The Armor of God, the Gospel of Peace

To you, oh Lord, I lift up my soul.

Oh my God, I trust in you, let me not be ashamed.

Let not my enemies triumph over me.

Indeed, let no one who waits on you be ashamed.

Let those be ashamed who deal treacherously without cause.

Show us your ways, oh Lord, teach us your paths.

Lead us in your truth and teach us, for you are the God of our salvation.

On you we wait all the day.

Remember, oh Lord, your tender mercies and your loving kindnesses, for they are from of old.

Do not remember the sins of our youth, nor our many transgressions.

According to your mercy, remember us, for your goodness sake, oh Lord.

Oh Lord, turn yourself to us and have mercy on us.

We're desolate, we're afflicted.

The troubles of our heart have enlarged.

Bring us, oh Lord, out of our distresses.

Look on our affliction and our pain and forgive all our sins.

Consider our enemies, for they are many, and they hate us with cruel hatred.

Keep our soul, oh Lord, deliver us.

Let us not be ashamed, for we put our trust in you.

And may integrity and uprightness preserve us, for we wait for you.

And oh Lord, redeem us, redeem Israel, redeem all of us, the true Israel, oh God, out of all of our troubles.

Oh Lord, this day, we pray this psalm again, and we recognize that we are not the first to have troubles, troubles that have enlarged our heart.

Enemies that hate us with cruel hatred.

Oh Lord, may we truly, as the psalmist said, put our trust in you.

And yes, we are guilty of great sins against you.

Great sins, oh Lord, because of your son, the Lord Jesus Christ, may you see us as forgiven sinners, because of what he did for us on the cross, taking that horrific pain, that punishment, that humiliation, which we deserved, which we rightfully deserved, on your son.

What a wonderful Savior, hallelujah, what a Savior.

Oh Lord, this day, we do think of those who have suffered for your name worldwide.

We know there are many right now, who because they will not compromise or give up your name, are suffering great things.

And even here, in the United States of America, where we have our so-called religious toleration convictions going on, and we see what's happening with that.

We think especially this morning, of those who've been arrested there in Washington, D.C., especially our acquaintance and friend, Jonathan Darnell, who has already been convicted, and already in jail.

And we know that those who hate you, and hate your children, and hate the babies, are serious, and they're not gonna quit.

Help us, oh Lord, to remember, that if we really are gonna be on your side, that the fierce may be the conflict, strong may be the foe.

And help us even understand that the foe is strong, but we'll never know it if we don't get into the conflict.

We'll never be able to figure it out, oh Lord, may that not be true of us.

We think of your servants in the Book of Acts, for example.

Oh, they loved your name, they loved your kingdom.

They knew that the servants of Christ cannot be overthrown in the end.

So we pray you'll sustain, Jonathan, in all people who love your name, who love your word, and love your children.

All of them throughout, and love their neighbors.

In this case, specifically the ones who are not yet born.

And Lord, we just wanna remember today our nation, our county, our state, our country.

And we acknowledge again, we confess.

We confess that we are an absolute stench in your nostrils.

We have turned our back on you.

You have been so gracious to us, how shameful we are.

Oh, it's awful how we've treated you, how we've treated your word, your son.

We've said in our libraries and in our schools that anything goes except your word.

How can we have done something so awful, so shameful, so wicked? We confess, oh Lord, today that we've been wicked.

We've been horrible.

We also confess that you have been extremely gracious to us.

And we come to you this morning, we can hardly ask for more mercy.

We've had so much already.

But oh Lord, by your grace and mercy, would you revive us again, oh Lord? May you strengthen your people, and may your people have courage.

Oh, we don't need knowledge, we have plenty of that.

It's courage we lack.

May we be filled with courage, oh Lord, to say and do what needs to be done based on your word.

May we ever remember that on Christ's solid rock we do stand, and all other ground really is sinking sand that will eventually swallow us up.

And now, oh Lord, today for this service, Dr.

White, as he comes to speak, may we have willing ears, not itching ears, willing ears, because we want to hear the word of God preached.

Because again, we're either gonna get the word of God or the word of man, and we know where the word of man leads us.

So we pray your blessing on Dr.

White this morning.

We thank you for this opportunity yet that we have to gather.

We pray that those who would oppose the gathering of the saints that you, oh Lord, would destroy, bring them to confusion, and confound them all.

Lord, we know that we serve a great king, a conquering king, not a negotiating king, not a retreating king, but a conquering king.

And Lord, may it be true that those who love your name rejoice when they see the absolute destruction of the wicked.

May we not act like we're negotiating saints at all, but may we not rest until we see the glory of the Lord covering the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Thank you, oh Lord, for your blessings.

They are mighty, and we love them.

And we love the one who has blessed us.

It's in the name of that Christ who's been so good to us.

We pray these things in that name, amen.

We're looking forward to hearing from Dr.

James White again this morning.

Dr.

White, thanks for coming.

It's an honor to be with you this morning.

It sort of seems like we were just here not very long ago, actually.

I'm a little less formally dressed as soon as we are done here.

I'm not sure if any of you pulled in after me, but you may have looked over to your right in the members parking and seen a RV parked there.

That's fine.

It only took 20 minutes to drive here yesterday because I could go through all these little Pennsylvania towns and two-lane roads and up and over hills and around corners, and it's not really good to do when you're 51 feet long.

So thankfully, I have a Garmin RV navigation system in my truck.

And when I fired it all up this morning, Google was just gonna shoot me right through those little towns and under those trees and everything else, because Google wants to kill me.

