A Man's Fight for Faith Against Satan's Lies | Kingsmen

Welcome to the Kingsman podcast, where we are reclaiming biblical manhood by training and equipping men for the work of the kingdom.

I'm your host John Moffitt. I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and one of the hosts of Theocast, another weekly podcast.

Guys, it's exciting to be on here with you again, because I think today is going to be helpful. It's going to be helpful when you start thinking about some of the reasons why we wake up depressed.

We wake up with no direction. We wonder why we work so hard, yet see no results.

Or we feel like we keep falling into the same sin, same trap, over and over again. And you begin to scratch your head of, like, maybe

I'm a hopeless case. I'm just going to have to pretend the rest of my life. I'm going to have to act as if I'm okay, knowing that I'm not, and I'm assuming everybody else is.

That's what we're going to deal with. And it's probably going to be in a way that—I don't know if you've thought about it before.

I remember when I started to process the Lord's Prayer. And He said in there, lead us not into temptation.

I couldn't wrap my mind around that. Like, what does He mean by that? And in essence, to answer that,

Jesus was saying, you need to ask God to keep anything that might be good away from you if it's going to tempt you, to trust that which is good more than trusting the

Lord, more than the dependence upon the Father and His mission and His kingdom. That's what we're going to talk about today, in that there are things that are good for us.

There are pursuits that are noble. But if they aren't what God has for us, they can become a disaster.

So we're going to talk about no battle plan leads to a disaster. And I think a lot of us have felt our lives have been disastrous at points, even though we seem to be pursuing things that are good.

Let me read you this quote by C .S. Lewis. I found it helpful. He said this. There are two equal and opposite eras into which our race can fall about the devils.

One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and feel an excessive, unhealthy interest in them.

And I think he's right. You have one side of the horse you're going to fall off on, where it's like, ah, you know, there's no threat.

Satan is kind of like this theoretical being in the Bible that God kind of uses as a scary tactic, but I don't really think about it.

Or the other side of it is to have this extreme fear or unhealthy, like, knowledge about them, where that's all you can think about, to the point where you're not even trusting in Christ as much as you are afraid of Satan.

And guys, if you're listening to this in the United States, mostly I'm talking to my own men here in my church, guys, where do you think we fall on this?

I would say most of the Americans that I have interacted with don't have a good awareness of the capacities of Satan and what he can do and the warnings in Scripture.

And so we fall off on the side of the horse where we're actually ignoring our enemy. And that's how God describes him.

One of the titles of the devil, of Satan, is the adversary, not just of God, but our adversary, our adversary who accuses us.

So when we kind of walk around as if, oh, there's no problem, you're being shot at, you are being tricked and tripped, and you keep wondering why, it's because you're blind and you're not living in what

I would call a warlike mentality. So this is what, you know, having a battle plan is all about, is that a lot of times we enter into this world just assuming, oh, we just need to work hard and that's going to be the way in which we're going to survive.

And that's not how we're going to survive. And I think in many ways, gentlemen, we don't mind the ignorance.

We don't mind thinking that there isn't really a threat out there because if we ignore those type of things, we can pursue what it is that we want.

I think the best war tactic that could be available in battle would be for your enemy to be right in your presence, working in your presence, and you're not even aware that they're there.

And that's exactly how Peter describes Satan, that we are unaware that his presence is crouching, seeking to come after us.

So I wanted to just spend some time on this show, pulling back the curtain on the

Spiritual Truman Show. You know, we all live in this, we think this perfect world, and we get out of it what we put into it, and that is just not the case.

We live in a fallen, cursed world. We've already talked about this in the previous episodes. So I want to talk about how

Satan has blinded us to our reality, what we're really struggling with. And I know that many of you probably are aware of Satan in some of these verses, but I don't think we take them serious, and this is why we don't walk around being aware and alert about what is coming towards us.

Let me read this to you. This is 2 Corinthians 11, verse 2 and following. He says, "'For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.

But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.'"

So he's saying just the same way in which Eve was deceived in the garden, we too have the capacity.

