Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Wherefore take up the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand.
Stand 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;
withal taking up the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts 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 supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints,
and on my behalf, that utterance may be given unto me in opening my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel,
for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.
And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in the Jordan.
And straightway coming up out of the water, He saw the heavens rent asunder, and the Spirit as a dove descending upon Him:
and a voice came out of the heavens, Thou art My beloved Son, in Thee I am well pleased.
And straightway the Spirit driveth Him forth into the wilderness.
And He was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan; and He was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto Him.
Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ;
through Whom also we have had our access by faith into this grace wherein we stand; and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
And not only so, but we also rejoice in our tribulations: knowing that tribulation worketh steadfastness;
and steadfastness, approvedness; and approvedness, hope:
and hope putteth not to shame; because the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which was given unto us.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You that You have saved us. We want to thank You for bringing us into a wonderful salvation.
We want to thank You that it is greater than what we have ever thought of. We thank You, Lord, that You have forgiven our sins, and there is the forgiveness of sins for us.
But we also thank You, Lord, that our salvation is much greater than just the forgiveness of our sins. And Lord, it is this we want to see, this that we want to enter into. You have opened the door and given us access.
Oh Lord, I am asking today that by Your Holy Spirit, through Your Word, You would draw us into this salvation, that we might walk and find it to be real and satisfying to our own selves, our own souls.
We are asking this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
You know, I really miss my kids. I miss my kids. I mean, right now I miss my kids.
And I want so much for them. I want so much for them that they were with me and that they were, you know, in a sense, hearing from the Lord and doing things like that. I am not saying that they are backsliding or anything. I am just saying that I wish they were here, and the Lord was speaking to them.
But you know, my feeling is so much less than what God has for us, because we are His kids. And He has such great desires for us and such longing for us.
And He has done so many things for us that He wants us to see and enter into. And I want to make that very clear: to enter into, not just to see.
Seeing is not enough. We have got to come to that point. It is not good enough just to understand, but we have to taste.
You know, that was a pretty good meal last night. But it was not enough for me just to look at it. I was not satisfied by just saying, “Hey, that’s roast beef. That’s pretty cool. Potatoes—you know, Polish people, we love potatoes. And that dessert? Oh.”
But looking at it was no good. I could not experience the reality of what it was, how good it was, and also what it does, you know, once it is inside me. My body goes and breaks it all up, and it incorporates it into my life.
Oh, brothers and sisters, that is what we need.
Now, we are talking about warfare in ways, and I only have one thing to say. I am not going to talk about the wiles of the devil and all these things, except to say one thing.
Brother Jose—we were talking the first night we got here. Dana and I were talking about this movie from the Stephen Ambrose book, Band of Brothers. We were talking about World War II and how these guys were fighting World War II.
Brother Jose brought up that, you know, yes, we fight an enemy, but our enemy cannot be killed. You think about that. The enemy is always going to be there while we are on this earth. He cannot be killed.
It is like, I do not know how many of you saw The Matrix or Terminator. Okay? I will tell you how worldly I am. Oh my goodness.
But, you know, they kill a villain, and all of a sudden it just comes back up like nothing happened. Well, brothers and sisters, it is the same way for us.
These spiritual beings, they do not bleed. They are spiritual beings, and they oppress.
And the thing is, in talking about these things, it says we wrestle. It does not mean we stand about a hundred yards away with our M16: “Ah, there they are. You know, they never saw me.”
No. We are not called to be snipers. We are called to wrestle.
And wrestling means hand-to-hand, where you feel your enemy. You feel his hands on you. You feel his strength.
Now, the thing is, when we wrestle, you want to be on top, not on the bottom. And brothers and sisters, that is what we want to talk about today: being on top.
Dana mentioned something, and it just really clicked with me last night. He talked about Hudson Taylor and the exchanged life.
Because, brothers and sisters, we try to fight things the way we are. We try to fight things carnally because that is the way we look at it. Remember, yesterday I talked about how we dwell on the finite, we think in the finite, so we try and battle in the finite.
And we have to get to the infinite. We have to get past that place.
And so, today, we want to look at what it is that God has given us. Now, we can look at this and just say, “You know, that’s just a bunch of stuff. There’s a bunch of stuff we put on.”
