918. Using Our Armor Effectively

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Today on The Daily Platform, we're continuing a study series entitled Our Ancient Foe, which is a study of Satan, the reality of his presence, and how Christians can be victorious against him. Today's message will be preached by Dr. Mark Minnick.

The title of his message is Using Our Armor Effectively, and BJU President Steve Pettit will introduce him. Without a doubt, one of the greatest expositors in my life that I've ever heard is Dr. Mark Minnick. I've listened to many, many of his sermons. In fact, as I've said, I preach his sermons better than he does, and so I have the most profound love and respect for Pastor Minnick and his faithfulness to God's word, and so we're delighted to have him come and speak to us in our theme as we are working through Our Ancient Foe. Again this morning, I would like to direct our attention to the sixth chapter of the book of Ephesians.

If you would turn there, please. This last week, I have been greatly encouraged and spiritually impacted by listening to almost all of the messages that have been preached in this series. When Dr. Horn began the series, he made a statement that very often Christian people are oblivious to, if not naïve, about spiritual warfare until they are wounded. That is very spiritually insightful, and what it does is call our attention to the fact that we are to be proactive about this matter, and the topic that has been assigned to me today is that of using this armor in Ephesians 6 in an offensive way, offensively rather than defensively. Last week, when Dr. Mazak preached, he made the comment, as he began to deal with this in an overview, that there isn't something that is just a secret here of which we're utterly unaware, or a methodology that we've never employed, but he referred to taking the armor as a matter of just classic discipleship, and that is the case.

When you leave the metaphors aside, and just simply look at the components that are scriptural, they are the basic elements of Christian living. We just sang Soldiers of Christ Arise. I didn't know that we were going to do that today, but in the 13th verse, we are exhorted to take unto us the whole armor. That Greek word is one that Charles Wesley placed in the stanza of the hymn that we just sang, and take to arm you for the fight, and the word he uses is one that we don't frequently employ, the panoply of God. That is the Greek word.

He's just taken the Greek word, transliterated into English letters. We sing a Greek word every time we sing that stanza, and the word panoply does mean the entirety of it. So that what we have the assurance about is this, that these half dozen components are all of it. That if we employ these in a classic discipleship, God knows this is utterly sufficient. So I would like to speak to you today on using this armor effectively, and what we're going to find is that every piece of it is to counter a stratagem of Satan.

You can think of it this way. These pieces are revelations of his strategy in reverse. And because there are six of them, followed by verse 18 in the admonition regarding praying, I'm going to throw the majority of the emphasis toward a couple of them, and one of them leave almost entirely for Dr. McGonigal for next week. But we're told, first of all, that our being protected, and to speak of it in terms of our topic this morning, to go on the offensive, it's a matter of what we're doing with truth. Dr. Talbert called her attention to John 844, which says that there is no truth in Satan. And he clarified for us by saying that even when he speaks half truth, that it actually is entirely a lie because its whole purpose is to deceive. Now folks, that matter is not something remote from us or anyone else, this matter of our being deceived. In the 12th chapter of Revelation, where we have an extended passage about our adversary, you have this blanket statement that he deceives the whole world. That isn't just hyperbole.

That is true of every single segment of world culture. The politicians are deceived. The educators are deceived. The economists are deceived. The entertainers and scientists and corporate executives and religious clerics, he deceives the whole world. And it isn't just selective, an individual here or there.

It is universal. We're born, the scripture says, given to lies. The scripture says that we actually go astray from our birth. And in this book, the second chapter and the second verse, the Holy Spirit informs us that the God of this world, the prince of the power of the air, is the one who, and this is the Greek word, I'll pronounce it and you'll know immediately what English word we get from it. It says, the word that's used is energeo, that he does that to all the children of disobedience. What English word would we get from energeo? It's the word energize. You wonder sometimes where lost people get their incredible energy for doing evil.

They are energized by the prince of the power of the air. And because this is the case, because there is this universal deception, not in every single point. People are made in the image of God and they do retain a conscience and they are truthful in some cases. But in general, that statement is applied to the world universally and to every individual in it.

