You're Armed for Battle [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

Prepare so that when the evil day comes, when you face temptation at its fiercest, that you've already understood what this armor means and how you use this. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series called Ephesians as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program today, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org.

That's PastorAlan.org or call 877-544-4860. More on this later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. You ready for some good news? God in Jesus Christ has already done everything that is necessary for you in Christ to live a completely victorious abundant life. He has provided for you an armor that is sufficient for you to walk out the abundance of the Christian life. And therefore, it's clear as we come to the end of this series on Ephesians today that the message is trumpeted with this absolute passion and clarity. You're more than a conqueror.

You are armed for battle. And this is Ephesians. It's chapter 6 and it's verse 10. Ephesians 6 verse 10. Paul writes, Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day.

And have done all to stand firm. Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness and as your shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.

And also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly as I ought to speak." Anybody that's a James Bond fan recognizes that means that at this particular scene in the movie, Bond is going to make some dramatic escape from peril. He is going to somehow escape from an impossible situation and overcome his foe and that he's likely to do so with one of his new gadgets. The best part of the Bond movie is when James Bond comes in and Q gives him his gadgets that he needs for, well, for that movie.

And there are certain themes to this any Bond fans know. He's had special watches over the years. Watches, some are super magnets, laser cutting tools. One of them had a little ticker tape that would come out with messages.

And this is all before the days that our watches really could read emails. And he had super explosives in the watch. But maybe the coolest stuff he ever had was his car. I mean, when you're a kid and you see a man drive a car into an ocean that then becomes a submarine, you're hooked.

I mean, that's it. And the cars would be so fully armored that they'd be impenetrable, but then they could do these amazing things. And probably one of the most famous scenes was back in the early days of smartphones. And of course, Bond had one better than anybody's smartphone because it also was a 20,000 volt taser. But he is in a bad situation being shot at and he's crouched down in the back of his BMW, but he flips open the phone and it becomes a touch pad that he can control his car by remote control and steer himself in a big car chase. And Bond escapes. But here's the thing that's most unrealistic of all the things about the Bond movies, probably the most unrealistic thing is that Q gives him these gadgets and gets ready to try to explain how to use them.

And Bond didn't listen. He just takes it and goes. So he never reads the instruction manual. He's a typical man. He's like, I'll figure it out as I go. And so he gets into the moment of crisis and he's trying to use his special equipment and he amazingly, he figures it out right away.

He's got something for every occasion. Well, you, having been armed with the very armor of God, are not one who has been given gadgets, but you have been given the actual benefits and privileges of a recipient of the gospel. And the picture that Paul paints here is the portrait of a Roman soldier, a familiar sight. But what Paul is saying here is that you've been given all of this by the Lord and therefore know how to use it. You're not James Bond on the fly. Oh, wait, I've got the breastplate of righteousness. What does that mean?

I'm in trouble. What are you saying is prepare so that when the evil day comes, when you face temptation at its fiercest, that you've already understood what this armor means and how you use this. This is one of the great examples in the New Testament of how it's possible that God has done everything for you in Jesus Christ, and yet you have something very important to do, and that is take it up and wear it. And so that's a figure of speech that you wear all of this. To wear something means that you move about in it, that you fight the battle in it, that everything you do is in this armor. So we want to talk today about the armor of God, and I want to give you some general principles and then touch just a little bit on each one of these pieces of the armor as we come to the end of this amazing journey through the epistle to the Ephesians. The first thing to say from this text is that the very fact that he's speaking about the armor is that he prefaces this that we are in a fight. Life is a battle. You know, most of the time we'd like to believe life is not a battle. I always played a lot of sports as a kid, and tennis was my sport, and I can just honestly say that almost every tennis match, whether it was in a tournament or a high school match, that I always had the same feeling going into it, and that was, I hope this joker just hands this thing to me.

I hope he just double faults, and I don't even have to try. I mean, honestly, that's just the way you feel going into these things, and it always takes you a little while to realize, wait a minute, I got to go out here and play this match. But I can remember specific instances in high school where maybe I'd had a couple exams that day. Maybe I'd been a little bit tired. Maybe I hadn't gotten that much sleep, and then we go, and after school's over, get on the van and ride maybe from Greensboro down to Laurenburg and play Scotland High School or somebody, and I'm just like, I don't even feel like playing tennis today. And yeah, you got to go out there and win your match for the team, and that's the feeling you get is, I want to go out here and just, I don't even know who this guy is.

I'm playing, never heard of him. He's probably not that good, and maybe he'll just start double faulting and hand the whole thing to me. And then after you go through this mentality, and you're in about the third game, and all of a sudden you're down and you realize, doggone it, I'm going to have to fight for this thing. And what I realize is the sooner that you realize that you're going to have to wrestle for it, the better. It's the days when I think life's not a battle, that life seems its hardest.

