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Jun 12, 2011

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

Passage: Ephesians 6:17

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Ephesians 4-6: Invading Enemy Territory

Category: Ephesians

Keywords: salvation, word of god, helmet, sword, defense, offense, war, battles

Summary:

Salvation according to the Scriptures is much bigger than just "getting saved" or being born again. It's a life-long experience of God's saving work in us. So is the helmet of salvation. This message looks at why understanding salvation as a past, present and future thing is critical to the spiritual battle as well as how the Word of God is both a defensive and the only offensive weapon in our spiritual armor.

Detail:

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

Ephesians 6:17

June 12, 2011

INTRO:

Do you know how long America has not been at war over the past decade?  3 months!  2.5%!  For a solid decade our sons, husbands, brothers, fathers, neighbors and friends have been dying every month in a war against the Taliban. 

      It’s so easy to forget that we’re at war, isn’t it?  Until it is someone you know and love who is killed or maimed.  Then there is never a day that goes by but you don’t think about them and, in some way, about the war. 

      War is not a pleasant thing, but it is, in a world where evil is never content with what it already has, a necessary and unavoidable thing.  Necessary and unavoidable IF you are a person of good, of truth and of righteousness.  Because evil will never stop declaring war on good.  And we who seek to live righteously, will be dragged into war almost daily whether we like it or not.

This is the nature of the spiritual battle we face daily too.  Evil is never content to let us live in truth, in holiness or in righteousness.  It is never satisfied to see people seeking to extend the Kingdom of God in this world.  It will always try to wound us, to sidetrack us, to ambush us and to destroy us.  That’s the nature of the spiritual battle everyone who calls themselves a follower of Christ must face every single day. 

PRAYER TIME about the Armor of God

As a way to help us “suit up” today as well as review what we’ve been studying over the past three weeks from Ephesians 6 about the armor of God, I’d like us to spend a little time talking with God about the different parts of the spiritual armor that He has granted us in Jesus Christ.  We’ll do this in prayer, some shared together by speaking prayers in unison, some done personally and privately in silence. 

The Belt of Truth: 

Heavenly Father,

      I want to live today in the profound realization of what truth really is.  I want to order my life by Your truth, by You who are Truth, not by the lies, deceptions and distortions of our culture, of the devil or of my own ideas. 

      I commit to seek out, listen to and follow the truths of Your Word for every area of my life. 

      God, please help me to think truthfully about You, and live according to your truth in everything I do and say today. 

      Please help me avoid being deceitful or deceived in any way.  May I be a person who always speaks the truth in love and is known as a person of honesty and integrity. 

      Please now reveal to me and throughout this day anything in my life where I am vulnerable to lies or deceit or have compromised my own truthfulness with myself, with You or with others.  Please open my eyes to the Truth of your Word this morning and enable me to apply it to my life properly and immediately.

Amen.

The Breastplate of Righteousness: 

Now I ask you, God, to help me realize more fully today who and what I am in Jesus Christ.  Help me to grasp and experience that I am righteous in your sight because I have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ, my Savior and Lord.  Thank you that I am fully loved and completely accepted in Jesus’ righteousness. Help me to feel and live out of that reality.

      Father, please enable and guide me to be a child of yours today who makes good, righteous and holy choices in everything.  Please search my life right now and throughout the day to expose any thoughts, words or actions I am engaged in which are not right as You define “right.” [A moment of silence before God.]

       Help me to confess these thoughts, words, actions or attitudes as sin, to turn from them and to embrace real holiness and righteousness in every part of my character and actions this day. 

      Thank you for the privilege of living out the goodness of my Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ

Amen.

Feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the Gospel of Peace: 

Father, thank you for granting me peace with you as well as peace of heart and mind that comes from you through knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. 

      I now bring to you anything in my life that is disturbing that peace.  I give those anxieties to you, and I trust in your care for me in everything in life (I Peter 5:7).  [Time of silent prayer about these things.]

       I also ask you to use me today in the lives of others to be a peacemaker who brings the gospel and peace of Christ to others.  Grant me the grace, humility and boldness to make amends wherever I have damaged or destroyed relationships.  Help me to know when and how I can help others to live at peace with people around them. 

      And I pray that whenever I have even the slightest opportunity to speak about Jesus, you will give me the right words and Scriptures to say and that may help others to make peace with You and with others.

Amen.

The Shield of Faith:  

Now, Father, I choose to take up the shield of faith by believing in you for everything I need today.  I pray that you will increase my faith in you—in your love, your power, your wisdom, your care, your provision and your protection. 

