The Armor of God: Ephesians 6:10-18

Good morning. Man, it's good to be back. It's good to be back.

My family and I have been gone for the last three Sundays, and, man, it's just good. It's good to be back. So if you started coming in the last three weeks. My name is Josh. I have the privilege of being the senior minister here at Whitewater.

And it's a blessing. It's a blessing. And I just want to say thank you for giving us some time over the last few weeks for my family to just kind of disconnect, reconnect to each other, refocus, get some energy and just kind of get away and turn everything off for a little bit. And our. Our hope was to come back better than we left.

And I think I can say that we successfully did that. So thank you to the elders, thank you to all of you, and thank you especially to the staff for giving us some time away. It's been really good. I feel like there's so much to catch up on. It's August.

Like, it's already August. Summer's almost completely over. Can you believe it? At my house, we don't have any elementary school kids anymore. It's all middle school and high school.

Moving forward, Heidi, my wife, goes back to teaching at C.O. harrison Elementary School for year 23. 23. And today. Today is our wedding anniversary.

Today's our wedding anniversary. So Today also marks 23 years that Heidi and I have been married. She was 15 when we got married. And we still like each other. We've decided we're going to keep going.

We had that discussion this week, but no, really, all joking aside, God has blessed us tremendously with a marriage that's rooted in him. And Heidi is literally still and always my person in the world. So happy anniversary.

Yeah. So on top of all of that, last week, Russ did a great job closing our series, our summer series, Songs of summer, working through the book of psalms. And I gotta say, it was really good just to study the word together, wasn't it? I had so many of you reach out and share the impact of this series of being in the word with your family. Of what?

Working through the devotional guide together. It's just been really good. It's been a good summer. And as that series closes, we're going to start a new series today. Back in March and April, I asked many of you, our staff, our elders, what is it that the church needs to be studying right now?

What is it that needs to be taught? What do we need to be looking at? And one of the things that rose straight to the top right away was this idea of spiritual warfare and the Holy Spirit. And so as we launch into a new school year, I thought this is a great time for us to start this new series on spiritual warfare. Now there's a lot of confusion and wonder around this topic, isn't there?

I think that we have this high tendency toward one of two directions that we go on this. Either we have this tendency to write the whole thing off as a fairy tale because we can't wrap our heads around a spiritual war happening from personal spiritual beings in heavenly places that we can't even imagine. Or the other tendency is for us to swing all the way to the other side and obsess over spiritual things. That every hardship, every difficulty, every sickness is a demon that needs to be cast out of someone, right? That we're always looking for the miraculous and the spiritual.

I think that for most of us, our understanding of spiritual warfare has been unfortunately predominantly formed from TV books and movies. Movies like the Exorcist, right? Where some creepy little girl is possessed by a demon. Why is it always a creepy little girl? But then a priest has to come, right?

And he's got to come and the holy water and the cross and all this stuff and he's got to exorcise this demon, cast out this demon. And it's usually filled with screaming and drama and head spinning and blood and vomiting and crawling up the walls, right? Several years ago, I was walking alongside of a family whose six year old daughter was dying from leukemia. And we had a night of prayer and worship. And after that night of prayer and worship, I had two ladies come up to me after the service and they said, we know why she's sick and dying.

And here's what you have to do. You have to go talk to her dad and tell him it's his sin that is binding her death in the courtroom of heaven. You have to tell him it's his fault and he needs to repent. Because somehow in the courtroom of heaven, Jesus is not allowed to unbind this death from this little girl unless he repents. Okay, I did not have that conversation.

Another time, I experienced a woman who came forward after a service and claimed that she was possessed by a demon. And so I prayed over her and there was screaming and writhing and it got chaotic. And that attracted people who get excited about these sorts of things. And so a group of people showed up, some were praying in tongues, some were yelling and trying to cast out this demon. One lady came and said, I Know this demon?

I have encountered this demon before when I cast it out of somebody else. I don't even know what to do with all of that. Another time, I was on a mission trip to Haiti, and the mission there had purchased a new tract of land. They were going to build a school on it. And so all of us went out to pray over this land.

And we were in a circle praying, and a witch doctor from the neighborhood comes, and he starts walking circles around us, chanting something out loud. And the missionary said, oh, he's praying against our prayers. It was creepy and weird, and we didn't know what to do with it. But we all felt like we were tangibly experiencing spiritual warfare. Right?

