Welcome to the War (Ephesians 6:10-20)
Welcome to the War
Ephesians 6:10-17
Introduction
I want to introduce you to a fictitious person by the name of Connie, and tell a story that I believe all of us would be able to see ourselves in one way or another.
Connie was born to an unbelieving but moral family. Mom and dad had problems, which were pretty obvious at times, and the siblings were relatively wild from time to time, but the whole family generally seemed like they had it all put together. Every Christmas and Easter, along with a smattering of other excursions, Connie’s family would go to church, where she would sit in relative boredom while the youth pastor, then the preacher, would talk about Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, and eventual return. She would return relieved that she could return to her life.
Connie was comfortable with her life, with only a small niggling and occasional sense in the back of her mind that something was wrong. She would gossip at school about her friends, lie to her parents about where she had been, and give too much of her body to her boyfriend. These things would make her feel bad, but with a shake of her head and a slight sigh she would shake off the unpleasant sensation and continue on in relative comfort with life—happy with the image of herself.
Connie had a friend named Liberty who went to church all the time and asked her if she wanted to read the bible together. She didn’t know why, but she said yes and they began reading the Bible together. Something strange started happening to Connie. While she thought that the Bible was there to make her feel good about herself—"God loves us, doesn’t he?”—she found that it actually started to make her feel worse about herself. She read the ten commandments and saw herself in each one. She was disturbed that she worshipped herself, that she took God’s name in vain, that she disobeyed her parents, that she had lied, was sexually immoral, and was filled with greedy desires. It made her upset because it disrupted the image she had of herself in her mind.
When Connie told Liberty this, Liberty felt above her head to help Connie, so they went to Liberty’s mother, Evangeline. Connie disclosed her heart to Evangeline, and she responded as follows: “Connie, Jesus is showing you who you really are. You thought you had it all together, but you really don’t. You are a sinner, who has broken God’s law. And Jesus came to die for sinners just like you. He lived a perfect life—the life you thought you were living but now see that you can’t live. And he died in the place of his people, absorbing the punishment that they deserved, then three days later he rose again and gave life to all who trust in him. And Jesus calls you to trust him—not yourself—and to turn away from you sin and no longer walk in it.”
At that moment, something changed in Connie. She felt a strange mix of happiness and sadness, a sense of relief married to a sense of fear, a feeling of being clean but also of being horribly dirty. She would learn in the coming weeks as she started going to church what had happened to her: she had been born again. Great! That pesky sense of guilt would go away! Her conscience would no longer condemn her! Things would be easy now, because she had Jesus on her side!
How wrong she was. Suddenly, things that seemed so normal before now seemed completely wrong, and she found that getting rid of those old habits was incredibly difficult! She still found herself gossiping about her friends. She struggled to be honest with her parents, though she was certainly more honest than before. She had to break up with her boyfriend because the temptations were just too strong. And whenever she would sin, she would feel accused—“Christians don’t do that sort of thing. How could you possibly love Jesus? He certainly can’t love and forgive someone who has done the things that you have. You might as well just give up and go back to the way things were—they were easier then, weren’t they?”
But on top of that, suddenly her siblings hated her, and even her parents began to avoid her. They would say horrible things to her, that she thought she was better than everyone else, and that she might as well just go away. Which was confusing because that certainly was not the way she felt, and it hurt to hear that from people she loved. One night, retiring to her room in near despair, she honestly felt that life was so much more difficult now that she was a Christian, like she was constantly fighting—almost like she was a soldier in the trenches. And that’s because she was. She needed strength to continue in the fight.
