist and he was trying to encourage the former champ so he told him, “You’re doing great, that guy has barely touched you!” The boxer looked up at the trainer, exhausted, and replied: “Then you better watch the referee because somebody keeps hitting me!”
In Christianity today, you have a lot of people, pastors and churches included, that are like that trainer. They are trying to convince everyone that there is no problem and they are telling everyone who will listen that their lives and lifestyles are alright, that the world is barely touching them or having an influence on them and that Satan and sin really can’t cause us that much harm as long as we try to be good. But if you look in churches today, you see a much different story. You see people who have been beaten and battered by life. You see immorality and addiction. You see families that have been torn apart but are still trying to keep up appearances for the Sunday crowd. You see churches that can’t stop fighting and that are splitting and accomplishing nothing for God’s kingdom. No matter what people think, someone keeps hitting us! Someone is landing these blows, someone is leaving the scars behind. You can see it on so many faces, the blows that have been landed in a battle that has raged from the beginning of time and that is not going to go away any time soon, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that it’s not there.
Many don’t want to believe in angels and demons and a spiritual realm, so they just refuse to believe that there is anything out there beyond what we can see. But this is a case where “What you can’t see, CAN hurt you!” If you want to witness Satan’s greatest victory to date, you don’t have to look in dark and seedy places. You won’t find it in the occult or in the filth and trash we call entertainment today. You can see his greatest victory in many churches today where he has convinced the people that he doesn’t exist. So many today are more comfortable taking Satan as a symbol of evil rather than a created being who is set against God and his people and is a very real enemy today. The Bible does not teach him as a symbol. The Bible does not teach him as incompetent or unaware of what’s going on. The Bible tells us that he is a deceiver and a liar and a lion that is ready to pounce and destroy. There is a war going on. And like it or not, you are involved. This war is outside of the realm of what we perceive as reality, it’s outside of what we can see with our eyes. We can see the consequences and the damage and rubble that this war has left in its wake, but the battle is a spiritual one. It is a battle for the hearts and minds of God’s most precious creation, you and me.
We are beginning a new series this morning and for the next couple of months, we are going to be digging into the area of spiritual warfare. This is scary for a lot of people and my intent in the coming weeks is not to scare you. In fact it’s the total opposite. My intent is to inform you of the reality of what we are dealing with and then to equip you with everything that you need, everything that God, Himself, provides to fight this battle so that when the dust clears, we will be still standing.
In the 6th chapter of Ephesians, Paul is just wrapping up a very lengthy letter to the church at Ephesus, a church that he helped to plant at the tail end of his second missionary journey. He wrote this letter while he was in prison in Rome and it is very different than many of his other letters. Paul used the majority of his letters not just to encourage believers, but to address specific issues that had arisen in the young churches that Paul and the other apostles had helped to start. With Ephesians, Paul writes with a broader purpose. He does encourage the Ephesians and he praises them for the good reports that he has heard, but his main purpose is to help them to come to a fuller understanding of their new found faith. He wants them to go deeper. He shares with the Ephesians a vision of God’s Sovereign plan for the church and for the world. He lays out the perfect timing of God sending His Son and reveals the depth, the full scope, of what was accomplished for us on the cross. He writes to the Ephesians about the unity that we have in Christ, it doesn’t matter what language you speak or what color your skin is, there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father over, in, and through all. Woven throughout the letter is the heart of God as laid on the heart of Paul. He gives a vision of what true Christian living looks like in a very hostile world. He teaches them how to pray; he speaks of how a marriage should work and how a family should look. He gives very simple and practical Truths to live by. Sounds like what we need today!
As he concludes all of this, he wants to give the people an idea of two things. First, he wants to make sure that they understand the reality and gravity of the unseen world. Second, he wants to make sure that they understand the hope and the victory that is theirs in a relationship with God. This is what he is trying to accomplish in the passage that we are going to be looking at over the next few weeks.
Read Ephesians 6:10-18.
Paul wraps his letter up neatly with 4 principles for Christians to successfully live out the vision that he has cast throughout the letter. He lays out how we can experience unity with other Christians and have those healthy marriages and families and he begins in verse 10.
Paul’s first principle for winning the spiritual battle is to:
1) Understand Your Strength
We had a dog growing up that was as big a baby as you’ll ever see. My sister had a little kitten, it was the cutest thing and absolutely harmless. Our dog was a small dog but he towered over the kitten and could have squashed the poor thing with one of his paws. One look, one hiss from that kitten would send that dog running and hiding under a bed or behind the couch. That dog had everything he needed to stand up to that kitten and to defeat that kitten but he had no confidence because he had no understanding of his strength.
Here, Paul starts with the basic idea that you cannot stand, you cannot defeat the enemy if you don’t understand where your strength lies. He says be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. This is not a fight that we can win in our own strength. It’s not a battle that we want to try to win in our own strength. God provides strength beyond anything that we can do on our own:
1 cor 1:25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.
