Proverbs 8:34 (Men At The Gates Part 2 - Rules of Engagement)

The Loss of Faithful Watchmen and the Need for Men at the Gates

Two weeks ago, Charlie Kirk was murdered for his faith in Christ Jesus. And since then, it doesn't feel like the world is the same, and in many ways, that's a good thing. But it's not just Charlie Kirk.

This year, we have buried too many of the best watchmen that have stood faithfully upon the wall. James Dobson, who fought unflinchingly for the family, died this year. John MacArthur, who stood unmovable upon the Word of God and the Gospel, died this year.

Charlie Kirk, Bodie Bauckham. These men were men who armed a generation with truth and courage, and they have finished the race. And now they are in the presence of Jesus. But the thing that hits me so hard is that their posts on the wall now are vacant.

And the question before us is, not how long are we going to mourn their losses. We should mourn their losses. They were great men. But also, who among us is going to step forward and stand in their shoes?

We can't afford nostalgia at a time like this. We can't afford the glory days, the Uncle Rico moments, where we remember when. Memory alone is not going to advance the kingdom. Victories of the past, however great they were, are not going to hold at bay the enemies of today.

In healthy empires, strong men are replaced by strong men. And when strong men fall, others are being prepared to rise up. Which to me is the need of the hour today in the Christian church. Because the church cannot endure without strong men who are willing to take their place on the wall, and who are willing to become the next lords and chiefs at the city gates.

And it's at this crucial juncture that I believe the church is now asking that question, who will stand up, who will with Isaiah say, here I am, send me. And the reason I say all of this is because Christianity, by its very identity, is a transformational, war-like religion.

Do not believe the lie that it is for feathered hair metrosexuals who are in touch with their emotions. It's not a bad thing to be in touch with your emotions. But the commission of Jesus, if you even think about what that means, go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Teach them how to obey everything I've commanded. You can't even fathom that command without understanding that Jesus intended for us to conquer the world. And in the eras past, we've understood that more fully, where the church has expanded greatly in this country.

And yet, as the old guard is dying, and as the mission is still before us today, I ask us, who is going to stand up? Who's going to be the man that God has called you to be in your family? Who is going to be that ambassador for Jesus Christ at your job?

Who's going to be the men who stand at the city gates, and who purposefully and intentionally work for the transformation of this world by the power of Christ and through His Holy Spirit? Who's going to pick up the hammer and start working on the section of the wall that Voting left behind?

Who's going to grab the baton from Charlie Kirk and keep on running? These are questions that we asked two weeks ago, even, when we did the sermon, Men at the Gates, and I thought that it would be appropriate for us to dive deeper into that topic over the next two weeks.

At Shepherds Church, we take one verse and preach it three times, so welcome. But one of the things that I would like to do is I would like to understand, what does it mean for men to be men at the city gates?

We talked about it in brief a couple weeks ago, where we said that it requires two things. It requires listening first to what God says and then acting. For the next two weeks, I'd like to talk about what does that mean, acting.

What does it mean for us to be faithful in warfare for Christ? And over the next couple of weeks, we're going to be talking about that. Today, we're going to be talking about the rules of engagement. What are our battle plan as a Christian?

Next week, we're going to be talking about what are the actual gates? What are the gates that need to be torn down in our culture? And what are the gates that need to be built up so that we can see Christendom again?

So today, we're going to be talking about what are the rules of engagement. Next week, it's going to be talking about where do we aim it. So if you will, turn with me to Proverbs 8, 34 and 35. We will read it, and then we will begin.

This is the word of the Lord. We'll stop there, and we'll pray. Lord, we thank you. We thank you, Lord, that you have called us to something and for something. We thank you, Lord, that you have given us, especially as we talk about men today, you've given us a purpose.

And Lord, I pray that we would not live below that purpose and below that calling, but Lord, that we would see it as a matter of our duty to bring your kingdom to our spaces. Lord, we know that we can't do that in our own strength.

Lord, we know that we can't just will it so, and yet, Lord, we cannot also sit on our laurels and expect that it would be done without the participation of your body, the church, who is the hands and feet of you on earth.

