Standing in the Evil Day | Ephesians 6:10-20

Well, I invite you to open your Bibles to the passage that we just read in Ephesians chapter six.

And would you pray with me one more time?

Let's ask the Lord to help us as we study his word.

Holy Spirit, come speak through me and open our eyes that we may behold wondrous things from your law.

Lord, in this moment we put away every distraction, every hindrance in our minds that keeps us from studying your truth, and we pray, Lord, that you would do a work of grace in our hearts now and sanctify us in the truth.

Your word is truth.

We pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.

Well, I wanted to do uh uh a series of sermons for you, a series of studies on the believer's armor from Ephesians chapter six.

And the reason why I want to do this is because three reasons.

Let me give them to you, is I think Satan is attacking today in our generation, unlike anything we have ever seen, especially in the West.

Especially in the West.

Uh during in in church history, whenever there's a great work of God, there is also great activity of the devil in the spiritual forces of evil.

When you read the pages of the gospels, you see this.

You see Jesus encountering all sorts of demon-possessed people that are saying all sorts of things, and Jesus is casting out demons.

The apostles are casting out demons, and demons are afflicting people.

And whenever there is a mighty work of God, there is a mighty opposition of Satan and the demonic realm.

I believe that demon possession is real, and you should too, because it's in the pages of Scripture.

What does that mean that somebody is possessed by a demon?

It's when an unbeliever, their faculties and their actions are essentially controlled by evil forces, demons.

There was a woman on a train over in Charlotte, and she was stabbed to death by a fellow behind her.

And I don't know if y'all read anything from the news, but he said, uh, the guy who stabbed her said, it felt like I was acting outside myself.

Did any of y'all read this?

And as a pastor, I said, that is demonic activity taking place.

It is overt demonic activity.

And you're seeing now mothers killing their own children.

There is no other explanation for that than that the devil and his demonic realm are at work.

So we're seeing that.

We're seeing the rise of Islam in our nation, which I believe is a demonic religion.

It is controlled by evil forces, and it is on the rise, and most importantly, Satan is marshaling his attacks at the church because we are his enemy.

Yes, he has his way with the unbelievers, but he seeks to oppose the advance of the gospel.

And whenever you have God doing a work in a church or a group of churches, what you are going to have is great opposition.

It's inevitable.

Jesus says that he will build his church and the gates of Hades will not stand against it.

That means that the church is advancing over enemy territory.

So every inch of advancement will be encumbered by pushback from the forces of evil.

And so we need to be ready.

Second reason is that too many Christians are ignorant of the devil and his schemes.

Evangelicalism is a mile wide and an inch deep.

And Christians have no idea about the enemy that they are facing or his stratagems, his schemes, and how he seeks to deceive and tempt and destroy.

I grew up in Texas, which is Comanche country.

I literally grew up, our family farm up in the Panhandle was where a famous battle was fought between the Comanche and some Texas Rangers.

But the Comanche were some of the fiercest warriors this world has ever seen.

They were called the Spartans of the Plains.

And what would happen is after the Civil War, guys would graduate from West Point and they would learn basic tactics and strategies and they would send them out west to fight the Indians.

And inevitably, what would happen is that they would underestimate their opponents.

They would underestimate the tactics of the Apache and the Comanche.

And it was said that whatever you thought that the Comanche would not do, that's how they would attack you.

If you thought that you were safe because they were a long distance from water, well, they knew where the water holes were on the high plains and they were coming for you.

And so you had guys, does the name George Custer ring a bell?

You had guys that came out west and they underestimated their enemy.

And I believe that is what is going on in the church, that we underestimate the powers and the strategy of Satan, his exploits.

And obviously, Christ has attained the victory, and we walk in the armor which we're going to study, that He's given us the resources to stand.

We do not need to be afraid, but yet the church, by and large, underestimates who our enemy is.

And then third, too many Christians are unaware of the resources we have been given in Christ.

By and large, I mean, if you were to take a cross section of people from most churches today, people are baby Christians.

They are struggling to know the basics.