How many of you feel like that? How many of you have retired at the end of the day with a sense of helplessness, or woken up in the morning with a feeling of dread—how can I face today? How many of you have carried around with you a sense of dread that you cannot deal with your lingering sins? Or a sense of accusation that, although you trust in Christ, that my sins somehow cannot be forgiven? Or a feeling of despair that cries out, “How can I possibly obey Jesus today?” Everything is against me! John Bunyan captured the nature of this battle well in his book, The Jerusalem Sinner Saved. Picturing a conversation between a Christian and a soul tempted to despair, he says this:
“Satan is loath to part with a great sinner. ‘What, my true servant,’ says he, ‘my old servant, will you forsake me now? Having so often sold thyself to me to work wickedness, will you forsake me now? You horrible wretch, do you not know, that you have sinned yourself beyond the reach of grace, and do you think you will find mercy now? Are you not a murderer, a thief, a harlot, a witch, a sinner of the greatest size, and do you look for mercy now? Do you think that Christ will foul his fingers with you? It is enough to make angels blush,’ says Satan, ‘to see so vile a one knock at heaven-gates for mercy, and will you so be so abominably bold to do it?”
Under such assaults from the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places, we need a word from God to give us strength. Ephesians 6:10-20. READ. God teaches us this through his word this morning: Stand in his might by donning his armor.
I. Stand in His Might (3:10-13)
If we are to be victorious in the war, we must be strong in him to stand in the battle. The picture is one of an army, preparing to go onto the battlefield. The troops are being assembled, you are streaming with your brothers at arms to the battlefield, and you are called to take all the equipment with you that you will need to be victorious. And the assaulting army crests the opposite hill, and you are given the command—“Hold the line! Dig in! We don’t move from this spot!” Notice how many time Paul emphasizes strength and standing.
But the strength in which we stand is not our own. It is the Lord’s. He calls us to be “Strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.” What does it mean to be strong “in the Lord”? How do you become strong in someone else’s strength?
I think the answer is faith—we become strong in his might when we trust him to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Some biblical examples of this 1 Sam 23:16 – David is in the wilderness of Ziph fleeing from Saul. Naturally, he is discouraged, weak, doubting, and in need of help. Jonathan comes and “strengthens his hand in God.” How does he do that? By pointing him to the promises of God: “Do not fear, for the hand of Saul my father shall not find you. You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you. Saul my father also knows this.” We become strong in his strength when we remember the promises of God.
2 Cor 12:10 – Paul is weak through his ministry. He has a thorn in the flesh—some sort of constant, never-leaving irritation that makes him discouraged and weak. So, he pleads that the Lord would take it away, and the Lord says, “No, My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Weakness provides the opportunity for God’s strength to shine brightly. So, Paul boasts not in what he can do or what makes him feel more able, but rather in what he cannot do and those things which make him feel less able. Why? “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Paul becomes strong with a strength that is not his own when he boasts in his weakness. God does for him and through him what he can’t do for himself. He is strong in the Lord and the strength of his might.
2 Tim 2:1 – “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” He had to be strengthened by grace. Grace strengthened him. So, for Timothy to be strong in order to train future pastors, it was required that he rely on God to give him grace to be strong to do that. But grace is not deserved, but is received by faith—trusting in the God of all power, that he can and will do what he has promised.
Perhaps and illustration will help, if my wife comes to me and says, “I want to move the furniture,” what is she really saying? “I want you to move the furniture for me.” So, she tells me where to put it, and then I move it around, and when her friends come over, what does she tell them? “I moved the furniture.” That is completely appropriate to say that, and when she does, she is being strong in my strength. She has moved the furniture by asking me, her husband, to move the furniture for her.
And so it is with Jesus Christ. We become strong in his might when we ask him to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. There are tasks we cannot do in the Christian life. Weights we cannot carry. Enemies we cannot defeat. So, we come up against them, and we turn to Jesus and we say, “Lord, help me!” Then he steps in and does the task, lifts the weight, defeats the enemy through us so that we can say what? “I put this sin to death.” We are strong in his might.
Be wary of the way of speaking that talks of “manly Christianity,” or “muscular Christianity.” Certainly there is a sense in which that is correct. But there is also a possible deception there—that we are Christians because we are manly, gritty, or spiritually muscular. Such is not true. We are too prone to treat our faith like Olympians rather than beggars. We must seek to be strong, but we must seek to be strong in him.
