If you would please stand in honor of the reading of God's word. This morning we'll be looking at Ephesians chapter 6 verses 10 through 13. Paul is wrapping up his letter to the Ephesians and he admonishes them, encourages them, exhorts them to put on the armor of God. And we'll be looking at it a bit broadly speaking this morning and then, God willing, in more detail next week. So verses 10 to 13 of Ephesians 6, this is God's very inerrant and infallible word. Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Thus far the reading of God's holy word. May he write it upon our hearts and may it bear fruit in our lives. Please be seated. Let me pray for us quickly as we come before the word. Oh God, our Father, would you speak to us now through your word. This is your word. May it go out with power. May it go out with your voice. May it go out and accomplish everything that you send it for and be successful in the things for which you have sent it. To accomplish your purposes, oh Lord, in us and through us, even beyond these walls. All this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Many years ago, there was a song by a Christian contemporary artist, Keith Green, called, No One Believes in Me Anymore. And you might think, just from the title, that it's a song about God and lamenting the fact that no one believes in God anymore. But if you remember that song, you know that that's not what the song is about. No one believes in me anymore. It's a song of joy. It's a song of celebration. It's a song about Satan, who claims his work is easier when no one believes in him anymore. When no one believes in such a thing as the devil, or no one believes in such a thing as spiritual warfare. Why? Because no one's on their guard. No one's paying attention. Spiritual things don't matter. Or we take what is meant to be spiritual and turn it into something about everyday things. We make being spiritual about having money or health or happiness or success, how to make this life on earth under the sun better than it really is. No one believes in me anymore. Is there spiritual warfare? Oh yes, there is spiritual warfare. And it is not something to ignore or forget about. It's true that it's not something we talk about very often, and maybe we should more often. There is this reality of Satan and his hosts and the battles that rage, the warfare that exists between those who walk in the light and those who walk in darkness. When we do talk about it, we seem to want to turn it into some Christian version of a horror movie. You may be familiar with the novels, some of them turned into movies, of a man named Frank Peretti, this present darkness, turning spiritual warfare into some sort of quasi-fantasy, overly mystical, overly mysterious. But there is a real battle, and it really takes place, and it takes place in our daily lives. The very things that we deal with, the people that we encounter, the struggles, the trials, the temptations that rise up to face us. It's a real life war whose spiritual nature impacts us every day in our actions and the choices that we make. Biblical history gives us an interesting glimpse into this spiritual warfare. James Boyce, in his commentary on this passage, refers to a speech that the great theologian John Gerstner made at a conference once, where he outlined four battles in the Bible that are part of this spiritual warfare. The first one, sometime in history that we don't know, we're told of a battle between God and Satan himself. and we're told that Satan loses this battle. 2 Peter 2 verse 4 refers to this, and how God did not spare the sinful angels who rebelled, but cast them into hell. Or Jude verse 6, which speaks of God keeping them in eternal chains until the coming judgment. Satan and God go to war, and this is not a battle of equals. This is not dualism. God wins, Satan loses. The second battle that Gerstner mentions is in Eden. It's a battle in the spiritual war between Satan and a mere human being. And this human being, Adam, goes to battle without God, without the God-man at his side. And Satan wins, at least temporarily. He learns the cost of what he's done in Genesis 3 and the promise of a seed of the woman to crush his head. Then the third battle that Gerstner mentions is between Satan and the God-man himself, Jesus Christ. This is the temptation of Christ out in the desert, out in the wilderness. This is the death of Christ on the cross. Or perhaps Satan may have thought that he won for a time, but within three days knew that in reality he had lost, and he had lost dearly. And then the fourth battle that Gerstner mentions is between Satan and another man, Peter. But this time, this man has the God-man, Jesus, by his side. Jesus tells Peter in Luke 22, Satan wishes to sift you like wheat. Peter had sinned against Christ. He rejected him three times. But by grace, through faith in Christ, he was forgiven. So the God-man holds on to Peter, and Satan loses again. Two battles between Satan and God, two battles between Satan and mere men. In these two battles between Satan and mere men, there's one victory, at least temporarily, and one loss. And I like the way Gerstner brings that out. If you want to have victory in the spiritual battle that's going on, you must have Christ. You must have Christ by your side, because in Him there is victory. You're either fighting with him or you're losing without him. One is guaranteed defeat, the other is guaranteed victory. And what Paul's exhorting us to do in this passage is to have Christ with us. Put on the armor of God. Unite yourself to Christ by grace through faith. Fight with His strength. Fight with His mighty power. Put on His armor. I want to look at this exhortation a little bit in its context. Why do we need this armor? Why do we need to be prepared for this battle? And then second, why it's imperative to fight that