If you feel weak and unqualified to engage in the spiritual realm, that's a really good thing because you're more likely to lean into God's power in those places. If dependence is the objective, then weakness is an advantage because weaknesses are the places you most naturally depend on God.
So I'm going to rejoice in my weaknesses because those are the places I don't need to be reminded to depend on God. Welcome back to the Summit Life podcast with Pastor J.D. Greer. If you're looking for a simple way to spend time with God this month, we've created a free Psalms reading plan. This guided plan helps you not just read the Psalms, but engage them in a more personal way.
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Okay, you've probably heard about the spiritual armor that Paul describes in Ephesians, but have you ever really thought that you needed it? Today, Pastor JD walks us through each piece of armor so that we know how to arm ourselves for the spiritual attack happening right now. Here's Pastor JD. Tuesday, June 6th, 1944. 6.30 a.m.
5,000 ships carrying 160,000 Allied troops approached the southern beaches in France. For the largest invasion in modern history, what we now refer to as D-Day.
Some of the men who survived the invasion that day said they remember the steady stream of exhortations being broadcast over the ships' intercoms in the final moments before the ships approached the French beaches. One said, fight to get your troops ashore, fight to save your ships. And if you've got any strength left, fight to save yourself. One said, we may die on the sands of France, but we will never turn back. Then another one said, this is it, pick it up, put it on.
You've got a one-way ticket, and this is the end of the line. Over 2,500 American soldiers died that day, many of them in a span of about 15 minutes. As the boats reached the shores, disembarking soldiers literally had to crawl over the bodies of other soldiers in order to be able to make it onto the beaches.
Now, images like that make us grateful for the men and women who have given their lives for the cause of freedom, but I share it to emphasize that the men who approached the beaches that day at Normandy had no delusions at all about what they were walking into. Not a single one of them thought that they were going to an exotic beach in France for a vacation. They knew they were walking headfirst into the onslaught of an enemy who wanted nothing more than their complete and total destruction.
Well, see, at the end of the book of Ephesians, Paul pulls back the curtain on life and he shows us that we are in the midst of a battle that is no less fierce with an enemy no less stringent. The tragedy is that many of us have no idea we're even in a battle. We approach life as if it were a vacation rather than a war, like we're on a playground rather than a battleground. But that's not true. And you and I might wish all day long that it were true, but that didn't change the fact that we really are in a battle with a very real enemy.
And unless we wake up to that, we'll probably end up as one of the casualties. How silly would it be to show up on D-Day with a beach towel and a ducky? That's how many of us are showing up spiritually for this battle.
So, Paul starts his conclusion to the book of Ephesians like this: chapter 6, verse 12. You see, he says, we don't wrestle against flesh and blood. Oh no no, we gotta work against rulers, against the authorities. Not earthly authorities and rulers, but against the cosmic powers over this present darkness. We're against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
Let's start with the obvious. Paul believed in an unseen spiritual realm. Isn't that obvious? And for whatever it's worth, Jesus did too. In fact, Jesus spent a large portion of his ministry in direct conflict with the demonic, and he summarized his whole ministry as proclaiming liberty to captives.
Captives implies that there's something or someone that you're being held captive by.
So Paul's just picking up right where Jesus left off. And throughout the book of Ephesians, he's going to refer to the believer's life as a struggle, as a fight, as warfare against evil forces. And he's going to end the book of Ephesians with a list of weapons that we need to engage in that warfare. C.S. Lewis once observed, he says, when it comes to the demonic, people usually fall into one of two errors.
Either they take him altogether too seriously, or they don't take him seriously enough. Maybe you've known people who fit into that first category of error: Christians who kind of imagine that Satan is to blame for every inconvenient circumstance in their life: a dead car battery, a traffic jam. Oh, the demon is messing with traffic again, a price increase at Bojangles. Oh, biscuits are now $1.40. Satan's trying to ruin my budget so I can't tithe.
And you're like, I don't think that's what's happening here. But other people on the other side, maybe in reaction to them, or maybe just because of the Western culture that we grow up in, they commit an equally dangerous error, if not more dangerous, and that is they ignore him altogether. But not only does that ignore a significant teaching theme in the life of Jesus, that also means that if what Jesus said is true at all, that's like walking onto the beaches of Normandy with no clue that there's an enemy that has machine guns trained right at you. Y'all, for what it's worth, Satan could care less whether or not you believe in him. Because he's not after your recognition.
He's after your destruction. In fact, 2 Corinthians, Paul calls him an angel of light. An angel of light means he transforms himself into whatever form is best suited to deceive you, even if it means you mistake him for an angel of God.
So it makes sense that in the modern Western world, Satan's best deceptions would not come from making somebody's eyes roll back in their head and foam at the mouth and levitate six feet above their bed. That comes from him working stealthily, invisibly, silently behind the scenes, anonymously.
