Reources For Gaining Spiritual War VIctory

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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 resources for gaining spiritual war victory. I want for our morning devotion to read to you verses thirteen to seventeen, Ephesians 6 13-17. Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girded about with truthfulness, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the readiness of the gospel of peace. On top of all that, taking the shield of faith, with which ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one, and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Now in that tremendous passage we have Paul presenting to us the resources for gaining the victory in the Christian life, at least as far as the battle with Satan and his demons is concerned. Now, we've been studying this for many weeks, and I want just briefly to introduce it, because we've introduced it so many times, and then go right on. But I was thinking this week how it may seem strange to some of you who've been studying this with us, that in an epistle like Ephesians, which gives to us the greatest unfolding of the believers' privileges, we would also have this tremendous issue of Christian conflict. In an epistle where, frankly, for five chapters we are dealing in the grandiose glories of the heavenlies, we all of a sudden wind up dealing with hell in chapter six. In chapter three, we sort of gloried in the testimony to the angels, and in chapter six we run right into the demons. In chapter one, we were seeing the tremendous majesty and power of God as he unfolded his eternal plan, and in chapter six we face the ugliness of the monstrosity of Satan. And so it is a book of ultimate contrasts. It begins in the heavenlies and it ends in dealing with hell. It begins with the angels and ends with the demons. It begins with God and climaxes in antagonistic results that are brought to bear upon God's work by Satan. It begins with high and wholly inestimable privilege and ends with a conflict against sin that seeks to take away the privileges. So it's a book of contrast, ultimate contrast. And I guess we could say again, the greater the privilege, the greater the conflict. The greater the reality of our belonging to the kingdom of God, the more obvious is going to be Satan's attack as he tries to dethrone Christ. Spiritual privileges always lead to conflict with the enemy, and we've seen that. And so, after having said all that Paul has said about the believer's position and practice, after extolling all of the blessedness of being blessed with all spiritual blessings, after giving to us all the resources and all of the functions of a believer through the end of chapter five and on into chapter six, he now says, get ready for a conflict, because it will not be easy. You will be withstood, you will be sidetracked, you will be attacked, you will be thwarted at every possible angle where Satan can succeed. Now, remember this also, that the Bible discusses the Christian life's conflict in three dimensions. In Galatians chapter 5, for example, there is a conflict seen in the life of a believer between the flesh and the spirit. In John chapter 15, there is a conflict seen in the life of a believer between the Christian and the world. And really, Paul is not zeroing in either here on the world or the flesh, but he is zeroing here on the conflict between the believer and the demon hosts themselves. Now, you can't really extricate them from the other two, because they will work through the world and the flesh. But he gets to the core of the matter here. How does a believer live this life in victory with the tremendous amount of opposition that he's going to get from what verse eleven calls the wiles of the devil, and what verse twelve calls principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, and wicked spirits in high places? How can we really gain the victory in this very sophisticated warfare? Well, if you go back a little bit, let me just give you some basics. Back in chapter 3, verse 20, we have a great truth. This is the summation of the first three chapters. Because of all that Christ has done for us, because of all that is really involved in being in Christ, now unto him who is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us. This is the sum of the believer's position. We have the power, we have the resource needed. Therefore, chapter 4, verse 1, because the power is there to glorify God, because the power is there, we are to walk worthy. In other words, we have the resource, and we're to walk worthy. The key to that, chapter 5, verse 18. How do you tap the power to walk worthy? Be not drunk with wine in which is a sortia, but be filled with the Spirit. We have the resource, which makes us responsible to walk in the right way. We tap the resource through the filling of the Spirit. You shall receive power after the Spirit is come upon you, said our Lord. And when we tap that power, we will be victorious. Now, when you come to chapter six, there's really nothing to fear, you see. The power is there, therefore the command is there, and the resource to tap that power in the Spirit of God resident in the life of every Christian. And so we can go into the army and right into the war with a sense of accomplishment and victory