This morning we begin a new part of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. You could call it the grand climax. I love Ephesians because of the picture that it gives of the church. The church, blessed by God, united, holy, and now, finally, in Ephesians 6:10-17, the church militant. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.
10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14 Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. 15 As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. 16 With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
After all the blessings that Paul has listed in his letter so far, all the things that God has done to bless his church, it’s only natural that we should be strong, be very strong in all this strength of God’s power.
But all too often churches feel, “woe is me. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the skills. We don’t have enough people.” But Paul isn’t concerned here with churches finding financial strength or strength in human skills or strength in huge numbers. He wants them to find God’s strength.
And, in our passage for today, the reason that we need God’s strength is that we live in the middle of a huge battlefield, a cosmic battlefield. It’s the ancient battle of Satan’s rebellion against God.
Have you ever come home from work and said ‘It’s a battle out there”? Well, it is.
And we are sorely tempted to be spiritually lazy, to say that it doesn’t matter whether I am connecting with God regularly in prayer. It’s too much work to dig into the scriptures to thoroughly know and understand God’s ways. It doesn’t matter whether I’m close to the other members of the church. I’m just going to take your rest.
And Paul says, No! We can’t afford that! You need to have all God’s equipment on, the full armor of God. It’s a battle. You need to be ready. Your fellow soldiers need you to be in place to support them. This is no time to relax.
Imagine, once football season comes again, a football player running out on the field without his helmet on. Of course the official would stop the game instantly. Such a player wouldn’t have a chance! But we Christians all too easily think we can be equally sloppy and haphazard about our preparations for life in a world that is a battleground between God and Satan.
When we were in high school I went out for basketball and my little brother, Alan, went out for football and wrestling. He was a very good wrestler. He pinned every heavyweight in our league. They must have felt doomed to have to face him. But then he got a chip in his elbow and started to wear an elastic brace on his bad elbow. And what did his opponents do? They started working on his bad arm. That’s what happens to Christians who go out into the world with only part of God’s armor on.
Allow one week spot, and that’s where the devil will attack you.
My brother found an easy solution. He decided that the brace would do him more good on his strong arm, so he moved it over to his strong arm and his opponents started working on it instead and wasted their efforts. But the devil isn’t fooled that easily.
You say, ‘where’s the battle?’
Look at the mess in the Middle East. I have met Israelis who seemed like very nice people and I can say the same about Palestinians. Ask anybody there if the ongoing cycle of retaliation is a good situation and they will all say it is horrible. But it just keeps happening. Ask anyone on either side and they can give you a long list of reasons that they are right and the other side is wrong. And much of what they say is true. But it is unbalanced, one-sided, laced with half-truths. Attitudes and beliefs have been built into both sides that blind them to the road to peace. Someone always stirs things up. What’s happening is so irrational. What’s happening is so tragic. There is deeply entrenched evil on both sides in the conflict. I believe that is something of the work of the spiritual rulers and authorities that Paul is talking about. They work in the darkness of ignorance to destroy God’s beautiful creation.
We need to be fully outfitted, spiritually, in order to pray for them with power and to prevent such cycles of retribution from beginning here.
And, just so we don’t get all inflated with how smart we are and how dumb they are, remember the disgrace of slavery and racism in our own country. Remember how those who supported slavery developed a whole system of ideas to make excuse for slavery, even to say that it was a good thing, because the whites were smarter and the blacks just weren’t capable of being free. It’s been painfully hard and long to purge those demonic thoughts from our culture, but we have made a lot of progress.
Look at another social problem in our society, entrenched poverty. We do ‘scientific’ studies with detailed statistical analysis. We pour a lot of money into a needy neighborhood, assuming that people will do the logical thing and take the chance to move ahead. And those who have done it have been meticulous in the past to keep God out of the process. And we’ve poured billions of dollars down scientific drains because we have neglected the spiritual dimension to poverty and ignorance and crime. And I’m happy when a purely secular program feeds a hungry person. They really are fed. But the deeper solution has to touch people in their souls. There are spiritual bondages; there is blindness that holds them down. There may be spiritual blindness and ignorance in us, as well that keeps them down. Often the hopeless poor have distorted beliefs about themselves, about what constitutes the good life and how to get it. The world will be changed when we do the practical things and also the spiritual things, of prayer and proclaiming the truth of God’s love. That’s how the battle can be won.