So, Peter and Paul, and pretty much the whole Bible says things like this: 1 Peter 5:8, be alert. And be of sober mind because your enemy. Your enemy, the devil, prowls around every day like a roaring lion. Just looking for somebody to devour. See, that verse there by Peter shows me at least two things.
First, Satan's like a hunter, and hunters don't care if you see them or not. In fact, hunters would prefer that you didn't see them. Second thing I noticed is that Peter calls Satan a lion. Which means he's part of the cat family. See, I knew it.
I knew it. I knew it. Catch your demons. Catch your demons. But just because you can't see him.
Just because you can't see him doesn't mean he isn't there. In 1864, a physician named Ignaz Simmelweis stumbled onto a theory that we now refer to as germ theory. You see, in those days, everybody thought diseases would spontaneously generate in the body because there was something wrong with the body. You had too much blood or you got too hot or something like that. And so, doctors in those days would go between patients that had different diseases without ever washing their hands.
Plus, it was assumed in our culture back then that real gentlemen didn't need to wash their hands because their hands were already clean. And so, doctors would go from working on the corpse of a dead person, for example, to delivering a baby, which is why death rates in the hospitals, infant mortality rates, and mothers were so incredibly high.
Well, Simmelweiss began to suspect that these doctors were carrying diseases with them contained in small particles that were invisible to the human eye. They didn't have microscopes powerful enough to see them, and he didn't know what to call them, so he just referred to them as microbes, which literally means small pieces of flesh.
Now, this all seems so obvious to us now, but nobody in those days thought that way.
So, Simoites tested his theory by just having the interns wash their hands at the hospital with water and a little bit of chlorine before delivering babies. And he found that the mortality rates of both mothers and infants went down dramatically. But even after this conclusive evidence and proof, the doctors at the time wouldn't accept the theory because the idea that all this death and all this disease was caused by something that you couldn't see just seemed unbelievable to them. At a famous conference, Simmel Weiss pleaded with these doctors, gentlemen, for God's sake, just wash your hands. But nobody listened for about two decades till a guy named Louis Pasteur came along and proved it in a different way.
Even Simmois's own wife didn't believe him. He died a couple decades later in an asylum.
Well see, many Christians are equally naive when it comes to what is happening in their lives because they are just as disbelieving to the things that they can't see. And they say, because I can't see it with my eyes, it must not really exist. But can't you look around and see the evidence of the demonic everywhere? Andy Stanley says, if you really want to see evidence for the demonic, you're not going to find it by looking through a microscope. You're going to find it by looking in the rearview mirror.
Not at your kids, but in the rearview mirror of your life. In the rearview mirror of your life. Can't you look back in your life? Can't you look into the rearview mirror of your life and see how certain temptations were just too perfectly timed and too specifically tailored for you to be merely coincidental? How the wrong person got put into your life at just the right time?
Or how the right questions were planted in your head to throw you off track? Or how the right suspicion grew up in your heart to really destroy the relationship? Or how the perfect storm happened in your marriage or your small group or your staff team in order to drive a wedge between you all? And I know that sometimes you can probably like, well, you can sort of reason away a lot of that and say, well, you know, the reason my wife and I have those problems is because our personalities are so ill-suited to one another. Or the reason that I struggle with that temptation is because my dad did, and I had the same genes as him.
But then every once in a while, every once in a while, something happens. You encounter something, and something inside of you says, no, that's evil. Maybe it's an act of terrorism, or mothers killing their children, or you watch a special on the Holocaust and you see how embarrassed Germany is. And they say, how could we ever have done something like that? It's because we wrestle not against flesh and blood.
We wrestle against rulers and authorities and spiritual evil in very high and controlling and influential places. You see, God tells us about these things for at least two reasons, both of which we see here reflected in Ephesians 6. The first reason is to make us, verse 18, to make us more alert. Because when you recognize there's more to your temptations than lust or doubts or relational problems or personality conflicts, when you realize that there is an enemy that is strategizing your destruction, it will make you more aware. You know, most of you know that before I became pastor here, I served for a couple years.
As a missionary in an unreached people group over in Southeast Asia, and so we brought in some friends from the United States to pass out some Bibles in our area and never really been done before. And make a long story short, a mob of 2,500 people collapsed on these guys, and the police arrested them, and the mob was calling out to the police, or they were rioting to demand that the police release these teammates of mine so that they could murder them. They did this for about the space of about three hours one afternoon.
So, one of the guys that we had put with the team was a local there. He was a local believer, so they didn't recognize him like the other guys. The mob burned my friend's cars towards them. And this guy said, as I was standing in that mob, as they were calling out for the police to release these guys, he said, I had a recorder in my pocket, so I just recorded and he recorded about 30 minutes of this mob as they in this murderously savage way called out for the police to let these guys out so that they could kill him. Later, he played that recording for me.
And I'm not a demon behind every rock kind of guy, but when I listened to that, there was something in it that I said that's beyond anger. There was something demonic that was going on in that murderous mob.
