The Battle in Our Backyard

In all circumstances, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the spirit with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints and also for me. That words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains that I may declare it boldly as I ought to speak. This is the word of the Lord.

We hear a few things here and I'm sure we all, in Sunday school growing up, have had cartoons of various armour pieces that we had to colour in and that picture of a man standing in full uniform and full armour is one that is so memorable in our hearts and our minds. It's definitely for me. But we hear this morning that there is such a thing as spiritual warfare and that is the very thing that Paul is wanting to equip us in dealing with. Three things that I want us to focus on this morning. Firstly, the place of this battle.

Secondly, the enemy that we face. And then thirdly, the gospel armour that we are given. First point this morning is where this battle happens. The place of battle. And that is the spiritual realm or the kitchen table.

Paul says in verse 12 that this spiritual warfare is located in various places but defined by that last phrase, in the heavenly places. Last week after church, I was talking with someone about the sermon series and they mentioned a great little line that they once heard about the structure of the letter of Ephesians. We've sort of seen now Ephesians one to three as one half, and then we look at four to six as another half. He said, the first three chapters of Ephesians are centred in its location around the heavenlies. The second half, however, from four to six, is centred around the kitchenlies.

The day to day areas of the Christian life. The family, a marriage, our workplace. The mention of the heavenlies here in verse 12, however, casts our thoughts back to the great gospel declarations in chapters one and two, where Paul describes what happens to someone when they become a Christian. They are, Paul says, brought into fellowship with Jesus Christ in the heavenly places. Ephesians one verse three begins with the words, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

In chapter two verse five, we are told that even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved. Verse six, and has raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. And so by returning to that same language here in chapter six, we get bookends. We get an inclusion.

We get the end of a parenthesis where Paul has started explaining to us the reality of the Christian life. That our reality really is a reality of union with the Lord Jesus, that we are alive with Him in heaven already. It is as good as sealed in those terms. We are seated now with Him in the heavenlies. And yet, to talk about the heavenly places here in the context of a battle against Satan shows us that our reality is fraught with something else, a spiritual battle.

On the one hand, Paul can confidently tell us that our salvation is so real that we can think of ourselves as seated on thrones next to Christ in the heavenlies. We are already victorious with Him and yet he warns us that we cannot be triumphalistic. Even as our eyes are fixed on heaven, don't take your eyes off the enemy that lurks around your feet. That is why we need to remind our younger Christians that life may be much more difficult for them now when they've become Christian than it ever was before they were Christians. Because they have been brought into the fellowship of Jesus Christ, released from the spiritual bondage of sin and slavery to death, and yet they have also become the objects of the enemy's attacks.

So that while it is true that in Christ we are more than conquerors, it is also true that the great battle for our souls rages on in a way that can sometimes feel fatal. And this is what Paul is teaching about in this final great section of Ephesians. As our Lord Jesus taught us in Matthew 16 verse 18, He is the One that builds His church. And it's precisely because He builds His church in what was enemy occupied territory. Once that church is established, Jesus is saying that you can be sure that the enemy is going to persist in fighting back even though he has been defeated.

He is, as we read in Peter, a roaring lion, a wounded predator seeking to devour. And so there is a battle that begins as soon as you become a Christian. It is a spiritual battle. Paul says, fought in the heavenly places. But notice something else.

For the past few weeks, we've been talking about things like the marriage, things like the relationships between parent and children, things like our vocation, the things we do with our life, the calling we've been given. And in the context of the ordinariness of life, Paul brings on this famous passage on spiritual warfare. Why? You would think that when Paul was talking about the heavenly places in Ephesians one and two, this is the place, the heavenly places. But the reason Paul brings it to us is this, that the battle will not be fought in the mystical, cultish warfare involving demons and witchcraft.

This warfare takes place in the ordinary routines of our lives. So on the one hand, while the heavenlies has broken into our lives as Christians, while we experience the hope of glory now, similarly, it is the spiritual warfare of the heavenly places that breaks into, that touches, that infects our home and family life. Likewise, it is in the fellowship of the church that this battle takes place. The calls to unity in chapter four in Ephesians, it's in the relationship of the church, the fracturing of it that Satan wins. It's in our relationship to our children that Satan wins.

