The Sword of the Spirit (Part 3 of 3)

In the Gospel of Matthew we read about how Jesus responded when he was tempted by Satan. He used God's Word. The Son of God used the Word of God.

And if we're ever going to combat the enemy's opposition, it's vital we make use of the same powerful weapon. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg challenges us to take up the sword of the Spirit and contend for the faith. Our study is in Ephesians chapter 6. What a strange thing it is that we who claim to love this book spend such little time in it, know so little of it, are prepared to dig down deep into it, are prepared to accept a few superficial quotes that have been hanging around since we were fourteen and received a car for Bible memorization that we keep up on a shelf somewhere in our study.

This is biographical information that you don't need, but nevertheless. He starts by quoting Deuteronomy 8. And then the devil masterfully decides, Well, if you can quote the Bible, I'll quote the Bible too.

We shouldn't be surprised by this. The devil knows the Bible. He knows it better than many a silly Christian.

And so what does he do? Well, he misstates the Bible. He quotes it, and he twists it.

That's always his way. And so he says, quoting from Psalm 91, here's the thing, if this, if this, and this… And Jesus says, No, you're absolutely wrong there, and let me say something else to you. It is written, You shall not put the LORD your God to the test. And a third time he comes back, and Jesus says once again to him, Be gone, Satan, for it is written, You shall worship the LORD your God, and him only shall you serve. So if Jesus dealt with the temptation of the devil by quoting the Bible, we are on a pretty good track if we determine that we will operate on that same basis.

But the way in which we respond is not on the strength of personality or some other thing. It is in confidence in the Bible itself. Three times, and three times it is written. It therefore follows straightforwardly that we shouldn't ever attempt to defeat the devil except by this sword. And that's why the sword has been given. It has not been given for ornamentation but for battle. When you wear a kilt as a Scotsman, if you choose to, you have a little ski and dew that goes inside your sock.

You may have seen it. And it is actually a dagger. And it is there as needed—you know, like if you can't open an envelope or something, very significant, very important. And it is there in order that it might be used. But in actual fact, it can't be used, because it's blunt, and it doesn't work, and it's there for style. The sword of the Spirit is given to us not for ornamentation, not for style, not to walk around with.

It is provided for battle. Therefore, when we think in terms of continuing in our faith, when we think in terms of what it means, then, to make sure that we have our sword at the ready, that we are quickened and enabled to take our stand about which we have read and about which we have sung, then again it is to the Word of God that we want to go. So which of us, if we've had any kind of background in the Christian faith at all, does not know? Psalm 119 verse 9. How can a young man keep his way pure? By taking heed according to your word, or by guarding it according to your word. How are we going to face the battle with temptation?

By doing this. Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is super for this. Psalm 119.

Not only storing it up in our hearts, but remembering it. Psalm 119, 93. I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have given me life.

I am yours. Save me, for I have sought your precepts. The wicked lie in wait to destroy me, but I consider your testimonies. What's the psalmist doing?

He's laying hold of the sword. And in verse 114 of the same psalm, he says, You are my hiding place and my shield, and I hope in your word. So it involves hiding it in our hearts. It involves recalling it for our help.

It involves resting in it for our security. How do you deal with your doubts? Take the sword of the Spirit to them. What about discouragements? What about, as we've sung, when darkness veils his lovely face, what do we do then? Well, I rest on his unchanging grace. Well, where do I find his unchanging grace? In the pages of Scripture. Says Spurgeon, in characteristic style, when discouragements arise like mists of the morning, oh, that God's Word may shine them away with the beams of his promises.

And in his own Victorian style, he says, I find if I can lay a promise under my tongue, like a sweet lozenge, and keep it in my mouth or mind all the day long, I am happy enough. If I cannot find a Scripture to comfort me, then my inward troubles are multiplied. Fight despondency and despair with the sword of the Spirit. I cannot tell what your particular difficulty may be at this moment, but I give you this direction for all holy warfare. Take the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

You must overcome every enemy, and this weapon is all you need. If you, my hearer, would overcome sin and conquer unbelief, take such a word as this. Look unto me, and be saved, all the ends of the earth. And as you look, you shall be saved. And doubt shall die, and sin shall be slain.

