Spiritual Warfare: The Battle

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, welcome to our worship service. And happy anniversary as well. You all look pretty good for being 128. It’s good to have you with us.

I have just a few announcements to mention before we begin.

If you haven’t gotten your picture taken for the new church directory, please do so at the end of the service. That’s right back in the fellowship hall, and it won’t take but a minute or so. And don’t worry if you’re not a member. If you’ve been here for a while and would like to stay at least a while longer — and we all hope you do — get on back there and have your picture taken too.

Don’t forget about the men’s group, they’ll meet tonight at 6:30.

The church council will meet this Tuesday at their regular hour.

And please continue to be in prayer for those we’ve lost this week and for church members who have lost family members, both the Harris family in the passing of Buck, as well as Twila, our church secretary, who lost her mother.

Twila will be gone for a while next week, as you can well imagine, but please reach out to her with your condolences. The funeral for her mother will be held tomorrow at 1:00 in Bluefield.

The Harris’s will hold a family night tonight from 5-7 at Charlton and Groome in Fishersville, followed by Buck’s funeral, also at Charlton and Groome, tomorrow at 1:00. The plan as of right now is to follow that service with a burial at Calvary right down the road, but that will depend upon how much rain we get this weekend. The ground might not be suitable for that, but they will make that determination tomorrow morning.

Please be in prayer for Linda, for Chad, Shannon, and their children, and for the Harris family. And please be with Twila and her family in prayer as well through this difficult time.

And for a bit of good news, this time next week we will have a new married couple in our congregation. David and Christie will celebrate their new life together next Saturday, so please be in prayer for them as well and for all the happiness that God has in store for them.

Jesyka, do you have anything?

And Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Father, thank you that you have brought each of us safely to this place, and thank you that you continue to bless this church after so many years. We gladly surrender our lives to you in worship and praise. As we gather we remember those who are not with us today - For those who are sick we ask for healing, And for those away from us we ask for your blessing to be on them.

We invite Your Holy Spirit to move freely amongst us. Come dwell in each of our hearts. Equip us, challenge us, comfort us, teach us. Inspire us as we learn more about your majestic ways. Father, as we meet now may we behold Your beauty and encounter your grace. We ask all this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Sermon

It doesn’t take long for us to realize that living out our lives in this world is not an easy thing. Thomas Hardy, the great English novelist, once wrote that “Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” Sounds a little depressing, doesn’t it? But really, it’s not far from true.

Life is tough, no doubt about it, and we all bear its scars. For many people, and for many of us in this room, life right now feels like it’s one terrible thing after another. Every day we’re waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

So we’re stuck saying things like, “I’ve never felt this tired.” Or, “I can’t stop worrying.” We say, “I’m just always so stressed out right now.” We’re dealing with temptations that won’t leave us alone. We’re afraid.

Sometimes we’re afraid of something very specific. Other times we can’t say exactly what we’re afraid of, it’s this general feeling of dread that won’t go away and keeps getting worse. We’re just sad, all the time. And then there’s that secret sin that we’re still dealing with that no one knows about.

How do we respond when things get that way? Do we say, “That’s just life. That’s just the way it is”? It could be, but there’s no doubt that the past few years have been especially rough on all of us. Everyone talks about the pandemic, but the truth is that Covid was just one of the pandemics we’ve had to go through.

We’ve had a fear pandemic too. We’ve had an anxiety pandemic. And those are still happening. Chances are good that you’re suffering from fear and anxiety in at least one part of your life right now, and likely more than one.

And it’s easy — it’s so very easy — to think that you just can’t handle it anymore. The world’s too big for you. Life’s too hard. Your faith can’t sustain you. You don’t even know if you’ll be able to make it through this. You wonder why this is happening to you and why God allows it.

That, at least, I have an answer for. It’s happening to you, and to a certain extent it’s always happening to you, because you’re in the middle of the most violent, most enduring, most costly war that will ever be fought, waged at every moment both around you and inside of you, by forces you can’t see. And you have a target right on your heart.

There are people who think that being a Christian means never being in trouble again. Never suffering, never grieving, always happy and at peace.

