Telling the Truth

Guest (Female): God has a plan for your victory. And today on Telling the Truth, Stuart Briscoe opens the book of Ephesians to help you see God's strategy for how you can walk in victory over the enemy. But first...

Guest (Male): In their new five-message series, Fighting Unseen Forces, Stuart and Jill show you straight from God's Word how you can stand strong against your spiritual enemy and live victoriously in Christ. We'll send you a copy of this resource as our thanks for your support today to help others experience the life of abundance God wants them to have in Jesus.

So call today to request your copy of Fighting Unseen Forces: 1-800-889-5383. That's 1-800-889-5383. Or you can give online at tellingthetruth.org. Now, here's Stuart with his message, God's Plan for Victory.

Stuart Briscoe: I have good news, and I have bad news. The good news is that God has a plan and he is totally committed to working it out. The bad news is that God has an enemy who is totally committed to thwarting the purpose of God. And you and I are caught in the middle. Of course, the good news is that God wins in Christ. And it is our responsibility and joy to share in his victory.

And that's what Ephesians chapter six is all about. God has an eternal cosmic plan. That this plan is focused in the Lord Jesus and that Christ is committed to building his church through which God's purposes are going to be worked out on Earth. This, of course, means that those who claim to be Christians, those who are part of the body of Christ, the church, are required to understand that their Christianity has to be much more than one hour a week. It has to be a lifestyle that is worthy of their high calling of being the body of Christ, caught up in God's eternal purposes.

However, we have to understand that the evil one, the devil, and all his malevolent forces are diametrically opposed to the purpose of God, and we have to know how to live in the midst of the struggle. With that in mind, let me read to you from Ephesians chapter six and verse 10. This is what Paul says: "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore, put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand." Paul then goes into more detail, but let me just address those opening verses first of all.

When Paul was dictating this letter, he was in prison and he was chained to a Roman soldier who was his guard. So he didn't have to look very far for an illustration of the conflict or the warfare in which he, as a Christian, and the Christians to whom he was writing were involved, and how they were to cope with it. He understood that he was dealing with some forces that were opposed to him. But he wanted to explain how the Christian, like the soldier in the midst of a struggle, has armor available to him.

And so he looked at the armor, he looked at the equipment, he looked at the uniform of the Roman soldier beside him, and he used this as an illustration of the spiritual resources that are available to us. Now, the thing that we need to notice first of all about Paul's statement here concerning the warfare or the struggle that we're in is this: He uses a word that was used to describe spiritual warfare as not being something vague and indistinct and esoteric, but it is something that is nitty-gritty, down to earth.

The spiritual conflict that we're in is not sort of a spiritual video game. It's hand-to-hand conflict with the forces of evil. Many moons ago, I had the privilege of serving in the Royal Marines. And as I did my training, I learned that there are three things that any person who is going to go into military conflict has to be clear about. Number one, they have to be clear about the enemy. They've got to be able to identify the enemy.

Number two, they've got to know exactly what they are supposed to do. Number three, they have to be fully conversant with their equipment and their weapons and know how to use them. If you don't know the enemy and you don't know what you're supposed to do and you can't use your weapons, you're no good as a soldier, and you'll be defeated. It's very interesting to notice that the apostle Paul in this passage in effect tells Christians engaged in the spiritual struggle: Number one, you need to know your adversary.

Number two, you need to be willing to accept your assignment. And number three, in order to do that, you must wear your armor. And those are the three things that I want to address with you. Identify your adversary. Notice the surprising statement that Paul makes here in verse 11: "Put on the whole armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For the struggle is not against flesh and blood."

Identify your enemy. What the apostle Paul is saying here is really quite shocking. He says very, very often, when we get ourselves into difficulties, we identify the difficulties with a person, and the person becomes the enemy. He said what we've got to understand is this: that our struggle is not basically, fundamentally against flesh and blood. It's not people that are the problem. It is behind the people that there is the devil, the evil one.

And in addition to the devil or the evil one, there are rulers and authorities and powers of this dark world and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenlies. And we've already noticed that the heavenlies are the realm of invisible reality. You see, we get into trouble. We have our struggles in life, but very, very often we identify the struggles as simply being down here in the realm of visible reality.

And Paul says no. Identify the real adversary. The real adversary behind those things is the devil, the evil one, and all his malevolent forces who use the material and the people and the personal as agents of his activity. That is critically important. We don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but we are struggling against malevolent spiritual forces. Now, how does this apply? Well, some of you are struggling in your marriages.

And as you're struggling in your marriages, you're having difficulty with your spouse. And the struggle has become a struggle against flesh and blood. The thing to realize, of course, is this: that that's not really the enemy. The enemy of your souls is the one who's the enemy of the purposes of God, and the one who's the enemy of the purposes of God is totally bent on wrecking families. Don't fight the wrong enemy.

