You know, as we were singing that last hymn, my brothers and sisters, it just dawned on my heart what a rich, rich heritage we have. There have been those who have gone before us who have been faithful. They have carried the torch, and they have served the Lord in their own generation. I would hope that would encourage all of us to be strengthened in the Lord.
Can you imagine sixteen verses? I felt as I was sitting there, “Hey, why don’t we just sing all sixteen and just go home tonight?” You know, it’s Ephesians 6. But anyhow, you’ll have to put up with me tonight.
It is wonderful to have such a history behind us. You know, brothers and sisters, we are here partially—certainly it is by the Lord’s doing—but there are those who have gone before us who have found Him to be the Overcomer, and they have overcome. We are here somewhat because of that.
Can you imagine being born prior to the Reformation? Can you imagine the Word of God being chained to the pulpit and not being allowed to be read by any but the priests? Can you imagine having to pay money to the priest to have your sins forgiven?
We have a rich heritage. You know, it ought to encourage us in faith. We just never, never know. Those dear saints who struggled during those times had no idea what was going to be the outcome. We are the reapers of their faithfulness.
Then we turn again tonight to Ephesians 6.
It’s no secret to most of you, brothers and sisters, that the Ephesian letter has a very special place in my life. I can’t fully explain to you exactly why it is, but it is just true.
I’m going through a number of my Bibles. I’m getting ready to ship my books to Brazil, and I notice there is a certain place in the Bible that has these finger marks on it. It all has to do with Ephesians.
Now, in one sense, that is not a good thing, because there are sixty-five other books, too, that we need to give ourselves to reading. But there is just something there in that letter to the Ephesians that has apprehended my heart.
What I discover is that this servant of the Lord, in a most difficult situation, seems to have been free when he wrote the letter to the Ephesians. There was no problem he had to solve in the church at Ephesus. Even though he was a prisoner, there was a freedom that he had to lay before these dear saints in the city of Ephesus the highest revelation that I think man has ever received.
He wrote it down as a letter to some dear saints. They must have been some quality saints to be able to receive it and to have some understanding of it. Do you understand all of Ephesians? I admit to you, I do not. I feel like I have just begun to understand this marvelous letter.
This man was able to open his heart and just say right things that would be an encouragement to those who read it. There are those who feel that it was not just a letter to the church at Ephesus, but a circular letter, and it could very well be.
Certainly, what we find in it is a man who had been lifted up into the third heaven. In a sense, he saw things that were unlawful to be uttered, and yet he had the freedom to write this as a letter to a group of simple believers in that first century.
There is so much in it that we could take a lifetime to study it. Yet, when we come to the end of the letter, we find him, in a sense, turning it up a notch and helping us understand that there is something bigger and greater that we have been caught up in.
Oh, my brothers and sisters, if you ever get so discouraged and want to give up—and I know we all have; maybe not everybody, but I confess to you that not too many weeks go by without there being one day that I just want to give up and forget the whole thing and go a different way—when somehow the Holy Spirit comes and reminds me, “You are caught up in something that is very, very big.”
Do you know how big it is, brothers and sisters? It is universal. It is not just a matter of you having your sins forgiven. Now, there is no way that human language can even begin to describe the glory of having our sins forgiven, but that is not all there is to it.
When you read Paul’s letter to the Romans, you see him talking about how the whole created order is in travail until the manifestation of the sons of God. That means, brothers and sisters, that you and I are caught up by God in the recovery of this universe. There is a work that we have been called to do, to be a part of.
He wants us to know that there is one who resists His work. He is an enemy. We have an enemy, and he is going to do everything within his permitted power to hinder, to prolong, and to prevent this work from being finished. He is God’s arch-enemy, and therefore, as God’s children and as God’s church, he is our arch-enemy as well.
As our brother Dana mentioned, Isabel asked me, “Why did Satan feel that he could overthrow God?” Well, pride is a funny thing. It does things to us. It blinds us to the reality of things. He became so proud of himself as a created being that he thought he could actually become an uncreated being and become God Himself.
God, in His great wisdom, love, and mercy, has chosen not only to lay hold of us in the deadness of our sin, to give us new life, and to forgive us of all the stupid wrong things we have done, but then to put us in Christ, to put Christ in us, and to engage us in this cosmic battle.
Ultimately, the whole universe will display the beauty of the Son of God.
Paul is the one who helps us understand the church as it is in God’s heart and mind. I am not saying that Peter and John and others did not see it, but it is Paul who tells us in Ephesians 1:
The church, which is His body,
the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
Now, dear brothers and sisters, that is a good definition of the church. It is the best definition that I have discovered of what the church is. It is His body: the body of the risen, reigning, victorious Christ, taken by the Holy Spirit and imparting the fullness of Himself into this church.
The church is not an end in itself, but a staging area. The church is where the Lord is working out His fullness. His fullness is there, but ultimately where is this fullness going to be? All in all—the whole universe.
Now think about it. Why did God save you? What did He have in mind? Do you think that this great God would be satisfied just to have you forgiven of your sin and to float out into eternity?
Now, my brothers, I hope you do not let me belittle that at all. I am not making light of that. But there is a calling, a high and holy calling, that has been extended to everyone who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a calling to be engaged with Him in this great work of re-establishing the perfect order of God in His universe.
We are a called people. When Paul gets to the end of this letter, he feels that he cannot conclude without bringing in this dimension of helping us understand that we are caught up in something spiritual. There is something in the unseen realm going on, and our activity and faithfulness here affect the outcome of the battle.