I could share half a dozen other stories and conversations I've had, but all of them almost always have left me with far more questions than I have answers for. Questions like, was that even real? Was that woman looking for attention?

Is this what spiritual warfare and spiritual things are supposed to look like? Are little girls really dying because their dad's sin is bound up in the courtroom of heaven? Do demons continue to possess people? Can a witch doctor curse us or hinder our prayers? In some ways, if there are more of us praying louder than them, do we win?

Is this how all this works? And then when we turn to scripture and we study spiritual warfare, sometimes that can just muddy the waters more and make it more confusing. There's this scene in Matthew 17 and Mark chapter 9. The disciples have tried to cast out this demon, and it didn't work. It's working.

They're casting out demons. And then this one doesn't come out. And they talk to Jesus, and they're like, jesus, why didn't this come out? And Jesus kind of rolls his eyes and he's, like, annoyed with them, and he casts out the demon himself. And later, they're having a conversation, they go, jesus, what happened?

Why didn't that work? And Jesus just says, well, some of them come out only with prayer and fasting. What does that mean? What kind of demon is this? What do you do with all of this?

One of my favorite stories in the Bible about a demon is in the Book of Acts. It seems that as the church is rising in popularity, people are invoking the name of Jesus. And even without really knowing Jesus, the name of Jesus is casting out demons. And so there's these seven brothers, the seven sons of a Jewish priest named Sceva. And they are like, this is pretty cool.

We should do this. And so they go find a guy with a demon, and they go in and they try to cast out this demon. They said, in the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out. Then the demon says, I know who Jesus is, I've heard of this Paul guy, but I've never met you. And then it says in Acts 19:16, then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all, all seven of them.

He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and, and bleeding. What another amazing scene described in the Bible is in the book of Daniel. And we don't get a whole explanation of it. We just kind of get to peek through the keyhole into the heavenly realms. Daniel's been in distress.

He's been praying and crying out to God for a long time, for 21 days. And there seems to be no answer. And then 21 days later he gets a vision and an angel meets him in that vision and says, hey man, I heard your prayers. I was trying to come, I wanted to get here sooner, but I ran into resistance getting here in Daniel 10:13. But the prince of the Persian kingdom, this is what the angel tells Daniel, resisted me.

21 days. Then Michael was one of the chief princes or archangels, came to help me because I was detained there with the king of Persia. This is not a physical king of the physical place of Persia. This seems to suggest that there are personal spiritual beings that have dominion over certain physical geographic areas. There seems to have been a demonic stronghold in the kingdom of Persia and one of God's lower ranking angels wasn't strong enough to get through and he required the help of a higher ranking angel, a more powerful angel to come and help him.

This is crazy stuff, isn't it? And then in Revelation 12 we get the description of what happened when Satan, who was once an angel in heaven, stirs up a revolt with some other angels. And this same archangel that's mentioned in Daniel was there, his name is Michael. And he came to fight against Satan and Satan lost. And as a result of that war that started raging, Satan is cast out of heaven, down to the earth with his angels, and that is the spiritual forces of evil, Satan and the angels that got cast out of heaven with him.

Now, quite frankly, we don't know what to do with all this, do we? We pragmatic Westerners, we look at this stuff and this immediately makes us wonder if this isn't another Harry Potter novel, not the Bible, right? And like I said earlier, this is stuff that causes some of us to write the Bible off completely. As a fairy tale. And it causes others of us to obsess over these things that don't get explored.

And whether we like it or not, the Bible simply does not unveil all the details of the inner workings of the spiritual realm. It doesn't. And I would be wary. I would be wary of people who claim to understand things that the Bible does not tell us about. If God wanted us to have an exhaustive manual on how all spiritual things function, then he would have given us one, but he didn't.

He gave us glimpses into spiritual realities, spiritual happenings. He shows us that these things are real, but he doesn't give us the whole explanation for how to engage with them or what is happening. And while there is certainly a pile of stuff that we can't understand that the Bible does not describe, there's also a pretty good pile of things that the Bible does describe and explain to us. I do believe that the Bible gives us clarity in the places that we're supposed to have clarity. So today we're starting this new series, and my hope is that it will teach us what the Bible does say about spiritual things, about spiritual warfare.

