Well, I looked over there and didn't see Miss Susan coming up the steps, and I thought Caden was going to play the piano. Still waiting on that, Mr. Caden. As soon as Johnny gets done teaching him. You don't have much confidence in your teaching, do you? Not at the piano. Brother Johnny is a world scholar school superintendent. Y'all didn't know that. You're over lunch? You're over eating the lunch. Yeah, that's what I thought over eating the lunch. Alright. Well, turn to your Bibles, book of 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy 1 and 18. Go ahead and turn over there. John, is that in the New Testament? Okay. You got one of them flip-flop Bibles that changes stuff around? 1 Timothy 1 and 18. The Bible says, This charge I commit unto thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that thou by them mightest war a good warfare. So, you know, it's good to know that when you go to war that you have some instructions. You don't just go out there and fight a battle and nobody knows what anybody else is doing. You don't know who you're fighting. You don't know who you're fighting with. You don't know what kind of artillery you've got. But with the word of God, God gives us the instructions that we may go to war with. And we're going to get why I'm talking about war here in just a little bit. But certainly, Paul considered a war. You know, Paul was in a war before he got saved. He was just on the wrong side. He fought a good battle before he got saved. And he fought a better one after he got saved when he got on the right side of the war. You know, the title tonight is Spirit-Filled Warfare. And we need to be filled with the Spirit on a regular basis. And that's because, you know, because we leak. The Spirit is perfect. The Spirit is good. But our fleshly bodies can't seem to hold on to it. They can't hold on to it. We need refreshing over and over and over again. Now we don't get saved again, but we get a feeling of the Holy Spirit. We get closer to God because we drift away. None of us in here has been saved any length of time at all can say that since the moment I got saved, I've always drawn closer to God. I think we'd all be lying if we said that. We can have the desire to. And there will be times that we do draw closer to God, but we're going to have to keep going back to the well and getting filled with the Spirit again. And we can't just, and a lot of times I really think that a lot of Christians, I'm talking about people that are actually saved, they allow themselves to be in the philosophy that they get filled on Sunday and Wednesday at church. Well, let me give you this philosophy. Alright, if you come this morning and I gave you all the water you wanted to drink, okay? And you're back here tonight, and you want more water. I give you all the water that you want to drink But I don't want you to drink anything till next Wednesday You'll be thirsty in bad shape and then if you refill and you had all the water Wednesday that you wanted and You waited till Sunday to come back and get some more You're probably dead. And it works the same way with the spirit. We have to be filled continually and we cannot get enough on Sunday and Wednesday. We can get a special feeling of the spirit. We can get something here. We can't get a home, but we can't get enough. If this is all you get, you will never have enough to fight the war. You have to be filled at home. You have to read the word of God. You have to pray. You have to ask the Holy Spirit to fill you with what he wants you to have. And it is a continual thing. I don't believe there's any of us that's been saved very long to say every day I've asked the Lord to fill me with his spirit. But there's been times that we have when we're right with God and we ask God to fill us. And we know that when He does, we know that it's different than from when we neglect the Word of God, than from when we neglect prayer life, when we neglect Witnessing, when we neglect all those things, we start to wither away. But when we have that desire, as the sign says around here, deeper, to get deeper in the Word of God, to get deeper in our prayer life, to get closer to God, then we know that that's how we get filled with the Spirit and we need to do it continually. We need the Spirit because the work of God is spiritual. This is not somewhere, I don't know what your job is, but if you go to a public place and work, a public job, if that's what you wanna call it, there's certain things that you have to do. You have certain responsibilities that you have to do. And you don't have to like your work, you don't have to like the people, but there's certain things that you're gonna have to do if you wanna get paid. And they may never know you didn't like them. They may never know you don't like the job, but the work gets done and they're okay. It doesn't work that way with the work of God. It takes a desire to do the work of God. It takes being filled with the Holy Spirit. If we get to the point where we are moving away from God, we're not going to be able to do the work that we need to do. The walk of a believer is a spiritual walk. There's things that we're just... Not going to do if we're not