They lack discernment about other religions, and they lack discernment about how to live the Christian life.

And they do not understand.

If you were to ask most Christians, what is the armor of God?

Do you think that they would be able to even tell you what the armor is?

I'm just being honest.

Much more how to use the armor that we've been given.

And so we want our church, you to be equipped to be able to put on the armor.

Martin Lloyd Jones once says, the church is a barracks.

In other words, we're here to equip you to fight in the Lord's army.

If you study the book of Ephesians, and it's important when you're doing a Bible study that you don't just ask, what does the text say to me?

Or I think this text says something, it's important to ask, what is the outline of the book I'm studying?

What is the general argument and the general flow?

The book of Ephesians divides into two sections.

Chapters one through three is the explanation of the gospel.

Chapters four through six is the life of the gospel, what it means to live the Christian life.

Chapters one through three, you could say, are the indicatives.

This is true of you in the gospel.

Chapters four to six are the imperatives.

In light of the gospel, do this.

You could also say chapters one through three is the doctrine.

And chapters four to six is the application.

And of course, those are wedded together.

And that's why they're all in one book.

It's like bark on a tree.

You can't take the application and abstract it from the doctrine, or vice versa.

They go together.

But Paul builds his argument in chapters one through three with doctrine, and then he shifts chapters four to six to application.

So in the first section, the first three chapters, he talks about the Christian life, and he makes an argument that the Christian life is built on the foundation of God's grace alone.

For by grace you have been saved through faith alone in Christ alone.

He will say that we are given every spiritual blessing in Christ in the heavenly places.

Magnificent statement.

Every spiritual blessing, that's Ephesians 1.3.

He will say that we are sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.

That's Ephesians 1.13.

He will say that we are saved to do good works that God prepared beforehand, that we would walk in them.

That's Ephesians 2.10.

And then in chapters 4 to 6, he shifts gears and gives us these applications of the gospel, these imperatives.

And you can read through chapters 4 to 6.

There's many of them.

There's so many that that it uh it's hard to actually count them all.

But he begins with an exhortation to unity.

He tells us, I'm just giving you examples.

Verse 3 of chapter 5, he says to walk in purity.

He says in verse 18 of chapter 5 to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

He gives instructions to husbands and wives in chapter 5.

He gives instructions to children and parents in chapter 6, and he gives instructions to workers and masters also in chapter 6.

And then he comes to this final section of chapter 6, and you'll notice verse 10, he says, finally.

Finally.

I've given you all of these imperatives and these instructions, but there's one more thing that you need to know.

You will be opposed.

You are in a battle, a mystical battle, an unseen war.

Notice what he says in verse 12.

It's striking language.

For 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.

Do you believe that, Christian?

In other words, when you when you're having conflict or persecution and you're being opposed by someone, Paul is saying that that is not actually the battle.

That the battle is behind that.

And that's a striking thing to say because if you go read the book of Acts, chapter 19, when Paul is in Ephesus, so many people are getting saved.

Acts 19 · chapter mention

The metal workers and the iron workers begin to get saved.

And people that were buying idols of Artemis and other Roman gods got saved.

And they stopped buying the idols, and the metal workers stopped making the idols.

And a fellow by the name of Demetrius stirred up the people.

And there's a great theater in Ephesus.

It's still there.

Huge theater.

See, it's over 20,000 people.

And Demetrius filled that place, and he grabbed some of Paul's associates, and they were about to beat him up.

And they started a riot, and everybody's shouting, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.

And Paul wants to go in there, and people are just grabbing him away and saying, if you go in there, they're going to tear you apart.

So that Paul, having experienced that, makes this striking statement.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood.

It wasn't really about Demetrius and all the metal workers.

There was evil forces behind all of this.

And Paul knew that all too well.

In fact, the section in Acts 19 before that event is about these Jewish exorcists that would try to cast demons out of people.

They were called the sons of Skeva.

Do y'all know this story?

And the sons of Skeva, there was a man brought a boy, there was a man, another man was brought, he was possessed by demons.

