©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

07-31-05

Fighting For Others

7/31/05 Fighting For Others

This has been another one of those weeks

in which I ended up someplace different than where I thought I was going.

I told you at the end of our time together last week

that I planned to take us to the next part of our armor,

our breastplate of righteousness,

but we’re going to put that on hold for one more week

so that I can share with you some thoughts

about how we can engage in spiritual warfare on behalf of other people.

The warfare we are involved in,

both within ourselves

and on behalf of others, is nonnegotiable.

I mentioned to you last week

that, when I graduated from high school in 1965,

I had several options open to me -

I could go to war or I could go to college.

I could face the possibility of being drafted into the Vietnam conflict,

or I could enroll in college and receive an educational deferment.

When we come to the our Lord, however,

we have no such options open to us.

I know it does appear as though there seem to be some in the church world

who have opted for some kind of lifetime educational deferment,

believing they can just hang out in church services and Bible studies for the rest of their lives

while avoiding all of the real spiritual conflict in life.

Such is the nature of man-made religion.

It clothes the person in a religious facade that looks great one day a week

while insulating them from the true life of Christ within,

that life that has the power to transform both our own lives

and often the lives of those God entrusts into our care.

The truth is that,

for those of us who truly do come to Christ,

not just to the Christian religion,

not just to the Church or to some religious system

but to Christ Himself,

from the day we bow before Him

we enter into a warfare that

becomes the central theme

and the defining issue of the rest of our lives.

It cannot be any other way

because when we come to Christ

the recreative work He accomplishes within our spirits

makes each of us a potentially major threat to Satan

and to all he seeks to do

in his ongoing warfare with Christ.

And whether we like it or not,

Satan will do all within his power

to blind our minds to those truths we have already sensed in our spirits.

And just so that this whole warfare thing doesn’t get too confusing,

let me remind us again

of the central issue in this warfare.

Let me remind us

of what our spirits have already seen,

and what Satan wants very much

to keep us from understanding at the conscious level.

It may not be what you think it is.

I know that much of my past church training

led me to believe that this warfare we are involved in has something to do

with our trying to do more good and to defeat evil in the world.

In our minds we may see Satan on one side

with all sorts of bad things he’s trying to get us to do,

and on the other side is God

with His list of all the good things He wanted us to do,

and then there we are in the middle

with the central issue of this warfare being whether we will choose the good or the bad.

Folks, that’s not it.

That’s not what this war is all about.

And it is certainly not what Satan is seeking to accomplish in our lives.

As far as he’s concerned

we can do all sorts of good stuff

and it won’t hurt his cause one bit.

In fact getting people to do good stuff

and then having them draw a sense of security from those good things they’ve done

is among his most effective strategies.

Do you know what the Spirit of God is fighting for in our lives?

Do you know what Satan is fighting against?

It is our personal discovery of

and trust in the love of our God for us.

To the degree that we see His love and respond to it,

to that degree every other issue in our lives will fall into place.

Certainly our personal encounter with His love

will result in a dramatic impact on our moral behavior,

but it doesn’t work the other way around.

Making changes in our moral behavior

will never bring us into a personal discovery of the love of our God for us.

Do you have moral struggles going on in your life right now?

Do you know why?

Do you think its just because you’re not a very good person

and you really do need to try harder to be better?

That’s not it at all.

Those struggles exist within you for just one reason -

because Satan has successfully placed within you lies,

lies that tell you that when it comes right down to it

your God simply cannot be trusted.

And he tells you that if you listen to your Lord

and follow what He says

there’s no way your needs will ever be met.

Everyone of us brought with us into this room today

our own personal battlefields -

places where we quite honestly cannot see

or do not trust the love of our God for us.

They exist within us

because of wounds Satan has inflicted on us in the past,

wounds designed to provide us with “proofs” that our God does not love us,

and because of the lies he feeds us on a daily basis.

Do you want an easy way to recognize some of the key battlefields in your life right now?

Two questions will help.

They are questions we ask ourselves.

“If God really loves me then why did He...?”

“If God really loves me then why doesn’t He...?”

And then we fill in the blanks,

and whatever we plug into those blanks

will reveal to us where we are under attack.

This will take us just a little bit off track,

but I find it fascinating

that it is impossible for the human spirit

to ever enter into a personal awareness of the love of God for us through external circumstances.

Have you ever found yourself thinking

if God would just do this or do that in your life

you would certainly then see His love clearly and respond to it?

If He would sufficiently flood you

with external proofs of His love

you would then fall at His feet in gratitude

and worship Him.

“Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

My friends all have Porches, I must make amends.”

Do you remember Adam and Eve?

They are us, you know.

And do you recall their situation

at that point at which they first chose not to trust the heart of their God,

or the reality of His love for them?

Do you recall their external circumstances?

