The Full Armour of God

SERMON: 2016-12-04--e0604--the-full-armour-of-god-part-4 SOURCE DURATION: 00:42:15.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: This segment serves as a concluding pastoral application, summarizing the trust required in God's work after discussing the role of 'harvesters.' It is the final piece of sermon content provided. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, we've been seeing together in recent weeks, if you've been here for some of these messages on Ephesians chapter 6, that when Paul talks about having your feet fitted with a readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, he is talking about the provisions that God has made in Christ so that we could walk, first of all, faithfully before him when the battle rages, because our feet are protected. Also, he has made provisions in Christ so that when the battle rages, we can stand firm against the spirit of the age. And then we have seen still a third implication of having our feet shod with a readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, and that is that we need to be limber on our feet. And that's what we want to come back to again this morning, because important as it is for a soldier to stand firm and hold his ground, it is equally important that he be nimble on his feet and able to change positions as the battle changes. Because the nature of battle is that one moment the enemy's strategy is over here, the next moment his strategy changes, one moment the enemy is coming from here, the next moment he's coming from an unexpected quarter, and the ability to shift your posture as the attacks change is incredibly important. Failure to do that is to be overrun. Two quick illustrations, one from World War I and one from World War II. Leading up to World War I, battles were generally fought by cavalry. And you see the old pictures of soldiers storming into battle on the back of horses. Think of the Charge of the Light Brigade of the Crimean War and so on. The generals, the British generals particularly, and the leaders in World War I, could not get their head around the fact that times had changed, strategies had changed, and so they stuck to the old way of doing warfare when actually the horses were being replaced by machinery. And you had an incredible bloodshed in World War I, you had the Passchendaels where thousands of soldiers got killed because the generals couldn't adapt to the changing flow. Same thing happened in World War II in France. Prior to World War II in France, General de Gaulle, who later became President of France, wrote a book indicating that the traditional position of lining your troops up to hold the enemy back as they had traditionally done would no longer work, things needed to change because of heavy machinery and the nature of changing warfare. He got left out of court by the military powers that were in his day. Sadly, it was proven right when the Germans came to attack France, the line of defense that France had established in their traditional way was blown out of the water, France fell to the advancing German troops in no time flat, and his position was vindicated. The same thing happens in spiritual warfare. If you've ever met up with the devil, then you will know that he is full of changing wiles. One moment he's coming in through the front door, you think you've got it figured out, you've got the door locked, and while you're busy keeping that front door locked, he's coming in through the back door. And then when you go running to the back door and you close off the back door, he's sneaking in through the window. One moment he's attacking you through your friends, the next moment he's attacking you through your spouse, the next moment everything goes wrong with your car, the next moment you are depressed and discouraged and you say, "What in the world is happening?" I can tell you what's happening. You are facing spiritual warfare. And because you're facing spiritual warfare, what worked yesterday doesn't necessarily work today. It's not good enough to take your stand and say, "I'm not going to move." When the battle moves, your posture needs to move. And even as that is true on an individual basis, that is equally true on a societal basis. And two weeks ago, I shared with you two major areas in which our culture has been changing, necessitating a change of posture in how the church deals with the world. Let me quickly review them. Number one, we talked about our view and our view and our understanding of authority. No longer is God's authority recognized. No longer is the authority of Scripture recognized. No longer is the authority of institutions or leadership typically recognized or yielded to. Instead, everybody, as in the days of judges in the Old Testament, everybody does what is right in his own eyes and everybody thinks he is an expert on every subject. So appealing to authority in the way that we used to appeal to authority doesn't work any longer. The devil loves it because now he can pick people off one after the other because nobody has lived long enough to know what the outcome will be of the choices that they make. You see, that's the importance of leaning on tradition. Tradition itself can be a bad thing, but it can be a good thing because it represents the collective wisdom of the generations. This is how life works. When you reject how life works, you better be sure that the new way that you think life works actually works because by the time you find out, 25 years have gone by and the damage is incalculable. So the nature of authority and our understanding of authority has drastically changed and then so has our view of family and gender. No longer do we believe that the human race consists of male and female who are meant to come together in family to produce the nuclear family and thus generate the next generation. I don't know if you are aware of this, but just this past week, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 28. Anybody hear about that? Bill 28 is called the