Lord, My Heart Is Open Help Me — Carter Conlon

The Whole Armor of God for the Evil Day

My message this morning is Lord, my heart is open, help me. Lord, my heart is open, help me. Ephesians chapter six, please, if you go there with me. Ephesians chapter six. Father, I thank you, Lord, for the touch of heaven in this sanctuary today.

I thank you, Lord, for your word, which is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. I thank you for the anointing and the power of your Holy Spirit. For you are the one, Lord, who quickens our physical bodies.

Me this morning to speak this word and all of us gathered today to be able to hear it. Thank you, Lord, that everything we sing about you, you are. Everything that the word of God tells us that you are and will do, you will.

Lord, thank you for the simplicity of Christ and of the cross. Would you help us to lay hold of it one more time and keep us, oh God, keep our feet planted firmly in your kingdom till the day you come and take us home.

And Lord, we thank you for it with all of our heart in Jesus' name. Ephesians chapter six, beginning at verse 10. Lord, my heart is open, help me. Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.

Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles, or that means the schemes or the arguments of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace.

Above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew chapter 24 and verse 12, that in the last days, lawlessness will abound to the point where the love of many will grow cold.

Lawlessness, Rebellion, and the Cooling of Love

Who can debate, but that you and I are living in that kind of a moment in history now. I'm appalled personally at the speech of our media, the veil being lifted off of the immorality in our society, at seemingly at every facet of society.

The push towards having no borders of boundary or boundaries of behavior in our generation. We're living at an extremely lawless time. And of course, ultimately the root of it is lawlessness against the word of God, against the Lordship of Christ.

I believe we're entering that moment the Bible speaks about when there'd be a worldwide rebellion against the Lordship of Christ, against everything godly, everything holy. We are quickly, we are rapidly coming into that time.

Now, 2 Thessalonians again, Paul says in chapter two, verse three, he speaks of a last day falling away before the final moments of this world as we know it. It's a season where if you compare it to the other warnings that are given about our day, it's a season where people who thought they were followers of God in Christ may put it that way.

They just suddenly fall away, fall away from the work of God, the love of truth, the love of what they were called to do and called to be in this world. Just a receding as it is. I'm out of here. You can get so jaded by the conversation of this generation, you can find yourself just wishing that everybody would just go to hell tomorrow and we would go to heaven.

I'm just being real with you, okay, do you understand? You just get so sick of it, you get so tired of it that it's going to take something supernatural to care. It's going to take something of God. It's going to take that same spirit of God that was upon the son of God, where even if abuse is our portion in the coming years and days and months, that we can say as he said, father, forgive them.

They don't know what they do. Even though rejected, even though scorned, ridiculed, slandered, yet still by the spirit of God upon the son of God, he was able to be given for you and I and thank God he was.

If he had drawn back, if he had decided not to pursue the full pathway of God that led him to the cross for our redemption, we would be here today without hope. We would be celebrating something that offered no forgiveness and offered no redemption if he had taken another path.

And by the grace of God, may you and I never take another path, no matter how difficult the days get. We were not born into adversity necessarily, spiritually speaking in this nation. We had it easy for many, many, many years.

We haven't had to suffer like other cultures and countries have had to do to give their lives to Christ. But that may not be our portion in the days ahead. As lawlessness abounds, as things begin to change, there's going to be a people who profess to know Christ, but they were not internally prepared to withstand in what was going to become a predominantly lawless time and an evil time.

And it's coming on the whole world, not just our society, but the whole world is moving in this direction. Jesus in Matthew chapter 25 speaks of these same people giving a parable, a type, as people who had no oil when it got dark, just before Christ was about to return.

They realized their lamps had gone out. They had no inner resource to stand or to be lights at the time that had come upon this world. They had neglected to embrace an eternal supply of divine strength, which God was willing to give them all along.

Surrendering to the Holy Spirit

God, help us. God, help us to open our hearts. God, help us to say, Lord, here am I. Fill me with your Holy Spirit. Govern me, guide me, empower me, strengthen me. Take me, make me, change me. Your promise to me is a new mind.

It's a new heart and a new spirit. I recognize that my old mind, my old heart, and my old spirit are not going to get me through these days. I will not have the resource to go the full distance. I will not finish the race standing.

So I yield, in a sense, my life to you, Lord. And I'm asking you to fill me. I'm asking you to begin to govern me. Give me the grace, Lord, because you've given me a free will, but give me the grace to yield my will to yours.

My strength to your strength. Give me the grace, oh God, to walk with you the way that you're calling me to walk, because it is a matter of life and death, not just for me, but for many that are living in this generation.