But really what we have to do is—yes, we are going to look at it as separate stuff—but it is the whole armour of God. It is not just, “Oh, we just need the belt.” The whole armour of God.
And again, we need to understand that this is really tied into what I was talking about yesterday. It is a life that is led by the Holy Spirit.
Yesterday, we talked about having the Holy Spirit. He is living in us. He is prompting us. He is leading us.
And the exchanged life is a life that is not just led, but in being led, has to lay down itself in order to have what the Lord has—the Lord’s power, the wind, and the fire.
The still, small voice leads, but in laying down, you find fire and the wind.
Now, we are going to look at these as just things, and then we are going to try and tie it into what the Lord is really trying to say. Okay? So, there is some technical stuff, and then we will just kind of get to the meat of things.
It says, “Take up the whole armour of God.” I tried to put it up there the best I could, even though this kind of looks like a sandwich board—Jay Creech with his Little Caesar thing. I just exposed—yeah, you know.
The first thing is the belt. It says, “Gird yourself with truth.” And then I have given you some verses there.
Now, before I look at these verses, it does not say, “Gird yourself with the truth.” And I have a feeling that we are looking at it: “Oh, gird yourself with the truth. I kind of know the Word of God.” No, no, no—that is not it.
Gird yourself with truth. And I think these verses will open up what we are talking about by girding yourself with truth.
In Psalm 51:6, this is David, and he writes:
Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts;
And in the hidden part Thou wilt make me to know wisdom.
You desire truth in the inward parts. Brothers and sisters, what does it say about the heart? The heart is the most deceitful and wicked. All right? But yet here God says, “I want truth in there.”
Basically, we are natural-born liars. We hide. We cover up things.
And this psalm that we are reading here, Psalm 51, is the psalm that David wrote after he was exposed. He had sinned with Bathsheba. He got caught.
He thought he was hiding everything. I remember Nathan gave him that little story about the little sheep, and he said, “You are the man.” Oh.
And then David said, “You know, here I have been putting up on the outside that I am all good and everything, and inside, I have been hiding a lot of stuff.” God says, “I want truth in the inner part.”
Now, truth in the inner part does not mean you look in and you are trying to find sins. It just means you let the Holy Spirit have access to you inside. You let Him bring you to conviction.
Notice, I did not say you let Him bring you to condemnation. The Holy Spirit does not condemn. He convicts. He brings to light so things can be judged.
And so David was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because of that, he did something he should not have done. And the Lord did not let him get away with it. Praise the Lord.
Do not think the Lord is going to let you get away with stuff. I think I said before, maybe last year or the year before, grace is not grease. Grace does not say, “I’ll let it slide. Let it fly.” Are you kidding?
Jesus died for your sin. He is not going to let it fly. Is that important to Him? Is that precious?
I mean, what the Lord has done for you in Christ is so precious, He will not let things slide, and He will see things to completion. That is how precious what Jesus has done is to God. He cannot let it go.
That is why I think you cannot be lost once you are saved, because God will not let what His Son has done be wasted. Not at all.
Now, then how do we go about looking? Well, Psalm 139. This is David again, and it says in Psalm 139:23-24:
Search me, O God, and know my heart:
Try me, and know my thoughts;
And see if there be any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.
In other words, he does not say, “I am going to look around and see what is inside.” He says, “God, I cannot even trust myself. I want You to go in there and You look.”
Remember, we talked about the sword of the Spirit yesterday being able to divide the soul and the spirit, and You say, “This is of you; this is of God.” He is able to point out, “This is sin. You need to get rid of it.” He will convict you on that.
Now, why is this so important? Why is this belt so important?
I will just tell you a funny observation. In Hebrews 12:1, I think we have read this every time I have been here:
Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.
Now, my wife teaches fifth grade, and I do not know how many of you guys are into hip-hop. All right? But hip-hop, the culture in itself—you ever see the guys’ pants?
I do not even think they are above the flank. I think they are right here, right? Right here. Okay? And they are long too, because they are all bunched up at the bottom.
And so, you wonder, like, I wonder if a rabid dog was chasing him, could he get away?
Now, my wife brought this stuff up because she has a lot of kids that go out to recess, and they are going to play basketball, and a lot of them just sit on the side and shoot. They do not play. You know why? They cannot move around.
You know what they need? A belt. Hey, to pull the pants up, put a belt on. Now they can play.