So, the next question is, “How do we do that?” Yes, we trust him, we believe in him, we boast in the things that make him strong in and through and for us. But how do we do that practically? V11 – Put on the whole armor of God. We become strong in him by putting on his armor. In the Old Testament, God is often described this way. Exodus 15:3, “The Lord is a man of war.” Isaiah 11:4-5: “He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.” Isaiah 59:17: “He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on his head; he put on garments of vengeance for clothing, and wrapped himself in zeal as a cloak.” It’s his armor. We have been swept up into his war. And we engage in that war by using his equipment.
Of what does that battle consist? In standing against the “schemes of the devil” (6:11). There is an assault that the Devil performs on you in which he is attempting to destroy your faith, to get you to disown Christ and throw him away. And he plots and schemes and is crafty in order to do that. His schemes are many, but they are basically three: 1) make you insensitive to receiving the gospel in the first place, 2) to scorch your faith with suffering, or 3) to choke out your faith with earthly pleasure.
You cannot fight a spiritual battle with fleshly tools. 6:12, “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood.” Do you want to know why you’re tempted? Why you sin? Why you doubt? Why you struggle? It isn’t mainly due to your brain wiring. It isn’t mainly due to your income. It isn’t mainly due to your family background or your genetics. It is a spiritual war. You cannot win a spiritual war with medication. Nor can you win a spiritual war with human ideas in psychiatry. Nor can you win a spiritual war with making policies at the state capitol. Yet so many Christians outsource the spiritual battle to things that cannot win that war and then are utterly confused as to why it doesn’t work.
And this is important: as we say, “the struggle is real.” Why is life so hard? Because you’re at war! And I very strongly believe—because I see it constantly in myself—that we don’t live like it. We forget that a conflict rages around us every single day. We have bullets flying overhead and shells exploding left and right, and we want to get out a tea pot and have nice, pleasant conversation. We live like the war doesn’t exist, and then we’re surprised when we get pulled into this temptation or like we aren’t spiritually thriving or we become discontent because we’re too attached to money. It is real. We really do struggle against spiritual forces of evil.
If it is real, then it is also above our heads. We struggle against “rulers…authorities…the cosmic powers over this present darkness…the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” How are you going to win that fight? And the simple answer is, you must be strong in his might. Remember back in Ephesians 1:20f? God “seated him…in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.” He is seated above those powers. But you, before you were saved, were subject to those powers. He was “at work in the sons of disobedience” (2:2). But in Christ we have been raised up and seated with in in the heavenly places, which means that in Christ we are also seated above these spiritual forces of evil. They are under Christ’s feet, and therefore ours.
So, v13, we take up the whole armor of God. We stand in the battle, strong in his strength, by wearing his spiritual equipment, all that we might “withstand” in the evil day—that’s right now—and having accomplished all, to stand firm—that’s in the future. We arm up, and we arm up every day. Every day Satan is seeking to use your earthly environment, suffering, and enjoyment of earthly things to kill your faith. And Paul says you have to stand by taking up his armor.
Transition: Paul is helpfully specific at this point, and he tells us what that armor is. As Paul says in v13, “therefore,” if this is true, if you need his strength, if you are to fight this battle, if you have to stand against this kind of enemy…
II. Don His Armor (3:14-17)
One very important interpretive note to mention up front: it is important not to overread Paul’s metaphor here. The idea is not so much that each piece of armor is only useful for one thing. E.g., that salvation is a helmet and therefore protects your thoughts. I don’t think Paul intended that. I think rather he intended the overall effect of fully putting on the whole armor of someone else that you might be fully equipped to step into the battle.