And if we are not a light set upon a hill, they will have no hope, no recourse. They will not be able to see where strength can be found. Second Chronicles chapter 16 in verse nine tells us, the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, looking to show himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to him.

Did you know that this morning? Did you know that God wants to show himself strong in you and to you, wants to make you into what you could never be. He wants to lift you into places you could never go, give you what you could never hope in any amount of human effort and energy to possess, all so that his name might be glorified on the earth and that others might be brought out of darkness and into a saving relationship with him.

Ephesians 6, 11 says, put on the whole armor of God that you might be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Embrace the full journey that God has for your life and the full supply of himself that he has given to accomplish it.

The full journey. We've made a tragic mistake in our culture, I believe. You've heard me say it before that we've never really fully understood this. Many people from the inception of coming into the house of God, in many cases, people have seen Jesus Christ as an add-on to their agenda.

Jesus gives me peace while I pursue my agenda. He blesses me while I chart my own course, while I craft my own will. And this is the kind of a Christ, but this is all about to be shaken. Everything that can be shaken is going to be shaken in our day.

Only that which is built on truth is going to remain, my brother, my sister. So you can get mad at me if you want this morning, but I'm not here to harm you. I'm not here trying to hurt you. If you're building your life, your journey with Christ on a foundation of sand, when the storms come and the rains come, that foundation is gonna be washed out from under you and your house is going to fall.

And Jesus says, great will be the fall of your house. In other words, everything that you thought was being built of stone is actually being built of straw, and it's simply going to be blown away by adversity.

But if you can hear the words of God, if I can hear the words of God, no matter what comes our way, no matter how difficult the day may get, no, even if we have anarchy in the streets of our major cities, if it becomes difficult to even go to the corner store to get groceries, your faith will be on a foundation that cannot be shaken by any of the storms of this life and of this time.

Finding God's Purpose and Will

God outlined a journey for you. Do you know you were born for a purpose and you were born again, you were drawn by the Spirit of God to the cross of Jesus Christ for a divine purpose for your life. There's a purpose that God has intended to fulfill in this world through you, and nobody else can do what you're called to do.

You are unique. You are created by God. You are set in place. The Bible says in Corinthians that the Spirit of God sets us in the body of Christ as he sees fit for his purpose and for his will. Not as we see fit, but as he sees fit.

He puts us where he wants us to be and he gives us all the resource of himself that we need to accomplish what he's called us to do. And so the most important thing in your life as a Christian is to find the will of God.

Lord, what would you have me to do? What is it you want out of my life? Where would you send me? What doors do you want to open before me? How may I be used of you so that you can actually present yourself through my life and bring your own name to glory?

God, would you give me the grace to yield my will to your will and let you lead me where I need to go? Now, the scripture says, put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

That means the argument of Satan himself against the will and the ways of God. Genesis 3, one says the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field. He has some really clever arguments against the will of God.

Now, it doesn't do any good to block your ears because when Satan succeeded in tempting and sowing his nature in humanity through Adam and Eve, our initial parents in the Garden of Eden, his argument presented to them was from the outside, but now it's also on the inside because he sowed his very nature into humanity.

And so your own heart, your own nature will argue against the way and the will of God. Paul the Apostle talked about it. He said, I have fears without and fighting within. I'm fighting on every front.

Do you ever find yourself fighting like that? We often think that the voice that's coming against our obeying God or living in the will of God is coming from outside. And quite often it's coming from inside.

It's coming from our own unsurrendered human nature. This is what Paul the Apostle says in Romans chapter seven, verse 23, 22. He says, I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. I know that God's ways are right.

You know that. Today, you know I'm not telling you something that isn't right, that isn't provable. You know you should yield to the will of God. You know that the power of God is there to accomplish what he's called you to do.

You know that most often God will call you into the areas of life and ministry where you are the least qualified to fulfill it because it's all got to be about him and not about you and not about me. Paul says, I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.

When you get saved and you hear a message like this and you start to realize that Christian life is a supernatural life. With God, all things are possible. Mountains can be moved. You become a new creation.

The old things pass away, all things become new. You hear the stories of David and Goliath and you hear about mountain moving faith and you're young and you walk with God and yet the truth gets a hold of you and the fire of faith starts to rise in your heart.

Where does the deepest argument against all that God wants to do come from? It comes from inside yourself. Doesn't even have to come from the outside. I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.

I delight in the things that are in the word. I delight in the thought of being used as Esther or Gideon or Moses or David or Samson or Jephthah or any of these great saints of God. I delight even in having the strength to endure as many the book of Hebrews documents had to endure.