Lord, help us. Help us to give all that we have for as long as we have so that this world and so that our nation would sing the hymns of God again and beg God that we would get our country back. It's in Christ's name we pray.

Amen. When we come to the matter of being at the gates, we're not talking about suggestions that the Scriptures give us or even helpful slogans. You're either standing at the gate faithfully or you are standing at the gate asleep at your post.

You're either upholding the society to which you live by the law of God, by the wisdom of Jesus Christ, by the power of the Spirit, or you are failing your own people and allowing our civilization to collapse.

And that is the point I'd like to press home today. There's no such thing as a man who does not stand at the city gates. You're either doing it faithfully and righteously or you're doing it poorly and shamefully.

There is no middle ground. Therefore, it stands to reason that if we're going to be men at the gates, if we're going to be watchers and caretakers of the society for which our forefathers have handed us, then we ought to do it well.

And we ought to do it with wisdom and intelligence and honor and valor and courage and commitment and strength and integrity and righteousness, which means that we need to know something about the rules of engagement.

Now, I'm not being merely metaphorical. As a young man, I was deployed into what was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. And I was bound to a particular set of rules that governed every mission that we were under.

I was told when to fire, how to fire, when to press forward, when to disengage. And those rules were not suggestions. They were orders. And if those orders had it been good, I'm tipping my hand here, then they would have given us clarity in the midst of chaos and they would have given us discipline in the midst of confusion and they would have been guardrails to guide us during the hot firefights that our people went under in Fallujah and Bokova and different places like that.

Without good rules of engagement, men die needlessly. Missions become confused about their purpose. Soldiers are not clear on how they're supposed to engage, which leads to chaos and confusion among the troops.

But if you had good rules of engagement, your mission would succeed. Soldiers wouldn't have to think. They would just react. People would go back home to their loved ones' victors instead of in coffins.

Now, thankfully, God has not left us guessing on what the rules of engagement are for the war to which he has called us as Christians. And we're not fighting with bombs and with bunker busters. But we are fighting with real weapons.

We are fighting with weapons that are powerful, that will bring this world under the dominion of Jesus Christ. And he has given us the rules for how to engage these weapons, the rules for how to engage this warfare, the rules that tell us how to fight, when to fight, how to hold the line, and how to win.

This is something that I've been not frustrated, very passionate about, is Christians have to learn how to win. We've become so convinced in the last 50 years that we ipso facto lose that we actually have to remember that Christ is king and all the nations are going to come and bow down before him.

So as we look at these, I want you to remember that these are the ways that we as men can stand in the gates. Next week, we're going to talk about what those gates are. But this week, we're going to talk about how we even wage war.

This is basic training. This is how you pick up your rifle. This is how you pick up your bayonet. This is how you don't throw the pin and leave the grenade. It's happened. And we're going to begin with the first and most important rule of engagement, and that is that we fight by the Word of God.

Fighting by the Word of God

The Word of God is our greatest weapon. It even calls itself that in Scripture. It is the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, Ephesians 6 .17. But it's even more than a sword because Hebrews 4 .12 tells us that it's living and active, and it's sharper than any two-edged sword, which makes it the most essential weapon in our battle in the war of the world.

I want you to think about it this way. No soldier enters a battlefield with an empty scabbard back in the day. And if we go into the battle empty of Scripture and devoid of God's Word, we swing at air, we miss, we accomplish nothing.

The Word of God is an essential weapon in the war to win the world. It's also our compass and our only connection to the direction that God would have us go. That's why David says in Psalm 119, Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light unto my path, which means it's our intel, it's our direction, it's our orders from on high.

It's telling us exactly where our commander wants us to go. Isaiah tells us to the law and to the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn. So if you don't follow the Word of God, it's because you have no light.

You're living in darkness. Therefore, the Scriptures must govern everything we do. That's why the Scripture must be the guide and rule and governing authority over our households. Deuteronomy 4, 9 -10, The Father shall make these things known to His children.

It doesn't say should.

It says shall.

