I want to thank you very much for the privilege of being here. I got to meet your previous pastor at his installation service at Rehoboth Baptist a few weeks back. Now I get to stand in his pulpit. It's beautiful out here. This is the furthest out on the Cape that I've been. I've been in New England now for Gee, almost 40 years I got stationed in the Air Force at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Mass., and stayed in New England when I got out. And this is the first time I've been this far on the Cape. But what a beautiful, beautiful area this is. And I can see why everybody moves down this way. For 37 years at Brookville, I was waving goodbye to people as they moved down toward the Cape. Can you find us a good church down there? And I'd be plugging them in here, here and there. And now I understand why everybody moves down here. I'm going to be preaching on taking up the shield of faith in Ephesians 6.16. It says, in addition to this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Now I I like to pick a very encouraging message when I'm kind of out on the road, because I don't know a lot about the ins and outs of various congregations, and I figure an encouraging message is always the best. But I was thinking, as we look at power and God's power, I have a dollar bill here, and we're going to look at the power that's in a dollar bill. Now, first off, you're probably thinking of spending power in a dollar bill, and granted, there isn't a lot of spending power in a dollar bill. I remember growing up, we had a third of an acre lot that I mowed. It was a power mower. You powered it, and it mowed. And it weighed about probably as much as I did. I think they were made out of steel back then, not out of aluminum. And I mowed uphill both ways. And I got $1 for mowing my yard. But with that dollar, I could ride my bike to McDonald's. I could get two hamburgers, two French fries, and a milkshake, and still have enough change left over to get two comic books. Well, now you've got a dollar, you'll be lucky if you can get a hamburger at McDonald's for a dollar. But I'm going to ask the question, what would you get if you took every atom in this dollar bill and converted it from matter into energy? Now, you can't do that with a dollar bill, or at least the technology isn't there yet because it's made out of carbon atoms, which are pretty stable. And if you're going to convert matter into energy, you need an unstable atom like uranium, not something like carbon. But if you could take all the atoms in this dollar bill and change them into energy, you would have the explosive force of a one megaton hydrogen bomb. That's the amount of energy that is locked up in a dollar bill. In fact, at the end of World War II, the Allies realized how far the Nazis were behind in trying to develop an atomic bomb, because they were working on their own Manhattan Project. Because a Nazi scientist, a German scientist that they had captured, said it would take two tons of weapons-grade uranium to make a nuclear bomb. And by then, with the Manhattan Project going, the Allied scientists knew it didn't take two tons. It only took two pounds of weapons-grade uranium to make a bomb. Einstein had the famous equation E equals mc squared, that energy and mass are just flip sides of the same coin. And you take that energy, it equals mass, whatever the mass is of what you're using, and you multiply it times the speed of light squared. And the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second. You multiply it by itself and you get roughly 40 billion miles per second per second. So you need a small amount of matter, if you're going to multiply it 40 billion times, to get the energy out of it. But you know, the Bible has greater power. It talks about faith the size of a mustard seed, which was the speck of a ground, like a speck of pepper, could move a mountain. And a hydrogen bomb couldn't even begin to touch. In NORAD Defense Command, where if World War III were ever launched, that's where it would be launched from. It is located in Cheyenne Mountains in Colorado Springs. It's a thousand feet into the mountain. It has 30-ton blast doors on the outside with 300 shock absorbers in the inside designed to take a direct hit from a nuclear bomb and still stay intact. You would have to drop bomb after bomb to move that mountain. But Jesus says, faith, the size of a mustard seed, could move that mountain. And not only can faith move mountains, faith can move us. And sometimes we're harder objects to move than a mountain. You know, the Bible in this passage says to take your stand. Take your stand against the devil's schemes. Verse 13, that you may be able to stand your ground. Verse 13, and after I've done everything, to stand. And verse 14, stand firm then. You know, if ever the church needs faith, it is now. We've had an election, and for the first time, and my Decades of voting, I just did a write-in candidate because I didn't care for either of the ones running. But we need to trust that it