battle in His strength and in His armor. It's because who we are up against. And then thirdly, I do want us to be encouraged by the results, because the victory is assured. Victory in and through Jesus Christ. Think of those three things maybe simply. Why do we fight? Who do we fight, and what is the outcome? Let's look at the context and understand a little bit about why we fight. Verse 10 starts out with the word, finally. Paul's finally going to conclude what he's been writing about. So the reason to be strong refers back to everything Paul has said up to this point in this letter. Immediately before this, what we've been going through is this long section on submitting to one another in Christ, out of reverence for Christ, these specific household examples. Submission being a mark of being filled with the Holy Spirit. That itself is necessary to be able to walk in wisdom, in light, as sons of obedience, as imitators of God who walk in love, as those who walk in a manner worthy of our calling. All these exhortations from Paul lead to this finally, and of course everything that goes before that about who we are in Christ. But these immediate past practical examples, wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters, it's really where the rubber kind of meets the road in our daily life. These things are hard. We talked about that as we went through each one. It takes faith to obey God, to do what He's called us to do. It can be scary for a woman to submit to her husband. It can be scary for a child to submit to a parent or a worker to a boss, especially if that person is not a believer. Someone who doesn't love Christ and doesn't love as Christ loved the Church. What if that husband is, again, lazy or overbearing or stupid or dumb? To submit in that kind of a context takes a tremendous amount of faith. The kind of faith that Scripture tells us drives out fear. That's a courageous faith. But what if a parent isn't a believer? Again, lazy, overbearing, stupid or dumb. Someone who has no qualms about provoking a child. But what if it's a relationship between an older parent and an adult child? What if role reversal is beginning to take place as it often happens? How do you honor a parent who doesn't want your help or who scoffs at it or scorns it? Obedience, again, is an act of faith. It takes courage. A boss who's not a believer, who threatens, again, lazy or overly controlling. If you've experienced this, and I suspect most of you have, a bad boss can be a tremendous stress in life. It can consume the vast, vast majority of our waking hours. So again, to obey with proper reverence to such a person, with proper respect to such a person, it has to be an act of faith. Paul, as we saw, ultimately points us to Christ as the one whom we are honoring and obeying and respecting in these relationships. There's something similar for those who lead. A husband still must love a wife who does not love him back. A parent still must love a rebellious child. A leader must still serve as he leads lazy, rebellious, disobedient workers. Leading can be just as frustrating and just as hard, and again, just as much an act of faith. Who's up to this? Who's up to that kind of living? Paul's response to that question is this, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Or another way it's translated, be strengthened in the Lord and in the power of His strength. See, victory doesn't come by our striving or by our effort. Victory doesn't come on our own by ourselves. We're just not up to it. We can't do it. Adam couldn't do it in the garden. Job couldn't do it when faced with his difficulties. Peter couldn't do it as he stood by that fire denying Christ three times. It's just as silly to think that we can or even need to fight these battles on our own, because we're not on our own. We're united to Christ. Remember the first two chapters of Ephesians, all the times we're told these things were done for us in Christ, through Christ, with Christ. We're in Him and He is in us. Every test of our willingness to submit to one another, whatever our role is, is a spiritual test, a spiritual battle. Every temptation that arises not to walk in a manner worthy of our calling is another spiritual test, another spiritual battle. If we're going to succeed, we have to look to the Lord. We have to look to His strength. What I want to say is, first of all, practically speaking, this should hopefully bring to mind at least two things that will help you in this battle. The first is to remember that the battle has already been won. That's another Keith Green song. The God-man has defeated Satan. Jesus defeated Satan. Satan fell like lightning from the sky. He is a defeated foe. He still roams, he still prowls, he still causes trouble, but he is a defeated enemy, chained for the Day of Judgment, just like the rest of his cohorts. First thing to remember, it's a defeated enemy that we fight. The second thing is that hopefully that brings encouragement that it's not up to you to win. Jesus has done it for you in his life, in his death, in his resurrection, in his ascension to sit at the right hand of the Father. But you can't lose. You can't lose. You cannot be lost. No one can snatch you out of the Father's hand. You're His. So take heart. Be of courage. You're like Joshua, standing with the people of God, about to enter into the promised land. You will be victorious, because God goes before you and defeats your enemies. Those enemies for us, sin, death, and the evil one, as our confessions put it, God goes before us. Has He won the victory over sin? Yes. Has He won the victory over death? Yes. Has He won the victory over our enemy, Satan? Yes. Go out with strength. Go out with joy. Go out with confidence. Go out strengthened in the Lord and in the power of His strength. But Paul goes on in verses 11 and 13, we're not only strong in