It says later in the passage to bind them to your children so that the Word of God, in Psalm 119 again, would be treasured in the heart that we may not sin against God. So that when we speak of Jesus and we speak of God and we speak of God's salvation, we don't speak as men who are filled with lots of bloviating opinions.

We speak as inscripturated men. We speak as heralds of the King's message. As Peter says, If anyone speaks, let him speak as if it were the utterances of God. While the enemy and all of his disciples traffic in lies and deceit, God's Word is truth, Psalm 119, 160.

While the enemy fights with perishable weapons, the Word of the Lord endures forever, 1 Peter 1 .25. While the enemy plots with cunning and cruelty, the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple, Psalm 19 .7.

We are conformed by, defined by, and fight by the Book. We are made wise by the Word of God. And we will win this war by the Word of God. That's our first rule of engagement, is that Christians are people of the Book.

And the world will be conformed to Christ because His Gospel is the power of God for the salvation of the world, the Jew first and the Gentile.

Amen?

Repentance as a Weapon in Spiritual Warfare

But it's not just that. We also have the weapon of repentance. No army can advance if there is disease festering inside of its ranks. Hidden sin can and will sabotage the mission. Like Achan, burying the stolen treasure beneath his tent, one man's compromise led to the entire country's failure.

So we have to repent!

We have to be eager to repent. And the answer, brothers and sisters, that sin wants to give you is that you live in your despair, you live in your brokenness, you live in your guilt, you live in your shame, you live in all of these different toxic emotions which make you run away from God.

That's not the answer. Repentance is the most joyful thing that you can do. Repentance is like the woman who goes to the hospital knowing that the cancer is going to be removed and it's going to save her life.

Yeah, the knife is going to hurt. But yes, the tumor's gone. The answer in the warfare of repentance is not despair and not shame. It's the confession of our sin to a faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who has given us every good gift on the cross to save us and reconcile us to the Father forevermore so that you can be forgiven and also reoriented to your mission.

King David knew both sides of this battle. He said, When I slept, my body wasted away as though groaning all day long. Psalm 32 .3. But then he said, When I acknowledged my sin to you, you forgave the guilt of my sin.

And this is the hope of every soldier of Christ. We have not been left in our shame. You have been washed, renewed, sanctified, restored by the mercies of Almighty God, brought back into the fight so that you can wage war through grace.

Knowing this, if you want to be men at the gates who reign and who extend the reign of Christ, who win the world to the kingdom of God, if we don't want that, then why?

Right?

If we're thinking more about our retirement than the advancement of the kingdom of God, why? If we're thinking more about our jobs and our careers, why? The chief affection of our heart ought to be Jesus Christ and what He loves.

And what does He love? But the advancement of His kingdom to the ends of the earth. In that sense, if we want to be men at the gates, we have to reign in the city gates. We have to win the world to the kingdom of God through the means that God has appointed.

And the first two means are the scriptures and repentance. The third is we fight underneath His lordship. And what I mean by that is simply that Jesus is Lord. Jesus is King. Jesus is sovereign. And we are not.

Jesus is the general. And we are the soldiers. And because He was raised from the dead,.

Whatever He says goes.

I mean, I want you to think about that. You and I have not raised ourselves from the dead, so our word means very little.

But Jesus rose from the dead,.

So whatever He says is infinitely important. How can you argue with a man who rose himself from the grave?

It's especially true.

You know the first thing Jesus said as soon as He was raised from the dead to His disciples when they were gathered? You know the first thing He said? It was the most base thing anybody could ever say.

He gathered them together on a mountain. He said, All authority in heaven and on earth are mine. Now therefore, go.

He's saying,.

By my resurrection, I took over the world. By the resurrection, Caesar has no more power unless he's borrowed from me. I own the world. Now therefore, go. I own this dilapidated, sin-ridden world. Now you therefore go, and you make it conform to my image.

That's why He left us.

He left us to make the world according to the blueprints that He designed. And what is that? Genesis 1 tells us of a perfect space, a garden where we live with God. He did not leave you here to sit around and watch Netflix.

He did not leave you here to plan your next vacation. Those things are good. I'm not saying that they're... Sometimes they're good. But the overarching, underwriting principle of your life is not entertainment and vacations and your next thing.

