This is War

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Okay, do you consider yourself a lover or a fighter? The truth is as Christ followers, we're actually called to be both. 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 J.D. walks us through each piece of spiritual armor so that we know how to arm ourselves for the spiritual attack happening right now. But it's also important to understand that you need every part of your body spiritually covered because where the gospel has built you up, Satan cannot attack you.

And that's good news, right? Well, let's learn more from Pastor J.D. today as he opens Ephesians chapter six. Tuesday, June 6, 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 ship's intercoms and 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.

And 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 six, verse 12. You see, he says we don't wrestle against flesh and blood. No, no, no, we're 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 gonna refer to the believer's life as a struggle, as a fight, as warfare against evil forces, and he's gonna 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 or 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 dive. 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 tells 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, 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, cats are demons, cats are 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 Semawai 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 Semawai 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 Semawai tested his theory by just having the interns wash their hands at the hospital with a 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 improved, 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 Semawai pleaded with these doctors, gentlemen, for God's sake, just wash your hands. Nobody listened for about two decades to a guy named Louis Pasteur came along and proved it in a different way. Even Semawai's own wife didn't believe him.

He died a couple of 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 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 rear view mirror, not at your kids, but in the rear view mirror of your life, in the rear view mirror of your life. Can't you look back in your life? Can't you look into the rear view 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 question 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 have 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 and very high in 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're listening to a message titled This is War here on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. We'll rejoin this teaching in just a moment, but I wanted to remind you about a daily email devotional from Pastor J.D. Couldn't we all use encouragement first thing in the morning to remind us of God's love for us? Maybe you're looking to establish a daily routine of spending time with God.

And if that's you, we have the perfect free resource for you. These daily devotionals follow along with our current teaching here on the program so you can stay plugged in regardless of your schedule. Make the decision to carve out time with the Lord each day by reading and studying with us here at Summit Life.

Sign up right now at jdgreer.com slash resources. And while you're there, there's lots of other free resources available to help you grow in your walk with Jesus. But right now, let's return for the conclusion of today's message. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. Most of you know that before I became pastor here, I served for a couple of 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 recorded it, and he recorded about 30 minutes of this mob 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 of weeks, I got put under house arrest, essentially under house arrest for a couple of 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 part of the world when you check in the hotel, you have to leave your passport at the desk, so I just slid my passport across the desk, I didn't even look 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 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, I left my passport there, and I just, I 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 lust of the flesh, sometimes he waits for me off stage 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 just 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 with 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 the strength of his might shows me that this has got nothing to do with your power, hasn'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, if 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 armour 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 summarise what he's been saying for six chapters, so these pieces of spiritual armour 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 armour through what I now refer to as flannelgraph 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 armour 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 analyse 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 armour is simply a way of applying the gospel, that's all that it is, a 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 at 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 fulfil God's command in verse 10 to be strong in the Lord, you see again the gospel message of Ephesians is that you are 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 realised that you didn't have the ability to save yourself and then 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 gained 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 armour 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 armour. 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 armour 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. Alright 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 centre, 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 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. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer.

If you missed any of the previous messages in our series called Love Incorruptible you can catch up online at jdgreer.com. JD, I think there's a question that many of us ask ourselves on a fairly regular basis. Does my work define me? Am I more than simply what I do for a living? Am I more than just a mom or a dad or brother or sister?

Who exactly am I? Yeah, Molly, I know for me a lot of these questions they're just kind of right below the surface. A lot of times we stay so busy we don't ask these kinds of questions but they're there just saying like, is this worth it? Is this what life is about? Am I going to get to the end of my life and feel like I wasted it or am I going to get to the end and feel like this is the life that I was supposed to live? You ever heard that phrase where the two most important days of your life are the day that you're born and then the day that you realize why you were born? The book of Ephesians helps you understand the answer to that second question.

God's purpose for you is to fill you with the sense of His closeness, to fill you with the fullness of His love, and to show you how to respond in a way that brings joy to you, glory to God, and life to others. This eight-part study called Your Place in God's Plan will help you connect some of these eternal gospel truths to your day-to-day pressures and the decisions that you're having to make. I'm excited to be able to get this into your hands, so go check it out at jdgrierd.com. Yes, we'd love to send you this new Ephesian study published by our friends at The Good Book Company. You're welcome to request it as a token of our thanks when you donate today to support this ministry. It takes friends like you partnering with us to make Summit Life possible so that more people can hear gospel-centered Bible teaching on the radio and web. Will you join that mission today? The suggested donation is $35 or more, and when you get in touch, remember to ask for Your Place in God's Plan.

Call 866-335-5220, or you can give online at jdgrierd.com. Don't forget to check out the Gospel Partner page as well to learn more about what it looks like to be a part of our monthly giving family. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us again Friday for the final piece of our series through Ephesians on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.