filled with the Spirit. And if we're not careful, we'll get to the point where we think we're just fine and dandy. And we're so far from God, we don't even recognize it. Because we're not filled with the Spirit. We're filled with self, we're filled with the world, we're filled with whatever, but we're not filled with the Spirit. And the warfare of the believer is spiritual. Now, if you get away from God and you're not doing anything for Him, you're not going to have too much of a battle because you've already been beat. Satan's got you where he wants you, not doing anything for the Lord. But if you're going to do something for the Lord, it's going to take being filled with the Spirit because Satan is going to be against you. The powers of this world are going to be against you. Again, verse 18 says, This charge I commit unto thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that thou by then mightest swore a good warfare. He didn't say to Timothy, I want you to go out there and you figure out what to do. Now we know through the scriptures that Timothy's mother was a Christian, Timothy's grandmother was a Christian, he was raised As a Christian, he knew the Word of God. He was taught the Word of God. And Paul is saying, that's what you rely on. You have been taught right, so that's what you do. All of us in here weren't raised on the Word of God. All of us in here didn't grow up a Christian. All of us in here didn't know anything about God. Some of you are much older. But you still have the same instructions that Timothy had. That's what I like about the Word of God. I like being able to say this is what God's Word says. I don't have to make it up. I don't want to make it up. We have the Word of God and we need to follow it. We need to be filled with the Spirit. There is a war going on and anybody Even if you go along with some of the things in the world, you can see that the world is changing rapidly. Part of the world likes it changing rapidly. It's going in the direction that they want it to. But it's not going in the direction that God wants it to. It's not going in the direction that God's people want it to go in. So we're going to have to be spirit-filled if we're going to fight in the war. I want to read Ephesians 6, 11 through 18, and we'll bring the rest of the message from that. Verse 11, put on the whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. The devil is not going to send out his battle plans. If you're frightened in a war and you got an enemy, you don't send your battle plans out to the enemy. I was talking with my daughter the other day, And some things I had read about World War II, and part of it I knew, part of it I didn't. But during World War II, we had, I just forgot, Navajo Indians that would use their language to transmit codes. Now, the enemy actually figured that out. and they captured some Navajo soldiers, but they weren't radio men. See, it was the Navajo language, but it was also coded. So they may have knew the words, but they didn't know what they meant because they were coded. And Germany, and I can't think of the name of the machine, they had a typewriter. You would type in what you wanted to say and something else would come out. But then you would put it back in the machine and it would come out what they want to say. You know how we figured it out? Because we got one of them. We broke their code and they could not break our code. The devil has wiles just like the Germans had that code machine. And he has codes that we can't read. We have no idea of his battle plan. We don't see it coming, but God knows it all. God knows what he is doing. Verse 12 said, For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. I remember years ago, I don't know if Sheila remembers this or not, I don't remember which one of her co-workers said this, But at some point she was talking to them and I remember that it was after listening to some of the things that Jimmy Clark said about rock music. And there were other things about different, certain things on television, certain things in movies, certain things in rock music and she was trying to tell them I believe it was her telling them that Satan controlled the people that were writing these songs. And they said, do you really believe that? Absolutely. Absolutely. I believe that. That was 30 years ago or more. Couldn't be much more than that because she's not much older than that. That's such a small part then to what it is now, how bad the world has gotten now. Verse 13, 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. It says to take the whole armor of God. You've got to know the whole armor of God. You can't just read a little bit of the Bible over here and say, well, I like the New Testament, and I especially like the writings of Paul, or I like the four Gospels, or I like, you know, I like the Pentateuch. I like them first five books of the Bible. You can't just take part of it. You've got to have the whole armor of God. You can't just take, you know, What you know, you need to study, you need to hear. That's what we talked about this morning, the power of the preaching of the Word of God. You need the preaching of the Word of God. The world calls