9/21/08 The Armor Of Light
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We are involved in a study of the Second Peter,

but you wouldn’t know that from what we will do during the next few minutes.

We’re going to pull out of that study just for this morning

because I think we need to take the morning

to remind ourselves once again of some truths we can so easily loose sight of.

This has not been an easy week for our nation.

There has been a tremendous amount of turmoil in our nation’s financial world recently,

and even if it has not affected us directly,

if we allow it to, it can create within us a sort of general anxiety about life,

an anxiety that, if we’re not careful, can easily blind us

to the most important truths of all.

Every so often I find myself

utterly overwhelmed with the absurdity

of the things we say to one another about God.

Or, more accurately,

I find myself overwhelmed with the absurdity

of the things we NEED to say to one another about God.

During the next few minutes of our lives

you will sit and listen

and I will stand before you and tell you

that our God is absolutely worthy of our trust,

and our faith,

and that we need have no fear whatsoever

of relying upon every word He has spoken to us,

and no fear of building our lives

upon those words.

And, if all goes well,

my words to you

will make it a little easier

for you to reach out to God,

trust what He says,

and rest in the reality of His love for you.

But, logically, the very fact that we need to do this is absurd.

We are created beings,

brought into existence by our Creator God

so that we could live in an eternal love relationship with Him.

The thought that we would have to fight our way,

one agonizing step at a time,

back into a trust relationship

with the very God whose love for us brought us into existence

seems ridiculous.

And yet, it is the way things are.

His having created us with free will,

and then our having used that free will

to rebel against His authority over us

has created what is, logically,

the most absurd situation that could ever exist -

a world full of created beings

terrified of their Creator,

their Creator who loves them with an everlasting love,

and His need

to attempt to coax us back into His arms,

His love,

and faith in His good intentions for us.

And so we live in a world

in which it is necessary

for one human being to say to another:

This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope. The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness. "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him." The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, To the person who seeks Him. (Lamentations 3:21-25)

His lovingkindness

and His compassions are new every morning.

What a powerful way of communicating the truth about our God.

I hope you do see what the prophet is saying.

He’s telling us that our God’s kindness to us,

His expressions of compassion for us

will continue on this earth

as long as there is a sunrise,

as long as there is a tomorrow,

as long as there is yet another day.

Sometimes when I look out our kitchen window

and I see the sun peaking up over the horizon through the trees

I remember the words of that song

that we sometimes sing.

When the morning falls on the farthest hill,

I will sing Your Name, I will praise You still.

When dark trials come and my heart is filled

With the weight of doubt, I will praise You still.

For O Lord our God, you are strong to save

From the arms of death, from the deepest grave,

And You gave us life in Your perfect will,

And by Your good grace, I will praise You still.

We do not have to begin each day

hoping that the kindness and forgiveness and compassion

that we received from our God yesterday

will still hold for today,

that some of it will slop on over

into our lives now.

We don’t need yesterday’s kindness from our God,

we don’t need yesterday’s compassion and forgiveness

because with each new dawn

He renews them to us once again in full measure.

There is a reference in these verses from Lamentations

to something that was imbedded in the Old Testament Jewish culture,

something I very much want us to see,

but something that we could easily miss

without an understanding of the social structure God had established for them.

When Jeremiah wrote these words

he said, "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him."

That statement, “the Lord is my portion”

is a reference to something that took place in the nation of Israel

in the days immediately following the Jew’s entrance into the land of Israel.

And for this to make sense

we need just a quick overview of Old Testament Jewish history.

As you know, the Nation of Israel began with Abraham and Sarah.

Abraham and Sarah had one son, Issac,

Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob.

Jacob was chosen by God to carry on the bloodline for the future nation of Israel.

Jacob then had 12 sons who formed the foundation for the Nation.

One of those sons was Joseph

who, in his teens, was sold into slavery to Egypt by his brothers.

Through the direct intervention of God,

Joseph rose from his slavery to become the second most powerful man in Egypt,

and was used by God to deliver that whole region

from a famine that devastated that section of the world for seven years.

As a result of that famine

all the descendants of Jacob moved down into Egypt

where they lived and multiplied for 430 years.

