Resist And Surrender

Resist and Surrender

Text: Ephesians 6:10-18

OPEN WITH PRAYER AND THANKSGIVING

Before we get into our sermon this morning, I want to ask you all a question: Do you think that in 1945, when our soldiers and sailors were coming home after fighting Hitler’s Nazi Germany, that they thought, or even hoped that the world would be like it is today? I mean, how many of those men and women who gave so much storming the beaches of Normandy, or fighting in the Pacific, or in Northern Africa against Rommel… how many of them would’ve ever imagined that we would be as we are today? I’m going to go out on a limb and say – NONE OF THEM.

What about veterans returning from the Korean War? Or Vietnam? I can tell you this – my dad was a Vietnam vet, and I remember as a kid asking him, “Dad, why did you join the Marines and go fight in Vietnam?” And he said to me, and I’ll never forget it as long as I lived, “Because it was better to go fight Communism over there, and hopefully stop it over there, than let it come here and have to fight it here.” How many of you ever thought that when the Berlin Wall came down, and for all intents and purposes, it looked like Communism had taken a fatal head wound as the former Soviet Union collapsed, that Democracy, and Capitalism, and Freedom had finally won the war? And if you remember that time – President Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev – Tear Down That Wall.” And the wall coming down, and Communism collapsing upon itself… how many of you thought or could’ve even imagined that we would be where we are today?

I think the problem was… and still is… that we often times forget, or fail to understand that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:12) And so the physical forces and nations, that were trying to implement certain ideas, and philosophies, and beliefs, were defeated, but the actual ideas, and philosophies, and beliefs still remained.

So let me back up, and give you all a little bit of history, and then we’ll get into our text.

In 1848 Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto. At that time, it was primarily an economic theory, but Marxism spread to every aspect of life. In 1859 Charles Darwin published his book, “On the Origin of Species”. Now understand that both of these books were published before the American Civil War… Both of those books attacked foundational principles that we find in the Book of Genesis. They attacked the ideas that God is Creator, that man is a special creation of God, that God even exists, that man is supposed to make his living from the seat of his brow, and that the fruits of his labor are his own, not someone elses. They attacked the dignity and value of work and vocation.

In 1884, a group known as the Fabian Society was created by a collection of Socialists and Communists, it included notable people like H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Eleanor Marx (the daughter of Karl Marx), and they began making plans for a New World Order – A Communist Utopia so to speak… and in order to bring this about, they had to get control of the world’s finances, so in 1895 they founded the London School of Economics, which began pumping out world leaders – Bankers, Politicians, Educators, and others. They called this the “Open Conspiracy” and Wells even wrote a book about it in 1928, and it wasn’t about these nations and states… it was about these ideas and beliefs and they knew that it would evolve out of Socialism and Communism.

They began to push ideas of peace… not real peace, false ideas and notions of peace.

In 1931 Russian students at the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow were told, and I quote, “One day we shall start to spread the most theatrical peace movement the world has ever seen. The Capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will fall into the trap offered by the possibility of making new friends. Our day will come in 30 years or so…” That was the 1960’s counter-cultural movement. Peace and Love man….

And then finally; in 1933 we see the First Humanist Manifesto published… Co-Authored by John Dewey (The Father of American Education) and C.F. Potter. I want to read you a quote from Potter. He said, “Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”