How Satan Destroys a Church - Part 7 (Who's the King of the Jungle?) — Don Courville

David and Goliath: The Battle Belongs to the Lord

Okay, did Terry come out yet? It's fray two. Okay, you got it, Terry? Alright, turn in your Bibles to 1 Samuel. Bring it on out. Yeah, bring it on out. 17. 1 Samuel 17. Thank you. Good man. Alright, let's see.

I'm going to need a volunteer in a second, a couple. But 1 Samuel 17. Whoops. You got it? Let's stand. This is the chapter about David and Goliath. You're beginning to get it here. Okay. We're not going to read everything, but I'm just going to point out some things to you that we're going to pray.

In verse 8, the giant comes out. The Israelites are on one mountain and the Philistines on another, and in the middle is a valley. And so here comes the giant. In verse 8,. And he stood and cried unto the armies of Israel, and said unto them, Why are ye come out to set your battling array?

Am not I a Philistine, and ye servants of Saul? Choose you a man for you, and let him come down to me. See, he'd come down in the valley, and he says, Come on down to me. Verse 9, If ye be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants.

But if I prevail against him, and kill him, then shall ye be our servants in service. And the Philistines said, I defy the armies of Israel this day. Give me a man that we may fight together. And when Saul and all Israel heard those words of the Philistines, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.

Well, God's going to give them a man. You come on over in about chapter 17 and verse 23, this man shows up, looks like a little boy, at least compared to the giant. And so David comes on the scene in verse 22.

He leaves his carriage with a keeper. In 23, he runs into the army first of all. And then 23, As he talked with them, behold, there came up the champion, the Philistine of Gath, Goliath by name, out of the armies of the Philistines, and spake according to the same words, and David heard them.

And you know the rest of the story. How David was really upset that this Philistine would be doing these type of things. And so Saul heard about it in verse 37. And David said, moreover, the Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine.

He said he'd go get him. And everybody said, you can't do that. And so then 38, and Saul armed David with his armor. And you know how the story goes. And you come on over in about 45, 46, 47, some tremendous warfare truths are shared, and we'll get into those.

Let's pray. Father, we pray that the Spirit of God would open up our eyes to the truth that we have in Christ, that we are more than conquerors, and open up our eyes to the victory that we have in Christ, and open up our eyes to the fact that we reign with Christ.

We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, I need a couple volunteers. I need somebody, a little boy, probably about this high. I don't care who you are. Somebody want to volunteer? Are you about that height?

Come on up here. Turn around now. Tell everybody your name. This is Carter. He's not afraid of a giant, are you? No, I ain't. All right. Now, okay, you better be quiet. You might get in trouble. Let's find a giant.

Anybody want to volunteer to be the giant? Samuel's volunteering. Isaiah, come on up here, Isaiah. We like volunteers. Okay, so we got the valley here, and we got, we got, you're going to be David, okay?

You're not going to be the giant. How tall are you, about three foot? All right, put on your armor, Saul. I mean, this is the giant. Perfect fit. A cup box. Okay, here's your spear. All right. Now, Saul says you got to wear his armor to the battle.

Put your dad's coat on. Put it on. And he gives you his spear. One thing I didn't get was a helmet. Hmm. Didn't get a helmet. Huh? Oh, yeah, I did get one. My memory's great. Okay. Now, then, you're going to, and this is probably about right proportion.

This giant could have been about 11 feet, they said. And so if he's three foot and he's about six, I don't know what, four or so, about twice as tall. So, now, are you pretty tough? You ready to have a fight with this giant?

You going to beat him up? Yeah. You better run for it, Isaiah. Anyway, this is the idea. Saul thought the way to win a giant was to fight the giant's ways. And if we fight the devil with his techniques and his ways, guess what?

He beats us every time. This giant's going to eat your lunch. That means he's going to whoop up on you. And he's going to feed you to the birds. But there's another way to fight giants. And that was get rid of all of this paraphernalia.