Believe me, it's tried before.

When I came out here, I think it was for the Washington G3 thing, I came through Pennsylvania, and it sent me through back roads and it actually sent me over a bridge that had three signs, it was one of these metal bridges, okay? So in the middle, it said like 13 feet and over here was 12 something and here was 12 something.

I was in between those.

What do you do? Got traffic behind you? There was all sorts of dings and stuff on it where trucks had hit it and things like that.

And I'm like, I'm never doing this again.

I managed to get through it without damaging anything and keeping my air conditioner on the road.

But the Garmin allows me to avoid all that.

So this morning, I fire it up and Garmin has me 20 minutes here.

And Google has me 20 minutes here.

Garmin, 45 minutes.

Because it said, no, you can't take that road.

No, you can't take that road either.

What are you talking about? So I ended up going all around the world and finally got here.

So it's a different situation when you travel the way I'm traveling.

Anybody going to G3? Oh, good.

All right, so we will see you next week.

If you get there by Wednesday, the pre-conference, you'll get to see me burned in effigy and that'll be sort of cool if you wanna come along and see that.

You're all wondering why that is.

You'll have to come to G3 and find out, sorry.

But I'm looking forward to that opportunity of being there and I speak on Friday morning on the sovereignty of God from the book of Isaiah.

So that'll be a challenge.

And this will be the first year my wife is getting to attend G3.

So that's exciting.

Looking forward to people finding out that even though they know that I've been married for 41 years, there she is.

Wow, how's that gonna work? This will be exciting.

Turn with me, please, to Ephesians chapter six.

And I want to sort of finish off where I started really on Friday night, to be honest with you.

And make sure that I'm not the one causing that difficulty.

Are we, everything okay back there? All right.

Let me make sure that the, all right, I see what's going on.

All right, I will no longer move.

So if I look really stiff up here, it's because I know where the connection issue is.

But I think we've got it to where it'll be now, he says to himself.

Old sound man here.

It's the world's most thankless job is running sound at a church.

Because you have to get there before everybody else.

You leave after everybody else has left.

No one ever, ever comes up to the sound man after a great sermon and goes, good job.

Nobody does that.

If anything goes wrong, everybody knows where to look, right? Everybody knows who to look at and they assume that it's your problem.

And it really, normally, it really isn't.

So I ran sound in a church that had 20,000 members.

We can only find 7,000 at a time, but 20,000 members, a 250 voice choir, full orchestra.

That was a full-time job.

It was amazing.

So thank the sound men wherever you are.

And next Sunday, thank the sound men.

And we'll hope that I can stop moving around.

Ephesians chapter six, we all know the text.

Come on now.

You're giving up too fast.

Honestly, I have a feeling.

Is it yours or is it? It doesn't like this backpack for some reason.

Test one, test one, test one, two, three, four, five.

All right, I stuck it in my pocket.

So hopefully everything will work.

Ephesians chapter six, sort of finishing off where we started with a, there's always a danger in addressing a text that everyone knows.

All the young people in this congregation know Ephesians chapter six and the armor of God.

You've probably, any of you old enough to remember flannel board? Flannel board, man, I'll tell you that was before video and all the stuff we entertain kids with.

But back when I would go to Sunday school, you had this big blue flannel board.

And my mom was a Sunday school teacher.

And so you'd cut out these, you'd cut out Moses and David and Goliath and you'd stick them up there on that flannel board.

And that was how you kept kids entertained during Sunday school.

And there was, I remember very clearly as a kid, it might've been in vacation Bible school or it was Sunday school or something.

You had the armor of God.

And so you'd put the armor of God on the soldier up on the flannel board.

And I'm sure at some point or another, we probably cut out stuff and wore helmets and did stuff like that too.

That's sort of how it works.

But everybody knows this text and that's the danger.

If you, my experience as I have lived the Christian life, the Lord was gracious to me at a very young age.

And so I've walked the Lord for many decades now.

And my experience is that you hear texts and passages of scripture.

You hear them expounded.

You grab hold of that understanding.

And then 20 years later, you look at the text and it's like you're seeing it for the first time.

You see things that you've never even thought of before.

I'm not talking about the kind of stuff you see on, does TBN still exist? It probably does.

I don't know.

I don't know.

It used to be channel 21 in Phoenix.

It was a trendy broadcasting network.

Paul Crouch and his wife with the purple hair, before purple was a big thing to do with your hair.

And I just remember so well, a woman who would eventually become famous.

Her name was Paula White.

Yeah, she's big in President Trump's circles.

And I just remember, I don't know why I even had it on, but I just remember her doing a whole thing on TBN.

If I recall, it was from Psalm 69 and it was about how you were supposed to give her ministry $69.

And you turn on folks like that and you listen and they can make any connection in the world.

I'm not talking about that kind of, oh, I didn't see that before, a type of mysterious esoteric type thing.

It's that we think we know a text and because of that, our mind fills in some of the gaps.

I remember when I was preaching, I was preparing to preach out of 1 Peter and the classic text on apologetics.

Always be ready to give an answer for the hopes within you, yet with gentleness and reverence, every apologist knows it back and forwards.

We've used it as our primary text for years and years and years.

And then at least 20, 22 years into doing apologetics, I was reading it and translating it and realized I had missed so much of the important context and what it was actually saying.

And I know that there are other texts like that that I will discover before the end of my life that I had missed things.

And so I'm not talking about just esoteric type of interpretation, but just hearing everything that the text says.