But there's another law in my members. It means inside my body, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. In other words, there's something in the fabric of my very being.

Paul the apostle says that is waging war against what my mind knows to be right and knows to be true. It's fighting against it. It's tries to speak to my heart, tries to get me to abdicate this path and maybe chart a course that's a little bit easier for my future.

Hence the scripture says this is a spiritual war that we're in. We're not wrestling against flesh and blood only but powers, principalities, rulers of darkness of this age, spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.

This is a spiritual war. Do you understand what we're fighting in this generation now? This is not a physical war. We are not fighting against people. People, yes, are pawns. They're being given more and more to darkness.

That's why media figures, they can't help but curse now on the airwaves because there's a spirit that's gotten ahold of them. It can't be fought. It can't be won by human effort. For you and I to win this battle, we have to receive everything by faith that God has held his hands out to give us in Christ.

Standing in Truth and Righteousness

Put on the whole armor of God, the whole armor of God, that you can stand, withstand, and ultimately finish still standing. We will not make it through, folks, in the flesh. Do you understand me? We will not make it through.

I don't care how strong you are. I don't care if you can lift an 800-pound beam. I don't care if you're the most stubborn person in the world and you've come to this church service today. You will not make it through this battle ahead in anything of your natural ability.

It has to be a supernatural ability. It has to be a given by God. You have to be carried by God. The strength will be of God. The thoughts will be of God. The power will be of God. If ever there was a time to get oil, it's now.

Be strong in the Lord so you can stand against the powers. Take the whole armor of God that you might be able to withstand to the evil day and having done all to stand. In other words, take everything that God has provided for you.

Don't go halfway. Don't live in a spiritual halfway house. Go the distance, folks. Go where God is leading you. Do what God is speaking to your heart to do. There is no victory outside of this. There's only a very weak, a very tepid testimony that really has no power to push back the darkness that's wanting to encroach on this whole society we're now living in.

Stand therefore, verse 14, having girded your waist with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness. Love the truth. Recognize the truth. Read the truth. Study the truth. Live in the truth.

When you open the Bible, this is what I always do. Say, God, I don't wanna just read your word. I want your word to read me. Let it be an x-ray machine that my life stands before. And may I stop and meditate and say, God, am I a lover of truth?

Do I recognize that this is the ultimate compilation from your heart? It is your truth. This is the lamp from my feet. It's the light from my path. It's my strength. It's my hope. These are the promises of God.

The apostle Peter says, by these promises, I will be made a partaker of the divine nature of God in Christ. In other words, everything God has intended for my life will come through the word of God. It doesn't say it comes through fuzzy experiences in some spiritual place.

Comes through the word of God. You read this book, you begin to realize these promises are for me. And not just to love the truth, to embrace it in your inward parts, but having this breastplate of righteousness means as much as I know, I'm walking in the truth that the Lord has revealed to me.

As hard as it is sometimes. When I was a young Christian, I loved the word of God until it came to some parts I didn't agree with. I remember reading the Bible. You know, at that time, our marriage was very young and we're brand new Christians and I was selfish and angry and I'd caused a lot of hurt in our home.

And then suddenly one day I'm reading, I'm just so excited. I'm going through Galatians, Ephesians. This is just life. I would sometimes park my car when I was working and just cry. I'd open the Bible and read it.

And then I got to this point, it says husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself. You know what I said when I first read that? I said, you got to be kidding. And then I said, well, it's easy for you to say, Paul, you weren't even married.

Now I had a, you know, when we counsel a lot of people who are having trouble in their marriages, it always comes down to disobedience to the word of God, folks. I don't, you know, just say, well, no, God never foresaw my situation.

He did. It's all here. Love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself. And so you quite often find that people know these verses of scripture. The wives know that they should respect their husbands, but they simply, for their own reasonings, decide not to obey the word of God.

And so the strength that God would have given to that relationship is taken away because of disobedience. That's why now the rubber's starting to meet the road, isn't it, in this message? That's why he says, have your inner parts girded with truth and have on the breastplate of righteousness to say, God, as much as I know, I am obeying you in this.

And Lord, as the title is, my heart is open, help me. God, I can't do this. I remember the Lord saying to me, you can't. I know you can't, but I can. If you will just let me be your source of strength, if you will let me touch your heart, if you'll let me touch your home, if you'll let me make you the man that you should be as a husband and as a father, there's no limit to what I can do in your life if you will open your human vessel and let me pour the oil that you need to be the light that you're called to be in this situation.