Well, a couple weeks. I got put under house arrest, essentially under house arrest for a couple weeks. And eventually, after things subsided, and We were able to move around again. I knew I needed to kind of get out and get on a little vacation. And so I went down to a resort city not far from where I was and walked in the hotel, checked in the hotel, was by myself.
And in those parts of the world, when you check into a hotel, you have to leave your passport at the desk.
So I just slid my passport across the desk. It didn't even look at the person behind it. And when I put my passport up there, I felt this hand kind of just sort of stroke mine. And I looked up, and it's this beautiful, I mean, beautiful girl that's looking back at me. And she said, and heard their language, she said, Is there anything else that you would like to hold at this hotel tonight?
And I looked up, and you know, I was-I mean, I was emotionally, I was bankrupt, I was spent. There was nothing, no strength I had left. I was as low as I'd ever been in my life. And I look up at this beautiful face staring back at me, and everything inside of me wants to respond and say yes. But then, all of a sudden, it wasn't like a vision, like I actually saw things, but it's just an insight from the Holy Spirit.
Where I looked into the eyes of this beautiful girl and I recognized the same savagely murderous spirit that had been in that mob that was now coming after me in a different direction. And I actually recoiled. I felt the Holy Spirit tell me, you get out of there. And I pulled back and I just left my passport there and I just ran the other direction. Because see, there are times in your life where you have to realize it's not just about lust.
And it's not just about a personality conflict. And it's not just relational problems. You got an enemy who is prowling around like a roaring lion and he is trying to devour you. And so he comes for me when I'm tired or when I'm down and he seduces me with the lusts of the flesh.
Sometimes he waits for me offstage when I have done well to whisper in my heart how awesome and extraordinary I am. He'll take whatever form he wants in order to be able to take my eyes off of God and to convince myself that I can do it better my way.
So he tells us, I want you to be alert that this is not a flesh and blood thing. You're against a real enemy. And for some of you, you are totally blind to the fact that he's working in your family and in your heart. The other reason that God tells us about these things, he says, is to drive us to greater dependency on God. You see, if this were merely a battle against other humans or with my own lust, that would be one thing.
But it's against an enemy with supernatural power. And so Paul concludes the book of Ephesians by reminding them of the presence of these spiritual forces in an attempt to one more time turn them away from themselves. From hoping in themselves to making them cast themselves in their hope and finding help in God. And so here's what he says: finally. Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.
By the way, right here is where that verse, verse 12, that we read just a minute ago about the, you know, wrestle not against flesh and blood goes. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God. That you may be able to withstand in the evil day. and having done all to stand firm.
Now, there's a couple of phrases there I've highlighted. I want to make sure you see both of them. Having done all to stand firm means that there's no way you can escape this fight. There's only two places in the Christian life in which Paul says a Christian can and should flee: sexual immorality and the love of money. When it comes to monies and honeys, you get out of town.
All right, but everywhere else, you got to learn to stand firm because you can't escape even if you did run. Parents, listen to me. You can't protect your family from Satan by putting your kids in private school or home school or by limiting their access to the outside world. And I am not saying that either of those or any of those are bad decisions. My family has done all of those things.
But you have to learn to stand firm in the battle and not always assume you can run from it because you can't run from it. It's going to come after you wherever it is. That's the first phrase. Stand firm. Here's the other one.
Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might shows me that this has got nothing to do with your power. Hadn't that been a recurring theme in the book of Ephesians? You're dead in your sin. You're spiritually powerless. This hope is about Christ's power in you.
In fact, in this battle, your strengths are more often liabilities because your strengths are the places where you will most likely forget to depend on God and lean into his strength. You see, if you feel weak and unqualified to engage in the spiritual realm, that's a good thing. That's a really good thing because you're more likely to lean into God's power in those places. We always say around here that in the Christian life, weakness is an advantage because dependence is the objective. In fact, you want to take notes, write this down and think about it for about a week.
If dependence is the objective, Then weakness is an advantage because weaknesses are the places you most naturally depend on God.
So, I'm going to rejoice in my weaknesses because those are the places I don't need to be reminded to depend on God. You feel spiritually powerless to engage the enemy? Congratulations, you're at stage one. That's a really important stage because that's where you'll know to depend on God. Y'all, see, listen, there's something really important to remember here.
As we get to the end of the book of Ephesians, listen, Paul is not introducing new content right at the end. like something he wants to add on and be like, oh yeah, these random pieces of spiritual armor are also really important too. I mean, every writer who's ever been in a writing class knows you don't bring up new stuff in the conclusion. You don't say finally, and then introduce a new concept.
So what Paul says is finally, and then he just comes up with a metaphor to summarize what he's been saying for six chapters.
So, these pieces of spiritual armor are merely a way of applying the gospel that he's talked about in six chapters to every part of your life. Here's why I point this out. When I grew up, I was introduced to the spiritual armor through what I now refer to as flannel graft discipleship. Anybody know what that is? These little pieces of flannel, and you put them on the board.
