The Battle You Cannot See - Series: STAND AGAINST - Ephesians 6

I think the only thing worse than losing a fight is losing a fight that you didn't know that you were in.

Right?

Sometimes you know when there's something going on, you're like, wait a what is happening here?

Nobody likes to lose.

That's not fun.

We'd much rather win.

That's what we're taught all the time.

But if we're to lose a fight, we didn't even know that was going on.

We would say, hey, why didn't somebody clue me in?

Why didn't you tell me about what was happening so that I could have paid attention and I would have done something different?

That's a very dangerous place to be.

Because if you know that you're in a fight or you're going towards a battle, you can plan for it, you can pay attention, you can understand what is happening around you, you can pay attention to your surroundings and figure out somewhat what is going on.

But if you don't even realize there's a battle, what we'll do is we'll mistake what is happening all around us.

We'll blame the wrong people, we'll use the wrong weapons, we'll use our energy in areas where we should be directing it somewhere else.

And that's the tone that the Apostle Paul takes at the end of the book of Ephesians.

We have a new study that's starting today.

If you have your Bible, I encourage you to get that out to the book of Ephesians.

We're going to be in the last chapter of that book.

We're going to skip until the end.

Ephesians chapter 6.

Ephesians 6 · chapter mention

In the first five chapters, what Paul does is he's riding to the church in that city of Ephesus, is that he tells them about who we are in Christ and what it looks like to live a life that is fully devoted to following after Jesus.

In the pages that precede, coming up to Ephesians chapter 6, Paul talks about grace and unity and forgiveness and marriage and family and work that he's to walk in love and in wisdom and live lives worthy of whose name that we put on ourselves as Christians.

Ephesians 6 · chapter mention

Then as he reaches the conclusion of this letter, he says that there are something else that we need to make sure that we don't miss.

That we need to clearly understand, that there is a battle that is happening all around us, and oftentimes that battle goes beyond what we can see with our eyes.

For the next two months, we're going to walk through these final words in this book of Ephesians that talks about what the Bible calls spiritual warfare.

We know how to fight a physical fight, or we know how to fight an emotional fight, not always fairly, but we've been there before.

What we're going to talk about together as the church is how we deal with the emo the spiritual battles that are going on all around us, when sometimes we can feel the weight of those, and other times we can't see exactly what's causing the thing that's causing us pain in front of us to happen, but we know its ultimate source comes from our enemy.

So I want to read this whole passage for us today, Ephesians chapter 6.

Ephesians 6 · chapter mention

I'm going to start in verse 10 and read through verse 20.

We're going to focus on the first couple verses of that, and over the course of the next really two months, we're going to walk through paragraph.

It says, Finally be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

Put on the whole armor of God and for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm.

Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness by the gospel of peace.

In all circumstances, take up the shield of faith, which you can extinguish, 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 power and supplication.

To that end keep alert, with all perseverance, making supplications for all the saints, and also for me.

That words given to me in the opening of my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, and that I may declare it boldly as I ought to speak.

In these closing thoughts to the letter to the church in Ephesus, and in turn to us, Paul talks an awful lot about the mystery of the gospel, the mystery of Jesus and what he has done.

When we hear mystery, we think we have to solve something and come up with a conclusion, or maybe we have to come up with an answer that nobody else figured out before.

But this isn't this is not the type of mystery that Paul is talking about here.

When he says mystery, he talks about something that was once concealed, that is now revealed.

That is this mystery of the gospel and of what Jesus has done for us, so we can know fully what God is doing and what Jesus has done for us.

In this passage, as Paul wraps up, he says, Finally be strong.

That sounds like pretty normal generic advice, doesn't it?

We hear that all the time.

Stand strong, you have this, I believe in you, you can do it.

Say positive things to yourself, and you'll cause things to happen to them, to yourself.

Oftentimes, when someone is going through something difficult, we say, say, stay strong.

Or if you get knocked down, get back up again, dig deeper, push harder, find something inside of yourself, you can do this.

We've heard that before.

Honestly, we've said that before.

We've also felt how empty that can feel at times.

And we pay attention closely to what God has said through Paul right here in Ephesians.

That is not what he said.

Paul says, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

That changes everything.

Where does our strength come from?

Not rhetorical.

Alright, where does our strength come from?

It comes from the Lord.

Our strength comes from the Lord.

If it comes from the Lord, does it come from ourselves?

No, it doesn't come from ourselves.

Let me give you an example.

At home, I have a collection of weights, not as heavy as I want them to be, but I use them at time to exercise and to feel better moving around.

And a couple years ago, I got this set of block weights.

They're adjustable from five pounds all the way up to 50.

When I become a big strong man, I can expand those to go up to 70 or 90 pounds, but I'm not there yet.

But as I've got one set of dumbbells, and I can go from five pounds in increments of two and a half pounds all the way up to 50.