Cause me to see by faith the things you want to do today.  Help me to be faith-filled in even the small things you have given me to do.  Help me to think by faith and be a visionary for Your kingdom work in and around me today. 

Help me to remember your promises and apply them to every challenge, every person and every situation before me today. 

Please protect me from the attacks of the enemy in every area of my life – body, soul and spirit…thoughts, words and deeds. Rather than giving into discouragement or temptation of any sort, grant me faith to continue to trust You in everything and for everything.

      We pray this desiring that Jesus Christ be glorified in our lives and You be honored in this world.

Amen.

So TODAY we’re looking at two more pieces of the spiritual armor that God has issued to each of us.  They are found in Ephesians 6:17.

“Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

The Helmet of Salvation: 

It’s interesting that helmets have not always been a part of a soldiers battle equipment.  Just think back to our own Revolutionary war and Civil War.  Have you seen any drawings or pictures with men in helmets?  There were caps aplenty but not any helmets. 

      Helmets were actually first reintroduced into modern warfare in WWI.  So many troops were being killed and wounded by shrapnel to the head that they thought it might reduce the number casualties. 

      When the steel helmet was first introduced, the War Office found, to its horror, that the incidence of head injuries actually increased. Eventually the penny dropped and someone noted that the increase in injuries was caused by the reduction in fatalities - men getting dinged around the head were now getting reportable injuries instead of just being killed outright.

Speaking of injuries, can you still survive and possibly win a fight with a broken ankle?  Broken arm?  Broken rib?  Wrist?  Sure, there are lots of places in your body you can suffer an injury and keep on fighting. 

      But our heads, our brains, is one place on our bodies that we cannot afford to take an unprotected hit.  A fractured, pierced or broken skull pretty well puts you out of commission immediately and indefinitely.  That’s why helmets are so critical!

When it comes to this metaphor of the “helmet of salvation,” God is telling us why salvation is so important as a protective device for the believer in Jesus. 

      If every time Satan can, he takes a whack at your head—your thoughts about your relationship with God—and you are not convinced that you are protected by salvation in Jesus…full, free and forever…then you are going to have your bell rung way too often.  You’re going to get disoriented, doubtful and discouraged in the battle if this issue of your salvation – past, present, and future – isn’t settled.

So let’s look for a moment about what God says about “salvation” for the child of God in his word.

Past salvation – Eph. 2:8,9

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.”

The clear, plain teaching that salvation is a gift you receive, not a privilege you purchase by some level of morality or effort is made very clear by what we call the “tense” of the Greek work here.  It is a perfect passive participle—something that happened in the past that has results which continue on into the present and future.  “Passive” means that it happened to you; you didn’t make it happen to you.  You were “saved” by a work of God, not a work by you!  That’s really good news, right?

In essence God is saying, “You have been saved, and the results continue on” – perfect passive participle.

Present salvation –

Phil. 1:6 – “Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Phil. 2:12-13

12 Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.

      Notice that this does NOT say, “work for your salvation.”  It says, “Work out your salvation.”  That’s a big difference. 

  • If I tell you that I’m working for my wife’s love, then that tells you more about her than it does about me, right?  It tells you that her love is conditional, that it depends on what I do, not what she has decided or who she is.  (It may also tell you that I have done something to violate her good graces and exhaust her love, right?)
  • But if I say, “I’m working out my wife’s love in my life,” that has a wholly different connotation.  It means that Sandy must be someone who is pouring out a lot of love on me and that I’m learning how to enjoy that love in different ways in life. 

“Working out” salvation does not mean working “for it” but rather making it operational in the present.  Salvation necessarily saved us FROM something, right?  It saved us from sin, from rebellion against God, from living all those lies of sin.  Salvation in Christ so changed our lives that we now can live to God instead of self, sin and Satan.  It changed our family, our Father and our natures.  It saved us FROM something in order to save us TO something. 

ILL:  Imagine you are a child who was born into a family living in North Korea.  North Korea is one of the world’s most repressed, poverty-stricken and depressing nations of the world.  Just to give you a little perspective, between 900,000 and 3.5 million people died of starvation or hunger-related illnesses in the early-to-mid 1990s. 

In 1992, the North Korean government launched the "Let's Eat Two Meals Per Day Campaign" [There’s a winning campaign slogan!] in an attempt to cut down food consumption. By 1994, people in some remote areas could not get food for days at a time, despite being issued the usual rationing coupons. As infrastructure throughout the country was collapsing, the distribution of food was breaking down and, as a result, shops were empty.