Families, All Families are Equal Act. All families are equal. And without spending a lot of time on it, this means that every form of family that we now recognize as family is said to be equal and you extend equal rights. And without getting into a lot of detail, it means that a child can have up to four parents. No longer are the words father and mother part of family law. It's now all areas of partnership. We are legalizing fundamental understanding of what family is and most of us I bet you aren't even aware of it and it's put into law. That's the reality. Likewise, about two weeks ago and I've referenced this bill before, Bill C-16 was passed by the federal parliament and that grants transgender rights in the sense that you're no longer allowed to discriminate, again which practically speaking means if I self-identify as a woman and I want you to call me Norma, took me a long time to figure out a good name to call myself, if I call myself Norma and you refuse to address me that way or by the personal pronoun that I have chosen to identify with, I can take you to the Human Rights Commission, did you know that? And the Human Rights Commission can take me to the cleaners. They so decide and so want. That's the world we live in. We've always had brokenness, we've never normalized brokenness. That's the big difference. So these are changing times and we need to be aware of changing times and that brings me this morning to still a third area in our culture that is really changing and I'll be brief about this but that is our emphasis on individual human rights. Our emphasis on individual human rights. Why is it that these movements of redefining gender, redefining family, redefining how we do life has gotten so far so fast? Have you even pondered that? I mean these are incredible changes in the last couple of years. Well it's rooted in our understanding of equal rights. Whenever you listen to the motivation for these changes to come about, it's always everybody has a right. So I have a right to identify myself in whatever fashion that I want to and there are now up to 72 gender specifications on Facebook in parts of the world. If I want to live in a polyamorous relationship then increasingly we're moving in that direction. That's going to be my right. Now the problem with that is that after a while everybody's rights clash with each other. If in an orchestra everybody has the right to play their own instrument and their own music and ignore the conductor, guess what happens? Goes crazy. You can only have harmony, you can only have symphony if we read off the same score, play our own part properly and all listen to the conductor. And so now this past week of course we had the federal government approving two oil pipelines out west and you know that's heading for major confrontation because of the clashes in our culture between the oil industry and the aboriginal community among others. If you're following the news they've got this whole protest where is it in North Dakota trying to put a pipeline through the Missouri River? The problem is when you take God out of the equation and you no longer allow God to define what is normal and God to define what your rights are and it becomes all about my experience and your experience then in the end truth doesn't matter and it becomes all about feelings. And if you hurt my feelings then you're discriminating against me and if you're discriminating against me I want you to be punished and so now at universities we have these trigger free zones where students can go hide because they don't want to be triggered by something that is not compatible with their belief or their experience. At a lot of universities protests are held to keep speakers out of the university because there are some students who are offended by what that speaker's position is going to be. And the irony is that in the western world where universities were supposed to be the bastion of free speech we now increasingly have to toe the line because somebody is going to be offended. Jordan Peterson I mentioned him the other day he's the University of Toronto professor who refuses to bow to the politically correct gender bending kind of stuff. He's a licensed psychologist he's afraid he's going to lose his license and I bet you he will if the pressure keeps up. So here's an interesting little tidbit of information Oxford dictionary every year comes out with what they call the word of the year and that is a word that they believe characterizes the spirit of the age. Don't know how many of you are aware of this but this past year the word they chose was the word post truth relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Isn't that interesting? Truth doesn't matter what matters is can I appeal to your emotions and if I can appeal to your emotions by exaggeration by falsehood or by other twisting of the facts then I will use that to accomplish my purposes. Don't know how many of you have seen this picture I don't know if you can see these guys their names are Paris Wade and Bill Goldman. As of last May they were both unemployed wondering how they're going to make their living and what they hit upon was creating what is known as fake news. So they hear a story and they create an attention grabbing headline and they write it up on their blog and they spread it among their followers and everybody goes crazy and the truth doesn't matter. You know I don't want to get into politics and but Mr. Trump, bless him, 560 false statements that he made during the campaign by an objective check. His record was 37 in one day and I'm not saying if he's going to be a good president or a bad president or that people should vote for the one or the other that's not my point at all. My point is that a population wins an election on the basis of post truth as opposed to the real thing. That is a dangerous departure in society because now the loudest voice that noisiest person runs the show and the freedom that the gospel has provided for us gets lost ironically in a generation that