Because we'd like life to be easy, and sometimes it is so sweet and so easy, but life itself is a battleground. And as a Christian, what theologians have said is that we're fighting against the world, the flesh, and the devil. And this general sense of theology has been built on texts like Ephesians chapter 2, where Paul says, you're dead in trespasses and sins, and you were dead in trespasses and sin, in which you once walked, following the course of the world, following the prince of the air, the spirit that's now at work, and lived in the passions of our flesh. So texts like that and some other that the battle really is against the world that's around us, the culture, the influence of the world, against the flesh, our own selfish desires that are part of the old sin nature, and against the devil himself. Tim Keller, in commenting on this, makes a very important point.

He says that most ideologies tend to emphasize only one of these dimensions of the battle. So behaviorism and B.F. Skinner and all following that says essentially that your life is determined by operant conditioning according to the environment around you, so that everything depends on the world around you. Everything, this shapes you, and this explains the whole thing. Other sociologists would say, no, everything's internal. There are desires inside of you. There's an unconscious being that's going to all these desires you have, and this is what fuels all human behavior. And then primitive religions overemphasize the fact that there's a spirit behind everything.

If there's a drought, then it must be the rain god is not happy. And what Christianity proposes is a much more complex view of evil in the world and of the nature of the battle, that it's not any one thing. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. How you see yourself determines how you live. In an 11 message series, Pastor Alan Wright takes you on a thrilling journey through the letters of the Ephesians. It'll flood your soul with good news and empower you to discover who you are in Christ. When you make your donation to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll not only send you the digital downloads of the entire transformational Ephesians series, but we'll also send you a printable copy of Pastor Alan's booklet, highlighting the most important scriptures about your identity in Christ. Make your gift today and discover a whole new way of seeing your life.

Isn't it time to finally find out who you really are? The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Now these are the final days this offer is being made available to you this month. Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues.

Here once again is Alan Wright. What Paul is focusing on here is not to say that the only battle is against the devil himself, but what he's saying is that every form of evil that has ever come, whether it is innate sin that came from our forefathers Adam and Eve who were tempted by Satan, or whether it's the influence of the culture around us that's been corrupted by the sin of the world, or whether it is a direct spiritual attack from the devil himself, that all of this has its origin, all evil and every single thing wrong in the world has its origin in a fallen angel and many other fallen angels that were creatures that rebelled against God and whose leader the Bible calls Satan, which means an accuser or a prosecutor. And what does a prosecutor do? A prosecutor essentially uses the law to seek to bring condemnation against the accused and therefore to bring about a condemning punishment against the accused.

That's what a prosecutor does. And this is how Satan is labeled, an accuser. And so all of spiritual warfare in one way or another has to do with the accusations of the devil against you. I don't want to speak much about the devil except to say that the Bible clearly affirms that there is a personal embodiment of evil in an angelic being that is called Satan and many other demons. But again, he along with all demons are creatures. They're not God and there is no equivalent to God.

There's no dualism. This isn't a good force and a bad force and we don't know who's going to win. This is the God of all creation. And then there are creatures that are angels and some of them have rebelled and absolutely hate God and therefore hate people. The one thing about Satan himself and all evil is that it is an evil that is beyond our imagination.

And so there's absolutely nothing but hate in all of hell. And this is the important thing to understand spiritually from underlies everything I have to say today about the armor of God is that Satan has been defeated through the cross according to Colossians chapter 2 where Paul said, You who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with his legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them. So if Satan is an accuser who has some weaponry against you, that gun has been disarmed. The bullets are gone, so to speak, so that it's like a criminal with an empty gun who is threatening but has no ultimate armament against the Christian.

Why? Because what Jesus did was in so completely taking our sin upon himself and imputing his righteousness to us that God has inaugurated a covenant of grace wherein we are not measured by our performance to the law. And therefore, since we are no longer under that law as a legal system but we are in grace, Satan has no accusation that it can even bring against us. And this underlies everything that we learn about the armor of God. Second principle to note about all of this is that every single Christian is given all of this armor and therefore, as the preacher of my youth would say, we are in it to win it.

This is not a desperate discussion for a losing army. It is an assurance that you have already been given this. Be strong in the Lord is an announcement of who you are. This is as my preacher my youth said, the Christian life is not an aspiration to strive for. It is a fact to adjust to. This armor is not something you strive for. It is a fact that you adjust to and you wear it and you live it. The repetition of this idea of being strong, of being blessed with every spiritual blessing is to say that God has already announced this. It's not something that simply is possible. It is a reality.

It is just a matter of will we understand it and will we appropriate it? I always love the story of Napoleon Bonaparte after he was reviewing his troops one day. The horse he was on began to buck and he was about to be embarrassed as the reins slipped out of the great ruler's hands. And there was a lowly little corporal who acted quickly, got the reins and brought them over back to the great leader's hands and Napoleon's saved face. And in grateful response, Napoleon looked down at the low-ranking officer and smiled and said, thank you, captain. And I love the young corporal's response. He said, of which regiment, sir? So when God says be strong, the Christian's answer is thank you.

