I believe the enemy attacks the believer to undermine God's character and credibility. And this really is the heart of the matter in terms of Satan's effort. He desires to undermine God.
He wants you to doubt God. Question. What is a soldier's worst enemy? Depending on the situation, it could be his uniform. Just imagine being chased through a wooded area, shirt tail snagging branches, speed and mobility lost.
The consequences could be deadly. Well, a similar principle applies to how you dress for spiritual war. Today, John MacArthur shows you that when the battle gets tough, you won't last very long without first putting on the belt of truthfulness. Stay here on grace to you as John continues his compelling study called The Believer's Armor.
Follow along if you can in Ephesians chapter 6, and with a lesson, here's John MacArthur. The believer is involved in a warfare, a battle. We have seen that this battle is against a formidable enemy, Satan and all of his host of demons. In fact, we've been trying to point out to you that the committed Christian and Satan are on a collision course. It is inevitable that your life will intersect with the forces of hell as you live for God. There is absolutely no question about that. It's only a question as to how that manifests itself and what specifics may occur.
The collision is inevitable, and by the way, it's rather constant as well. And so we must be ready for the war. We must be aware of the battle.
Now, to begin with, let me just give you a little bit of an introduction in this manner. Since the believer and Satan are on an absolute collision course—and by the way, it's a collision that constantly goes on—we need to understand something of how Satan attacks us. And I want to give you a series of ways, which I believe are not only biblical but I have seen manifest in my own life, in the Church, in the lives of others, that give us an idea of how Satan attacks us.
And if you would like to, jot them down, because I think they'll help you to guard yourself in these areas. First of all, I believe the enemy attacks the believer to undermine God's character and credibility, to undermine God's character and credibility. And this really is the heart of the matter in terms of Satan's effort. He desires to undermine God. He wants you to doubt God.
That's the thrust. He did it in the garden with Eve, hath God really said, and then he impugned God's motive by saying, well, the reason God doesn't want you to eat that is because God knows you'll be like Him and God can't stand the competition. In other words, He wanted to ascribe to God a selfish, ulterior motive. You can't really trust God, He was saying. You can't really believe God. He may say one thing, but down deep inside means something else, and so His Word is not believable. In effect, in the New Testament it says if you deny God His Word, you make Him a liar, and that's what Satan wants to do. He wants people to think God is the liar and He tells the truth.
So while God tells us He is truth and Satan is a liar, Satan tells us He is truth and God is a liar. Second thing, I'm convinced that Satan attacks us to make it hard to live the Christian life, to make it hard to live the Christian life. He doesn't want it to be easy. He wants it to be very difficult to really live the Christian life. He wants it to be hard, and I think he attacks it three ways to make it hard to live the Christian life. One would be through persecution.
That would be the most extreme way. It may come on the job, may come from your friends and so forth. Second to that, I would say he makes it hard to live the Christian life by a lesser kind of persecution in a way that I call peer pressure. Some people really don't want to come out for God because they don't want to lose their friends. They don't want to move out of the circle they're in. They don't want to be thought to be different. They don't want to have to change their relationships with people. They're very comfortable with the acceptance they have.
They like being liked and they're just not ready to take a different tack which may alienate them. This is something of what the writer of Hebrews was dealing with when he was writing to those who were sitting on the fence in the Jewish community, never having committed themselves to Christ, though they believed it was true, for fear of what their friends and their family would say and that they would be ostracized. And so Satan makes it tough in that area also, as well as in the outright persecution such as Paul referred to when he said, all that will live godly in this present world will suffer persecution. There's a third way he makes it hard to live the Christian life, and that's by making it easy to live the Christian life, if you know what I mean. I think sometimes the hardest place to live the Christian life is in the easiest place to live the Christian life.
You know, it's so easy now there's no price to pay and maybe that's what makes it hardest of all to live the Christian life. The third thing that Satan does when he attacks the believer is he confuses the believer with false doctrine. He confuses the believer with false doctrine. There are many Christians tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine. There are many Christians who are deceived by the false teachers who come in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.