Now, brothers and sisters, it is the same way with us. You know, when we carry sin and hide sin with us, it is like wearing pants down here. And we cannot move around.
And what I mean by “we cannot move around” is that our walk with God is hampered. We cannot walk as we should.
And we find ourselves sometimes watching other people walk, and we cannot walk. “Hey, that’s really cool,” but, you know, hey, it stops.
And so Paul says, “You need a belt.” Because these soldiers, you know, they wore those little toga things. I have never fought in a skirt, but the thing is, you know, I can get it.
It is like a robe. You have these things down here. You have got to pick it up and put it in there, and put that belt on so you can do what you have to do.
So it is not getting caught up. Your sword is not getting caught in it. Your shield is not getting caught in it. You are able to run because your legs are free.
Well, brothers and sisters, the belt—the thing is, like I am saying, this is not just a thing. The Holy Spirit leads us to put on a belt.
Now, secondly, it says, “Breastplate of righteousness.”
Now, I am a history teacher, but I do not know a lot about military weaponry, so I read a little bit. They said the breastplate was made up of two layers: a little leather, a little metal.
Now, what that means is this breastplate of righteousness has two sides. One side is something that is given to us. One side is something that is worked out in us.
Let me just read these Scriptures that go with it.
Romans 4:6 says:
Even as David also pronounceth blessing upon the man, unto whom God reckoneth righteousness apart from works.
Righteousness apart from works: the righteousness of Christ imparted to us.
And we read yesterday in 1 Corinthians 1:30—as I told you, it was one of my favourite verses:
But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, Who was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.
So, first of all, we have a righteousness that has been imputed to us. But it is not something that stands alone.
We have been made righteous to be made righteous. Sounds weird, does it not? But it is true. We have been made righteous, so we have access, so that in coming in, we can be made righteous.
And the Scriptures for that are in Hebrews. Now yesterday, we talked about a tutor—the Holy Spirit was like a tutor. So in Hebrews 12:11 it says:
All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous but grievous; yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that have been exercised thereby, even the fruit of righteousness.
And in Romans 6:13—Romans chapter 6, verse 13. How come you guys did not catch it? I got you there, did I not?
It says:
Neither present your members unto sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves unto God, as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
Then Romans 6:16:
Know ye not, that to whom ye present yourselves as servants unto obedience, his servants ye are whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?
Now, brothers and sisters, what are we talking about in this righteousness? I am going to put it very, very simply. Again, this is something that we are led into.
It is not something like, “Oh, I have got to do this. You have got to do this, this, this, this, this. Then you have righteousness.” No, no, no—that is not what we are talking about.
We are talking again about being led and having an exchanged life. And so, when the Holy Spirit is in us and He is leading us, He is leading us to do right things. That is a simple explanation of it.
He is leading us into doing the right thing. What is the right thing to do in this situation?
Like, you get an F on a test. Well, for some of you, you get a C—that is like an F for some of you guys, right? Okay, you get a C on a test. Do you tell your folks?
No, no, no. Why? Because you feel they are going to jump all over you, right?
But when they jump all over you, what do you think they would say? “Why were you not studying?” Right?
So the thing is, in doing the right act, you go and say, “Hey, Mom, Dad, I got a C.” “Why were you not studying? We are going to make sure you study this time.”
All of a sudden, you find out you are doing the right things. You are saying the right thing. You are thinking the right thing.
The Holy Spirit leads into righteousness—to doing what is right. That is a simple way of looking at it.
Because the Lord is not going to just box you over the head and say, “Hey, here is a bunch of commands. Read the book and do them all.” No. He leads you into life.
He leads you into that righteousness, and then that righteousness becomes part of you. You are made righteous to be made righteous.
You know, the worst thing that Christians can be called is a hypocrite. And that is why it is so important that we do not just say the things that everybody says, “Oh yeah, those were the right things to say,” but our life matches up with it.
Jesus had the harshest words for those religious Pharisees because on the outside they were clean, but on the inside it did not match up.
And you have to understand that these are connected. If you are right on the inside, it will lead to being right on the outside.
Now, feet shod—not monster, feet shod. Okay, that is a sandal. Look, look, look, look. Here is the strap across the top. Here is the one that is going to hold the heel in there. I am going to tell you, it is not cheese. Geez, I am sorry.
