Good morning. Greetings from Bolivia. You know, you probably can't imagine what it's like to be running around in Bolivia one day, dodging potholes and pigs in the road, and suddenly to be back in Blacksburg, this wonderful city, and to see all the familiar sights and sounds and friends in Christ. More importantly, friends in Christ who have helped us get to Bolivia, help us stay there with their support and your prayers, and I'll certainly mention the aspect of prayer again today in my message. We really, really appreciate all that you do to support us in the field. And your prayers have done great things. We want to share a little bit about what God has done through your prayers at the lunch hour at the potluck, so we hope as many of you can come as possible. We'd love to show you some neat photos of what's going on with our work as Mary continues to work in rural animal health and as I work in the area of Christian microfinance and how we, by God's grace, are using those ministries to also lift up the name of Jesus to meet spiritual as well as physical needs. Right now we're going to turn to God's Word. I'm going to turn to Matthew chapter 6, if you want to read along with me. I'll be reading through lots of passages this morning, and a couple of times I'll stop and give you a chance to follow along. This is one that I'll do that. Otherwise, you can just sit back and trust that I'm reading from God's Word. You know, I got a number of great comments this morning from my sermon. However, there was only one of them about the content. The rest of them were about how short it was, and they seemed to really appreciate that fact. So don't worry, I won't keep you here that long today. I have kind of a short attention span myself, and I assume others do as well. But we've got some neat stuff, just a couple of points. In fact, it's a two-point sermon as opposed to a three-point sermon, but hopefully we'll get the two points down before it's all over with. Matthew 6, starting in verse 9. I'm reading from the New International Version. This, then, is how you should pray. our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors. And a verse in which I'd like us to focus this morning. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. I'd like us to look at this last part of the Lord's Prayer this morning, this command by the Lord to pray for protection, this command and advice to pray for protection against temptation and against the evil one. Will you first join me in prayer? Father God, we ask for your grace, for open ears, for open hearts. Father, we pray for conviction from the Holy Spirit and for a speaker yielded to you. one who will speak your truth this morning, and we ask all this in the powerful and blessed name of Jesus. Amen. We want to be reminded this morning of a fact that we Christians live and minister in the midst of a battle, a spiritual battle, a battle in which our children, our marriages, our church, and the souls of men and women and young people yet to know Jesus are all at risk. Spiritual warfare is a very broad topic, and I've already told you I've got some positive comments about having a short sermon, so I'm obviously not going to cover this topic real thoroughly today, just to touch the interest and to supply, hopefully, some motivation to dig into this a little bit deeper. In fact, it's just a topic I'm learning a lot about right now. I'm just a lay person. I'm a banker turned missionary who's trying to serve Christ in Bolivia with my family, In the context of that service, we are learning a lot about spiritual battle, things that we had not thought about in our culture here. The two main things I want to point out is, one, it is to our peril if we ignore spiritual warfare, and two, we need to obey Jesus to engage in the battle in the form of prayer. If you've been called by God to faith in Christ, then you are forever blessed and your eternity with God is secured by him. However, for whatever time you or I have on this earth, we need to be reminded that Scripture teaches us that we've been drafted, really, drafted as participants in a great spiritual battle for souls of men and women, proclaiming turf for the kingdom of God until either your death or until the Lord's return, whichever comes first. You know, in America, outside of our church, this topic or the reality of spiritual darkness is essentially ridiculed. And even within our own evangelical circles, Christ's clear teaching on the subject are often overlooked. We're a little bit uncomfortable with the subject or we sort of pass over it. We seem to be embarrassed with the idea of spiritual warfare. The idea that it would be part of our doctrine makes us feel a little unsophisticated, maybe a little unscientific, a little bit maybe associated with those Puritans in the Salem witch trial. We want to kind of back away from that. And so it's a subject that which we we don't focus on too often. But we want to this morning. Because the facts are clear from the Bible, the facts are clear that we are all commissioned by Jesus to be his ambassadors. And this is to be ambassadors in enemy territory, not friendly territory. The fact is that Satan is real. That his angels known as demons are also real. and that we are opposed by them in every aspect of our sanctification and every aspect of our ministry and work. So Christian, your role in spiritual warfare is not an option. You don't get to choose. It's just a clear fact presented to us in the Bible, whether we like it or not. So let's take a look. Now, before we can think about how our lives personally or our ministries might be affected as a part of spiritual warfare, it's great to first look, of course, and our Lord Jesus Christ and