Sermon for Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

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[Machine transcription]

In the name of Jesus, amen.
Finally, dear saints, be strong in the Lord and the strength of his might
put on the whole armor of God. You who are baptized, which is you, if you’re not baptized
see me after church, you who are baptized have been enlisted by the Lord Jesus in a spiritual battle.
How many of you know that, and if you are kind of crawled in here weary from the battle,
scarred by the battle, wounded by the battle, worn out by the battle?
Pastor, I know, I know, I’m in the midst of a spiritual battle.
But for some of us, it’s just a good reminder why things are hard in this life.
This life, this Christian life is an opposed life.
We have enemies, the world and our flesh and the devil himself with all of the demons are
fighting constantly against us, against you, against you hearing and having and believing
the Word of God.
And so Paul is reminding us that we are in the midst of a battle, a severe spiritual
battle, that the battle is not ourâ�¦ we don’t have a choice if we want to fight it or not.
We cannot remain neutral in this battle.
we are either for the Lord or against Him, and because we are for the Lord, the devil
is against us.
So we are at war.
And we want to think about that this morning.
In fact, I think I have four questions about this spiritual battle.
Where is it?
Who is it with?
What does it mean to� or what do we fight with and how do we fight?
The first question is where is this battle?
And here I’d like to suggest something to you.
I don’t think that we normally connect Ephesians chapter 6 verse 10, this famous passage on
spiritual warfare, with the texts that come before it, but I think we should.
Remember in Ephesians chapter 5 verse 22, well verse 21, submit yourselves to one another
in the Lord.
And then in verse 22, St. Paul started this table of duties, wives submit to your husbands
as unto the Lord.
And then husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church.
That was the beginning of his table of duties, which tells us what our love and what our
submission and reverence looks like in this life and the various different vocations.
He first talks about marriage and husband and wife.
And then in chapter 6, verse 1, he talks about children and then parents.
And then after that, he talks about bondservants and masters.
In other words, Paul is telling us this basic Christian wisdom that our love looks different
depending on our vocations and callings in life.
So, what is your vocation?
That’s where the Lord has placed you.
That’s your station in life.
You might be a husband or a wife.
You might be a father or mother, a grandfather or a grandmother.
You are a child.
You might be a grandchild.
You might be a brother or sister.
You might be a student.
You might have a� you might have work.
You might have a job.
You are all listening to the preaching of God’s Word, so you’re all part of the baptized.
Otherwise, these are your different vocations and your stations in life.
And here’s what I want to suggest, that when Paul goes through this table of duties and
says, here’s what your vocations are, and then he says, finally be strong in the Lord
and put on His armor, what he’s saying is the Lord has placed you in your vocation to
do spiritual warfare.
In other words, where is the war happening?
The answer is the vocation and station where the Lord has placed you.
I suppose it’s like when you enlist in the army, and they give you orders, and they tell
you where you are supposed to live.
It’s not an option.
You can’t go into the army and be like, but I’d rather be in South Florida, you know.
They tell you exactly where to go.
Well, the Lord has told us, he’s put us in a place, and he said, this is where I want
you to do battle.
This is where I want you to wage spiritual warfare.
That’s the where.
And it’s very important because this is kind of a big, bigger theme and maybe a little
bit aside from the sermon, but you know that there’s a temptation for us when we think
about spiritual things that it all becomes kind of chaos and disorder.
I think this is our general idea of the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit enters in and
sort of throws us off into sort ofâ�¦ we lose self-control and everything’s kind of crazy.
No, we want to understand that God’s ordering of the world and our spiritual relationship
to the world are the same.
It’s precisely in the ordering of the world that the Lord is working, and it’s precisely
in the ordering of our vocation that the Lord sets us to do spiritual warfare.
That’s the where.
Now the second question is who.
With whom are we fighting?
With whom are we wrestling?
St. Paul tells us, and he doesn’t just tell us who the fight is with, he also tells us
who the fight is not with.
In fact, he says that first, and we have to pay careful attention.
Verse 11 in the text, if you want to look at it, he says, put on the whole armor of
God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil, for we do not wrestle
against flesh and blood.
So, before we even know who the enemy is, Paul is telling us who the enemy is not, and
the enemy is not flesh and blood.
That means the enemy is not another person.
If you have a list of people who you think are your enemies, you have to get rid of that
list.
Jesus has not authorized it.