gets rid of God's authority that redefines reality according to its own feel and in the end you lose your freedom to the politically correct people. Why do I belabor that? Because people those are the days in which we live and that affects both how we live the Christian life and how we respond to our culture. So the battle changes, our stance has to change, what do we do? Well I said last time first of all we have to understand the changes in our culture that's why I have been elaborating on them a little bit but then beyond that we need to get to the next point and that is that we need to find new ways of engaging our culture. We have to find ways of bypassing the objections so that the truth of the gospel can nevertheless still penetrate beyond where people find themselves. Quick example may not be the best one but back in the 1930s when Bill Wilson first founded AA the third AA step Alcoholics Anonymous was the step whereby let me read it to you here I made a decision to turn or we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the call of God that was the original wording. Now as you can imagine that put up hackles to people who didn't believe in God or whose understanding of God was very different and so as time went on they changed it to the understanding of or to God as we understood him and the original idea was people are in different places of growth their understanding of God is different the point was let's not let prejudices get in the way of turning our lives over to a higher power and the idea was to be all things to all people so that by all means they might gain some now as the years have gone by that definition of God as we understood him has drastically changed so that I remember being attending an AA meeting as part of my schooling many years ago and had it explained to me that you could make your higher power anything that you wanted it to be and if you wanted it to be a light bulb or if you wanted to be a fried egg hanging from a telephone pole that was your business whatever you believed could help you so you know it gets off base real fast but I love the way the Apostle Paul approaches his mission to the Gentiles in these verses that you have often heard me quote I've become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some I do this for the sake of the gospel that I may share its blessings so in a changing world holding on to the essence of the gospel that we cannot compromise how do we change our posture how do we change our position how do we stay nimble on our feet so that we can actually have a hearing in the world because that of course is where the challenge lies three practical suggestions as we move along this morning the first of all I would recommend that if you are interfacing with the world around you pick your battles carefully I love second Timothy 2 23 don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments because you know they produce quarrels ever since the dawn of the internet and ever since the dawn of blogs everybody has an opinion and if you want to see the nastiest streak of human nature then you read the conversations that flow out of responses to articles or to blogs isn't that true it brings out the worst in people now it is a forum whereby good conversation can take place but typically human nature being what it is it's extremely difficult not to get sucked in to the negativity of somebody's position so don't do it don't exceed your knowledge don't give in to fighting fire with fire there is no way that you can win the battle because if you throw mud when people throw mud at you you're all going to end up being swarmed scripture puts it this way be wise in the way that you act towards outsiders make the most of every opportunity let your conversation be always full of grace seasoned with salt so that you may know how to answer everyone and then one Peter 3 15 and 16 always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have but do this with gentleness and respect stay out of arguments that don't go anywhere and before you step into them ask yourself the question is the Holy Spirit calling me to respond to this or should I just shut up and if I do respond to it what is my purpose what am I trying to accomplish will this be helpful years ago Alan red path the British pastor put it this way he says before you speak think t meaning let me think of it here it'll come to me in a moment this is bad this is bad I didn't write this down either true well of course it's true thank you hi this is a collective enterprise here the H stands for honest the I stands for inspirational the N stands for necessary and the K stands for think simple little formula but boy we'd avoid a lot of needless hassles if we just ask ourselves those questions before we step into a given situation truth matters truth matters before God and truth matters in the Christian life I could go on about that for a long time but I will refrain second thing step into the lives of people around you step into the lines of people around you I love what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5 9 and 10 he says I have written to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters in that case you would have to leave the world I've talked about this before but it bears repeating God's people historically are always caught in the tension of two conflicting missions that God has for the church one mission for the church is to be separate from the world to be holy to be a distinct people who marched to the beat of heaven the other mission that the church has is to leave the safety of that collective community and step out into the world to reach the world now you can see how those two conflict but they are so at odds with each other and the temptation is to lean to one extreme or another and so there are a lot of Christians who say I don't want anything to do with the world they're dirty they're sinners they're immoral they're wrong they cuss a lot I don't want to be part of that and and so they retreat into their holy