clearly see how his ministry was defined really in the Bible as a as a ministry that involved was all circled around spiritual warfare. Let's look at Christ's ministry in the light of spiritual warfare. Matthew, Mark and Luke all begin Jesus' ministry with the discussion of temptation of Satan. This is not a general evil. This is a personified Satan, who was tempting Jesus. There was dialogue going on in this situation. And throughout these three Gospels, particularly, there are many, many cases where Jesus not only heals, but he confronts demons. He casts them out. I'm going to read one such reference we find in Luke chapter 4. In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an evil spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice, What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God. Be quiet, Jesus said sternly. Come out of him." Then the demon threw the man down before them all, and came out without injuring him. All the people were amazed, and they said to each other, What is this teaching? With authority and power, he gives orders to evil spirits, and they come out. For Jesus had said, Come out of this man, you evil spirit. If you might remember the story where Jesus sent out the seventy-two to do ministry, and then they came back rejoicing. And we see in Luke ten, the seventy-two returned with joy and they said, Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name. He replied, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. and I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions, and to overcome all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the Spirit submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." How did Jesus' disciples refer to him in his ministry in the light of spiritual warfare? Acts chapter 10, remember Peter's great sermon in Acts, filled with the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem. as a part of his message, Peter says this, You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. You know what has happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee, after the baptism that John preached, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him. Since the children have flesh and blood, he, meaning Jesus, shared in their humanity, so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. The Apostle John writes in 1 John 3, He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work. I'll read that again, 1 John 3 verse 8. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work. I read an interesting article recently by a gentleman named Greg Boyd, the title of the article was God at War, and in this article Boyd says Almost everything that Jesus and the early church are about is colored by the central conviction that the world is caught up in a crossfire, a crossfire of a cosmic battle between the Lord and his angelic army and Satan and his demonic army. If we had more time, we could make this point even more strongly, but the point is this, that there was something that Jesus came to save us from. He didn't arrive in a neutral world just to visit us and to bless us. He came to a world that was oppressed by Satan. He came with a mission to defeat an enemy and to save us from that oppression. His ministry was all about breaking the power of Satan. In any reasonable reading of Scripture, you really can't separate Jesus' teaching, his healing, with the fact that he was confronting a personified Satan and his demons that are in opposition to the work of God and in opposition to his saints. You know, you've heard the argument sometimes people say, you know, I believe that Jesus was a great guy. I think it's really good to follow his teachings, but I can't really follow him as God. I think that's getting a little too far, but his teachings are really good stuff. You've also heard good, strong Christians confront this kind of argument by pointing out, you know, it's impossible to separate the deity of Jesus from his teachings. If you really read the scripture honestly. His deity, his actions, his statements about himself are intertwined in his teachings. And in the same light, it is very difficult to read through the Gospels and take away Jesus's ministry of casting out demons, of confronting Satan, of teaching about evil in this world. It's part of what Jesus was all about. Well, if the focus of our Lord was all about overcoming Satan's grip on mankind, then it only makes sense that those of us who are called by God to carry out the Great Commission until his return are also going to carry out our work in the context of this battle. Now, there's an important caveat here. There's war and there's battle. The great news here is that the war has already been won. Praise God, the war has been won. Jesus dealt Satan a knockout blow with his death on the cross, and he died for our sins. So Satan is already knocked. You can think about it, a fight, a slow-motion fight. The blow has been delivered. The opponent is falling down. But Satan wants to take as many people with him as possible. He wants to destroy as many things as possible until Jesus' return. The Lord is yet to return, and when he does, the final judgment will occur. But in the meantime, we find that we still have what I might call a series of cleaning-up operations. The victory is in hand, but there is a very feisty and deadly enemy that is still bitterly fighting for territory, and we are called by God to finish the work. And until God comes, until Jesus comes, We've got a mandate to make the Great Commission known, we've got a mandate to serve the Lord, and we've got a mandate to do it in the midst of spiritual battle. There's a great passage of Ephesians 6, you've all heard it before, but it's a classic and it's a strong, strong ammunition. Jesus is trying to tell us to do something very strongly here. He's telling us to put on the full armor of God. