©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

07-24-05

War Of The Worlds Pt. 3

War Of The Worlds Pt. 3

EPH 6:13-17 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.

We are involved in a study

of one of those jewels in Scripture,

one of those brief, powerful passages

that gives us so much,

so vividly,

in so very few words.

This is one of those passages

in which truth is so easily accessible to the mind of the Christian,

and yet at the same time

it is truth we never outgrow, never go beyond,

truth we need as much

50 years after meeting our Lord

as we do the day He brings us into His family.

For it is in this remarkable passage

that Paul opens our eyes

to the armor God has given us

for our role in the warfare we face each day.

And before we look at the next piece of our protection,

I want to diffuse a common lie used by Satan

to keep us from reaching out to what our God is giving us in this passage.

What we are being given in this passage

are not religious duties we are suppose to fulfill.

These are not things God is requiring from us,

they are things He is giving to us.

And here once again is one of those places

in which the armor analogy used by Paul is so brilliant.

Could you imagine a warrior in the 1^st century

preparing for the battle he will face that day,

the battle that he knows will bring about a brutal, bloody warfare,

a warfare in which he will be at the very center,

and then having that warrior say to his Commander,

“Do I really have to put on all that stuff?

It takes so long to get it all on,

and I’m really not sure it makes that much difference.

Why don’t I just head on out to the battle field without all this stuff and give it my best shot?”

The man would have to be a fool.

Any warrior who valued his life and knew what the battle was like

would take the armor handed to him by his commander

and then drop to his knees before him

and thank him for providing him with those things on which his very survival depends.

And my point here is simply this.

Do not let Satan once again perform his favorite slight-of-hand trick on you.

The things we will look at in this armor

are not things we are suppose to give to God in order to be “good Christians”

they are things our God is seeking to give to us

in order to preserve

and to protect us,

and to equip us for the life we face each day.

Last week we looked at the first piece of that armor.

EPH 6:14 Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth...

If what you heard Paul saying to us in that passage

is that God wants you to be truthful,

or that He really wants you to learn more of His truth,

then you utterly missed the heart of what he’s saying to us.

He’s not giving us a religious duty to fulfill,

He’s giving us insight into the one thing

that has the ability to bring about real personal freedom of spirit within us.

Truth is not our duty,

it is our friend, our treasure, our protection.

And the same principle applies

to everything we encounter in this armor.

Now, for this morning,

I’m going to have us skip the next piece of armor,

the breastplate of righteousness,

for one week,

and drop down to verse 15 because it fits well with what we looked at last week,

and because it is where my thinking has been during the past few days.

In verse 6:15 Paul say,

“...and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace...”.

Obviously, Paul is talking about our battle shoes,

about what we put on our feet.

Last week he told us

that truth gives us the freedom to move,

and now this week he’s telling us

that “the preparation of the gospel of peace” gives us the ability to do so.

What’s on our feet

is what gives us the ability to charge the enemy.

It is what gives us the ability

to plant our feet firmly when he attacks,

to brace ourselves against even the most vicious blows.

It is the key both to our mobility and to our stability.

But here again we need to do a little work

before we can understand what he’s talking about.

Just exactly what is “the preparation of the gospel of peace”?

Now, I’m going to say some things during the next few minutes

that may at first overwhelm you, even discourage you a bit.

But I promise that before I finish this morning,

I’ll offer some thoughts

that will have the ability to turn that around for you.

And let me begin by sharing with you

a rather painful experience I had

about two years after I became a Christian.

I graduated from high school in 1965.

For those of you who remember or know your history,

in 1965 a male high school graduate had two options available to him -

go to college

or risk getting drafted and sent to Viet Nam.

I started college in the fall of 1965,

and it was a year later,

in the fall of 1966,

that God’s Spirit blasted into my life

and thoroughly messed everything up...forever.

In ways that only His Spirit can do

He made it clear that He wanted my life on His terms,

and after several weeks of determined resistance,

sensing even then

that if I let Him in

my life would never again be the same,

I finally accepted His terms of surrender

and knelt before my Creator.

Though I really didn’t realize it at the time,

from the very beginning

Christ’s entrance into my life had such a profound impact on me

that a number of my fellow students

began to notice

and then to look to me in a sense as their role model for the Christian life.

I was incredibly ignorant of nearly all things Christian when I met Him.

I had lots of church in my background

but almost no knowledge of what it really meant to live daily with my Lord.

But one thing I knew with certainty -

my Lord was real, and that knowledge had implications that affected every aspect of my life.

I share this with you

because it will help you to better appreciate

an incident that took place in a crowded dorm room

in the fall of 1968.

A number of us were sitting around talking

when Gary Conklin came in.

Gary and I had, by then, gone through nearly four years of school together,

but at the time

he was intensely hostile to anything Christian.

