The Whole Armour of God
When we began Ephesians 6 at verse 10, we saw that this passage is about spiritual warfare. And in the beginning it tells us that we’re supposed to realize that we’re, as Christians, we have an array of spiritual darkness and wickedness that is attacking us.
And we spend a number of times dealing with this whole idea of personal supernatural evil, something that’s rather difficult for a modern New Yorker to grasp, at least personal supernatural evil. They can understand personal evil pretty well.
But the idea of the devil, the idea of demons, that sort of thing is a difficult thing for folks to grasp. We spent time trying to understand what the Scripture teaches about it, the reality of it, the nature of it, and there’s a sense in which we’ve spent a number of weeks looking at the arsenal of the forces of darkness against us.
Now tonight, to set us up before we go to the Lord’s table, I would like to go back in a sense to the passage that we originally started with and look at the other part of it, which is our arsenal against our enemies, our arsenal, the full armor of God.
Now we’re not so much looking at what is being thrown at us, but what we can do to respond to it, how we can defend ourselves. We’re looking at our arsenal now, and I’m going to read Ephesians chapter 6, verse 10, down to 18, and tonight we begin with what we call the in actually sort of a series within the series.
We were all talking about spiritual warfare, and we spent a lot of time talking about the problems that get thrown at us, the attacks against us. Now we’re gonna look at what we are supposed to do so that we don’t lead defeated lives.
That’s the full armor of God, what that is, how to put it on. That’s what we’re gonna start looking at tonight, and tonight I’d just like to introduce you to the whole series, which will continue next week and the weeks after.
Chapter six, verse 10 reads, and I quote, finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Therefore, put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, You may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything to stand. Stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the Gospel of Peace.
In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, and pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.
With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. That’s God’s Word. The full armor of God. Let’s just introduce you to it tonight. What does that mean? Remember this. This is as much as I will refer to what we’ve just gone through.
Remember this, that the Bible says that evil is multidimensional. What you have is, in 1 John, we’re told that all of us are always fighting against the world, the flesh, and the devil. And therefore we said that Christianity has the most nuanced, subtle, multidimensional view of evil possible.
For example, it is B .F. Skinner, right, who says, what makes us what we are is the world period. Conditioning, how we’re treated. All that we are is environmentally conditioned, and all the problems we have are basically due to the way in which we’re conditioned.
So in a sense, Skinner says it’s all the world. Sociology explains the whole thing. Or are the other ones right who say, it’s not all the world, it’s actually the flesh. There’s different people that say that.
There’s the biological determinists who say, what makes you what you are is your genes. You’re biologically determined. There’s other sorts of people saying no, the existential humanist psychologists say it’s a matter of personal choices.
You make yourself what you are through your own choices. So is it all me inside? Is it all the world, as Skinner says, is it all the flesh, or is it all the devil? The pagan, the old pagan religions always saw spirits behind every tree.
And if you had problems, well, you’ve probably gotten a spirit upset with you. And so you needed a sacrifice to the tree god, or to the water god, or to the harvest god, or something like that. And they saw, in a sense, they saw all of our problems to be spiritual.
They were superstitious. They believed everything had to do with demons, everything had to do with evil spirits, and so on. Who’s right? The Bible says they’re all right and they’re all wrong. It’s not the sociologists, and it’s not the psychologists, and it’s not the channelers, and it’s not the…
the mediums, and it’s not the existentialists. None of these folks know that evil is multidimensional. It comes at us from every direction possible. It comes from, as we said, there’s evil inside me, there’s evil outside me, and there’s evil above me.
And therefore, because our life is in such peril, you have got to know how to address that. And that’s what Paul’s talking about. When he talks about the full armor of God, what he’s saying is, unless you know exactly what you’re doing in dealing with this evil that’s coming from every direction, you are going to lead defeated lives.
And let me, please, let this question come home to some of you. How else do you explain your condition except to describe it as a defeated life? You didn’t know there was a battle, but you lost, and now you know there was one.
You didn’t know where the enemies came from. You’re really not even sure. You didn’t even see what hit you. Remember from last week, the book that goes, I don’t remember dropping the skunk, but I do remember trying to breathe.
You know, you’re defeated. You know that you’ve been beaten, but you’re not even sure why anymore. And Paul says, because evil is so multidimensional, unless you know how to deal with it, you are going to lead defeated lives.
You can’t luck into a happy life. There’s no way. That’s what this is saying. You can’t luck into a happy life. Don’t forget that you have to put on the full armor of God. Secondly, second thing we learn here, verse 10, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.