Get rid of this sword of Saul's. Get rid of this armor of Saul's. Now you need a sling and a stone. Boy, we just don't have one. But you pretend you've got a sling. And you come out after, Carter, you come after this giant.

He's going to come get you. What did David do with the sling? Do what David did. Yeah, get him. Whoa, and he hit him right in the head. And what's the giant do? Oh, you got him. Way to go. Give me five.

Whoop, do it again. All right. Give Carter a big hand. He just slew the giant. Yay. All right. Thank you. You can sit down. Is the giant okay? Wow. Okay. Thank you, Isaiah. You were very useful today.

All right. What did you say? Oh, that's right. Come on back. That's the point. David went over there, jumped up on top of the giant, and took his own sword and cut off his head. We just skipped that part.

Might have gotten a little blurred. We didn't know what Carter might do to Isaiah. He has no fear. He might have took that sword and bonked him over the head. All right. Now we've got a picture, a word picture, and now let's see what God can teach us from this.

Loving God as the Foundation for Spiritual Warfare

I've been going, I think this is my seventh one in this series of how Satan destroys the church. And I was praying the other day and I said, Lord, this could just go on forever. It really could if we get to looking at it.

What is something you would like us to have? And so I went to sleep, took a nap, and just said, Lord, would you show me? Within the next couple of three hours after I woke up, things began to come together of something that's very important.

On this one, the enemy beats us every time. If he can draw us to fight the way he wants us to fight, he'll beat us. Goliath had no doubt in his mind that if somebody would come down there and fight with him one-on-one in the usual warfare techniques, that he'd beat them.

But he wasn't expecting a little old boy, so to say, compared to him to come out there with a sling and a stone and take him down. Why, there was somebody even in front of him that was his armor bearer and he had all this stuff on him.

But it didn't matter. It doesn't matter with giants. If God wants that giant to go down, he's going to go down. Now, many of us know who Pastor Philz is up there in Indianapolis, that giant of a man, godly man.

And if you ever shook hands with him, you might have thought you were shaking hands with Goliath. His hand would just swallow you up, and he's gone with the Lord now. But wherever he went, it seemed like almost every time he liked to share this story.

And this story, he'd come out with, Who's the king of the jungle? Who's the king of the jungle? How many of you have heard that story? Maybe you've heard it many times. And so then he'd tell this story about how this lion was going through the jungle.

He'd come up to a monkey. Who's the king of the jungle? And he'd roar and he'd scare the monkey to death. You are! You are! You are! And he'd go to different animals around through the jungle and he would just roar and say, Who's the king of the jungle?

Oh, you are king! You are! He was the king of the jungle. But one day he walked up to an elephant and he roared out and he said, Who's the king of the jungle? And the elephant just stood there and looked at him.

And I'll tell you the rest of the story when we get to the end of this. Because this is the way Satan is. He is a roaring lion going around through the jungle, devouring who he can, destroying who he can.

Now I'm going to start off this series in sort of a strange way, but we're going to tie it back together at the end. And it's this. I was just reading in my Bible on the way to church this morning, in Revelation chapter 2, about the seven churches.

And the first one was the church of Ephesus. And the Lord went down there through all the things that they did that He liked and He was pleased with this and that. But then He comes down in verse 4 and He says, Nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.

What does love have to do with warfare? Thou hast left thy first love. Well, it has a lot to do with it. You remember the basis of a lifelong relationship is agreement? Do you know what the bond of agreement is?

It's love. It's love. John 14, 15, and 21, 23, 24, all those verses through there, Jesus said, If you love Me, you keep My commandments. If you love Me, you keep My commandments. And I'm going to give you this propositional statement.

If Satan can draw us out of our position of power, he can destroy us. If he can lure us away to thinking, well, this is happening to me. God doesn't understand. There's something going on. Surely He must not love me to let this happen.

