Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: Ephesians chapter 6, we're going to continue our series, Subversive. The Devil and Self is the title of this morning's message. I know we're in spring training, but if I can just refer back to football just for one more service until the next Super Bowl that we win. I'm sorry, I don't want to brag because my team won the Super Bowl or anything like that, but it is sort of true. In the NFL, what happens is teams have scouts. This is a series on spiritual warfare, and you'll see the connection to what I'm saying here as the message progresses.

If the New England Patriots play in a city, when they get on the airplane to fly home from that game, they're handed a scouting report from the next team. They already know the next team they're going to play. They have advance scouts. I think it's two weeks out where they're going to play. In the first round of the playoffs, they played the Baltimore Ravens. They had scouts at the last two Ravens games, so they could see tendencies the Ravens have, their strengths, and their weaknesses. The scouts and some of the coaching work is always looking forward to prepare a strategy for how best to play that particular team. Every team does it.

When the playoffs began, they had a game plan based upon what those scouts came up with and the coaches put that information together. They developed a game plan: this is how we want to play that team. This is how we think we can beat that team. With the Baltimore Ravens, they played them and said, "We think we can run the ball on this team, and we think we can pass the ball on this team." It turned out they couldn't run the ball on that team. So in the middle of the game, they had to change the game plan. They had to change their strategy and they began just passing the ball. In fact, they passed it over 50 times in that game.

What they started with really wasn't what they ended with. They had to strategize. Now the next team they played was the Colts. They thought they could run and pass against the Colts, do both, and they did pretty effectively. They stuck to the game plan. When they got to the Super Bowl, they had Seattle. They said, "Can we run against them? No. Can we really pass down the field against them? No, they're pretty good." So they developed a game plan showing these little three-yard, two-yard passes. They let the guys run another yard, and they did a bunch of those. That's what they did. They threw 50-odd passes that game.

That's not how they played the Colts because the Colts didn't have that weakness. That's not how they played the Ravens because the Ravens had a different type of defense. Every attack against these teams had a specific focus on it. They didn't look at the team's strengths. They didn't try to run up the middle on the Seattle Seahawks because they wouldn't have gotten anywhere. They didn't try to throw down Richard Sherman's side of the field because they wouldn't have completed any passes. They stayed away from there. They went to where they knew they could succeed. That's exactly what the enemy likes to do.

He has scouts that watch us. Now Satan has what we call demons. I'm not a demon chaser. I'm pretty conservative in my theology, but the scriptures talk quite a bit about these characters. Satan nor his demons are everywhere present. In other words, they don't have the ability to be two places at one time. They're actually in one place at one time. There are a lot of them, so they can cover a lot of territory, but they're not everywhere present. They're not all-knowing. They don't know what you're thinking. And they're not all-powerful. They are created beings.

The only one who's all-knowing, everywhere present, and all-powerful is God Almighty himself. Understanding we're dealing with a created being, yet one that we saw last week in Ezekiel 28:12 has the sum of God's wisdom. He's no dummy, and he has tremendous scouting reports on you. Your self. I'm getting specific there because he's specific. Neil Anderson says this: "Admittedly, we can go too far in seeing demons behind human problems." Neil Anderson is a Christian psychologist and counselor who has written many books, so he comes from that perspective.

Admittedly, we can go too far in seeing demons behind human problems and can describe to them more power and influence than they possess. And that's true. Flip Wilson said, "The devil made me do it." Who doesn't remember that? Yet we can go to the other extreme and not see them anywhere at any time. We're not speaking against the proper use of medication or reason, but we're warning against trying to ignore the daily living role of evil spirits, the principalities and powers against which Paul says we struggle. The warnings of the New Testament about this enemy need to be taken seriously.

We want to look today at what are some of these ways he likes to attack us and how do we defend ourselves in this spiritual warfare, this subversive enemy that we have. Let me look at some verses and we'll see a little bit of a range of some of his attacks. Second Corinthians chapter 2, verse 11. Let me give you some background because it's important to frame this in the right background. Second Corinthians 2:11 directly looks back to First Corinthians 5. There was a man in the Corinthian church that was guilty of some pretty nasty stuff: sexual sin.

Paul said, "This is how you deal with that man. You abstain from him. You put him out of fellowship until he makes this right." That's what the Corinthian church did. They put him out of fellowship. Paul listed other things there that we should break fellowship with saints on: railers, gossipers. You can look at there and read it yourself if you'd like. Now we fast forward a year or two. This man has been put out of the church. This man repents. He comes back to the church. Now the church is treating him like this. They're knowing him after his flesh.