What I find is that those weights are super helpful because when you do different exercises that work different types of muscles, you need different types of weights.

And this one set of weights sits in one place instead of having a whole rack to take up spaces in my house.

When you're doing things with your shoulders out to the side, I don't know about the rest of you, but my shoulders are relatively weak, at least in relation to the rest of the muscles that I have.

So I have to use relatively light weight.

And if I use too heavy of weight when I'm lifting and when I'm exercising, what's gonna happen?

I'm gonna hurt myself.

I'm gonna get injured.

Now there's ways that we can what what we call progressive overload, and you can build muscles up and you can get stronger and you can work the different parts and do slightly different exercises with different weights.

But there's some things like our shoulder, my shoulder is just not as strong as my bicep or my chest, so I can do stronger weights with that.

But if I grab a weight that I can do a squat with and I try to do an overhead press with, I'm gonna hurt myself.

I'm gonna cause injury instead of causing myself to get stronger.

I recognize that there's this balance that we have between pushing yourself and getting stronger so that you can lift more, or both either in weight or in repetition.

But the weaker muscles that are in our body are only gonna get so strong.

They're only designed to do certain things.

Sure, you can be diligent about diet and exercise and working out, but eventually there's gonna come a weight that I'm not able to lift.

It doesn't matter how motivated I am, it doesn't matter how much I tell myself, come on, you got this, you can do it.

Eventually that weight exceeds the strength that I have to move it.

And when I try to lift too much, I will injure myself.

I think along these lines is where we often make mistakes when it comes to our spiritual development and our faith, is that we assume that our Christian faith works the same way.

If I just work those muscles enough, I'll get stronger.

Now, there are disciplines that we are to practice, studying the Bible, coming together, praying.

Silence and solitude is a classic spiritual discipline that, quite frankly, we, myself included, ignore a lot.

But as we do those more, those do help us to grow in our faith in the strength that we have.

But too often we think that the goal is to become strong enough by the things that we do.

If I pray enough, if I read enough, if I attend enough, if I serve enough, if I learn enough, maybe eventually I'll become spiritually strong enough to deal with whatever comes to me.

But notice Paul does not say here, he doesn't say become strong for the battle.

He doesn't say here, work hard so you can build up your strength and be ready for what's happening.

What he says here, right in that verse that's right in front of you in verse 10, he says, be strong in the Lord and in his might.

Our strength does not come from our power.

The source of that matters.

We are called to stand strong in the Lord.

It's very simple, it seems very plain, but it's very foundational for everything that we believe and everything that we're going to do.

Our strength as believers comes from the Lord.

Before Paul goes on to tell us about the belt or a breastplate or a shield or a helmet or a sword, he reminds us of the source of all of that protection.

He reminds us of the source of all of those offensive weapons.

He reminds us that the source of the power stands in God and in God alone, not in our will, not in our discipline, not in our power.

It doesn't begin with us, it begins with God.

And he reminds us of the battle that we are actually in.

Verse 11 says, Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.

Paul has this idea in his head that our culture doesn't always know what to do with.

There is a real enemy that we have in this world.

And Paul doesn't describe evil merely as an idea.

He doesn't speak as though the problem in the world is simply human beings that make poor choices.

Paul talks about the devil, the great deceiver, the author of all lies.

He talks about schemes.

He mentions the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil.

No, I want us to be careful here because I don't think as faithful Christians we have to see a demon hiding behind every inconvenience.

You got a flat tire, maybe it was just a nail in the road, maybe it wasn't Satan.

Your Wi-Fi meant down.

Satan may have attacked your router, but he might have more important things to do than to inconvenience you by having our Wi-Fi go down.

What Paul does tell Christians is that there is an opposition to us in this world, and it is not things that we can see.

It is not things that we can tangibly touch and put our hands on.

Our enemy is much more crafty than that.

Our enemy is real, evil is real, temptation is real, deception is real.

And Paul teaches us here is that the enemy always has schemes.

That word matters because it lets us know that he has a plan.

He is crafty.

He is always trying to come up with a way to entrap us in a snare somewhere and get us caught.

Satan's work all throughout scripture and all throughout history, we can even see him working outside of the things that we read about talking that the Bible talks about.

His work is often deceptive before it's dramatic.

The dramatic gets our attention, but Satan comes in and he wants to deceive us and to take our eyes off of the thing that is most important.

If we go all the way back to the beginning, well, just after the very beginning anyway, in Genesis chapter 3, we have this event that we call the fall, where sin came into the world, where Adam and Eve were in the garden, and everything was perfect and right, and the relationship with God was perfect, and there was nothing either between them as man and woman, and there was nothing between them and God to hinder their relationship or their communication or anything that was going on.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

And God gave them one rule: do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because you can't handle it.