So, this is kind of how I remember it. And I just always assumed that spiritual armor were these strange, mysterious things that you needed to have to ward off demons, like some kind of spiritual amulet or an expecto-patronum or something like that. And I think a lot of Christians still think of it that way. You don't believe me, just type it down on a Google search and look what comes up. You got Christians who are like, oh, when I analyze it, what exactly is a flaming dart?
What's your flaming dart? Find it, find it, rewind it. You know, and you're like, I don't think that's what Paul is doing here. Jot this down. Each of these seven pieces of armor is simply a way of applying the gospel.
That's all that it is. Ways of applying the gospel, a metaphor for applying the gospel to every single part of your life. In fact, if I could be so bold, some of them are quite repetitive. They get it similar concepts. Putting on the helmet of salvation and taking the shield of faith are not two fundamentally different ideas.
The more important idea is that the gospel should cover every part of your body, every part of your heart, every part of your life, because where the gospel has fortified you, Satan cannot attack you. Putting on these pieces is how you accomplish, how you fulfill God's command in verse 10 to be strong in the Lord. You see, again, the gospel message of Ephesians is that you were weak, you were dead, you were sinful, you were guilty, and God chose you, saved you, drew you, redeemed you, set you apart, adopted you, and filled you with His Spirit.
So, this battle is not about you learning to fight Satan, it's about learning to let him fight in you and through you. You got saved when you realized that you didn't have the ability to save yourself. And if you were going to get saved, God was going to have to do it for you. In the same way, just like you were saved, you gain spiritual power the same way by confessing you don't have the ability to resist Satan in your marriage, your relationships, your temptations, or your life, your parenting, that you're going to have to depend on God's grace and His power to do it.
So these pieces of spiritual armor are where you apply the gospel of dependence on God's grace. to an area of vulnerability or weakness in your life.
So with that as the backdrop, let's very quickly look at each of these seven pieces of armor. The first piece, he says, verse 13 and 14, take up the belt of truth. Your belt, of course, goes around your core. Your belt holds all your weapons and the rest of your armor in place. And now, as far as the metaphor goes, this one's really important because nobody wants to go into battle with their pants down.
Amen. Amen. All right, so what does Paul mean exactly by belt of truth?
Well, I think probably two things. We usually think of truth as primarily a what. But in the Bible, truth is primarily, or first and foremost, a... Who? That's right.
John 14, 6. Jesus said, I am the truth. I'm the way, the truth, and the life.
So to take up the belt of truth means to gird yourself up with Jesus. Make your identity in Christ the center, the core of your life. I've always heard it said that your identity is based on what the most important person in your life thinks about you. Here's a question: Is Jesus that most important person to you? And have you made what he thinks about you your core identity?
You see, the gospel is this: that in Christ, there's nothing you can do that would make God love you anymore, nothing you have done that makes God love you any less, that his acceptance is a gift given to you in Christ. Have you taken that to yourself, or do you still base your identity on how well you perform, how you compare to others? Are you still consumed with what other people think about you? Or do you say, Jesus thinks this way about me? I don't care what everybody else thinks.
Because if that's not your core, that is the first place Satan can and will attack. Here's how I know it's the first place. You remember Satan's temptation of Jesus? What was the first thing out of his mouth? If you are the Son of God, what did he attack?
He attacked his identity. If you really are the Son of God, you wouldn't be out here. Here's what he says to you. If you're really a child of God, you wouldn't struggle with that. Hey, if you really were a child of God, your life wouldn't be like this.
If God actually existed and he loved you, then there's no way your life would be what it is.
So, the belt of truth means you counteract that by saying, No, I am a child of God because God has done that for me in the gospel. Here's the second thing: the belt of truth implies: you have grounded your perspective on everything in your life based on what God says. And I'm talking about things like sexuality, your sexuality, your marriage. The purpose of your life, what you do with your money, etc. Here's a question for you to consider: How do you determine what is true and right in your life?
I'd say for the vast majority of people in our community, in church and outside of church, at the end of the day, what they rely on is their internal compass, what feels right.
Now, you'll let God influence it a little bit. You'll let other people influence it, but at the end of the day, does this feel right for me? For other people, they follow the whims of popular opinion, whatever their friends think, their professors think, their favorite stars in Hollywood think. The only way to escape the deception of the enemy is to let the word of God shape your thinking. Here's a question, do you know the word of God enough for it to shape how you see everything?
My friends, listen, these are not just doctrines to learn. These are a means of survival. Because wherever you're not covered in the truth of Scripture, you are exposed to the attack of the enemy. Satan's first attack on the human race was to say, Has God really said this? And in several thousand years, he hadn't come up with a new line yet.
He doesn't need to come up with a new line because we still fall for that one. His goal in your life is to make you do one of two things with the Word of God: to either doubt it or to neglect it. He doesn't care which one because both of them are going to have the exact same effect in your life. Right now, the church in North America is facing a critical moment. More people than ever say they have no faith at all.