And Paul's saying, I'm afraid that you have been deceived. You've been deceived away from Christ. This is 2

Corinthians 11, verse 13. He says, "'For such men are false apostles, deceiving workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness therein or correspond to their deeds.'"

The point of it is that even where we might feel safe, which is in the church, there has to be a sense of being alert.

That there are people there that want to lead us into danger, where they want to distract us. This is why Peter says in 1

Peter 5, 8, be sober -minded. Now he doesn't mean don't be drunk, you know, don't drink alcohol. He's talking about things that clutter our mind.

Hey, guys, if you kind of lost me, I want you to come back in. I know I've been talking for like five minutes. Focus back in with what

I'm saying right here. We are lazy with our minds. We are lazy with our thoughts.

And I want you to take note of what Peter is saying here. He's saying, be sober -minded, which means he says, don't let your mind be drunk with thoughts that don't matter, that distract your focus.

He follows it up with this. He says, be watchful. Well, why would you have to have a sober mind and be watchful?

Well, if you have a guy who's supposed to be on the battle line and his job is to look out for the enemy, first of all, you don't want him drunk.

You don't want him tired. And you want him to have the capacity to know what he's looking for. And what is it that he's looking for?

He's looking for the attacks of the enemy. This is what Peter says, your adversary, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Just think about that for a moment. At the end of his letter that Peter has given this church, he's saying, church, you need to focus your mind in such a way on thoughts that you're alert and aware of how it is that Satan may come in.

And by the way, the reason why lions are good at what they do is because they're a powerful being that knows how to hide.

And Satan is a powerful being who knows how to hide his tactics. And if we're not alert and aware of them, he can come and start to, when he says devour, he can't kill us as far as remove our faith and hope.

And when Romans chapter eight tells us, there's nothing that can separate us from the love of God.

So we don't live in fear. There's a difference between fear. We're told straight up not to have fear.

We're not a people of fear. There's a difference between fear and being alert and being watchful of something that might trip you up.

In the next letter that Peter writes, 2 Peter chapter one, he describes all the glory of the gospel through his divine power that's given to us.

But he says, if we are not increasing in this pursuing as far as kindness and meekness and gentle and godliness, and we're going to get into this in the next episode.

He uses this word, and I want us to hold it into the back of our minds when he says this. He describes it as being ineffective and unfruitful.

See, Satan doesn't need you to quit on the faith. He in many ways may not be able to do that.

He also can't take away your faith. But he can get you so distracted, and he can get you so pulled off of what it is that you are to be focusing your attention on, which we're going to talk about in the next episode, that you are completely ineffective and unfruitful.

And all he needs to do is to get your mind cluttered with something other than Christ and the gospel and the hope of grace and the hope of mercy and the hope of the kingdom.

He just needs to get your mind cluttered with something else. So you are no longer sober minded, clear thinking, and aware of what you're supposed to be doing.

And so what I want to do with the rest of our time is, how do we have a battle plan? How do we have a warlike mentality going into the purpose of our life, going into what drives us as men, and realizing that Satan wants to get anything and everything, it doesn't matter what it is, as long as we are not trusting in Christ and the sufficiency of Christ and his kingdom.

And so we have to ask ourselves what it is that we're fighting for. Satan can get us fighting for things that are noble, that are noble.

But Paul describes them as not sinful, but of no value, of no benefit, when we think about it from an eternal perspective.

The writer of Hebrews describes it this way. He says that we're looking unto Jesus, the author and defender of our faith, and he says, lay aside the sin, but what else does he say?

Lay aside the weight, that which is holding us down from pursuing what we're supposed to be pursuing.

So there's not necessarily, our sin is always identifiable, like, man, this is really bad,

I shouldn't do it. I don't know if we're really good at identifying the weight. I don't know if we're identifying the things that distract us and pull us to the side, and I think get us to be content with not being watchful and not being sober -minded.

So this is 1 Timothy 1, verse 18. I love this, when he says, This charge I entrust to you,

Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare.

Paul's mentality, according to writing to a young pastor, is he's not just shepherding sheep and enjoying life.

He's like, actually, you're at war. And this makes sense, because if we are living in two kingdoms, right, we're going to talk a little bit more about this in the next episode.

The kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of light versus the kingdom of darkness, those are opposing one another.

Light and darkness cannot exist in the same place. They're at war. And so he uses this concept of war, and then he says this in verse 19,

Holding faith and a good conscience, by rejecting this, some have made shipwreck their faith.

So not waging war, not taking this serious, all of a sudden you find yourself in a situation where your faith is being,

Paul says in Ephesians 4, it's tossed all over the place, right? Tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, meaning that we don't study theology neutrally.

We don't have theology, then we gain theology. That's how we think about it sometimes, right? I don't have knowledge, then

I gain knowledge. Actually, you can gain the wrong knowledge. All Satan needs to do is just infiltrate a little bit into our theology and into our minds, and he can start swaying our path.

Many of you guys have struggled with, I don't know if I'm saved. I don't know if Christ has truly saved me, and you wrestle for years.

Do you know how ineffective that makes you? I'm not criticizing you. All I'm saying is that Satan's tactics is working.

That if you truly see the gospel and the sufficiency of Jesus, and you're wondering whether Jesus has saved you, you either believe in his promises or you don't.

You can't put your faith in Christ in your own power. Just go back and read 2

Peter 1, his divine power, or Ephesians 2, he raises from death into life.

How do you know this? Because you believe it. Wrong theology just slightly off gets the soldier, instead of focusing on taking this weapon of the gospel into the kingdom of darkness with confidence, this soldier's ineffective because he's over here in the corner walking around in circles like,

I don't know if I belong to the king. I don't know if I want to get into this war. It's a brilliant tactic of Satan to make sure that soldiers just don't even know who they belong to.

So, we want to make sure we can be aware that he wants to do that. So, how and who you learn theology from, gentlemen, it really does matter.

This is 2 Corinthians 10 3, for though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war against the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

So, when we go to war, we go to battle, we're not thinking about who's the strong as far as physically, we're thinking about who's the strong spiritually.

And a lot of times that's not going to be guys that you're going to respect. There's not going to be men that you're going to look at and say, yeah, that's the guy that I want to follow.

That's not who God uses. As a matter of fact, in Corinthians, he says that he chose the weak and the frail to confound the wise.

So, when you hear this, gentlemen, I want you to get excited to realize that you can be very effective in fighting back in the kingdom of darkness, and you could be a very weak, sickly man, a man that's body is broken and needs to be restored.

You don't have to be a Spartan in order to fight in God's kingdom. See, he recruits the weak.

Man, that makes me excited, right? Because the weapons of our warfare are Christ's gospel, not our capacity to strengthen our own physical bodies.

This is why in Ephesians 6, verse 12, he says, For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against authorities, and against cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of the evil in heavenly places.

It's like, how many times do you have to hear, you're in a war? You're in a battle. You can't just lay down and pretend like nothing's happening, right?

It's like, can you imagine you're out in a foxhole, and you're supposed to be advancing so you could take the city and free all the slaves that are in there.

And you're in this foxhole next to a guy, and he's watching Netflix. I mean, how angry would you be at this dude? Like, what are you doing, man?

Do you not realize we're on a battlefield right now? Do you realize this is serious? Listen, as a means of illustration,

I'm not saying watching Netflix is wrong. But the point of it is, is that we allow ourselves to relax spiritually, and we should not.

Because we, as Paul is saying, we are waging war. This is why it makes sense going back to be sober, right?

Being alert. So I'm just going to read the whole context here, because I think it's helpful. It says, "...finally, brothers, be strong in the

Lord and the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may stand against the schemes of the devil."

I just want to stop here. I'm going to poke some eyes. I cannot stand it when people read this, and they start giving men these steps of putting on the armor of God.

And it's all external means, right? Do this, and do that, and do this. There's nowhere in the context.

In the entire Bible, that would be the case. But specifically in Ephesians, this is not it.

He's talking to a church, who he just got done giving them three chapters of gospel.

Then he talked about how they are unifying that gospel by not trusting their own means, but the body functioning together.

Then he's worried in chapter 5 about their disunity, and how the disunity could absolutely fracture them all over the place.

He's using battle mentality, right? A soldier in a field by himself is doomed, right?