In fact, the opposite is true. The moment you become a Christian, you’re placed on the front lines of a constant battle between two mighty armies, one of evil and the other good, and those armies have been fighting each other since before the creation of our world.

All through history, one of those sides has claimed victory in battle.

God made the first move when he created the angels. Lucifer responded by rebelling and taking a third of the angels with him. Then God created Adam and Eve. Evil countered by tempting Adam and Eve to sin. God called Abraham. Evil trapped Abraham’s descendants in Egypt.

That’s how it is all through the Bible. God moves, evil counters. Evil moves, God counters. Until we come to the New Testament, when God goes on the offensive once and for all by bringing His son into the world.

By Christ’s death and resurrection, that great war has already been decided. Victory for God is assured. And as a child of God, your victory is assured too, because you have a champion in Jesus who knows how to guide you in every circumstance, no matter how difficult it is.

But here’s the thing: that war might be decided, but it’s still going on. It’s still being fought around you and in you.

You’re still having to endure countless troubles and worries and fears because evil still wants its way with you. It doesn’t have authority over you. It can’t defeat you. But evil does have one great power and one great aim — to deceive you, and to get you to think that the winner of the war hasn’t been decided yet.

I’m talking about spiritual warfare, and that’s something that every person in this room is having to go through. We’re going to take the next month or so talking about this because it’s so important and so relevant to our world right now, and we need to know how to fight this war so that we can claim the victory that Christ promises.

And to learn how to do that, we’re going to look at what Paul says. Turn with me to Ephesians 6, verses 10-13. Follow along with me:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. 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. 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.

And this is the word of the Lord.

We’re going to be jumping around scripture quite a lot as we go through this series, so have your Bibles and your pens ready.

But Paul gives us a huge amount of information about this spiritual war you’re fighting right here. In these verses, he gives us three important points: Paul tells us the location of our battle, the enemy in our battle, and our strategy for fighting that battle. Let’s take a look at those one at a time.

First, where’s this battle being fought? On the surface this seems an easy question to answer, because here in this world is where you’re suffering. Here is where your life is falling apart. Your doubt and your fear and your worry are over real, concrete things that you have to live through every day.

But Paul says that’s really not the case. He says in verse 12 that our enemy isn’t what we think it is — it’s not flesh and blood. We think our problems are about people, or about bills that are due, or about jobs that we hate. It’s not.

Where the war over is truly taking place is laid out right at the end of verse 12 — it’s in the heavenly places.

Paul says it plainly — spiritual warfare is carried out in the spiritual world, in the heavenly places. It’s raging there, in a place you can’t see, but the effects of that war play out here in a way that you can see.

So here’s what you need to know right away, because it’s going to be the center of everything we’re going to talk about for the next few weeks: everything you experience physically, whether it’s a sickness, a loss, a setback, or a tragedy, is caused by something spiritual.

What happens in the spiritual world is the cause. What happens in our physical world is the effect. So the key to victory in spiritual warfare is to learn how to fight the powers of evil in the spiritual world.

So the heavenly places, the spiritual world, is where this constant war you’re in is taking place. That’s also where the weapons God gives you to fight that war are kept.

Look back to Ephesians 1:3. Paul’s writing his introduction to the church in Ephesus, and he finishes greeting them by saying:

“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.”

Notice that — in the heavenly places, God has blessed you in Christ with every spiritual blessing. Now, what does that mean?

Every promise God has ever made, everything he has planned for your good, every gift, has already been given to you. They’re stored up for you in the heavenly places and standing ready for you to claim and use them.

And the way for you to claim them is by what we talked about last week. It’s by faith, and faith is nothing more than acting as if God is telling the truth regardless of what you might think or feel.

Our fight, then, is in the spiritual world. Which is why our weapons — “our every spiritual blessing, Paul says” — is also in the spiritual world.

What else is there? God’s there, of course, isn’t He? And Christ is there. But turn over to the next chapter, Ephesians 2, and let’s see who else is there.

Look at Ephesians 2:4-6:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus ...