Many churches are struggling and fewer than 1% are truly sharing their faith.
So what's the answer? It's not bigger events. It's not bigger marketing. It's the same way the church has always grown. Multiplication, disciples making disciples.
Churches planting churches. Ordinary believers taking the gospel seriously, right where they are. That's the vision behind Summit Life. Through clear, gospel-centered teaching on radio, podcasts, and other digital platforms, Summit Life exists to equip believers and churches to multiply so the gospel can reach neighbors, cities, and nations. When you support this ministry, you're not just funding a broadcast, you're investing in the future of the church.
You're raising up new leaders. You're joining with God and fueling a movement of disciple-making disciples. It's time to be part of something bigger, something better, and something eternal. Join with us today by giving a gift. Call 866-335-5220.
That's 866-335-5220 or visit jdgreer.com. What do you believe about this book? And maybe more important for you: does how you treat this book, is it reflective of what you say you believe about it? There's a very famous skeptic over at UNC Chapel Hill named Bart Ehrman. He teaches New Testament over there.
He calls himself a happy atheist. And every single semester, he convinces hundreds of UNC freshmen to depart from the faith they grew up in. And what he does in the first class is he usually asks a question like this: He'll say to the class of several hundred people: How many of you believe the Bible is the Word of God? He always says about two-thirds of the people in the audience will raise their hand. He'll say, okay, of those of you who have your hand raised, how many of you have read it cover to cover?
He says out of several hundred students, there's usually one or two that will say that they've read it. And so he says, really? You say that you believe this is the Word of God and you haven't even read it? See, you don't actually believe it's the Word of God, because how could you believe a book is written by Almighty God and not read it? Your heart knows it's not true.
And I'm just going to spend the rest of this semester convincing you, your head, to acknowledge what your heart already knows.
So here's my question for you. Does the way you treat that Bible acknowledge that you actually believe it is from Almighty God? Are there actually parts of it you're like, yeah, I don't really know that and I don't really care? How would you say that we understand these are not education things that we get together and they're not tips for life? These are spiritual life to you.
This is life. And your life depends on your knowledge of... The belts of truth, the word of God. Here's the second piece of armor. Take up, he says.
Verse 14, the breastplate of righteousness.
Now, breastplate is going to cover your vital organs, right? Your heart and your lungs and your stomach and all those kinds of things.
So, what does he mean by you covering your vital organs with righteousness?
Well, again, listen, for Paul, being covered with righteousness first means embracing your identity in Christ. I think the breastplate gives us a really interesting picture here. Because you've seen Roman breastplates, right? And in Roman breastplates, watch this, you've already got the abs and the pecs already cut in, right? Which means that if I put on the breastplate of righteousness, you're going to see perfect pecs and abs, regardless of the jiggle that's going on behind the breastplate.
Now, was Paul actually thinking about that? I don't know, but you have to admit, it makes for a really interesting metaphor. 2 Corinthians 5, 21 tells us that God made Jesus, who knew no sin. He made Jesus to be my sin so that in Christ I could become his righteousness. He got my sin, I got his righteousness.
The love handles of my sin became his. His perfect abs of righteousness became mine. Right? You have never heard that gospel analogy before, ever? That is a J.D.
Greer original right there.
So first, I think it means taking Christ's righteousness as our own, but I think there's also an obedience element there. Not only are we covered by Christ's righteousness, we now bring our lives into conformity with His righteousness. Again, Satan's going to use whatever part of you is not surrendered to God and not conform to His truth as His focal point of attack. Maybe that's a bad habit you have that you know is sinful, but you just don't take it seriously enough to really devote the energy to breaking it. Or maybe it's a temptation that you just can't say no to.
Maybe it's somebody in your heart you won't forgive. And you're like, well, I just don't know if I can't forgive them. And I'm just going to nurse this grudge. And that's fine. That's fine, you think, until Satan decides now it's time for me to take that foothold that you gave me, and I'm going to use it to destroy your whole life.
Maybe it's just some part of your life that you don't trust God enough yet to surrender to him, your dating life. Maybe what you do with your money. And you're like, yeah, I mean, I want to be surrender to God and everything, but I don't know if I can trust him yet in those areas. And that is going to become the place where Satan gets his foothold and tears you apart. Whatever part of your life is not brought into obedience to God's word will be Satan's focal point of attack in your life.
What do you think that would be for you?
Some friends of mine and I, when we hold each other accountable, and we ask this question. If you knew that next year, this time, Satan would have taken you down, taken you out. If you knew that, what area would it have been in? What area do you think it would be in? Because that's probably the area where you are least surrendered to God.
What would it be for you if you knew Satan was going to tear you down? What area would it be? Here's your third piece of armor. as shoes for your feet and having put on the readiness. given by the gospel of peace.
So we're talking about shoes now, okay? The third piece of armor.