The central purpose of your existence is to glorify God, enjoy Him forever, and build His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Why else would Jesus tell us to pray that? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.

Thy kingdom come, and Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And I don't believe Jesus prayed pipe dreams. I don't believe Jesus prayed a prayer like, that'll never happen. No, I think when He prayed it, He intended for it to happen.

Through His church.

That the kingdom of God would come on earth as it already has in heaven. So you ask yourself the question, how has the kingdom of God come in heaven? Pretty fully. There's no angels who are disobeying.

There's no one up in heaven questioning. There's only obedience. There's only people who said, I'll do what you say. You're the commander. I'm the soldier. That's what Jesus is bringing to earth so that every square inch of reality, every gate we face, every enemy that we're called to oppose, every stronghold that we encounter, all of them now lie under the supremacy of Jesus Christ.

It is so easy for us to look at evil in the world and think of how big it is. Do you know when God looked at evil in the world at the Tower of Babel, it says that He had to come down to see it.

Have you read that?

It says that they gathered at this valley called Shinar to build a magnificent building that reached all the way to the heavens and it said God came down to see it. The very best of human intervention and wisdom and all of the machinations of their evil is nothing compared to the power and the glory of God.

When we look at rulers and authorities and evil in this world and we think, gosh, that's so big, our initial reaction should be, but how much bigger is God? When churches cowered at the commands of a secular government and shut down churches and social distanced and commanded that everybody wear face diapers when they go to worship, we were dishonoring Christ and His kingship when the church did that.

Not this church, but the church. Because Christ is Lord. Christ is King. We're supposed to be taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. We're supposed to be ordering our families according to His Word because the King has given an order.

We're supposed to have a church.

That is bound together by His commands. Why? Because Jesus is King. We're supposed to be citizens that obey Him in every facet of our life. Why? Because Jesus is King. Every aspect of our life comes under the banner of His lordship and His kingship, which means that every aspect of our life.

Ought to conform to Him.

And tell me this, if the church took lordship seriously, what would the world look like? How could the world not look different if we were different? Our King has even guaranteed the victory. It's like betting on a fight where you know the opponent is going to fall in the seventh round.

That's the world we live in. That we know the enemy can't last and that we know the King is going to win. So put everything you have in that mission. Put everything you have. You have no idea if your job is going to succeed.

You have no idea if you're going to get to the end of your life and have nothing. You have no idea what your future looks like. A bullet could take you out tomorrow. A motorcycle could get hit like our sister Janelle's father got hit while he was riding his motorcycle and it's over.

You have no idea.

So don't invest your life in that. Invest your life in the kingdom of God. That's what has been promised victory, not the other stuff. That's the third thing. The fourth is we fight from the auspices of the church.

The Church as Training Battalion and Supply Line

And this makes sense because if Christ is Lord over all things and He has married for Himself a bride called the church and He has told us that His bride is the hands and feet of His power and dominion on earth, well then it would make sense that a lot of our battle would be waged under the banner of Jesus' church.

In this sense, the church is the training battalion. It's the command center of the kingdom. It's also His supply line to His soldiers. The church is where the soldiers are trained and fed and armed and disciplined and deployed into the battle.

The church is the place that calls us in and then commissions us out to do the work of Christ in the nations. To fight from the church means to submit to it, to love it, to learn from it, to be sharpened by it, to be strengthened by the word and sacrament given every Lord's Day and to march out from here after the benediction with a bounce in your step to bring your corner of the earth under the dominion of Christ.

To cut yourself off from the church is like a soldier cutting himself off from his supply lines, which is a recipe for disaster. This is why in any war, if you want to win the war, you don't go fight the most powerful unit in the army, you attack the supply lines because it doesn't matter how trained and how good your soldiers are.

If they can't eat and they don't have fuel, they cannot win. So in the same way, if you cut yourself off from the church, you're cutting yourself off from the only place on earth where Jesus promised that He would be present with us every Lord's Day.