I also hope that this series will completely and powerfully reorder our understanding of spiritual warfare, that it will also reform our view of the church and our view of God's plan for this world and our view of what this spiritual war is being waged over at all. The series is not going to be an exhaustive study of demons and angels, about charismatic gifts, or a whole guide on the spiritual realm and how every aspect works. Again, these things are real and they're in the Bible, but it does not give us clear instructions on much of it. This series is not going to teach us to cast out demons. It's not going to call for the church to build an army of crusaders to storm the Muslim world and cleanse Jerusalem.

And while there's a lot more to spiritual warfare than we can cover in this series, my hope is that we will hone in on the parts of the spiritual war that the Bible does give us instruction for, that we can demystify much of the noise surrounding this, and we can understand better what it looks like for us personally, daily to engage in spiritual war. Now, the core of our teaching is going to come from Ephesians 6. This is where Paul lays out for us the armor of God. There are. These are the things, the elements, the tools of war that Paul says, help us to stand and fight here and now.

But before we get there, I want to answer a foundational question. Why is this war being waged at all? What's the purpose of this war? Wars are fought for a reason, right? Some of them are good reasons, some of them are bad reasons, but there's always a reason.

Well, last week, Russ, kind of precursorily. Is that a word? Talked about this. He didn't even know he was setting me up, but he talked about Genesis 2. And after God has finished creating the earth, we read that creation is good and whole, and as it should be.

The Hebrew word that's still used by the Jews to describe this wholeness is the word shalom. At creation, there is shalom, it seems, both in heaven and on earth. We don't know exactly when Satan rebels against God, but in the books of Isaiah, Ezekiel and Revelation, we get these bits and pieces of the story that we can kind of form and stitch together. It says that God made Satan as a guardian cherub, a guardian angel of Eden, that God made him wise and beautiful and powerful. But all this wisdom, beauty and power led him to want to be God, to overthrow God.

And so he gathered other angels around him. This is the war that we read about in Revelation 12. So that in chapter three of Genesis, Satan has lost this heavenly war. And since he cannot become God, he decides he's going to disrupt God's beautiful, good, complete and whole creation by injecting the virus of sin into Adam and Eve by way of lies and pride. Now, one key result of sin entering the world is that what was once good and immortal and whole and at peace is now broken and mortal.

And the new way of things is decay and death. Everything decays and dies. The virus of sin has infiltrated the whole of creation. It's in the midst of all this, all this decay and death, that God sends his son Jesus, first as a sacrifice to break the power of sin and death, and then as a resurrected king who wages the counter war against sin or on this earth. Now there's much more to the story, but the short of it is that until Jesus returns in glory for a final time and vanquishes sin and death forever, that the Father has called us, the church, to join the war against Satan and his angels.

And he's given us the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit to be made effective for this fight. And what is this fight for? To restore, redeem, and reconcile all things to God, to bring shalom. This is the war. I told you that.

The main text of the series is in Ephesians 6, and we'll look at each piece of what Paul calls the armor of God. And we'll walk away each week with small acts of war that we can look at and take part in that will help us in our daily lives to restore, redeem, and reconcile the parts of this world that God's given us in our care and influence over, so that his kingdom will come and his will will be done in and through and around us. But before we get to Ephesians 6, we got to look back through Ephesians 1 5. This all builds up to the purpose and the power of the armor of God. So let's get this quick summary of how Paul describes this war so right out of the gate.

Paul summarizes this massive reality in Ephesians 1. Starting in verse 3, he says, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed all us in Christ with every spiritual blessing Where? In the heavenly places. File that away in the heavenly places. That's going to play big in this discussion today.

With every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world. For what that we should be holy and blameless before him in love. He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us in the Beloved in Jesus we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will according to his purpose, which is set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time. What is the mystery?

What is the plan for the fullness of time to unite all things to him, things in heaven and things on earth. Shalom is the purpose and plan of the fullness of time. Then we pick up with Paul's prayer for the Ephesians and for us in Ephesians 1. Starting in verse 17. His prayer is that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give us the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of our hearts enlightened the that we may know what is the hope to which he has called us, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might, that he worked in Christ when He raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly Places that phrase again.

Far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named not only in this age, but also in the age to come. This is so significant. Christ is over every power, every authority, every name, now and forever. And he put all things under his feet and gave him his head over all things to the Church which is his body. This is insane.