When Eve was tempted by the enemy, He drew her out of her position and then He captured her. We are placed in Christ when we become a Christian. By the way, if you have not given your life to Christ, you have not surrendered your heart to Him, you are vulnerable to everything the devil wants to do with you and to you under the permissive will of God.

And he wants to destroy you and take you straight to hell. This is why as soon as you understand that you're a sinner and that your sins, you're going to have to pay for them and go to hell. Once you understand that, then you understand that somebody's going to pay for your sin.

And then if you understand that Jesus Christ stepped up when He died on the cross and He paid for your sin for you, you make a decision. You make a choice. Are you going to surrender your life to Him?

Are you going to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? Or are you just going to go on and somehow think you're going to get to heaven? Without that, the enemy will take you and destroy your life. But once you surrender your life to Christ, and if you haven't done that, let me encourage you to do that right now.

Do it today. Today is the day of salvation, the Bible says. Then once you surrender your life to Christ, you are protected. You are in Christ. You are safe and secure. But in our walk with Christ, the enemy, he's lost your soul, so what's he going to do?

He's going to try to draw you out of Christ. Now he can't really draw us out of Christ because we're sealed. The Bible says that we're sealed. But if he can draw you, so to say, in a practical way, we walk by faith.

If he can draw you to not live by faith, he will destroy you. And this is what he did with Eve. Eve belonged to God. But her life was given over to Satan, and so she was drawn away. Taken captive. And this is why Jesus Christ came.

To pay the price for her sin and your sin, and to bring us back into God. Now all the enemy can do is mentally work on us and suggest to us and get us drawn back out. A way not to live by faith. You're saved by the blood of Christ, but if we won't live by faith, we'll live by flesh.

We'll try to fight our Goliaths in the flesh. So if he can draw us out of our position of power, he can destroy us. And this thing that makes it work is love. Love of Jesus. Our love of self. All of a sudden, Satan talked Eve into caring about herself and loving herself more than loving God.

Loving God has to do with keeping His commandments. This is exactly what Jesus said. And so the enemy, he comes along, and he tries to talk us out of our position. And if he can get us out there in that valley to fight with him, the way he fights, he'll just whoop us.

And he'll beat us up. And he'll do great damage in our lives. In John 14, I'm just flipping over here to read you a few of these verses. In verse 15, If ye love me, keep my commandments. And verse 21, He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.

And he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. And then verse 23, Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our bode unto him.

A tremendous thing that God invites us to come to Him for salvation. To surrender our life. And then He brings us out of the realm of fear. Out of the realm of all the terrors of the world. And He puts us into the realm of love.

And He says, live here. Stay here. It doesn't matter what comes against you. Just stay in my realm of love. And the devil is always out there on that side. Come on out and play with me. I've got some goodies for you.

I've got this. He's always throwing temptations to get us out of our realm of protection, out of our position. And never is one's love more in a backslidden state than when it rebels against the one he loves.

Now David had a good day with the giant, but later on he had a couple bad days. He's a type of us. One day we can be walking with God and the next day we can blow it. And just an amazing type. Now let's see if there's some lessons for us as we go into this.

The Believer’s Position of Power in Christ

Agreement is a position of love. Bonded together. And it's also one of power and strength. This is why the enemy, once you receive Christ, he hates you. Because now you are a threat to him. And one thing he doesn't want you to do is pray.

Because that is communion with the one you love. That is communion with the one you love. And when you pray, there is more strength and power that comes out of your life that threatens him. And when you go touch other people's lives, you can do great damage to his kingdom.

So what's he going to try to do? He's going to try to destroy you. He's going to try to knock you off the track. The love of Christ constrains. That means holds together. That's what Paul said. The love of Christ constrains me.

It controls me. It holds me fast. Holds together. And so the commands of Christ are our weapons. These are our weapons to use against the enemy. Ephesians 6, verse 17, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

Now there's one passage in Ephesians I'm going to use this morning. And that's Ephesians 6, verse 10. I can't go through all of it. But finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.