So when we look at Ephesians 6, and just in passing, I know that I shouldn't do this.

Every class you'll take in seminary says you shouldn't do this, but I've just done it for so long, I can't not do it.

And I've found that many people have been very thankful when I do it.

But you might wanna be aware of something.

When you walk into a Christian bookstore, if such things even exist any longer, I've always described them as one of the most dangerous places for a Christian to go.

The reason for that is you walk down the commentary aisle and you assume that if someone takes the time to write a commentary on a book of scripture, they probably believe in the Bible.

Well, let me warn you, that's not the case.

And much of what you'll buy today online in a Christian bookstore is written by people who don't believe that the book they're commenting on is really supernaturally connected to, even, for example, looking at Ephesians and Colossians, parallel texts.

There'd be many commentaries that really wouldn't see a necessity to see a harmonious meaning between them.

Or Peter contradicted Paul, and Paul contradicted James, and it's just so common anymore that people will buy commentaries, and then you end up reading stuff going, well, that doesn't make any sense, and that's because it's coming from a completely different perspective.

Well, you should be aware of the fact that there are many, many scholars, and when I say scholars, I'm not talking about necessarily believing scholars.

I'm not necessarily talking about conservative scholars, but there are many scholars writing in the field of the New Testament that don't believe Paul wrote Ephesians.

Someone like a Bart Ehrman has a very much what we would call diminished Pauline canon.

That is, he only believes that seven of the books we have in the New Testament came from Paul.

So, all the pastoral epistles are forgeries, and Ephesians and Colossians is a forgery from their perspective, and if you ask, well, why would they believe something like that, it's because they have a theory about what the church looked like initially, and these books don't match up with that theory, so they must have come from a later time period, and one of the ways they substantiate that is by saying, well, look at the vocabulary differences.

Well, the problem is, vocabulary differences, the only way that you can compare one book to another is making one the standard, and I've often said, if you were to compare Bart Ehrman's scholarly books that are meant for scholars, like his Orthodox Corruption of Scripture from 93, I believe it was, if you were to compare the vocabulary of that with the popular books he has written 20 years later, you'd have to conclude that Bart Ehrman didn't write all those books, that there is a forgery taking place, and it's the same way, you go, well, okay, we believe Paul wrote Romans, but that means that the vocabulary that's found in Second Timothy is different, and therefore he didn't write Second Timothy.

If you were writing a letter to the church in the chief city of the empire, you want it to be read, you want it to be distributed, you want this to be your thought-out presentation of the gospel, is that gonna have a little bit different vocabulary than a personal letter you write at the end of your life to a young man that you've invested your life in and who's going to be doing ministry? Of course, of course it will.

I've always been stunned, to be honest with you, at what passes for scholarship, but you go to seminary, you hear it from the people you respect, you accept it, you repeat it, you go on from there.

That's the problem with so much of what we have being published today, and so you could buy a commentary on Ephesians chapter six, and you just wanted to learn more about the armor of God, and you end up with all this stuff about how Paul didn't write this book and all the rest of that stuff along the way, so just be aware of those things.

Don't let those things throw you.

Always be patient when you encounter things that you've not seen before, not heard of before.

Don't make sudden changes and sudden moves.

Take time and be patient as you study the word of God.

So all of that to Ephesians chapter six, verse 10, finally be strong in the Lord and the might of his strength.

Put on the full armor of God so that you'll be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Therefore, take up the full armor of God so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.

Stand firm, therefore, having girded your loins with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace, in addition to all, having taken up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming swords of the evil one, also receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

And so again, if you had the privilege of being raised in a church as I did, you've walked through this text before, you've seen all the graphic presentations, but we're talking about the church at war, the gospel at war.

We're talking about the fact that there are, as in verse 12, rulers, authorities, world forces of this darkness, spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

If you don't believe that that's true, then you're gonna have a hard time explaining how all across the world today we can see such self-destructive philosophies and beliefs being promoted amongst men and women.

Self-destructive as in bringing about a demographic crash.

There are certain nations that simply are not going to exist.

Certain people groups that will not exist in a brief number of generations.

If I recall correctly, South Korea has dropped below 1.0 I think it was 0.8 replacement number.

Now, if you don't know what that is, you need at least 2.1 children per woman to maintain a population at a steady level.

2.1, some would say 2.2, it all depends.

And that's not even talking about during periods of war and things like that.

And the United States, excuse me, the United States has dropped below that.

The only reason we're as high as we are is because the number of immigrants we have.

But if the United States is thinking that immigrants are gonna make all that up, you have to remember when people migrate to the West from nations that had high birth rates, by the second generation, their birth rate matches the West.

So it doesn't last.

My Muslim friends, I've debated many Muslims and it's fascinating that when they come from majority Muslim countries to the West, they have the same concerns that we have.

They realize they're losing their children.

They're losing their children to secularism.

They stop coming to mosque, they stop doing the prayers.

And when you look at the number of children they have back in the old country that have five, six, seven children, the next generation has three, four, five.

And by the third, they're right down to the standard of the culture around them.

And so that's the case all over the place.

There won't be any South Koreans in a very short period of time.

When you have a replacement rate of only 0.8, you've only got a couple of generations, you're gone.

The Japanese are in the same boat.

The Russians are trying to turn the ship around, but a little late.

It's sort of tough to turn ships very quickly, by the way.

The abortion rate in Russia had been high for so, so, so, so long that to try to all of a sudden tell people, you know what? We've been telling you all this time, just live for yourself.

You need to stop doing that and start having kids.