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore, put on the full armor of God, that when the day of evil comes, you'll be able to stand your ground, and after you've done everything, to stand." Well, despite the clear spiritual support that Jesus's ministry was in the context of spiritual battle, and indeed ours is as well, it's very difficult for us to believe this in our culture. One benefit of being in Bolivia is that we see more manifestations of the spiritual battle. We see where a president decides to, instead of putting his hand on the Bible at inauguration, He does a blood sacrifice of llama blood and gives honor to the Andean spirits and gods. And we see people buying llama fetuses in the markets to dig and bury before they do any kind of construction work. We see just a more clear manifestation of spiritual issues of darkness than we do here. But can you imagine a soldier who's drafted in the war who doesn't believe there's an enemy? How well is that soldier going to perform on the field? He's going to get his clocks clean, isn't he, if he doesn't believe that there is an enemy to fight? Well, I want to demonstrate this graphically by a couple of images up on the screen. What I think is the state of our country and many believers with respect to their recognition or lack thereof of spiritual warfare. Now I'm going to turn, being a very deep theologian that I am, I'm going to turn to the talented cartoonist Gary Larson and The Far Side. This was borrowed from my daughter and son's a library collection of Farside Comics. OK, here we go. OK, the first image is a Viking ship. Now, as you all know, in Viking ships, you have a cruel taskmaster who's got a whip and he's ready to whip anybody who's out of line. And you've also got a lot of slaves out there working really hard. You can tell they've had a long life of abuse and hard labor. And they're working away here. But there's something a little out of whack here in the background. You've got this skinny little wimpy guy back there and he's got his hands raised and he's saying, you know, oh, you know, I'm getting a blister. Well, why is that funny? It's funny to me anyway, because one of the great things that Larson does is he he puts us in a position to understand what's going on. We know the situation. We know what Viking ships are like. We know they're cruel taskmasters and they're getting whipped. We know that it is a bad situation. And we can probably anticipate anyway, when somebody says, I've got a blister, it's not going to be received all that well. Okay. Now, who knows how this guy got on the ship? You might think about it. Maybe he bought a ticket on a carnival cruise to the Caribbean and just kind of got on the wrong dock or something like that. And he's been paddling away for a couple hours and it's starting to blister up a little bit. He, he's trying to make his needs known. Well, we understand he's not in a good situation, but he doesn't. And that's exactly where the American church often sits with regard to spiritual warfare. We don't have a clue that it's going on. There is darkness around us. There is spiritual opposition. The Bible tells us it's true. We just can't focus on it because it's not material. We're in the same position that this little wimpy rower is. Okay, I've got to try one more cartoon. It's a little darker in its humor. I thought it was real funny, but here we go. This is called Caveman Basketball. Okay, so here we have a scene. You guys are way ahead of me, I can't really describe it. For those of you who are listening on tape, what we have here is caveman basketball, and everybody knows when the cavemen get together on Saturday to shoot hoops, they gather together and they're really anxious to play. But on this particular morning, the leader says, Oh great, no one brought ball, now what we do? Well, it turns out there happens to be one caveman with, like, the most perfect basketball-shaped head that you can possibly imagine. And thus the title, The Birth of Headhunting. Well, there are people with dark-sense humor like me that really laugh at this, and we laugh because we understand the situation. We know when cavemen gather to play basketball, they're ready to go. And if somebody didn't bring the ball, they're looking for the quickest solution, right? And this fellow, we'll call him Grog, okay, for lack of another name. Grog doesn't quite figure out that he's in big trouble. Maybe the mirror hasn't been invented yet, right? And he doesn't realize what uses his head could play. It's really an awful thought, but it's perfect an example of spiritual warfare because men and women, the American church often is like Grog. We are in the midst of a caveman basketball game. We've got heads just like basketballs and we're in trouble if we don't wake up and realize that we need to either get our clubs ready to defend ourselves or get the heck off of this court, we are in big trouble. So hopefully that helps you. I've got those two in my office in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to remind me that I am in the midst of spiritual warfare. There's a great verse in Hosea chapter 4 verse 6, and it's God is saying to the nation of Israel through the prophet the following, My people are destroyed from a lack of knowledge. My people are destroyed by a lack of knowledge. I think the same can apply to us. Without the knowledge of spiritual warfare, we are at risk in our walks for an effective walk with the Lord. So point number one, two points, we're halfway there already. Point number one, we need to be more