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 the clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: To recite and quote once again Lewis Sperry Chafer, who said next to the study of Christ and his cross, his work, the ministry of Satan should be a next study in importance. I probably wouldn't think that unless I was in ministry for as long as I've been in ministry and you see things creep into people's lives and how they impact people's lives. We are in a 24-hour, lifelong battle against evil.

I don't want to make something so dark and cloudy, but it's true. Not saying that we have to succumb to it, not saying that we have to be looking for demons underneath our pillows. None of those things, but we're talking about that. This evil doesn't even have the potential of being good. This evil hates good, and this evil is bent on ruining it.

This evil hates God, hates Jesus. This evil hates you only because Jesus loves you. And because Jesus loves you, you become a target for this evil. When the Lord prayed in Matthew chapter 6, he said, "Deliver us from evil." That wasn't talking about a nebulous evil; that was talking about an entity. The word there is Hoponero, and it means it was talking about Satan. "Deliver us from Satan. Keep us safe from Satan's attacks."

Think with me for a moment. Israel had just come out of a 400-year captivity from Egypt. They marched out of there, the Red Sea parts, the Egyptian army goes through, the Red Sea closes, it takes out Egypt. The manna grows in the wilderness. Water comes from a rock and gives them water. And they march right up to this place called Kadesh Barnea.

That's right on the verge of the Promised Land. They send some spies into the Promised Land and say go check this place out and come back in a month or so and tell us what's there. So they do. They go out and they come back. It’s 12 spies, Caleb and Joshua being two of them.

They come back and they get there and they tell the people, "This place is amazing." They brought all these grapes, grapes, the mother of all grapes. This place flows with milk and honey. It's an incredible place. Everything that they said it was, it is, except you have these giants in the land, the Amalekites. And these giants are not good people. We are like grasshoppers in their sight.

So they said, "We don't recommend you go up." You can blame those guys, but let's frame this. They'd been making bricks for 400 years. They weren't trained in warfare. They didn't have a sword, they didn't have a cannon, they didn't have a slingshot, they didn't have a blowgun. They didn't have nothing. What they had were a few spades and spatulas, that's what they had.

And now they're coming into walled cities with trained warriors that were much bigger than them. That could create a little intimidation, and they were intimidated. Caleb tried to quiet the people as they stood before Moses. He says, "Let us go at once to take the land. We can certainly conquer it."

The Bible went on to describe Caleb as having another spirit, a different spirit than the rest. What was his angle? Why didn't he fear? Well, he just used a little logic. "Let me see. We were captive 400 years. God came, brought seven plagues, and got us out of Egypt. The Egyptians followed us, He swallowed them up in the Red Sea. We needed water, it came from a rock. We needed bread, it grew up from the ground."

God's been pretty faithful to us up until this point. I'm thinking that if He can take out the Red Sea and take out the whole nation of Egypt, He can probably deal with the Amalekites. And the people rebelled, and they went 40 years into the wilderness. There is very little offensive imagery. There's a little bit in the scriptures, especially the New Testament, referring to spiritual warfare.

I believe that's a very simple reason for that. When Jesus died on this cross, He shed His blood, we know He crushed the head, fulfilling the prophecy of Genesis chapter 3, and He dethroned the prince of this age in John 12:31. His cross gave us and guaranteed us victory. Amen. Thank you. A little slow, but I understand. There was a time change that went on, so some of you might be a little slow. So, amen.

With that in mind, I might as well close because everyone in here has had victory all week. Everyone's all month, none of us has had any issues, none of us has failed, none of us has been tempted or succumbed, none of us got angry or emotional or worried or concerned or overwhelmed or any of those things. We just all had these spiritually victorious weeks where we just walked on cloud nine all week long. Where's the devil? I'll kick him in the teeth.

That's one out of 150, two out of 150. All right. The rest have been kicked around a little bit. So how do we wage war? What is the New Testament idea of warfare? How do we wage war? How do we do battle? What I've had to do with this message, I got a little bit twisted. If I had to preach this again, I'd preach it differently. I would break it into two weeks, which I'm going to have to do anyway because there's not enough time to finish what I want to say.

I would have developed a passage a little better than I did, but I didn't develop it because I was trying to cram all three points into one message. It isn't going to work. So we're going to break this, finish this up next week. I want to look today at, at least briefly, on what, how does Paul say that we wage war? How does James say that we wage war? And how does next week it'll be now, how does Peter say that we wage war?