The moment you were saved, God made you alive and seated you with Him and Christ in the heavenly places. Right now, you and I are seated with Christ in the spiritual world. Our bodies are here on earth, but our spirits are operating in another place.

That is such an important point, because it’s something we all tend to forget. Because we’re all trapped in this physical world, aren’t we? That spiritual world is invisible to us, so we often just put it out of our minds.

We’re so focused on what we can see that we forget that’s only half of what exists. The other half is what we can’t see, and that’s where all the action is happening. You’re sitting in this church right now, but that’s not the only place where you are.

Angels are also the heavenly places. That’s where they do battle. I’m a firm believer that scripture plainly teaches every one of us has a guardian angel. Hebrews 1:14:

“Are they not all” — meaning angels — “ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”

You don’t just have Christ fighting for you, you have the angels too, including your very own. But the fact that they’re fighting for you has to mean there’s something fighting against you too, doesn’t it? I’m talking about demons. They’re in the heavenly places too.

The battles that are always going on there, right this moment, impact what happens in your life. That’s the biggest point I want you to take away today.

The Bible says over and over that both your fight and everything you need for that fight is in the spiritual world. You have to understand that truth, because otherwise you’re going to be doing what you’ve probably always done — you’re going to keep trying to solve your spiritual problems with physical solutions.

There’s one other being in the spiritual world, and that’s the prince of those demons, Satan. We’re going to be talking a lot about him too over the next few weeks, because on one hand we give the devil way too much credit, and on the other hand we don’t give him enough.

Satan began as an angel — a cherub, to be exact, which is the highest created angel. But he became prideful and decided he wanted to sit on a throne above God’s, and so he was cast out of heaven along with a third of the angels who rebelled against God as well.

Satan became the ruler of this world. He’s described in the Bible as an accuser, a tempter, and a deceiver. His name means “adversary” and “one who opposes.” And it’s not just God he opposes. Satan opposes you too, because you are a child of God saved by Christ.

Satan will do everything he can to oppose God and those who follow God. Now remember, his fate has already been decided. Revelation 20 says he will be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity.

But in the meantime, his goal is to get you to forget, to lay aside, or to doubt all those blessings that God has already given you in the heavenly places.

He’s tricky, he’s smart, and there is no way you can outwit him on your own. Try to take the devil on under your own power, and he’s going to squish you like a bug. Fight him with the power of Christ, and Satan becomes the bug.

The devil cannot create anything. All he can do is spoil and poison what God has already created. The best example I can give you of how the devil operates is a story of a farmer who had a melon crop.

Every night, thieves were getting into his fields and stealing his melons. So the farmer came up with a great idea. He injected poison into one of the melons in his field, and then he posted a sign that read, “One of these melons has been poisoned.”

It worked for a while. The thieves didn’t take any melons, because they didn’t know which one of them had been poisoned. The farmer thought he’d outsmarted the thieves until he woke up one morning to see that the sign had been changed. It now said, “Two of these melons have been poisoned.”

The farmer had to destroy his entire crop, because he didn’t know which of the other melons the thieves had poisoned.

That’s how Satan operates in your life. Back in Ephesians 6 verse 11, Paul says to put on the whole armor of God so that you can stand against the schemes of the devil. The word “scheme” just means a way of getting something you want by trickery. That’s exactly what he does with you.

Now listen: As a Christian saved by grace, Satan cannot snatch you from God’s hands. As a Christian saved by grace, your victory over the devil is guaranteed so long as you know how to use the weapons and the blessings that God has already given you in the heavenly places.

The devil cannot beat you. He knows that even if you don’t. So he wants to do the next best thing, and that’s to make you ineffective. He wants to rob you of the power and the influence you have through Christ, and he does that through four areas of your life.

First, he’s after you personally. He’s out to ruin you, to crush your heart and mind. He tries that through drugs, though discouragement, through arrogance, and through depression. He tries that through sickness and trials and loss.

Second, he’s out for your family, and especially through your children and grandchildren. When the devil destroys a family, he does more than destroy a handful of people. Destroying a family has a great chance of destroying whole generations of descendants, can’t it?