Our unfaithfulness can prolong the work, but our faithfulness is something that can be used by the Lord to conclude this work more quickly.
Well, let’s read these verses in Ephesians 6, beginning with verse 10.
Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.
Put on the full armour of God, that you may 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 powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.Therefore, take up the full armour of God, that you may 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, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming missiles of the evil one.
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.With all prayer and petition, pray at all times in the Spirit; and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints.
And pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in proclaiming it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.
Could we join our hearts again and ask the Lord to really help us tonight?
Lord, we want to bless You for how faithful, merciful, and generous You have been to us during these couple of days together. Lord, thank You for being with us, for making Your presence so very real.
Thank You, Lord, that we do not have to feel it with our emotions to know the reality of it. We bless You that You have been here, and we thank You that You are here tonight.
Lord, we give You Your rightful place, and that is the place of preeminence. Lord, You alone are our Teacher. You alone have the words of eternal life.
Lord, it is by Your Spirit, and Your Spirit alone, that You can do what You desire to do as we sit here before You tonight. Lord, we do come. We humble ourselves before You. We are not even sure we know all that that means, but, Lord, we acknowledge how desperately we need You.
Lord, it is more than just words to say, “Without You we can do nothing.” Lord, it is reality. You are making it more and more real to us as we go on with You.
Tonight we cast ourselves upon You and ask You, Lord, in this simple way, to take the words that are written on the pages and, by Your Spirit, make them live to each one of our hearts.
Lord, we believe there is something You want to say. Would You take this clay vessel and use it as an instrument to speak Your Word? Then, Lord, for all of our hearts, please help us. Strengthen us, quicken our bodies, and help us overcome anything that would hinder us from hearing and responding to what You want to say to us tonight.
We ask it so that You can get for Yourself what You have planned out of this meeting tonight. We do it in Your name. Amen.
Last evening, we spent a little bit of time reading Psalm 2, in which the psalmist points out to us that there is a great conflict being waged.
The Gentiles rage, and even the people—that is, God’s covenant people—devise vain things. It is an amazing thing that what God has done is to seek to bring people into the fullness of the blessing and riches that He always intended for them to have.
Even though the enemy has done his work and God’s judgment has come upon man, God has not been deterred from re-establishing and bringing again the harmony into His universe that He wants to be there.
Yet there are those who continue, in every generation, to challenge God’s decision: that He has anointed His own Son to be the sovereign ruler of the universe.
Now, brothers and sisters, it is a tremendous day in our lives when you and I, out of the depths of our hearts, can just give a hearty amen to that decision. There is no one else worthy.
Again, I do not understand why God chose to create men and women and then use them as His agents of recovering this part of His universe. I do not question it. I just do not understand it. It is a mystery to me.
Think about it, brothers and sisters. The most important work in the whole universe, and God has called you to be a coworker with Him. Maybe that is not a big shock to you, but it is a shock to me that God would take the likes of us to be His coworkers in this whole process.
It is a wonderful thing when we see that God anointed His Son to be His King and set Him in the position of sovereign rulership.
As we see, it was God’s intention that man, Adam, and Adam’s descendants would be the agents through which God would do this recovery work on this planet.
We do not want to go into what we shared last evening about how Adam was disqualified because of his disobedience, how the enemy came in and deceived the woman, and how they both ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, demonstrating that they wanted to live their lives independently of God rather than dependently.
Do we understand? Is it clear in our hearts tonight that there is absolutely no way that you and I, together or individually, can hope to be a part of God’s great redemptive work in terms of redeeming the whole creation unless somehow we are in union with Him? It is not a human work.
Even if man is perfect, like Adam was—perfect in the sense that there was no flaw in him—there was something incomplete. He was not in union with His Creator.
That is what the tree of life is all about: that if he had eaten of the tree of life, he would have received the life of God, and there would have been that union between man and his Creator. It is only God Who can do this work.
What a wonderful thought, brothers and sisters, that God would create beings in His own image with the potential of having full fellowship with Himself. They would be His coworkers and His representatives, as Paul identifies himself in Ephesians: an ambassador in chains.
Whose ambassador, may I ask? Whose ambassador? From where is he an ambassador?
Last Monday, Isabel and I walked on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. Has anybody ever been there? Massachusetts Avenue? What is up and down both sides of the street? Embassies from all different countries in the world—China, Japan, all our embassies.
What are they doing in Washington, D.C.? They are there representing their government and their interests, where they can be in communication with the government of the United States of America.
Paul says, “I am an ambassador.” Whose ambassador? Who sent him here? That’s right: he is an ambassador of heaven, sent by the Lord Jesus Christ.
You know what we find in 2 Corinthians 5? We are all ambassadors, on a mission. A mission of what? Reconciliation—not just reconciling men with God and men with men, but reconciling the whole universe back to God’s original plan and design, back to Himself. This is our calling, brothers and sisters.
It is a wonderful time in the life of any believer when the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see Who the Lord Jesus really is.
Brothers and sisters, when you read Revelation 5, what do we discover? What did we discover from John’s experience when he was taken up into heaven and saw these different things?
On one occasion there in Revelation 5, he began to weep. Why? Because there was no one worthy—no one worthy to take the scroll and to open the book, to execute the will of God, to execute God’s judgment, and ultimately to bring everything back into full restoration the way God wanted originally.