God grant you his Spirit's aid. Well, this all ties in with what we made mention of this morning in Hebrews 4, about the fact that in his Word there is clarity and there is authority and there is vitality, and God continues to enable us to continue by this means. And then I said, I want to say just a word about contending for the faith. If it is by means of the Word of God that we come to faith and continue in the faith, then it is surely on the same basis that we're able to contend for the faith. And I use that word there, that verb, not in terms of being contentious but rather in terms of being persuasive, or being, if you like, assertive, or being enthusiastically engaged in making it known—in other words, being kind of apostolic in our practice, or being like Jesus in the Gospels. Paul, when he writes to the Corinthians, he says to them, it is knowing the fear of the Lord, and in knowing the fear of the Lord, that we persuade men. And in persuading men of the truth of God's Word, it is the very Word of God itself that enables them to handle the powers and the authorities that come against them. And so he says, for though we walk in the flesh—that's, we go about normal human beings in the reality of who and what we are—we're not waging war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience when your obedience is complete. So, that is as clear as a bell, isn't it? What a tragedy that so much of the time that has been spent by evangelicalism in the twenty-first century thus far has had to do with waging war that is actually physical war, that is actually the kind of argumentation and fighting and moaning and complaining and disgruntlement that is so representative of the culture in which we live.

Surely the apostles gave us a pattern in order that we might follow their pattern, that they established precepts in order that we might obey their precepts. What would it take to bring down many of the strongholds in this nation, in this Western world? Well, it won't be political machination, that's for sure.

It won't be about getting the right person in office. It never has been, and it never will be. Because it is the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God by which the apostles worked. Why don't we do it? In certain cases, we're ashamed. We're ashamed. Let's be honest. We find it hard to say with Paul, I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

It is the power of God for salvation to the Jew, to the Greek, to everyone who believes. It's very easy to say that up here, isn't it? Protected by the room, the group, the context, the songs, the church. It's different when you're one-on-one on the golf course. And someone says to you, So what actually is that?

Somebody says to you, Well, I spoke to a Roman Catholic priest, and he told me that because I'm Jewish, I will be able to go to heaven and get a special pass, because I'm Jewish, said my friend to me. And then he said, But once we hit this shot, I want you to tell me whether that was true or false, and then I want you to tell me what the real story is. Well, you know how much I want to say? Yes, that sounds like a brilliant idea to me. Yes.

Wouldn't that just be wonderful? But what did I say? I said, Well, did you believe that? He said, No, it sounded rubbish to me. I said, Well, that's good.

You're making progress. I said, Well, let me tell you what the Bible actually says, that there is one mediator between God and man, and that's the man Christ Jesus, that he provides reconciliation, forgiveness for our sins, to the Jew and to the Greek. Therefore, you and I stand in the same position before an almighty God in need of a Savior, and God loves you, and send his Son, Yeshua, Jesus, the Messiah, in order that your sins might be forgiven. And it was met by that same kind of silence.

Ashamed. You see, nothing silences our tongues faster than a loss of confidence in the Word of God as the sword of the Spirit. And just as surely as the devil misused Scripture in tempting Jesus, so it is routinely that people seem to undermine our confidence or seek to undermine our confidence in the infallibility of the Bible.

I always want to be guarded what I say, because I should be, but I can't not say this. Those signs that are around us in front of certain church buildings that declare God is still speaking, if you actually go to the website, to the theological underpinnings of what that is declaring, you will discover that it is not a statement that is referring to what I've just said to you about the fact that the sword of the Spirit is timeless in its application. What they're actually saying is that God is now speaking differently from how he used to speak. God is now contradicting what he had said previously in the realm of morality, in the matter of marriage, in the issues of theological underpinnings.

Therefore, if we are going to contend for the faith that was delivered once to the saints, then we have to be alert to the devil's schemes, and we have to be able to defeat him not by our own ingenuity or by our own animosity but by the wielding of the sword of the Spirit. John starred very helpfully on one occasion, said, the reason why the church has historically submitted to the Scripture and why evangelicals continue to do so is that our Lord Jesus himself did. If you think about that—Matthew 4, what we've just seen in relationship to temptation—but think of other places in the Bible. For example, think about when they came to him, when the Pharisees came to him, with a moral question. When they came to him with a question about divorce, how did Jesus settle that question? By quoting the Bible. By quoting Genesis 1 verse 27 and Genesis 2.13. He said, It is written. In other words, all the equivocation, all of the discussion, was brought to an end by the statement, This is what the Word of God says.

He settled the moral disputes by referencing the divine authority of Scripture. Now, loved ones, we go back out into the world tomorrow and face all of the challenges in the realm of morality. And when we are pressed back into the corner by those who say, This is phenomenally arrogant of you and rather bigoted of you to hold these positions, what are we to say?

We're to say, We don't have an option. Our commanding officer has given to us our sword. Our sword is the Word of God. The Word of God is fixed in the heavens. God doesn't change like shifting shadows. Therefore, he doesn't change his word with the passage of time.

Therefore, though these things may seem alien, irrelevant, unwanted, they remain. If we wish to submit to the authority of Christ, we must submit to the authority of the Bible. It is logical. Christ submitted to the Scriptures. We submit to Christ.