And God’s people need to be equipped to do that hard work of spiritual discernment and prayer and loving service to break those strongholds of Satan, where God’s children are so trapped.
Look at the church. People come together with the best of intentions. And I’m thankful that we have moved into a time of relative peace, but any church will have conflicts that just seem to come out of the blue. Rumors get started. Misunderstandings develop. People divide up into parties. Satan’s number one priority is to neutralize the church.
You may remember the story of the little tailor who was working at his bench one day when he took a swat at the flies and killed seven with one blow. He was so impressed with himself that he sewed the phrase, “I killed seven with one blow,” onto his belt and set out into the world for adventures.
I forget the details, but somehow he came to be walking down the road with a little bird in one pocket and some cheese in the other. And he met a giant and challenged the giant to a strength contest. He bragged to the giant that he could squeeze water from a stone. He picked up a stone and challenged the giant to squeeze water out of it. The giant squeezed with all his giant strength, but couldn’t get one drop. Then the little tailor took out his piece of cheese and squeezed out a few drops. The giant was amazed. He challenged the giant to throw a rock as far as he could. The giant did it, and threw it really far. But then the little tailor took the bird out of his pocket and threw it in the air. And it just kept right on going until it was out of sight. The giant was defeated. He was a clever little tailor.
The next day he saw two giants coming, so he climbed up in a tree so they wouldn’t see him. But they sat down for a nap right under his tree. Quietly he dropped a pebble on one of them. He woke up with a start and complained to his partner, “Quit poking me, I’m trying to sleep.” They didn’t know the little tailor was up there in the tree.
They dozed a few more minutes, and then he dropped another stone. This time the giant was angry and they exchanged some strong words.
They dozed again, and he dropped another stone. And pretty soon he had those two giants beating each other to a pulp, with no idea who was really dropping those stones on them.
Do you think the devil sometimes drops critical thoughts into the minds of Christians? “Well, who does she think she is?” “He looks good on the outside, but I’m sure he’s really a hypocrite.” “When he disagreed with me it was because he really doesn’t like me.” Let a few thoughts like that be planted in your minds and the church is destroyed. That’s the devil’s work.
It’s easy to label other people as ‘the problem.’ But our text for this morning says that our warfare is not against people, against flesh and blood. God doesn’t want us hating anyone. Our warfare is against distorted ideas, the hurtful lies planted by the devil, destructive tactics that have taken hold of people around us. And the solution is not to hurt them, but to love them and correct their distorted thinking, not to destroy them. And yes, of course everyone is ultimately responsible for their own words and thoughts and actions. But Jesus was able to see that we are also very much victims of the evil in this world, and that gave him amazing compassion.
If you can’t see this battle, look inside yourself. Many of us carry crippling messages in our heads, messages that we are inadequate or that we can do without God or that we will meet our deepest needs by watching more television or drinking more or working excessively, sleeping excessively, shopping excessively. The devil loves to take any one of God’s good gifts and twist it into a destructive obsession in our lives, anything to pull us away from finding wholeness, joy and freedom in God himself.
It’s a battle out there. It’s a battle in here (in my heart). God provides everything we need to hold our ground, to stand firm. But we need to take the effort to put it on, to make it our own. And if we don’t, the devil will blind us, lull us to sleep, trick us into fighting the wrong battles, anything to keep us from experiencing the blessings God has for us.
In the coming weeks we will go through each of the pieces of armor that God offers us to make us strong, so that we can stand our ground in this battleground we live in. As we do that, I invite you to take a personal inventory. Ask yourself, “Am I taking advantage of the strength God offers me?” Am I using the full armor of God? It is God’s will for us all to be strong in him, to be able to stand.