The Church which is his body. The fullness of him who fills all in all. We are the fullness of Christ on this earth. He goes on to say in Ephesians 3:10 that the reason the Church was established as Christ's Body on earth and is so that through the Church the manifold wisdom. This word manifold just means multifaceted and complex.

That through the Church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This is crazy. That the Church's purpose is to reveal the multifaceted complexity of of God's wisdom not only to this earth, but to the heavenly beings. That by the way, that God redeems and makes His Church righteous through the blood of Jesus. That angels and demons are learning things about God they have never known before.

That's wild. What does this look like? He continues in chapter four, he says, I urge you then, to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient bearing with one another in love.

Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. This sounds nothing like war. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. Then he says that the Church, the Body of Christ, is being built up. Verse 13.

Until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Paul says that the aim of the war for the Church is that we, by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the blood of Jesus Christ, might attain the whole measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Why? So that through the Church, God's ways and wisdom might be known to those on the earth and to those in the heavenly realms. And because when we look like Jesus, who has come to bring unity to all things, we are on the way to restoring and redeeming and reconciling and uniting all things to him, things in heaven and on earth.

Our part in the war is to become more and more like Jesus and bring shalom, unity, wholeness, peace and reconciliation to the world. This is way more than hopping in a Baptistry so that you don't have to go to hell.

Then, very practically, Paul gives us instructions on how to live this out. He gives us a list of things that we need to put off to take off, and a list of things that we need to put on if we want to look more like Jesus, things that we should no longer wear and things that we need to start wearing, so to speak. He says that we should put off our old self, which is constantly being corrupted by its evil desires. He says that we should put off lies, impurity, drunkenness, greed, sexual immorality, unrighteousness, rage, unwholesome talk, bitterness, malice and slander. This isn't an exhaustive list, but I think we get the point that we're supposed to put off everything that doesn't look like Jesus.

Then in chapter five, in the beginning of chapter six, he describes how this plays out in our marriage relationships, in our parenting and child relationships, in our working relationship relationships. All of this to say that the war is being waged in the everyday, every moment decisions of regular life. When we look like Jesus in normal life, we are fighting the war. This is why there's so much interpersonal conflict. This is why parenting is so hard.

This is why our interactions at work are so strained at times. This is why so many marriages end in divorce. Because all of this, though it may not seem so, is the battlefield on which the war is being fought. So that when we look like and act like King Jesus in these areas, we are somehow powerfully warring against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. It's after all this that we get to the armor of God, after we have put off or taken off our old self, which is a very poor representation of Jesus.

Here is what we're to put on. Ephesians 6, 10, 18. Finally, be strong in the Lord in his mighty power. I think he knew we would ask, how the heck am I supposed to put pull this off? And he says, you can't, it's God's power.

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, and we're going to talk a whole lot more about this throughout this series. 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, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground. And after you have done everything to stand, stand firm.

Then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, I skipped the breastplate of righteousness in place. And with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, in addition to all of this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and then go slashing and screaming and killing. No, he says, and pray. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions, with all kinds of prayers and requests, he says, with this in mind, be alert, keep your head on a swivel, and always keep on praying for all the Lord's people.

What Paul just described in each piece of the armor is Jesus. In order for us to be dangerous in this world, we need to put off our old self, death and decay. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are to put on Christ. And when we do this, and we draw others to do it too, we're dangerous. We are potent.

We are actively working to reconcile all things to God. We are bringing heaven to earth. We are causing his kingdom to come and his will to be done. We are bringing shalom. Paul describes this further in Second Corinthians.

He says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone, the new is here. All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us us the ministry of reconciliation. That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against him. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's appeal behalf, be reconciled to God. Now, this word, reconciliation, it has two meanings. First, it means restoration. We have the work of restoring things back to completeness, to wholeness, as they should be.

Shalom. But it's also a word that describes an economic term. To reconcile in this sense is to equivalently trade one thing for another, like exchanging money. When we look like Jesus in the very small everyday decisions and relationships, we are quite literally trading death for life, unrighteousness for righteousness, darkness for light. We are tangibly making God's character and wisdom and likeness known to the enemy.

We are restoring things back to the way that they should be. And this restoring in trading is war.