We also must remember not to read these things legalistically, as though Paul has completely changed gears. It would make no sense for Paul to say, “Be strong in his might! Stand firm against the devil by putting on God’s armor!” And then immediately turn around and say, “You will stand because of what you can achieve in your own power. Remember, this armor belongs to God, not to us. In other words, for each of these, we need to first put on the armor by recognizing that Jesus is these things for us. In ourselves, we are not truthful, righteous, at peace with God, believing, saved, or understanding the word properly. That’s the whole point. We are not strong in our strength but in his strength. Then, second, we must put on the armor by striving to do these things more and daily in Christ. If Jesus is truthful for me, then I can strive to be more truthful in him. If Jesus is righteous for me, then I can strive to be more morally upright in him. And it is both in recognizing that Jesus has provided these things for me, and in seeking to imitate him in ever-increasing degrees that we can stand against the devil’s schemes.
The belt of truth—the virtue of integrity. Truth is reality. It is the actual state of things. Truth is that which corresponds to reality. So, if a statement represents how something actually is, it is truthful. God perfectly exemplifies this, and Christ as the perfect picture of God. He speaks how he is. Everything he says about himself is true, and what he does backs up what he says. In other words, God possesses perfect integrity.
The opposite of truth is falsehood. Falsehood is when reality and the words we say about it don’t match. Falsehood happens when word and deed contradict, when content and expression mis-align. And the product is deception. We present something to be true that is not, in fact, true. We deceive.
Thus, the belt of truth probably doesn’t just refer to the content of what we believe, but to the experience and expression of that truth in word and deed. The sense is “truthfulness,” wholeness, or integrity. God in Christ is who he says he is, and acts according to what he says and who he is. He is perfectly aligned. And Paul calls us to imitate God in this way—to have harmony and consonance between our words, our deeds, and our character. We ought not present ourselves to be who we really aren’t. We should not deceive, but we should have integrity.
Confession is one way we practice this. Confession maintains integrity by saying, “This is who I really am before the Lord.” Integrity doesn’t mean being perfect. It means believing and saying what is true about yourself. Notice how John puts it “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:8-10). Notice how he zeros in on truthfulness. Integrity is not necessarily having it all together—it is also acknowledging frankly and honestly when we don’t. This protects us from the schemes of the devil by 1) exposing sin where it still exists and 2) protecting us against accusations that are false.
The breastplate of righteousness—moral uprightness. The immediate question is whose righteousness? Ours or Christ’s? Because this is God’s armor, I would say, we put on God’s righteousness. Our righteousness is not primarily ours. We don the breastplate of righteousness every day when we remind ourselves of God’s provision of righteousness by faith in his Son. And thus we are protected from the schemes of the Devil! “You aren’t any good. You are still a sinner. You don’t deserve to go to heaven. You’ll probably be condemned and are deceiving yourself.” We can come back and say, “But it’s God’s righteousness, not mine.”
Yet, when we receive this righteousness, it inevitably works itself out in our daily walk. God’s righteousness is received by a living faith, and that living faith desires to work deeds of righteousness. Even though our obedience in this life is limping and imperfect, it is nonetheless true and sincere. Thus, our obedience becomes a partial yet increasing validation of the fact that we have indeed received his righteousness. And again, this protects us from the devil’s schemes by being a secondary proof of our good standing with him.
So, when the Devil tempts you to turn away from Jesus by pointing to your sins and your flaws and your imperfections, don’t try to convince him otherwise! He’s right! Instead, admit to yourself that you have sinned, and that you are striving to obey, and the Jesus has provided a sufficient righteousness for you.
The shoes of readiness—gospel-preparedness. The two questions that come to my mind are 1) readiness for what? And 2) how does the gospel of peace give us that readiness? To the first question, I think the context tells us pretty clearly—you’re preparing for battle, to stand against Satan’s schemes. And just like the shoes of a Roman soldier, which would often have big metal spikes through the bottom, would prepare the soldier to stand when the enemy army slammed against their shields, so also we must be prepared to meet the assaults of the enemy.
So, how does the gospel of peace then prepare us for the spiritual war? I think this is how it works. The gospel of peace means the good news that, in Christ, we are at peace with God and God is at peace with us. Rom 5:1, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” That reality has a stabilizing effect on our faith. When we plant our lives there and live in it, when we are firmly rooted and grounded in the gospel of peace, when we dig into it with our soldier’s cleats, it makes us stable and firm.