There was no one worthy, and John began to weep. Why did he weep? Because there was no hope. What was all of his life on the Isle of Patmos for? He was there for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus. He had given his life for this, and now he sees this vision, and there was no one worthy.
But that was not the end of the story. There is One Who is worthy. He was a Lamb, as freshly slain. He came and had the authority to take the scroll out of the hand of Him Who sat on the throne.
What does this mean, brothers and sisters? It means that this Lord Jesus, Who is the eternal Son of God and Who was born into the human race as Jesus of Nazareth, lived an absolutely perfect life.
How did He live a perfect life? By total dependence upon His Father. That is how He lived. How do you suppose you and I are going to overcome? By living a totally dependent life.
When the Lord Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in Me, and I in you, because without Me you can do nothing,” He was speaking of this reality. When we abide in Him, His life abides in us. Then, in a natural way, He lives His life out through us.
My dear brothers and sisters, it is more than just religious language for us to talk in terms of there being a man, a human being, a flesh-and-blood human being, seated in the position of sovereignty in the universe.
You and I, by the mercy of God and by the help of the Holy Spirit, have been brought into a knowing of Him, into a living relationship with Him. We discover Him, by the Holy Spirit’s help, to be our Lamb of God, to be the One Who shed His blood for us so that all our sins might be forgiven.
God cannot use us in this process of recovery if we are still laden down with our sins and guilt. We cannot have fellowship with Him. He cannot have fellowship with sin. It is not that He is a prude. He is righteous, and righteousness cannot fellowship with unrighteousness.
He provides a way for you and me to become one hundred percent righteous before Him. He provides the way—not our way, but His way. That is through the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Through that shed blood, the Lord Jesus Christ is our righteousness. My brothers, I hope you do not think this is an overstatement or bad theology. I do not think it is. I believe that since the Lord Jesus Christ is our righteousness, God sees us just as righteous as He sees His Son—as if we had never, ever, ever, ever committed any sin.
That is the great righteousness that has been imputed to us, which Charles Wesley put in his hymn: righteousness imputed and imparted.
Not only imputed—that is, God took the righteousness of His Son and imputed it unto us—but imparted righteousness. The character of His Son is also impressed in us, built into us, conforming us to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ: Christ formed in us. This is His righteousness.
This righteous, victorious One is, at this very moment, seated in the position of absolute sovereignty. There is nothing that happens in this universe except by His permission.
That does not mean that everything that happens is His perfect will. We have to face the fact, brothers and sisters, that this One Who sits at the right hand of Majesty on high is absolutely wise. He is the all-wise One.
We have to be very careful, since we are not all-wise. As a matter of fact, we may be at the other end of the pole. Paul says in Ephesians 5, “Do not be unwise.” One translation says, “Do not be stupid.”
We are unwise in the way we would handle things. We have to be careful that we do not put Him under our microscope and seek to judge Him according to what He allows to happen. His wisdom is perfect wisdom.
I do not pretend to be able to explain what is happening in our world right now. I do not know. If the Lord tells me, I will share with you what He tells me, but I could be wrong even in what I hear from Him. I do not know all that He is doing.
But I know there is one thing He is doing. It is something He has called you and me to do, individually and corporately: for us to be a testimony to the fact that He is Lord. He is Lord of lords and King of kings. He is the sovereign ruler. That is our testimony.
I watched some of the things that happened after the event on September 11, and the things that happened at the National Cathedral—how all these great clerics came walking up and gave their prayers and speeches.
You know what I was waiting for? I was waiting for somebody to walk up and say, “Jesus Christ is the ruling Sovereign of the universe.” These were people who claimed to be Christian, but their testimony was not, “Jesus is Lord.”
That is what I was waiting for. Well, my brothers and sisters, this is our testimony. It should be our testimony, not just with words, but with our lives.
Individually, it needs to be something that you and I work out in a practical way. It is not enough to say, “Lord, Lord.”
Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven;
but he that doeth the will of My Father Who is in heaven.
Being Lord is not just some religious experience. It is practical. It is down to earth every day: living under His sovereign rule, living in the reality of His kingdom.
When we bring this matter over into the corporate realm, it seems to me that the major reason the Lord builds His church is so that there will be a company of believers in all places, all over this globe, in which He is free to manifest His sovereign rule.
It should not just be words. It should not just be songs that we sing, that He is Lord. The world has a right to look at our corporate life and see the reality of the kingdom of God being worked out and displayed in our life together.
When we look at what God is after, my brothers and sisters, He wants to bring in something of the reality of the kingdom here and now, during our time here.
When we read the book of Revelation, we see that down the road there is coming a time in God’s timetable when the Lord Jesus is going to do something to Satan. He has already confronted him, as our brother David has been sharing with us, and He overcame him. He overcame all the best the enemy had to throw at Him.
There is coming a time when He is going to bind him in chains, when he will not be free to do his work, and the Lord Jesus is going to set up His kingdom here on this earth.
But until then, for now, the objective and the focus are for His lordship to be clearly and powerfully manifested in every assembly that names His name.
How can we name Him as Lord and still do things our own way? It is a contradiction, brothers and sisters. It is a denial. How can we say, “Jesus, You are Lord,” and then come up with our own programs?
When our Jesus came here, He came as man because, in the heart of God, God has chosen that man would be the agent through which He would bring full recovery to His universe.
God has decided that He is not going to change His mind, even if man fails. So, what we find the Apostle Paul talking about in 1 Corinthians 15 is the last Adam and the second man.