And the sons of Skeva went into a building and tried to rebuke the demon out of this man, and they did it with the name of Jesus, the name of Paul, and all these things, but they weren't really believers.

They were Jewish exorcists.

And that demon-possessed man tore the clothes off those guys.

And so Paul knows.

Paul knows the nature of this battle.

The word he uses, notice that word wrestle.

That's a great word.

And it's an accurate word.

Because the word that Paul uses describes hand-to-hand combat in the wire.

You don't when you know you read stories about guys in Vietnam, and what you didn't want to have happen were the Viet Cong to get inside the wire.

Where now they're between you and the your buddy and the foxhole next to you, and now you're doing hand-to-hand combat.

That's not what you want.

But that's how Paul describes the nature of this battle, that it's it's up close and it's personal.

And I think if we're honest with ourselves, if you if you've lived the Christian life long enough, you know that that's the nature of your experience.

You wake up in the morning and maybe a past sin is being whispered in your ear, a sin for which Jesus died and you've been forgiven.

And all of a sudden you're feeling condemned for that sin.

Where does that come from?

Or maybe you're being attacked, you're being persecuted, unlike anything you've ever seen.

You're being slandered.

Where does that come from?

You're what is happening?

And it's a spiritual battle, my friend.

And it's up close, it's personal, and it's inside the wire.

So Paul understood all this.

He would have agreed with the apostle John, who said, quote, the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil, 1 John 3.8.

And he told his protege, Timothy, to be prepared.

In this battle, he said, 2 Timothy 2 3, share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.

The Christian life is a battle, and you will endure suffering.

Paul says.

But he also says that in Christ at the cross, Jesus procured a great victory.

He has already procured a great victory.

And Satan is unleashed for a little while.

But when the Lord Jesus comes back, he will finally be defeated.

And Paul says this is Romans 16 20.

He says the God of peace will soon crush Satan underneath your feet.

Amen.

So the battle has already won, in a sense.

It's kind of like we live between D Day and VE day.

Satan has already been conquered, but yet the war is not yet over.

So we live in this age where it's in between the times, so to speak.

If you look at verses 10 to 20, it divides into two sections.

In verses 10 to 13, those four verses, Paul gives general instructions about the nature of this warfare.

General instructions.

He moves from the general to the specific.

Verses 14 to 20, he gives specific instructions, specifically about the believer's armor.

He's going to introduce the idea of the armor in verses 10 to 14, and then he's going to unpack it all in verses 14 to 20.

But I want you to notice the major imperative that Paul gives.

What is Paul's main imperative?

That's the question that I was asking this week.

And you'll notice that Paul's main imperative to us is very simple.

It is to stand.

It is to stand.

Notice the emphasis.

Look at verse 11.

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

Notice verse 13.

Therefore take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day.

Notice the emphasis.

And having done all to stand firm.

Notice the transition to the next section, verse 14.

Stand therefore.

The whole point of the armor that's then talked about is given in order for that we might stand in this evil day.

That's the main imperative.

Now, obviously, this is a metaphor, right?

We're talking about a spiritual battle.

He's not talking about physically standing up.

In fact, oftentimes we'll be praying on our knees.

This is a metaphor, right?

We're tracking on that.

Militarily speaking, the picture that is given by this word is that of a military unit making a stand against an onslaught against them to hold a critical military position.

You think of the Spartans.

Do y'all know the story of the great battle of Thermopylae?

Do y'all know the story?

The great Persian army, the hordes of Persia, had come over into Greece, and they were marching south, and 300 Spartans and a number of Thessalonians and others, under a fellow by the name of Leonidas, went to what was called the hot gates.

We call it Thermopylae.

And right there, it was a strategic position because you had the ocean on one side, the Aegean, and then you had cliffs on the other.

And the only way through was this narrow passageway.

And Leonidas said, at that narrow passageway where people can't go to the right or the left, there we will make our stand.

And it would be a great delaying tactic in order for all the Greek city-states to come together, and they eventually won against the Persians at the Battle of Marathon.