He deceives the whole world. And what we discover when we go out into society, you're very aware this is the way in which society begins to speak euphemistically or in acceptable terms when actually what is being disguised is evil. So murder of the unborn becomes freedom of choice.

To be morally deviant is to be gay or happy. To advertise deceptively is just doing business. And people who evangelize are being divisive.

And we grow accustomed to living in a culture of lies passively. And what the scripture is telling us for our own protection, as well as for the cause of Christ, is the necessity of taking truth to ourselves. And the metaphor that is used here is that of a belt. And for these ancient soldiers, that is what girt everything together. It folded up and held together the loose folds of their robes or that kind of a leather skirt that a Roman soldier wore. But in addition to that, the breastplate was fastened to that belt both in the front and at the back so that it wouldn't ride up and leave the soldier exposed in a moment of battle. And the scabbard, of course, hung from it. The belt was the thing that really bound all the other components together. It was central to the whole scheme of a soldier's panoply. And certainly the scripture begins with this because this is the single most important element in life.

Everything is held together by that. And what the scripture tells us is that there are at least two aspects to this for believers. One, of course, is the objective aspect, and that is the truth of God. And one of our defects is if we only know it superficially.

That is, if we only know the general facts of the thing. But we don't have spiritual insight as to what those facts actually mean for us. And that insight is given only by the Holy Spirit of God. There are probably two great failings that as Christian people we often have when it comes to the truth of the word of God. The failing with reference to the breadth of it and failing with reference to the depth of it. With reference to the breadth of it we often just read Bibles selectively.

Favorite books or passages. And they're portions that perhaps we seldom if ever read. What that does is leave us with a distorted view of God. So that we view God only in terms of certain of his perfections. And whenever then we're confronted with another perfection, particularly those that are more severe, we're shocked.

And there is a kind of an unconscious recoiling and down in our souls a rejection of that perfection of deity. It's imperative that we read the entirety of our Bibles from beginning to end and that we do that regularly. And I would encourage you today with reference to using this panoply offensively to be sure in the future that you look into getting a good Bible reading schedule.

There are a lot of different ones that are out there. Get a hold of one that you can just mark off the chapters as you read them and whether you get through your Bible in a year, whether it takes you two years to get through. But you just start a lifelong habit of exposing your soul to the imprint of the entirety of the character of God. Whether it's in Leviticus or Revelation, the Psalms or Philippians, the whole thing is pressed down on your soul like a dye to form up in you the image of God.

And the other defect, of course, that we have is the depth of things. And one of the ways to overcome that is through regular scripture memory. And I just say this to share with you what I do in the mornings. I start with a little three by five post-it pad, yellow with lines on it. I do the same thing every single morning. I list out the things that I have to do that day.

And it always starts with four. Bible, prayer, memorization, reading. And then as I do them, I just check them off.

It just helps me to check them off. But memorization is always part of that. And I try to work on at least a couple of verses every day just to say them to myself.

Just takes a couple of minutes, but often to carry them with me through the day like that to repeat them. That is imperative. We have to get the word of God locked into our being so that it's there at our disposal. I want to encourage you to bring truth into all your circumstances and to bring the entirety of the truth and a depth of it that literally is locked away inside your inner being that way. The other aspect, of course, to this truth is the subjective aspect of our truthfulness. God's truth objectively, my truthfulness subjectively. This, folks, is utterly irreplaceable in right human relationships. And you know that leading up to this election yesterday, one of the greatest complaints of the American public was that neither of the candidates appeared to them to be entirely truthful people.

Society, a family, a church, a pulpit ministry just simply can't function without truth. It holds everything else together. You can't let yourself become an untruthful person, a chronically deceptive person, but your adversary, the devil, is intent on habituating you and me to being less than truthful in our relationships. We need to hold ourselves and this is an effort because there is something in us that is always bent to the left.