Once you are placed into Christ, do not be drawn out to live by the flesh. To live in fear. Whatever. You're drawn out of your position. In every single battle, we are to remain in our position in Christ.

And I'm going to say some things about that this morning. So agreement is a position of love being in Christ and power and strength is there. You know, Jesus said, if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven.

There is one of those promises. There's one of those promises. Standing on the promises. Now I'm going to do two things this morning. I'm going to give you some doctrinal teaching and then we're going to slip over and get some practical teaching on what we're talking about.

Ephesians 6 .10. Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Now in the doctrinal teaching, also let me share something with you. I've been memorizing these verses in Ephesians 3 .16.

That He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to what? Listen. That He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened with might. Strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man.

And then it goes on. That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith. That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith that ye be enrooted and grounded in what? Love. And then what? And then what? May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge that you might be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now unto Him that's able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think. According to what? How we feel? No. Look at it. According to what? According to the power that worketh in us. Satan's only weapon he has is to talk us into coming into the valley to fight him with our own armor.

But if he can't talk us out of Christ and he can't position that we're in Christ but if he can't talk us to come down and fight in the flesh. And so, if he can't do it, he can't get us. And we're going to get him.

This is how Satan destroys churches. He gets churches to live in the flesh and operate by the flesh and not by the Spirit. And to fight our weapons and make our decisions and make our progress that we go.

And I want to share some stories with you about these things. So, Ephesians 6 .10, God is saying, Live according to your position. And I wrote this for myself. Not your perception of your problems. But take all of my problems and put them in proportion to my position in Christ.

I can do all things through Christ who has strengthened me. And some of these things, I guarantee you, tear our heart apart. They grieve us and they hurt us. And some of these things hurt us physically.

Some of these things damage our families. Some of these things destroy our churches that we come against. And if you've got a lot of passion in you like I do, it's really hard to stay in the Spirit sometimes and not jump back out into the flesh.

Just every day. I've asked God like you a thousand times to get rid of this. And He says, No, my grace is sufficient. Live by grace. Quit living by those passions. They get you in trouble every time you ask the Lord.

How many times do you have to... Oh, Lord. But live by faith. The just shall live by faith and not his passions. The Goliaths, they get us. Now, Ephesians 6 .10, Ephesians 6 .10. Back over to that page.

Finally, my brethren. He's concluding. He's teaching to the Ephesians. Okay, now I'm going to give you guys the best I've got. Finally, my brethren. Be strong in the Lord. Don't be strong in your education.

Don't be strong in this or that. Just be strong in the Lord. That's what he's saying. In the Lord. In the power of His might. I was reading something the other day. It was written by Roy Knutson. Knutson, I don't know how he said his name.

But he wrote a book Calling the Church to Discipline. And he showed in this book how far things can go. There were some pastors together. And the question was asked in the pastor's meeting. What do you do with a church member you know is committing adultery?

And the pastor asked the group of ministers. And there was silence. You'd better leave him alone. An experienced minister finally warned. If you make an issue of it, you'll split your church. Take my advice.

Leave him alone. What do you think about that? Yeah, right. Right. It stinks. It stinks. You've already got a church split. So you have to deal with it. You have almost got a checkmate. Where Satan has almost destroyed that church completely.

Because when you split it, churches hardly ever get over a split. Hardly ever. This is why a little sin leavens a whole lot. And so when you do deal with it, you're going to have a big bang. And I don't believe in the big bang theory.

But you're going to have an explosion. Because Satan has invested himself. And he does that in us. And so I wrote out, Wrong. And what happens if you don't discipline the man? You're not going anywhere.

You might as well stop and deal with it. And if I can look back over some of the things I've gone through in my life, I see it's far better to just go ahead and stop and deal with it right then. Go ahead and split the church while you've got maybe 500 in there.

Because if you keep on going and get 5 ,000, it's going to make a whole lot bigger mess. Deal with it. Deal with it. And this is one of the ways that Satan destroys our churches. Because we don't deal with our stuff.