So anyway, just put it this way. The breastplate kept your heart, kept the internal organs—the things that were vital—from being pierced. That is what the breastplate is.
Now these shoes, these shoes that we have—the Roman sandals for soldiers had hobnails. Those are the hobnails, okay?
And, you know, it is just like a football player or a soccer player wearing spikes. It helps him to get a grip on the ground that he is on so he can hold his position, or he can make his turns without slipping.
And that is why those things are there.
“Feet shod with the preparation of the gospel.” Now, I know a lot of you think, “Oh, you are going to tell me to go out and preach the gospel.”
Well, I am not going to say do not. It is good to preach the gospel, and we should preach the gospel, and we should witness to our friends.
But it says, “Shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.” So what does that mean?
We are going to read a couple of verses and explain it. In 1 Corinthians 2:12, since we are talking about being led by the Spirit in all of these, we will start out with that verse about being led by the Spirit:
But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.
That we might know what has been freely given to us by God. Now that is important.
Because if we go to Colossians 1, starting in verse 3, it says:
We give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you,
having heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye have toward all the saints,
because of the hope which is laid up for you in the heavens, whereof ye heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel,
which is come unto you; even as it is in all the world and beareth fruit and increaseth, as it doth in you also, since the day ye heard and knew the grace of God in truth.
So, in other words, the Lord shows us what is ours. And then, in a way, we dig those little cleats into it, and it starts to bear fruit.
And it bears fruit in such a way that in 1 Thessalonians 1:8 it says:
For from you hath sounded forth the word of the Lord, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place your faith to God-ward is gone forth; so that we need not to speak anything.
For they themselves report concerning us what manner of entering in we had unto you; and how ye turned unto God from idols, to serve a living and true God,
and to wait for His Son from heaven.
Now, what does this all mean? What am I trying to get out here?
You know, talking about hypocrites and stuff like that, I hate when people witness—I mean, I think they just made a movie about that, something like Saved! or something like that, and they really made Christians out to be bad.
I have not seen that movie, and I am not planning on seeing it, but I heard about it. You have these people who are doing things that are unrighteous—not right—they are hypocrites, but then they are going out and sharing the Lord Jesus.
Okay, now that is what the world thinks about Christianity: we are a bunch of hypocrites.
But the thing is here, since these have to do with feet, they deal with our walking.
Now, on the first night, Dana talked about Caleb. And God promised Caleb, “Wherever you tread your feet, you can have.”
Now, brothers and sisters, the Spirit shows us what is ours, and He says, “Come and walk on it, and it is yours.”
And what that does, when we see what we have and we start walking on it and start to realize—in other words, we are not just looking at the food, but we begin to eat it, and we begin to have it come into us and be a part of us.
And all of a sudden, we begin to be transformed. Now, transformation, brothers and sisters, that is what the world is going to see. And that is what is going to make them hungry for the gospel.
And transformation is a weird process. I mean, how many of you guys, maybe you have younger brothers and sisters, but before they were born, your mom and dad had those little books about the birth of a child?
They start way back at the embryo—before the embryo, the zygote—and all that kind of biological stuff. And you see the pictures of that life that is growing.
I mean, the first part of it looks like a Martian. You know, it has this big head, and it has these little things coming out, and you go, “What is that?”
And then, as time goes on and it continues to grow, you start seeing, “Oh, those little nubs coming up—those are going to become arms and legs. Oh wow. Oh, look, that is going to be the spine. That is going to be the thing that connects the head. It is going to do all this.”
“Oh, it has got this little tail here.” “Do not worry, that is going to go away.”
But the thing is, you see, that is the way your friends are going to see you. At first, they are going to say, “You are just plain weird.”
But pretty soon they are going to say, you know, there is a time in the womb when that baby looks whole. And they are going to look at you and say, “You know, I can see what that child is. I can see Christ.”
That transformation—that us getting hold of the gospel and walking in what God has for us, what the Holy Spirit shows us—that is what is going to prepare the way for your friends to have their hearts softened.
That is what it is all about. You know, yes, preach the gospel. Preach it in season and out.
Even when you are at a place where you are not walking as well as you could, look, preach it anyway, because sometimes just the preaching of the gospel convicts you to get back on the ball again. You know, preach it in and out of season.
