The Daily Blade, hosted by Pastor Joby Martin of the Church of Eleven22 and Kyle Thompson of Undaunted.Life, is a short-form devotional show that equips Christians to apply the Word of God to their everyday lives.
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#430 - Joby Martin // Stop Calling Surrender A Struggle
•Season 1•Episode 430
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We open Philippians 1:27-30 and make the case that “standing firm” means we wake up to a real spiritual war. We challenge men to stop calling failure a struggle, bring sin into the light through confession, and fight side by side with brothers who will hold the line. • Philippians 1:27 as a call to live worthy of the gospel • standing firm as active spiritual warfare against the devil’s schemes • the difference between struggling and surrendering with guilt • Spirit-powered fighting for real victory over sin • confession and honesty as the path to healing from James 5 • refusing isolation by building foxhole brotherhood • Ephesians 6 as an army image with shields linked together Before you go, if you want to help equip other men for the fight, share this podcast around and leave us a five star rating and review. Stay sharp.
Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the Spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.
All right, welcome back to day two of the Daily Blade as we continue to track through Philippians chapter one. I'm going to read 27 to 30, and then we're going to come back and unpack a part of a verse. Verse 27 says, Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you, that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation and that from God. For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him, but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had, and now hear that I still have. All right, we're going to do the second half of verse 27. All of 27 says, Only that your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, here's what Paul wants for you, and he wants for the people of the church of Philippi. He says, So that I may hear of you, that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind, striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.
To stand firm means to fight, because you and I were born into a battlefield. That every day we don't just wake up and go to work, we wake up in a war. It is a struggle. And to stand firm means to fight against the devil and his evil schemes. It means to stand up, to stand your ground, to take a stand. Because, men, we have an enemy and he's a thief, and the only thing he wants to do is kill and steal and destroy. And just because our battle is spiritual, it does not mean it's not actual. And I want to ask you a lot of men will say to me, they say this to Kyle too, man, I'm really struggling. Like I'm struggling with porn, I'm struggling with pride, I'm struggling with alcohol. Let me ask you, are you actually struggling? Because to struggle means that you're warring against the thing. What I have seen over and over and over is a bunch of people just give yourselves over to the lust of the flesh and then feel guilty about it, and you call failure a struggle. Well, if you are in Christ, then Christ is in you, and the power of the Spirit of God that brought Jesus out of the grave lives on the inside of you. So fight. Because if you would actually struggle, if you'd actually fight more, you would
see a lot more victory. A part of the way that we struggle, a part of the way that we fight is James chapter 5 says, confess your sins to one another that you may be healed. You see, if you fight the devil in the dark, you're always going to get your tail kicked. And if you want to be free, you got to learn to be honest. And oftentimes we take these things that we fail in and we're ashamed of them, so we hide them away in the dark. We create distance between us and God, and we think that once we get our act together, then we can re-enter community and re-enter fellowship with God. That's dumb. What we're supposed to do is drag that thing into the light and confess it to one another and say, brother, I need your help. Would you help me with this? Would you pray for me? And in light of this, Paul says that I want to hear that you are fighting or standing firm in one spirit
with one mind. Check this out, striving side by side for the faith of the gospel. You see, the reality is that we need each other. So guess what? I'm gonna talk about it again. You need Mac Carriers in your life. You need foxhole brothers in your life. We talk about it all the time because the Bible talks about it all the time. I want you just to see how much the scripture talks about the reality that we are in this thing together. In Ephesians chapter 6, which is the preeminent text on how to fight against the devil and his evil schemes, when it talks about putting on the full armor of God, it's not talking about dressing an individual soldier. It's talking about dressing an army that would fight side by side together. There is no backplate in the army of God because we are never to turn and run, but we are to fight side by side with our brothers, linking our shields of faith together, bearing one another's burdens. That we are to link these things together. We've talked about this before, like a phalanx, like the lines of armies that you see in movies like the 300. And when they would put men like that to war, they would put them together as family groups. So if I was going to war, my dad, Perry Martin, would be on my right, my son Joseph Perry Martin IV would be on my left. My brother Russ would be beside him. My brother-in-law Justin would be next to him because I know that if the enemy took one of my family members down, there's no way I would turn and run. But I would give my life side by side to fight with my dad, my brother, my son, my brother-in-law. So do you have those kind of men in your life? It is my hope and my prayer that you would fight against the devil and his evil schemes, striving side by side with brothers, Matt Carriers, Foxhole Brothers, Kingstable, whatever you want to call them, that you would have a band of brothers around you to fight for the faith of the gospel.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Before you go, if you want to help equip other men for the fight, share this podcast around and leave us a five star rating and review. Stay sharp.