Doesn't work real well, doesn't work well at all.

And so we are looking at worldwide, when you look at abortion, when you look at the truly, man, if you haven't thought about what the Chinese are doing in genetics, trying to literally, you know, we have all these movies that warn us, but we don't listen to the movies.

And didn't you watch I Am Legend? They're trying to do that kind of stuff.

The Chinese are trying to develop a super soldier.

They're trying to develop, interestingly enough, genetic vaccines that would allow soldiers to survive in radiation contexts or in disease contexts and all sorts of things like this.

And the world knows how dangerous this is, and yet it just is running blindly toward that kind of stuff.

And so you have the transgender movement destroying little boys and destroying young women and destroying families and secularism.

The secular, the world, that's what secularism is just simply a focus upon this world and not upon any spiritual world, not upon anything that comes after this.

There's no transcendent value.

Secularism is not some neutral thing.

Secularism is anti-Christ thought.

Some people think the anti-Christ is some dude in a movie that, you know, was really bad.

And then the sequel was really bad.

And the sequel after that was even worse.

And that's not what the anti-Christ is.

The spirit of anti-Christ is secularism.

Everything that Jesus said was good and true and life-giving, secularism denies.

And that's what we're up against.

And the only way to explain why that exists in the United States and in France and is moving into portions of Africa, but God bless Africa, most of the Africans are like, are you people crazy? Are you nuts? Have you noticed that? Wouldn't it be fascinating? I mean, this would be so wonderful if God did this.

If the way God turns stuff around is after the West completely destroys itself, it's places like Africa that come along and say, okay, you all messed everything up now, listen to us.

We know how to make this work.

That would be a wonderful thing.

In fact, my prayer, you know what my prayer is? My prayer is that God will get hold of the Chinese church, give it sound theology and grow it like crazy.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if China became Christian? Wouldn't that be awesome? I mean, China's already under the Lordship of Christ, right? Sure is, they're living and rebelling against it, but Christ is Lord in China, just as he's Lord anyplace else.

It would be so awesome if a worldwide revival was sparked out of China, out of a place that has been so horrifically oppressed by the powers of darkness.

That would be awesome.

But it's all around the world.

And the only way to explain it is that there are, our struggle is not against flesh and blood.

And this is the problem.

I don't wanna step on too many toes, but this is the problem with so many conservatives today is that we think it is against flesh and blood.

There are, conservatism in our nation just seems to be progressivism moving slowly.

If you don't have a foundation, if you don't have a framework holding things together, you're just gonna move more slowly than the other people, but you're still gonna end up going the same direction and coming to the same conclusions.

And I'm listening to some people these days, and I recognize as non-believers, there is such a thing as common grace.

There is such a thing as having a level of common sense in this world.

And I hear them and I appreciate some of the things they have to say, but when it comes to really having the final answers, they don't have any final answers.

They don't have any answers that are gonna be relevant to the next generation, the next generation, the next generation, because they don't understand the world in which they live.

And it's frustrating to me to see that.

But the fact is, the only thing that explains why we have this global movement toward, well, the culture of death, is because there is rulers and authorities and world forces of this darkness.

And that's what it is.

It is darkness.

We think of the dark ages, right? We think of the medieval period as the dark ages.

We look back and we stick our noses up in the air and we are so much smarter, because we have smartphones, you know, and we have our iPads.

And, you know, I'm old enough that I did drive back in the days when you use something called a map.

A map, it's really easy to define it for the young people.

A map is a big piece of paper that comes to you nicely folded up and you'll never be able to get it folded up like that again, ever, ever.

I will never forget my parents.

We were driving in New England.

It was after dark.

We were lost.

And my mom's over in the passenger seat and my dad's in the driver's seat.

And they're going, no, it's exit.

No, and my mom's got this map open.

And I remember my dad reaching over and says, going, we're right there.

And his finger went straight through the map.

And now we didn't know where we were because it pretty much took out that part of the map.

But I'm old enough to have driven using one of those things too.

And so we think we're so smart because we can whip out our smartphone and dial up Google so we can get where we're going.

Can you imagine if all the satellites went out one day? How would any of us get anywhere? I mean, seriously.

So we think we're so much smarter than they were back then.

And in some ways we are.

Look, we understand how the human body works.

We understand disease.

When you think of what happened during the Black Death, where, and you want a pandemic, folks? That was a pandemic, okay? That was the real thing.

There were certain cities where 70% of the people died in a matter of weeks.

There was one form of the Black Death, a viral form that was taken in through the lungs that would kill you in less than 24 hours.

So they came up with the idea that it could actually pass by looking at someone.

Because, I mean, when it would happen that fast, why wouldn't you come to that conclusion? And so we know now, we probably could have really slowed things down as far as the Black Death was concerned.

So yes, we've made some advancements and we're thankful for that.

But the reality is when it comes to mankind looking at the world, we are fools in comparison to many of the people who lived as serfs in that day.

They had a better understanding of the spiritual realm and the physical realm.

They had a better understanding of the meaning of covenants and living faithfully than many people today do.

And so we look down upon them because they had such a spiritual worldview and we just know so much better now.

But the reality is the only thing that explains the madness of celebrating, emasculating an eight-year-old boy or ruining the body of a 13-year-old girl, the only thing that can possibly explain the depth of that depravity is spiritual.

And so we have a battle that we are involved in.

And if you're gonna get involved in a battle, you have to know your enemy and you'd have to know what the warfare is gonna look like.