But at Thermopylae, the Persians came and they said to they sent out some couriers to the Greeks, and they said, We have enough archers that our arrows will blot out the sun.

To which Leonidas responded, Good, then we'll fight in the shade.

And so there they made their stand and they repelled wave after wave.

Of the Persian onslaught.

And the only reason they were defeated is because they were betrayed by a shepherd, and the Persians eventually went around those cliffs and came around behind them.

But there they made their stand.

And because of that, they saved Greece from Persian dominion.

There's another place near and dear to my heart in Texas.

You probably have heard of it, a little mission in San Antonio called the Alamo.

What's interesting about the Alamo is Jim Bowie, famous for his long knife called the Bowie knife, was sent as the commander of the Texacan troops down into San Antonio.

And Sam Houston told Bowie to destroy the Alamo, to not allow the Alamo to fall into the Mexican army's hands.

He said, Don't, it's it's indefensible.

Don't try and defend it.

Bowie gets down there, and for whatever reason, he said, no, we're not going to destroy it.

He actually disobeyed Houston.

He said, We're going to fortify this place, and here we're going to make a final stand.

And in the providence of God, God used that to delay the Mexican army, similar to what happened with the Greeks.

And eventually Sam Houston ended up winning at the Battle of San Jacinto.

Can y'all tell that I'm interested in this sort of stuff?

I have walked the Battle of San Jacinto, you know, swatting all the mosquitoes down there in Houston.

But there, Bowie and Travis and Crockett, y'all know that name, they made their stand there.

That's the picture.

Is that in the face of opposition, we're not running away like cowards.

We're not melting away with spineless backbones.

But in that day, we are standing.

So the picture spiritually is that in the onslaught of Satan, when there's persecution, we're not renouncing our faith.

We're not slithering away to hide for cover.

But in that day, we are boldly and courageously standing for the truth of the gospel.

One of the things I loved about Charlie Kirk is that guy was bold.

And he would go to the college campuses and he would answer questions kindly in a loving way from a Christian worldview, and he would go and make his stand on the campus for Christ.

It was amazing to watch.

But that's the picture is that we're going and we are making this stand.

Paul says, 2 Thessalonians 2 15, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or letter.

Peter says, talking about the devil, resist him, firm in your faith.

It's amazing.

We're not called to destroy the enemy.

Jesus has already accomplished that.

We are called simply to stand.

Simply to stand.

When the word of God is maligned, to stand.

When the church is persecuted, to stand.

When you are tempted to sin, to stand.

Martin Lloyd Jones said of this word, he says, this one word sums up the exhortations of the New Testament.

That's a bold statement.

Stated though they may be in a variety of forms, it is all designed to this end that we should be enabled to stand.

The order of the day for all Christian people is stand.

William Gurnell, who wrote just this magnificent volume called The Christian in Complete Armor, said, quote, What does God expect above all to stand firm?

To stand as opposed to a cowardly flight from or treacherous yielding to the enemy.

Friends, it is a dark day.

It is a dark hour.

Ask yourself, are you prepared to stand for Christ?

We're not talking about casual Christianity here.

We're not talking about going through the motions.

Are you prepared for the battle and in the midst of the onslaught to stand?

Do you think the church is ready today?

And I mean the church by and large, do you think the church is ready and equipped to stand?

We need to be.

We must be.

But how do we do it?

How do you stand?

Every day.

When you wake up in the morning, how do you stand today?

How will you stand tomorrow?

Well, Paul tells us, and I'm just going to cover these very briefly, the three ways that we are to stand.

So important that we understand this.

First, we stand in the Lord's strength.

If you can get this and we can all go home, it's his strength, not ours.

Look at verse 10.

Finally, be strong in the Lord.

And in the strength of whose might?

His might.

Your might, no.

Your wisdom, no.

Your abilities, no.

His might.

The only way to stand in the evil day is by his grace and his power.

We are dependent people, dependent on the strength and the power of God in the evil day.

And the moment I'm the moment that you think that you can pull this off is the moment that you will fall.

We must be humble and dependent on his strength.

