©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

10-02-05

The Sword Of The Spirit

10/2/05 The Sword Of The Spirit

EPH 6:10-17 Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of God, that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the full armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming missiles of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

For the past several months now

we have been involved in a study of the these 18 verses

from the final chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

It is a passage given to us by Paul

for the purpose of equipping us with the tools,

or more precisely, the armor and weapons we will need

to fulfill the calling given to us by God in the first 5 chapters of this letter.

We are the people of God.

We are His family,

His sons and daughters,

His friends.

But we are more than that.

We are also the physical body of Christ here on this earth,

the means through which

He now reveals Himself,

and His love,

and His heart of redemption for the entire human race.

Because we have aligned ourselves with Christ,

and because His Spirit has equipped us

with the ability to literally reveal the manifold wisdom of God through our lives,

we have within us the potential of being

strategic players

in the warfare that is now raging throughout this world.

It is a warfare being fought

between our Creator

and all the forces of evil that war against Him,

a warfare that has one central issue -

our discovery of the true nature of God’s love for us

and our individual response to that discovery.

It is a fascinating war,

one in which there are as many battlefields

as there are individuals on this earth at any given time.

Your own personal life is one of those battlefields,

and this past week there have been a number of carefully planned attacks on you

all designed to cause you to question

or to doubt the reality of God’s love for you.

With each of us

those attacks have come through those avenues

that Satan knows will most effectively cause us to doubt,

or to fear,

or to hurt,

or to question,

or to hide.

And with each of those attacks

we have been confronted with a choice.

Do we accept the lie about our God

that is being plunged into our hearts,

or do we once again

choose to fight our way back to the truth,

and then, once we have regained our footing on that truth,

to look again at what caused the doubt, or the fear, or the pain,

and see it this time

firmly within His hands

and see it present in our lives

with His assurance that He will work this, too, together for good.

And what is that truth we must fight our way back to?

JER 31:3 The Lord appeared to him from afar, saying, "I have loved you with an everlasting love...”

EPH 2:4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us...

TIT 3:4-5 But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy...

It is impossible for us to understand any aspect of life correctly,

or any event that enters our lives

until we understand it

within the context of His love for us,

and His commitment to us,

and His assurance that He both can and will bring both healing and redemption

out of even the worst forms of evil in our lives.

One of the great tragedies

in our attempts to understand our God

is that we have so abused certain words and concepts

as to make them almost meaningless to us,

like, for example, that word “salvation”.

PSA 27:1 The Lord is my light and my salvation; Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the defense of my life; Whom shall I dread?

The Lord is my salvation...

It is what He offers us,

and His longing to bring that salvation

to as many people as possible

is the only reason why He has chosen to allow this world

to continue on as it now exists.

Have you fallen victim to the lie of Satan

that suggests that God is in the business of judging and condemning us for our sins?

Do you think He is looking with disgust on the human race,

deeply offended by our behavior,

trying to find some way of getting us to clean up our act?

Would you like to hear Him tell us the truth?

JOH 3:17 “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”

He is not in the business of judging,

or condemning.

He doesn’t need to do that.

We’ve already done it to ourselves

with our actions and our attitudes.

He’s in the business of salvation.

He’s in the business of redemption -

buying back what was lost.

Do you want to look into the heart of God?

Maybe this will help.

Have you ever been in fear of losing someone you love?

I don’t mean losing them physically,

I mean losing their heart.

Maybe it was a son or a daughter.

You saw them churning over choices

that could result in your losing access to their heart forever.

How did that make you feel toward them?

Did it cause you to long for

and search for some way to reach them

and to break the power of the evil that was seeking to destroy them?

That is the heart of God for us.

That is the way He views us,

the way He responds to us.

Do you think God doesn’t understand your world?

Do you think He doesn’t feel your pain when you’re 5 years old,

or 14,

or 17,

or 35,

or 70?

He knows,

and He cares,

and He longs to become your salvation

in the deepest sense of that word.

And all it takes from us

is our recognition of our helplessness without Him.

“Oh my God! Save me!!”

That’s it.

That’s all it takes.

We don’t promise to change anything.

We don’t promise to fix it.

We don’t try to clean it up.

We just cry out for help,

for redemption,

for His salvation.

And He’s right there,

next to us,

with us,

where He has always been,

reaching out to us,

calling to us,

waiting for that time when we reach out to Him.