You're cutting yourself off from the only place on earth where Jesus promised to feed us with His own body and His own blood. You're cutting yourself off from the only place on earth where you can be in His presence, be nourished by Him and sent out on mission.

It is like a med tent in the middle of a battle. You must come, get patched up, and then go back on the mission that God has called you to and your mission is not building your castle, it's building His kingdom.

That's the fourth. The fifth is that we fight together. And men, this is especially important for you. Men, you are not designed to be alone. That's why God gave you the best helper that He could ever give you in your life.

But you're also not meant in your mission to be a lone wolf thinking that you can do it on your own as some kind of cowboy. God has not put you in that situation. He has put you in a situation where you need others.

That's why Ecclesiastes 4, 9 -10 says, Two are better than one because they have a good return of their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. That's why Proverbs 27, 17 says, Iron sharpens iron, so that one man sharpens another.

This is why Paul urges the Philippian church to strive together with one mind for the gospel because we're meant to strive together. We're meant to work together. We're meant to labor together. Even our Lord sent out His disciples two by two because our faith and our campaign to reclaim the world from the enemy's clenches is not designed to be accomplished in isolation but together as the people of Christ.

And again, this is especially important to men because men are more prone to isolation than women. Men are more prone to go off by themselves, to live in their head, to deal with the things that they're dealing with with a smile on their face while nobody knows what's going on.

That's why men commit suicide at higher rates than women because no one sees it coming. I didn't know he was depressed! Whereas with a woman, they talk about it and tell you about it and relate to you about it and draw near about it because women are better at relationships than we are.

We need men, men, to develop us into the kind of men that will actually be a threat to the gates of hell. We need each other for accountability, for encouragement, for correction. This is one of the things that we've stumbled upon as a church.

Accidentally! It wasn't like we were brilliant. We met at a cigar bar and had a fraternity. And you men have blessed my life more than any season of my life being in relationship with you. You've helped me, you've strengthened me, you've motivated me.

You've made me a better man because I'm made for being in community. And so are you. And I pray that this next season, as the men are now taking a new challenge and becoming strong and physically fit, not just spiritually and theologically fit, that it will lead to even that much more fruit because we're made to work, to labor together.

So if your community is weak, brother, you're going to be weak. If you have no friends, you're going to be weak. But if you have a strong fraternity of men in your life who are encouraging you and strengthening you and calling you out and grabbing you by the collar at times and saying you're an idiot and you need to repent, if you have that kind of fraternity, you're bulletproof.

They can kill your body, but you're bulletproof in this life against all of the wiles and schemes of the devil. It's time for us, brothers, to lock shields and to war together. It's time for us to be that cohort, that band of brothers, and to continue developing that because God has made us for that.

How are we going to win the city gates if we don't lock arms and do it together?

Amen?

Fighting with Hope Against a Defeated Enemy

Number six is we fight with hope. This is important. We don't stand with drooping heads and trembling knees. We fight with the word of God. We fight with repentance. We fight under his authority and his lordship.

We fight from the church, trained and commissioned by her, and we fight together with hope. And that's essential because we're not expecting Jesus' world to end in defeat and disaster. We fight with hope because Jesus has dealt the death blow to Satan.

That's why Paul says in Colossians 2 .15, he's disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through the cross.

That's military language.

He took the enemy's weapons away and he paraded them publicly for their shame. What in the world are we doing being afraid of that? If I was in Iraq and all of the Iraqis turned in their AK -47s and walked around in the streets, what would I have to be afraid of?

There's no weapons pointed back at me. There's no mortar rounds in the back of pickup trucks anymore. He disarmed the enemy.

They have no weapons.

The only weapon that the enemy has is to convince you that you lose.

That's it. Think about that.

The only weapon that he has is to get in your head and make you afraid of nothing.

Of a paper tiger.

He must reign until he's put all of his enemies under his feet. We have no room for fear and we have no room for cowardice because as our brother Mark Wambault said last week, it is the coward who is the first on the list of those who are thrown into hell.

We have no room.

The gates of hell may rage, but the strong man is bound. The rulers may come up with their laws and their plans, but they will not prevail, which should give us great confidence because you actually can't lose.