doesn't always matter who's in the White House. What matters is that Jesus is on his throne and Jesus rules from heaven. And then we need faith individually as individual churches. You're in the process of looking for a pastor and doing a pastoral search that requires faith, that requires God to send just the right man with the right set of skills and a good fit for this congregation. And then once he comes, there is a need to exercise faith that we work together as a team for the church. What we don't want to get is a pay as you go church. or pastor, we pay you and you do the going. No, we all do the going. We all minister. We all exercise our gifts in the body of Christ. So you have your little outline to follow along. In Roman numeral one, faith like a shield protects the whole person. Roman shields were, they were kind of curved slightly and they were about two and a half feet wide by about four and a half feet tall, almost the size of a door. They were made of wood, either covered in bronze or covered in thick leather. And they could make a wall. It could kind of interlock these shields and move forward toward the enemy. And they could have their archers behind them and other military men behind them. And they were protected by this shield. And enemies would often use flaming arrows. They'd dip their arrows in pitch and set them alight. and then aim them at the troops coming. Sometimes they would soak the arrows in poison. And even if you got a minor flesh wound, you'd die from it because the poison that was in the arrow, that warfare has never been pretty. But the whole idea of making arrows effective was to ambush the troops so they never saw it coming. And Paul likens this warfare to Satan's attacks because he loves to ambush, to blindside us where we never saw it coming. I'm indebted to the English preacher Charles Spurgeon for some of the outline of this. I fleshed it out myself. But the enemy likes to go, first of all, for the heart. You know, if you shoot somebody in the heart, It's over. They're not going to fight anymore. They're going to die instantaneously. And he attacks to discourage, to dishearten, to disappoint all the things that affect the heart, to make us give up, to throw in the towel, to say, what's the use? There's no point in trying anymore. It's always going to be this way, and it's never going to be any better. And an unsettled heart springs. from this weakness of faith. Jacob, at the end of his life, when Joseph, the brothers have gone down to Egypt and Joseph finally winds up finagling to get the father and his brother, Benjamin down. And he holds Simeon in prison and lets the other brothers go back because he wants to get the father down and his younger brother, Benjamin, And of course they have to drop the news on the father Jacob, and he doesn't want to go down there, he doesn't know who this guy is that's second in command to Pharaoh and getting them in such a hard time. And Jacob says, you have deprived me of my children. Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more, because he's sitting in jail in Egypt, and now you want to take Benjamin, Benjamin who is his pride and joy and the devotion of his heart. And he says, everything is against me. And what he didn't know is God had the biggest blessing right around the corner for him that he could have never imagined. And he thought at that point in time, everything is against me. I quote again from Spurgeon, this heart and souls have a peculiar advantage on which to view a trial in the worst possible light. If there were only one line in the forest, they would be the ones to hear it roar. If there were only one swamp in the world, They would soon be up to their necks in it. Today we'd say if they were on only one needle in the proverbial haystack, they would manage to sit on it. That's why the Bible says in Proverbs 4.23, to keep your heart with all diligence, because out of it are the issues, the whole outflow of your life. And Satan knows the heart is the heart of the matter. And so he takes his fiery darts to go after the heart. Then the enemy Satan goes for the feet. You wound a soldier's feet and you paralyze him. He can't maneuver in battle or in combat. He can't get out of the way. He can't run or he can't run at you or run from you. You've gotten him in his feet. And our feet fall into sin and moral failure. We go where we shouldn't go. We compromise. our testimony. And we think, well, nobody will ever know, and the devil makes sure the whole world knows. There's a recent scandal with Ashley Madison, supposedly a site that you could go to if you wanted to set up a fair, and now it looks like it was totally fictitious, that they were just taking people's money and You never did get an affair, but sure enough, there were some Christian leaders on that site, and somebody threatened to expose, and they did, and sent all the names out. And what you thought was private, just between you and a site on the internet, now becomes public information to the whole world. We need