Oh, hallelujah, brothers and sisters. We know the first Adam was an utter failure, and we are his descendants by natural birth. But hallelujah, brothers and sisters, there is a second Man, and He is victorious.
At this very moment, He is seated at God’s right hand with all authority and power in the whole universe. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters, you and I have been put into Him. By God’s doing, we are in Him. By God’s doing, He is enough.
We have been called, and His name has been placed upon us: Christian. Christian. What does that mean, brothers and sisters?
In the culture in which you and I live, here in the United States, it does not mean a whole lot. It can mean a whole lot of things that it does not mean.
But what does it mean? If something is Christian, if it has the name of the Lord Jesus Christ on it, then it has to have its origin in Him. If it does not have its origin in Him, then you have misused His name. It is a misnomer.
How would you like it if somebody went around plastering your name all over the place on things that you had nothing to do with and wanted nothing to do with? Yet they put your name everywhere. Well, this is what has happened.
My brothers and sisters, understand that the Lord is after our own generation. Let me ask it this way: Why do you meet where you meet? Why do you gather with that group of people that you meet with?
Why are you not part of a more elaborate, systematized, organized, all-worked-out situation? Is it because you just grew into this? Or somehow you find yourself dissatisfied? It needs to be more than this, brothers and sisters.
You need to understand that you have been called to come out from all of that. But the great danger, brothers and sisters, is that we have the capacity to produce a better system than the one we came out of. We learn how to do things, but we do not need Him as our living Head.
I thought I was supposed to be fellowshipping about spiritual warfare. But my brothers and sisters, I hope you see that the issue—the number one issue—has to do with God’s decision to make His own Son the King, the sovereign King. We have been called to be that testimony and to stand for that reality.
Here the apostle strongly encourages us to experience being strong in the Lord.
Probably the great hindrance for us to know the strength of the Lord is that we are sufficiently strong in ourselves. We can do it pretty well. We can fool most of the people most of the time. We can learn the language, do the things, pull this off often, and convince most people that this is the Lord.
Brothers and sisters, we need to face very clearly that there is no good thing in any of us. There is not one thing in us naturally that God can use in fighting against the principalities and powers, the world forces of darkness, and these spiritual wicked forces in heavenly places.
There is nothing in us naturally that is a match for any of that. We have to acknowledge that in ourselves there is no good thing. It is not just a matter that you cannot live the right kind of life; it is also a matter that you are no match for the enemy and his minions.
We are no match corporately. It has been proven, brothers and sisters, that there is only One Who is capable of standing up to him and overcoming him. We are glad to report the good news tonight: it has happened.
Now you and I are called to stand in that victory, the victory wrought on Calvary. Stand in it, in the strength of the Lord, and watch God do His work of recovering His universe.
Now, we mentioned last evening that there seems to be somewhat of a difference between the first three pieces of armour that Paul mentions and the last three. I hope you will help me tonight. I borrowed fifteen—I think thirteen—minutes of yours last night. I want to try not to do that again tonight.
The Bible says not to be indebted to any man, so I do not want to be indebted to you. I do not want to owe you and owe you and owe you. I want to be careful tonight.
Paul, encouraging us to get actively and personally engaged in this warfare, points out that in order to do it, we need to be aware that God has provided an armour. He wants us to do everything we need to do in order to be effectively engaged with the Lord in this warfare.
He points out that we are to put on the whole armour—the whole panoply—everything that God has decided we, as His called people, need in order to stand against all the efforts of the enemy to undo, to hinder, and to prevent God from having what He wants.
Sometimes, my brothers and sisters, it may be difficult for some of us to think about someone being so evil as the enemy is. I do not know what your experience was when these planes flew into the Trade Center and into the Pentagon. It was just unbelievable.
Sometimes it is difficult for us to see how evil, deceitful, and determined he is. It is almost unexplainable to think that somebody could be this evil. He is, as our brother has mentioned to us, very wise. He is the wisest created being God has ever created.
Therefore, he has many methods to hinder, prevent, interfere, destroy, and tear down what the Lord has built.
We have a responsibility to stand. As we mentioned last evening, it seems that this battle we have been called to is primarily a defensive battle. Why? Because the offensive has already been taken. The battle has already been won.
It is our responsibility to stand in that victory and stand against the assault of the enemy. Again, the Lord has continued to allow the enemy to go on doing his work, and I just have to rest in the fact that it is God’s great wisdom.
At the end, brothers and sisters, we will all fall on our faces and worship Him for His ways, even though we do not understand them now.
God has chosen to allow this enemy of His to continue to do his work. We have discovered, in a very small way, that what he intends for evil, God turns for good.
He causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
In a few moments, we are going to fellowship a little bit about faith. It requires faith for us to stand in the face of tragedy and the inexplicable coming into our lives, saying, “My God is able to take whatever it is that has happened.”
I hope that we get very clear about this: Satan is a created being. He is not God. He is not equal with God. Somehow in the world, we have been led to believe that there are two great equal powers in the universe—God and Satan. It is a lie. It is a lie that Satan wants us to believe, but it is a lie.
There is only one Sovereign. I hope you will listen carefully: he is God’s Satan. What do I mean by that? Not that God made him Satan, but that God uses him when He chooses to.
Sometimes, unbeknownst to him, Satan ends up being one of God’s most faithful servants. If Job were here tonight, he would give his testimony that that is true.
Why do we need to see this? Because we need to see who we are over against him. We are no match for him in ourselves, but in the Lord Jesus Christ it is already a proven fact. He has done it.