The shield of faith. Now, the shield of faith—I have got one verse up there, but I want to talk about something else with it also.
It says to extinguish the fiery darts of the enemy. Now, the shield of faith, I am going to say, has to do basically with the past. But hear me out on this.
The first thing—the shield of faith, in order to extinguish the darts of the enemy—one of the things the enemy does, he always tries to get you: “You are no good. You know, God does not forgive you.” He always does that. He condemns you in that way.
In Colossians 2:13-15, it says:
And you, being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, you, I say, did He make alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses;
having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us: and He hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross;
having despoiled the principalities and the powers, He made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.
That is in the cross. Brothers and sisters, one of the things that our shield is, is going to what Christ has done for us on the cross.
That is never, ever, something we lose. Because every time the enemy comes, you have to go back to that, because otherwise you are on shaky ground.
“Well, I am really okay. No, I am doing the right thing.” No. If you are thinking that way, you are going to get those hobnails stripped, and you are going to slide down.
My brothers and sisters, this is the shield that extinguishes. The enemy has nothing to say. He cannot argue that point.
He might say, “Well, you know, Jesus really died for everyone else but not for you.” But you say, “No, no, no. It says here, me too. And He nailed it to the cross.”
Everything. All our sins are forgiven, separated as far as the east is from the west.
But the second thing—and I do not have a verse for it because there is no verse for it. The whole Bible is full of it. And it is not just the whole Bible that is full of it; the lives of saints are full of it. If you read biographies, it is full of it.
And what I am saying is this: it is our experience—our own experience, our personal experience—that God is faithful.
Because one of the things the enemy is going to do is say, “Oh, you know, God is not going to come through. He is hiding.” Like, for instance, Eve: “Hath God said? Come on, He is holding back on you. He has not really said that.”
Or the Israelites: you look at their circumstances—“Oh, You brought us out here to die. Yeah, I am hungry. You got water, got no bread. What are You going to do? We could die. You brought us out here to die.”
But their experience then is this: manna from heaven, water from a rock. That is the experience.
The experience is that shield of faith. God has shown me that He is faithful to me. The things He has spoken to me, He has backed up. I can go back and look, and there it is.
You do not look for yourself and how you have overcome. You look to see what God has done that brought you along to overcome.
Remember that little poem, “Footprints”? The devil comes like that and goes, “Okay, finally, I see one set of footprints.” We do not realize they are His. He is carrying us.
We look back to those times when He carried us and brought us through, and that extinguishes it: “I know God loves me and is faithful because He has shown me in my life. Be gone.”
The helmet of salvation. Now, in other parts of the Scripture, like in 1 Thessalonians 5:8—and this is what I want to deal with, because you think of the helmet of salvation and you go, “What the heck, the helmet of salvation? Is that protecting our mind?” Okay, let us look at this.
In 1 Thessalonians 5:8 it says:
But let us, since we are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.
And I want to deal with that word “hope,” the hope of salvation.
Hope is not a wish. You know, what is it—Snow White? “I’m wishing for…” You know, wishing for her husband, hoping I get the right one. Okay. You said you got seventy-four. God has a sense of humour, does He not?
But we have a hope. And remember, I used the verses in 1 John 3:2. It says:
Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is.
That is our hope: that we are going to be like Him. But it is not a wish. “I sure wish I will be like Him in the end. I hope.”
A biblical hope is an expectation. It is not that I am expecting that I am going to be good enough and make it like this, but I am expecting God to carry out what He has promised me.
And it does not mean that in the expecting I am sitting there and going, “Okay, God, You do all the work and I will just sit here.” Remember, the Holy Spirit is leading.
And as He leads us from place to place to place, we find the old being torn away and the new coming in. And therefore, our hope is emboldened and made more sure.
Let me finish the rest of 1 John 3:2-3, where it says:
And every one that hath this hope set on Him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.
In other words, it is letting the Spirit lead you from place to place so that you are being purified. You are going from place to place, and what is happening is that you are being transformed.
And then Colossians says, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
Now, our biggest problem is if we think of us in terms of, “Hey, good job.” I know, I am an artist. The caterpillar. Art imitates life. Okay.
You know, in a sense, we can make this analogy that we are all caterpillars. But the thing is, in the caterpillar is a butterfly.