I used to go to a gym in Kentucky.

It was at a church.

There was a Baptist church near our house, and they built this$3 million gym for their members to use and people in the community to use.

It was cheap.

And so our family joined the gym of this different church that we didn't even go to.

And they had all this nice new equipment: bench presses, squat racks.

And when you would go in the room with the free weights over the bench presses, on the wall, behind the bench presses, they had Ephesians 6.10 quoted be strong in the Lord behind the bench presses.

And that always cracked me up.

Because it's this idea that we're working up our strength for God.

God, we're going to be strong for you.

But that's not at all what Paul is saying.

At all.

Completely misses the point.

And it's obvious because he says, be strong in the strength of his might, right?

His strength.

But actually, the verb that he uses is not an active verb.

Meaning, oh, I'm going to work it up to be.

It's not an active verb.

It's a passive verb.

Meaning, this is something that happens to you.

In fact, I was reading the Christian Standard Bible.

They correctly translated it.

It's finally be strengthened by the Lord and by his vast strength is how the CSB translates it.

And that's right.

You are to be strengthened by the Lord.

Well, what's the context for this?

What does this mean to be strengthened?

What is he talking about when he's talking about this spiritual power?

What do you think he's talking about?

Well, if you read the rest of the book of Ephesians, it's obvious what he's talking about.

He's talking about the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit who resides in every Christian.

Remember in the apostles with Jesus, Jesus said, Go to Jerusalem and await for the Spirit, you will receive what?

Power from on high.

Ephesians 1, Paul talks about that every believer, verse 13, in whom you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.

Every believer has been sealed with the Spirit.

He will go on and talk about that this power that the Holy Spirit possesses is the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.

And he will say that this power is at work within the believer.

So, chapter 3, verse 16, he says, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being.

And friend, that should be your prayer every day.

Every day before I get up to this pulpit, every Sunday, I'm praying Ephesians 3.16.

Lord, strengthen me with power in my inner being, because I cannot pull this off in my own flesh, in my own wisdom.

We need his spiritual power.

How great is this power?

Look at Ephesians 3.20.

Amazing verse.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us.

Isn't that amazing?

Not just what we think, but abundantly more than what we think.

Not just abundantly more, but far more abundantly more.

By his power that is at work within us.

I think that we seriously underestimate the spiritual power that is given to every Christian.

That God the Holy Spirit indwells you, gives you the resources needed to stand in the evil day.

Prophet Zechariah prophesied, we looked at this as deacons a few weeks ago.

This is Zechariah 4.6.

He says, Not by might, in other words, not by your might, not by your power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.

So what does Paul say about life in the Spirit in Ephesians?

Two things.

One, he says, Ephesians 4 30, do not grieve the Holy Spirit whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

In other words, don't live in known sin.

Do you think that you can access the power that the Holy Spirit gives you if you are walking in rebellion against God, an unconfessed, unrepentant sin?

No, you will not.

You have to live as a useful vessel, Paul says to the Thessalonians, having put away the things of evil, being sanctified for God's holy purposes, not grieving the Holy Spirit.

Moreover, he says in Ephesians 5.18, do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Holy Spirit.

That means that the Holy Spirit is the one guiding and directing your actions through the ministry of the Word of God.

That you are living your life.

What does alcohol do?

That's the contrast.

Alcohol controls an individual, causes a person to stagger, to make poor decisions.

So the contrast is don't be drunk with wine, but allow your life to be controlled by the Holy Spirit.

And then the Holy Spirit will use you according to his sovereign power and will.

So we need this power, this might in order to be effective.

Paul says, if you do this in your own strength, guess what?

You will fall.

So we need his power, his might in order to stand.

Secondly, we stand in the Lord's armor.

The believer needs the proper resources in order to stand.

And obviously, Paul is a Roman citizen, right?

He he grows up in what is modern-day Turkey, uh the Roman Empire, his whole life.

He's looking and seeing Roman soldiers walking around, and the garments and the armor of the soldier would have been the same throughout the empire.

And he's writing this letter from a Roman prison, probably guarded by a Roman soldier.