So, when Satan’s methods come along, we dig into the gospel and it gives us stability. He tempts us to sin, and we were ready for that temptation because we know the gospel of peace—“I’m at peace with God, I don’t need that sin.” He deceives us, and we are ready for the deception because we are at peace with God. The difficult providences of life wash over us and we are ready for them, for the gospel has taught us that we are at peace with God and that nothing can separate us from his love.
The shield of faith—trusting in the promises of God. Faith is trust. So, we must ask, trust in what? And I believe that it is trusting in the promises of God—believing in what God says to be true rather than in the deceitful schemes of the Devil. If the devil can get you to believe him, he has won. But if you can trust what God has said, then you have defeated him. “Extinguished the flaming darts of the evil one.” As he shoots temptations at us, we must hide behind the promises of God.
So, Satan tempts you to despair of entering heaven because you do not have enough righteousness, and we hide behind Romans 8:1, “There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” We are tempted to give up under withering trials and we hide behind Hebrews 12:7, “God is treating you as sons!” We are tempted to sin against God or against our neighbor, and we hide behind the promise of 1 Corinthians 10:13, “No temptation has overcome you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not allow you to be tempted beyond your ability but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it.”
The helmet of salvation—remembering God’s gracious saving work. This does not refer to getting saved but rather to remembering the salvation that you have already received. And how are we saved? Paul has had quite a bit to say about this in Ephesians 2:1-10. We are saved by grace through faith apart from works. And remembering our salvation keeps us from being tricked one the one hand into believing that we must earn our salvation and on the other hand into believing that we can simply sit back and coast through Christianity.
The sword of the Spirit—the Bible. God has put into our hand a mighty weapon. It has been commented that the sword is the only offensive weapon that Paul names. I think that’s true enough—you can only fight back against Satan’s methods with Scripture. And one of Satan’s most nefarious methods is to get you to put down the sword and pick up the twig of human philosophy. He wants to disarm you. That’s why he doesn’t want you to come to church to hear the word preached, why he doesn’t want you to read the Bible in the morning, why he doesn’t want you to memorize it. If you don’t have the Bible in you, then you are disarmed and useless in the fight. But if you have that mighty weapon, then you can cut the head off the head of any temptation he throws at you.
Conclusion
To sum up, the gospel itself is the armor for the battle. Paul is not calling us away from faith in Christ to some sort of works-righteousness. Yes, there is maturity. Yes, there is growth in grace. But, at bottom, he is calling us to trust in the gospel. Remember, he these things for us. He is the truth, he is our righteousness, he has accomplished the gospel of peace. He has given us steadfast and sure promises. He has accomplished salvation for us apart from our effort. He has put the word into our hands. We stand in the battle because of what he did, not because of our competency. So, stand in the might of his strength. That’s another way of saying, believe, believe, and believe! It’s all about Christ. When we do that, we will withstand the war and make it home.
In the intro I mentioned Bunyan’s work, The Jerusalem Sinner Saved. Satan accuses the church of not being worthy of Christ’s love, of tempting us to think that his righteousness is insufficient for us, and that because we are unworthy of his presence then we shouldn’t even try. Bunyan gives the perfect response of one who stands firm in the war:
“Thus Satan dealt with me,” says the great sinner, “when at first I came to Jesus Christ.” “And what did you reply?” Saith the tempted. “Why, I granted the whole charge to be true,” says the other. “And what, did you despair…?” “No,” saith he, “I said, I am Magdalene, I am Zaccheus, I am the thief, I am the harlot, I am the publican, I am the prodigal, and one of Christ’s murderers; yea, worse than any of these; and yet God was so far off from rejecting of me, as I found afterwards, that there was music and dancing in his house for me, and for joy that I was come home unto him.” “O blessed be God for grace.”
What do we do when Satan tempts us to despair? To give up the fight? I punch us out? We grant the whole charge. Then we point to Christ.