Daniel 2 .35 says that Jesus is that pebble that would become a rock that would fill a mountain that would fill the entire earth. Entire means entire. Unless we forget because sometimes we become myopic.

History is the story of that. A pebble that went from 12 ,000 to 70 ,000 to 3 ,000 within like the first week. Then from there, it eventually toppled the greatest empire that's ever existed in the Roman Empire.

It toppled it with the word of God, with prayer, with sacraments, with the weapons of our warfare. The Roman Empire. I want you to consider, Adam and I were talking about this yesterday, how astounding the Roman Empire must have been to have conquered all of the land surrounding the Mediterranean Sea when at that time ships could not even cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Imagine how powerful they must have been and how efficient they must have been and how incredible they must have been in administrating that government to have done that and yet the church with prayer and fasting and the sacraments toppled Rome.

If that does not put fire in your bones, then you need an AED wake-up call. Isn't that the thing that they hang on the wall?

Yeah.

Psalm 2 -8. This is God talking to Jesus Christ. Ask of me and I will surely give you the nations as your inheritance and the very ends of the earth as your possession. God told Jesus to ask. Jesus asked.

The cross was his ask and he got it. All the earth belongs to him. Psalm 22 -27. This is the psalm that begins with, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And as we talked about at Easter, that's Jesus quoting that psalm from the cross.

Look at how it ends. All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord and all the families of the nations will worship before you.

All.

So either we believe that the entire world is going to eventually come to Christ or we don't believe Psalm 22 -27. Isaiah 11 -19. They will not hurt nor destroy in all of my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the water covers the sea.

Hope is not a pipe dream for the Christian. Hope is deeply, intrinsically built upon the fact that the Bible has promised it. Hope is nothing more than having your life anchored in the promises of God.

And in that sense, doubt and defeatism is not just fearfulness and cowardice. It is a deep sin. Because passivity is not admirable and cowardice is damnable, according to the scriptures. This is why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, 8 -10, We are afflicted in every way, but we are not crushed.

We are perplexed, but not despairing. We are persecuted, but not forsaken. We are struck down, but not destroyed. Always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifest in our body.

We're the only people on earth that if they kill us, we get stronger. And if we are faithful, we get stronger. And if we do what we're supposed to do, we get bigger. There's no losing. There might be seasons of waning, which we're going through right now, but that's not en route to defeat.

It's en route to victory. So therefore, to be a man who works at the city gates, to conform the city gates, you must lift up your head and refuse to navel gaze. You must stand firm in the battle, knowing that God has won.

And this is why Paul ends 1 Corinthians 15 by saying, Thanks be to God who gives us victory through Jesus Christ. Because we overwhelmingly conquer because of him who loved us. It's so central to the message of the Bible.

I find it so interesting that it's so hardly believed. If you've watched the broadcast, you know that I harp on this all the time. But it is astounding to me that there's so many passages of victory, and we have such a defeatist mindset as a church.

We've got to repent of that. And I don't care what label you put on it. You can call it post-millennialism, or you can call it optimism. I don't care. Jesus wins. Go live likewise. Amen? Seventh is that we fight with charity, clarity, and order.

Truth in Love, Charity, and Order

Men of the gates who are seeking to transform culture must hold the line, but they must do it with disciplined lives and not licentiousness and acting as men of the world. This is why Scripture says that we are to speak the truth in love as we grow up into all aspects of him who is the head, even Christ.

Truth without love is a bludgeon. Love without truth is flattery. But when truth and love are bound together in a man who is self-ruled and disciplined, they become a powerful weapon in the mission of God.

That's why Paul exhorts us in Colossians 4, 6, Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, so that you will know how that you should respond to each person. And I'm going to be clear here.

Sometimes our speech seasoned with salt is to call them vipers. It's to call them whitewashed tombs because that's what Jesus did. Sometimes the most loving thing to do is to bring the serrated edge so that they realize their folly.

The point of this passage is not that you are to give sugar-coated Confucian, what are those? Fortune cookie answers. The point of this answer is to speak with love. Sometimes love confronts and sometimes love comforts.