Now God didn't quite give them that because, but what I find in life is sometimes God gives me a directive and he doesn't give me the because.

And just because he leaves out the because doesn't give me an excuse to violate what God has told me to do.

Because there are consequences that come.

Back in the garden, the serpent doesn't begin by knocking down the garden or setting it on fire.

He said, Did God actually say that you shouldn't do that?

What our enemy does is that he introduces doubt, he twists the truth, he suggests that God is withholding something good from us, that we could achieve it on our own if we disregard what he has to say.

That is how temptation often works.

Sin rarely walks up and says, I'm gonna destroy my marriage today.

I'm gonna wreck my integrity, I'm gonna numb my conscience so I don't have any feelings.

Or I'm gonna intentionally move farther away from God.

What sin usually does is it offers something that looks good now and it hides what it will cost us later.

This is why we need to know that there is a battle going on around us, and I think most of a ret uh most of us recognize that there is a battle, but we need to recognize what type of battle it is.

Like I said in the beginning, it's one thing to lose a fight, it's a whole nother thing to lose a fight that you don't even know is going on.

Paul has this reminder for us that the battle that we face primarily as believers in Jesus is a spiritual battle.

And if it's a spiritual battle, we need to ask ourselves: who is it that we are fighting?

Verse 12 reminds us and tells us about this spiritual warfare that's going on around us.

It says, For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood.

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood.

Now, constantly, what you and I do is that we fight against other people.

Sometimes physically, other times emotionally.

We fight against other people, and we think that other people are our enemy.

And what Paul reminds us here is that they are not our primary enemy.

Our enemy goes beyond that.

Now he might be helping to direct their actions, but the person that's right across from us is not our arch enemy.

People are not the enemy, but that does not mean that people never hurt us because we all know they do.

A lot of the hurts that we deal with in this life come from people.

Sometimes those people, that people is me.

People can lie about you, people can betray you, people can abuse power, people can do terrible things, and let me say this there are evil people in the world.

Period.

Now, nobody is beyond the redeeming love of Jesus, but there are evil people that exist that Satan has a hold of, and he is driving their behavior.

But what Paul tells the Ephesian church is that if we reduce the battle to the person standing in front of you, you're misunderstanding what is actually happening and you're missing the bigger picture of everything that is going on.

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood.

That means that the person that votes differently than you is not your enemy.

That coworker that makes your life difficult because they don't pull their weight and they're always chiming in on the work that you do is not your ultimate enemy.

Your neighbor who doesn't follow the rules of your neighborhood or doesn't believe what you believe is not your enemy.

Your family member that you can't seem to get along with, or maybe they're the ones that can't get along with anybody else, they are not your enemy.

That person that is caught in sin is not your enemy.

Jesus died for that person.

Jesus died for the sin of every person that you will ever meet, whether they recognize that and accept that gift of salvation or not.

Jesus has afforded everyone the opportunity to have our sin, to have our hurt, to have our shame, to have our brokenness healed and put back together.

One of the enemy's most effective schemes may be convincing Christians to spend all of our other all of our energy fighting people that Jesus told us to share the love of Jesus with.

That happens very quickly sometimes.

Someone says something that we disagree with, and then suddenly they are the problem.

You know what?

We can go a lot farther, faster in this life if we learn to disagree better, to disagree with grace and with love and with truth.

Because in our world, as cultural issues get heated, we start treating other people like the problem.

Our relationship gets strained, and instead of trying to see that person made in the image of God, we are saying they are the one that is rising up against us.

I believe what Paul is telling us here is that we are aiming for the wrong target when we do that, because the battle is deeper than that.

If we fight physical, if we fight spiritual battles with physical weapons, we are not going to win.

We're gonna hurt people and lose sight of the real enemy because you can't hate someone into the kingdom of God.

You cannot insult someone into repentance, you cannot crush somebody in an argument and call it a spiritual victory.

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that should change the way that Christians, you and I, and every one of us who follows after Jesus has every difficult conversation.

If this battle were simply us against the other person, maybe I could strain, maybe I could train to do better.

That's like the old story, right?

If a bear is chasing you, I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun Daniel.

Daniel's chasing me, I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to knock Daniel down and run, right?

But that is not it.

My battle is not against another person that I have to be smarter than or craftier than or to outrun them.

Our battle is against the enemy and the spiritual forces of evil that are all around us.

We think maybe I could have been smarter or more persuasive or more disciplined or overpowered them, but Paul reminds us that that is not the battle that is in front of us.

And if the battle is spiritual, then ordinary human strength is not gonna be enough.

We're not gonna have the tools in our own power to do that.

That's why verse 10 reminds us before everything else, be strong in the Lord and in his might.

This call that we have is to stand strong in the Lord because there will be moments in your life when you're facing difficulty and it feels manageable.