But let me bring us back to our study of the armor of God,

and back, too, to the final piece of our protection

given to us in this passage.

It is what Paul calls the sword of the Spirit,

and it is a piece of our armor

that is unique in the list given to us by Paul.

Every other piece of the armor listed for us

is primarily defensive.

That is, it is given to us

to protect us against the attacks of the enemy.

The helmet,

the shield,

the breastplate,

even the shoes are primarily to equip us

to handle the attacks that come at us,

to protect us from blows we receive.

But the sword is not primarily defensive,

it is offensive.

It is what we use

not to defend ourselves from the enemy,

but rather to attack and destroy him.

And to help us make sense of this

I want to talk a little first of all

about what the Sword of the Spirit is,

and then about how it does what it does.

Now, we can find the obvious answer to what it is

right here in the passage.

“...and (take) the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

It is the written word of God,

the Bible.

But that in itself is not a completely accurate picture

of what Paul is saying to us here,

and unless we understand what’s really being said

we can easily fall victim to what I would call the Christian grenade approach to Scripture.

We all know what grenades are,

those handy little explosives

that soldiers in battle

can fling at the enemy.

I have seen Christians who use Scripture in the same way.

They’ll lob verses at the people around them

thinking they are accomplishing great things for the cause of Christ in the process.

Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of this grenade approach to Scripture

is that most of the time

those who take this approach

spend most of their efforts

flinging their verses at other Christians in an attempt to blow holes in their doctrinal beliefs

so that they can then win some argument

and prove they’re right and the other guy is wrong.

That is not what Paul is saying to us here.

What he’s doing

is giving us insight into the way the Spirit of God accomplishes His work in our lives.

You see, the Word of God is not the sword of the Christian,

it is the sword of the Spirit.

And in context

Paul is not telling us that we should use this sword to attack other people,

he is telling us

that God’s Spirit will use His Word

to attack Satan in our own life.

We are given several vivid descriptions of this process

other places in the New Testament.

One of them is found in Hebrews 4:12 when the author writes,

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

He is talking here

about a fascinating work of the Spirit of God within us,

a work well known to every true believer,

a work in which God’s Spirit

takes some portion of the written Word of God

and gives it a life and a power within us

unlike anything else we’ve ever known in our lives.

In my own life

this remarkable work of the Spirit of God

and the Word of God

began from the very beginning.

I’ve shared with you in the past

my memory of that 18 year old kid

in the fall of 1966

sitting night after night in the fire escape stairwell of the dorm,

pouring over the first three books of the New Testament,

finding that the words I was reading

were boring into my spirit as nothing had ever done before.

And the more I read

the more clearly I knew exactly what He was saying to me -

“Larry, I want you.”

I had never encountered anything so real,

so powerful,

so demanding,

so dangerous in my life.

I couldn’t ignore it.

I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening.

All I could do is choose

either to submit

or to rebel.

And that same process has gone on in my life

on a regular basis

for the past 40 years.

Paul describes a similar working of the this sword of the Spirit

in his second letter to the Corinthians.

He says,

2CO 10:3-5 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ...

And my point here

is simply that the process Paul is talking about here

is not one in which God has equipped us with this weapon

so that we can attack error in others,

it is a weapon with which the Spirit of God

is able to attack and destroy error within ourselves.

And when the Spirit of God

uses the Word as it was designed by God to be used

it will comfort,

it will heal,

it will restore,

and it will bring us into a knowledge of the love of our God for us as nothing else can do.

Certainly there are times when it will convict,

when the Spirit will use it as the perfect mirror for the soul,

the mirror in which we suddenly see ourselves

and recognize some area in which God is seeking to bring changes into our lives.

But even then He uses it in our lives

in a way that gives us tremendous hope for the future,

a hope based on the assurance

that we truly can be different people than we have been,

and it also gives us an awareness of God’s love for us,

a love that cares enough

to help us break the power of sin in our lives.

Now, I need to offer you a couple of warnings here

just so that you are prepared for some of the strategies Satan will try to use against you.

The first thing I’d offer us

is some help in knowing

how we can tell the difference

between the conviction of the Spirit

and the false condemnation of Satan in our lives.

When we are dealing with the conviction of the Spirit of God in our lives

there is always a specific issue He’s addressing

and a clear way in which to resolve it.