And so what Paul does here, and it seems to me, I don't think he just came up with this idea while writing this letter.

And by the way, I think that Ephesians was meant to be a letter that was passed around the churches in the Lycus River Valley.

Remember, Paul spent quite an amount of time in Ephesus.

And he invested in that church.

He invested in the elders.

Remember Acts chapter 20, when he's leaving, he knows he's gonna be arrested.

He knows that he's been spiritually informed about what was gonna happen in Jerusalem.

And so he knows he's never gonna see these men that he spent so much time and so much treasure in investing in them.

And so you've got that tremendously touching text in Acts chapter 20, where he warns them.

He said, I know that from amongst your own selves, men are going to arise speaking perverse things and drawing the disciples after themselves.

Man, think about what that's like.

An apostle invested himself in these people.

And yet he knew that even from amongst them, it's not that he was purposely putting false believers in there.

He just knew that even he was not given the insight to necessarily know.

Keep that in mind, fellow ministers.

When you have younger people that you have invested in and you have great hopes for, and all of a sudden they turn.

I've seen it happen.

And it can be so discouraging.

But it happened to Paul.

Paul, I bet you there's one name that none of the parents here have named their kids.

Any kids here named Demas? No.

Some of you are looking at me going, what's wrong with that name? Because there was a associate of Paul's that had been involved in ministry, but what's he famous for? He loved the world.

He loved the world.

He went back to the things of the world.

And like I said, Friday night, sadly, as soon as I mentioned this, I start thinking about people.

I can think of a man who 19 years ago was one of our speakers at a major conference, 19 years ago, that today makes no profession of faith and has gone back to the world simply to have the riches of the world.

And he's open about it.

So you realize that that is gonna happen and you have to have a firm foundation not to be totally knocked out of the orbit of your ministry when it does take place.

So how do we prepare ourselves? We have to know our enemy.

We have to know what the battle is.

And I don't think Paul, like I said, he wanted this epistle to be passed around through all the churches.

And so it seems to me that these texts, and by the way, almost all of these are drawn from primarily Isaiah and other Old Testament texts.

They've been brought together.

Clearly, this is something that Paul had probably preached a series on and things like that because he doesn't really expand too much upon it.

He's giving them things that they can understand and probably remember well.

But briefly, beginning in verse 13, we need the full armor of God so that you will be able to resist in the evil day and having done everything to stand firm.

Stand firm.

What does that mean? Well, when you think about this from a church history perspective, this is written about within 10 years of when formal persecution of Christians by Rome, not by the Sanhedrin, but by Rome was going to begin.

And off and on, it wasn't always empire wide.

It wasn't always extremely severe.

There were periods where it would rise and then fall.

And the church always lived with the reality that it could come again, the persecution.

But that was going to start basically in 64 AD under Nero.

And it was going to continue until 313, long period of time.

And the worst period, the most intense period was 303 to 313.

10 years, the Roman empire said, we're going to wipe out the Christians all the way across the empire.

And that went from 303 to 313.

And then that's when the peace of the church took place and the persecution ended under Constantine.

And then it was about 60 some odd years later that Theodosius declared the Roman empire to be a Christian empire.

A lot of evolution took place between those two periods of time, politically speaking.

So there's going to be deep darkness and difficult times who will be coming against the church for the next more than 200 years.

And so in the midst of that, take up the full armor of God, stand firm.

One of the hardest things that the church dealt with.

I mean, we think we have it.

We think we have a lot of stuff going on now.

Oh, all the political infighting and everything else.

And yeah, we do.

Ha, but I think about what it was like to pastor, say in the middle of the third century, where you not only have the persecution outwardly from the Roman empire, but you've got all sorts of heresies within the church.

And some of us think that, well, you know, once we start having major persecution externally, we'll stop thinking about all this theology stuff.

That's not how it happened then.

If you were a pastor back then, you had to not only deal with the Roman soldiers outwardly, but the Martianites and the Gnostics, and oh, Valentinian Gnosticism, one of the greatest dangers the church ever faced.

I think some of the warnings Paul gives us were prophetic warnings, knowing that that was coming.

I mean, we're talking incredibly challenging things, and they did not have the resources you and I have.

They did not have a completed canon.

Can you imagine what that was like? If you want good evidence that God wants his church to continue, look at the early church and the fact that it did continue in the midst of all the things that came against it, and they didn't have anything in comparison to what we have as far as resources and history and everything else.

And so stand firm.

That was the great danger, was the pressure that was brought against Christians to not stand firm, to compromise.

And I really don't have time this morning to go into this, though it's a fascinating area of study.

Look up the pinch of incense in the early church, the concept of the pinch of incense, because all you had to do to get out of persecution was take a pinch of incense and offer it upon this little altar.

It was just a little thing.

And it was normally set up in front of a rather minor Roman official.

And all you had to do is take a pinch of incense and throw it upon the burning coal in the little, very small container.

And all you had to do was say, Kaiser Kurios, Kaiser Kurios, Caesar is Lord.

And you know how easy it would be to go, I just mean that politically.

In the political realm, Caesar is Lord, but the early church recognized we can't do that.

And everybody who died in the early church under Roman persecution, that's why.

That's why they couldn't say it, they couldn't do it.

And one of the biggest challenges you and I have today is to recognize when the world has set up a little altar, has offered us a little bit of incense, and is saying, just a little pinch.

Just say, Caesar is Lord.

Just sign the card addressed to your boss at work that congratulates him on his marriage to his same-sex partner.