it foolishness, but God calls preaching wisdom. You know why it's wisdom? Because that's how He makes you wise. I said this morning, I think I said it's not the preacher, it's the preaching. stand therefore having your loins gird about with truth and having on the breastplate of righteousness and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace above all taking the shield of faith wherewith you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit which is the word of God praying always with all prayer and supplication in the spirit and watching there unto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. So we have several parts of a defensive part of the armor and we have a couple of things of the offensive part of the armor. We will talk about first Verse number 14, the girdle of truth. Stand therefore having your loins girded about with truth and having on the breastplate of righteousness. The Word of God will strengthen your inner being. When you are out in the world and you're trying to do the Lord's work, if you're doing it without the Spirit, if you're doing it without the Word of God, you will famish. You will faint in the way. You need something to keep you strong. If you send a soldier out to fight a battle, and you said, I want you to go out, but you didn't give me any food, you didn't give me any way to get food, he's going to lose. He might win the first day, and he might win the second day, but by the time the third day comes around, he's going to lose. He's done. We have to have the Word of God. We have to have the truth. And then it says, verse 14 also, the breastplate of righteousness. God's righteousness will repel the fiery darts of Satan. Now we're going to say something else about the fiery darts in just a little bit, but your righteousness sometimes, not your righteousness, but God's righteousness on you because you are full of the Spirit will repel what Satan does. You won't even notice part of it. You won't even pay attention to part of it. It won't bother you. If you get weak in the Word of God, if you get weak in the Spirit of God, if you get weak in your prayer life, every little thing that Satan does will come against you and it will knock you down. But if you're strong in the Lord, if you're strong in the truth, if you're strong in the Spirit, it won't bother you at all. And then it says in verse 15, choose the gospel of peace. And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. We need to know the gospel and we need to tell the gospel. Knowing the gospel only does one thing for you. It gets you saved. Telling the gospel does stuff for everybody you tell. It's not receiving the gospel and holding it up. It's not like there's not enough to go around. There's plenty to go around. I read a few verses this morning. I said, that's enough to save the whole world. And it was. Just keep telling the gospel. Verse 16, the shield of faith. Above all, taking the shield of faith Wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. Now sometimes Satan's darts do get through and they do hit you and they do hurt you. But because of your faith you're able to withstand them. You're able to come back from it. It doesn't take you out. With the faith of God, you can still build strength while you're being hit with the darts of the fiery darts of Satan. You can continue on. Because greater is He that is in you. If you're full of the Spirit, if you were to get shot, you're going to bleed. If you bleed enough, you better get some more blood put back in there. When Satan hits you with his darts, you're going to lose some strength. You need something to rebuild yourself, and that is the Spirit of God. You need something to reinforce, and that's the Spirit of God. And then it talks about, well, one more thing, the helmet of salvation. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Know that you know that you know that you're saved. Know that you know that you know you're saved. If you have doubts about your salvation, you won't be a good soldier. You won't do anything because you'll be afraid. You'll be weak. There are times that people that are saved doubt their salvation. The first thing I would tell somebody that was doubting their salvation, what I would ask them, what were you depending on for salvation? And you go back to that day when you got saved. Do you think that Satan don't tell preachers and pastors that they're not saved? Of course he does. He might tell them what he tells you. But I always go back to the day that I got saved. You know what? I can't remember what the preacher said. He said, do you want to ask Jesus to save you? That's the only thing I remember what he said. I can't remember what my grandpa said when he told me how to be saved. But I knew after he got done talking with me, I knew how to be saved. I knew what I needed to do. I know before he talked to me, I didn't know how to be saved. But he told me with the word of God how to be saved. He told me what I needed to do. And I go back to that time where I would never do what I did unless the Holy Spirit was leading me and telling me that I needed to be saved. And I know, I know, I know I asked Jesus to save me. And the Bible says if