Now, that doesn't mean, of course, that your spouse who's giving you trouble is not an agent of the evil one and is not totally without fault. But if we simply deal with that which is visible and that which is material and that which is personal, the best that we will do is solve the symptoms. We won't really address the fundamental problem. Some people say we've got all kinds of problems in our culture at the present time, and it's the politicians.

So what we've got to do is deal with these politicians. Well, is that really the struggle? Or is it that the politicians could conceivably become agents through which the one who is diametrically opposed to the work of God is working? And could it be that whilst we may have political solutions to political problems, all we're solving there is the symptoms? And the real struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers and the powers and the authorities under the thralldom of the devil, the evil one.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Telling the Truth with Stuart and Jill Briscoe. He's coming right back with more from today's message. But before he dives back in, you can't always see it raging around you, but every day you're locked in a battle that threatens your spiritual, emotional, and relational well-being. Spiritual warfare is very real, and you can't afford to sit this fight out.

Your spiritual enemy will stop at nothing to keep you from experiencing the abundant and impactful life you're called to in Christ. But you can stand strong in Jesus and the power of his Spirit. And Stuart and Jill want to show you how, straight from God's Word, by sending you their new five-message series, Fighting Unseen Forces. We'll send you this encouraging series as thanks for your gift of support to help people around the world hear the message of Jesus through broadcasts like this one today.

Your gift of support helps Telling the Truth carry the message of God's love to people across the globe so they can experience life in Christ. Call today to request your copy of Fighting Unseen Forces when you give: 1-800-889-5383. That's 1-800-889-5383. Or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. For many, our smartphones have become our social connection, but we want to help you make a spiritual connection with the Telling the Truth mobile app.

You can listen to daily programs, engage in Bible reading plans, journal, and share your thoughts and prayers on the community wall. Get the Telling the Truth app through your App Store or log on to tellingthetruth.org/mobile-app. Remember, you can also give to support Telling the Truth on our mobile app. Now, here's more from Stuart with today's message from the series Fighting Unseen Forces.

Stuart Briscoe: Well, who is this devil? Well, let me suggest to you that Scripture tells us a whole lot about him. It tells us that this devil is the one whom Jesus met. People sometimes say to me, "At first, we thought you were reasonably intelligent. But now, are you really telling me that you believe in a personal devil?" And the answer is, "Well, thank you for thinking I'm reasonably intelligent, and yes. Yes, I do."

And they'll say, "Well, why?" And the answer is Jesus did, and he was quite smart. Jesus believed in a personal devil. He confronted him in the wilderness. We are told that in the power of the Spirit, he went into the wilderness for a period of 40 days. He had a nose-to-nose confrontation with a personal evil one. And he humiliated the evil one, and he totally routed the evil one, and in the end, the evil one turned and ran away from him.

And Jesus, in the fullness of the Spirit, came out of the wilderness the way he went in. That's why he was able to say with great composure, "The devil has nothing on me." Moreover, the devil is the one whom Jesus confronted on the cross. And the writer to the Hebrews tells us that through death, Jesus destroyed him that has the power of death, that is the devil, and delivers those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.

So the enemy is a malevolent spiritual force who has phenomenal power, but he is one who has been humiliated by Christ and defeated on the cross. However, Scripture tells us that he goes around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. In other words, this evil one can release such overwhelming evil against us that it's almost as if he pounces on us and chews the life out of us. He doesn't just approach us like a roaring lion.

Sometimes he comes like an angel of light. Sometimes he comes not head-on with overwhelming force, sometimes he comes in the back door insidiously, quietly, stealthily stealing up upon us. Many years ago, the first time I visited Singapore, I was particularly interested to look at something that I'd heard about in Singapore, and that was the military defenses that the British had built there.

I was particularly interested in this because during the time of the Second World War, the men of the town where I lived were all drafted into the Border Regiment. And the Border Regiment was shipped out to Singapore, all of them on one troopship—hundreds of men from the area where I grew up as a boy. But something terrible happened to them. As their ship docked in Singapore, they had not got the right intelligence, and they didn't know that in the hours immediately prior to them docking in Singapore, the Japanese had overrun the place.

And they docked and they marched off the ship and were simply shipped straight into a Japanese concentration camp for the rest of the war. What had happened? Well, what had happened was that the British had built formidable defenses for Singapore. There was only one thing wrong. They'd built them on the south of the island facing out to the ocean. They had put massive naval guns in deep concrete bunkers. The only problem was that the Japanese came in from the north.

And they couldn't turn the guns round. So they didn't identify the right enemy, so they got the wrong strategy, so they never enjoyed the victory. And the apostle Paul says you'd better understand who the enemy really is. Because if you don't identify the enemy, you'll have the wrong strategy. And if you have the wrong strategy, you won't gain the victory. In warfare, we have all heard stories of overwhelming military might coming against people.

But what we also know is that in modern warfare, there are various techniques where it is not necessarily might against might. One of the things that they do in modern warfare is try to create a diversion. So that if you're going to attack from the north, then the thing to do is to divert the attention of the defenders from the north and create a diversion on the east or the west. It's an old trick. Actually, the devil knew it much longer.