And so here is the first truth we need to understand this morning, that the mess of your family life, the mess of your marriage, your bitterness about work, the dissatisfaction you have with church, all of these things are spiritual. Stop thinking about fixing these things in natural ways. There may be lots of human frailty and weakness included in those situations, but the battle isn't a battle of flesh and blood, Paul says. It is a spiritual one. It takes place in the heavenlies to try and resist the in breaking power of the very same heavenly realities, which is your union with Christ.

There is a spiritual realm, friends, and it is sitting around your kitchen table. So if this is a battle, who is the enemy? Well, it's a tactician of divide and conquer. We've seen lots of news lately about spy balloons and spy drones being shot down. The reason for that is obviously that if you have an enemy, you send out spy balloons and planes to know your enemy.

And so for us, in the spiritual warfare, we need to know our enemy. Paul identifies him by name. He is the devil, he says in verse 11. That we are to stand against the schemes of the devil. Our enemy is not flesh and blood but spiritual forces of evil, verse 12 sums up.

Notice there that the force we come up against isn't necessarily the devil himself, it is the schemes of the devil. Why? Because the devil has been conquered by Christ. We don't fight Satan himself. We fight his plans, his wily tactics.

It is his schemes which are being worked out by the rulers, by the authorities, by the cosmic powers and the forces of evil. In other words, our resistance isn't against Satan, but his plans working around us. We have to go to other places in scripture to show us some of the types of strategies that Satan has and uses against God's church. For example, helpfully, we can go to the book of Acts and we can see the oppression and the resistance that happens against God's fledgling church. In some of the earliest chapters, in chapters four to six, we see three different types of attacks on the church.

Firstly, is the pressure brought on by the early church to conform to the world, to just look like the rest of the people around it. Number two, we see the pressure of compromising wholehearted devotion. Remember the story of Ananias and Sapphira? They say that they've brought all the money that they have from having sold a piece of land. And they lie to Peter.

They lie, Peter says, to the Holy Spirit and to the church, and they are struck down by God. There is a compromise of their wholehearted devotion. Number three is the pressure to cause tension and division in the fellowship of the church. We see Jewish Christians and Greek Christians having a fallout with one another because of the distribution of the mercy ministry to the widows and those in need. There are fractures inside already taking place.

So some of these are the consistent strategies that Satan uses against the church today, against us today, to make us compromise with the world. Who is experiencing perhaps in their workplace a line similar to, you can't stand with your exclusive claims about sex and sexuality. How dare you? Your job might be at stake if you hold on to that line. So we compromise and we keep our mouths shut to win their favour.

What about the pressure to compromise our consecration, our devotion to God? We are willing to give up big parts of our lives, but not all of our lives. We're happy to commit ourselves to great knowledge of the Bible, to rich theology, but we lack the zeal, the humility and the discipline to apply it to our very lives. That is not a consecration of your life to God. To live a pretentious life pretending to be one type of Christian on a Sunday and yet living very differently the rest of the week.

That is a compromise of your consecration to God. Your setting apartness for God. And finally, that famous tactic of Satan, division. He is the master of divide and conquer, to bring division into the church and then gleefully watching as the whole thing crumbles in. Another classic place to see Satan's tactics is Satan's temptation of Christ in places like Matthew four.

Satan tries to drive a wedge between Christ and God, the Father. He says to Him, I will give you the whole world if you will fall down and worship me. He says, turn these stones into bread. Feel the hunger inside your belly and turn these stones into bread. Throw yourself off the highest place and force the angels to rescue you.

And all of those things is to drive a wedge between Christ and His mission that He has come to do to please His Father in heaven. It is the same deception that he used with Adam and Eve because scarily, Satan against Jesus uses scripture. And Satan says to Jesus in a roundabout way, did God really say? Satan's tactics, his strategy is always to divide and conquer. To divide us against each other, us against our family, us against ourselves, and ultimately, to divide us against God.