1 John 2 and verse 4, the apostle John says, people who say that they know Jesus, but continue to walk in a way that is wrong and they know what's wrong, eventually embrace a lie. Isn't that awful? Because the truth is not in them.

You can so twist around the word of God that you can actually formulate a lie. Because remember, the sin nature of humanity is to be as God is as a judge and to know what is good and to know what is evil.

And if the light that is in you be darkness, Jesus said, how great is that darkness? If you have studied truth and you've twisted it and you've refashioned it, you've done exactly what Aaron did. You've taken this calf and you've made your own Jesus out of it.

You're walking in a way that is not truth. It does not conform to the word of God, but you've justified the whole thing. You've created your own theology because that is what the sin nature of humanity will do.

That's why to fight against darkness, you have to have a love of the truth as it is revealed. Don't try to change it. Don't try to mold it. Don't try to fashion it away. Don't excuse it away. Love it the way it is written.

When God says, when Christ says, love your enemies, that you may be the children of your father in heaven, he makes his sun and rain to shine and to fall on the just and on the unjust. Love your enemies.

Now there's no qualifier to that. There's no qualifier by race, by ethnicity, by country, by origin, by history. He just says, love your enemies. Let the love of God be in you. In other words, for all men and make no exceptions.

None, none, because we were the enemies of righteousness. We were the enemies of God. You and I, if we had been alive, we would have been at the cross. We would have been right there with the mockers, mocking our savior, but he chose to love us and his love sent him into a grave and caused him to be raised again the third day and caused him to send the Holy Spirit to give us the strength of that incredible love.

The Gospel of Peace and the Mission of Redemption

Your feet shod with the preparation, verse 15 of the gospel of peace. In other words, it means you've embraced the actual work of God and your part in it. It's not any deeper than that. You've embraced the work of God.

The work of God is still the saving of the lost because this world is going to perish. Everything and everyone in it apart from Christ is going to perish eternally in a place called hell. I don't know if any people today are not even hearing that in the Christian.

There is a literal place called hell and the way it's described in the Bible, it is the total absence of God. There's a torment there that your mind and mine cannot understand. There's a darkness so thick it can be felt.

There's an anguish so hot it's described as fire. There's a separation, a lostness that never, is a thirst that's never satisfied. Forever, folks, do you understand this is forever? This is forever. There's no getting out of that place when somebody is there, it's forever.

It's forever and we are left on this earth as a testimony of the mercy of God, the cross of Jesus Christ. We are called to bring this work of redemption to everyone where God sends us and to embrace our part in this, whatever our part happens to be.

Faith, Spiritual Warfare, and the Weapons of God

Take with you the shield of faith, verse 16, with which you'll be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. These are things that will be said to you by people. They're things that will be said, that will come out of your own heart to try to stop your advance on this journey.

Think of David when he came into the camp. He's a young man that's being used of God to bring an incredible victory to the testimony of the name of God in the earth and to push back a moment of darkness that was threatening to swallow this testimony.

The first thing he had to face was people, including his own family, looking at him because he was not a warrior, he was just a boy, saying to him, who do you think you are? And when he got past that and went into the valley, he had to face a giant that said, what do you think you're doing?

And this is exactly what you will have to face. Who do you think you are and what do you think you're doing? What do you think you're doing, facing the darkness of our generation with just five stones in your pouch and a sling and a staff in your hand?

What kind of a weaponry is this? You're gonna have to get through everything of hell that will be sent to stop your advance. But I want to remind you one more time, the weapons of our warfare are not carnal.

They are not carnal, they are mighty in God to the pulling down of strongholds, casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.

The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. God displays his might through the weak, through the feeble, through the nobodies, through the nothings of society that no flesh can glory in his presence. Consider your calling, brother, not many mighty, not many noble, not many wise.

You go all through the list and you begin to realize one more time, you finally realize who we are in Christ, what we are called to do and the incredible resource that God is willing to give us to accomplish it.

Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. Know who you are in Christ. Know who you are. Know what God, this is what we teach at our Bible school. If you ever choose to study with the students of the school or you become a student of the word of God, the one thing you've got to learn is who you are in Christ.

If you don't learn that, you'll be taken down by the darkness of this age. You have to learn who you are, what Christ has declared you to be, what he's done for you on the cross. And take the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

When Jesus was taken into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, he had the power to dig a hole and bury Satan 10 ,000 miles into the center of the earth. But instead of doing that, he used the weaponry that was stronger than all of that.