to pray Psalm 17.5. Hold up my goings in your paths that my footsteps slip not. that the enemy can't get at my feet. You know, you can be walking with God and be on the right path and still run the risk of slipping. I think when David went up on the roof of his palace, quite possibly it was to pray or to meditate on God. I don't think he was going up there to check out the ladies in his kingdom, but happen to be seeing Bathsheba bathing in the privacy of, you know, her surrounded fenced-in backyard, and the rest is history. So we got to guard where we walk, and to make sure that the devil can't send arrows to our feet. Because when our feet wander from the correct path, it is easy to lose focus, to major on the minors, to get busy in ministry. It's so hard to keep the main thing the main thing. When we came here, we used our GPS guidance and it tells you turn here, take the second exit at the rotary or however it's set up. Take Isaiah 30.21 as your GPS guidance. And your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, this is the way. Walk in it when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left. You know, GPS isn't the only item that tells you where to turn. God's spirit within you takes God's word and the principles of God's word and tells you where to turn next. And then sometimes our feet swell from the roughness of the journey and we want to give up. At times a Christian life can be downright weary. We slug away sometimes and only see meager results. We're faithful, we do what God wants, we obey his scriptures, but it doesn't always mean there's going to be a massive revival. Sometimes we train up our kids in the way we should go and we see the world working overtime to take them away from that way, and the world is only getting darker. But that is not for us to give up. That is for us to walk all the stronger. Those are the flaming arrows from the evil one, to go after your feet and say, well, I just quit walking in the Christian life, you know, it's in the mantle hill of beans anyway. And you're just going against the current, against the tide. Why don't you swim downstream with everybody else instead of always fighting the current and going upstream. That's when you take the shield of faith empowered by the word of God. Isaiah 40, 31, but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be worried. They shall walk and not faint. You know, that shield of faith lets us run the Christian life with perseverance. And then our feet sometimes get entangled in the snares of this world. Entrapment, getting us to compromise our testimonies, the devil's favorite tactic. William Jennings Bryan, who was a big figure in the Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s, and actually he had done a run for presidential office, though he was defeated by the other candidate. But he was a tea-toddler, he would not drink, and Lord Nelson, the famous British admiral, had won a great naval battle and was coming to the United States. And of course, you toast these great men who accomplished great things, and they wanted to see what Jennings would do, whether he'd drink alcohol in this toast. And Jennings beat them all to the punch. He had a glass of water in his hand, and he said, I propose a toast with this glass of water to Admiral Nelson. He won his victory on water, and I propose to toast him with water. When he wins his victory on alcohol, then I will drink. a toast with alcohol. But you pray that God doesn't let you get entrapped. You know, Psalm 25, 15, my eyes are ever toward the Lord for he will pluck my feet out of the net. And then your enemy goes for your knees. He loves the knees most of all, because that's where we pray from. And in warfare, what do you take out first? You take out the lines of communication. When we had the Iraq war, what did we do? We destroyed all the communications towers so nobody could communicate with each other. So you're out in the middle of the field blindsided and blindfolded. You don't have any orders coming from headquarters. because nobody can get through to you, all the communications are destroyed. So it'll get us sometimes too busy to pray, sometimes get us so busy with ministry success that we stop praying and then the ministry falls down around us like a house of cards. And if the enemy can't get us bad, he'll get us too busy and he'll reap almost the same kind of harvest from it. In 1 Kings 20, 40, The prophet was saying, as your servant was busy here and there, he was called to guard a prisoner. The prisoner was gone. You know, I just happened to be busy here and there, and the guy I'm supposed to watch hightailed it and made it over the hill and got away. We can get busy here and there, and that precious time that would have been given to prayer gets eaten away by other things. And then the devil likes to come in Tell us we're too sinful to pray. That's another attack at the knees. Well, you don't measure up. You're a hypocrite. You're not spiritual enough. He'll do anything to shut down our prayer life. And