He has no idea what he's doing. He's exposed himself. But a soldier who's a part of an army and understands his role and his function can actually be protected from the enemy.

So this is exactly how Paul is using this. When he says, put on the full armor of God, another way of saying this is he's saying, wear the righteousness of Christ.

All right, guys, here, come back to me. I know this has been a little bit of a longer podcast, but hear this out. The way in which we fight against Satan is constantly claiming the promises of Christ in the gospel.

Because think about when he says the armor, right, the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, right? First of all, we didn't save ourselves.

We don't clothe ourselves with our own righteousness, right? It's not our truth. The truth that secures us up, the belt of truth, it's

Christ's truth, right? You don't put on the armor of God by doing Bible reading and prayer every day, so you're going to be attacked by the devil because you didn't do a particular act that morning.

You live every single day knowing that Satan can attack. Now, Satan can attack my righteousness.

If he wants to come after me and say, John, look what a failure you are. I've seen your thoughts. I've seen your actions. I've seen your heart. I mean, he can't see these things, but he can see the outwards of me.

And his accusations against me, they can land and sting. How do we fight the fiery darts of Satan's accusations according to Paul?

He says, you hold up Christ. You hold up Christ, right? You can't touch me. I got the blessed bread of Jesus' righteousness.

I got his helmet of salvation on me. It's his truth, not my truth. It's his truth that I am safe in.

If you do not walk around constantly reminding yourselves of why God loves you and he protects you, which is

Christ's righteousness, Satan will absolutely take you down. And he does, right? I mean, guys, how many times have we woke up in the morning or at the end of the day and we are so beat down because we have allowed the world to tell us we're a failure.

We have allowed the world to tempt us and we give in to that temptation. We allow the world to give us what we should love and we fall in love with it and we feel guilty for it.

Instead, we can say, no, I don't need those. Satan can't touch me and I'm not going to allow the darts come after me.

And I know I'm in a war and every day is exhausting, but it's the righteousness of Christ, the armor of God that protects me.

I hope that's a different perspective for you and you don't get wrapped up in this idea that it's something you do every day.

It's a hope you live in. It's a promise you accept. I'm going to read you just a couple of other verses here that I just want you to just take this away and think about it as far as the tactics of Satan.

I think this is very helpful when he says, he was 313, but exhort one another every day as long as it's called a day that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sins.

It's time to take the blinders off. You're every day under the attack of Satan and he wants to get you addicted to something.

He wants to get your eyes on something that has nothing to do with God and his kingdom. That's what he wants to do.

And he's good at it. And so he's saying, be watchful, be aware of this, and then consider daily how to encourage one another so that you are hardened by the deceitfulness of sins.

This is so important and so powerful. So I'm going to read this last section to you and then we'll close it and then we'll pick it up next week.

It's this, it's 2 Timothy 2, and I want you to hear this exhortation. You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

By the way, where does he find his strength? Guys, it's in the gospel, right? And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses and trust of faithful men who will be able to teach others.

Guys, I really hope you learn this so that you can go and pass this down and the kingdom of God becomes strong based upon the message of the

King, not our methods, not our spiritual disciplines, but it's the truth of Christ. Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus, which means, guys, we are going to suffer for the sake of the

King, and that's okay. But hear this last part. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits since his aim is to please the one who enlists him, 2

Timothy 2 .4. Gentlemen, he wouldn't write that if we couldn't get entangled. And I can tell you in my own experience, and I know in yours, you've allowed yourself to get entangled in lust and desires and money and fame or whatever else, and you're not satisfied.

The reasons why you're hearing this, and it's probably resonating with you because you're like, yeah, you know what? I've tried to pursue the world, and I got entangled in it, and it did not produce any desire of satisfaction.

Well, I can tell you, you can be completely satisfied, have total meaning in life, and do something that really matters versus just increasing your bank account or increasing or decreasing your waistline.

There's more to life than that. And next week, that's what we're going to talk about, is how do you find true purpose and meaning from, first of all, stop believing the lies of Satan.

Come up with a battle plan to protect your mind. But then you have to come up with the reason why it is you're going to exert so much effort for your