Now, I've often heard that the sword of the spirit, which we're going to get to in a minute, Is the only offensive weapon in the Christian arsenal, but that's not true. Your feet are also offensive weapons because they carry you forward into battle. Paul is saying that the way we overcome Satan is by going on offense with the gospel. going on offense with the gospel. Listen.
Overcomes both Satan's work in other people that you share the gospel with, and it overcomes Satan's work in your life. Let me kind of break those apart real quick. First, sharing the gospel with other people is how we counteract Satan's work in them.
Sometimes we only want to share the gospel with people who seem interested in it. But didn't that put in the cart before the horse? How can they get interested in it until it's had a chance to go to work in their lives? The message of the gospel has in it the power to set the captive free. The gospel message has in it the ability to give sight to the blind.
The gospel has in it to give spiritual life, spiritual interest to those who are disinterested, and those things can happen to people who've never heard it. One of my good friends, who may be the most effective person I've ever been around at bringing other people to Jesus. He says, you know, somebody who shares Christ with other people only has to believe really two things. Only two things you got to believe. He said, number one, you got to believe that salvation belongs to God.
Which means it's not on you. You don't have to persuade. You're not trying to convince them. Ultimately, the Holy Spirit's got to do that. He says that takes the pressure off of you because if you don't know that, then you're going to get overwhelmed and you're going to quit.
He said, the second thing you've got to believe, though, is just as important, and that is that faith comes only by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Which means that it's impossible for faith or spiritual interest in somebody to grow until you've planted the word of God inside of them. Isn't that how you were? You remember before you became a Christian? You weren't interested in the Bible.
You didn't memorize scripture. You didn't like sermons.
Somebody had to sow the word of God in you, and then that began to grow, and it created in you that spiritual interest. You need to learn to share the gospel. Right? You know, when I'm on a plane, my first question to the person next to me is always: what do you do? Because I know that just out of politeness, they got to ask me back.
And I get to tell them I'm a pastor. At which point, the whole temperature in the entire cabin changes. Right? And I'll look at them sometimes and be like, Yep, I'm a pastor, which means you know we got to have this conversation. Do you want to go ahead and have it now or you want to wait till later?
Just you tell me when you're ready, right?
Sometimes I'll say things like, you know, where do you go to church? And they'll say, you know, they'll tell me, and if they say they do go to church, I'll be like, well, have you always gone? Do you feel like God is becoming more real to you right now, or is he becoming less real? And see where that conversation goes.
So if they say, no, I don't go to church, I'm like, well, tell me about how do you see the universe? How do you see God? And we just get in that conversation. It's that simple.
So it's how you counteract Satan's work in people's lives. But it's also how you counteract his work in your life. Because, see, listen, we are the easiest prey for Satan when we're bored. Isn't that how King David fell to Satan's temptation? When he fell to temptation, 2 Samuel 11 says that all the other armies of Israel were out fighting battles where David should have been, and David was at home lounging.
They were fighting, he was lounging.
So it made him a perfect target for Satan to bring along, Bathsheba.
Well, see, for many of you, not just men, but let me talk to you, men, for a minute. For many of you men, the reason that you are so bound up in Satan's deception is that you're bored. And the reason you're bored is because you're disengaged. You're disengaged from God's plan for your life, and that is to use you in mission, which is why we say around here, we don't want a big audience to be entertained. We think you're an army to be engaged.
The picture of the church that we see throughout the New Testament is not a hovel of saints cloistered together trying to keep out the barbarians, but a missionary people that are battering hell's gates. Only then will you be healthy. Above all, here we are here fourth piece above all Taking the shield, above all means, this is probably the most important. Taking the shield of faith by which we extinguish the fiery darts of the wicked one.
Now, this is really a way of summing up all the other pieces. Satan's main weapons are the lies that he throws, you see? They're like fiery darts that come into our hearts. Listen, you're not supposed to try to out-reason those darts. The image is not that you are some kind of like ninja that's able to very dexterously move as they come at you.
What do you do when you're in the presence of a fiery dart being thrown at you? You cover yourself. You hide from those darts behind a shield. That's what Paul is telling you to do. Don't try to outreason Satan.
Don't try to argue with him. You hide from him behind what you know to be true in the gospel. Use the gospel, what you see is true about God in the gospel, to extinguish the fiery dart.
So, for example, Satan hurls at you, you're no good. You're nothing. You're pathetic. After what you did, you really feel like God still loves you. You could never make a difference.
He'll never use you. Your marriage will always be bad. You'll never be a good parent. You'll always be sick. You'll never get out of debt.
Boom. You put up that shield. And you say, oh no, surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Joshua tells me, I am blessed coming in and blessed going out, which means there ain't no time in my life that I'm not walking in the blessing and favor of God. And greater is He that is in me than He that is in the world.
And all the promises of God are yes in Christ Jesus. And God has plans to prosper me and give me a future and a hope. And I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. And I know that God is working. And all things together for good in my life, because I love God.