You and I are responsible to do everything to stand in that finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ, to take on ourselves the whole armour of God, that we may be able to stand, withstand, resist, and not give in to him.
This does not come naturally. At least, I have not found it to come naturally. It is something we have to be trained to do.
It would be wonderful if, the moment we came to know the Lord, we were brought into this. But the Lord has shown us that there is a certain point, a stage along in our Christian life, where He begins to bring into focus this whole matter that we are engaged in a battle.
He wants us to take on all this armour and to be effectively involved in the battle He has called us to wage.
We mentioned last night the first three. Notice that Paul talks of the first three as having put on the girdle of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod our feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace.
It seems that Paul is saying there is something that needs to be there as a permanent part of you. “Having” is not something you are going to do; it is something that is already yours.
You know the truth by the Holy Spirit revealing it and continuing to reveal it, opening it up more and more and more. The truth as it is in Jesus, as Paul talks about in Ephesians 4.
No man has seen God at any time, but the Lord Jesus was full of grace and truth. He has revealed to us in very specific ways Who God really is and what He is really like. By His life, ministry, and teaching, He demonstrated to us Who God really is and what He is like. He is the truth.
Put on the breastplate of righteousness. Our brother helped us this morning to see what this means. Then, having shod our feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace—I have to admit to you, brothers, I am having difficulty getting beyond this one. I want to pitch my tent there tonight, but I know we have at least three more to go to.
My brothers and sisters, we have inherited a great peace by the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He has taken both groups. What are the two groups in Ephesians 2? Help me. Jew and Gentile. He has torn down the barrier wall, the dividing wall between them, and has made one new man.
A new humanity, of which the Lord Jesus is the living Head—not Adam, not the fallen Adam, but the reigning Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Head of this new humanity, and you and I are a part of that new humanity.
It is our responsibility, having done all, to stand in the reality of that harmony, that peace produced by our Lord Jesus Christ. It is part of our testimony.
What testimony does the world see today when it sees the Lord’s people, the people of the Lord Jesus Christ, so hopelessly divided under all kinds of names?
It seems that God, in His mercy, has worked in the hearts of some of us to see that this is not where His heart is. This is not what He wants. He has brought us out by His grace, mercy, and doing. It had nothing to do with us.
But the sad thing, brothers and sisters, is that we allow the same thing to happen among us that happens there.
We are to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, not produce it. There is already a reality. When the Lord Jesus prayed in John 17:
That they may be one, even as We are one.
The union, the oneness that is between the Father and the Son, is to be witnessed and experienced here on the earth among those who are God’s redeemed people.
That is having our feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. We are always ready to go and be at peace with our brothers and sisters, whatever the price. We must die to ourselves.
Now, I put myself at the top of the list on this one. I need to learn, brothers and sisters, to die to me.
Why do you think there is division among us? I am not talking about Christianity; I am talking about those of us who meet in this simple way. Why is there division? You know why? Because something other than the Lord Jesus has been brought in, and there is a good chance that I brought it in. There is a good chance you brought it in. But it needs to be eliminated.
When we come to this table that we celebrated this morning, how many loaves of bread? How many cups? One. What does that represent? Our oneness in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Brothers and sisters, I hope you will keep me honest in this matter. We need, even at the risk of our lives, to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace—harmony.
You may not see it anywhere else, but the world ought to be able to look at our corporate life together and see a oneness, a harmony, a beauty that cannot be seen any place on this globe outside of the church filled with the Holy Spirit.
Well, let’s look at these last three pieces of armour that Paul mentions. Notice that the language changes a little bit. He talks about “having” in the first three, but here he talks about “taking.”
Above all, take the shield of faith.
Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.
I do not know if I am correct, but I want to share with you what came to my heart when I saw this distinction between having and taking.
Have you ever seen a film, or actually witnessed firefighters getting ready to go into a fire? They have the place where they sleep upstairs, and the fire trucks are down below. Have you ever noticed how quickly they can get dressed, get their boots on, get everything ready, get down there, get all their equipment, and get out to fight the fire?
That is what I feel like. There is something that has to already be a reality in these firefighters. But when the fire comes, they do not sleep in their heavy coats and big old boots. When the fire comes, they slide down that pole, get their boots on, get their helmets, and run out to get the other equipment they use.
When they get to the fire, they have other equipment that they can use to actually fight the fire. This is what I hear Paul saying.
There is something that ought always to be there in our lives: truth, righteousness, and peace. But when we find ourselves face to face in the battle, there are three more things He tells us to take up: the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
Again, remember that this is a defensive battle. Why? Because the war has already been won.
I was not there, but I have heard some stories about what happened in Europe when World War II was over. After the signing of the peace treaty, there were still things to be done in Europe. The Allies had to go in and take over places where the enemy had been and establish the reality of the peace.
That is what we have been asked to do. That is our responsibility: taking up everything available and, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, beginning to apply the reality of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So he says, “Take the shield of faith.” The word Paul uses here refers to a shield that covers the whole body. There was another smaller shield that soldiers carried on their belt, which they would use in hand-to-hand combat. But Paul never mentions that little shield. He only mentions the big shield that covers the whole body: the shield of faith.
Our brother helped us wonderfully this morning in seeing something of what faith is. Why do we need faith? We need faith because it is faith that brings into our experience, in our circumstances, the reality of Who the Lord Jesus Christ is.
It is the way the writer of Hebrews puts it in Hebrews 11. My version says that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But Darby has a much better translation: faith is the substantiating of things hoped for.
