Spiritual Warfare

Good morning everyone

Going over our mission and vision statements along with our four core values as a church. But these last two weeks we are speaking on topics that are also vital to the church. Last week we spoke on the importance of prayer, how it is as vital to us as breathing. And this week we are going to be looking into the topic of spiritual warfare. And I am just going to dive right in so buckle up!

But first let us ask God to guide us teach us today.

Two Kingdoms

When we look at reality from a biblical worldview, we see that Scripture tells us that there are two kingdoms, two kingdoms that are utterly opposed to one another.

On one hand, you have the domain of darkness. This is the fallen world we live in now. And this world was created good and pleasing to God, but because of the sin of Adam and Eve, it became broken and is just a dark shadow of what it once was, and is now full of sin, pain, suffering and death. And every human being is born into the domain of darkness. Col. 1:21 says that we were hostile in mind towards God, alienated from Him and lovers of sin, proud citizens of this domain of darkness.

On the other hand is the Kingdom of God. Now this kingdom can be defined as already and not yet. What I mean by this is that if you are a Christian, you are a member of Gods kingdom, which is everywhere. After Jesus was resurrected, we are told in the first chapter of Acts that He ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father, and all authority was given to Him on heaven and on earth. So in one sense, the kingdom of God is here, Jesus has ultimate authority over everything in this world and we are called to proclaim this kingdom by sharing the gospel. But as we read Scripture, especially the book of Revelation, we come to understand that there will come a day when Jesus comes to physically, not just spiritually, establish His kingdom here on earth, completely wiping out sin and the domain of darkness, and everything will be made new and we will reign with Christ in His Kingdom on earth for eternity. So the kingdom in one sense is here now! And in another sense, still to come.

So, we live in a reality of two kingdoms, the domain of darkness and the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness hates the kingdom of God and God despises the dominion of darkness and seeks to rescue His people out of their bondage to it.

Take a look with me at Acts 26:16-18: 16 But rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, 17 delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you 18 to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’

Paul is giving a retelling of his conversion experience when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus. During this encounter, Paul is so startled that he falls to the ground and is told by Jesus that that He, God Himself, came into the domain of darkness to open the eyes of the spiritually blind, who could not see the truth of the gospel, and to deliver His people from the domain of darkness, out of the rule of Satan to bring them into His own kingdom. And He has done this how? By forgiving us of our sins and sanctifying us, making us clean through our faith in Him! By doing so, he moved our citizenship out of the domain of darkness and into His kingdom of light!

This is repeated to us in Col. 1:13, “God has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the Kingdom of His beloved Son in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins.”

So, brothers and sisters, though you were born into the realm of darkness, you have been delivered! Like God used Moses to deliver the Israelite's out of the land of Egypt and into the promised land, God sent His Son to deliver us out of darkness into His glorious Kingdom! We are no longer bound or enslaved to the domain of darkness but we have been liberated and given citizenship in the kingdom of God!

The Spiritual War

Now at this point, if we are Christians, we can look at these verses and say, wonderful, now that we are citizens of the kingdom of heaven, we will no longer experience sin or temptation or trials of any kind! But is that the experience of any Christian here? If you have been a Christian for a day, for a year or for 30 years, you know that there is still a battle, a spiritual war being waged against you. And brothers and sisters, we are doing something here that the enemy does not want to see accomplished. We are starting a new gospel proclaiming church, and we have been given a mission to plunder the domain of darkness, to be shining beacons of the gospel in the dark, leading others to Jesus and into the Gods Kingdom and friends, our adversary wants us to fail. So we must be aware of what Spiritual warfare looks like and how we can stand against it.

And to help us do that, we are going to look at the three dimensions of spiritual warfare that Scripture presents to us and how we can stand against it.

But first, let’s pray

Ephesians 2

Please open your Bibles with me to Ephesians 2, and we will be focusing in on verses 1-3: “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked (Paul speaking of our state before salvation, the natural state of mankind), following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience-among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature, children of wrath like the rest of mankind.”