We see that happening now. If Satan can get kids out of church, if he can get the kids into sports on weekends, then the parents will follow.

And that’s one of the reasons why Christians are now expected to be a minority in this country by 2070. Whoever controls the family controls the future. The devil understands that truth a whole lot more than we do.

Third is the church. There’s no more a greater danger to the devil than the church, and so he tries to weaken every church the best way he can through division, through legalism, through bitterness, and these days through technology.

“I don’t have to go to church,” we say, “I can just watch it on Facebook.” But you’re not just harming your family and your own souls by doing that, you’re harming the church as well, and the influence it has over communities. And the devil just sits back and laughs.

And last, Satan tries to overcome society itself. And he’s been doing a great job of that, hasn’t he? Wrong gets turned to right, truth gets turned to lies, lies get turned to truth, and before long we become convinced that the real enemies in this world are people instead of him. That the real problems of this world are physical rather than spiritual.

The greatest victory Satan’s had in our lifetimes is that he’s convinced so many people he isn’t real that the ones who say he is are called crazy.

So given all of that, how in the world can the devil be beaten? Paul gives us a hint in Ephesians 6:12 — we’re to wrestle with him.

When Paul uses that word, he’s not talking about wrestling as we think of wrestling. It’s definitely not the sort of wrestling I used to watch on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid.

In Paul’s day, a wrestling match was a contest where one person tried to throw the other, and the winner was the one who could hold his opponent down with his hand upon the other person’s neck.

Satan wants his hand on your neck, squeezing. God intends it to be the other way around. He wants you victorious through Him over everything Satan throws your way. Whoever wins that fight over you is the one who has the most powerful weapons.

And let me tell you, Satan and his demons have some powerful weapons. Because they know all about you. Every single bit. They’ve been watching you since the moment you came into this world.

They know exactly what happened to you when you were a child that messed up your thinking. They saw all the little things that made you feel like a failure and wrote them down. They know all of your weak spots and the best way to tempt you into sinning.

I’ll use a sports term here — Satan has your playbook. He knows exactly what you’ll probably do in any situation, and so he’s there behind the scenes, sending his demons out, trying to manipulate circumstances just to trap you. To make you weak. To make you doubt who you are and who God is.

But. God’s given you a playbook too. It’s that book in your hands. In the Bible you’ll find everything you need to know to have victory in your spiritual war. In that book is everything you need to defeat your enemy in the spiritual world, but it’s up to you to read it.

The Bible is God’s holy Word, but it’s useless if you don’t read it and apply it to your life. And what does the Bible say over and over again? The devil can’t touch you as long as you stay right beside Jesus. You have to stand firm when the devil comes. You can’t give him an inch. And in verse 10 of Ephesians 6, we find the key to standing firm: Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

You have the greatest weapon imaginable at your disposal every moment of every day. You have the presence, the love, and the protection of God.

The devil can’t fight that head-on, so he uses one of those schemes of his. He causes you to miss those blessings. Or he tricks you into questioning those blessings. Or — and this is a good one that gets us all — he gets us so focused on what God hasn’t given us that we no longer see what God has.

You see? The devil can’t beat you, but he can try to work things so that you beat yourself. He can’t turn you away from God, but he can convince you to do that yourself. He doesn’t have complete power, but he has power.

And let’s talk about that for a minute. Let’s talk about Satan’s power, and what he can and can’t do. We have to make a difference between what’s called headship and what’s called authority.

Way back in the beginning, in Genesis 1:26, God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

When God said “let them have dominion,” let human beings rule over all the earth, He willingly put a limit on Himself of where and how He would act based on our own decisions. In His wisdom and love, God gave us the freedom to choose how much He involves Himself in our world and our lives.

Now, did God know Satan would throw a wrench into all of that? Yes. But again, you can’t have true love and worship without freedom. But Adam and Eve’s freedom gave rise to sin with the serpent’s help, and when sin entered the world, authority over the Earth was transferred to the devil. The devil became ruler of the world.