Now there might be people who consider you to be their enemy, and you can’t do anything
about it except for what Jesus says, love your enemy, pray for those who persecute you,
bless those who abuse you, do good to those who afflict you. In other words,
that’s what we’re called to do to those who would consider us an enemy, but the
Christian can never look at another person, can never look at flesh and blood
and say that my battle is with you. That’s maybe important for us to
remember during these political cycles because we are so tempted to think that
I can identify the enemy and it’s that person or that name, but we do not fight
against flesh and blood.
Who is to fight with?
Paul says it, and he’s going to use some technical terms here.
We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of
evil in the heavenly places, and we say, I’d rather wrestle with flesh and blood.
Paul says that you fight against the devil, and you fight against the demons, and you
fight against cosmic powers in the heavenly places.
And we say, Lord, how could I do that?
How could we stand against the devil?
Adam and Eve were perfect and they couldn’t manage it.
And look at us.
We’re far from perfect and we’re weak and we keep getting weaker and weaker as the years
go by.
How could we possibly stand against the devil?
devil.
The old evil foe with deep guile and great might, his dread arms in fight, whose is equal?
Now here’s the point, the Lord sets you to fight against the devil, but he does not set
you to fight against the devil and the demons with your own resources, with your own strength,
with your own reason or capacity.
If that were the case, you would be in trouble.
But the Lord has equipped us for the battle, and that’s the point of the text.
So where do we fight?
Who do we fight?
How do we fight?
This is the � or the what is our equipment for the fight?
The Lord has equipped us for battle, and this is what Paul lists here as the armor of God.
Now, the idea, and sometimes we try to connect the various pieces of armor to the gifts that
they are, like the helmet of salvation to protect the mind, and the breastplate of righteousness
to protect the heart.
We should know that Paul will list the armor of God in a couple of different places, 1
Thessalonians and Romans, and he kind of moves around.
The actual armor and the equipment isn’t really the important point.
But the important part is that we are protected with the righteousness of Christ.
When the text says put on as a breastplate the righteous� the breastplate of righteousness,
it is certainly not your own righteousness.
Can you imagine that?
Like, you know what I’m going to do?
I’m going to go protect my heart with my own efforts to keep God’s law.
Oh boy.
That’s like going out to fight in an old, raggedy, beat-up undershirt.
The righteousness that protects us is the righteousness of Christ.
The helmet that protects us is the salvation that the Lord Jesus brings to us.
The shield that protects us from all the flaming darts of the evil one is not our works, but
our faith, our trust in the promises of God.
God, the belt that holds everything together is the truth of God’s Word and the readiness
that arms our feet and protects them is the readiness to shed the gospel of peace.
In other words, we are equipped to fight against the devil in his kingdom of darkness, not
with our own whatever, but with the Lord’s righteousness, the Lord’s Word, the Lord’s
truth, the Lord’s strength, the Lord’s mercy, the Lord’s promises, and by all of these we
are clothed in what Paul calls in Romans, the armor of light.
I wish that�
Maybe I shouldn’t wish.
I’ll tell you what I was about to say and then I’ll take it back.
I wish that we could see each other like the Lord sees us and maybe even like the devil
sees us, clothed in this armor.
The reason I have to take it back is because the Lord hasn’t given us that, and so we
shouldn’t want what the Lord has given.
one.
But could you imagine it this way?
Could you imagine that for a moment you could get a glimpse of this armor of light that
the Lord has clothed you in?
If you could see the helmet of salvation, if you looked in the mirror and you could
see that salvation like a helmet on your head, and you could see the righteousness of Christ
like a breastplate protecting your heart, and you could see the shield of faith that
stops all of these fiery darts, that you could see yourself radiating with the
glory of Christ that he has clothed you in. You are in fact not by yourself but
by the gifts of Christ. You are a formidable foe to the devil. Now here we
have to reverse our thinking, at least I have to reverse my own thinking, because
because I think that for for most of us it feels like the church is this, like
maybe we’re in a besieged castle.
And it’s nice because we’re here in the sanctuary, but outside the walls, it’s like we’re in
this castle and the whole world is like aâ�¦ it’s like a raging flood, and it’s pounding
in on the walls, and it seems like the Lord’s church is being assaulted from every angle
and is about to be overcome.
And we hold on to the promise that the church won’t be overcome by all the devil’s might,
at least we’ll be able to endure to the end.
But when the Bible talks about spiritual warfare, it has a completely different picture.
It’s not that the church is going to somehow survive all of the assaults of the devil’s
kingdom.
It’s quite the opposite.
Remember how Jesus says it in Matthew 18, I’ll build my church and the gates of hell
will not stand against it.
In other words, it’s the gates of hell that are being assaulted, not the gates of the
church.
And those gates will not stand.
James writes in James chapter 4, and this is astonishing.
