The Full Armour of God

SERMON: 2016-11-20--e0603--the-full-armour-of-god-part-3 SOURCE DURATION: 00:43:43.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: The material maintains a consistent tone of theological exposition and pastoral challenge throughout all candidates. Candidate 15 serves as the final concluding exhortation regarding the Holy Spirit, indicating that all shown content is part of the main sermon body. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:43:31.440-00:43:34.640 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, we were seeing last week that standard footwear issue for the Roman soldier was the simple sandal. And we saw that the sandal for that soldier served a threefold purpose. Number one, to protect the soldier's feet. Number two, to provide solid footing. And number three, to enable quick movement. Each one of those we saw has a spiritual significance in that they correspond to the provisions that God has made in Christ to help us remain faithful to God in our walk with him, regardless of what the devil throws at us. And so we saw last week, first of all, that in Christ, God has made provisions so that our walk will not be compromised. Look carefully then how you walk, says the Apostle Paul, not as unwise men, but as wise, making the most of the time because the days are evil. In Christ, God has provided provision so that we don't get entangled in relationships that will tear us away from our faithfulness and our loyalty to Jesus. And then we saw that in Christ, God has made provisions so that we can stand firm and hold our ground. Be on your guard, 1 Corinthians 16, 13, stand firm in the faith, be men of courage, be strong. To stand firm means to occupy your ground, regardless of the pressure that comes at you. It's to remain faithful to the Lord, whether you feel up or whether you feel down, whether the people around you agree with you or disagree with you. It is simply to stand where God has planted you. And last week, you will recall, we looked at the first two of three areas in today's society where it is particularly important for God's people to stand first. The first of that that we looked at was the authority of scripture, has God said Satan will constantly challenge the authority of God? And the second that we looked at was the centrality of the cross. There is no other way of salvation but through Jesus and his death and his resurrection. That brings us this morning then to still a third place where the Lord invites us to stand. I introduced it very briefly last week, want to look at it with you in some more detail this morning, and that is to live out our faith biblically, Ephesians 4, 1, a verse I quoted some time ago, Paul speaking to the Ephesians, he says, "As a prisoner for the Lord then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received." To live a life worthy of the calling that you have received. And when we looked at that verse in some detail a while back, I pointed out to you that from God's perspective in Christ, we are seated in heavenly places. God's intention for us is to echo the values of heaven. Colossians 3, I believe it is, Paul talks about if you are seated with Christ in heavenly places then put on the values of heaven. That's one of the jobs of the church today. God wants us to live out our faith in practical, everyday realities. And the reason for that is three-fold, God is holy so he wants us to be holy, but more than that, he wants us to be salt and light in the world. Every time you and I refuse to laugh at somebody's dirty joke, we serve as salt in stopping corruption. Each time you and I refuse to compromise our integrity and model holy Christian living before family and friends, we serve as light. We are letting the light shine that there is an other way of living than what the world is living. That's what God is looking for because that's how the kingdom spreads. Now you can appreciate that the devil absolutely hates God's people living out their faith in the real world. And the reason for that is that it exposes his darkness and so he will do everything that he can to dilute our salt, to stop us from being effective in stopping the corruption around us, and he'll do everything that he can to dim our light. And one of the ways in which he does this, especially in this day and age, I believe, is by encouraging us to privatize our faith. And what I mean by privatize our faith is he tries to let us buy into this notion that faith is a personal thing, a crutch that we lean on, on the inside, but that shouldn't come to expression on the outside and it shouldn't dictate to us how we live. And he has been, I think, extremely effective in that because when he succeeds in that then he creates this huge credibility gap, this credibility gap between who we are in Christ and what we profess to be and how we live over here. And of course, the world has got huge hypocrisy tentacles that they measure. And if they can see that kind of a gap, it destroys the effective witness of God's people. Let me read you some statistics. These are from a new book that I hope will come out in the next couple of months on the book of James called When Trouble Strikes, How to Handle the Losses in Your Life. And this is from chapter 12, a chapter that's entitled Faith That Works. And I quote a series of statistics here illustrating the schizophrenic nature of North American society, and I give some statistics. Here they are, 90% of North American adults profess to believe in God, 85% would call themselves Christian, 85% believe in heaven, and 63% believe that the Bible is the authoritative word of God. Pretty good so far, right? Now listen to the actual practice. Only 15% of people who profess to be Christian would declare that God is their highest priority. So much for loving the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, strength, and mind just for the record. 