And now, having spoken about the location in which the battle takes place and speaking about the nature of the enemy, Paul moves on to talk about the resources that the Christian has to resist, to push back against Satan. And that is our third and final point. And we don't have time to go into much detail about the various pieces of the armour mentioned in verses 14 to 17, but I wanna give a quick summary of what is probably being highlighted here in general and then how it's sort of touched on by the various pieces. Paul here doesn't talk about different separate items that have magical powers each. He's essentially talking about the hope in the gospel, that your trust and your faith in the news of the gospel gives you an armour to resist Satan.

And then he talks about these things. So when we read, you know, the helm of salvation or the breastplate of righteousness, we shouldn't read virtues like the spiritual gifts. These are external realities that God places over us. They're not connected with us. They are God's and He places it on us in the gospel.

So let's look at the belt of truth in verse 14. That refers to the objective reality of what the gospel has done. It's the truth of the gospel. The dependable reality that Christ has died for your sins, that He is the conqueror, that He has been raised for your life, that He is seated in the heavenlies right now and you are as good as there with Him. That is the truth of the gospel, your belt.

The breastplate of righteousness isn't a virtue of you having a morally good life. This is referring to the righteousness placed on you through faith. It covers your heart. It is the perfect righteousness of Christ that gives you the peace that His perfect obedience has satisfied God's requirements. It is the hope that you are accepted by God through Christ's obedience.

The readiness of the gospel, your shoes, your sandals, is the constant preparedness to resist Satan and his schemes because you have peace with God. Not a single one of his accusations that you aren't worthy of His love, that you have failed Him in a dreadful way, will cause you to stumble in these shoes. You are ready. You are prepared to resist those accusations by the peace of the gospel. The shield of faith in verse 16 is a reference to those big Roman door shields, the two by four foot shields that they used to carry with them in battle.

They used to interlink and create these amazing shelters against arrows that were fired against them. It's exactly what this shield of faith will do. It extinguishes the flaming arrows of Satan. Satan through his accusations, Satan through his schemes, will fill your hearts and minds with all skeptical, horrible thoughts that burn inside you. I should hold on to this bitterness against someone in my church.

How dare they treat me like that? Can it be that I am truly forgiven? Will Christ really accept me on that final day? These are the fiery arrows that burn in our hearts. Against these things, we are given faith which causes us to look to Christ again and again and again and His work on our behalf to resist those assaults against our souls.

The helmet of salvation goes onto the head, verse 17, and once again, it is the hope and the joy of God's salvation in Jesus Christ that will guard your mind. And then finally, the only offensive weapon given to us is the sword of the spirit, and it is identified as being the word of God. Like Jesus, who used the words of God to resist the temptations of Satan, so the truths contained in scripture not only parry and deflect Satan's attempts, they can deal effectively with thrusting back against the enemy. The power of the word comes, Paul says, from the Holy Spirit who inspired those words and thankfully gives us the power to understand and apply it to our lives. So not only does He give it, not only has He produced it, He is the One that actively, continually works in us to understand it and know it.

And so fitted with all these armour pieces, we have the realities found in our faith. These realities are produced in us by the truth of the gospel, causes us to defend against the assaults on our own minds, on our families, on our workplaces. But notice how we are to use this armour. As someone who loves fantasy stories of, you know, the Lord of the Rings and knights in shining armour, I like imagining this armour. I love imagining the types of beasts that you could conquer in this armour.

But read this passage and what is the overall verb that Paul gives us when we have this armour on? He's willing to take a stab. What's the verb that we have here? Repeat it several times. Stand.

We are to stand. With such a magnificent set of armour on, you might think, what an anticlimax. You should be out there slaying beasts. You should be invading the darkness, pressing onward. But we are told to simply stand.