There's a problem today because the doctrines of demons are so rampant and Satan confuses the church. Fourthly, he tries as hard as he can to hinder our service to Christ. He wants to stop effective service. He wants to stop Grace Church. He wants to stop my ministry and your ministry and the ministry of anyone who is serving Jesus Christ. Number five, I believe Satan does all he can to cause division in the body. He works hard causing division in the body, fracturing us. That's why our Lord was so explicit when he said, if you have anything against your brother, go and be reconciled before you come back to worship him.
So he causes division. 1 Corinthians 1, 1 Corinthians 2, 1 Corinthians 3 talks about the division in the church. In Ephesians 4, Paul says, Endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace.
Do all you can to maintain unity. Paul exhorts us in that because Satan rips us apart, brings friction and factions into the body of Christ. Sixth, and this is another area where Satan really hits us hard, he urges us to trust our own resources.
This is subtle. So easy for us to lean on our own understanding, depend on our own knowledge, wisdom, insight, erudition, education. And we fail to cast ourselves upon the power of God with the sense that Isaiah had when he said, woe is unto me.
He knew he had no resource apart from God. A seventh way in which Satan attacks us, and I think this is also common, is that he causes us to play the hypocrite, to be hypocritical. You know, we can go on smugly, glibly, with a smile, the mask, spirituality, letting the whole world think that we're fine. And all we do is pollute the fellowship, and all we do is mask ourselves so well that we never deal with the real problem. We never let anybody see what we're really like. We never open up and tell the truth so that nobody can ever come and wrap their arms around us and help to deliver us from the problems, you see.
Just two other things. Number eight, Satan attacks us to make us worldly, to shove us into the mold formed by the world. And I mean he is so successful at this, people. The Church today is so worldly, affluent, materialistic, self-indulgent, self-satisfied, smug, so much like the system around it that it's hard to even separate the two. And yet does John say to us, love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world, and the world passes away, and the lust thereof, that he that doeth the will of God abideth forever. He's saying, look, you have no business having anything to do with the world. The world is passing, and you're eternal. The very dimensions of life are incoherent, incongruous, and can't come together.
What are you doing with the world? And yet the Church gets engulfed because Satan constantly pushes us into the world. Final thing, I think Satan wants to cause us to act in disobedience to what we know is God's Word.
This maybe is the pinnacle of it all. Satan wants us to act immorally. If God is moral and God sets the moral law, then any act against God's law is immorality, whether it's sexual or social, whatever it is. Acting immorally is acting against the moral law, and God is the one who established it, and so he wants us to disobey God. That gives Satan an opportunity.
That gives him his advantage. Well, there you are, people. In these areas, Satan works. That's where the battle lies. Now you say, well, how do I deal with it? That's a pretty big order of attacks.
Well, the wonderful thing, people, and this is what I'm so thrilled about, is that all nine of the things I gave you can be dealt with in one simple way. Look at verse 13 of Ephesians 6. Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. It doesn't matter where the enemy comes from, it doesn't matter how subtle his attack is in a war, if when he gets there, you're ready for it.
That's all. It doesn't matter what tack Satan takes, it doesn't matter what path he comes on, it doesn't matter whether he's crawling on his belly or flying overhead, it doesn't matter how subtle his attack or how blatant it is, if you're ready when he gets there, that's all that matters. And the believer with his armor on will stand whatever the attack. So having said all that I've just said, to let you know where he comes from, be aware of those areas, but the major issue is not how he's coming or what the attack is, but are you ready?
Are you ready? Because if you have your armor on, you can handle it. I want us to look at just the first piece of armor.
It's very simple, but very, very important. The first one is in verse 14. Stand, therefore, and that takes us back, the end of verse 13, having done all to stand, in the middle of verse 11, that you may be able to stand. The idea is to stand against the attack of Satan, to be firm against his onslaughts, to be victorious when he comes.
Therefore, if you're going to stand against those things, you must have your loins girded about with aletheia, truth or truthfulness. Let me describe the belt so you get the imagery a little. In Paul's day, a Roman person, even a soldier, wore a tunic. A tunic is a big square piece of material for the most part. It had a hole in it for your head and two holes for your arms. That was about it.