And so there's this wonderful picture that Paul takes.

It's the picture of the soldier in complete armor.

And he says that picture is the picture of what the Christian life is like with the resources that Jesus Christ gives us.

But the Christian needs to put all of that armor on in order to be effective.

So this theme of the armor was something that Paul had latched onto early in his ministry.

Thessalonians, one of the earliest letters he wrote, this is 1 Thessalonians 5.8.

He says, Since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.

He had earlier written to the Romans, Romans 13.12, he says, the night is far gone, the day is at hand.

So then let us cast off works of darkness and put on, he says, the armor of light.

Two verses later he says, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.

So the imperative is to put off works of the flesh, evil works, anything that is that is sinful, and to put on the armor.

To put it on.

This is something that we must do.

You don't just casually walk through the Christian life and the armor's automatically there.

Paul says you have to put it on.

And tragically, like I said earlier, I don't think most Christians even know what the armor is.

What is the armor?

Well, there's six pieces of the armor that he walks through, beginning in verse 14.

He begins with the belt of truth.

That truth binds everything together.

The whole outfit, if you will, of sanctification is bound together in the truth.

That's why expository preaching and sound doctrine are so important.

And then he says, we also have the breastplate of righteousness, talking about an understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ in the gospel gives you his righteousness.

Praise be to God.

That we have his righteousness covering our chest.

Because if it was just merely our own works, do you think that there would be some holes in the breastplate?

You betcha there would be.

But it's Christ's perfect righteousness.

We sang that, didn't we?

His robes, his righteous robes cover us.

It's also like a breastplate.

Then he says, We have on our feet, verse 15, shoes for our feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace.

In other words, we're evangelists.

We're ready to present the good news that Jesus Christ died for sinners and rose again from the dead, that all who put their faith in Jesus Christ might have the forgiveness of sins and the perfect righteousness of Christ.

And then verse 16, he says, In all circumstances, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.

Verse 17, he says, the helmet of salvation, and then finally the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

That's the only offensive weapon that we are given.

So, friends, our job as elders and pastors is to teach you to know what the armor is and train you to put it on in order that you may stand in this evil day.

It doesn't matter how big a church is if its people cannot stand.

The measure of our church is our resiliency in the day of attack.

It's not it's not the it's how sanctified we are.

I I read some stats this week.

And these are sobering.

But fifty to sixty percent of men who claim to be born-again evangelicals are regularly using pornography.

Seventy-five percent of Gen Z males in the church are regularly using pornography.

Friends, what is taking place in the modern church is a massacre.

Satan is having a field day, and we wonder why our churches are ineffective, and we're so anemic and so powerless.

We are getting destroyed, and we need to buckle it up and get serious about sanctification, get serious about fighting sin.

Put sin to death, and get ready to put the armor on.

We are at war.

And if you don't realize that, then Satan is going to eat your breakfast.

He's gonna destroy your life, your family, the church.

That's his aim.

And so we have to do this with the Lord's strength and with his power.

Well, there's a third way that we are to stand, and that's in militant prayer.

We are to stand with his strength, we are to stand with his armor, and we are to stand in militant prayer.

This is so important.

Because in some ways, this is the glue that brings everything together.

How do you put your armor on daily?

Answer prayer.

How do you receive strength from the indwelling spirit?

Answer, walk in dependence in humble prayer.

Notice how Paul concludes this section.

Talks about the armor, and he concludes with a focus, three verses, 18 to 20, on militant prayer.

He says, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication.

That means.

All sorts of petitions.

That's what prayer means.

Supplication.

You could say urgent request.

Urgent request.

If you ever watch those Vietnam movies, when people are coming inside the wire, what are people doing?

Inevitably, there's somebody on the radio, right?

And they're calling up to hire, and they're saying, send the bombs now.

Bomb everything outside the wire.

Bomb everything inside the wire, right?

Urgent request, calling to hire.

That's the picture.

We're in battle and we are giving up request to our commander, who, by the way, has won the battle and will give us the resources needed to stand in this day.