You feel like, you know what, I've done this before, I've got this.

I can do this on my own, I don't need any help.

And then it grows.

And the weight gets heavier, and then we get injured, and then we start limping, then we start favoring one side for the other.

Temptation, fear, grief, anger, discouragement, doubt, more pressure, more conflict, another thing you didn't see coming.

If your entire strategy is I need to try harder, you're gonna be exhausted all the time.

Because the strength doesn't come from me or from you.

When we say, I just need to try harder, eventually we're gonna find that there's a weight that we can't carry.

And that there's a weight that we were never designed to carry.

And my friends, that is not failure.

That is recognition of reality.

There are burdens that you were never meant to carry on your own.

There are battles that God does not want to leave you alone to fight.

What Paul doesn't do is he's not shaming people who are weak and telling them to toughen up, get your act together, figure it out.

He points weak people towards a strong God.

And my friends, that is good news.

Because the strength of the Christian life is not measured by how impressive I think that I am or what I can accomplish or what we can do together.

It is not my faith that gives faith power.

It is the object of our faith that gives it power.

And the object of our faith is Jesus, and he is the one that sustains us.

Listen to the language that Paul uses.

He says, Not your armor, but put on what?

The armor of God.

Not in your strength, not in your power, not in your might, but in whose?

In God's might.

Not in your ability to out-scheme the great schemer, but it is God that provides you what you need to stand.

That is why our study is called stand against.

One of the words that is repeated often in this big paragraph of Paul is that word stand.

Verse 11 says, so that you might be able to stand.

Verse 13 says that you may be able to withstand the evil day and having done all to stand firm.

Verse 14 continues, it says, Stand therefore.

Paul is not picturing Christians cowering and hiding from the enemy.

He's picturing us up on our feet, charging after him.

And that is the life that God has called for us to live.

He pictures Christians standing in the power of God, steady and prepared and rooted in the power of God, not afraid, not obsessed with the enemy, and also not looking at the wrong enemy, not looking behind demons at every difficult moment, but also not naive.

Because there is a battle that is right in front of us.

There is an enemy, there is spiritual opposition, and there are often times that we can't properly articulate with words all of the things that Satan and his angels are doing against us.

But there is spiritual opposition, and we are not strong enough to take it on by ourselves, and God isn't asking us to.

And for that we should be thankful.

This very clear reminder that we are to stand strong in the Lord, in his strength, in his might, in his wisdom, in his timing.

And that's why, over the course of our study together, this is the foundation of all that we're going to talk about.

Standing strong in the Lord.

And when we recognize where that strength comes from, who provides us the armor, then we'll talk about truth and righteousness and readiness that comes from the gospel and faith and salvation and the word of God and prayer.

But before we pick up any of those pieces, let us remember where Paul begins.

Not with the armor, not with the enemy, not even with the battle.

He begins where we should always begin.

He begins with the Lord.

Lord, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might.

I wonder what place that you have in your life right now where you are carrying a weight, not by his power, but by yours.

Perhaps you've been telling yourself, I can handle it.

I just need to push harder.

I just need to get stronger.

What if today comes the moment where the most faithful thing, the most faithful thing that you can admit is that I am not strong enough to carry this.

And when you recognize that, my friends, it is a good thing.

Because if when I try to lift something that is beyond my ability, I'm gonna get hurt.

I'm not gonna do it well.

When we recognize that we are not strong enough for this battle that is before us, that is a good thing because Paul never told us that we had to be.

The battle is bigger than you, but it is not bigger than God.

Don't stand in your own wisdom, don't stand in your own strength, don't stand in your own ability, but stand strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.

If you try to get your strength from anywhere else, it will fail.

And failure hurts and it becomes embarrassing and it makes us hide and it makes us want to remove ourselves from Christian community and go, I just don't have it in me anymore.

Let me tell you, if you meet you, if you have made a profession of faith in Jesus, the promise that we are given as believers is the Holy Spirit of God living in you.

And it is true that you don't have the power, but you have the power within you in the Holy Spirit of God.

And it is time for us to tap into that power and to use it to drive all that we do as we stand strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.

May we find that encouraging and truthful and invigorating.

Can I pray for you?

Let's pray.

Father God, thank you for what you have done and for how you teach us.

You've given us your word and you have encouraged us, and God, that you challenge us all along the way.

Father, help us when we open up your word, which is the true inspired, trustworthy voice of the Creator of the universe.

Father, help your word to transform us from the inside out.

God, renew our hearts and renew our minds.

May our truth only come from you.

Father, help us to know your voice so well that when the enemy tries to lie and to deceive us, we'll go, that is not true.

That is not who I am going to follow.

Father, help us to stand in the power of your love and your strength and your might together as the body of Christ, the church, the called out ones, to be a bright light shining in a dark world.

In Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.