He just threw it on. It was kind of a non-gathered piece of material. But if you were going to go into a war, you wouldn't go into a war with that thing flying around.
In fact, you didn't even take a journey in that situation. In other words, girding your loins was gathering up all this loose material so that you could get ready to go. What that means then is readiness, preparedness.
It's the idea. The belt was preparedness. A Roman soldier wouldn't go into a battle with his dress flapping in the breeze. Somebody would pull it over his head and, whew, that would be the end of it. You wouldn't fight a battle with that flapping all over the place.
And so when a soldier went into a war, if a man on a journey would do it, you can imagine a soldier would. He would take a belt. He would cinch it around his waist.
It could be made of a sash material. Most likely a soldier's would be out of leather. He would tighten that leather belt up, take the four corners of that tunic, pull it up through that belt, make it into kind of a mini tunic. He would have mobility, flexibility, be able to move, and it wouldn't be in his way. That's really the imagery that is in the mind of the Apostle Paul. Further, on that same belt, it was common for a Roman soldier to have a strap.
He would come down, connect to the belt, go over his shoulder, and connect in the back. He would attach his sword to it so that later on we'll see the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, is attached to the belt of truth. In other words, truth is revealed in the Word.
You have the truth, as it were. You take it out to fight the battle, right? So that the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, is attached to the belt of truth. But over the shoulder was this strap, and on this strap were emblems and insignias of previous victories.
You could just like decorations. You see a soldier and he's got all that stuff all over him from the battles he's fought and the things he's done and the accomplishments. Well, that's where they put them on a Roman soldier. All of the medals and the awards of his accomplishment were placed there, and it connects with the belt of truth.
Beloved, this is it. When you wear the belt of truth and you draw the sword of the Spirit, you're going to win the battle and get the medals. You see, this is where it all begins. It became the emblem of accomplishment in battle, a fitting combination. Only those ready girded up, only those with a sword of the Spirit hanging on the side, were the ones who won the medals and who went into battle as having been victorious. And so this is the heart of the term. Now listen, it does refer to truth. I think you can take aletheia in the sense of content, but that's not the primary thought here because that's dealt with in the sword of the Spirit. That'll be dealt with in that last piece of armor. The main thrust here is the idea of truthfulness, which the word also can mean.
And there it is speaking of attitude, not content. What he's saying is, put your belt on. That shows an attitude of readiness, an attitude of commitment, an attitude that says, I'm ready for the battle. I'm dressed. I'm alerted.
I'm ready. See, what it means is you fight without hypocrisy. It means you're going in serious. You know, frankly, most Christians never get the belt on.
They just sort of flap through their life, blown in the breeze, you know. There's little commitment. Never sash on that truthfulness.
Never get committed. Listen, when a soldier put on his belt, put that strap over, hooked on his sword, he was saying, I am ready to fight. And I think that most Christians lose because they don't care that much. They don't care that much.
They just soon flop around. You know, like Hebrews 12, seeing we're compassed about by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which doth so easily beset us and run the race. Right? Can you imagine a guy on a track meet running in an overcoat and combat boots? I mean, that's absolutely stupid.
Don't do that. Those guys wear so little, it's embarrassing. They're out there running around with his little aunt. They're going to be mobile. They want all the flexibility there is.
And yet there are Christians trying to run the Christian race with combat boots and an overcoat. And they wonder why they get so tired. Boy, this is tiring. Never seem to get very far.
Five years later, they're 10 feet from the starting line, you know. That's because there's no commitment. I think the greatest synonym for truthfulness is commitment. What Paul is saying here is, look, you've got to realize this is war and get serious. You've got to go in without hypocrisy, sincerely, with the right attitude, having a heart for the battle. I am a soldier. I will endure hardness for the cause of Jesus Christ, as 2 Timothy 2 3 says. I will endure hardness. I'm willing to pay the price that I may please the one who chose me to be a soldier. I have a heart for battle. Listen, the true Christian loves the fight, and the true Christian loves the Lord so much he won't lose.
He won't give up. Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 9. And you know, I just, I can't relate to a Christian who is content to be defeated all the time, to just flop through his life, falling to temptation, falling to all the sins that come to the flesh and the mind.