      In fact, just this year, in 2011, during a visit to North Korea, US ex-president Jimmy Carter reported that 1/3rd of children there were malnourished and stunted in their growth because of lack of food. He also said that the North Korean state had reduced daily food intake from 1,400 calories to 700 calories in 2011(a normal food intake for a healthy European is 2,000-2,500 calories per day.

      Just imagine you are a little 6-year old kid whose parents died of starvation in N. Korea.  You got put into an orphanage where kids were dying every day.  And then, my some miracle, you find yourself on an airplane to the United States with a couple of funny, pale looking Americans, people you had been told were your enemies, out to destroy you.

      Before you knew what was happening, you were being fed 3 meals a day and snacks in between. There were whole closets of food, some that even kept it cold or frozen!  You took up residence in a beautiful home where you were given a room of your own, bigger than the room your whole family used to live in. You were loved and doted over.  People here actually smiled and laughed. And you started going to school to learn.

      Now,  as a 6 year old kid, do you know everything your adoptive parents saved you from?  No, you can’t.  But you can learn and grow in appreciation of what they saved you from IF you want to.  And every day that you enjoy food on the table, a warm home, the love of someone who didn’t have to do this for you…is one more day you get to “work out” your adoption…your salvation from unimaginable poverty, certain malnutrition and probable starvation.  You’re not paying for it.  It’s not a result of your effort or work.  But you get to experience something very few of your fellow North Korean children get to.

Friends, that is what God has done for us with salvation.  HE rescued us.  HE brought us into his family, gave us his name, gave us all the benefits of being his children.  He didn’t do it for what he gets out of it; he did it for love and what we get out of Him.

      And now he invites us to “work out our salvation.”  Who wouldn’t want to?  That’s like saying to the son or daughter of a billionaire, “Work out your family wealth!  Work out your inheritance!  Work out your privileged life!”  Who wouldn’t want to work that out? 

Then there is the Future aspect of Salvation.

I Thess. 5:8 – “Let us be self-controlled, putting on…the hope of salvation as a helmet.” 

What is this “hope” that guards our minds?

Romans 15:13
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Ephesians 1:18
“I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints….”

      There is a future aspect to our salvation that should give us a hope that transforms life today. 

ILL:  It’s one thing to say, “I hope it doesn’t rain today.”  Whether it does or doesn’t isn’t going to be terribly earth-shattering to me.  But if I say, as I did when I was courting Sandy, “I hope we live long enough to enjoy marriage together,” that was a HOPE that dominated virtually every part of my life at the time:

  • The plans I made…every day.
  • The future I dreamed about…every day.
  • The way I related to other women…every day.
  • The way I treated her…every day. 

Do you see how our salvation is not just a “been there, done that, it’s past” sort of thing?  Our salvation, according to God’s word, is something that should shape every part of every day for every one of us. 

And if we don’t put on this helmet every day, the enemy is going to be able to do untold damage to us.  We’re going to be terribly vulnerable to his attacks and somewhere along the line, we’re going to be picked off and taken out of effective service in this eternal Kingdom battle. 

Have you put on this helmet by faith in Jesus?

Are you really settled from the Scriptures that your salvation is a once-for-all, sealed-with-the-blood-of-Christ issue?  Or are you reeling with doubts every time sin gets a lick in on you?  God doesn’t intend for you to go through life that way. 

I Jn. 5:11-13-- 11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.

Are you enjoying “working out your salvation”?  Or have you been wandering away from home, living on the proverbial “streets” of another life, a life distant from Jesus?  How about deciding to come home?  How about deciding to enjoy God’s love and family and salvation for you every day instead of going back to the soul-desolation of life in the Enemy’s starving nation? 

PRAY: 

  1. To accept God’s offer of salvation in Jesus Christ.
  2. To enter into living/working out this great salvation every day but living close to the Author of that salvation, Jesus Christ.

The SWORD of the Spirit which is the Word of God

This is the only defensive as well as offensive weapon listed in the pieces of armor here. 

The Apostle John also recognized it as powerful offensively in the spiritual battle when he wrote in I John 2:14b – “I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God lives in you, and you have overcome the evil one.”  The word of God is THE most powerful weapon ever created by which we can both repel the lies of the Master Deceiver and conquer new territory in our lives and this world. 