It's like having a big, thick rubber band around your head and the pull is always to the left. It's our flesh inside us doing that. And that applies to this matter of truthfulness as much as to anything. There are so many ways that we need to check ourselves about this.

Dr. Ormiston took us to Genesis chapter 3 and the way Satan just directly contradicted the word of God. That, of course, is the most conspicuous form of lying and we tend to recognize that one perhaps pretty well. But I want to tick off real quickly five other ways that we need to check ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. Misrepresentation is deception.

For instance, many of you are going out into the corporate world. Proverbs chapter 20 verse 14 gives you a little window into how that works. As a buyer, you go to a seller and you try to talk down his product. You say, oh, it's nothing.

It's nothing. But then when you go your way, you boast about what a great deal you got. We are so given to a culture of lying and deception that even reading that verse and someone commenting on it like I am right now, it just catches us like, hey, wait a minute. I thought that was just good business. Everybody does that. That's exactly the point.

Everybody does that. And scripture is putting its finger right on it and saying not so as a straight shooting righteous person. I have a book in my library by J.C. Penney. It's his autobiography. He's the one who began the penny stores. It's called 50 Years Living by the Golden Rule. And I know some of you who are in business are always looking for good books that you can read for inspiration.

And you might get that. I don't know a lot about Penny's spiritual life, but he did attempt to live that way and to run his business that way. And one of the things that he was insistent upon with his salesman was absolute truthfulness in advertising. So you would go into an early penny store. There would be a whole stack, let's say, of flannel shirts.

And the sign would read, the colors are not attractive, but the shirt will wear well. Misrepresentation is deception. Evasion, which is withholding truth at times that it's imperative that someone have it. Insinuation, which is suggesting things that are untruth, like the sailor who had it in for his captain. And so he decided that he would slip into the ship's log to be read later by the owners of the ship.

He'd write things like this. The captain is sober today. When in fact, the captain was sober every day.

A week later, captain sober today. Insinuation is deception. Exaggeration is deception.

Silence when you know that people are misunderstanding and misrepresenting things. And folks, this matter of being truthful, you can bring it right down to this one practice in our lives that will help us. The thing that will most help us to learn to be entirely truthful is in our confessions to God.

If we will be honest with God, if we will be entirely righteous in what we confess about ourselves, we are habituating ourselves to be truthful. Secondly, and I intended to throw most of our weight right there on this next one, but is this matter of righteousness? When the scripture says having on the breastplate of righteousness, you may be aware, I'm sure you've seen images of this, this was a kind of a sleeveless vest. And it was made of heavy material and on it were some these polished overlapping pieces of metal so that there would be no chinks in it. But the enemy was intent on stabbing through some hole or chink between those pieces of metal.

And as you know, that breastplate covered everything from the bottom of the neck all the way down over the hips, both front and back, protected all of the vital organs. And the scripture is saying here that this is like righteousness for a Christian. And again, the Bible knows of two aspects of this. One of them is Christ's righteousness, which is his lifelong obedience as the man Christ Jesus.

It's the life that he lived that was impeccable. When we come to Christ and entrust ourselves to him, the scripture says that that lifelong obedience is imputed. That's the Bible word imputed to us. It's given to us and entirely credited to us.

The way you could think of it is this way. It is legally given over to me. And from that point on, I have the complete authority and legal right to use that righteousness that is not my own. Theologians refer to it as an alien righteousness, righteousness foreign to me, but given to me. I have the legal right then to use that in all my transactions with God. And where this becomes imperative is when I have taken a blow. And that, of course, occurs when we have not ourselves done right. And when you don't do right, your conscience accuses. And if several of those wrongdoings pile up, how do you feel when it comes to your liberty to go into the presence of God?

I want to ask you this. How do you feel about asking God to forgive you yet again for the same sin or failing for the one hundredth time or the thousandth time? How do you feel about that?

You feel about that the way I feel about that. It's like I can't even hold up my head. I don't feel like I can go to God again. That's where this is so essential. It's what Hebrews is talking about when it says, no, no, don't shrink back. Don't hold back.