even when it's true, the shield of faith is still empowered by the word of God. You had your prayer of confession at the start in the service here. I think of Isaiah 118, come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. You ever stop and think what business is it of the devil that I'm too sinful to pray? I'm not praying. to the devil. You know, he tells you, God won't listen to you. You know, since when has the devil become such an expert on prayer? You know, Jesus calls God our father, who art in heaven, not our judge or magistrate in which we need to be absolutely perfect before we can come before him. In Isaiah 49, 15, and 16, God says, can a mother forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? He says, even these may forget, but I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands. Your walls are continually before me. I don't care much for tattoos, but God's got at least tattoos on both sides of his hands of we are engraved on the palms of God's hand. And if you're his child, he will not forget you. He will not fail to listen to the prayers of his children. And then, of course, the enemy goes for our conscience. Revelation 12.10 says he accuses us before God day and night. Whatever else the devil will let slide, he will not let accusations slide. Because his name is Satan, which comes directly out of the Hebrew and it means slanderer. And boy, does he know how to live up to his name. Now you've done it. You call yourself a Christian and you did that. You know, Satan baits you to sin And then rubs your conscience in the sin after you've done it. And he likes to rub our conscience raw with the sandpaper of his accusations. And we need the healing balm of Jesus' blood. You know, there is a hymn, there is a balm in Gilead and it refers to Jesus. that healing balm, the blood of Jesus, that cleanses us from all sin. In 1 John 1, 7, that nothing heals a wounded conscience better, quicker, and faster, and more permanent than the blood of Jesus. Then faith not only protects the rest of the armor or the whole person. In Roman numeral two, faith like a shield protects all our other armor. It is armor for our armor. You know, the shield is armor for all the parts that we put on. You know, the other armor is good in hand-to-hand combat, but it will not stop those fiery arrows. You know, arrows have superior penetrating power at some points, even up better than a bullet. And a Roman armor that he wore was no match for a flaming arrow if he didn't have that shield to put out in front of him. And then arrows often come in whole volleys. If you ever saw a warfare, there's a scene in Braveheart where they have the archers and they must fire, it looks like, 10,000 arrows into the air. They're all firing at once. Doesn't matter how good or how poorly they aim, when 10,000 arrows are coming at you, they're bound to hit somebody, somewhere. Well, Satan seldom hits you one at a time. He likes to work on different fronts. You know, he'll work on the home front, he'll work on the marriage, he'll work on your job situation, your children, wherever he feels he can ambush us from, that's where he wants to send the arrows. And then the shield doubles for that long distance combat. It can help you in close combat, but it is especially good in long distance combat. And you know, Satan keeps his distance through deception. Now with Jesus in the wilderness, he came up to Jesus toe to toe, nose to nose. Because Jesus knew who Satan was, and Jesus knew exactly what he was doing, and Jesus knew Lucifer before he fell out of heaven. There was no point in the devil trying to disguise himself and coming up to Jesus. Jesus would have seen through it anyway. But don't you ever think he's going to walk up to you and say, hi, I'm Satan, and I'm here to tempt you right now. That's not how he works. You don't do stuff like that if you want to win. You got to be sneaky. You got to be deceptive. You got to kind of come around in the back door. And sometimes the devil will be subtle. And he'll even use other believers to derail us. We always think he'll use the world, which he certainly does, but he'll even use other believers if he can work at it. He'll get a well-meaning Peter to tell Jesus, God forbid, that you should go to the cross. That's not going to happen to you, Jesus. He'll use well-meaning Christians to derail something God is calling you to. Oh, don't go to the mission field. There are plenty of heathens right here in America. And besides, we wouldn't see the grandchildren for three years at a time if you were over in some foreign land until you came back on furlough. Or for heaven's sake, don't go into full-time ministry. You're going to starve. You're not going to make a great living at it. You know, why don't you just get a good job and serve as a lay person, and you'll make lots of money, and you can give lots of money to the church that way, and then you don't have to go into the ministry. Things just to derail you. He'll use a non-Christian worldview to deceive