So we pray.

Notice this word in verse 18.

We keep alert.

We're watchful.

We're watchful about the needs.

Paul will often say, be sober-minded.

And that means to be alert, to be watchful.

Watchful of yourself, watchful of your family, watchful of others.

You're watchful.

We're alert.

But it's a prayerful alertness.

He says, with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.

With all perseverance, don't you love that?

Don't stop.

Don't stop praying.

Have your children ever asked you, mom, if I prayed for something, should I pray for it again?

Do I keep praying for that thing?

Because it doesn't seem like there's been resolution to that.

What does Paul say?

With all perseverance you keep praying.

I was growing up, uh, after my dad was killed, my grandparents in Lake Jackson essentially helped raise me, and I would go stay with them for long periods of time.

So after they died, I found the old church directory from First Baptist Lake Jackson, and I turned to the Castleberries, and it was a picture of them and me in the church directory.

But I was with them quite a bit.

And I remember one of the things that they did at First Baptist Lake Jackson is that they had a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week prayer room.

That at any given point during the week, somebody at the church was up there praying.

And I remember watching my grandma or grandpa go up to the church at midnight, 1 a.m., hours of the night, and making supplication, Paul says, for all the saints.

Friends, the kingdom advances not by our might, nor by our power, nor by our ingenuity, but by his strength.

And the way that we access that is by prayer.

It's not hard.

It's very basic.

I want to show you something.

I want you to turn with me to Mark chapter 9.

Mark 9 · chapter mention

Fascinating story.

This is right after the Mount of Transfiguration, where Peter, James, and John have seen the transfigured Christ.

And there's this incident where a father brings his son to the disciples, and his son is possessed by demons.

If you look at verse 17 of chapter 9, someone from the crowd answered him, Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute.

And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid.

So I ask your disciples to cast it out.

And look at this.

But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.

And Jesus said to him, If you can, all things are possible for one who believes.

And immediately the father of the child cried out and said, I believe, help my unbelief.

And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, You mute and deaf spirit, I command you come out of him and never enter him again.

And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, He is dead.

But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.

And we had when he had entered the house, this is the key part, his disciples asked him privately, Why could we not cast it out?

In other words, why didn't we not have power, authority to cast out the demon?

Notice Jesus' answer.

Very, very important.

Jesus said, This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.

Because who drives out the demon?

Answer, God does.

It's ultimately not the disciples who are driving out the demon.

It's God who drives out the demon.

It's God who delivers the boy through prayer.

And of course, Jesus is God, so he's able to cast out the demon.

But it's the power of God that is able to vanquish the devil and his minions.

And Jesus says this power is given only through prayer.

But yet, how often are we prayerless?

When you wake up in the morning, are you driven to your knees to pray?

Do you keep a journal of your prayers, things, petitions, supplications that you are making to God?

Paul says our powerlessness is due to the fact that we fail to pray.

So these aspects together help us to stand.

We stand with his strength, with his power.

We stand by putting on all of the armor every day.

And we do all of this through prayer and supplication.

And then God speeds the advance of the ministry.

That's why Spurgeon called the prayer room below the church where people were praying.

He called it the boiler room.

Because he says that's the power, that's the energy from which we are able to fight the battle.

So, what we are going to do in the coming Sundays is we are going to look at the armor.

And I'm going to teach you what it is and how to put it on so that you will be able to stand in this evil day and having done everything to stand.

Heavenly Father, our desire is to be used by you to be useful for the kingdom.

We don't want to be cowards.

We don't want to flinch when the battle is fierce.

Lord, help us to be courageous Christians, standing in the strength of your might, standing with the full armor of God, kneeling in vigilant prayer, making supplication with perseverance for all the saints, that the gospel might go forth in power.

God, this is real.

We know that this is truth, that there is real opposition, real forces that oppose us, and real spiritual armor that we are to put on every day.

So, Lord, let us be alert as you implored us to be sober minded, vigilant in prayer, useful soldiers in your army.

We pray all this in Christ's name.

Amen.