Now, I don’t have a great deal of experience wielding a sword.  In fact, I don’t have any at all!  But, like any weapon, it takes practice.  Guns have made us lazy, but even with guns, you need some practice.  There are certain rules you need to learn if you are not to endanger yourself or fellow soldiers at your side.  Just go hunting with former Vice President, Dick Cheney, if you don’t believe me.

ILL:  I remember standing in the garage as a kid one day, unloading the 22 rifle we used to hunt gophers in the horse pasture.  (Gopher holes and horses don’t mix real well…at least if you like to keep your horse from breaking a leg.)  I had emptied the magazine, and could see the little orange tab on the end of the clip (meaning there were no more bullets in the magazine). 

            So I pulled the trigger to dry-fire it so there would be no chance of anything happening.  As I pulled the trigger, the rifle discharged a live round… right into the roof of the garage. 

            It was a metal garage so that round echoed in my ears for about 3 seconds.  I thought, “Oh no.  How am I going to tell my dad he now has a hole in the roof of his ever-so-dry garage?”  Interestingly enough, as I looked for the tell-tale hole of light in the roof, I found that the round had actually hit one of the steel girders holding up the building and hat ricocheted harmless off somewhere in the garage.  It gave me a whole new appreciation for gun safety. 

You know, the Word of God is the same.  It can serve as a powerful weapon to protect us from the constant lies of the world, the flesh and the devil.  It can give us faith to experience amazing things in Christ.  And it can also do great damage to our own souls and the lives of anyone around us if we don’t handle it properly. 

In 2 Timothy 2:15, Paul calls on Timothy to learn to “correctly handle the word of truth.”  Here’s what he says to his son in the faith:

15 Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

Too many people treat the Bible with one of two extremes. 

1.)    They look at it like a dangerous firearm.  They’ve been told that the average person can’t possibly interpret it correctly so they stay away from it altogether…and thus handicap themselves horribly in the daily spiritual battle.  

2.)    They throw the Scriptures around indiscriminately like some child waving a loaded pistol in your face, unaware of the harm that can be done if handled improperly.  They see no need to treat the Scriptures with any more care than what they give to reading the funny pages.  Consequently, they wound others and themselves from time to time by pulling promises out of context and treating the different types of scripture as if they were all a singular type of literature.  (Explain the difference between historical narrative, prophetic narrative, poetry, apocalyptic, epistolary, etc.)

Question #1:  What are you doing to learn to handle God’s Word correctly? 

Just because you’ve owned a Bible most of your life doesn’t mean you know how to use it well.  My family owned my Grandfather’s mandolin for decades and never learned to play it.  Every now and then we’d pull it out, strum the strings a few times, admire the beautiful woodworking and inlay on it…and put it back in the case unchanged.   

Let me ask YOU, what have you found most helpful in learning to correctly handle God’s word in life? 

  • BSF
  • Taking a class on “How to study the Bible.”  [Offer to teach it and see how many takers there would be!]
  • Taking notes: Memories of my Dad and his Scofield wide-margined Bible:  marked to the gills on every page.  A one-volume commentary of 40 years of sermons he’d heard, Bible conferences he’d been to, personal readings he’d done,  Bible studies he was a part of. 

Dwight L. Moody, great American evangelist of the 19th century and founder of Moody Church and Bible Institute in Chicago wrote, “I prayed for Faith, and thought that someday Faith would come down and strike me like lightening.  But Faith did not seem to come.  One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, "Now Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God."  I had closed my Bible, and prayed for Faith.  I now opened my Bible, and began to study, and Faith has been growing ever since.”  Dwight L. Moody,  Leadership, Vol. 10, no. 4.

C.H. Spurgeon  -- “I would recommend you either believe God up to the hilt, or else not to believe at all. Believe this book of God, every letter of it, or else reject it. There is no logical standing place between the two. Be satisfied with nothing less than a faith that swims in the deeps of divine revelation; a faith that paddles about the edge of the water is poor faith at best. It is little better than a dry-land faith, and is not good for much.”

      Some of you have genuine, serious questions about whether this book, the Bible, can be trusted fully.  You’re wondering, “I’ve heard there are parts of it that contradict itself? You can’t expect any book to be 100% free of errors and true.  So why should I believe that about the Bible?”  Then the logical problem becomes, “How will I know which parts are true and which are in error?  And if some part of this God-breathed book is in error, what does that say about the Author, God?  Where does that leave me in know which part to stake my life and eternity on and which part to not take seriously?” 

      Some of you really need to read some of the great scholarship out there these days about why we should believe the Bible is God-breathed and totally trustworthy. 