All of the sudden Gary began to bombard me with questions about Christ,

and about Christianity.

Though his attitude was combative,

the questions he was asking were excellent,

and they were questions for which I had no answers at all.

The more he attacked,

the more helpless I felt,

until, when he finally quit and walked out,

we all just sat there in silence.

One of my friends in the room finally spoke up.

He asked me why I hadn’t answered the questions.

I tried to cover for my ignorance

by mumbling something about Gary not really wanting answers,

to which my friend said, “Yes, but maybe we did.”

Looking back on that experience,

I know now what a gift it was to me.

Gary’s attack didn’t affect my faith in my Lord

or my allegiance to Him at all.

The one clear fact of my life even then was that He was real

and nothing could ever change that.

But it made me realize how utterly ignorant I was

of so much of what He said,

and of how His pattern for life operated.

To use Paul’s analogy,

at that point in my life

I was running around on the battle field in my bare feet,

with almost no preparation of the gospel of peace whatsoever.

When Paul tells us that we are to cover our feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace

he is telling us that both our mobility and our stability in this warfare we are involved in

are a direct result of our knowing in our minds

the truth we have already discovered in our spirits.

And there is no other way to gain that knowledge

than through the right kind of preparation.

We simply need to know how our God thinks

and what He says

about all of the most critical issues in our lives.

And those of you who are new to my teaching,

and who have come out of some of the more abusive forms of religion

probably think that the next thing I’m going to say

is that this preparation of the gospel thing

is simply Paul’s way of telling us

that we must have daily devotions

if we want to live an effective Christian life.

Let me see if I can say this

in a way that leaves no room for confusion.

I believe that the concept of daily devotions

as it is typically handled in the mainstream religious world

is among Satan’s most brilliant strategies

for keeping the people of God

from discovering the truth of God

in a way that truly brings them life and freedom.

Now why in the world would I say that?

I say it because I know the ways of religion,

and I know that the concept of “daily devotions”

as it is so often presented within the church world

turns the Christian’s relationship with the written Word

into a hideous little religious game

in which we believe that God is pleased with us if we have had our devotions

and displeased with us if we have not.

And remarkably,

once that “law” of devotions is in place in the Christian’s mind,

even when they have their devotions or their “quiet time”,

they bring to their relationship with the Word an attitude

that makes it extremely difficult to actually learn

because their primary focus is simply that of fulfilling a religious duty.

As your pastor I could care less

whether you have daily devotions or not.

I do, however, care very much

about your preparation of the gospel of peace.

And in view of that

I would like to share with you

an approach I have taken in my own life,

an approach that involves both a vital attitude and then a valuable technique,

an approach that has had more to do with my own progress in the preparation of the gospel of peace

than everything else put together.

You see, I know how overwhelming it may at first seem

when I start talking about our need to understand

how our God thinks

and what He says about vital issues in our lives.

The truth is that in our culture today

very few people

have any personal knowledge of the written Word.

We have some cultural background,

most of which is grossly inaccurate,

but most of us come to the Lord

with almost no real, correct personal knowledge about what He says.

So where do we start?

How do we start?

Well, I’ll tell your first of all that, if your primary source of knowledge is me,

you are in deep trouble.

What I offer you each week is, I believe, good stuff.

It’s in context and, to the best of my ability accurate with the truth.

But it frequently takes me more than a year

to teach us through a 4 or 5 chapter book of the Bible.

As your teacher I can and I should equip you with the basic attitudes

that will provide you with the foundation you need

for the life God is calling you to lead.

But I can never ever provide you

with the knowledge you need

that will then give those attitudes life.

So how do you go about it?

Even if you were to begin a diligent Bible reading program

it would take most of you months just to read through the Bible from cover to cover,

and even then you would not relate effectively

to the truths you were reading.

So, if you are relatively young in your relationship with the Bible,

and if sometimes you find yourself

rather overwhelmed with it,

let me offer just a couple of thoughts

that have been pure gold to me

in my own relationship to the Word of God.

The first is simply an attitude

or maybe I should call it a protective mental grid

that I bring to my relationship with the written Word,

a grid that allows me to receive what God wants me to receive

without getting lost in what I’m not yet ready to understand.

I remember one Saturday morning when I was a kid

walking around to the back of the garage

and finding my dad involved in a process that fascinated me.

My dad loved to garden.

I’ve never known a time

when he hasn’t had something growing somewhere.

And a big part of successful gardening

is preparing good soil in which to grow your plants.

That Saturday morning

my dad had made about a two foot by two foot 2x4 frame

over which he had then nailed a wire mesh.

He had it sitting on top of a wheelbarrow as I recall,

and he was shoveling dirt onto the wire mesh,

dirt that was filled with rocks,

and roots,

and other junk he didn’t want.

Then he’d shake the frame

until only the big chunks were left inside it

and underneath

was the most beautiful, soft, pure dark soil you’ve ever seen.