Because you know if you don't sign it, well, your yearly review's coming up pretty soon.

And you know, there's a lot of people that want your position.

It's just a little bit of incense, you see.

And Paul says, having done everything, stand firm.

That's what I love about Scripture, is the Romans aren't around anymore.

I visited the Coliseum, it's not in very good state of repair right now.

That empire that stood against Christ has been destroyed.

We're in a different context, but they're still setting up the little altars.

And Scripture gives us the warning and the ability to stand firm in so many different situations, in so many different contexts.

To resist in the evil day and to stand firm.

So how do we do it? Well, you know the text.

Stand firm, therefore, having girded your loins with truth.

There will never come a time when Christian people will be able to embrace any form of philosophy or worldview that says there is not a knowable, communicable, objective truth.

Once you buy where the world is now, well, you've got your truth, I've got my truth.

No, that's a denial of Jesus.

Denial of Jesus, I wasn't denying Jesus, yes you are.

He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Everything he taught was based upon the reality of an objective standard of truth.

When you say you have your truth and I have my truth, you're saying Jesus was a liar.

That's putting it rather bluntly, but that's the case.

That's what it is.

Having girded your loins of truth, and that girding of the loins, that's what kept everything else firm.

You can put on breastplates and all the rest of that stuff, but it's sort of like that one fashion trend that's been around for a number of years now that I will never understand, where men run around with their pants down around their knees.

Now, there's a background to it that, okay, it does make sense, I guess, in a perverted sense, comes out of the prisons, but still, watching a perfectly healthy young man waddling down the road, holding his pants up, when you go, you know, we invented belts for that a long time ago.

They work pretty well.

It's astonishing, you know.

You don't have stuff properly there, the rest of it's not gonna fit.

And without truth, you can try to grab all the rest of that stuff, but none of it's gonna work.

Having put on the breastplate of righteousness.

Again, Paul's borrowing this terminology from the Old Testament.

And in fact, if I recall correctly in Isaiah, that was something that God himself said that he wears, if I recall correctly.

But the point for us is that breastplate, if you think of that Roman soldier, that Roman centurion, for example, you would see that breastplate and man, you had to have a pretty impressive weapon to be able to penetrate.

Just as today, we have all this Kevlar armor and things like that.

What are you doing? You're protecting that central core, where the heart and the lungs and the vitals are to be found.

But we put on a breastplate of righteousness.

A righteousness that does not come from ourselves, a righteousness that comes from God, but one that recognizes that God is the source of righteousness and the definer of righteousness.

That's not up to man.

And a nation that has judges, that recognizes that God has defined righteousness and that they therefore are accountable to that, that's a blessed nation.

A nation that forgets that is a nation that becomes a nation of men rather than law.

And there will be no righteousness, there will be no justice in a nation like that.

We live in a nation that has descended very rapidly into different kinds of justice for different kinds of people.

And that's because we've forgotten what we had started with.

And that was that if our law is going to demand our obedience, it must be in accordance with God's truth and hence binding upon all men equally.

Having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace, you all know, I think ladies know more than men do, I don't know how you ladies walk in some of the shoes you do I'll be perfectly honest with you.

But when you grab the wrong shoes or something goes wrong with your shoe, you get a rock in your shoe, oh, that's just horrible.

The gospel of the, I'm sorry, the preparation of the gospel of peace, we'll get it out there.

The gospel of peace.

And you might say, well, we're talking about the gospel at war, but the gospel is only at war with that which is opposed to God's purpose in bringing about peace between rebel sinners and a glorious savior, Jesus Christ.

The fundamental result of the gospel is peace, shalom.

Shalom, I'll never forget.

This is one of the few debates that I had before Chris Arnson started doing so many of the debates and arranging so many of them.

But I debated Mitchell Pacwa, really nice guy, brilliant guy, 12 languages.

And I honor Mitch because of all the Roman Catholics I've debated, he was the only one who didn't use cheap debating tricks.

He was honest, he was straightforward, just very different than many of the other people that I had engaged.

And I asked him a question in our first or second debate, they were right next to each other, so I don't remember exactly which one was which.

But I asked him a question about peace because in Roman Catholicism, you do not have the non-imputation of sin.

If you commit a mortal sin, it's imputed to you, if you commit a venial sin, it's imputed to you.

The whole beautiful discussion in Romans 4 about the blessed man to whom the Lord will not impute sin just doesn't have any meaning in Roman Catholicism.

An Orthodox Roman Catholic cannot provide an answer to the question, who is it that the Lord does not impute sin to? Because they don't have that concept in their gospel.

And the result is Romans 5.1, therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

They struggle with what that means.

And I remember asking him and I was very specific about how the greatest commandment is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

And yet none of us have done that perfectly today, but that's the greatest commandment.

And I pushed him because I knew he knew Hebrew.

The term Shalom, peace, does not simply mean cessation of hostility.

There is no Shalom in Israel as long as they have to have advanced missile systems active 24 seven, preparing to shoot down incoming missiles from their neighbors.

That's not peace.

Even if there are no missiles being launched, that's not peace.

Shalom is a wellness of relationship, not a cessation of battle.

It's a wellness of relationship.

And so I asked Mitch, in light of the fact that you believe you could commit a mortal sin before your head hits the pillow tonight and lose your relationship with God and become his enemy, how can you say that you have peace with God? And he was one of the few honest people who after we had a little back and forth, once I really focused it in, he said, I don't know.

I don't know.

The preparation of the gospel of peace, our ultimate goal in warfare is to bring about peace.