He knew it long before modern military strategists figured it out. He's a past master at diversion. He knows what it is to be able to get the attention of God's people and divert them into secondary issues so thoroughly that they aren't even aware that they're being suckered into defeat on primary issues. We could get diverted into all manner of good things. Remember, he comes as an angel of light.

He's not coming like the roaring lion now. He is coming like the angel of light and he is presenting to us beautiful, seductive, wonderful things that are simply meant to divert us from the task. What a superlative job he's doing. He can do it with our homes, he can do it with our jobs, he can do it with our money, he can do it with our sports, he can do it with our friends, he can do it with our gardening, he can do it with all manner of things.

Angel of light stuff this, not roaring lion. Diversionary tactics. And if diversion won't do it, deception will. He is known as the deceiver. In the First World War, Winston Churchill was the First Lord of the Admiralty. He devised a strategy that he called attacking the soft underbelly of the Axis. In other words, instead of meeting the forces head-on, he was going to come in from the back. And so he devised a brilliant military strategy where the Allied forces would come in the back door through the Dardanelles.

The task was given to the Australians and the New Zealanders. The strategy was brilliant, the execution was very poor, and the Australians and the New Zealanders were massacred at Gallipoli. Churchill was in disgrace. He was dismissed or he resigned, and at the age of 42, he said, "My life is over." At the age of 42, "my life is over." He simply settled down to writing to earn his living. One of the things that he wrote was this:

He said, "Never again will I meet force with force. In future, I will always confront force with deception." And this is what he said: "In times of warfare, the truth is so precious she must always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Sounds odd, doesn't it? In times of warfare, the truth is so precious she must always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. Let me show you how it worked out.

You all heard of the resounding success of how the Allies went across the English Channel on D-Day and began to roll back the formidable force of the Nazi armies in Western Europe. Did you know that one of the reasons that they succeeded in this brilliant military maneuver was that the Nazis weren't expecting them? Do you know why they weren't expecting them? They weren't expecting them because they had decided to get the body of somebody who'd been killed, dress it in the uniform of a high-ranking Royal Marine, put in all kinds of phony papers on the body, and attach to it pseudo plans for the invasion.

Saying that the invasion was going to take place on a certain date in a certain place, but they gave the wrong date and they gave the wrong place. And the Nazis bought into it so thoroughly that they knew for a fact one weekend when it wasn't going to happen. So thoroughly were they suckered in that Field Marshal Rommel, the one in charge of the defenses of Western Europe, took the weekend off and went home for his wife's birthday. And that's when D-Day struck.

Deception. You might not be able to beat the big guy because he's just too big and too strong. If you can deceive him and if you can divert his attention, you can beat him. The devil is a past master at diversion and is a superb strategist at deception and is doing it all the time. If he can't use deception and he can't use diversion, then he's perfectly open to utilizing another military strategy called demoralization.

If you can just strike fear into the enemy, if you can just give an element of doubt into the thought patterns of the enemy, if you can just start to discourage them, then you are nine-tenths of the way to defeating them. They may actually be militarily stronger than you, but if you can introduce demoralization, that will do the trick. It's not very new. When I was a kid during the Second World War, there was a strange broadcast that we used to listen to in the evenings.

It was the broadcast of a very powerful station coming out of Germany. It was a program where a traitor from Ireland who'd gone over to the Nazis used to broadcast back to Britain. He was bent on twisting the news, giving propaganda, and giving the most outrageous claims so that he could simply demoralize the British people. Fortunately, it didn't work because his claims were so outrageous that we actually used to switch him on in the evening to laugh at the stupid things he was saying, and it was treated more or less as a comedy program.

That's where we got our jollies during the Blitz. We called him Lord Haw-Haw. But the strategy was brilliant. It's the strategy of demoralization. And the evil one knows that if he can just get fear in the hearts of God's people, and if he can just insinuate doubts into the hearts of God's people, and if he can just discourage them enough, then coupling diversion with deception and then in addition demoralization, and if that doesn't work, simply introduce dissension.

The angel of light is having a field day. And the apostle Paul says we need to be able to stand against the devil's schemes, his cunning strategies. Now, if you don't know the enemy, you don't know who you're up against, then I promise you you'll identify the wrong enemy, you'll develop the wrong strategy. Develop the wrong strategy, you won't enjoy the victory.

Guest (Male): Thanks so much, Stuart. Before we go, we want to remind you that this month, when you give to support Telling the Truth broadcasts like this one, we'll send you Stuart and Jill Briscoe's five-message series, Fighting Unseen Forces. This powerful new series will help you stand strong in Christ and in the power of his Spirit against the enemy so you can live victoriously each day.

Please request your series when you call and give: 1-800-889-5383. 1-800-889-5383. Or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. We're so glad you've joined us today. Don't miss more biblical teaching from the Briscoes when you tune in next time for Telling the Truth.