This is backed up by Jesus himself. Three times in John, Jesus He calls Satan the ruler of this world. That’s the way thousands of years of history unfolded, with the devil in control.

But then came the cross. Through the death of Jesus and his resurrection, Satan’s authority was crushed. Christ overcame the grave. He paid the price for sin. So when you come to Christ and accept his sacrifice for your sins, you are putting yourself under the care and authority of a new ruler.

That old ruler, the one who kept you in darkness, the one who robbed you of peace and joy, has been defeated.

Christ set you free to live your life in victory with him. Satan no longer has any authority over you. You have to know that. You have to believe that. You have to sink that deep into your bones, because that’s the key to defeating him in your life.

But now there’s a catch, and it’s an important one. To have authority over someone means that you have the right to use your power over them. As someone saved by grace, you are now under God’s authority. Satan doesn’t have authority over you anymore. He’s lost that. But he hasn’t lost his power.

In order for him to take control of your life again, he has to convince you to leave God’s kingdom and come back to his. He has to keep you from living under God’s authority, because if you’re not under God’s authority, then Satan has the right to use his power on you.

That’s exactly why so many Christians feel like they’re constantly giving in to the devil. Why they constantly feel defeated instead of victorious. They’re saved. They’re washed in the blood. But they’re not disciples, they’re not living under the authority and protection of the God they say they love and worship.

They’ve been tricked into thinking that just going to church and saying a prayer before they eat and go to sleep is enough. Or that they can be functioning Christians without a church home. So little by little, they slide back into that old way of living. They slide back into that other kingdom.

Your thoughts end up being what the world thinks instead of what God says. You start making your decisions based on your emotions, or what your friends are saying, or what the newest trend in our culture is. And the devil ends up being victorious in your life because you keep yielding power to him instead of standing firm in who you are in Christ.

And the devil is tireless. His demons are always after you. If they can’t get you in a big way — if they can’t get you to ruin your entire life — then they’ll be content just ruining little parts of your day, getting you to feel down on yourself, getting you to lash out and say that mean word, getting you to be less than who you really are.

And who are you really? You are united with Christ. The moment you forget that, the devil’s going to be right there.

Listen to Colossians 2:8-12:

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.”

Paul says everything that makes up God — everything — is found fully in Christ. The only different between God and Christ is that with Christ, all of that’s found in a body of flesh and blood, and you have been filled in him.

One chapter earlier, in Colossians 1, Paul again writes:

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Jesus holds all things together. You included. Which means that if you find yourself falling apart, it’s because you aren’t standing firm in him.

When Christ died, you died with him. When he rose, you rose too. When Christ was seated at the right hand of God, he brought you along with him.

In other words, you were made to function with Christ. That’s exactly why you have to stand firm under his leadership and give him control over what you do, what you say, and how you live.

And a hugely important piece of doing that is found right there in Ephesians 6. Verse 13 talks about putting on the whole armor of God, and then Paul describes what those individual pieces are in verses 14-17.

That’s where we’re going to be for the next weeks, and we’re going to see how standing firm in the authority of Christ and living by the rules of his kingdom will always result in his victory in your own life.

You’ll see in that list six pieces of armor. The first three are pieces that God says you have to wear every day, all the time. Just like you put clothes on when you go out into the physical world, you put these three pieces of armor on to go out into the spiritual world. The last three pieces of armor are ones you take up when you feel the devil coming after you.

And you’ll notice something else important here too — there’s no armor for the back. Every piece is you put on only functions as it should if you’re moving forward. If you’re attacking your attacker instead of retreating and running away.

Because you don’t have to run away. You’ve already won. God’s given you everything you need, and we’re going to start learning how to use it next week. But for now, let’s close with prayer:

Father we thank you for the guidance of your word and for all of the blessings and protections that you’ve already laid up for us in the heavenly places. We thank you that through Christ we stand confidently before your throne, and that in all of our struggles and pains, your love secures us and lifts us up. Equip us, Father, for every good work. Help us to stand firm in our faith in You that we may come through our battles with victory. For it’s in your name we ask it, Amen.