Now while the Bible tells us this is true, I think most of us have made ourselves impotent in this fight for two main reasons. First is because we think that spiritual warfare is all about us. Our behavior about nothing more than being good or being bad. We view spiritual warfare like the old cartoons that had a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. And the name of the game was that they were to try to convince us to do something good or to do something bad, like a spiritual tug of war.

This is nothing more than moralism. God has so very much more in mind for us than good behavior in so many ways. God has little interest in one person's behavior. He has far more interest in his church being transformed into the likeness of Jesus. Paul says, until we all reach unity in the faith, faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

If being good more than being bad is the pinnacle of our existence, then Jesus died a cheap death. That is not what the Bible teaches. Instead we read that the power that is in us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit Ephesians 1:19, is the same as the mighty strength God exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him in his right hand in the heavenly realms. Why on earth would God give us resurrection power for nothing more than good behavior? We must break away from the lie that spiritual warfare is all about us and this line of being more good than we are bad.

Now the second way that we've made ourselves impotent in this fight is by giving into the lie that we're always on the defense. Like Satan, the boogeyman is always out to get us, always has the upper hand. All we can do is just shield ourselves from the giant bully that we can never stand and fight against. This could not be further from the truth. I love how Priscilla Shire says this.

She says what a shame it would be for the enemy to believe more about your potential than you do. Even if you don't believe what the Bible says about you is true, you need to know that the enemy believes it is. He knows that you've been forgiven. He knows that there is now no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus. He knows that you have been given the victory.

He knows that you have not been given a spirit of fear, but a spirit of boldness. The enemy cannot destroy you, so he will seek to distract you and discourage you. Instead, we are not helpless. We are not defenseless wimps hiding in a bunker somewhere. By the blood of Jesus, by the power of the resurrection, by the power of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Paul, Paul says we are more than conquerors. Do you believe that today?

If you don't believe this, it is time now for you to reframe your view of things. The weapons, power and purpose of spiritual warfare are provided and established for us. And it is time that we change our view of things. It is time that we learn to properly fight this war. And so that's the aim of this series.

Now close with this question.

What do you need to put off today to be ready to put on armor? What do you need to put off today? We don't get dressed on Monday morning and then keep those clothes on and wake up on Tuesday morning and then put more clothes on and Wednesday and put more clothes on and Thursday and put more clothes. Right. That's ridiculous.

That's ridiculous. Would be like the guy from the Christmas Story or whatever that movie is, right? We must put off the old self to put on Christ. And whatever portion of us is left having not put off the old self is the portion of us that cannot put on Christ yet. And so what do we need to put off?

What do we need to put off this week to be ready to come back next week and start putting on the armor of God. And so I'm going to ask you to ask the Holy Spirit this week, I know he will be faithful to reveal the parts of you that are still wearing the old dead skin that needs to be put off. Now. Maybe today you've never put off the old man. Maybe you've never put on Christ.

And if today you want to take part part in that, we'd love to have that conversation with you about putting on Jesus for the very first time about the power of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, about salvation, about being conscripted into the army to fight the war. If you want to talk about that today, we'd love to talk to you about that. We're going to have a prayer team here on the ramp after the service. They'd love to pray with you, they'd love to pray for you, they'd love to rejoice with you, you and pray over you and they'd love to talk to you about Jesus. So after the service, we invite you to come join us on the ramp.

Join us for some prayer. Would you stand? I'm going to pray. We're going to sing Almighty King of the Universe, Creator God, King Jesus. Everything is under your power and dominion.

All names are nothing in the face of your name.

Break us of these lies and all of this deception, of the fear mongering and nonsense of the chasing things that don't matter. God confess. Convict us deeply today in the parts of our lives that we're running and hiding in some bunker somewhere like weak, impotent, useless warriors.

Make us powerful in this fight and change our thinking to see that it is all about reconciling all things back to you.

Teach us during this series to wage war in our personal lives. To wage war in the quiet times when no one else is around. To wage war at our dinner tables and wage war in our workplaces and wage war in our community and wage war in our schools. To wage war in the everyday, every minute decision making not so that we can be cleaner and nicer and good, but so that we can attain the fullness of the complete measure of Christ. We cannot do that without you.

So come Holy Spirit, come show us the parts of our old self that need to be shed and help us to put on Jesus. It's in his name we pray. Amen.