This text is also teaching us that it takes a princely spirit in order to be a Christian. Remember I told you some weeks ago that the, maybe some years ago, William Gurnell’s book, The Christian Incomplete Armor, is an old Puritan position of this text.
And when I was struggling with whether I should come to New York with my family and start a church, there was a particular line in that book that was expounding this particular text, verse 10, Be Strong in the Lord.
And the line goes this way. Grinnal writes, it requires more prowess and greatness of spirit to obey God faithfully than to command a battalion of troops. And you know he’s right, here’s why. See, it takes more courage and it takes more endurance to simply put on the armor of God to obey God, to be a consistent Christian than it does to command a battalion of troops.
He said that. Is that an exaggeration? Is that creaturely hyperbole? No. For example, in many cases, to obey God seems suicidal. To all human wisdom, to all human wisdom, It’s a little bit like if you’re a commander of a battalion, you’re taking a bunch of troops out there and you’re going against the enemy and you’re obeying orders.
And the orders from the top say, you charge. And we’ve got a plan and you won’t get slaughtered, but your job is to charge. You don’t have to know anything else. That’s what it means to command a battalion in many cases.
To really obey God, let me just give you a kind of good example of this. To put on the form of God as we’re going to see means to follow through, to obey, to be consistent. One of the last things in the world that modern Americans can not just want to hear but can even understand is to be told, you have to submit your will to someone else’s.
That’s what it means to put on the armor of God, among other things. We want God to come into our lives and enrich us. We want God to empower us. But the idea of us completely submitting our will to a higher will is something not only that we don’t want to hear, but I’m not even sure we’re even able to hear anymore.
To put on the full armor of God means that you’re in the army now. To put on the full armor of God means that you get an order and you take the order. And if you don’t obey the order, it probably means disaster.
But to obey the order in many cases looks awful, looks terrible. Here’s just a good example. The Bible, for example, we know this says, and common sense says this too, though we always have to be reminding ourselves of this, that if you’re going to marry somebody, you need to marry somebody who has a similar spiritual commitment.
Remember, we spent some time talking about this back in the end of August and early September. It’s not just the Bible says that. Common sense says that what’s really sexy is to be understood. That’s really sexy.
To have someone look all the way deep down into you and understand your inmost thoughts and your deepest commitments. things that you really get passionate about. And if somebody go look in there and say, I understand that and I can get passionate about that too, that’s really sexy.
And we’ve said that for you to be a Christian or to be a person who’s growing in Christ, for you to marry somebody who doesn’t understand that, who says, well, you have your religion, I have mine, I don’t really get it, means that you’re marrying somebody who can’t understand what makes you tick.
And the Bible says, don’t marry somebody that doesn’t have a similar commitment to Christ. The Bible also says, and this is not quite as much a matter of common sense, but the Bible also says that sex is something that God invented only to be used in the context of total commitment.
If you weren’t listening to anybody around you, it would make sense, because the first time you have sex, and if you’re not married and you’ve had sex, you immediately feel this total commitment, but of course your culture tells you that’s silly, that’s pathological.
You know, you know, I read an article in Glamour magazine. Why was I reading that? Forget it. Don’t ask me that. It was in my sister -in -law’s bedroom where I was staying for a holiday. I opened it up and there it says, you know, the real thing, you know, the thing that women really need to get into is masturbation.
Why? Well, look at men, it says. So the good thing about men is, through masturbation, they’ve learned that sex is for them. You see, after we’ve had sex, we’re still sitting in there. This is how the magazine goes.
We’re still sitting in there saying, ah, you know, I want to be held. I want commitment. I want love. And he’s up and he’s out the door and he’s going to have a great day. Because you see, we’re still hung up on this commitment thing.
And they’ve learned to keep control of their own sexuality. They are responsible for their own sexuality and they’ve learned through masturbation and women need to get into it too. That’s what the magazine article said.
Now, you see, if you listen to that, you’ll start to say, gosh, why is it that when I have sex with this person, I want them to have some commitment to me now? The Bible says, it’s not pathological. You shouldn’t read Glamour magazine and you shouldn’t masturbate in order to get control of yourself.
What you’re really doing is you’re dehumanizing yourself. You’re animalizing yourself. The Bible says that sex was built as a way to say to somebody else, I belong completely, permanently, exclusively to you.
We’ve been through that. We’ve talked about that before. But you see, friends, think of the guts it takes. Think of the courage it takes to say, I’m not going to marry a non -Christian. I’m not going to have sex with somebody until I’m married.