You have heard those little analogies before, but it is true. The problem is, we get hung up with being a caterpillar: “I am just an ugly caterpillar.”
And part of it is because we are just too much into ourselves. That is it.
I mean, what is the first thing you do after you get out of bed? Okay, you go in the bathroom, look in the mirror. That is the first thing. You are getting up at you.
And right away you go, “I am not going to make it through this day.” All right, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
No, you are laughing, but you know something? That is true. And, you know, they talk about the devil having smoke and mirrors. He does.
He shows that mirror to you all the time: “Just look at you. How can you ever hope to be completed? Look at you. Pitiful.”
And then we believe it. And we say, “I am bound.” That is it.
But the thing is, there is a butterfly inside. And the helmet is to remind us, saying, “You know, we are not looking here. We are looking ahead.”
Get your eyes fixed on the goal. You know, if you are running a race, what happens when you look backwards? They pass you. You do not look backwards in a race. Look forward.
Looking ahead—is not that what Paul says? Forgetting what is behind, I press on to the upward calling of God.
I am a caterpillar, but I am going to the upward calling of God, because I am being led that way. He is in my life doing a transforming work in me.
Now, the sword of the Spirit. Here again, we are going to look at the Word of God.
Oh, brothers and sisters, it is not just the Word of God. And let me tell you, if we think it is just the Word of God, we are going to be really messed up.
No, I am not saying do not read the Word of God, because remember yesterday? You have to give the Holy Spirit things that He can use in your life.
You read the Word of God. You memorize the Word of God. You study the Word of God, so the Holy Spirit can use it at times that He needs to.
But, you know, we just think it is the Word of God. We just spout Scripture and everything, and there is no power in it because we are just spouting Scripture.
Yeah, I grade essay tests, and people that do not know, they write so much. They have facts about everything, but it has nothing to do with what they are supposed to be writing.
And sometimes that is why we know so much and we say all these things, but it has no meaning to us, and it has no meaning to the enemy.
The enemy just says, “Yeah, blah, blah, blah.”
You ever see that Far Side cartoon where he has the little dog? It says what people say: “Bad dog, blah, blah, blah.” And then it says what the dog hears: “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
You know, sometimes we are using Scripture with the enemy, and that is all it is: “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
And sometimes we think that it is just that we have to know the Scriptures and go out with this knowledge.
I remember as a young man, I took some studying and listened to some tapes and learned stuff about Mormonism so I could go out and refute Mormons.
Okay, now you are laughing, but I thought, “Oh man, now I have got it all.” And I went out looking for Mormons. I did.
I went out and I wanted to tell them that they were wrong and this and that and the other thing. And so, one day, I was at a friend’s house, and he had two friends who were Mormons come in.
They were backslidden Mormons, or they are called Jack Mormons. “Oh, you are Mormon? Oh boy.” Did I just pull all the stuff on.
Everybody goes, “That guy shut me down really bad.”
I went home with my tail between my legs because all I had was a bunch of knowledge, and I did not know the truth. It was embarrassing for me. I started wondering if I was even saved.
Now, what are we talking about? The sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
In Luke 12:11-12, Jesus is talking to the disciples about the times when He is gone. He says:
And when they bring you before the synagogues, and the rulers, and the authorities, be not anxious how or what ye shall answer, or what ye shall say:
for the Holy Spirit shall teach you in that very hour what ye ought to say.
Brothers and sisters, when the Word of God is in the hands of the Holy Spirit, then it is the sword of God.
Boy, because then it knows exactly where it is going, and the One Who is wielding it is not you and your knowledge. It is the Spirit of God, and He knows right where He is going.
Remember, we talked about it being sharper than any two-edged sword, able to divide between soul and spirit? Man, that is what He is talking about.
But the thing is, read the Word, so when those times come, the Lord goes and says, “You know this Word. Now I am going to show you how it is used.”
And all of a sudden, things open up because the Spirit has that Word. And He reveals to you, “It is for this situation. It is for this time now.”
And then it talks about, even though I did not put it up here, prayer. And it says, “With all prayers.”
You know, there are a whole bunch of types of prayer. I made a whole list of them right here.
There is prayer that is worship, which we were doing this morning. We were worshipping the Lord. That is prayer—all prayer.
There is prayer that inquires, “Lord, what should I do? Where should I go? What about this situation?”