Christ, but we're to arm ourselves with the full armor of God. We'll talk about this again in more detail, God willing, next week. But here, just understand that we put on all the armor, not part of it, not a piece here and a piece there. But also remember that it's God's armor. This is the armor of God. Many commentators say this is Christ Himself. Christ is our armor. It's given to you by Him, and so it must be effective. God doesn't give out lousy armor with chinks and holes in it. Remember how King Ahab was killed by his enemy Ben-Hadad because he had a chink in his armor and was pierced and killed? We don't have chinks in our armor. God does not give out faulty armor. So take heart. From God you get strength, and from God you get armor for the battle. And God does not lose any battle anywhere. So that's the context. We have an enemy. We're to be strong in the Lord, in His might, wearing all of His armor, not to fight earthly battles, but spiritual battles. Again, this is spiritual warfare. Walking in a manner worthy of our calling is a spiritual task, and our enemy doesn't want us to do it. Walking in love, our enemy hates it. walking in wisdom, in light, in obedience, walking as those filled with the Spirit, walking in mutual submission. Our enemy hates it. He will do what he can to defeat it, to distract us. And our enemy, says Paul, is the whole assembly of that which is evil, all these spiritual powers. He says we struggle, in verse 12, our struggle, our wrestling. We wrestle, he says, not against flesh and blood. I wrestled in high school. I was terrible. I was horrible. But you know what wrestling teaches you? It's up close and personal. This is not a distant battle. This is not lobbing spears across a battlefield. This is not sending cruise missiles thousands of miles into the distance. This is personal. And who do we wrestle with? Against rulers, against authorities, against cosmic powers over this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. And then if we look back at verse 11, Paul tells us about the schemes of our enemy. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the enemy. So it's a battle. It's wrestling against the devil and all of his allies in the spiritual realm. They are wily, they are crafty. Now some people will try to categorize these different terms in some sort of rank order of demons and that sort of thing. That's not really Paul's point. Paul's point here is to drive home the vast array of spiritual beings, of spiritual forces allied against you and against me and against all believers. What do we know about them? I already mentioned it. They're wily, they're cunning. They have schemes, as Paul puts it in verse 11. Satan's methods are going to tend to appear wise, logical, prudent, practical. Remember, he appears as a prince of light, but he does it only to deceive, because he's not a prince of light. Even with Jesus himself, Satan used scripture to try to tempt the Savior. crafty, wily. He did the same twisting scripture with Adam and Eve. He accuses God in chapter 1 of Job, twisting the truth in ways that might seem plausible. Job only serves you because you protect him. Last summer we talked at length about a part of 2 Timothy chapter 3. How about a whole panoply of sins can somehow have the appearance of godliness. This is what our enemy does. He tries to convince us that wrong is right, that good is evil and evil is good, that light is darkness and darkness is light, that self-love and self-indulgence and self-identity and self-worship are good and wise and desirable. It always sounds too good to be true. Not just wise for daily life, but even wise in the study of Scripture. Oh, look at this insight. But one of our best defenses, when Satan begins twisting Scripture, causing you to question, causing you to doubt, what I like to tell people is just take a step back, go back to what you know. Go back to the simple truths of Scripture, the clear, simple truths, and build back from there. We use what is clear in Scripture to interpret what is less clear. Go back to what you know. Go back to the simple truths that you know. We should always be exploring scripture with depth and with insight, but when you find yourself being pushed or shoved or tweaked or tempted in a different direction, don't be led astray. Cling to those simple truths that you know. Stay grounded. They're wily, they're crafty, but these enemies are also powerful. They're described as rulers and authorities, as cosmic powers. But again, we don't need to fear their realm and their rule, because it's just this present darkness. Remember that you are light, you are not darkness. Light drives away the darkness. No Christian is under their rule, now or ever. A question that people ask, can Christians be possessed? No, never, of course not. How can a mere evil spirit drive out the Holy Spirit of God? It's not going to happen. It cannot happen. God always wins. As light in the Lord, we shine light into their darkness and drive them away. We're told elsewhere, resist the devil and he will flee from you. But we can't ignore the fact that the cunning and the power that they have, the means that they have at their disposal, all the different temptations, all the different things that they might raise up, trying to cause division and discord or discontent among friends and neighbors and family. You ever get that sense of things happening? Maybe there's spiritual warfare going on. Things that we read, things that we watch on television and videos, the music that we listen to, the places we go on the internet where we shouldn't be going, the places that occupy our time and attention, the hobbies, the activities, even possessions are all potential weapons that these enemies will use in crafty ways against us. Resist them and they will flee from you. They're crafty, they're powerful, but they're also evil. And we cannot forget the fact that they are evil. These are spiritual forces of evil. And so they exercise this cunning. They put their power to use, not for your good, not for anyone's good, but for evil purposes. Spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places, says verse 12. Again, we're called to put on the armor of God in our battle against these foes. More detail next week. But the third thing, again, look to the outcome, look to the end. Victory. There's that old hymn, right? Oh, victory in Jesus, my savior forever. He sought me and he bought me with his redeeming blood. He sought me ere I knew him, and all my life is due him. Victory in Jesus, my Savior forever. Victory is ours. It's not outrightly, explicitly stated in these verses, but I think it's at least implied if we look at verses 11 and 13 that call upon us to stand. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand. Stand strong. Stand sure. It's not a hope, it's an assurance. Be strong in the Lord and in his power. Put on his armor, you will be able to stand. But more than that, we will be able to stand. Paul says we wrestle, we stand together. This is the image of warfare that existed really up until at least through the later Middle Ages. Soldiers would line up. Long lines, two or three lines deep. Shields linked together. The wall, the fighting wall. And the armies would come together, face to face, looking at each other within inches of each other. And they would push and shove and they would try to shove a sword or a spear or hook an axe. We stand together. Sometimes there are rapid attacks against such a wall, but it's a close battle in the shield wall, one army pushing against another. The Romans were great at it because they wouldn't just have a wall, they'd have a phalanx or a different formation to try and pierce through. But when the battle is won, when the enemy territory is conquered and occupied, The victorious army stands, and it stands firm. This is a battle we fight together. We're in that medieval shield wall together. But here's a little truth that I think is, I hope, hopeful for you. Friends, we are battling in conquered territory. These are spiritual forces in the heavenly places. But we who were once dead in our trespasses and sins, have been raised to new life in Christ. And as we saw earlier in this book, we have been raised to be seated in the heavenly places with Christ, who is seated until his enemies are made his footstool. A seated king, as I've said before, is a secure king. Kings sit on thrones to show that they are powerful, that they don't need to get up and fight, that they are secure, that they are safe. A seated king is a victorious king. And what Paul tells us early in this letter, you are seated with Christ in the heavenly places. That's victory. That's safety. So we also are victorious. But yes, we talked about this quite a while ago, there's an already-not-yet aspect to Paul's writing. We already have that, but we still live life on this earth, this life under the sun. From an eternal perspective, the war has been won, but we're still fighting battles day after day. But as we fight those battles, be assured of the victory, the final victory, and that it's assured in Christ and because of what He's done for us. Again, by His life, by His death, His resurrection, His ascension to the right hand of the Father, we now have access to the strength that is His, that is ours. Be strengthened in the Lord and in the power of His strength. He gives us His armor to wear, His armor as our own, so we have assurance of ultimate final victory. Again, this should be an encouragement to us to be strong in our relationships with our spouses, with our children, with our parents, to be strong as leaders and followers, to walk in a manner worthy of our calling, to be imitators of God, to walk in love. How do we put on the armor of God again? Perhaps more a little next week, but for now, how do we put on the armor of God? Worship. Public worship. We worship. Together worship. Without worship, you're leaving a huge hole in your defenses. In worship, we get the preaching of the Word. We get the sacraments. We get prayer. Take advantage of times of teaching and of fellowship with the body so that you can stand together. Christianity is not a lone ranger, hermit kind of a religion. We are together. We stand together. We work together. We fight together. And the battle can be fierce at times. Times of temptation. Times of distraction. Times of just utter frustration. Times of despair. Times of great and deep sorrow. Times of real pain, physical and emotional and spiritual and otherwise. And times when it seems the devil is just battering us down. Your armor is strong. Your armor can withstand it, because your armor is Christ. talked about the people of Israel following in after Joshua. One of the things that's not clear in our English translations but would have been to the people of Israel is the name Jesus, Yeshua in Aramaic, is just a modernized Aramaic version of the Hebrew name Yehoshua or Joshua. He saves. Call him Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. He saves. He saves as the victorious leader and he's gone in and he's already won. So cling to him, be strong with his strength, put on his whole armor and stand victorious in Christ Jesus. Let me pray for us. Oh God, our Father, would you indeed protect us from the slings and the arrows of our enemy, the accusations, the temptations, the things in life that he causes to rise up to great conflict and pain and sorrow. Would You guide us with wisdom as to do what is right, but especially to look to You for our strength and for our hope that we might walk in faith and in the very simple acts of obedience be resisting the evil one. And may He flee from us as we flee to Christ. We do so now and ask these things in His name. Amen.