In their early days in Egypt they were treated with great honor

because of their brother, Joseph.

But when Joseph became only a distant memory in the minds of the Egyptians,

and the Israelites continued to multiply rapidly,

the Egyptians forced the Israelites into slavery.

Then, four centuries after their arrival in Egypt,

God brought Moses onto the scene,

and through Moses freed Israel from their Egyptian slavery

and brought them into the land He had promised to Abraham,

the land of Israel.

Now, once the people entered the land,

God guided Joshua, who took over leadership after Moses,

in the division of that land,

dividing the country into eleven sections,

and allotting a section to 11 of the 12 tribes of Israel.

But one tribe,

the tribe of Levi,

received no land allotment in the this new nation.

With Aaron, Moses’ brother, serving as the first Priest for Israel,

the tribe of Levi had been placed under Aaron’s leadership,

given to him to serve as the priests for the Israelites from that time on.

And in Numbers 18:20 we have God making this remarkable statement to Aaron.

Then the Lord said to Aaron, "You shall have no inheritance in their land nor own any portion among them; I am your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel.”

God then instructed the Israelites to set up a system

in which the Levites were dispersed throughout the nation,

and a tithe was collected from the other 11 tribes

and given to the Levites to meet their physical needs.

But it is that phrase spoken by God to Aaron that I want to draw our attention to,

that phrase where God says,

“I am your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel.”

God had chosen the Levites for Himself,

and He had given them the highest calling any Israelite could have,

the calling of standing between the people and their God.

When God said to the Levites, “I am your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel.”,

it was His intention to honor them with the greatest prize of all,

the greatest inheritance of all,

the greatest portion any person could ever possess.

He was saying,

“Your countrymen each receive a little piece of dirt as their hope for the future.

They will have to toil over their little bit of dirt,

working it,

caring for it,

guarding it,

protecting it.

And in the end it can give back to them

only what they have already poured into it through their own effort and agony.

But you, Levites,

you get ME.

I am your portion,

I am your Provider,

I am your hope for the future.

You don’t have to care for Me,

and guard Me,

and toil over Me,

and protect Me with the hope of some return.

I will care for you,

and guard you,

and protect you,

and toil over you.

You are honored above all others, because I am your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel.”

But I have sometimes wondered how many of the Levites

really understood what God was saying.

I think there were more than a few of them

who looked at the land allotted to their countrymen,

and then looked at what had been given to them,

and said to themselves, or to one another, “What a rip-off!

You get something real,

something you can touch,

something you can build your future on,

and all I get is God.”

And as I was reading Jeremiah’s comments in this passage from Lamentations,

it struck me how clearly the prophet had seen the truth.

LAM 3:24 "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him."

He knew there was nothing in this world

that a person could hold in his hands

and, through the possessing of it, really have hope for the future.

But in the midst of all of his turmoil,

all of the adversity that was flooding into his life,

Jeremiah saw the truth,

he saw the way things really are.

Because the Lord is my portion, therefore I have hope in Him.

And it is this same principle

that forms the centerpiece

for our life with God through Christ.

From the very beginning

what Christ came to offer us

was not forgiveness,

or purpose,

or healing,

or gifts,

or eternal life,

or great insights into life.

What He came to offer us was Himself.

Everything else is just fringe benefits.

But the one thing,

the only thing that gives us hope

is that we have Him,

with us,

in us,

for us forever.

And when we see things as they really are,

along with Jeremiah we will say, "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him."

We are here for only one purpose -

I don’t mean here in this room,

I mean here on this earth -

we are here to discover the truth about our God,

that He created us in love,

that even in the face of our total rebellion against Him He loves us still,

and that through the death of His own Son for our sins

He has provided a way for us to reenter an eternal love relationship with Him.

We are here to discover

the endless goodness of our God.

With that discovery

everything else in our lives

begins to find its proper place.

Until we make that discovery

we find ourselves forever driven

to find some God-substitute -

something or someone

that will serve as the center of our world.

Success...

money...

sex...

passion relationships...

power or control over others...

vengeance against those who have hurt us...

recognition and affirmation from others...

the abuse of drugs or alcohol...

adrenalin highs...

food...

travel...

work...

and on and on.