huddle but the result of that is they have no connections with the rest of the world and nobody that can ever lead to Christ and no ability to communicate because they speak an entirely different language they become irrelevant to the world and then there are those to say yes it's really important for us to read to reach the world so we're going to make friends with them and they become so much like the world that they lose their salt and they lose their light and they lose their witness and the balance of course is the Lord Jesus who left the glories of heaven came into our world as a human being was able to interface with the worst of sinners and yet remain unpolluted by their sin and his advice to you and to me his calling to you and to me is that as the father has sent me I am sending you if Jesus leaves in us and we're walking by his spirit he will help us both to remain holy and yet have an ability to live in the world so that what we have to say can be heard by them and there will at least be some who respond to the gospel and who come to salvation the fact that we're going to be doing six adult baptisms in two weeks time ought to tell you that the Spirit of God is still at work seeking and saving the lost amen so avoid stupid battles and stupid conversations just don't do it step into the lives of people around you and let me just give you some practical pointers in how to do that first of all identify people in your sphere of influence here's a little chart that you might find extremely helpful a good exercise as we move towards Christmas I won't take a lot of time with this she can't remember this you might want to write this down but start with here you are now who are the people in your sphere of influence that God puts in your heart so you start with family members write down their names how many family members can I think of for some it's a handful for others it's an army depends on a lot of factors same thing with your neighbors who are your neighbors who are your friends who are the people that you work with or go to school with who are the people that are a church with you and who are the people that you hang around with in free time 30 40 50 60 names no problem at all now when you name all of those names then ask yourself and ask the Lord the question who in this list are you placing on my heart is there a person here that you want me to specifically be praying for you may already have such a person is there another person who do you want me to invest my time and energy into who should I invite over for a cup of coffee who should I share my heart with whose story do you want me to hear because you see even while the world is falling apart and changes are happening at an unprecedented rate it is an incredible opportunity for the gospel because the rest of the world is just as confused as you and I are sometimes except they have no answer and so all you have to do is show some consideration to family friends or neighbors that God puts in your life be open to their story and I don't know if you have ever noticed this but people are more than ready to spill their guts I mean part of the culture of the day is there is no shame so everybody lets it all hang out well it's a great chance to hear to show empathy to show that you care a lot of people have nobody that cares about them nobody that will cry with them nobody that will hold their hand nobody that will hear their stories without shaming them or trying to advise them on how to fix it and would you please not try to fix people I know the temptation is always overwhelming every time somebody shares a problem whether it's an illness or a difficulty with a child especially Christians are full of good advice don't do it don't do it because most of the time it means you're not really hearing what's being said so who in that whole chart lets put it back up again for a minute who in your circle of acquaintances does God put in your life that you can speak into pray into or go somewhere cultivate love in those relationships pour yourself into them and then third step in all of that is find ways let me find it here it's not there find ways of connecting the gospel with the issues that people are addressing many years ago I told you the story years back in one of the churches that I served a young man in our congregation was working in a grocery store with a young married woman her marriage was a mess her life was a mess the two of them began to develop quite a relationship and he understood that this was going in the wrong direction so he came to see me and said what do I do and I said well let me talk with her and so he arranged the meeting with herself and myself and I believe my wife was with me in a restaurant she told us some of her story the tragedy of a lost baby and the tensions in her marriage and how hard her how hardened her heart had become and I remember asking her the question do you ever cry much I don't know where that came from it was just there and she promptly burst out into tears it just came like a river it was so bottled up and out of that came a number of meetings at our house where Michelle and I had the opportunity to share the gospel with her and she gave her life to Jesus because she told us later she had no reason not to believe that I had her best interests at heart because nothing else that she had tried worked that's many many years ago now that marriage survived more children were born and she continues to be a vibrant Christian to this day don't underestimate the opportunities that you have with the people in your circle of acquaintances that you can share Jesus with now that's very threatening because we have all our own religious notions of what that ought to look like I'm going to finish with just three very practical suggestions to help you do that the first is learn a very simple way of presenting Jesus in the context of the needs people face now you know my favorite method is this brilliant I have I have to tell you these circles are brilliant and I'm constantly