I don’t know why,

but there was something about that simple process

that just seemed like magic to me.

Over the years

I have discovered a similar sort of mental grid

that accomplishes the same thing for me

in my relationship to the Word of God.

It’s every bit as simple

as was that frame and wire mesh system of my dad’s.

But for me it has been

every bit as effective.

When I first started reading the Word 40 years ago

I was overwhelmed with how many things I didn’t know,

and how much I didn’t understand,

and how much I had to learn.

And now, 40 years later,

every time I read the Word

I still find myself overwhelmed with how much I do not know,

and how much I still do not understand,

and how very much I have yet to learn.

But even in those very early days

I noticed something else as well.

Even though there were so many things I didn’t understand,

I also found that

every time I read a passage

there were also within it

some things that I did understand,

truths about myself,

and about my God,

and about my life with Him

that made perfect sense.

And for many years now

I have brought to my relationship with Scripture

an approach in which, when I read,

I trust the Spirit of God to become that wire mesh for my mind.

I trust Him to allow the truth I need right now

to fall through into my conscious mind,

and then I take all the rest of it

and set it aside.

This is that work of the Spirit of God

that Christ prepared His disciples for

in the final hours prior to His crucifixion.

He said, “I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He shall glorify Me; for He shall take of Mine, and shall disclose it to you.” (Jn. 16:12-14)

He is talking about a very personal,

active process in which the Spirit of God

literally guides our minds and our hearts into truth.

And He makes it clear

that, when that process is working as it is designed by God to work,

it will not just fill our minds with knowledge,

but it will give us understanding in a way that always, always, always brings us back into the Person of Jesus Christ.

So, simply stated,

what I’m suggesting is this.

Whenever you read Scripture

you will find in what you read

a lot of things you do not understand,

and a few things you do.

Take what you do understand

and cling to them as the great treasures they are,

and then take all the rest of it

and set it aside.

And then

let me offer you my other personal little treasure.

If you are looking for a way to build up a relationship with the Bible

in which you really make friends with the books you read,

in which you get to know them,

to know where certain passages are at,

and how the authors move through the ideas they are trying to communicate with us,

I will share with you

an approach I took early in my Christian life,

and one that I have been grateful for ever since.

First of all,

begin with the New Testament.

The entire Bible is rich with truth for us,

but the New Testament,

and especially the Epistles, those books beginning with Romans and going through Jude,

are the lense through which we can then see everything else in correct focus.

Then second,

realize that each of the Epistles

are not simply a collection of unrelated verses,

but rather they are unified statements,

with most of them containing just a few major statements

with the supporting truths that then flow from those statements.

The book of Romans, for example,

deals with just four major areas.

What does the human race look like without Christ?

What does it mean for a person to live with God through faith in Christ?

What happens with the Nation of Israel now the God has established the Church?

And what are the basic principles governing our relationships with one another within the Church?

And we will not be able to correctly interpret

any passage of Scripture

until we correctly understand it in context,

why it was written and were it fits into the overall statement of the book.

But how in the world

can we reasonably expect to gain that kind of relationship

to so many books

and so much material?

Well, I’ll tell you what worked for me

and some of you may find it of value as well.

Seventeen of the twenty-one New Testament Epistles are 6 chapters long or less.

Most of them are only four or five chapters long.

Even I, with my incredibly slow dyslexic reading,

can read the longest of those 17 Epistles straight through in about 15 minutes.

I would suggest that you take one of those shorter Epistles each month,

and read that same Epistle through from beginning to end once a day,

for 30 days.

Start with first Peter if you don’t have another that you prefer.

Don’t try to “study” it.

Just read it through from beginning to end.

Use the same Bible each time, (I like the New American Standard Version),

and if, after a few days of reading,

you begin to notice words or ideas that are repeated,

make a note of it in some way in the margins.

I drew circles around repeated words or ideas

and then connected them with a line.

Then, at the end of 30 days,

go back through the letter

and try to jot down one sentence

that summarizes the main idea in each paragraph.

And after 30 days

you’ll have the book for the rest of your life.

It will have become your friend.

And if you followed this same pattern for a year

you would have made friends with 12 books.

And in a couple of years

you would have made friends with every one of the Epistles.

With the longer ones

divide them up into 5 chapter chunks

and follow the same pattern.

And once you have made friends with the Epistles,

I promise you that as you begin to read and interact with the rest of the Bible

you’ll see it and understand it in correct focus

as you view it through the lense of the Epistles.

So there it is,

our second piece of the armor of God.

EPH 6:15 ...and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace...

It’s not one we slip on in a couple of days,

but one that, once it’s in place,

provides us with a stability and mobility in our Christian walk

as nothing else can ever do.

And next week we’ll back up just one phrase

and look at that breastplate of righteousness.