I know He'll never leave me or forsake me. And His eyes on the sparrow, and He knows how many hairs are in my head. And if I got how many hairs are in my head, I know that He's watching me, and I can assure you that when you get done with a montage like that one, Satan won't be anywhere near. Not a place. Even one other thing before I go on here, I think it's a really interesting angle.
A Roman soldier's shield in those days was created to be linked up with his brothers next to him. Right? You've seen them, they and they make these shield walls, which I mean, you've seen like the 300 movie. Or gladiator, or something like that. And one of the things it shows you is that sometimes your own faith is not enough to get you through a situation.
It was never meant to be. You're supposed to be part of the church so that in one situation, somebody else's shield shields you, and your shield will shield him in another situation. Maybe you ought to end every small group by yelling, Smart guns, or something like that. That'd be cool. And it'd probably help you remember it.
Piece number five. Peace number five, take up, he says, the helmet of salvation, verse 17.
Now, again, this just repeats in a new way what he's already said, but specifically here, your head is where you think. Paul is telling us to let the truth about our salvation. and permeate or cover, control everything that we think. Every morning, there are two things I try to tell myself. It's part of a gospel prayer that I wrote several years ago to saturate my heart and mind and God's grace before I even start the day.
The first phrase is, because I'm in Christ, there's nothing I could do that would make God love me more. There's nothing I have done that would make him love me less. His acceptance is a gift given in Christ. And I just embrace that for a minute because I don't want to go through life that day thinking I got to earn God's favor. The second thing is, Lord Jesus, you are all I need for everlasting joy, which means I don't need other people's approval.
I don't need success. I don't need acclaim. I don't need creature comforts. I just need you. That's what one of the first books I wrote called Gospel is all about: how to put on the helmet of salvation every day to guard your mind and your heart so that you think about your day through the lens of the gospel.
Here's your sixth piece. And taking the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
Now we're going to transition to exclusively offensive weapons. We've already talked about our shoes.
Now we've got our sword, which is the Word of God. Of course, the Word of God's been in each of the other pieces already. But see, Paul is telling us again to so master this book. to so master it that it'll give us the ability to counteract Satan's lies. Your ability to overcome Satan is directly proportionate to your knowledge of the Word of God.
Parents, your children's ability. To counteract the lies of Satan is directly proportionate to how well they know the Word of God.
So, yes, have them involved in castle and have them involved in dance, but you make sure that they graduate out of your house with a thorough knowledge of the Word of God because those things might help them get a better job, but the Word of God will save their soul and deliver them from Satan.
So, you learn it, you meditate on it, you memorize it, you read it, and you sing it. It's like I often say, be so saturated with God's word that when life cuts you, you bleed God's word.
Now, in order to be a good disciple maker, You gotta first be a good disciple. Which means you've got to know the word better than you know anything else in your life. Finally, he says, look at that, verse 18, and praying at all times in the spirit. Here's our other primarily offensive weapon, prayer. Prayer.
A lot of people don't include prayer in the list of weapons, but Paul puts it there as the thing that you do after you get dressed for battle. And that's really important, I think. Because most Christians see prayer, watch this, as what they do to prepare for battle. Paul sees prayer as what you do after you've gotten dressed and go into battle. Prayer is not preparation for battle.
Prayer itself is the battle. The book of James tells us the same thing. It says that the most effective weapon that a believer has in their hand is prayer. And it uses a guy like Elijah. And it says Elijah changed history through his prayer, Elijah changed the weather patterns through his prayer.
Prayer is where we put into practice what we believe about the gospel. Prayer is where we say, God, I really believe you are as compassionate as the cross demonstrates that you are. I believe you are as powerful to save as the resurrection proves that you are, and that you ask God to release his power, and when you do, He opens up heaven's gates and he begins to pour it down. Prayer summit church is not the only thing that we do here, but it is the first thing that we do, and it is the most effective thing that we do, and it ought to begin in the middle and end everything. One of the examples I've used in the Bible on this for you is the way we see the early church behave in the first chapters of Acts.
So, you know, Jesus gives the great commission, take the gospel to every nation on earth. Can you imagine, has a more overwhelming assignment ever been given to a less qualified group of people? They literally have no education. They got no money. They got no jobs.
Their pets ads are falling off. They've never been outside of Israel. They literally have not been outside of Israel. And Jesus said, yep, you're going to take the gospel to every nation in the world. And so what do they do?
Well, they do what Jesus tells them. He says, I want you to go and do nothing for a while. I want you to just wait. Wait for the promise of the Holy Spirit. And while you're waiting, I want you to pray.
And so they did. And if you add up the days that they waited, this unspecified amount of time, it was 10 days. They prayed for 10 days. Then the Holy Spirit came. Peter stands up in Acts 2.
He preaches a sermon. You read it from start to finish, it'll take you 10 minutes. Peter prayed for 10 days, Peter preaches for 10 minutes, 3,000 people get saved. I've told you before, this is what we do. We pray for 10 minutes.
