The Weapons Of Our Warfare Series

BE121105

WAR WITH GOD

2. The Sword, Cordial and Horn

(TITLE SLIDE) INTRO

Samaritan’s Purse put out a story about brutal persecution going on in Southeast Asia and the Sudan. This year in the Sudan, a pastor was singled out by Muslim revolutionaries and drug behind a tank by his bound hands then left for dead. He lived, but lost an eye and his hands are wrecked for life.

- No more productive manual labor,

- no more eating normally,

- no more throwing a baseball with his kid,

- no more caressing his wife.

His commitment as a follower of Christ cost him so much. Yet on the day he emerged from the hospital he proclaimed:

“if I lift these withered hands, may they point the way to Jesus Christ!”

There’s no resentment, no ‘why God did you allow this to happen’, no agonizing over the “problem of evil”, no dark night of the soul, no apathy, or self pity or withdrawal from church. Why didn’t he do any of that?

Because he gets it. Gets what? He gets that he is in a war. He knows that when Jesus called him, he called him to a cause and self denial and sacrifice and to being a solider in a spiritual war of the worlds, and soldiers take hits. He gets what Paul said to Timothy:

(SLIDE) 2 Tim 2:3-4 Endure suffering along with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. And as Christ’s soldier, do not let yourself become tied up in the affairs of this life, for then you cannot satisfy the one who has enlisted you in his army.

Are you tied up in the physical affairs of this life? Then you’re not thinking like a soldier. A soldier expects bad things to happen. Should this pastor resent God? Why? He’s at war:

(SLIDE) Eph 6:10-13 For we are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood, but against the evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against those mighty powers of darkness who rule this world, and against wicked spirits in the heavenly realms.

If he accepts this as truth, would he resent Jesus for his wounds? This is par for the course! I think he might say:

I knew when I signed up for the Master’s kingdom that I was signing up for war! Other people are not my enemy, they are the battlefield for spiritual forces of good and evil, the territory I’m fighting for. All temporal wars, recessions, cultural fads, broken relationships, social movements, persecutions, temptations are expressions in some way of this spiritual conflict.

- Everything is a potential weapon,

- Everyone is a potential casualty.

Now those radical Muslims who attacked this Christian also see themselves as “holy warriors”. They will maim and kill and strap bombs to their bodies as an expression of how they view spiritual conflict. So how is that different from you, the Christ follower who are ALSO called to spiritual warfare?

It’s in the weapons that you use. It is HOW you fight. It is the MEANS of our warfare:

(SLIDE) 2 Cor 10:4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world (sarx). On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.

So if we’re soldiers, how do I war with God? What are my weapons exactly? Well, in the book the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the children are given three weapons in Narnia:

- Peter is given a Sword…

- Lucy is given a cordial…

- and Susan is given a Horn.

Because Lewis meant for this to be a Christian allegory, we see a beautiful picture here of the spiritual weapons mentioned in the Bible which we use to war with God.

(SLIDE) 1. SWORD

In the TLTWATW, Peter gets a sword for his confrontation with the evil White Witch. A sword is clearly about offense. It’s how a solider inflicts damage. Now keep in mind, the battlefield is souls:

2 Cor 4:4 Satan, the god of this evil world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe, so they are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News that is shining upon them.

So what kind of activity would a Christian be doing if they were on the offensive? They would be about the liberation of souls

- from destructive thought and heart patterns

- from lies that hold us captive to serve only ourselves and the enemy

- opening eyes to see Truth

You could equate the SWORD with one idea: WORD. In the list of spiritual weapons from Ephesians 6 Paul includes an ACTUAL sword just like Peter’s from TLTWATW and he says what it represents:

(BULLET) 17: take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.