These words, every time I read them I think, if they weren’t written here in the Bible
I would never believe them.
James says this, he says, resist the devil and he will flee from you.
I think, I don’t know if this is the same for you, but I think that I’ll be doing well
enough just to stand against the devil and not run away when he shows up.
But James says that when we resist the devil, not only do we not run from him, but that
he in fact runs from us, that’s the promise.
Or there’s this little treasure in Romans chapter 16, I want to read this to you, it’s
almost â�� if we’re just reading through Romans 16, you can almost miss it because
this is when Paul is saying all of his goodbyes.
Greet Rufus, greet Asencritus, and Phlegion, and Hermas, and Patrobus, and Hermes, and
greet Philologus, and Julia, and Nereus, his sister, and Olympus, and he’s just listing
all these people.
And then right in the middle of all these goodbyes, we get to verse 20, well, starting
Starting with verse 18, your obedience has become known to all, I’m glad on your behalf,
I want you to be wise in what’s good, simple concerning evil, and verse 20, here’s what
he says, and the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.
The God, again it’s one of these verses that you couldn’t believe unless you saw it in
the Bible.
No, the God of peace is crushing Satan under your feet.
Now this is a reflection of Genesis 3.15.
Remember that promise of Genesis 3.15 where the Lord comes and finds Adam and Eve and
the fig leaves and he’s, what’s going on here?
And he talks to Eve and he talks to Adam and he talks to the devil and he says, I’m gonna
put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed.
He’ll crush your head and you will crush his foot.
And in that promise, the Lord Jesus will now be born of a woman and he will suffer death
at the hands of the enemies of God, but he will rise from the dead, and in his death
he will destroy the power of the devil.
And the picture is of a barefooted man putting his heel right through the face of a snake.
Whap!
And that’s what Jesus does on the cross.
He crushes the head of the devil.
But now, Paul takes that same thing and he applies it not just to the feet of Jesus pierced
on the cross, but to your feet, in the life of the church, in your hearing of God’s Word,
in the fruit of good works that it produces in your life, in your prayers, in your trust
in the Lord’s mercy, in your suffering quietly the afflictions of this world, in all of these
things, the God of peace is crushing the devil under your feet.
It’s not the church about to collapse, it’s the devil’s kingdom about to collapse.
The kingdom of darkness that’s being overcome by the kingdom of light.
We can’t see it, but we have it in the Word.
It’s what God has promised.
So that you are now standing where the Lord has placed you against the devil, against
his kingdom, against his assaults, against his attacks and all of his, what Paul calls
them wiles, which I don’t know why, but it reminds me of like Wile E. Coyote.
And all of the devil’s foolish attempts to overthrow the Lord’s Word.
And how do we battle?
This is the last question.
So where’s the battle in our vocation?
Who is it with?
Not flesh and blood, but the devil and the demons.
With what do we fight?
The armor of God, which is the gifts of His righteousness, which shows up in our life
as salvation and the fruit of faith, good works.
How do we fight?
This is the last question, and I want to put your�
I want to put your eyes on the very end of verse 17 and the beginning of verse 18.
Paul says, take the helmet of salvation and take the sword of the Spirit, which is the
Word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication.
So, Paul tells us all of the other armor that we have is protective helmet, breastplate,
and shield, and all this sort of stuff.
You have one piece of offensive weapon, and that is your sword.
That is the Word of God.
And how are you to wield the sword of the Word of God?
Here’s the most important thing, is that we wield the sword of God’s Word in prayer.
And here’s how we fight.
We pray the Scriptures.
And it seems a pretty simple thing.
But I think the Lord has placed each one of you in a very unique place in the world.
And that means that you get to listen to the Word of God with one ear, and you get to listen
to the people around you with the other ear, and you get to bring those two things together
in prayer.
It’s a pretty astonishing thing.
I don’t know your situation in life, certainly not as well as you know it, and you don’t
listen to all the things that I get to listen to each week, but we all are in
this world and we get to hear unique things. We get to hear the problems of
our friends and our family and our children and our parents and we get to
read the Word of God and we get to apply God’s Word directly to those problems
in our prayers. And when we do that, when we take up the sword of the Spirit and
And we pray for those around us.
The devil’s kingdom is collapsing.
The gates of hell are being shattered.
The kingdom of God is coming, even in our midst.
So we’re in the midst of a spiritual battle, and this is terrible news for the devil.
Well, because you are equipped not with your own strength and resources, but with the armor
of God, who has crushed the devil already under the feet of Jesus, and even now is crushing
him under your feet.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might.
May God grant it for Christ’s sake.
Amen.
Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus
Christ our Lord.
Amen.

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