I preach for what feels like. 10 days. And three people get saved. It's because all of our zeros are all in the wrong places. You see, prayer becomes this weapon by which we release the almighty power of God.
You understand what I'm getting out there? You see, some of you have this as a gift, and it's the greatest gift you could have. You're not that impressive looking on the outside, but you have a gift of intercession, and you need to use it. For all of us, it should be the primary and most effective way that we fight. It's the point where you should where you begin to apply the gospel, what you believe, and release God's power in the world.
My friend Joby Martin. Joby was a former bodybuilder. He says a lot of Christians are basically like bodybuilders. He said that when I was a bodybuilder, I never did anything with my strength. I worked out all the time.
But I never fought anybody. I never played any sports. I just showed up and flexed. That's all that I did with my strength. He said a lot of Christians are like that.
They puff themselves up with doctrine, but they never actually do anything. They know all this stuff about God, but they never exercise that belief in bold, frequent prayer. Prayer is how you demonstrate, it's how you use the gospel and release its power. You see, there's a lot of you that listen, you know a lot about the Bible, but your prayer life is nothing to speak of. and you're just a Christian bodybuilder.
You just show up at church and flex. And you need to start using that stuff that God gave you and applying it by releasing the power of God in the world. Do you understand how much power and compassion God is ready to pour out if you will just pray? Jesus says, ask, ask, ask. Specifically, he says, He says, pray.
Make supplication for all the saints. It means your people in your small group. Pray for them by name and also for me. I don't think we're still to be paying for Paul, but let me translate that for you. That words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel to you.
I think that means you pray for me, me. Because I'm the one who usually every week stands up and gives you the word of God. And fortunately or unfortunately for you, I'm never short on words. Right? But you don't need me standing up here talking for an hour.
What you need is the words of God to be given to me for you. Because my words might educate, his words will liberate. My words can fill up your mind. His words can save your soul.
So, you need to pray that God will give me the word so that I can lead this congregation to know God, to know the gospel better. That's not going to happen except that you pray for me.
So see, listen, Paul's last words are to tell us that, yes, life is war. Life is war, but we can and should be confident because we have a God who is willing to fight for us. And these pieces of armor are just learning to think about the strength of the gospel in your life, the way to fight Satan. is not to engage Satan. The way to fight Satan is to cover your life with the gospel.
Luke chapter 11, Jesus said this from a little different angle. It's a great little parable. He said, That was a man. who had a demon living in his house. And he drove the demon out.
And so then he went to his house after the demon had gone and he began to clean up the house. The demon had made a mess, and obviously it's a metaphor for his life. He'd made a mess of his life, so he begins to clean it up. But the demon goes out and finds seven of his buddies who are just like him and comes back and finding the house swept and in order, he re-inhabits the house, now with not one, but seven. and now the last state of the man is worse than the first.
And then Jesus says something that a lot of times people don't put together with the parable, but Jesus then says this: He says, You know, when you drive out a strong man, Which is the demon? In order to be able to really fortify the house, you need to have a stronger man who lives in the house. The strong man is Satan. The stronger man who occupies the house is Jesus.
So, it's not about driving out the demon, it's about letting Jesus fill the house of your life so that there's not a single place that Satan can touch you. You need. The presence And the power of the Holy Spirit and the gospel in your life, the way to resist Satan is not to engage Satan, it's to get filled with the presence of Jesus, the stronger man. Charles Spurgeon used to say the preaching of Christ is the whip that flogs the devil. Do you want the devil out of your head?
Do you want him out of your home? Do you want him out of your family? Do you want him out of our church? You want him out of the community? Then preach Christ.
Trust Christ. Abide in Christ. As a Christian, we don't have to fight for victory over Satan in our marriages. Praise God. We don't have to fight for victory over Satan in our church.
We don't have to fight for victory over Satan in our lives. Listen, we fight from victory. Amen. The last verse in Ephesians, last verse. Look at this.
Grace be with all of you who love our Lord Jesus Christ with. Love Incorruptible. What a great title idea for a series. What do you think, huh? God's love is the only incorruptible, everlasting, immutable, all-powerful, unchangeable thing in this corruptible, falling, ever-changing world.
Woo! And with that, we've come to the end of our study titled Love Incorruptible.
Next week on the podcast, a brand new series. Apocalyptic Visions, Mysterious Creatures, Dramatic Warnings. The book of Revelation can be scary. It's a book depicting the end of the world as we know it. It's chaotic, it's messy, and yes, it can be pretty scary.
But the Apostle John didn't write this book to fill us with fear, he wrote it to give us a message of hope. Comfort and certainty, the hope of knowing that Jesus holds the final victory over sin and death, the comfort of knowing that He will come again and make all things new. and the certainty that God will once again dwell with his people. We'll see you next time as we kick off a month in the book of Revelation. Until then.
Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