They lived in the Garden of Eden -

not figuratively, but literally.

Every need they had

was met in overwhelming abundance by God Himself.

They were never cold,

never hungry,

never sick,

and they had never even seen a mosquito.

They had never experienced boredom,

or loneliness,

or fear.

Such words were not even in their vocabulary.

They had never heard of aging,

or tooth decay,

or viruses,

or Alzheimer’s,

or cancer,

or heart disease,

or death.

And every evening

they walked with their God face to face

and could ask Him anything they wanted to ask Him.

And yet all of that was not sufficient

to keep them in a life of trusting submission to their God.

So then what makes us think it would be enough for us?

You see,

we just can’t get there that way.

There is only one doorway into our discovery of the love of God for us.

It isn’t through our walking up to Him

with our arms filled with all of our good deeds

hoping He will then pat us on the heads and smile on us.

And it isn’t through His walking up to us

with His arms all full of good stuff for us -

an easy life,

lots of money,

no pain or disease.

Neither one of those

will ever give us entrance

into our discovery of His love.

But do you know what will?

It’s when we listen closely to what He’s saying to us

about what Christ was doing on that cross 2000 years ago.

And then

when we choose to believe

that He was literally offering Himself as full payment for our sins.

And then

when we choose to gather up in our arms

not all our good works and good deeds and successes,

but rather when we gather up in our arms

all of the disasters of our life,

all our moral failures,

all our corruption and internal sewage

and we bring that to our God

and see what He does with it.

And the beginning of our discovery of the love of our God comes

when we first understand that,

... when we were dead in our transgressions ... He made us alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us and which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. (Col. 2:13-14)

That’s the beginning.

That’s the doorway in.

But it’s only the beginning,

and from then on

we enter into a daily warfare

in which, issue by issue

and day by day

we then seek to understand what that love means

in every area of our lives.

And the heart of the warfare we are involved in right now in our lives

is our warfare against all of those things we are currently thinking and feeling

that cause us to question or doubt the depth of God’s love for us.

That’s the internal battle we fight on the personal level

and, as we move through our study of this armor given to us by our God,

we’ll gain greater understanding

about how we can fight and win that battle consistently.

But that’s not really where I want to take us this morning

because I realized this past week

that this warfare we are involved in

has two distinct aspects to it.

There is that internal warfare for our own discovery of the love of God that we’ve been talking about,

but there is also a warfare we are called to fight

on behalf of those around us.

And the heart of the warfare we are called to fight for those around us

is the warfare for their discovery of that same truth - the love of their God for them,

a warfare fought through our actions toward them.

And to help explain what I’m trying to say here

I want to first share with you

one of the defining moments in my own life,

a point at which an attitude was born in me,

an attitude that, looking back now,

I realize has shaped the direction of my life

as few other things have ever done.

And at the same time

it opened my eyes

to an aspect of spiritual warfare

I had never seen before.

It came as the result of a question I asked Francis Schaeffer

in a discussion group in the fall of 1970.

I’d only been a Christian for about four years.

I was on my way back from a one year mission trip on the Island of Trinidad.

Francis Schaeffer was doing a great deal of writing at the time,

and I’d read everything he’d written up to that point.

I was fascinated with what I was reading,

and on the way back to the U.S. from Trinidad

I took a two month detour to visit Schaeffer’s school in Switzerland.

During my year in the Carribean

I spent my time helping a missionary family

in their efforts to start a church in the Cascade Valley

just outside the capital city of Port-of-Spain.

During that year I worked with a number of the kids in the valley,

building friendships,

teaching Bible studies,

doing what I could to bring them to Christ.

For those of you who have long memories,

it was during that year that I met Tony,

a boy I told you about several years ago.

Another one of the kids I worked with,

a boy about 11 or 12 years old,

we called Little Barry.

We called him Little Barry

to avoid confusion with Big Barry,

another boy in the valley who was several years older.

Little Barry was deaf.

He’d been deaf most of his life,

ever since, in his early childhood,

one of his brothers got mad at him

and kicked him down a flight of stairs,

causing him to hit his head,

resulting in his loss of hearing.

During the year I was on the Island

Little Barry and I developed a great friendship.

I was driving a motorcycle at the time

and several times a week Little Barry would show up at my door with a big grin on his face,

point to the bike,

and we’d take off together for a ride around the island.

I cared about that little fellow a great deal,

and found myself intensely frustrated

with my inability to know how to tell him about my Lord.

I didn’t know sign language and neither did he,

an when I left the Island

I had no idea what he understood and what he didn’t.

When I got to L’Abri

I entered into the most remarkable environment I’d ever been in before,

an environment in which all honest questions were welcomed and treated with respect.

In fact, several times a week

Schaeffer held discussion groups

in which anyone could ask anything they wanted.

