Spiritual Hand-to-Hand Combat

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God is Government called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ's teaching of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting Scripture, but Scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today's focused discussion will be spiritual hand-to-hand combat. Now remember, you're going into hand-to-hand combat. You don't want your dress blowing around in the breeze. Somebody grabs it, pulls it over your head, yaha, and it's over. You can't you can't get into hand-to-hand mortal combat with your dress blowing around, catching the bushes, getting in the way of my sword out of this thing. Not going to work. They need to run fast. They need to move with alacrity, dexterity, speed, had to pull in all the loose ends, or they would be an easy mark for the enemy. This speaks of preparedness. This speaks of readiness. This speaks of alertness. A soldier needed a sash. Might be made of leather on some occasions, or some kind of material to pull everything together, pull up the robe if it was at all long, tuck it in, so that he could move with speed, and no one would get an advantage of him. Also, that sash would be a place to which he might attach his weapons, supporting a sword or a bow, some arrows. That sash would also have some identification marks on it, maybe indicating what battles he had fought, what battles he had won, whether or not he had been awarded a decoration of honor for his heroism. So it became really the emblem of battle. When you put your sash on, you were going to battle. It marked you for battle. It's where your weapons were, it's where your medals were. More importantly, it's where you declared that you were pulling in all your loose ends because you were headed for mortal combat. It's a fitting combination of things, because that's exactly what the Apostle Paul wants us to understand: that you're never going to win the spiritual battle unless you really get ready for it. This is preparedness. This is what I read you earlier, 1 Peter 1, 13 and 14. Gird up your loins, pull in all the loose ends of your life. Now, the identification of this is it is the belt of truth, or Alithea. You could say, that's content, and you would be true. You would be right. Alethea can refer to truth, and surely that's an important element of it. We need to be committed to the truth. But it's more than just the content, because later on, there's another piece of armor called the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. So we're not so much talking about the fact that we go to war wielding the word of God here, as we are talking about Alithea, not as truth, content, but as truthfulness, attitude. In other words, it is that we are seriously committed to the battle. Because we believe the truth, because we love the truth, we go to war for the truth. We pull in all the loose ends. This is sincerity, if you will, truthfulness, integrity, true dedication. It is not so much content as it is commitment. Attitude is the real issue here. We have a heart for the battle. We're not out there unprepared. We've got all the loose ends pulled together. We've put on the sash that holds our weapons and marks us as soldiers. We have a heart for battle. We've counted the cost. Like Jesus said, you don't go to war unless you count the cost. The true Christian loves the truth and is ready to fight for the truth. We will earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. We'll go to battle for the truth, but we'll go to battle truly for our own spiritual protection. We're not talking so much, remember now, about advancing the gospel here as we are about defending ourselves against Satan. And you will never, my friend, you will never win the spiritual battles that come day by day against your formidable enemy, unless you are seriously committed to that victory. If you're just going to flop your way through your Christian experience, you will be a consistent loser. If you're content with all the loose ends of your life, all the little sins, if you're content with your infrequent interest in prayer, your infrequent interest in worship, your indifference toward great spiritual truth, if you're content with your small understanding of the greatness of God, if you're content with the sins in your life, you are an encumbered soldier, ill-prepared for the battle, get ready to be defeated. To borrow the language of Hebrews 12, another metaphor altogether, if you're going to run the race, you have to lay aside the weights that encumber you. You don't see somebody going to run the hundred-meter sprint with an overcoat. You get rid of what encumbers you. That's exactly what the Apostle Paul is saying. He's looking for that sincere kind of commitment. Seneseri is a Latin term without wax. That's what it means, without wax. Where does that come from? When they made pots in those days, they would bake a pot. Sometimes when you bake a pot, it cracks. A pot cracked couldn't be sold, but unscrupulous people would take wax and they would fill the crack, cover the crack, paint over the wax, sell the pot. The first time somebody put it on the stove, put something in it, the wax melted, and everything ran out the crack. But somebody who is sincere has no covered cracks. They don't melt and become useless when the heat is on. And of course, Jesus is a perfect model of this, and Paul follows his example. And Paul is such a great model of going to battle in a mode of a soldier ready to resist whatever comes his way. He says to the Corinthians this my conscience is clear, 2 Corinthians 1.12. I know that in godly sincerity and spiritual integrity I've lived before you. That's so important. He says, I have renounced a hidden life of shame. Same book, fourth chapter. How badly do you want to win? That's the question. I'm convinced actually that most Christians lose the spiritual battles as they go through life, because they really don't care that much about winning them. Doesn't matter to them that much. For some people, life is just like that. Or it just didn't feel like running. If you're indifferent about the spiritual battle, believe me, you're going to lose it. And you're going to live in the doldrums, and you're going to waste the opportunity for an eternal reward, for usefulness, for joy, and blessedness. When a believer is committed to being a soldier, to borrow the words of Paul, wonderful words, you will remember them. 2 Timothy chapter 2. Suffer hardship with me as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. See your whole life as a soldier. You know, when you go into the military, you don't come and say, Look, we want you to come and be a soldier for the United States Army. Could you work it into your week? You know, if you could, we'd like you to be here every day for a while. Are you kidding me? And by the way, when you come, we'd like you to wear the uniform we give you. Would that be okay? Are you kidding? When you go into the military, they own you 24 hours a day for the duration of your involvement. You are a soldier, and you are nothing but a soldier. That's all you are, and you are nothing more, and you are nothing less. And that's how it is in this spiritual struggle. You strap it on, you gird it up, you pull it together, you go to battle because that's who you are. You are a soldier and you are engaged in a war. Committed to obedience, committed to fight the enemy in the power of Christ. Commitment at any cost. Let me talk about a second piece of armor here, and that would be in verse 14 as well. And having put on the breastplate of righteousness, the breastplate of righteousness. Dedication is important. Dedication is essential, commitment is vital, it is necessary, but it has to be backed up by the breastplate of righteousness. It would be nice if you were a Roman soldier, and you got your belt on, and you pulled all the corners up, and you got your mini tunic going, and there's no loose ends, you're serious, you're committed, but you just can't run into battle unless you put one other thing on, for sure, and that's the breastplate. It's hard to distinguish relative importance of these various pieces of armor, so I don't even want to do that. We may be seeing them simply in the order that a soldier would put them on. But maybe that's not even necessarily true, because it would be hard if you already had your breastplate on, to put your sandals on. So it would seem to me that probably your sandals went on after you got your tunic organized, or even maybe before. So we're not looking at priorities or sequences. These are all essentially and equally necessary. But there's something about the breastplate of righteousness that is really, really important, because the breastplate covers the most vulnerable part of the soldier's body. Sometimes a Roman soldier had a breastplate made of very heavy linen, to which were attached overlapping pieces, sometimes of iron, and sometimes of shell or horn, but more often it was apparently made of metal, sometimes woven chain metal, which would be very, very heavy. Sometimes the woven chain metal was linked together with rings of metal, and sometimes it was a thin pounded plate of metal. And we've seen that, haven't we? We really don't know what kind of man is behind that big molded metal Roman breastplate. No Roman soldier would have thought of going into battle without his vital organs protected. You can take a shot in the thigh, you can take a shot in the arm, you can take a shot in the shoulder. But you get one here, and that's serious. Protect your vital organs. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of spiritual hand-to-hand combat. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way.