amazed there are still some of you that come to me and you tell me after all these years I don't know what they mean well if that's you you better come see me and I'll walk you through them in great detail and knock you over the head or pray for you to receive Jesus so that you can get it in your heart what I love about these and I'll be very brief with this is you can use this in any situation with just about anybody and they will get it if we don't get it that's our problem but they'll get it because really all you're saying is listen there is a God made the whole world made it good wanted us to trust him and obey him we rejected him we sold out to the devil God is outside of our lives and because we sold out to the devil we're all selfish and we're in conflict and the world is an awful mess now you don't have to be very brilliant to understand that and most people understand that real fast and then you say because the world is a mess we all have a desire to get back to what we have lost we all want to be happy we all want life to make sense we all want success and so the message of the Bible is that there are two methods by which we try to get back to the Garden of Eden one is by our own efforts I try harder I get educated I follow the benefits of science and modern medicine and you know making money whatever it is and yes that seems to work but it doesn't solve the problem of sin and ultimately leaves us hanging relationships alone don't do it God's answer is what God's answer is Jesus who came into the world to bring us back to God by dealing with our sin issues he gives us the Holy Spirit God renews us and everything changes not that complicated you can do it and you can do it with your friends and you can draw it on a napkin amazing things can happen when you draw on napkins there's special power in napkins secondly be prepared to tell your own story remember Dave referred to it last week we had the trees up before he prayed over that bowl full of leaves and the leaves represented places where God had met you over the years in your life well those are stories those are stories those are the word made flesh those are places where God comes into your world and gives you insight and gives you hope and gives you blessings and so now you're sitting down with your neighbor and she's telling you about how miserable her marriage is or how difficult the time she has raised in her children or how she just lost her job or his car won't run whatever else and you've just got the story a story that demonstrates the power of God here's a story I've told you many years ago a friend of mine out Weston first church that we pastored was trying to witness to his neighbor wasn't getting anywhere was trying to teach the neighbor that actually God cares about the little things of life and that he should be praying for the things that he couldn't solve so this guy rolled the clock forward he was out in the field in harvest time and his machine broke down and he had to get the bearing off the shaft I don't know if you ever tried to get a bearing off a shaft it's not always an easy thing he's pounding away at this stupid thing and it just wasn't going anywhere and the words of his friend came back to him he said how about I pray about it so this guy for the first time in his life appealed to a higher power whose name happened to be Jesus not a Friday gang you from telephone pole and in the simplicity of faith said Lord if you're there please help me with this and not a word of a lie he tapped that bearing with his hammer and off it popped now the skeptic will say well it would have happened anyway but the child of God knows that regardless of how it happened that was a moment of revelation that was a moment when God became real in that man's life you've got stories like that and if the opportunity presents itself share those stories in humility and with power and authority and God's Holy Spirit will take those stories and he will make them come to life in people's lives sometimes years and years later and then of course third thing you can do is invite them to a church event and that's why the holiday season is particularly a fertile time for you to do that go through that list pray about all the people that are there and ask yourself the question Lord who is there that you want me to invite to Christmas Eve or to Christmas Day to the profession of faith service you know the invitations that were referred to earlier they make it easy for you to hand them out offer to meet people somewhere it's very intimidating to walk into places that you don't know offer to pick them up offer to meet them here and I know a lot of us worry if I invite my friend to church and it isn't going to go the way that I think it ought to be going they're never going to want to come back and I'll be embarrassed I've learned not to worry about that a long time ago because I'll tell you why the elect of God will know the truth when they hear it and it doesn't matter how it comes or how it is presented there will be something inside them that registers this past Wednesday at council we met with all the candidates for profession of faith those are always great meetings but what stood out for me in this one and you'll hear some of those stories when they make profession of faith is how many of them came to this place because they were sovereignly led here by the Holy Spirit they drive past on the road they see the sign and they said something tells me this is where I need to go and eventually they do and when they do guess what happens they meet up with Jesus that's why prayer is such an important part of this you see because the Holy Spirit is already at work he's preparing the ground you and I are part of the harvesters our job is just to do our part in facilitating the invitation and then [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:42:08.200; remove through 00:42:15.000] trusting that the Lord will do what he needs to do to bring people to life. 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