16% profess to read the Bible with any measure of regularity, so much for believing it to be the authoritative word of God. And only 29%, these are US figures, I'm sure Canadian figures are much lower, only 29% seem to attend church regularly, and as I said, I'm sure that doesn't, it's a lot lower in Canada. Now that's the adult population. Let me give you stats for the youth. 60% of youth who go to church call themselves committed Christians, 66% of these declare the Bible to be the word of God, and 43% are active in the local church. Pretty good, yeah? Well, 73% of youth surveyed indicated that they have been involved in occult activity, does not include reading horoscopes. When you include that figure, it climbs to 80%, and 25% of that group order their lives by reading a horoscope. 50% of such youth will have had sex by the time they're 18, and then this one, this one really blows me out of the water, only 9% profess to believe in moral absolutes. That is to say, some things are always right or always wrong by a biblical standard. 9% of the kids surveyed, many of which go to church, believe there is no such thing as absolute right or absolute wrong. Why? Because we live in a culture that says right or wrong is what you make it, and what everybody else around you says that it is. So Satan has had considerable success in trying to create a gap between what we believe and what we stand for. And the more you strive to stand for some particular biblical value, the more the pressures of society come against you because you're standing. Nobody cares what you believe as long as you don't practice what you believe. Give you another example. I don't know how many of you have followed in the news the story of a professor, Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto. He's gotten himself in a lot of hot water because he refuses to be politically correct. And he's been addressing a federal bill called C-16, which has just had second reading in Parliament, but you never heard of it, fair to say. Bill 16 is federal legislation that would alter the Canadian Human Rights Code and the Criminal Code, making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender identity or expression. You get that. Gender identity is, as you know, I self-identify as something other than my biological identity, right? Biologically, I may be a boy, but inside I'm a girl, so I want you to call me by my girl name. I don't want you to discriminate against me because I have chosen to adopt one of what is now 50 or 60 different identities that our society embraces. Well, Professor Jordan Peterson has had the courage to say at a university level, I refuse to call you by any other pronoun than what your biological gender would indicate. If you're a boy, I'm going to call you he, and if you're a girl, I'm going to call you she. And that's got a whole bunch of students up in arms. It's got the university on his case because it no longer makes the classroom safe for people who are struggling with gender identity issues. I haven't heard the outcome, but there was a big public debate, I believe, at the University of Toronto just yesterday, and I'm very curious to see what the results of that were. He's in hot water over all of this, but he's particularly upset because in a university setting you're supposed to be allowed to debate a variety of issues and have free speech, whether people agree with you or disagree with you is a don't. If Bill C-16 passes, as I understand it, if I say to you I want my name is, give me a good feminine name, Jocelyn, well, we have a Jocelyn here, so anyway, no matter what name we pick, it's going to be somebody, right? But if I say this is what I want you to call me and you're going to address me as she and not he, if you refuse to do that, you'll be criminally liable. Isn't that interesting? That's the world we live in of political correctness, and let me say again that I have great compassion for people who struggle with identity issues. A lot of my life and a lot of my ministry is geared to helping people finding their true identity in the person of Jesus Christ. I, of all people, know how big that battle is and how great those struggles are. Don't call normal what the Bible calls broken. And what the church needs to do is learn how to stand up on the issues of the day with love, compassion, but with firmness that says here I stand, I can do no other. Here's a quotation that is often attributed wrongly to Martin Luther. It actually comes from a novel written by a lady by the name of Elizabeth Rundle Charles. She was an Anglican author. The book is called The Chronicles of the Schoenberg-Cotta Family. Was published by Nelson, I believe, in 1864, but the book is set in the 1500s. And this quotation, which is often attributed, as I say, to Martin Luther, she actually places in the mouth of a monk called Fritz. But even though it's not a literal quotation from Martin Luther, it's an accurate reflection of his position in terms of standing firm. And here is how it reads, "If I profess, with a loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity, where the battle rages, the loyalty of the soldier is proved and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point." Be men, be women of courage. The devil doesn't care what you believe or what you do, as long as it doesn't impact the world around you. And to have our feet shod with the equipment of the gospel of peace not only means that we try to walk without getting entangled and tripping up so that we can walk faithfully before the Lord, it also means that we remain standing firm on issues like the authority of Scripture, the centrality of the cross, and the integrity of the Christian life. Don't ever be one of those persons who says, "Well, my personal position is