aware of spiritual warfare. As dramatic as this may sound, I think we really need none other than a change in our entire perspective on life. It sounds like a big thing, but it is, as we live it under the Lordship of Jesus. Too often, I'm afraid, we have viewed the Christian life as something like a theme park. Now, this is how I think I thought of the Christian life for many years, that it's like The grace of Jesus is like getting a great ticket to Disney World with all the parks included in it. It's definitely God's grace, right? We have nothing to do with it. Jesus gives us the gift. We get the free ticket. We enter. Now we're in the theme park. It's a great time. There's lots of rides and things to do. Now we realize we've got to obey the rules. We've got to stand in line. We probably shouldn't throw trash around and things like that. So there are things that are expected of us. But it's a great theme park, you know, and it's great. The Christian life. Thank you, God, for giving us this theme park to play in. But now I see a better analogy of the life of a Christian after the receipt of grace of God in our lives. It's more like being awarded a commission. Our conversion day is really a little bit more like a graduation day at VMI. We're being sent out principally to fight. It's a noble fight. It's one that will not be easy and not unopposed. Now personally, I like the idea of the theme park a lot better than I do of a battle. I can't think of anything more challenging than to go into battle, a literal physical battle. But it seems that that is how we are called. I don't know how many of you have read Pilgrim's Progress, but the first time I read it, it really upset me because as I read it, this guy, Pilgrim, was walking along in life. He seemed like a good guy. He deserved a break. As he was walking along, he continually had trouble. He continually ran into opposition, people trying to hurt him, fool him, deceive him, harm him, trick him. And I actually got tired of it after a while. I remember one night putting it down. I said, this book makes me mad. It's really frustrating. Why is this such a good description of the Christian life? Why does God have to give us, you know, why can't we just be in a theme park? Why is it a battle? Why is it such a struggle? But it's such a great book because it does describe in many ways what our lives are like. that we are called to walk with the Lord, and there's going to be trouble on the way. There's going to be opposition on the way. Of course, I'm not trying to say that God has awful lives for us. He has rich, wonderful plans for us, and we can enjoy rich lives under the protection of the Lord. What I'm saying is, we have a privilege of being a part of the work of the Lord. It's serious work. It is challenging work. We've been given a great commission of Christ, and we don't have that much time to fulfill it. That theme park idea is going to be preserved for a little bit later on. Now God's going to walk with us. The great news is he walks with us. He gives us tools. He loves us very much, and he wants us to be good soldiers for him, but he's got the tools he's going to put with us to protect us along the way. So he's not leaving us unprotected. Now here's an awesome prayer that Jesus prayed in John chapter 17. You'll remember the prayer that Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane. He's praying for his disciples, but he says he's explicitly praying for us. He says, I'm praying for those who believe in my name through my apostles. So what did Jesus pray for us in this room right now? About two thousand years ago, here's what Jesus prayed for you and for me. In John chapter 17, verse 15 and 16, I have given them your word, Jesus praying to the Father. and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one." I'll read that again. This is Jesus' words to the Father. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one. Now, men and women, if Jesus prayed this prayer for us, don't you think we should be praying this prayer as well? Okay, we're heading into point number two. If Jesus prayed this prayer for us, shouldn't we pray the same prayer? What a great example of an application. One of the primary things that we can do to deal with the fact that we are part of a spiritual battle is to pray. Jesus did it for us, and we need to do it for ourselves. In fact, when we began this message, we read the Lord's Prayer. A key part of the Lord's Prayer, about the fifth point of all the final points, is, do not leave me in the temptation, but deliver me from the evil one. Now, King James translates that as evil, which is a fine translation. The problem with that in our culture is that when we hear evil, we sort of say, oh yeah, evil, that's bad stuff. I want to be protected from evil. But we don't really think about it too much. But when you see the NIV translation, evil one, it becomes a realization that there is an actual opposing force to us. If we remain neutral, we will be defeated. If we don't move forward, we'll be moving backwards. We need God's power to help us against an evil one. So the Lord himself prayed this prayer for us. He encourages us directly in the Lord's prayer to be praying this prayer for us. We need to be praying every day maybe every hour for protection. In the final passage of the description of spiritual armor, which we're not going to go through, it would be a great study and I know many of you have done that, but at the end of the listing of what is the spiritual armor all about, the last thing that Paul says is this, and pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. Pray also for me that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me, so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel." So Paul ties up the spiritual battle with prayer as a key tool. Here's a passage you might want to turn to. It's 1 Peter chapter 5, and I'm going to read 6 through 11. It's kind of a nice summary, really, of what we've been going through this morning. 