at hand. But that doesn't mean the battle is going to be easy, does it? I mean we all struggle. The battle goes on and on, and it's just relentless. Some of us are winning and some of us are losing. And maybe some of you are sort of in the lull right now, and you're not winning or losing. But that's the way it'll be, as long as you live in this world. The battle will go on and on and on. And I think as you grow in Christ, as you feed on the word, and as you mature, what happens is you begin to win more than you lose. And then the percentage of winning gets higher and higher. But everybody experiences the victories, and everybody experiences the defeats in the battle. We have all been in the battle in some form or another. He's been in the battle, so have you, and so have I. And being victorious in the battle is a matter of putting on the armor, isn't it? Let's go back to the armor in verse fourteen and following and see what the Spirit of God would say to us today. And as I say, we started out to do an expository study. I remember about eight years ago when I taught Ephesians, we did the armor in two weeks, and now it's taking us about eight to ten. But we went back in the last few weeks and looked over these tremendous pieces of armor, and found ourselves opening up such a treasury of truth that we stuck with one at a time, and we'll do that even for the fifth one, today and next week. But remember first of all, in verse fourteen, stand therefore having your loins girded about with truthfulness. And we discussed that what the Apostle Paul is talking about here is not so much content that comes in the last piece of armor, the Word of God. It's not so much the content as it is the attitude, and he's using Alithea in the sense of an attitude of truthfulness, or commitment, or no hypocrisy. In other words, you're girding up your loins, the old Jewish expression meaning readiness, anticipation. A soldier is ready for the battle, he's made his commitment, he's joined the army, he's girded his loins, and he's going to be a winner. And we saw how important it is, if we're going to win the victory, to make the commitment to victory from the very beginning. Secondly, we saw in verse 14 the breastplate of righteousness, and we said that another thing that must arm the Christian is his own purity of life, righteousness, holiness, practical righteousness. We all have received imputed righteousness from Christ. That's the basis of our own righteousness, but we must maintain a pure life, or Satan will get us in the vital areas. We protect our vital areas by righteousness, lest Satan should get an advantage of us. And then thirdly, we saw that we are to have our feet shod with the readiness or the preparation of the gospel of peace. And the idea here is that the gospel of peace is the good news that we're at peace with God. We were enemies, we fought against God, we were on the other side, but the gospel is peace with God. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God, and the shoes that allow us to stand firm against Satan are simply made of the fact that God is on our side. We can resist anything with his resource available, and so we stand, with our feet shod, made ready by the fact that God's on our side. In other words, this is what you keep on all the time, and then when the battle gets really hot, you pick up the rest, and the verb changes in verse 16 to taking, and verse 17 take the helmet. And a soldier would have his breastplate secured on, he would have his shoes secured on, he would have his belt secured on, and when the battle got hot, he would grab his helmet, pull it on, take his sword, and take up his shield. And so it's as if these add that kind of immediate preparation for when the arrows really begin to fly. And so we moved into verse 16 last time and discussed, on top of everything else, we take the shield of faith, with which you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. We talked about how Satan wants to shoot his arrows of temptation, and the only way we can quench those is with faith. In other words, whenever you sin, you have believed the devil's lie, right? You've bought his bill, you've let him succour you. But as long as you believe God's word, you will not believe Satan. And so the shield is faith. As long as I believe God, God says, Don't do this and you'll be blessed. God says, Do what I tell you, and you'll be blessed. Do what I tell you and you'll be happy. Do what I tell you, and everything will be well with you. Do what I tell you, and it'll be fulfillment. Satan comes along and says, Do this and you'll like it. God won't care, he won't chasten you, or go ahead and do it. It's fun. Who do you believe? You believe Satan, you sin, you believe God, you don't. It's that simple. The shield of faith. Now for this morning we want to go on to the fifth piece of armor, tremendous, tremendous truth in verse 17. And take the helmet of salvation. That's all it says about it, and yet I can't even finish talking about it this morning. I'm gonna have to keep it off till next week, too. You say, what is there in that? The helmet of salvation, that's easy. Being saved. No, not that. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of resources for gaining spiritual war victory. 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.