this, but I would never speak out against somebody else's position because everybody is entitled to believe what they want to believe." It's not how it works before God. And I'm not suggesting we be rabble rousers, I'm not suggesting we be the extreme right, crazy people who do all kinds of crazy things, but we are called with gentleness and with reverence to stand up for what the Bible declares to be truth. Amen? That said, it's not enough to walk safely, it's not enough to stand and to hold our ground, it's equally important, and this might even sound contradictory at first, we have to be flexible in our methodology. We have to be flexible in our methodology. Now, methodology is how we present the gospel in a world that is undergoing tremendous change. I love the slogan of one of our local churches, I think it's Hastings Park, if my memory serves me correctly, they have a slogan that I hear on the radio periodically, "An unchanging message for changing times," you've probably heard it. And it really captures this issue of both standing firm and being limber on our feet and being able to change our position in places where with integrity we can change our positions. Because you see, historically, God's people have had the challenge of how do I remain faithful to the gospel and not compromise where I stand and what I believe and how I live, and at the same time, how can I stay connected to the world in such a way that I have integrity and a hearing among the world to win them for Jesus. And historically, the church hasn't always been very good at it because we tend to fall into one extreme or another. The one extreme, and you'll see this among a lot of Christians, is to dig in, surround, you know, circle the wagons. They look out at the world and they see all the stuff that is happening over there and they're against everything that is out there. They isolate themselves in order to keep themselves and their children safe. The problem with doing that is that you lose any salt influence or light influence in the world. These are weird people who are living in isolation from the rest of society. But the other extreme, you see there are other Christians who say, "Well, we're supposed to be salt and light, so we're in the world. But they end up compromising their Christian values to the point where they stop being salt and light because they're so much like the world, they're so anxious to win their friends to Jesus that they compromise the gospel, they compromise the authority of scripture, they compromise their walk with Christ, and why in the world should their friends become Christians when they're just as worldly as their friends are?" So how do you live in the world without being part of the world? That's where you have to know the difference between standing firm in what you believe and being flexible in your methodology. I love how the Apostle Paul puts it, 1 Corinthians chapter 9, 22 and 23, it's a verse you've heard many times. It's part of a much broader passage, but he says in these two verses, "I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings." You'll find the same thing in Jesus. There was nobody more righteous and more holy than Jesus, you've noticed that. He never compromised, ultimately cost him his life, but he was in the world without being of the world. He could rub shoulders with sinners without catching their sin, and that's what you and I need to be able to do. We need to be able to live in the real world, rub shoulders with "sinners" without being polluted by their sin, in the hope and in the expectation that there's something about our life and something about our witness that will in fact make an impact on their lives. So how do we do that? Two suggestions. I don't know if we'll get to the second, but let me introduce the first. We need to understand the seismic changes that have been happening in our culture. The seismic changes that have been happening in our culture, particularly within recent years. Let me see how far I can get in this, but I want to identify with you, out of the many changes that you will find in culture, I want to identify three in particular that have a huge bearing on how we relate to the world and why the world at this point in time very seldom listens to the church, because the train has long left the station. The first is our understanding and our view of authority. Our understanding and our view of authority. The biblical view of authority, that is who has the right to tell who what to do and how to live, that's what I mean by authority. The biblical view of authority is that authority derives from God. Why do you think it derives from God? Because God has this thing about I made you so I can tell you what I want you to do. That's not conceit on God's part, it's just reality. God has the ultimate authority and then he creates institutions and leaders who are to reflect that authority, isn't that true? Creates government, creates parents, creates teachers, creates law men and women and creates institutions that are responsible for rewarding good and punishing evil and that's what's supposed to shape the world and how the world operates. It's not that complicated, he raises up leaders who have the ability to define what is right and what is wrong. Now it's true because we live in a fallen world, society as a whole hasn't always honored this there are lawbreakers and there are rebels and there's you know prisons are filled with people who have committed crimes but understand this until relatively recently in North American society and I would say the last 30 or 40 years even unbelievers recognized the authority of God, the authority of scripture and the authority of institutions that were assigned to guard law and order. Satan doesn't like that very much because he knows that as long as we honor father and mother that is to