That helps tremendously, at least it helps me. Faith takes that which is already a spiritual reality and, by believing, brings it down into our own situation and circumstances and makes it a reality.
For example, since the Lord Jesus is the ruling Sovereign of the universe, and He is made Head over all things to the church, if we find ourselves as an assembly of the Lord’s people engaged in a conflict with the enemy, how do we bring the reality of the Lord Jesus being sovereign into our situation and confront that circumstance? We do it by faith.
What the enemy wants to do is throw certain things at us in such a way that he gets us to doubt and question the fact, the reality, that Jesus is Lord—or some other dimension of our life.
As was mentioned this morning, he gets us to question whether or not we are really Christians, whether we have been forgiven. Crazy things happen in our minds. But faith in a living God is able to take that which is already a reality and bring it down, making it applicable in our situation, right where we are.
As I have been giving a little thought to this whole matter of spiritual warfare, especially as it is applied to the church, this whole matter of the gifts of the Spirit has arisen in my heart.
You know what the Word of God tells us? It tells us, first of all, that every believer—every believer without exception—has been given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. Every Christian, without exception, has some gifting that can be used in this process of standing against all the devices of the enemy.
I want to suggest to us tonight that we find the Lord’s wisdom in taking those giftings mentioned, along with others, in 1 Corinthians 12 and other places, and bring them into the situation. Let them be used by the Holy Spirit through the members of the body as a way of our being victorious in this battle.
In this recent thing that has happened here in the United States, where has been the breakdown, brothers and sisters? In intelligence. The intelligence community. We are not throwing rocks; we are simply saying that with this new kind of war, you have to have a new way of getting intelligence.
How do we get intelligence from our Commander-in-Chief? How does He communicate to us what we are supposed to do? If the battle is His, if He is the Commander-in-Chief and is in charge of everything, how is it that He communicates from heaven as headquarters down to us in our local situation?
By the Holy Spirit, using the gifts of the Spirit. What are some of the gifts? A word of knowledge. You say, “Maybe that might be helpful if we knew what we were supposed to do.” A word of wisdom: how to do it after we know what we are supposed to do. Discerning of spirits. Faith.
Brothers and sisters, our God is so very, very practical. Faith is what brings those things that are already ours down to our situation, and the Lord Jesus, as the Commander-in-Chief, has the opportunity to communicate His heart, His wisdom, and His ways into our local situation.
It means, brothers and sisters, that we need to have a real openness to the gifts of the Spirit operating, and an encouragement for every brother and sister to discover by experience and by the confirmation of others that this gifting is operating.
Then, when we are in the battle, we have already discovered where the giftings lie. We can learn to trust that somebody who, over a period of years, has been used by the Lord to bring in a word of knowledge may be speaking into our situation.
When the battle comes and this person speaks, we are able to trust them. We have faith that the Lord is speaking through them into our situation. If we do not have this communication with our Lord, brothers and sisters, we are left to ourselves and to our own devices.
We need to have living, absolute confidence in the Lord—absolute confidence in His promises, absolute confidence in His Word, absolute confidence in His ability, and absolute confidence that He will hear our cry and respond.
He will not just sit up there and ignore us. If we are in a situation and crying out to Him with a true heart, we need to believe that He will answer us. That is faith.
We cannot see Him with these eyes. We have to have other eyes. The eyes of our hearts have to be opened to see Him for Who He is.
Praise God, brothers and sisters, there are brothers and sisters among us who have this ability. We need to learn how to trust them and encourage them.
I know there were a lot of crazy things that happened during the charismatic movement. I know that people used these gifts for all kinds of crazy things: calling attention to themselves and showing off how great they were. But, brothers and sisters, that is no reason for us to throw them out, ignore them, or debunk them.
It is time for us to allow the Lord to recover them in the right way among us, so that we can be men and women who stand with a shield of faith and are able to ward off the enemy.
Do you think our Lord Jesus would call us into a battle and not be available to help us know what we are supposed to do when the situation arises? I cannot believe that for a moment. I will not believe it.
We need to be a people who have living faith in a living Lord, Who will demonstrate the reality that He is a living Lord.
I remember one brother saying to us one time that the prayer meetings—especially the prayer meetings where spiritual battle is taking place—are the most exciting places to be on the face of the earth.
When the Lord Jesus Himself is actually in charge of what is going on in the meeting, it is not something planned by man or organized and put together by man. When the Lord Himself is in charge, He may say, “There is something here that I am displeased about. There is something going on in your community that I do not want to continue.”
“I want it to be done away with. I want you to cooperate with Me, because you have the keys. I do not have the keys; you have the keys. But I want you to learn how to operate under My direction.”
Oh, my brothers and sisters, what a difference it would be.
Then he says, “Take the helmet of salvation.” Well, I wish I could tell you exactly what Paul was talking about. I do not know for sure. I have my ideas and impressions.
I know this: the writer of Hebrews tells us that we have so great a salvation. Not just great, but so great. Do you know what that means, brothers and sisters? It means that God has provided thoroughly in us everything that needs to be done in order for us to be effective soldiers.
It means that God has provided everything in terms of salvation that we need as a local assembly of people to be able to maintain this testimony that He wants to establish in our midst.
When you read the Scriptures about salvation, you find that our spirit can be saved. Saved from what? Saved from death. We were dead in our sins and trespasses.