In this passage we are given the three dimensions in which we were once entrenched in the domain of darkness before our salvation. And these three dimensions also correspond with the three dimensions in which Scripture tells us to expect spiritual warfare. Look at this passage again with me as we identify these dimensions:

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of this world”- So that is our first dimension, the world. Now, what does Paul mean by the world? Does he mean the trees, flowers, animals, and the rest of nature? No, I don’t think so. What Paul means here is what John meant in John 1 meant when he said that Jesus came into the world but the world did not receive Him. It wasn’t nature, the wildlife that rejected Jesus, but the people who were aligned against God in their thinking, a people with a whole set of values that are opposed to the God of the Bible, the world here is the domain of darkness. And this includes every culture around the globe. And the world tempts you to fall back into step with it in many ways. Take our culture now, the culture praises you for living your authentic self by giving into your base desires. Our current culture sees Jesus’ call to self-denial and godly living as an evil ideology meant to stifle you from living out your truth. And the culture puts pressure on Christians to either fall in line and adopt it’s way of seeing the world or to shut up and stay silent.

The world hates God, is at enmity with Him, it is the domain of darkness, that is what Paul means by the world. And this is the first dimension of spiritual warfare.

Let’s continue by looking at our verses again...

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of the world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” Following the prince of the power of the air. That is another name for our adversary, our enemy, Satan. This is the third dimension of spiritual warfare, attacks from the demonic forces. In the domain of darkness, Satan and his demons have been given an amount of limited power and freedom and we are told in 1 Peter that he prowls around like a lion, seeking to devour that which is of God, including you and including me.

Scripture also calls Satan the deceiver. Take a quick look with me at 2 Cor. 11:12-15. In this passage he is speaking on false prophets who are attempting to deceive the church of Corinth, and these false prophets are stealing the tactics of Satan and his minions to do it. Let’s read, “12 And what I am doing I will continue to do, in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. 13 For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. 14 And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 15 So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.”

Satan’s primary tactic is deception. He wants you call what is sin good and what godly sin. He will tempt you with the things of this world, whether it be sex, slothfulness, your career, anything, and he will tempt you to make them ultimate things in your life, to replace God with those things. This is shown clearly in Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. If someone were to read Matt. 4, not knowing the story, without knowing the context, not know who Jesus or Satan was, it would appear that Satan is simply trying to help Jesus, to be a friend to Him, show Him that He doesn’t need to suffer in the way that He is, that He could simply turn the rocks to bread to feed Himself, or to name Himself ruler of Israel right then and there and stop being this lowly servant of human beings and so on. But in reality, we know that Satan was attempting to appear as an angel of light to deceive God the Son to place earthly comforts before the will of God the Father. To drive a wedge in the relationship between them.

And Satan does the same to you, appearing as an angel of light, offering you attractive things in order to get you to compromise you devotion to Christ. So we are to look at the world through the lens of Jesus, holding all things up to the light of the Scripture to be sure we are not being deceived

This is just one of the many tactics Satan and his demons use to compromise our relationship with Christ. Others include accusing you of sin that has already been forgiven, demonic oppression and even demonization of unbelievers. So demonic attacks is the second dimension of spiritual warfare.

Now let’s look at this last dimension…

Read with me the rest of our passage in Ephesians 2, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of the world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience-among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature, children of wrath like the rest of mankind.” Spiritual warfare, even as Christians, can still come from our own flesh. So what does Paul mean by flesh?

Well, we can say that the flesh are our own sinful desires that are opposed to God.

Look with me at Gal. 5:16 and 19-21 “But I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh… Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.

All of these things are warring within us. As long as we are here on this earth, we will still struggle with our sinful flesh. And as you can see from this long list, this internal battle going on with ourselves takes on many different forms, from lust, to anger, to jealousy. And Scripture tells us that even as Christians who find their citizenship in the kingdom of God, we will continue to struggle with our flesh until we depart from this world of Jesus comes back.

Well believe it or not, the answer to this is found in who we are in Christ. Because while we experience spiritual warfare in all three of these dimensions, we as Christians are most attacked by temptations to underrate God’s forgiveness and who we are in Him. What do I mean by that?Revelation 12:10 gives us another important look into one of the tactics of Satan. It says this, “Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: ‘Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down’”

You see what the enemy loves to do is accuse you of your sin, both past and present. And he does this to make you doubt the forgiving power of God and who you are in Him. He wants to trap you in a mind set of believing that you are too bad, too sinful for Jesus to possibly forgive you or that since you messed up yesterday and fell into sin, Jesus now wants nothing to do with you. He wants to cut you off from Jesus and he will use the pleasures of the world and the desires of your flesh to do it.