They're not forgetting what he did. They're not really accepting him and forgiving him and seeing him through the eyes of Christ as a new creature. They're just remembering what he did because what he did was a pretty blue-collar, grotesque billboard sin. It was one you all see. When you become professional sinners like me, you just know how to sin less noticeably. But this man's sin was out there. People were like this with him because of what he did, and what he did was not good.

Paul talks about forgiving this man. He says, "Lest Satan should get an advantage of us, for we are not ignorant of his devices." He just told us that not forgiving somebody, and I'd even take it a step further, not seeing people through the eyes of Christ, is a device that Satan likes to use. Let that marinate. Not forgiving somebody and seeing somebody after the flesh is a satanic device according to what the Apostle Paul just said. Ephesians chapter 4, verses 25 through 27 says, "Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another."

He's talking about body life. He's talking about community within the local church in Ephesus there. Be angry and sin not. Let not the sun go down on your wrath. He says don't go to bed angry. Don't let stuff between you and another Christian marinate because neither give place to the devil. So if I go to bed angry and I don't put these things away, I'm giving place to the devil. The word "place" there is a Greek word, topos, and it talks about a boundary line, a marked-off boundary line. What you've done, Paul says, when you don't put this stuff away, you've given territory to the devil. You've made a boundary line for him where he can function. You haven't really kicked him out. You've invited him in. You've kept him in the parameters.

First Peter 5:8 says, "Cast your cares on Jesus because he cares for you." This church that this book was being written to was undergoing a local persecution. There were Christians being jailed, Christians being beaten, and potentially Christians being martyred for the faith in the church that Peter wrote this epistle to. He's talking to this church and he says, "Cast your cares on Jesus." We've used that verse many times. Consistently cast your cares up to Jesus because he cares for you.

Then he says this: "Be sober-minded and watchful." Those are two Greek words. One word is a picture of the gazelle in the African Serengeti. You know there's lions everywhere. That gazelle knows a lion would love to have it for lunch. So that gazelle is eating, but he's also very aware. Looking out above the grass, he's looking, straining, just to make sure before he takes the next bite that he's not going to be the next bite. He's looking all over the place. That's the picture here. Be sober-minded, be watchful. Be watchful because your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking whom he can devour.

Criteria there again goes back to verse 7: stress and worry. Burdens that you bear. You were never made to bear burdens. You were never made to be overburdened with stress. Ever happen to you? Probably more times than you can even remember when you felt the world was on your shoulders. It says be sober, be vigilant, don't let that happen to you because you have an adversary, a roaring lion. You ever get so stressed out that all of a sudden you go home and there's a little conflict in the home and that little conflict turns into a big mushroom cloud? No, never happened, right?

Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary is seeking whom he may devour. Second Timothy chapter 2, verses 24 through 26: "A servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but must be kind to everyone who is able to teach and be patient with difficult people. Gently instruct those that oppose the truth. Perhaps God will change those people's hearts and they will learn the truth." Then they will come to their senses. This was a picture of somebody waking up after they'd been intoxicated. They come to their senses. The intoxication wears off and all of a sudden they come to their senses.

My brother-in-law Steve is a psychologist for the state of Massachusetts. He works in an institution in Brockton. About eight or nine years ago now, I happened to be visiting, and we read in the newspaper the next day that there was a man that climbed atop the public school. It was the middle of the winter, and he was going to jump off the roof and commit suicide. They called the local mental hospital where my brother-in-law worked, and he was the one that they said, "You go over to that scene." The police are there, the media is there, everyone's there. You have to talk that guy off the roof.

My brother-in-law never told me that. We found out in the news the next day. That was a marital issue between him and my sister, but I won't get involved in that. So I asked Steve how he talked him down. He goes, "It really wasn't that big of a deal. He was up there. He had just shorts on. It was the middle of the winter. He was very intoxicated." I said, "I'll just talk to him." I talked to him about the Red Sox. I talked to him about anything I could talk to him about because I knew at some point it would be so cold and he'd sober up.

So he sobered up. He sobered up and says, "What am I doing up here? I'm getting off this roof, I'm freezing." And he came down and he got off the roof. He sobered up. That's what the picture is here. They come to their senses to escape the devil's trap, for they have been held captive by him to do whatever he wants. The word "captive" there is a Greek word for a prisoner of war. So there's an organization, the best we can tell, at some level we don't really quite understand the full scope of it. I won't get into the fantastic; I'll just tell you what the scriptures say. But we see there's an organization of the demonic.