And we cannot lose sight of that.

We cannot lose sight of that.

If you've ever seen the movie, and it was one of the longest movies ever made by humankind called Gods and Generals.

From the Civil War period, it was the Battle of Fredericksburg and up through the death of Stonewall Jackson.

And there was a scene where Lee, and I really liked the actor who played Lee in that particular one, where Lee said to Longstreet, he said, it is good that war is so horrific lest we should learn to love it.

And there is a danger for those who fight in the war that they might come to love the war.

If you want a different illustration, if you don't like that one, remember the Battle of the Bulge, remember the 1960s movie, The Battle of the Bulge.

And Colonel Hess, the head of the German Panzer units, he's driving his Panzers to try to get that fuel depot to keep the battle going.

And he has an older aide that finally just right to his face says, you wouldn't know what to do if there wasn't a war.

You love war.

He says, I love my sons.

And so I know the war cannot continue.

That's a dangerous attitude and there are many people who have developed it.

We need to realize that in our battle, our feet need to be shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.

The power of the gospel is that it subdues rebels and brings them into a relationship of peace with God.

In addition to all, having taken up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

When you experience in ministry, when you experience in the church, warning in case any of you don't know this, guess what? Christians might offend you in the church.

Just a little warning.

And oh, how I see people who hop from one church to another church to another church because they don't realize that we're gonna step on each other's toes.

There's gonna need to be forgiveness extended right, left and center.

We should be reminded of that in the Lord's supper all the time.

But those flaming arrows that come at you, whether they be doubts from the world, internal conflicts in the church, external persecution, what do we need? We need the shield of faith.

And faith does not necessarily always know what the outcome is going to be in any given situation.

Faith is always focused upon what the ultimate outcome is.

And that is the victory of Christ and his kingdom and his people.

We take up the shield of faith.

We extinguish all the flaming arrows, the evil one.

We also receive the helmet of salvation.

That which gives us confidence.

I know that as a cyclist, I always wear a helmet.

I'm a good cyclist.

I've ridden some incredible routes.

But I also realized when I'm flying down a mountain, I can have a chipmunk run out in front of me and wipe me out.

And there's nothing you can do.

You can be the greatest cyclist in the world and not avoid that thing.

And you're gonna come down and that head of yours, you think you can keep that from hitting the ground? Ha, ha, ha.

You gotta have something up there for protection.

And those little helmets we wear don't provide a lot.

But the helmet that Paul would have been talking about would have had a whole lot more substance to it.

The helmet of salvation.

Do we have assurance? Do we trust God's word and what he has said that we are in right relationship with God? And then we get to the one that everybody likes the most.

And all the guys that are up to three o'clock in the morning on Facebook, correcting everyone in the world.

I have the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

When you think about it, notice it's called the sword of the spirit.

It's the spirit of God that brings the word of God to life in anyone's heart and mind.

I can't do it.

And when I try to use psychology, emotions, even the nicest music to try to short circuit the spirit of God, I'm getting in the way.

I'm blunting that sword.

And see, people want to see results right now.

I remember a dear friend of mine, I taught him Greek.

And he came to me once and he said, you know, I was looking at this text and John looking at it in the Greek and talking to a Jehovah's witness.

And they came up with an interpretation.

I'll be honest with you.

I don't know what to do with it because it could mean that.

It could have that understanding.

And he was troubled.

And I remember looking at the text and looking, I'm going, yeah, it could mean that.

A Jehovah's witness could be right about something.

I said, well, God's truth is brought to us in its fullness by all of scripture, not a particular passage.

It's one particular passage in relationship to this passage, this passage, this passage, so on and so forth.

But the reality is what he wanted was to be able in every situation to just simply close down the opponent with a killer argument and they'd just be forced right then and there to repent.

And guess what? That's not how it works.

In fact, after 40 years in ministry, you would think I would remember to turn my phone off before preaching.

After 40 years in ministry, I can think of a number of instances where someone came to me with an objection, with an argument, and I did not try to whip out the sword and slice them to pieces.

I gave them a truthful response, but I gave it to them in such a way that they had to think about it and wrestle with it.

And I just can think of these specific instances where years later, years later, we encountered each other again and they were like, you have no idea how much that impacted me.

I was ready and I had warmed up and I was getting ready and you just stood there and you didn't even look at me.

You just went and popped me in the nose and it was over.

I had never expected that response.

I expected you to come out swinging and instead you just hit me up and I had to deal with it.

And I've discovered you were right all along.

We so often are so impatient when it comes to bringing the message of the gospel to people.

We've bought into the evangelistic, hey, let's start the 32nd chorus of just as I am, we'll get you down here.

We'll get you to make a decision.

And how many of those decisions end up being nothing? In fact, end up putting somebody in a situation where they're even harder to reach because now they think they've got their ticket punched.

Speak the truth, gird your loins with the truth, speak the truth and then trust the spirit of God.

Because once you go past where the spirit allows you to go, it's all in the flesh and the results are all gonna be fleshly.

They're just gonna be fleshly.

Now that doesn't mean that I always know exactly where that line is or that you always know exactly where that line is.

That's why we're put in a fellowship.

That's why I'm glad to have fellow elders.

And I'm glad that the church that I'm at now, I'm the old guy.

One of my fellow elders says I know so much about church history because I was there.

Stop laughing, Chris, you were there too.

But I hopefully give to them the maturity and the vision of four decades in ministry and they give to me that youthful exuberance and strength and drive.

And that's why we aren't supposed to be lone ranger Christians.