But when we believe into the Lord Jesus Christ, we receive as an absolutely free gift eternal life. That life comes to dwell in our human spirit and brings us back to life again in union with God. So our spirit is delivered; it is saved.
But then there is the salvation of the soul. Paul says to put on the helmet of salvation. He could have used another illustration, but he said, “Put on the helmet of salvation.”
When you think about the soul, we find there are three main functions: the emotions, the will, and the mind.
I think it is very clear from what our brother said this morning that this is where the major battle is for us. We need our minds to be renewed.
It is almost like a CD that has received a recording on it, or a tape, or a phonograph record. Something has already been put on there, and it just keeps playing over and over and over again.
Even after we have been born again, as our brother pointed out to us, we still need to have our minds delivered from that old stinking thinking. We think the wrong things. Our hearts may be right, our spirits may be rejoicing, but our minds are still thinking those old thoughts.
It needs to be saved. It needs to be delivered. It needs to be set free from this. We have to undergo a renewing of our minds that we may know what the will of God is—that which is good, acceptable, and perfect.
Even in Ephesians, Paul talks about having the spirit of our minds renewed. We need to have our souls saved.
Can you imagine what would happen in a battle, in the real world, if someone were operating purely on their emotions? Let us suppose that the emotion of fear was operating in them. What would they do when the battle came? They would turn and run the other way.
If we are operating in this matter of spiritual warfare and we are operating on our emotions, brothers, I do not have to tell you that your emotions are the most undependable part of you. You can feel two opposite ways about the same thing at the same time. You talk about unreliability.
We need to be saved. That is, we need to have our emotions laid hold of by the Holy Spirit and brought under control—not eliminated, not eliminated.
Oh, may God be merciful. Can you imagine no emotion? It would not be fun being a human being. But when emotions get in charge, you have a tiger by the tail.
God has to take us through the experience of discipling us until our emotions are ruled by the indwelling life of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Our will: hopefully, brothers and sisters, you have come to the place in your own life where you have made a permanent decision: “Jesus Christ is my Lord.” You know what that means? It means you have taken your will and totally surrendered it to His. That is what it means. You have no rights of your own anymore.
Hopefully, we will come to that place. But there is this matter of our minds—these fortresses that get built in here, these ideas and concepts.
One time, I was reading the experiences the Lord Jesus was having with His disciples, and what I saw was that He spent a lot of His time dealing with their concepts. There was something wrong with their ideas or concepts.
If that was true of them, guess what? It is true of us as well. We need to have a brain transplant, if we can put it that way. We need to have our minds fully renewed so that we are spiritually minded, setting our minds on spiritual things.
We need to have a capacity for the Holy Spirit to communicate His thoughts. God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” But sometimes we take our thoughts and impose them on His.
We need to learn how to die to our way of thinking and let the Holy Spirit come and enable us to think the thoughts of Christ about the situation that confronts us.
Well, I have done it again. There is a whole section that we wanted to get to that is very, very important, brothers and sisters, where Paul says in verse 18:
With all prayer and petition, pray at all times in the Spirit.
This needs to be a most vital part of our corporate life. We know how important it is for our own individual life, and let us be honest tonight, brothers and sisters: almost every one of us drops the ball in this area.
Do you pray as much as you should? Do not answer me out loud, but do you pray as much as you should? Do you spend as much time as you should with the Lord—getting to know Him, fellowshipping with Him, petitioning Him?
Do we? No, we do not. It is a battle.
I ran into a sister out on the West Coast, and I did not laugh when she said it to me, but I laughed afterwards. She said, “Ernie, I love to pray so much, I wish somebody would pay me for praying. I wish I had a job where somebody paid me to pray.”
I do not find it that way myself. I find that in order to get to real prayer, there is a battle already. Even after you get there, there is a bigger battle to stay there. So it is not easy.
The Lord knew this, brothers and sisters. What did He do? He sent us a Helper, namely the Holy Spirit. We do not know how to pray as we ought. Is there any amen to that? All the time, every time?
But the thing is, we need to be careful because we learn how to pray without the Holy Spirit helping us.
Who is the Holy Spirit, and what is His responsibility? First of all, the Holy Spirit is God—one hundred percent God. He is as much God as God the Father is. He is as much God as God the Son is. He is one hundred percent God, and therefore He should be obeyed.
What is His responsibility? His responsibility is to keep us in living union with our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul says that the way we implement this matter of spiritual battle is by praying at all seasons, at all times. How? In the Spirit.
That is, the Holy Spirit is the One Who is to be controlling, influencing, and leading our prayers—not just individually, but together.
I want to suggest to you a couple of books that you might find helpful in this matter. I mentioned one of them last night, and I hesitate to do this because we are not selling books. These books are not available here, so we are not selling them.
But I think they may be helpful. The one we mentioned is by our brother T. Austin-Sparks, In Touch with the Throne.
There are many things that our brother says that I think are very, very helpful. One of the things he points out to us that is so very much needed among us as the Lord’s people is that prayer has at least five aspects to it.
Most of us, when we think about prayer, think only in terms of petitioning, of asking. But he helps us to see that prayer is, first of all and primarily, communion with God: getting to know Him, getting to know His mind.
Brothers and sisters, I do not know if it has been your experience, but I am sure it has been to one degree or another, that the Lord has not always answered your prayer the first time you asked Him. Why?
If it is His will to answer it at all, why did He not answer it the first time? Because He wants you to get to know Him. If He answered it right away, you would just go on your way and would not talk to Him again until you needed something else. You would not get to know Him.