us. I think the big one today is that God wants everybody happy. Boy, you hear these motivational speakers, they really aren't preachers of the gospel, they're just motivational speakers, and God just wants you well, and God just wants you happy, and we're all on our way to Oz walking down the yellow brick road, and that isn't life, that isn't biblical. Oh, if you're in a tough marriage, if you're in a tough ministry situation, just bail out. God wants you happy. God doesn't want you going through this. The vast majority of people in life, particularly Christians, they're swimming upstream. And when you swim upstream against the current, you're bound to get a few mouthfuls of water as you're trying to keep your head above water, but the current's coming at you. God's idea is for us to be holy. Happiness is a nice, side juncture if that happens. And sometimes there are happy times in a Christian's life. I'm not denying that, but that's not the motive of what we live for. We live to honor God and we live to be holy. And then he will pretty up the package to deceive us. He'll package sin in the nicest light possible. Several decades ago, There was a garbage strike in New York City, and of course the trash just piled up and piled up and piled up. But one man got rid of his trash every night and had no problem. He would take his trash bag and he'd put it in a great big box, gift wrap the box, put a pretty bow on it, and leave it on the front seat of his unlocked car at night. Every night somebody stole the box of trash out of his car and he got rid of his garbage. Well, the devil doesn't want us to see the end from the beginning. You know, it's cool to do drugs. No, it isn't. The opiate epidemic is terrible. I just had my third funeral yesterday. took it for a pastor who couldn't be there to do the funeral. And it was a 35-year-old man who OD'd on drugs. A tragedy. I had some, not people in my church, but friends of people in my church had asked me to do the funeral. And another was a 40-year-old guy, another guy in his 30s, all taken out on drugs. The devil will tell you have sex outside of marriage, be a party animal, live for your toys. You'll never hear him using words like addiction, STDs, AIDS, lust, bondage. He does anything to keep you from seeing cause and effect of your choices. He will not let you see the bridge out sign until you're five feet away from the precipice and you're going 60 miles an hour. Then he'll let you see the sign that says bridge out because you're not going to stop in time. His whole idea is to just keep you going with the one wrong choice after another till it finally catches up. And Satan keeps his distance through disguise. The person he loves most to disguise himself as is you. He loves to accuse the brethren in the first person. I'm a failure. I'm no good. God can't forgive me. God can't use me. And it's only by the shield of faith empowered by the word of God that we see through his disguises and his deceptions. The Bible in 1 John 2 says you all have an anointing of the Holy One. Everyone that is born again is God's Spirit living in them. And all of you know the truth. Learn to practice that. Learn to realize when the devil is lying to you and to take that shield of faith and say no. That is not true. That is not what the Word of God says. That is not what the Word of God promises to me. That is a lie. You use the shield to protect yourself and your armor. There is tremendous power in faith because it grabs hold of our ever faithful God. Faith shields us from every attack the enemy sends our way. It enables us to ward off Satan's blows and allows us to quench all his flaming arrows. It is the armor for our armor and the defense for our defenses. Handle the shield well and you'll be able to stand anything and everything Satan throws at you. Let's pray. Father, we bless you for the truth of your word That Father, you have brought us into a relationship with yourself through the shed blood of Jesus Christ on the cross. And Father, how our enemy works over time in any and every way to take us off that solid footing of the atonement and to get our eyes on ourself or our actions or our successes or on our failures. As long as our eyes are off the word of God, the devil is happy. And Father, I pray we would take that shield of faith. We would couple it with the sword of the spirit, the word of God, and say what is true and what is not true. That if it does not line up with the word of God, no matter how good it sounds or seems or logical it seems, that Lord, it is not true. That it is not the GPS system we're going to run our life by. We're going to run it by the word of God. Father, give us grace to have faith in the promises and the sure word. Lord, to fly by instruments and not by feeling and not by the seat of our pants, but by what you have said in your word, that Lord, we might do battle with the devil and come out not a defeated foe, but one who defeated him and not in our own strength, but in the power of God's word in his name. Okay.