That's why we're supposed to be in a body because there's other people in the body that are better at wielding the sword of the spirit than another person.

Another person has a better helmet, better grasp of all of that.

We compliment each other.

We need to depend upon each other.

It's vitally, vitally important.

And notice, of course, even after it says we have all this armor, there's a comma at the end of verse 17.

Praying at all times with all prayer and petition in the spirit.

And to this end, being on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints.

The greatest warfare takes place on our knees.

The greatest warfare takes place when we submit ourselves to God and say, may my will become conformed to your will.

That's where so much of the battle takes place.

So much of the battle takes place.

And so I know we all know the text, but as we think of our warfare today, let us be reminded of the basic foundational issues.

The danger for us today.

I'll close with this.

Here's the danger for us today.

Let me give you, teach church history, so let me give you a church history example to wrap things up.

And I don't have any idea how long I've gone, brother.

I don't even remember where I started.

So, doesn't matter.

Here's our closing illustration.

I love to tell this story from church history.

You're probably familiar with the quote from B.B.

Warfield, the great Princeton scholar, who said the reformation inwardly considered was just this.

It was the victory of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church.

So what Warfield was saying was, Augustine contradicted himself.

And he did.

Now, Augustine was a brilliant man.

And he produced some of the most important works in the history of the Christian church.

There are times I read some of Augustine's stuff, especially his stuff about how we know that December 25th is the birth of Jesus.

That you, go read it sometime.

It's probably pretty easy to Google that one.

And you just go, yeah, I'm not so sure about that.

By the way, there was an assumption in the ancient world that all great men died on the day they were conceived.

Did you know that? I didn't know that until, I don't know, about 10 years ago.

There was a, it was, and it was just a given.

Everybody believed it.

All great men die on the day they were conceived.

And so you can sort of guess when Jesus died.

And so do the nine month thing.

And wow, December 25th, that must be how it worked.

And so Augustine contradicted himself in major areas.

And you might go, why didn't he recognize that? He didn't recognize that because the contradictions arose because of the conflicts he was involved with in his life.

The major conflict at the beginning of his ministry was called the Donatist controversy.

And it was on the nature of the church, persecution, sacramentology, things like that.

And when the Roman Catholics quote Augustine on their side, they're quoting from that early Augustine.

But then the later controversy of his life was the Plagian controversy.

And that's where he's writing on predestination and election, the perseverance of the saints.

But the result is, because those were the great conflicts, the danger for all of us is when you're involved in a conflict, when you're, remember, I bet you they don't do this in school anymore because one side would win and one side would lose and we can't have that.

But remember tug of war, tug of war, that was fun.

That was fun, that was a lot of fun.

But when you're pulling on that rope, you're not balanced.

In fact, one of the ways we try to win is all of a sudden everybody let go of the rope and hope that everybody on the other side fell over and then you grab it and start running the other direction.

Remember? Because you're not balanced.

When you're in a war, you're pulling one specific direction.

Not balanced this direction, not balanced that direction.

And so what happens is when we're at warfare, the danger is we become imbalanced.

And so Augustine became imbalanced against the teachings of the Donatists in the early part of his life.

And then later on, he's dealing with Pelagianism and he understands predestination, election and things like that.

But he ends up with this weird belief that baptism makes you a truly regenerate Christian, but unless you're given the gift of perseverance, you will apostatize, you won't make it.

So he got the baptism thing from the Donatist controversy and then the perseverance and the elect from the later and he tried to cram them together and we can sit back and go, you don't need to do that.

But he did.

And that's a danger for us.

If someone as brilliant as Augustine could end up with contradictions in his theology that fundamental, then wouldn't it be wise for us to recognize that yes, there are vitally important things that we're dealing with today.

There's warfare that must be waged, but our prayer needs to be, but Lord in the midst of our working hard and fighting the battles, keep us balanced.

Keep us balanced.

Don't let us lose sight of the fundamental and foundational truths that actually give us unity and harmony with one another.

I just see so much willingness on the part of Christians today to grab the stake, gather the wood and burn people right, left and center.

And it just makes me wonder, what if all the battles shift in 20 years? Are we gonna look back and go, man, there was absolutely no reason, but we did.

I don't wanna be there.

I wanna be balanced.

I want to have the full armor of God.

I want to use all of the armor of God properly.

I want my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren to be able to look back at what their grandfather or great-grandfather did.

And be able to say, there was someone who knew the seasons, loved the word and what's the main exhortation there in Ephesians six, stood firm.

Stood firm.

They don't have to believe that I was perfect in everything that I thought or did, but did I stand firm no matter what it cost? Or will I be a person who was known as one who offered the pinch of incense more than once? No incense, stand firm.

Will we agree together? Let's pray together.

Father, we do thank you for the privilege we have had of being able to gather together these past literally number of hours to think about things that may have challenged us, hopefully challenged us, encouraged us, but Lord, that we've still had the freedom to do so.

We haven't had to hide.

We haven't had to do this out in the woods.

We still have many freedoms that you have given to us.

Help us to realize that these freedoms are blessings from you, to be filled with thanksgiving for all that you've given to us.

But Lord, we do ask that as we leave this place, as we go back into a week of ministry, Lord, that you would cause us to stand firm.

Use all that you've given to us.

We don't do it in our own power.

Make us to stand firm.

May we not compromise unwittingly or unwillingly.

May we not fail in the day of adversity.

May we stand firm to your honor, to your glory, and to the fame of the name of Jesus Christ, as in his name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.