I don't understand that, how you can give in so easily. In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul says, don't you know in verse 24, that they who run in a race all run. When the race starts, everybody runs, but only one receives the prize, so run that you may win. Look, he says, if you're going to get in this deal, win it.
Who wants to lose? What Paul is talking about here is desire. Well, we used to say in athletics, desire is 90% of the issue.
It's true. You want it bad, it's there. Our coaches used to say, if you want it bad enough, you can get it. If you want victory bad enough, you can get it. You know something, that was a good thought, but it always wasn't true. Sometimes I'd get across from a guy who was tougher than I was, and I wanted it bad. In fact, I wanted it worse all the time, but nothing I did ever worked.
I was eating dirt all I was eating dirt all day just because I couldn't get it. Some of the greatest effort was against the worst adversary, and I couldn't win. But you know, in the cause of Christ, if the desire is there, the victory will be there, because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world, right? So it's always available. And so Paul is saying the desire has to be there. And he says, in an athlete, he runs, and a lot of people run, but only one gets the prize. So if you're getting into this deal, win it.
Win it. Oh God, give us people with this commitment. God, give us people who want to win in the Christian life. Not so they can stack up their own crowns, but so they can give them to Jesus Christ. So they can say, this is my act of love. This is my act of worship.
This is my act of praise that I gave my life, the living sacrifice. That's what he's after, commitment. He says, every man that strives for the mastery, every athlete is temperate. In other words, he disciplines his life. He's careful what he eats and how he trains. And he does it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible.
He says, if these guys can work that hard to win a corruptible crown, can't we have the desire to be victorious in our lives for God's glory? And so he says, I run not as uncertainly. I don't flip-flop all over the track, running half speed, three-quarter speed, one-quarter speed, rest in a while.
I run full bore down the track. I fight not as one who beats the air. I'm not just bouncing the ring, punching around the air. I'm hitting my opponent right in the chops. I'm going after the fight, he says. And in so doing, I keep under my body. I bring it into subjection. See, here is the disciplined life of a winner.
Life of a winner. This is what God wants. So, the call of the armor of the believer is for commitment at the very start. You're not going to beat Satan. He's going to come at you in all these nine ways and a few others that I haven't even figured out yet.
He's going to come at you in all these combinations of ways, and you're not going to know what to do unless you really are ready to fight. Commitment. Oh, beloved, only one thing matters in this world and this life. And it's the dimension of the spiritual. All the rest of the stuff doesn't matter a bit. You know, I'm concerned about a lot of things in our world, but frankly, I could care less about most of the things. Unless they relate to the things of God, I'm not even interested.
Because only the spiritual matters. Only that God be glorified. We need to get our focus on the right things. How badly do you want to win?
How badly? You really want to win? I've been in athletics all my life, and I've seen people that didn't care about winning. We talk about that a lot when we work with pro athletes, the fact that you can lose the desire. You've been there.
It's not that hot. You just go through the motions. If that can happen in the world, it can happen to us because Satan pumps it into us all the time. You can be content with mediocrity. You can be content with lethargy. You can be content to just keep your life the way it's going.
You come week after week, go home. Nothing changes. Nothing's different. Attitudes are the same.
Reactions are the same. Your home stays the same. Nothing ever happens. You just come and go, come and go, come and go, and the commitment never changes.
God help you and help me if that happens. We must be committed to fight. So the apostle says the first piece of equipment is the belt of truthfulness.
It's based on content, but it's an attitude he's after. Let me close with the words of John Munsell, who wrote this hymn. Listen to it. Fight the good fight with all I might. Christ is thy strength and Christ thy right. Lay hold on life and it shall be thy joy and crown eternally. Run the straight race through God's good grace and lift up thine eyes and seek his face. Life with its way before thee lies. Christ is the way and Christ the prize. Cast care aside, lean on thy guide. Lean and his mercy will provide. Lean and the trusting soul shall prove. Christ is its life and Christ its love. Then he said this. Faint not nor fear.