What shall I defeat today? This is a reality for every single Christian. And Paul says, the whole armor is yours. Now here's the most important principle about this before we kind of look at some of these individual piece of armor. It is the armor, notice what he says, the armor of God. You take up God's armor.

There's a wonderful image. One of the most famous images in the Bible of armor is in the scene when young David, who was a shepherd boy, who had brought some bread to his brothers at the battle line against the Philistines, realizes that all the Philistines are scared and they're not fighting Goliath. And David says that he wants to fight Goliath. And eventually King Saul lets him, he said, okay, you can go fight on our behalf. But Saul says, here, take my armor.

And it must've been a comical scene because David was nowhere near as tall as Saul. And he puts on this armor. David never worn the armor before. And I can just imagine him clunking around in this armor. And David says, I can't wear this armor.

I don't want this armor. And so David goes out to fight Goliath seemingly with no armor. And he gets these five smooth stones.

The first stone, as you know the story, he slings it, kills the giant. Well, David, as much as any figure in the Old Testament, prefigures Jesus himself because Jesus is the son of David. And what do you see in that story is that David is essentially saying, I am going to wear a different kind of armor. Whereas Saul had this majestic armor, Saul had no integrity and no righteousness. And David is wearing armor of integrity and righteousness.

He's a man after God's own heart. Saul was a coward with thick armor. David had faith.

So David, what did he do? He beat Goliath with righteousness and faith, a different kind of armor. And when Jesus came, Jesus approached all of life from a different perspective than all the other great leaders. And he loved enemies and fellowshiped with sinners. He was a friend to the outcast. He marked his life by utter and complete righteousness, never ever once sinning. His word was so full of truth that every single thing he said he also did.

The only person who's ever done that. Complete integrity. Peace so sweet and so deep that a big storm, a hurricane could be brewing and he's sleeping in the boat. He wore an armor that was different. And what Paul's saying is we don't fight against flesh and blood. And so you don't wear the kind of armament that the world wears, but instead you wear the armor of God.

It's as if this is what's happened. When you accept Christ, you are mysteriously, mystically, eternally joined with Christ and you being found in Christ are clothed with Christ's armor. If Christ was righteous, that becomes your righteousness. If Christ had peace, then he gives you that peace. If Christ had faith, then he instills in you that same faith.

And so what you do is you adjust to this, that this is who you are. The Lord saw that he needed to send someone into the earth who would have this armor. And so Isaiah prophesied it in chapter 59.

He saw there was no man and wondered that there was no one to intercede. Then his own arm brought him salvation and his righteousness upheld him. And he put on righteousness as a breastplate and a helmet of salvation on his head. This is a picture of a messianic picture of Christ himself. He has come. And when you accept Christ, you get his armor.

Alan Wright and today's teaching Arm for Battle. How you see yourself determines how you live. In an 11-message series, Pastor Alan Wright takes you on a thrilling journey through the letter to the Ephesians. It'll flood your soul with good news and empower you to discover who you are in Christ. When you make your donation to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll not only send you the digital downloads of the entire transformational Ephesians series, but we'll also send you a printable copy of Pastor Alan's booklet highlighting the most important scriptures about your identity in Christ. Make your gift today and discover a whole new way of seeing your life.

Isn't it time to finally find out who you really are? The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Now these are the final days this offer is being made available to you this month. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Alan, today's teaching, you're armed for battle. I can hear some people right now. All right, Pastor, you've been teaching great all through Ephesians.

Now you're talking about something I'm not so comfortable with. Forces, spiritual forces, darkness, armed for battle. Can I skip this message? Well, you could skip the message, but you can't skip the battle.

That's right. We're in a battle every day and clearly this is what the Bible teaches and what Paul is wanting to say here at the end of Ephesians. This battle that we're in, it's cosmic in its nature and we can pretend like there's not a battle, but that's not going to help us. And so we're going to see how every Christian is in it to win it. And I just don't know of anything more important for our daily living than to understand what it is to get up in the morning and put on the armor of God. If you really know who you are, then it'll change how you think, it'll change what you say, it'll change how you react to people, it'll change everything. And no more fitting way to draw it all to a conclusion and to say that God's given you all of this armor.

This is yours. You are a rightful recipient of the armor of God is His armor on you. And so you're still going to face problems. You're still going to have tribulations. And yes, you're going to still stumble and fall, but you have been designed by God through Jesus Christ in such a way that you can live with a spiritual victory. And that's my prayer for each and every one. Keep in mind over and over and over, who am I in Christ? Remind yourself in the morning and in the evening when you lie back down and it will change everything. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.