But He wants us to know Him. More than anything else: that I may know Him. When you know Him, know His heart, and know His mind, then you are in a much better position to be involved in this matter of warfare.
First of all, prayer is communion. Secondly, it is submission. Do you know one of the primary things we are saying when we bow our hearts before Him in prayer? We are saying that we are surrendered to Him.
We need Him. This whole matter depends upon Him. It does not depend upon us. This ought to be the attitude in our hearts: that we are coming, surrendering to Him.
He is God. We are the creatures; He is the Creator. He is the all-sovereign One, and we are the servants.
Prayer is a way that we come and submit ourselves to Him and say, as the Lord Jesus taught us to pray:
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
Prayer is also cooperation with God. It is a mystery, brothers and sisters. God is capable of doing everything without us. He does not need us. He has chosen to need us, but He does not really need us.
It brings great delight to His heart when He can find people who will come and be coworkers with Him in this matter of prayer—taking the victory of Calvary, standing in it, standing again, standing against, and resisting.
He has chosen this as what He is going to do. Without our cooperation, at least the work is postponed. It will never be scrapped. He will never give up, but it can be postponed.
Our coming and being willing to cooperate with Him can further and hasten the day when our Jesus will return.
He says that prayer is petition, and this makes up a lot of prayer. There are a lot of things we need to ask the Lord for—not for ourselves.
Now, this is a big step for us. Certainly, there are things that you and I need to deal with in our personal life, things we need to trust the Lord to give us, impart to us, and help us with.
But when we come together as an assembly, the issue is not us. The issue is His will. We need to learn how to petition Him about these things, asking what His will is concerning these matters.
The final thing that he mentions is warfare—battle. Sometimes our prayer meetings are to be in the mode of battle. There is something going on, and God wants us to stand with Him so that victory will be realized here.
Well, my brothers and sisters, I have already taken some more of your time tonight. But please remember: the Holy Spirit is here to help every one of us.
This is not something you just graduate into overnight. We need to learn how to know the Holy Spirit. Guess what, brothers and sisters? In the learning process, we are going to make mistakes. We are going to make mistakes.
We need to have an atmosphere among our times of prayer where people are able to learn by making mistakes.
I hope we understand that we need to be sensitive, so that we do not simply let any mistake go by, because it can be something used by the enemy to undo what the Lord wants to do.
But what I am trying to say is that in our times of prayer, the Holy Spirit wants to teach us, and there are going to be some mistakes made.
It is just like learning how to walk in the Spirit. Did any of you ever learn how to walk in the Spirit and never fall down? No. Well, you will not learn how to do that without falling down.
Hopefully, there are those among us who can cover our mistakes and make up for our mistakes. But we are going to make them. It is going to be a part of the process.
Now, I skipped over a very important part of the armour: the Word of God. Sorry, brothers and sisters. My brother Dana said I was going to share about it. Well, he was wrong.
I want to, but the time is gone. But just to say, my brothers and sisters, that just as the Lord Jesus, when He came face to face with Satan himself, had at His disposal the Word of God.
It is interesting: Satan did not mind quoting the Scriptures to Him either. But the Lord Jesus did not just quote words. He knew the reality. He knew the truth. He spoke truth.
It means, my brothers and sisters, that we need to become men and women and young people who spend time reading, meditating, loving, and getting to know this Book. By ourselves, we need to spend time reading it over and over and over again.
I stand before you tonight condemned, my brothers and sisters, that I have not spent the time reading this Book that I should have. The consequences are there.
I know God is able to make up for it. It is not that I am living under a lot of guilt, but I want to say to you, younger ones especially: do not spend your life without spending time getting acquainted with this Book.
When you are engaged in spiritual warfare, only the Holy Spirit knows what He wants to bring out of this Book and use as a sword against the enemy.
My heart rejoices when I see some young people who have read it more than twenty times—just simple people who have read it more than twenty times. It is an amazing thing. So it is possible.
What we have to do is push aside some of the other things we allow ourselves to get involved in. We need to see that this culture in which you and I live is not conducive to becoming good students and lovers of the Word of God.
We are going to have to find a way to push beyond all of that and become a disciplined people: to read it, memorize it, store it in our hearts, obey it, and have it available when the Holy Spirit wants to use it in a time of battle.
Thank you so much for your patience. May it be that our hearts have been stirred, if nothing more, so that we can go out of here at least having a heart’s desire to be more effectively involved in this battle to which we have been called.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we want to bless You for all the ways that You have proven Yourself to us during these couple of days we have been together: Your presence, Your love, Your working, and Your patience with us.
Lord, for every way that You have spoken, we want to thank You. Lord, we do not want to be just those who hear. We want to be those who put into practice what it is that You have spoken to us.
We thank You tonight that You have this wonderful ability to take Your Word and tailor-make it for every one of us, designing it in such a way that it speaks to our own hearts and to our own situations.
Oh, blessed Holy Spirit of God, take those words that You have spoken to us and bring them back to us again. Then, Lord, continue to deal with us until we begin to put them into practice in our lives.
Lord, when we are fellowshipping about this matter of spiritual warfare, please use all of these things—the words You have spoken—to really equip us in a better way to be involved as good soldiers of the Lord Jesus Christ in the battle.
May we do all that we can do by the grace You give us, so that, Lord, we can be a part in a productive way of this work that You are doing.
How we bless You. What a wonderful Lord You are. We exalt Your name and commit ourselves afresh to be all You want us to be. We ask it in Your name.