There are prayers of petition: “Give us this day our daily bread.” There is prayer that is thanksgiving.
There is prayer that is public, that is corporate. There is prayer that is in the closet, where you pray privately.
There are some prayers that you cannot even utter because your heart is so burdened. All you can express is groans. You just groan.
I remember I had a brother who was blind, and I believe he would get so depressed at times. He would say, “You know, Jim, it is just too hard to breathe.”
That is like when you are praying. It is just too hard. You just groan. “Lord, hear it,” you know, because it is the Spirit groaning in you.
And so we pray, it says, in all seasons: when I am up, when I am down.
I am watchful in my prayer. What is happening here? Is the Lord answering it? Has He answered? Does He want me to wait? Shall I still keep praying? Shall I go on to something else?
“Oh, there is my brother over there. He is falling. I need to pray for him.” Watchful. All these things as the Spirit leads us and shows us.
Now, these are things that we can take several ways and say, “Okay, we can dissect them. This is this, and this is this,” right?
But the thing of it is, if you put these all together, this is Jesus. This is Christ.
All of these—the whole armour of God—are not separate things. The whole armour of God is Christ in us.
Now, as I start to close here, I just want to bring this home.
Sometimes we cannot relate to the Lord. I mean, He is God. And we feel like, “Well, you know, I cannot relate to that. He had all that power. How can I ever be like Christ? I am—I am a caterpillar.”
And it is unrelatable to us, and so that just stops us.
But, you know, Dana has been talking about transition. And he said Jesus was the final Man of transition, or the biggest example of transition. And I want to just deal with that for a moment.
You know, the Lord—we read yesterday in Philippians 2—it says He humbled Himself and He came down and He became a man.
Okay, now here is the transition: He became like us so that He could lead us to become like Him.
Now, I do not mean that we grow beards and then we try to do miracles and stuff like that, right? But this is what I mean.
He is the breastplate, the belt, and what that is, He is holy. He lived holy.
And we might say, “Well, you know what? He was—I cannot be like that.” That is true. In yourself, you cannot. All your trying cannot do it.
Okay, again, we will get back to that leading of the Holy Spirit.
But the holiness that He had is like this. When He was talking to the disciples in John, when He was in the room during Passover, there is a little interesting verse here.
John 14:30 says:
I will no more speak much with you, for the prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in Me.
Brothers and sisters, that is holiness. Holiness is, as we are led by the Lord, there is no hook. You could not get a hook in.
The enemy could not put a hook in the Lord Jesus because He lived that holy life, that transition that He is bringing us into.
The shield and the helmet—you know, we think, “Oh, what does the Lord have to trust?”
Well, if you think about this: “I am going to die. He said He is going to raise Me up in three days. Can I trust that?”
He had to trust. He had to trust His Father. He had to trust in doing the will of His Father, that His Father would be faithful in doing that.
You know, He shared in John 17 in His high-priestly prayer. He said, “And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.”
He looked back and He said, “I remember that.” And here I am coming to this place of death, but I am remembering that so I can go through this kind of death. Bring Me back to this place.
And then, in looking at that cross, like in the rest of Hebrews 12:2, it says:
Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
He saw the finished work of what He would do—sons brought to glory—and He said, “That brings so much joy, that strengthens Me to endure this.”
And endure means to go through it, not to put up with it—to go through it. That is what endure means.
And then He walked in the will of God. His life was walked in the will of God.
And because He walked in the will of God, He knew His position. He knew what was His. And in the end, He could say, “All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth.”
And then with the sword and prayer, He knew and He heard the voice of the Lord, His Father. He knew it.
Now, the thing is, you see, He laid aside the deity to be that transition Man. He came down to live as a man so that a man could be brought up, so that we could be like Him—not only in His death, but in His resurrection.
And this is what I close with, all right? The transition for us is that we move from being stone men to being postmen—mail carriers.
Let me show you what I mean.
In Ezekiel 36, this is the Lord talking to Ezekiel. It is just before his vision of dry bones—I am sorry.
And the Lord says:
Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord God: I do not this for your sake, O house of Israel, but for My holy name, which ye have profaned among the nations, whither ye went.
And I will sanctify My great name, which hath been profaned among the nations, which ye have profaned in the midst of them; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, saith the Lord God, when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes.