When the Israelites were hemmed in by the Philistines and the Philistine Champion, Goliath, was challenging them to come out and fight. We’re told in 1 Samuel that for 40 days this giant of a man challenged God’s people to fight and that each day the Israelites ran at the sight of him and hid in their tent. These are the people who had seen the power of God on a grander scale than any other people in history and they could only think in terms of their own strength. In their own strength, they could never defeat a giant and so they sat for 30 days in fear and frustration and unable to move ahead towards what God had already given and promised to them.
Then David came along. He was just a boy against a giant, just a shepherd against a trained military warrior. But David knew where his strength came from. Whereas all of the adult, trained military men could not see past the strength of the enemy, David understood that no power on Earth, seen or unseen, can compare to the power available to God’s people. Listen to the confidence:
1SA 17:45 David said to the Philistine, "You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. 46 This day the LORD will hand you over to me, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. Today I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. 47 All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD’s, and he will give all of you into our hands."
David understood the strength that was available to him and it allowed him to step out in faith and to accomplish God’s will through that act of faith. As we begin to understand that we are in a spiritual battle, Christians have got to begin to claim the power that is available to us. We cannot do this in and of ourselves but we don’t have to! God makes the full resources of heaven available to His children. It’s something that we so often forget but God says in Zechariah:
ZEC 4:6 `Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty.
By God’s spirit we can have victory, by God’s spirit we can raise godly children, by God’s Spirit our marriages can flourish. So many of us have a preconceived notion of who God is and what He can and can’t accomplish. We talked a few months ago about some of the ways that we underestimate the power and the majesty of God. We cannot fathom that He may be bigger than the box we’ve put Him in.
I was working on the roof of a man’s house just outside of Nyack. It was a gorgeous day and the house was up on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. As I stood on that roof, a bald eagle soared a few feet over my head. Its wingspan was immense, I could see the power of that bird, right down to the talons on the end of his feet. I had a whole new respect for eagles. I had seen them before, always in zoos, always sitting peacefully on a tree branch, always at a distance. For the first time I got a true glimpse of the power and majesty of this amazing animal when I witnessed it outside of how I was used to seeing it. So many of us can only picture God in this way, we’ve only seen Him at a distance, We’ve seen Him work and move but its always been within the boundaries, the box we keep Him in, of how we think He should work. When we step out in faith and when we understand the power and majesty of the God that we serve, a God who cannot be tamed or contained, when we get just a glimpse of how big and how powerful God is, we will never think the same again.
Satan is a strong enemy, the thought of spiritual warfare is a scary thing, so the only place our confidence can come from is the strength available to us through God. Paul says know God’s strength and then know the strength that you have in that. It is unlike anything else you can experience. The first, basic, idea of spiritual warfare is to know your strength, everything follows from this because as Paul writes later:
Phil 4:13 I can do everything through him who gives me strength.
Spiritual victory begins with God’s strength.
Then Paul moves to the next principle of spiritual warfare: As a soldier in this war, you’ve got to:
2) Dress the Part
11 Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. And he repeats it 2 verses later.
If you are about to engage an enemy, you want to have every possible scenario covered and be protected from every possible attack. Too many Christians try to enter into the battle without the right weapons and without the right armor and just like trying to fight in your own strength, this is going to leave you frustrated and defeated and frankly, it’s why many people fall away from their faith. They enter the battle underdressed.
CRAIG HERBERGER ILLUSTRATION
For a state trooper, there is a uniform that they put on each and every day. There is not one piece of gear that they would feel comfortable leaving the house not wearing. Each piece is vital. They have something to communicate with and to call for help with. They have something that covers their heart and protects them from bullets. They have a gun if a situation calls for the use of deadly force. They have handcuffs to subdue the enemy. A trooper hopes that he will never have to use some things in the course of duty, for a Christian, the reality is that we will use every piece of this armor on a regular basis as we fight to advance God’s kingdom on Earth. Paul says, put it all on, the whole armor. Each piece is as important as the next because there is one rule that is certain in Spiritual Warfare, if you are making a difference for God and He is using you, you will come under attack. If you are comfortable and unwilling to take spiritual risks and living a life that is having no impact on anyone for the Kingdom of God, Satan is not going to waste his time on you, why would he? You’re already playing into his hands. But if you are growing in Christ, if you are serving, if you are sharing, if you are following where god leads, if you are living the life of one who is set apart by God to accomplish something for his kingdom, whether big or small, you will be noticed. Satan will attack.