we come to Him, He will save us. If we will ask, He will give. And so it's not based on what I did, what I said, where I went, where I was, who I was, had nothing to do with it. But it was the fact that I did ask, and I asked God, and God said that He would save me. It's not on me. God, it's on God. God is the one that saved me. If you're saved, God is the one that saved you. And you have to have that helmet of salvation. When you take the helmet of salvation off, you need to take cover. Because you won't be able to withstand anything. And the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. You could have a few verses of Scripture. and realize that you're lost and realize you need to ask God to forgive you and save you and do that and you're saved. But I hope that's not all the scripture that you have. I hope that's not all the word of God that you have read. I hope that's not all the word of God that you know. You need it all. You know if you had a sword I wouldn't be very good fighting a sword, I don't think. But I know I'd be a whole lot better with a whole sword than half a sword. I'd be a whole lot better with a sword than I would a penknife, Brother Shane. I'd hate to be fighting somebody with a sword, and I had a penknife. I'm not one of these Navy SEALs that could whip the other guy with a penknife. I'd rather have a gun. If I was in a physical battle, but in a spiritual battle, we need the Word of God. Now our offensive armor, and that's part of it, is the Word of God, but it also defends, but it also is what we use to battle with, to fight with, is the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. You know what Satan hates? The Word of God. the Word of God. You need to know the Word of God sometimes just so you can quote it. And if you get nervous or if Satan begins to defeat you and you can't quote it, get the Bible and read it. He don't like that. He don't like that. But we need the Word of God. We cannot do it on our own. I know there are people that have memorized a lot, a lot, a lot of the Bible. I've heard of people memorizing the whole New Testament. That's wonderful. Most people can't do that. But we need to have the New Testament and the Old Testament available to us. We need to rely on the Word of God. We need to trust in the Word of God. And the other part of the offensive armor is verse 18, the supplication of the Spirit. Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit and watching therein too with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. And I don't know which one Satan hates the worst, the Word or us praying. He doesn't like either one of them. But he certainly does not like it when you start praying to God and in that prayer relying on God. I'm not talking about reading a prayer. I'm talking about talking with God. When you got saved, if you're saved, you didn't just read a prayer and get saved. You might have read, but you believed it. You believed you were talking to God. And when we talk to God, it strengthens us and it enables us to fight the war. The word and prayer are your strongest weapons. We have to be efficient with both weapons. You know, if they give me a bazooka to go out and shoot a tank, they've messed up. I wouldn't be very efficient with a bazooka. But if I was going to use it, I'd want to know how to use it. I wouldn't want to guess at it. I said, well, which end does the rocket go in? I don't know. I'd want to know how to use it. If I was fighting a war, whatever weapon they give me, I'd want them to train me and show me how to use it. They give me a sniper rifle, I might just figure it out, but I wouldn't know how to figure out all the elevations, how much it drops, what the wind effect is. I'd want some training on how to use that. We need the Word of God to train us. how to fight our enemy, the devil. We need to be able to pray to God. Sometimes you can read and it's just not enough. You have to ask God to help you. God can help you in prayer and there's no other way you can get the help. So we have next the assured victory of the church. Just like you need to be assured of your salvation, you need to be assured that the church is going to win. Matthew 16, 18, And I say unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. He's not building on Peter. He's building on what Peter had said, and Peter said, Thou art the Christ. You're the Savior of the world. We have to know that. And Christ built His church on that fact that He is the one that saved the church. He is the one that died for the church. And our church is built on Christ. And the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. And we need to be careful. A lot of times, I think, at least in the Baptist church, they think the gates that we're in the gates. And the gates are protecting us from Satan. Satan's the one in the gate. We're the one with the power. And God says, he can't prevail against you. I've got control of him. We are to be on the offense, not the defense. We must face the enemy. Again, verse 13, Ephesians 6, 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. That armor, that defensive armor, I know you probably heard this before, is for the front. There is no armor listed