We don't deal with our stuff. And if you don't bring the church under the Lordship of Christ and to the cross, you're going to have a whole bunch of wimps always complaining about this and that and criticizing and gossiping like we just learned in our family school time this morning.

So we've just got to deal with it. I can do all things through Christ. Ephesians 6 .10 We're seated with Christ. It's the position of victory. So we have to just go in there and by faith. But before you do it, one time I was in a church and there was something wrong there with the pastor.

I didn't know what it was, but I was there for a year before I finally figured out what it was. It wasn't good at all. And so I had a man that came through and visited with us and we took him to church and I said, I want you to meet this pastor.

And his family went to the church and their family sang in the church. They were just passing through and visiting us for a few weeks. So we went to lunch. Breakfast, actually. And we visited with him.

And at that time, we were on a sabbatical break. Just taking a break. Back in my early days, we'd do that. And so as we walked away from the restaurant, my friend, he looked at me and he said, leave him alone.

He will destroy you. He was the pastor in the church. At that point and at that time and with that counsel, that's all I could do. But, he said, God has showed you that so you know how to pray. So there's situations where you're just going to have to do what God is showing you.

There's some situations that there wasn't anything I could do in that. But he warned me that if I did try to do something, that man would destroy me. And so you have to be very careful in this area. There are some tough, tough calls.

Really tough ones. The evidence of faith is action based on that faith. So, Goliath was just a typical representation of the problems that we have. We've got Goliaths all over. And so when David was challenged by the Goliath, he had faith and his faith was evidenced by what he did.

How he moved on it. Now, let's get into the practical application of this. 1 Samuel 17. And I've got four or five things. And they all start with an S. Let's see. Go back. D is the last one. A, B, C, D.

Four things. They all start with an S. Our position of faith. Faith is with Christ. Remember, whenever I say faith, think of in Christ, with Christ, ruling with Christ, reigning with Christ. Our position of faith with Christ is one of separation from the ways of man.

You see what God says? Put on the whole armor. Put on the whole armor. In Ephesians, He's talking about 11. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

In verse 13, Wherefore, I take unto you the whole armor of God. What? Get this. Saul's spear and Saul's armor. If David would have tried to fight the giant, he would have been in the armor of Saul. And the giant would have killed him.

But God says don't fight giants with the armor of the world. And so our position of faith is one of separating from the ways of man. He had to put off. He had to put off the armor. Now let me tell you something.

Faith’s Separation from Human Methods

A lot of the churches. Who's the king of the jungle? A lot of the churches have been taken over by the enemy. How does Satan destroy the church? He gets control of it. I've been studying by E .M. Bounds on this.

He gets control of them. And you can't get them back. He's got them. And so you have to separate yourself from it. And if you do try and you go in. This is why revival teams, if they really are going for God at a certain point, they will break the kingdom of Satan free.

They will break in and they'll have revival. And God will get the glory. But many times, they are run off. Or starved out. Or done something. Or gossiped out. They just go so far. Oh well, we've got to stop.

We've got other meetings. We've got other plans. But if God has left free to go, it may take two weeks. It may take four weeks. It may take ten weeks. But they just go until they break it. And then once you break through, then it just cleans.

It cleanses. And those that get revived are free. And those that can't stand it, they leave. And so when you're done, you have those that are walking with God. And so it's a position of faith. And faith, by the way, does not work with the armor of man.

It never does work. And why we keep trying some of those things in our churches, I don't know. The armor of light, Romans 13, 12. 1739 in this passage in David, put them off. There may be something...

You see, if we had that armor, that is a weak spot. And the enemy is going to throw his spear right at those weak spots in our lives, in our families, in our churches. And so we've got to have the armor of God.

So we put it off. Here's a second thing. Well, let me say some more things in that first one. See, Saul had weak faith. And weak faith puts its comments in man's methods and man's schemes. He had his armor.