Let's look at what they have to say. Ephesians chapter 6, Paul first. "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might." So be strong in what? The Lord. That's the key, one of the keys right there. Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. "Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil."

Let me stop a little bit because we talked about this verse in the first service in the Subversive series. Remember Ephesians. Ephesians is an amazing book to outline the Christian life. First three chapters of Ephesians talk about who we are in Christ and our position in Christ. We're seated together with Christ in the heavenlies, Ephesians 2:6. We have all spiritual blessings, Ephesians 1:3.

It goes right up, amazing, far above thrones, dominions, and mights, 1:21-23. So great, great verses throughout the first three chapters of Ephesians. It tells us who we are in Christ and what He did on the cross. Then it gets into very practical life. It gets into body life, church life, marriage life, family life, and how dealing with sin and temptation and stuff like that.

How that truth of chapters 1, 2, and 3 bleeds into and impacts us in practical, everyday, feet-on-the-ground, Planet Earth life. Then he ends the book of Ephesians with this passage talking about spiritual warfare. There is a perfect continuity in the whole book. So with that in mind, be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might.

That looks back to chapters 1, 2, and 3. Be strong in the Lord and who He said He did, what He did for you, and who He is and the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God that you will be able to what? Stand. Key word. Verse 12: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places."

Therefore, looking back in light of everything that was said, therefore, take on the whole armor of God. In light of this spiritual struggle that we have, that we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but we have this demonic hierarchy of principalities, powers, authorities, rulers of darkness, spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places. In light of those guys, take on the whole armor of God that you'll be able to withstand the evil day and having done all to what? Stand firm.

Verse 14: "Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness." So we have in that particular portion of scripture, one, two, three, four different times it uses this word stand or withstand. John Wesley said, "This is a grand device of Satan to destroy the first work of God in the soul, Ephesians 1 through 3, or at least hinder its increase by our expectation of a greater work."

So this word stand and withstand all come from the same word, histemi. And the other withstand adds a prefix to it, antihistemi, I guess is how you say it. It means to resist, stand firm, hold one's position, to be called into a defensive spiritual battle. I forget who it was, one of the guys that I was reading, but he says he paralleled this word as used in relating to, in classical Greek, relating to the Greek phalanx, the military formation.

Anyone familiar, a little bit familiar with that? It's an amazing formation. What the Greeks would do, and other subsequent societies would do it too, cultures would do it too, they would have these spears, and you would line up 15, 16 across, depending on what needed to be accomplished here. You had the spear this way, a shield this way, and a spear this way.

Shield to shield, it’d be like a wall. Behind them would be another 8 to 12 layers of men with their spears up, because they didn't want to stab the people in front of them, and their shields ready to go, leaned against the soldiers in front. So when you came to hit that wall, the first wave of soldiers, it didn't move. You moved.

That wall, they were trained in walking in unison. They would walk as one person. That whole wall would walk in one person. They would steer people, move crowds, move the enemy's army. They literally could protect the city indefinitely because you couldn't get through the city street because you would always meet that wall of humanity. That's the picture here.

They would withstand. That was more of a defensive structure. It ranked havoc in offensive warfare, but as these invading armies would come, they'd meet a 12-foot spear or so and a wall of shields that couldn't be moved because behind it was another shield and another shield and another shield. If one guy fell, he was quickly replaced by the guy behind him and they would never, they would by the time you'd get through all that, you were tired and ready to go home.

That's the picture here. Withstand. Don't give an inch. Buckle down, lean into it. It would literally push the enemy off the battlefield. So he's saying here, with all stand. I'm in a conscious, active, aware plan of resisting and opposing the attack that I'm currently in, the attack that is coming and will come in the future.

Or we press on. We don't succumb to it. Matthew 4:4, Luke 4:4. Jesus is tempted by the devil on top of the pinnacle of the temple. Did he throw the devil off? No. When he tempted him with turning the rocks into loaves of bread after 40 days of hunger, did he hit the devil with a rock? No. He simply said three things every time.

"It is written. It is written. It is written." That's how we stood. That's how he withstood the devil. That's how he waged spiritual warfare. It is written. He stayed under the umbrella of God's revealed truth. Look at this quote: "The ability to withstand when the fight is on is to be sought with a view of holding one's position when the conflict is at an end. Neither dislodged or fell but standing victorious at one's post." That's Paul's wisdom on how to wage war. You withstand it.