say honor authority figures that God has established we will live long in the land that God has assigned to us. And so for years and years and years every time he has an opportunity Satan is at work undermining the authority of God and the leaders and the institutions that God has ordained for the safety and for the security of human society. So first we get rid of God because we no longer need him to explain the origins of life we now have our own scientific explanations. Then we get rid of the authority of scripture because well it's just another book that is the reflection of people's searches for God historically and we all know the Bible's got all kinds of mistakes in it though most people who claim that have never read the Bible enough to know what those mistakes are but that doesn't stop them from you know spouting that off. And not only that and I don't know if you've ever noticed this but there's been a systematic attack on institutions that represent authority. So generally speaking what's our view of politicians? Well they're not very high on our list of credible people right? What's the world's view of the church particularly after the scandals in the Roman Catholic Church? A bunch of hypocrites right? Well it wasn't enough to stop there if you look carefully you will see institution after institution has had scandal exposed to undermine their integrity and their authority. We have the business world, the world of big business filled with crooks who have lined their own pockets at the expense of the little guys. We have sports often elevated as the epitome of integrity and the human you know form. Well we've had enough drug scandals and enough child abuse cases in the sport world that that glamour has worn off just a little bit hasn't it? And then well the RCMP the police they are people who walk with integrity until now we discover they've been filled with sexual harassment and abuse from one end to the other and of course now we have all these cases coming forward of policemen shooting black people whether justified or not and the question of the police forces are increasingly being challenged so we have the same thing with teachers we have the same thing with parents and I'm not saying there isn't truth to those claims but you understand what's happening do you not? If you can no longer trust authority and authority figures because of their failures and you no longer trust God now who becomes the high priest of what is right and wrong? It's the individual is it not? I don't trust anybody except myself. The problem with trusting myself you may remember from last week the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that when I have no authority outside myself to tell me the difference between right and wrong I go by my own values but now I have the infinite capacity of being deceived because nobody ever listen to this nobody ever lives long enough to know the outcome of their decisions long term and so God says this tree is gonna kill you I look at this tree and I think I'm pretty smart why should I listen to government why should I listen to police why should I respect parents why should I respect teachers I know better than them all and so now the high priests of wisdom are no longer the trained leaders of society that have been uniquely gifted by God to run the world it's now run by every Tom Dick and Harry who sits in front of a computer and who searches the internet and who thinks he's got ultimate wisdom and ultimate truth and that becomes the measure of what one society you want to see proof of that the world is still reeling from Donald Trump's election as president of the United States true everybody and his uncle all the pundits said he'll never get nominated then when he could nominated everybody said ah he'll never get anywhere and that's certainly what it looked like until election day and on election day he swept the electoral college votes and he's now president-elect whether you like him or not and of course now all the pundits are analyzing what in the world happened how could we miss this well you know hindsight's always 20/20 right but I'll tell you one thing they missed of the more than 270 newspapers in the United States Hillary Clinton was supported editorially by 240 of them Donald Trump was supported by get this 19 newspapers all of those editorials were ignored and Donald Trump won how did he win because he used social media do you know that 44 percent of people in North America now get their news daily from Facebook only two out of ten get their news from newspapers well what's the difference between Facebook and newspapers what's the difference between internet articles and articles in the newspaper well at least until recently newspaper articles at least had to be researched because they were liable for libel and so they tended to be historically as accurate as they could make them well Facebook the internet doesn't have any of those kind of provisions in fact there was a news story out just this past week of some you know high profile internet kind of person boasting that he helped Trump win because he planted all these false news stories in the media that everybody passed on to everybody else truth didn't matter because you see when you lose the biblical concept of authority and I become the authority then I can believe anything that I want to believe whenever I want and I can pass it on without any regard for truth and make you believe it too you see what I'm getting at authority the view of authority in today's society has profoundly changed I'll give you one more our view of family and sexuality has profoundly changed now we've talked about that on and off here in the past and I don't want to beat the horse to death but we need to understand why we're not being heard by society what's the biblical view of gender and sexuality