That's all he had. He didn't have God anymore. God had already left him. And so when we don't have God, what do we do? We use substitutes in our churches. We do all these things. I was in a church one time on a sabbatical break.

I'm trying to think if that was... No, that was a different one. And they started a building program where I was. And I got in there and helped and was working. And this was a tremendous thing. They were building this church by faith.

And they were running out of money. Well, I guess we're going to slow down. We're going to send the contractor back home until we get some money. Money came rolling in. And they kept going and going by faith.

And they got right down to the end. And I forget how much they needed. 40 ,000 more or something to finish. And boy, it was slowing down again. And the leadership of the church said, boy, we'd really like to get done.

We've come this far. But money's not coming in. And so all the way up to that point, they would always say, well, we're just going to shut down and see what God will do. But at that point, they decided, let's just go to the bank and get the money so we can get this thing done.

And they did. And when they did, the giving just stopped cold. And I don't know how long it took them to pay off that loan. Why do we do that? I don't know. We just do it. Here's the second one. Our position of faith is one of victorious stability.

First of all, our position of faith is one of separation. Now it's victorious stability. Confidence. Let me share a story in this letter. This is about in a church. A man had a marriage problem. You've never heard of this.

I'm not talking about the marriage problems, but what they did. You know, most of our places, we've got churches that people, they separate, they divorce on grounds of incompatibility or she burnt my pancakes and all kinds of junk.

But if you get a church that's going to do things right, they're not going to stand for that in the church, right? Well, what do we do? We compromise and we give in and this and that and it's just a mess.

And so here's what happens. In one church that speaks with authority, that lives with authority, a man was seated next to his wife. That's what I'm saying. You just don't see this. He arose and he stood up in the church and he said, I would like to have prayer for our marriage.

What'd he do? He humbly acknowledged they had a need. What'd the church do? What do most of our churches do when somebody's got a need? We sit back there, oh, look at old needy so-and-so. I don't know why they came here.

Most churches will take a needy person and just pick them to death. But we've got to bring them to the cross. We've got to bring them free. And not everybody wants to get free. But this man did. And he stood up right there.

Humbly acknowledged their need for help. What happened? What do you think? You think they grabbed ahold of that man and his wife and they said, you've got to get out of here. We just can't have that stuff in the church.

No. That whole church just surrounded them in love. Jumped in to help them because they were a body. That whole church. And here's what this article said. He did not need to fear gossip. He counted on a loving church family living together under the authority of Christ to surround them with their prayers and faith.

And they did. That's what I said. You just don't see this. What do we do? We come in, we've got our problems, and if somebody comes to try to help us, oh no, I'm okay. No, you're not okay. You'll continue to hurt yourself and hurt your family and hurt your children, and you'll hurt us.

We've got to deal with our stuff or Satan will destroy us. How is Satan destroying our churches? We're just not obeying the commands of Christ. We're just not doing it. 1 Samuel 17, 45 -47. So here's how you handle your problems.

What did David do? Why do we do things different? Look at how David handled his giants. 1 Samuel 14, look at 45. Okay, they're going to go out in their fight. Then said David to the Philistine, Thou comest to me with a sword and with a spear and with a shield.

But I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand, and I will smite thee and take thine head from thee, and I will give the carcass of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in heaven.

And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear, for the battle is the Lord's and He will give you into our hands. That's how he fought his battle. How do we face our battles?

Oh, well, I don't know what's going to happen. I just don't know what's going to happen. We've got this terrible problem. Second church we went into. We got there and they had problems. If you can imagine a church having problems.

Two of them I knew about and the other two I didn't know about until after I got in there. But the first one is they had a charismatic split. The church had grown real fast. Souls were getting saved. They built a new church.

And then the enemy got in there and the charismatic slipped in and began to give their doctrine stuff. And the pastor found out about it and that hit the fire. And it had a big blow up. And just a little small group of people were left with this new building.