there for the back. Because you need to be facing the devil. If you turn on the devil, he will climb up your back. He will win, but you have to face Him. But we need the Word, the Spirit, prayer. We must fight the enemy the same way Jesus did. That's one of the first things Jesus did was give us an example how to fight Satan. The Bible tells us He went out into the wilderness and prayed for 40 days and 49. And the devil come on him and he offered him all these things. You know, it's always seemed funny to me what Satan offered him. He offered him not what belonged to Satan, but what belonged to Jesus. But Jesus didn't take it on his own and say, that's already mine. What did he fight with? He'd already prayed the Word of God. He used the Word of God to defeat Satan. That's what we have. That's what we need to use is the Word of God. And then lastly, the absolute command of the church. Acts 1 and 8 again we read this morning, but you shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you and you shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem and all Judea and in Samaria and unto the uttermost part of the earth. We are to be witnesses. A lot of times Baptists will call this, this is the main thing. And they'll say we have to keep the main thing the main thing. But they don't do the main thing. And if you don't do the main thing, it's no longer the main thing. Just calling it something doesn't make it so. You have to do it. And we have to trust in the power of the Word of God. I think that we look to ourselves and we say, well, I couldn't possibly have any influence on somebody in the world if I go told them about Jesus. I'm glad you figured that out. Because you're exactly right. Because you can't. But God can. God has given us how to do it. He's told us what to do. And we try every other way in the world to get around that. But we are to give the gospel out. We are to tell people about Christ. We have many different ways to try to help you to do that here at Currytown. And we want to help you, we want to encourage you to do that. We don't want to say, you just go do it. Right? Just keep it the main thing. One thing that encourages me, whether I'm working in the public or whether I'm doing work for the Lord, when I, the last job that I had, don't want to get into all that, just say where I worked. I could get long. One of the things that helped me to work long hours, to work hard, to try to do it right, is because the guy that was running the place worked as hard as I did. I never liked working for somebody that was lazy. It encouraged me that when I was there late, most of the time I'd see him there late. When we're working for the Lord, we know that He's there with us. We know that He will always be with us. And we must remember, we must trust in the power of God, we must remember it is for the glory of God. I know we feel like we mess up sometimes. I know there's been times that I've tried, even when I overcome all the obstacles that Satan tries to put in front of me. I know you do it too. You overcome the obstacles. You get out there and you're witnessing somebody, whether it's on the job, whether it's a relative, whether it's out knocking on doors with the church or whatever it is, and you get done and, oh, I messed that up. That's the reason we need to give them the Word of God. It'll never mess up. It'll never be wrong. It'll never give the wrong impression. You say, well, they didn't like it at all. Well, that's true. Because the Word of God is either going to draw you closer to Christ or it's going to drive you further away from Christ. Most of the people that Jesus talked to, He drove away. Now, He called some and some came. But the majority, even in His day, even though it was Jesus saying it, most of them went the other way. But some will believe. The Holy Spirit will reach hearts and some will believe, but we have to keep doing it. It is an absolute command. We cannot deny the command to give out the gospel. So we're still in January this year. We're still working on the teams, getting them going for this year. So what have you done in your heart, in your personal life, in your personal walk with the Lord? What have you done in your life to say, I'm going to keep the main thing the main thing this year? I'm going to get the gospel out. I'm going to do better than I did before. See, if you can't start out like that, I'm not going to say you're not going to mess up, you're not going to falter, you will, I will. But we have to have that desire to get the Word of God out. Ms. Susan Combs, we stand at your feet. You may be here and you're lost tonight if you never received Christ as Savior. You let somebody know you need to be saved, we'll certainly take the Word of God and show you. But tonight, As this is the last Sunday of the first month. Next Sunday will be in February. Almost 10% of the year's already gone. I want to encourage you, if you haven't already done so, to make a stand in your personal life. I know we're trying to make a stand as a church, but we have to have people that's making a stand in their personal life that I'm going to follow through this year. I'm going to do it. I'm going to get the gospel.