That's disaster. The throne of God's grace and the imputed righteousness of Christ are made for that very time in your life. That's exactly when you need to come. And when your conscience says you can't come, that's a lie. You must come. You're not just invited to come for your safety and your cleansing.

You're commanded to come. And you're authorized by the righteousness that was imputed to you. And there's no door that shut between you and God when you sin. And the veil that was rent when he died isn't re-stitched when we sin. It's still all wide open to the throne of grace.

You've just got to go. And you go on the basis of the righteousness that was given to you in Christ. The second aspect, of course, of this is our personal right doing. And the only, folks, the only right rule for our right doing is the entirety of the Word of God. There's a verse in Proverbs that I often refer to for my own guidance in situations where I can't seem to quite figure out what I ought to do. Proverbs 11, verse 3, and it says this, the integrity of the upright shall guide him. And what that verse is saying is when you're caught in a situation and it just seems like you're not exactly sure what the will of God would be, that verse says the will of God, the thing that should guide you, is integrity.

Do the thing of integrity. That's God's will. And that kind of righteousness ends up being very protecting of us. And that brings us thirdly to this matter of the preparation of the gospel. The word preparation is a word that has reference to readiness. Readiness with giving it. It's part of what keeps us stable. In the ancient war, soldiers would wear sandals, thick leather soles studded with hob nails, and that was designed to enable them to keep their footing in the initial shock when two great armies, a whole vast heaving sea of thousands of rough, pushing, violent men, it enabled them to keep their feet so that they didn't fall and expose themselves to the fatal blow. It's imperative for your defense to go on an offense with the gospel when you go out into life, same way that it is for me. And what it does is run up a banner.

It makes you conspicuous, but it does affect everything around you. I learned that when I was a student here, there were three summers when I worked on a carpentry crew, earning money to come back to school. My first summer after my freshman year, I went into that summer so enthusiastic about trying to serve the Lord. By the end of the summer, I was absolutely crushed spiritually. My second summer, I went back and discovered to my delight that the contractor had hired two other fellows to serve on that crew who were also Christians from another college. So now there were three Christians and three lost guys. The atmosphere as we roughed in these houses was completely different because there was an offense. The language toned down.

The filthy stories disappeared. There was more respectfulness because there was a more of an offensive readiness with the gospel. I went to the hospital this last weekend, picked up my Bible, wasn't even thinking, walked into the hospital, holding this small little Bible, walked out of the hospital the same way. And all of a sudden it occurred to me how conspicuous you feel and look when you're carrying a little Bible in your hand. And really, there's a protection in that. It makes you very alert.

I found myself alert just to the way my countenance looked. And if we would think about it that way, a Bible on your desk, tracks in your coat, Christian music in your car, these things are an offense that also creates a tremendous defense for us. The only other thing that I want to comment on, the first Thessalonians, excuse me, the last thing that's said here, and that is for a helmet. What part of our body does a helmet protect? Our head. What's in our head that has to be protected?

Our mind. And 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 8, which is the cross reference here, says, And for a helmet, the hope of salvation. And the word hope means the confident expectation that I am a Christian. It is nearly impossible to survive if you lack assurance as to whether you are even God's child. And I know from my own experience as a student and from counseling students here for many years that that is a problem multiplied many, many times across a student body. And dear young people, I want to encourage you to get that matter settled.

You must come to the place where you get that file drawer that has that file in it. Am I saved? Am I saved?

Where you get that file drawer shut, locked, welded around the edges, and you never open it again. If you don't do that, you will always be an insecure, ineffective, vulnerable, defeated person. And you've got to have on your head, protecting your mind, your confident expectation of salvation. Let's pray together. Loving Heavenly Father, thank you so very much for all of these good messages. We pray that you would help us to take these truths, to apply them and live them by your grace. In Christ's precious name we ask, Amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached by Dr. Mark Minnick, which is part of the study series entitled, Our Ancient Foe. Join us again tomorrow as we continue the series here on The Daily Platform.