Many of those things are great parts of life,

until we try to form them into our God-substitute,

demanding that they provide us with an adequate and fulfilling reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

But once we attempt to use them for the foundation of our existence,

building our world upon them,

they will crumble under the weight.

Whether we are consciously aware of it or not,

there is a warfare raging around each of us,

and in us.

It is a warfare that involves God Himself,

and Satan,

and each person who has ever lived on this planet.

And, at its heart,

it is a battle for the discovery that our God is absolutely, and eternally, and utterly GOOD,

and that He is eternally GOOD

to all those who come to Him.

Paul uses a fascinating phrase in his comments to us in Romans 13:12.

The verse says,

ROM 13:12 The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.

In that verse He uses the phrase, “the armor of light”.

He calls us to “put on the armor of light”.

That’s really great stuff!

That is Paul giving us a visual image

of what takes place in our lives

when we make choices that grow out of our trust in what our God has said to us.

We create around our spirits the armor of light.

And let me just point out the obvious here -

armor protects,

armor guards,

armor deflects the attacks of those who would destroy us.

In this verse in Romans 13

Paul is offering us a crucial principle

for effective living within the family of God: clothe yourself in the armor of light.

Do you know the type of things

that have the power to defeat us in life?

It isn’t the threat or the reality of an economic downturn.

It isn’t a volatile stock market.

It isn’t having the “wrong” candidate win the election,

whoever we may think that is.

It isn’t another terrorist attack,

or escalation of the crisis in the Middle East.

It isn’t any force,

or circumstance,

or event,

or individual that can ever attack us from the outside.

The real enemies in life all come from within.

They are things like

our sense of shame over things we have done,

and the fear of being found out.

It’s our load of guilt,

and our physical and emotional addictions,

and our damaged relationships,

and our uncontrolled lusts for people,

or power,

or possessions that we hope will then bring us peace with ourselves

and fulfillment in life.

And when Paul talks with us

about putting on the armor of light,

he is telling us that,

as we move from darkness into light,

from lies into truth,

one of the fringe benefits of that process

will be the growing creation of the protective armor of light around us.

If that sounds a little weird or mystical,

let me put it more simply.

The greatest personal security a person can ever know

comes from seeing our God as He really is

and seeing our relationship with Him through Christ as it really is.

And the light that comes into our lives through knowing the truth about Him

literally becomes a protective armor around us,

an armor that will keep us from being defeated

by the attacks that come against us.

What attacks did you face this past week?

Were they attacks that came as the result of the financial turmoil in our nation right now?

Did your personal financial empire

shake,

or crumble?

There’s no doubt such things can be hard to adjust to,

but the truth is if we have been building our sense of future security

on anything that can be affected by the Dow Jones Average

then we have misunderstood the true nature of life.

You see, there is nothing that has happened this past week

that has altered our God’s commitment to us in the least.

MAT 6:25-33 "For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear for clothing?' For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

Do you think those are just religious platitudes,

words that sound nice but have no application in “real life”?

Then you have not yet clothed yourself in the armor of light in this area,

you have not seen and accepted the truth,

and will continue to be vulnerable to the attacks.

Maybe your attacks this past week

had to do with an overwhelming sense of guilt,

or shame,

or unworthiness as you looked at your own life.

And you allowed your own failures

to define who you are as a person.

You have chosen to believe

that what you have done determines both who you are

and how your God will relate to you.

Can I give you just a little light to help with the battle?

COL 2:13-15 When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.

Do you see it?

Paul clearly recognizes the power of those lies to attack us,

but he also wants us to know

that when we know the truth,

when we know that everything that we have ever done

that would have the power to cause us shame or fear before our God has already been nailed to the cross,

when we possess that armor of light,

then the result is that in disarms the rulers and authorities who war against us,

it takes away their weapons.

Well, we could continue on with endless examples,

but what I want you to know most of all this morning

is that when we know the truth about our God in any area

that truth becomes for us our great and impenetrable armor of light,

and armor that can protect us against literally anything this world can throw at us.

"The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him." The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, To the person who seeks Him.