In other words,

He points us in a specific direction

and makes it clear to us how we can move in that direction.

We know what He wants us to do.

When the Spirit of God used the Word of God in my life in the fall of 1966

I knew what He wanted.

He wanted my life,

and He wanted me to choose.

And there have been numerous times since then

when He has done exactly the same thing

with specific issues in my life -

some place where I have opened some doorway into sin in my life,

hoping maybe He wouldn’t notice,

or some place where I have offended another person

and needed to go to them and confess what I’d done.

But always there is a specific issue,

a specific choice He’s calling me to.

Sometimes it takes Him a while

to get me to the place where I’ll look at what He’s saying,

but He’s real good at what He does.

And that’s all part of that beautiful convicting/freeing work of the Spirit of God in our lives.

The condemning work of Satan, on the other hand,

has no specific issue,

and no way of resolution.

It is aimed not at choices we can make,

but rather at our basic attitude toward ourselves.

“I’m such a lousy Christian.

All I’ve ever done is failed.

I know God is sick of me.

All I’ll do in the future is fail because that’s what I am - a failure.”

Those are classic thought patterns

brought about within us

as a result of demonic harassment and attack in our lives.

God never calls you a failure.

He never calls you a sinner.

He calls you His holy one,

His beloved,

His precious child.

And everything He says to us about our performance

is said within the context of His love for us.

And then, with my second warning,

I’d like to broaden this whole thing out a little more.

We’ve seen this morning

that the sword of the Spirit

is the Spirit of God

using the Word of God in our lives

to defeat and destroy lies,

and to encourage our spirits,

and to give us hope,

and direction,

and freedom,

and purpose in our Lord.

But the Spirit of God

is not the only one

who will seek to use Scripture in our lives.

The truth is

some of the greatest damage Satan has ever done in this world,

and some of his most effective attacks against us personally

have come through his turning Scripture against us.

Many, probably most false religious systems in the world

point to Scripture as their authority

and use it freely.

And there have been times with most Christians

when we have opened up the Word of God,

read what we found there,

and come away feeling confused,

and condemned,

and utterly unworthy,

and even in fear of God’s wrath, and judgement, and condemnation.

If you are acquainted

with the accounts in Matthew 4 and Luke 4

of the temptations Satan brought against Christ

at the beginning of His public presentation of Himself to Israel

you will remember that Satan quoted Scripture to Christ Himself

in his efforts to divert Him from His purpose here on earth.

So how in the world

can we tell whether it is Satan or the Holy Spirit

who is using Scripture in our lives?

And what I share with you here now is not complicated.

It’s not confusing.

But if we loose sight of it

we will also loose sight of the only certain reference point

by which we can correctly understand and relate to the written Word.

From the beginning of our study of this armor of God

we clearly defined the basic point of attack

used by Satan in his efforts to defeat us.

It’s always the same.

From the day we enter this world

until the day we depart from it

Satan is in a constant ongoing process

of seeking to wound us in ways

that will blind us to the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of our God for us.

He wants to blind us to His love.

And from the day we enter this world

until the day we depart from it

the Spirit of God is in a constant, active process

of seeking to open the eyes of our spirits

to the incredible reality of the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of our God for us.

We know that with certainty

because when, in Romans chapter 5,

Paul gave us that remarkable list

of the birthday presents given to every Christian

at the time we enter the family of God,

when he got to the gift of the Holy Spirit

he didn’t just say that God has given us the Spirit,

but He also told us exactly why the Spirit was given.

He says, “ROM 5:5 ... the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

That’s what He’s doing.

He is seeking to pour out within our hearts

an ever growing awareness of the love of our God for us.

And whenever

and where ever He uses the sword,

the Word of God in our lives

He does so in a way that will enrich our awareness

of the depth of God’s love for us.

And that right there is the test.

Whenever we read the Word of God

or hear it preached

or hear it quoted

and what we hear intensifies our awareness of the love of our God for us

it is the Spirit doing His perfect work in our lives.

And whenever we come in contact with the Word of God

and come away feeling condemned,

or rejected,

or unworthy,

we know with certainty

that at the very least we have misunderstood the passage,

and very possibly

we are in a situation

in which Satan is seeking to turn our sword against us.

So there it is - the sword of the Spirit -

not a sword we use against others,

but rather a sword that the Spirit uses within us

against those lies that keep us bound and defeated.