His arm is near. He changeth not and thou art dear. Only believe and thou shalt see that Christ is all in all to thee. Beloved, the victory is there. It's ours, to the glory of God, no matter how sophisticated Satan is.
If we have the belt of commitment, I pray God it's so in your life. Father, thank you as we have gathered to worship your holy name, as we have sung your praises, that we have thought of your virtues, as we have listened to your tremendous truths out of the Word. Father, we feel we've been drawn into your presence. We sense that you're here and that the message is not my message. It is not a human message. It is not simply the message of paper and ink any more than a message of a human voice, but it is the breath of God. The call to commitment is not from us.
It's from you. The consequences are not to be dealt with by us but by you. Oh, Father, help us to hear your voice, somehow drop aside all of the human elements, all of the physical factors, and may we know that God has spoken through his Word, calling us to commitment. Oh, Lord Jesus, make us the kind of people you want us to be, that you might be glorified, that we might stand as a beacon light in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation holding forth the Word of life, that we might so live to silence the critics, that we might not be of those who use Jesus and abuse Jesus but of those who give him glory. Lord, help us to win the battle because more than anything else we want to win and we depend upon your power for. In yieldedness we pray, for Christ's sake. Amen. That's Grace to You with John MacArthur.
Thanks for tuning in today. John is a pastor, author, and chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary, and his current study is showing you how to use the believer's armor. John, today you gave several examples of how Satan tempts believers to sin through false doctrine, through divisions in the church, and so on. And of course, each of us has a sinful nature. We can sin, we do sin, even apart from Satan's temptations. So for that person who is wondering, how do I know when it's Satan who's tempting me, and how do I defend against that temptation?
What would you say? Well, I would say that you wouldn't necessarily know. But a better way to understand it is this. You don't need to think of Satan as picking you out of all the people in the world since he's not omnipresent. You don't need to think of Satan picking you out of the whole world and coming at you and whispering temptations into your ear. You rather need to understand that Satan is the god of this world. He's the spirit that works in the children of disobedience, but he works there by the influence of the corruption of everything around us. If Satan were the cause of our sin, we would assume then that he would have to get to every single human being, and if he wasn't around, you'd be living a different kind of life with less sin.
We know that's not true. So you can't reduce your sin to an actual one-on-one satanic invasion. I think it's much better to understand that he basically has created the kingdom of darkness full of lies and deception, and he is the god of this world and everything that is in the world—the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life—is not of God but is of the world. So he operates through the corrupt systems of the world that come at the believer all the time. This is obviously a battle that all of us fight and face all the time, and it isn't just when Satan shows up.
It's because we're in the world, and the world is what it is. I want to mention a book that I wrote some years ago called Standing Strong, and we want to offer this to anyone contacting us for the first time as a gift, a free gift. Listen, this is a full-size book. It describes the role that Satan plays. It describes how his strategies attack believers and the church.
It talks about how we are to fight Satan and his forces—12 chapters in all—and questions along with those chapters that allow you to discuss things, maybe in a Bible study or a Sunday school class. Here's the special offer. We'll send you a free copy of Standing Strong, full-length book. If you've never contacted us before, do it today.
Yes, do. And again, to learn more about Satan's devices and how you can protect yourself from him, pick up John's book called Standing Strong. And if you've never contacted us before, we'll send you a copy free of charge.
Just ask for your book today. Call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. Standing Strong shows why no matter what Satan throws your way, you can honor Christ and you can keep your spiritual footing.
This book has chapters on protecting your mind and your emotions, the role of prayer in spiritual warfare, and—very important—how to use the sword of the Spirit, God's word, to repel Satan's attacks. Again, Standing Strong is our gift to you if you've never contacted us before. Just call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. I would also encourage you to visit our website, gty.org, where you can download any sermon you hear on the radio, including all 12 lessons from John's current series, The Believer's Armor. Those messages are part of our sermon archive, more than 3,500 sermons that are yours free of charge in audio and transcript format. Head to our website today and start downloading. Again, you'll find us at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to be back tomorrow when John looks at the breastplate of righteousness. What is it and how do we use it effectively? Don't miss our next half-hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-08-12 11:23:41 / 2023-08-12 11:35:37 / 12