For I will take you from among the nations, and gather you out of all the countries, and will bring you into your own land.
And I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.
And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep Mine ordinances, and do them.
And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be My people, and I will be your God.
Here you had a situation where these people, on their own, in their flesh, had defiled the name of God because they just walked as they would. They tried to do what God wanted them to do, but they were flesh.
And the thing was, they had a heart of stone. They had that law of commandments in stone, but that was all they were. It was written in stone, and they tried to live up to it, and they could not.
And so the Lord says, “The heart of stone is not what I want. It cannot make it for you. So I will give you something else. I will give you a heart of flesh, and I will write My commandments on you.”
Now, the postman. Think of this: 2 Corinthians 3:2-3.
Ye are our epistle, written in our hearts, known and read of all men;
being made manifest that ye are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in tables that are hearts of flesh.
And then I just want to skip down to verse 7, where it says:
But if the ministration of death, written, and engraven on stones, came with glory, so that the children of Israel could not look stedfastly upon the face of Moses for the glory of his face; which glory was passing away:
how shall not rather the ministration of the Spirit be with glory?
If the ministry of death—the Ten Commandments, written and engraved on stones—was glorious, and it was, the mountain shook. If you read Exodus when this happened, all these things happened, and it was glorious.
It was glorious so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away.
How will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?
What I am saying is this: it is not us trying to be. It is us being led and transformed into what He is making us.
We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.
I gave you two little verses at the beginning. One was Mark 1:9, and you notice I have been tying in the baptism of Jesus to all of this. It says how the Spirit led Him into the wilderness, and He was tempted.
Okay, and I want to intertwine that with Romans 5, just to let you know this: as caterpillars, you are being led out.
And in being led out, you are not going on a slide. You are going to a place of temptation and trial—tough stuff that you are going to see.
But the thing of it is, you know what happens to caterpillars as they eat? They grow bigger.
But the thing is, they have to get rid of their old skin as they keep growing and growing and growing.
You see, brothers and sisters, I think we think that we have got to be perfect all at once.
But as we are led into these trials and temptations, which are to bring out that butterfly in us, the skin has to be peeled back. It just has to be peeled back, and it is.
And listen again to Romans 5:3-4:
And not only so, but we also rejoice in our tribulations: knowing that tribulation worketh steadfastness;
and steadfastness, approvedness; and approvedness, hope.
Glory—in other words, glory has to do with being satisfied and being completed. You are looking to an end.
We glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulations produce perseverance, and perseverance, character, hope.
And the thing I am saying is this, brothers and sisters: as you are going through this, as you are going through this way, being conformed into the image of Christ because you are being led by the Spirit, prompted little by little, laying down your life little by little—
the character of Christ is being developed in you. And as that character is being developed, all of a sudden hope is being strengthened.
And remember, hope is looking at the completed work. It is the thing that is done. I just keep going. I just keep going on. I keep just letting the Spirit lead, and I am going to see where He is leading me.
It is not an easy thing, but it is a true thing. It is the truth.
And that, brothers and sisters, is what you have to lay hold of. Lay hold of this truth so that it leads you out.
And you experience the leading of the Spirit, the laying down of your life, and the raising up of the new life.
And I will leave you with this one verse at the end. Philippians 1:6:
Being confident of this very thing, that He Who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.
We will be like Him because we will see Him as He is. Let us pray.
Oh, Heavenly Father, it is so easy to just compartmentalise things and say, “This is that,” and just get everything out of perspective and think we have to have things and do things and get stuff to make our Christian life.
And really, it is just that we let You lead us and let Christ be formed in us.
Now, I know that sounds real simple, but Lord, that is the truth. If we would only follow You and let You lead us, You would make sure that Your work is done.
Lord, as we say today that we want to bow to Your workmanship in our life, and we want to tell You, Lord, that it is hard, and we want to tell You, Lord, that we have failed before.
But Lord, putting that behind us, we look at You today and say, “Father, we see what You want. We see the finished work.”
We say that we cannot do it, but we bow anyway and say, “Lord, take us there. Help us yield to You. Do Your work, and Lord, be glorified.”
Be glorified in our lives. Be glorified in our communities, in our schools. Be glorified in the nation, and be glorified before these principalities and powers, who have nothing in us because You are all in us.
Oh, Lord, we commit ourselves to You for this work.