I remember one of those discussion groups so well

because it was the night when I got the wrong answer that changed my life.

As I recall,

several rather abstract philosophical questions preceded mine,

and then Schaeffer called on me.

I gave him a little background about where I’d been

and what I’d been doing,

and then I told him about little Barry.

I asked him what he thought God would do with this little boy I cared about so much,

this little boy who could not hear me tell him about his Savior.

I asked that question

with the hope that Schaeffer would tell me

that I didn’t have to worry about that boy,

that somehow God’s Spirit would surly supernaturally intercede

and fill in the gaps left by my ignorance and now by my absence.

But that wasn’t what he said.

What he said was, “You can fight for your young friend.”

That was all.

That was his answer.

“You can fight for your young friend.”

It definitely wasn’t the answer I wanted,

but it was an answer that, in a very real sense,

God has used to shape and define the course of my life ever since.

For, in that one sentence

Schaeffer defined for me

the heart of all true spiritual warfare for others.

It isn’t fighting against Satan,

it’s fighting for the ones we love,

fighting for their discovery of the true nature of God’s love for them,

fighting against those lies in their lives

that prevent them from believing or trusting the heart of their God.

I was never able to return to Little Barry,

but in the past 35 years

my Lord has brought others into my life,

each one just as important,

each one needing an ally,

each one needing someone to help them see the lies

that Satan is using to blind them to the truth of God’s love for them.

And in whatever way I can

I fight for them.

You see, that’s what spiritual warfare is.

It’s waging war against those lies

in our own lives

and in the lives of those we love,

those lies that blind us to the personal knowledge of the depth of our God’s love for us.

And how do we go about it?

Well, in our own life

we fight most of all

by doing what Paul calls us to do

in this passage we are studying in Ephesians.

In the most remarkable way

we discover the truth about our God

in the process of clothing ourselves

with the armor He has given us for our protection.

That will make more sense

as we move ahead in this study.

But how about the warfare we enter into on behalf of others?

Who do you have in your life who’s worth fighting for?

Who do you love?

Who loves you?

Whose life has God placed into our hands?

And how do we go about fighting for them?

How can we most effectively help to break the power of the lies

that Satan has etched into their lives,

lies that are keeping them from seeing the truth

about God’s love for them?

And this is where I’ve been trying to get to

ever since I started this morning.

I don’t know exactly why this works the way it does,

I only know it’s true.

You see, most of all

the most effective way we will ever have

of giving another person the ability to see the love of God for them

is by our acting in love toward them ourselves.

When we choose to act toward another person

the way our God acts toward us

in the most remarkable way

it’s like handing them a tiny mirror

in which they can then see reflected

the love of God Himself.

When we choose to forgive

it reflects God’s forgiveness through Christ.

When we choose not to take into account a wrong suffered against us,

it stirs in the other person

the hope that just maybe

God might do the same thing.

When we show compassion,

or kindness,

or patience,

or faithfulness to them

even when their actions toward us make us want to do just the opposite,

it creates within their spirits

the hope that God, too, might really be kind,

and compassionate,

and patient,

and faithful to us even when we have not been faithful to Him.

Do you know what is far and away

the greatest single evidence of the love of God I have known during the past 30 years?

It is the kindness,

and the patience,

and the faithfulness,

and the compassion,

and the grace shown to me by my wife, Sandee.

Because of her love for me

it is so much easier

for me to hear and respond to the love of my God for me.

We fight for another person’s discovery of the love of God

by loving them ourselves,

and whenever we choose to relate to them

in a way that is consistent

with the way Christ relates to us

we will, in the process, remove tremendous barriers in their lives,

barriers that would otherwise block them from seeing the love of God.

And it works the other way around, too.

If you allow your flesh

to drive your response to another person,

whether it’s your greed,

or your lust,

or your fear,

or your jealousy,

or your anger,

when you relate to another person

in a way that is inconsistent with the way Christ relates to them,

you will place into their lives

significant unnecessary barriers

to their discovery of the love of their God for them.

If you want to greatly intensify another person’s struggle

for their discovery of the love of God

accuse them unjustly,

hold a grudge against them for days or weeks or months or years,

speak evil of them to others,

question their integrity,

attack them for your own gain,

use them for your own pleasure,

compare them with others and find them falling short,

refuse to trust them,

tell them their value as a person comes from what they produce.

In other words,

relate to them in ways that are exactly opposite

from the way our God relates to them

and the pain you will cause them

will dramatically intensify their inability

to hear and respond to the love of their God for them.

That is spiritual warfare, my friends.

That’s the battle we fight each day on behalf of those around us.

It’s real,

and it matters more than I could ever even begin to express to you.

And next week

we’ll probably do what I originally intended to do this week,

we’ll return to Paul’s words in Ephesians

that reveal to us how we prepare ourselves personally

for this warfare we have entered into.