But, in Ephesians 6:10-20 we told how to resist these accusations and lies, read with me, “10 Finally, ebe strong in the Lord and in fthe strength of his might. 11 gPut on hthe whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against ithe schemes of the devil. 12 For jwe do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against kthe rulers, against the authorities, against lthe cosmic powers over mthis present darkness, against nthe spiritual forces of evil oin the heavenly places. 13 Therefore ptake up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in qthe evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. 14 Stand therefore, rhaving fastened on the belt of truth, and shaving put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and, tas shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. 16 In all circumstances take up uthe shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all vthe flaming darts of wthe evil one; 17 and take sthe helmet of salvation, and xthe sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,

Now, before you get concerned that this sermon is about to double in length, I am not going to go over each of these pieces of armor in detail, I implore you to do that yourselves after this. But I want to point out something very special about this armor of God we are told to put on in order to stand firm and wage war again the enemy:

Each of these pieces of armor are all quotations from the OT, mostly from Psalms and Isa. Now, Paul would expect the ancient readers of this book to know the OT because the ancient writers and those who are well read of the OT would see that every single one of those pieces of armor is a characteristic of the Messiah.

So fundamentally, what Paul is saying here is that the way we prepare for battle against the enemy is to realize that you are in Christ, and that His character qualities have been given to you for you to embrace! To fill your mind with truth, to remember that you have not only been forgiven of your sins, but that you have been clothed in the righteousness of God Himself so that you can stand blameless before Him, to embrace the salvation which has been granted you and so on.

So Paul is drawing out these OT pieces of armor to remind the us that for this battle, you must be like Christ, you must put on His characteristics that He has given to you and live in the truth that you are a part of the Kingdom of God and this will protect you and allow you to stand firm against the attacks of the evil.

Now it is important to know that you do not put on this armor of God by some formulaic or mystical prayer, that is not what Paul is intending you for you to do here. The putting on here is the steps of becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ, it is recognizing the truth of who we are, it is the transformation in us by the Holy Spirit. And prayer is certainly a part of that. In verse 18 Paul says to prayer at all times in the power of the Holy Spirit, with all prayer and supplication, meaning, to pray with the power of the Holy Spirit that He aids you in you and your fellow brothers and sisters in your sanctification, in your becoming more and more like Christ and remembering who you are in Him. But putting on the armor of God is not a mystical prayer we prayer and if we forget to “pray on the armor of God” than oh boy, watch out cause Satan is going to get ya. That actually undercuts who we are in Christ by saying we need a magically prayer to protects. No, what Paul is saying the way to fight against all forms of spiritual warfare, whether it be temptations from the world, your flesh, or demonic warfare, is to pursue Christ-likeness.

Now, the final way to engage in spiritual warfare is remember another key thing; the battle is already won. Read Col. 2:13-15 with me, Col. 2:13-15, “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, (Paul here is describing us before salvation, we were spiritually dead and members of the domain of darkness, but..) God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross (There is now no longer anything the devil can use to shame us or accuse us of. When the greek word for all here, when properly translated means all. All of our sins have been forgiven and the debt we owed God because of our sin has been paid in full, nailing it completely to the cross, our sin has died and we have died to it). (Now listen and rejoice here) He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”

Christian, on the cross Jesus defeated sin and death. And what’s more, He has disarmed the enemy. The demonic hooks that used to be in you have been completely removed and Satan and his demons have been put to open shame. The imagery used here in this passage is one of a conquering general parading his defeated enemy through the streets in shame. That is what Christ did on the cross and the power and authority Jesus has over the evil one and his forces has been given to you through the Holy Spirit! You can stand firm and rebuke the enemy because of Jesus’ victory on the cross! Satan may tempt you, the world my try to entice you and your flesh may beckon you, but they have no true power over you because you are more than a conquer in Christ and you stand victorious in Him over all spiritual attacks!

So while the domain of darkness is still here for a time and while the evil one is given a measure of power, he is on a leash and will be thrown into the lake of fire when Christ comes again to establish His Kingdom on this earth! That is our hope and that is our victory!

Let’s pray