well it's called binary you listen to today's discussion it's all about binary versus non-binary binary is a computer term computers are binary because all data is either a 1 or a zero binary in terms of gender means you're either a male or a female a boy a girl a man or a woman non-binary means you're not restricted to those categories you can make up your own category this is what we've been talking about in terms of your own gender identification which people have been doing for a long long time but now is being elevated into legal positions of anti-discrimination you cannot disagree with me if I say what I am which doesn't fit a binary position so from the biblical notion of God created everybody male and female out of that you get the traditional model of marriage therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother cleaved his wife the two will become one and out of that you have a marriage commitment and you have children and you have the foundations of society and up until very recently that was the understanding in the western world now that doesn't mean that we have not had broken families or divorces or families that have been highly dysfunctional in a fallen world they've been with us for as long as history is Augustine but understand the difference until recently that was said to be broken in need of healing and now we are saying this is normal and if you disagree with it you are abnormal you see the difference I want you to hear this because this is what's happening right under your noses and it's going to have huge impact we've already seen it with the Trinity Western issues with the Law Society we have seen it just this past week with Cornerstone Christian Academy in Napanee having to defend themselves against the Human Rights Commission I understand that hearing went reasonably well it'll be months before the single Human Rights Commissioner files her report and only time will tell where that goes but understand that these changes are huge because they have a profound effect on what life looks like going forward not only for society but also for the church because consider this we've talked about how personality is shaped and how fundamental healthy family life is for raising a healthy generation of children and I won't go through all of it in detail except we've talked about legacy making a huge difference and that if you have trust and autonomy and initiative and industry and identity you come to a place where you can do intimacy you know who you are you can have a relationship you can sustain a marriage you can love your kids it's not just about you it's about your children you learn how to sacrifice and give yourself up but the more broken society becomes the more messed up my legacy is the more messed up my life becomes down here now I have no idea who I am anymore I live in isolation and we live in a world did you know that in the last two years for the first time in North America singles outweigh married people percentage wise never happened before in the course of history there's nothing wrong with being single and there's lots of reasons people are single and you can be single for the gospel sake but understand that part of the brokenness in today's society is that our ability to form relationships and to be men and women of our word and to control our lusts and our passions and our desires is all rooted in the fundamentals of what we grow up with and that's why Satan is making such a determined attack on the nuclear family today in the hope and in the expectation that he can just move into all of these places of vacuum and drag people to where he wants them to go because of their pain because of their brokenness and because of their confusion now that's just two places where society is changing do you understand how those changes in society directly affect the church not just in terms of the people that we get to minister to but the way that we communicate with people that we're trying to minister to if you try to share the gospel with your neighbor and challenge him on his lifestyle or her lifestyle and you say well this is what God says in his word guess what happens I don't believe the Bible so why should I submit to the Bible's authority I don't believe in the integrity of the church so why should I submit to the integrity of the church why do I think you have anything to offer me and if you try to criticize my lifestyle family wise we talk right past each other why do you think that in the most recent years the pro-life forces have made no inroads whatsoever on the pro-choice people because the arguments are long laid to rest we talk right past each other because we don't even speak the same language and we don't have the same values and if we're going to be salt and if we're going to be light and we'll talk about this more going forward Lord willing we need to be able to find the places where people do their living and we need to be able to identify their places of hurt and their places of need and then we need to be able to talk about Jesus in those places in ways they can understand because far from being panicked by what is happening in today's society it creates an unspeakable opportunity to proclaim Jesus in ways that are relevant and real because the more people's lives are falling apart the greater the stress that people are living under the greater the confusion that people are living under the more important it is for you and me to love people the way they are speak into the lives with power and authority and to believe that Jesus is at work and that he is still able to save to the utter most those who call upon [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:43:31.440; remove through 00:43:43.000] his name that's our challenge that's why God gives us the Holy Spirit. 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