1 Peter 5, verses 6-11. Be self-controlled and alert. your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kinds of sufferings. And the God of grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen. What I like about this passage is that it makes clear that we are dealing with Satan. He is prowling, he is to be feared, he is to be recognized, but not feared in the way that we fear our Lord Jesus. We are told to resist him, so it is possible to resist. With prayer we can resist. With knowledge of the Word we can resist. and we're told at the end of this passage that we'll suffer for a little while, that we may have a few bruises and scrapes along the way as we walk with the Lord, but the main thing is not to have fear that these spiritual powers exist. The point here at the end is to realize that God will restore us and make us strong, firm, and steadfast. We have the ultimate general on our side, and there's no reason to fear the ultimate outcome if we stay close to Jesus. So to apply this sermon Point number one is make yourself better aware of the topic of spiritual warfare. God's Word is the most important source. I'd encourage you to read the Gospels again and reflect upon the life of Jesus and look at it a little differently. Look at his life, look at his miracles, look at his teachings and see how often his life and work was really described as a clear campaign against Satan and his demons and how the epistles define our role as instruments of God in a war that's won. It's a war that's won, but in battles that continue until God's appointed time. I'd encourage you to read some books that cover the doctrine of spiritual warfare, and I'd encourage you to seek the elders and other leaders of the Church for good recommendations in this regard. I'd also encourage you to read some Christian fiction sometimes, maybe not to try to get doctrine out of it, but there are a number of good books out that I've enjoyed that really help me The main purpose, again, is not for doctrine, but to remind me that there's a spiritual world out there, not a physical world. And that is a big step for us sometimes in this culture to remember. Now, we don't want to fixate on the enemy, an important point to make here. We do want to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, as we're told in Hebrews 12. We want to fix our eyes on Jesus, but we want to be aware of spiritual warfare. I hope that helps think about the balance here. We've got to be aware of what Satan is up to and can do. But we want to fix our eyes on Jesus. Here's an interesting quote from C.S. Lewis in his book The Screwtape Letters, a neat little book about spiritual warfare, a fictional book, but it's a lot of fun. Here's what he says in the foreword to his book. There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall into regarding devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and they hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. Also we need to pray that Lord's Prayer every day. We need to understand what we're praying about. We're not praying for protection against some manby-pamby general evil. We're praying about protection from a very specific personified evil that wants to destroy you. The kind of evil you see in the faces of those orcs in the Lord of the Rings. That's the kind of evil we're talking about. That's why I love that first movie. I had no clue what was going on. When I walked, I hadn't read any of the books, but when I walked out, I told Mary, I said, you know, I got to see that a few more times to figure out what was really happening. But one thing I know is the bad guys were really bad. They were like those orcs. I mean, they don't want to just kill you. They just want to chew on you for a while, you know? And I think that's the real value of Tolkien's writings is they do portray the world pretty black and white and in this sense of evil. And so I that's the kind of evil we're talking about. We're talking about a kind of evil that wants your kids on drugs, wants to see them die on drugs. The kind of evil that wants to destroy your marriage, slowly but surely, and wants your witness neutralized. So, it's a prayer we need to pray. The Lord has more power than we can imagine to defeat this kind of evil. That's the great news. So, in conclusion, recognize that you are in a spiritual battle. not a battle for your soul if you're a saved believer, but for your walk and your role in the Great Commission, and your role in the lives of those who have yet to return to Christ. Recognize that until the day you die, you will continue to be in a spiritual battle. God knows this, and it's part of his plan. An interesting truth is that the same God who loves us, the same God who saved us for eternity, wants us to serve him in the midst of the battle. He loves us enough to have given us his word to teach us how to deal with spiritual warfare. Prayer, daily prayer, constant prayer, is a key tool. So will you pray with me? Lord God, by your grace We ask this morning that you bless us and keep us and make your face to shine upon us. Father God, lead us not into temptation today, but deliver us from evil. Deliver us from the evil one. Deliver our loved ones from the evil one. Deliver this special church and its leaders from the evil one. We pray this in the name that is more powerful than any name, our leader in spiritual battle, the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.