He spoke to him the words of God. Those things that cannot be contravened. The speech of God is clear, clean. It has all power. It has all authority. Take the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

Prayer in the Spirit and Love for the Saints

Now, lastly, praying always with all prayer and supplication in the spirit. Being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints. Praying in the spirit, leaning on the Holy Spirit.

For even your prayer life, waiting until God begins to speak, there are groanings, the Bible says, inside of you of the spirit, which are too deep sometimes to even have words. And sometimes all you can do is groan along with him.

You don't even know what to say. Sometimes you just have to pray in the spirit. There's no other way to pray, but leaning on the spirit so that you know what you need to pray for, because sometimes you and I don't know.

God knows what's up ahead, we don't. God knows what we will face tomorrow. We don't know what we will face tomorrow, but God knows, and he can start you praying and beginning to believe with him that the future will be sound and secure because of Christ.

And watching with perseverance to the end and supplication for all of the saints. This is how you know. In the scriptures, it says, mark the man. If you mark the person in whom the work of God is perfected, the end result of it is that he has an unpretended love of his brothers and sisters or her brothers and sisters in Christ.

It's not feigned, it's not faked, it's not Sunday. It's all the time, it's everywhere. And it means we are moved by the spirit to look outside of ourselves and we look around us for the sake of others.

It means you could be here and maybe you have some problems in your life today, but you find yourself lifting your hands during worship and you just notice the person two seats over just seems to be really struggling.

And the next thing you know, you're interceding for that man, for that woman. Oh God, please help my brother and my sister. That's an indication that you are praying in the spirit and you've come to a place of maturity when your prayers are not just always.

It's not that we don't pray for ourselves, but your prayers are not just always about yourself. You're looking away and looking to God. When you have one hand in the hand of God and one hand stretched out to somebody around you has a need.

That's what the church is supposed to be. That's when we have arrived. And if you do these things, the scripture says you will withstand in the evil day. You will finish your course and you will finish it standing by the grace of God.

By the grace of God, you will stand and you will finish it standing. And so we come back to our title. Lord, my heart is open. Help me. That's a prayer that God will never despise. It's a prayer that he will always answer.

It's not fancy, but it's real. I'm so short of where I need to be right now. Today though, I open my heart to you and I ask you to take me to where I now need to be. I want to finish my journey and I wanna finish it your way.

My heart is open, oh God. Help me. That's a prayer that all of us have to pray and we have to pray it all the time because there are difficult days. We all have to face them, but by God's grace, we're gonna run this race together.

We're gonna finish it together. By God's grace, we're going to be a mature church. A church that really understands things of the spirit and walks in those things. A place where somebody walks in who's new in the Lord and they're struggling and finds the people surrounding them who care.

That we are delivered from this constant self-focus which has brought great weakness into many churches in many places. By God's grace, we will be the people. We will have the full armor of God. We will finish and having done all, we will stand.

We will stand. Praise God. All of my Christian life, I've sought to learn how to pray. God has helped me along the journey, but there's one prayer I've prayed all my life. I still pray it. Sometimes I pray it on the platform here Sunday morning.

Lord, help me. God, give me what I need. And I'm not just speaking just for me, it's for you. Help me to care about people that I'll meet throughout the day. Help me to stop and speak. Help me to be focused where I need to be focused.

God, my heart is open. Lord, help me. And Father, I thank you, Lord, that you have, you have, Lord, brought us to this place and you've allowed us to be born at this time. And you've ordained us to be a lamp and a testimony for this moment.

A moment of darkness. A moment where many are going to turn away. A moment where churches are going to compromise with evil. A moment, Lord, that is going to be difficult. But oh God, you promised in your word that if we would put on everything you've given us in Christ that we would stand.

And so I pray for this church, Lord. I pray for the testimony that you have planted in this part of New York City. I ask you, Lord, for the testimony that you've given us around the world. God, that you would cause this light to burn brightly.

That it would be a light of truth. A light of passion for your work. A lighthouse that is filled with people who are given to doing your will and your work and doing it your way with your strength. Our hearts are open, Lord, but we recognize our own weakness.

We recognize our frailty. We all recognize that given the choice, we would probably go in another direction. But Jesus, you showed us the way when you went into a place that you didn't wanna go. And three times you prayed, Father, if it would be possible, take this cup from me.

Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done. And the scripture tells us, Lord, that for the joy that was set before you, the joy of having us here today, worshiping you, reading your word, you endured the cross, despised the shame.

And now you sit at the right hand of all authority and all victory. And you invite us to join you there for all of eternity. So Lord, help us to be ambassadors of that victory, that kingdom. Give us that passion, Lord, that we don't have, but you do.