Therefore, we submit to the Scriptures. Derek Thomas, in a wonderfully helpful little book on this subject—and I'll stop now—but he quotes in this book from an event in 1983 regarding the national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Pittsburgh. And the convention began with a pastors' conference. The previous fall, in the suburbs of Chicago, seven people died having taken Tylenol laced with cyanide.

It set off a national panic. One speaker of the pastors' conference took out a bottle of Tylenol and said, "'If I knew there was one capsule in this bottle that was laced with cyanide, I would throw the whole bottle out.'" Then he picked up the Bible and said, "'If I knew there was one error in this book, then I'd throw the whole thing out.'" These are peculiar days, daunting days, exciting days, and we stand on the shoulders of those who've gone before. I found myself going back again to my file and was delighted to see that we had placed in there a quote from a song from 1929. It was written by a man. You will know one of his songs if you've been around for any time at all. This man wrote the little chorus, "'Thank you, Lord, for saving my soul.

Thank you, Lord, for making me whole.'" His name was Seth Sykes. He was a conductor on the Glasgow trams.

He was a very ordinary little man. His wife was called Bessie, and Seth and Bessie Sykes were evangelists in Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century. I had the privilege of hearing them speak and listening to them as they showed pilgrims progress on these big lantern slides that I alluded to a couple of Sundays ago. And going back into my files under the Bible, I found one of his classic little songs.

It goes like this. Many folks are sad and weary, and they often fret and pine. For they read what many critics have to say about the dear old Bible, blessed, holy, book divine. But for me, I've proved its worth, and I can say, I'm acquainted with the author, and I know God's Word is true. In times of grief it brings relief and tells me what to do.

Now I dearly love its pages. For I've found the rock of ages. I'm acquainted with the author, and I know it's true. That's not arrogance. That's faith. That's belief. One of the reasons God has given us his Word is so we can use it in spiritual battle.

It's a powerful weapon. Do you believe that? You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Alistair will close today's program with prayer in just a minute, so please keep listening. We were reminded in today's message that the Bible is not like any other book. God's Word is unchanging.

It's without error. And our passion at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible with clarity and relevance every day. We do this trusting that God will work in your life and in the lives of all who listen, that he will convert unbelievers, establish believers in their faith, and in the process strengthen local churches.

When you give to Truth for Life, that's the mission you're helping support. And today, when you donate a gift of any amount, we want to invite you to request a book we're recommending, it's an excellent supplement to Alistair's teaching on spiritual warfare. It's called Our Ancient Foe, Satan's History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise. We've been hearing Alistair talk about the protective equipment that God has given us to guard against the attacks of the evil one.

But how well do we know our enemy? And do we take the threat of spiritual warfare seriously? The book Our Ancient Foe unpacks the danger, the real danger, that Satan poses.

The contributing authors are a group of pastors and scholars. They make it clear in this book why we need to be diligent in protecting ourselves from a ruthless adversary. The Bible speaks clearly about who Satan is, about how he works, and yet so many people take this far too lightly. You'll find that this book, Our Ancient Foe, helps you better understand that the devil is a powerful force. You'll also learn how to rely on the power of Christ to withstand his attacks. The truth is, we'll struggle against evil as long as we're in this world.

So the more we know about the devil's tactics, the better we can safeguard ourselves against his lies. Be sure to request your copy of the book Our Ancient Foe when you give to support the mission of Truth for Life. Simply visit our website truthforlife.org slash donate or call us at 888-588-7884. And if you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book Our Ancient Foe, you can write to Truth for Life at P.O.

Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. Now let's join Alistair as he closes with prayer. Father, thank you for the Bible. Thank you that you equip us as soldiers in your army. Thank you that the lessons that we're given are to be heard and acted on as a company, that we're not solo in this endeavor, that we're not on our own. We're not supposed to be on our own. We're better together. And whether it is in holding up the shield of faith or helping one another get on the shoes of the readiness of the gospel of peace, or whether reminding one another, Don't leave your sword now.

Make sure you have it by your side. Lord, help us with these things, we pray. Give us a heart of compassion when we have to say things that run counter to the thought forms of our culture. Give us wisdom and grace in a boldness that is at the same time winsome. Remind us that our words are to be full of grace and seasoned with salt. Give to us something of the kindness and compassion of the Lord Jesus himself, who was particularly willing to make space and time and extend the story of his mercy to those who were most in need. We thank you that you have made us part of the company that runs from age to age until finally we're gathered into your presence. We bless your name, Lord Jesus. Amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. You sometimes feel as if you're alone in the midst of the spiritual battle we face. Tomorrow we'll learn why we're never alone when we employ one of the crucial weapons God has given us for the fight. Find out what that weapon is and why it's absolutely necessary. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.