But that's why knights in shining armour will always remain a fantasy story. Because in real battles, the ones who win it are simply the ones who remain standing at the end of the day. Battle weary, worn out, they are simply the ones who made it out alive. One of the most glorious evidences of the Christian gospel, friends, is that at the end of the day, the church will simply be the church that remains standing. The evidence of the gospel's power is that the church withstands the daily, the weekly attacks of the evil one against it, and it continues simply to bear faithful witness to Jesus Christ who is the conqueror.

Friends, the battle against Satan isn't fought with a bit of holy water and a crucifix. It's not fought somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of surface paradise on a Friday night. Satan's arrows are fired in the marriages that exist in this church. The battle is in your family life, your workplace relations, the way that you view your calling in God. And you and I must constantly withstand it, strengthened by the objective reality of the gospel so that as the dawn breaks at that final day, we'll be left standing while many others have fallen.

Stand firm then, Paul says, in the strength of Christ. Finally, the thing that kind of holds all this armour together, because you can imagine, you know, the various bits and pieces on you, the thing that is sort of the interlinking chain holding it all together, for Paul, is the presence of prayer. Have a look at those final verses, verses 18 to 20. And he asks for the church in Ephesus to remember two things. Please remember to pray for each other.

Supplication means requests of God, to request God to protect and to save and to spare and to heal. And then secondly, to pray to remember the preaching of the word, for God to protect that preaching. Why these two things? Because these are the two resources that the Lord places into the hands of His people. We need to pray that the gospel brings those objective realities of the armour to the people who are dying in the battlefield.

And Paul says, pray for me that I may open my mouth boldly to bring them the truth of those realities. And equipped by these realities given to us by the gospel of truth, the gospel of righteousness, of peace, and of power, we stand strong in Christ's army. Ultimately, we have the only hope of resisting Satan through this watchfulness and prayerfulness and bold claiming of what Christ has done for us. That's why Paul begins this passage in verse 10 with the words, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. We can only be strong because He is mighty.

We just listened to that hymn before I got up here. The battle belongs to the Lord. It belongs to Jesus Christ. He is the conqueror. He is the warrior.

He is the victor. He did what we could not do. He resisted the flaming arrows of Satan in the wilderness. He stood firm against his attacks in the Garden of Gethsemane. He took the enemy's accusations against us to the cross.

He paid the penalty. He paid that penalty which the enemy rightly accused us of in the face of God. And in doing so, Christ has united forever God and His people and His people to each other. Christ, Paul says, has broken down the dividing wall of hostility. And so it is true that for now, we battle in enemy occupied territory.

Yet, one by one, through the gospel of peace, people are filling into the ranks of the army of the Lord who is mighty. The same gospel that has brought us peace with God causes us to resist Satan, to stand powerfully vigilant against his attacks on our church, on our family, and on our own thoughts. And so brothers and sisters, friends, put on that armour. Keep on that armour. Put your trust in the effectiveness of that armour and pray and stay vigilant.

Stay on guard for our church. Stay on guard for our families and serve Him with all your lives. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for some of these very visceral, very clear pictures that we can hang all sorts of hooks on. Help us to hang the right thoughts on those hooks.

Help us to understand that we are not the ones that need to scavenge around for these pieces of equipment that we can sometimes have on and sometimes not. Lord, you simply tell us that faith in the gospel, hope in the gospel will place these things on us. Help us to stand firm in our hope. Help us to understand how the gospel against the various attacks, whether over or under or around us, the various attacks in its various angles, Lord, can resist and push back against Satan, that we can deflect and that we can be protected against those onslaughts. Father, I pray that where there is weakness in our families, where we are feeling the penetration of Satan, Lord, help us to humble ourselves under Your mighty hand that we will be sober minded and vigilant.

Help us to resist the devil and be sure that he will flee from us. Give us spiritual eyes, Lord, to see the spiritual warfare. Give us the truth of Your word that is with us constantly. Give us the discipline to know it. Give us the willingness to go to those bible study nights when it's been a tough day, to come to Sunday worship when it's been a long week, to hear, to remember, to proclaim that in Jesus Christ, we have won, that the battle belongs to our Lord.

In His mighty strength, we pray. Keep us standing firm. Amen.