ILL:  I just about lost my faith over this one in college when I went to a mainline church liberal arts college where the religion department had bought into the higher criticism arguments against the Bible and saw it as their job to “educate” belief in the trustworthiness of the Bible right out of every kid.  I watched as student after student ditched their faith in God’s Word for…nothing, nothing but skepticism and doubt. 

      God used it to move me to Bible college where I found that there are equally intelligent and scholarly conservative theologians who have done the hard work in the original languages of Greek and Hebrew and have plenty of answers to the liberal critics.

Have you settled that question of the reliability of the Bible in your head and heart yet?  If we are to obey the most basic and foundational commandment of God—to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, MIND and strength—then we really need to get serious about deciding if you can stake your life on EVERY part of this book. 

EX:  We won’t send any of our kids off to college, secular or church run, without giving them the foundation they need to stand up to any Ph.D. secularists in the university classroom who is trying to belittle, degrade or undermine a rock-solid belief in the Bible as God’s word.  So we spend the money to fly them down to Colorado Springs and enroll them in Summit Ministries’ Worldview Conference that  gives them 70 hours of instruction from some of the best Christian minds in the country about how to examine and analyze the arguments they are going to hear against their Christian faith in everything from religion and philosophy to biology and sociology.   

Question #2:  What have you done to really be convinced that this Word is unlike any other, vitally important for your success and growth as a child of God?

  • Read books like Understanding the Times by David Noebel, Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, Without A Doubt by Kenneth Sample
  • Take a class on Bibliology.
  • Get into a study that deals with these issues.

Question #3:  What have you found most helpful for getting into the habit of getting into the Bible on a daily basis?  [Ask for feedback.]

  • PRAY for hunger!
  • Set a specific time every day.
  • Learn how to have a meaningful time in God’s word from someone who you respect.  [STORY of trying to help Kevin B. by going to his house at 5:30 every morning for 2 weeks.  Found his problem was the wrong time of day for him.  I couldn’t wake him by banging on his window…and when he did wake up and let me in, I couldn’t keep him awake even if I was sitting 3 feet from him.  I find I have that effect on some people! J]
  • Memorize scripture that has to do with a specific battle you are facing spiritually.   

EX?  If I’m fighting lustful looks at women, I’ll pull out a verse like Job 31:1-- “I made a covenant with my eyes, not to look lustfully at a girl.” Or Psalm 119:37—“Turn my eyes away from worthless things; preserve my life according to your word.”

If I’m fighting discouragement or depression, as verse like Psalm 42:11—“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”  Or something as short as 2 Cor. 4:8—“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair…. 

If there were any question about the importance of God’s word to fighting temptation, Jesus Christ put that to rest.  He quoted the word of God from Deuteronomy every time he was tempted by the devil in the wilderness.  (How many of us would think Deuteronomy one of the better books to memorize or study in order to overcome in the spiritual battle?)

  • Deuteronomy also tells us what Moses said to God’s people in his last words to them before he died in Deut. 32:46. “Take to heart all the words I have solemnly declared to you this day, so that you may command your children to obey carefully all the words of this law.  They are not just idle words for you – they are your life.” 

      Do we really believe that?  Or has the enemy of our souls got us deceived on that score too? 

STORY:  Hudson Taylor, founder of China Inland Mission, conquered immense hardship by daily meditation on God’s Word.  One family biographer writes, “It was not easy for Mr. Taylor , in his changeful life, to make time for prayer and Bible study, but he knew that it was vital. Well do [we] remember traveling with him month after month in northern China, by cart and wheelbarrow with the poorest of inns at night.

      Often with only one large room for collies and travelers alike, they [the Taylors] would screen off a corner for their father and another for themselves, with curtains of some sort; and then, after sleep at last had brought a measure of quiet, they would hear a match struck and see the flicker of candlelight which told that Mr. Taylor, however weary, was poring over the little Bible in two volumes always at hand.  From 2-4 a.m. was the time he usually gave to prayer: the time he could be most sure of being undisturbed to wait upon God.”  Kent Hughs’ commentary on Ephesians, p. 245.

CLOSE: 

The Sword of the Spirit:  I gratefully receive the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, today.  As I read it, please give me understanding so that I may grasp it firmly, apply it personally and obey it fully.  Fill my heart and mind with its truth.  Help me to meditate throughout the day on the things you reveal to me in your Word.  Whenever I face any temptation, bring your Word to my conscious thoughts that will enable me to have victory over the world, the flesh and the devil.  Thank you for the power of your Word.

Amen.