But Paul says to put on the whole armor of God and to move forward in the confidence of God’s strength and you will have victory. It’s a promise. It’s not a guarantee of a pain free easy life, but it is a promise to provide everything that you need to stand strong and to receive your reward in eternity. Put on the belt of Truth, the breastplate of righteousness, fit your feet with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. Grab a hold of the shield of faith, put on the helmet of salvation, and lift high the sword of the Spirit, God’s word. In the weeks to come we will be digging into what each of these pieces provides for us and the responsibility that comes with wearing them. For now, the important thing to remember is that we are in a battle and we’ve got to dress the part.
The third principle that Paul gives us for spiritual victory is to:
3) Know Your Enemy
You wouldn’t think of entering into a war without gathering as much intelligence about the enemy as you can get. Paul gives us the background on what and who we are fighting against.
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.
As you begin to understand this battle, you need to understand that it is played out in and through the lives of people, but it is a spiritual battle and its roots are in the heavenly realms. There are some who simply cannot believe this, it sounds too sci-fi for them. But I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the evidence of these forces and I assure you that they are real and closing our eyes and trying to convince ourselves that they don’t exist does not make them any less real nor will it make them go away. Another step towards victory is to understand and to know your enemy. One of the reasons that America is a free country today is that the British did not know their enemy in the Revolutionary War. They were expecting one thing and we gave them something completely different, we didn’t fight in conventional ways. They failed to adapt and as a result, they lost the war. We hid in fields and trees and shot at them from unexpected places. That’s how Satan works. He lurks and waits for that perfect opportunity when our guard is down and that’s when he attacks.
But God has given us a blueprint of the way that Satan works in the pages of Scripture. We see that he is a liar, we see that he is a manipulator, we see that he walks so close to that line of truth so that it is easy to become confused, but we also see that he cannot stand in the presence of the power of God. There is so much that we could mention here but these are a few quick things that we need to know about Satan.
A. Not the Cause of all evil
The devil made me do it is not a valid excuse in the life of a Christian! Satan is not sitting there pulling strings and controlling us against our wills. He is always lurking, he is always prowling, Peter says: Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. He is active, but he is not to blame for all of our bad choices. Satan can tempt, Satan can make evil look attractive, but it comes down to our choice. We choose to sin or we choose not to sin, its that simple. There are no times in our lives where Satan puts us in a position where we have no choice but to sin, it doesn’t work that way. James explains the process of sin:
James 1:14 but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. 15 Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
Satan stands ready to capitalize on our mistakes, but we need to own up to the choices we make. There are so many Christians who cave in over and over again to sin and say that they simply cannot defeat Satan in their lives. Just because temptation is before us, does not mean that sin is inevitable. We need to make up our minds before hand to make the right choice and then recognize our own weaknesses and our own shortcomings and stop blaming Satan for all of the bad choices that we make.
So, while he is not to blame for all the evil in the world, we also need to know that Satan is:
B. Not Passive
Satan is an active enemy, looking for weakness and looking for vulnerability. Just as God has goals and plans for us, Satan does as well:
1. To outwit us and confuse us. (2 Corinthians 2:10-14)
2. To ensnare us (2 Timothy 2:26)
3. to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10)
4. Accuse and Blame (Revelation12:10)
5. Distort the Truth (John 8:44)
Knowing the goals of Satan and the fact that he is actively pursuing those goals in our lives will help us to stand.
C. Not God
He is a created being, he is subject to and inferior to God. He is not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent. Ultimately he is defeated and his doom has already been secured. Satan is not God and his power is limited.
Listen to the promise in 1 John 4:4
1JN 4:4 You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.
A key to having spiritual victory in our lives is knowing our enemy and the most important thing to know and remember is that he cannot compare to God. Hank Hanegraaff, in his book on the armor of God called “The Covering,” says this:
“A proper perspective of spiritual warfare is focused on the power of God rather than on the ploys of Satan”
So, as we move ahead in the coming weeks, its important to understand our enemy and what his plans and goals are but our main focus should always be the power of God that we have on our side, it’s understanding our strength, like we talked about.
When we have done these first three things, Paul says there is one more thing:
4) Stand
Knowledge and preparation are not enough, we’ve got to join the battle and stand our ground against the attacks of Satan. David’s belief in the power of God was partnered with his willingness to stand and fight, that’s when Goliath fell.
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.
When the dust settles and the battle is done, God says that we are to still be standing. We may get knocked down a few times, we may get injured along the way but when we understand our strength, and we dress the part, putting on the whole armor of God, and we know who it is and what it is that we are fighting against, we will be able to stand up to whatever the battle brings.
Spiritual warfare, the unseen, is a reality. This is going to become more and more evident to us as God continues to use this ministry for His glory and as Satan continues to seek ways to divide and destroy. In the next few weeks we are going to discover what Paul means when he talks about each of the components of the armor that God provides, we are going to learn what it looks like to wear each piece in our lives and we are going to see how we can be a ministry, that when all is said and done, stands tall and strong in the power of God for the work He’s called us to. Like that boxer, someone is hitting us, but we know who it is and we have what we need to hit back.