And every year you get older. And you’re still single. And it’s sort of like God is saying, charge. I won’t let you be slaughtered. And you say, honest? You see, if you’re in the military, the armor is a military metaphor.
military, you are not able to demand an explanation. If you get it, that’s great, but we all know that there’ll be disaster out there and people’s lives will be lost if you go out there and you say, I’ll obey if I get an explanation.
And rightly so, your commanding officer has a right to say, when you say, I’ll obey if I get an explanation, what you mean is I won’t obey. In other words, I want to be convinced. I want to see why it’s practical for me.
And that means I want to decide for myself. And that means I’m not going to obey. I may agree, but I will obey. Now we all know that there would never ever be anything but defeat in an army where people said, I’ll agree with the commanding officer if I won’t obey.
It requires more prowess and greatness of spirit to obey God faithfully than the command of battalion in the battle. It really does. It really does. To obey, even though you understand the inner logic, yet emotionally you say, this is crazy.
If I obey, why do you think Paul brings up military metaphors? I’m going to have to keep mentioning this again and again. Why does Paul use a military metaphor? He does not glory in warfare. He does not think military stuff is grand.
He has no particular interest in glorifying the apparatus of warfare. He’s trying to say this is the only metaphor that gets across the seriousness. This is the only metaphor that gets across the real nature of what it means to live a Christian life in a way that you won’t be defeated.
The first thing is you have got to obey orders, and you’ve got to have a princely spirit. To be a Christian takes a princely spirit, a greater, more noble spirit than it takes to commit a battalion. Another introductory note to this whole thing.
Look at verse 11. It says, put on the full armor of God. What I want to do here tonight is give you a general definition of what it means to put on the armor. What it means to put on the armor. The armor is a symbol, and I’ll have to say this now, it sounds kind of general, but every week I think you’re going to see specifically how it works out.
The armor is a symbol of the benefits and privileges of the gospel. Now, that doesn’t immediately grab you.
I know I’m going to have to take a few weeks to really put legs on that, give you handles. Back when I became a Christian, which was 1970, there was a whole generation of people who became Christians in college.
And back in those days, it was the real leadership of evangelical or educated evangelicalism was we’re British guys. And especially three guys that we used to sort of call the Brit, the Brit connection.
that you hear me often still. They’re not as popular, I don’t think, as they once were, because the evangelical movement to some degree has grown up a bit. But J .I. Packer, John R .W. Stott, and David Martin Lloyd -Jones, three British preachers and teachers, and all of them used to use certain metaphors to try to get across what it means to live the Christian life.
What it means to lead a Christian life and to put on the armor of God means to see who you are in Christ and to begin to cash in on it, to take the benefits of the Gospel, and to use them in your life so as to get a new disposition, to get a new way of looking at yourself in life, to get a new habitual way of thinking about yourself.
All three of you guys, I don’t know who borrowed from who, but all three of those guys used to use these illustrations. One of them was the slave illustration. They would say, imagine a man who’s a slave in a country where slavery is legal, and in that country, if you’re a slave, you have no legal rights.
So if somebody decides they want to beat you up or they want to rob you, you have no recourse to the law because in the eyes of the law, you’re not a person. As we all know, in 1854, that was true in this country.
But for now, let’s just imagine a country where that’s true. And here’s a man who’s been raised all his life a slave. And if a free man wants to push him around, wants to punch out his lights, wants to ridicule him and will beat him up if he doesn’t play the game, this slave basically has to do what he said, what he’s told to do, because he has no recourse, he has no rights.
Then let’s imagine that one day, the legislature of that country abolishes slavery and puts up in every single town a magistrate who’s going to enforce the law. He says, now the slaves have rights as human beings.
They have recourse to the law. If they have a grievance, that grievance has to be addressed and redressed. On the day after that slave becomes a free man and he walks into town and the people who have always bullied him and have always pushed him around and have always beaten him up begin to treat him the same way they always have, what is the test for that man?
Now Packer and Lloyd -Jones and Stott used to tell the story this way, they used to say the hardest thing in the world is for that slave to begin to act as if what is really true of him is true of him.
It will be the hardest thing in the world for that slave to start to act as he really is a free man and it will be the easiest and most natural thing for him to still act as a slave and not actually appropriate the new legal rights that he’s got.
If somebody lays a hand on him he needs to do what any citizen would do but will he do it and will he refuse to be bullied and will he stand up to it or will he continue to act as a slave? Now, Paul directly says this in Romans 6.
In Romans 6, verse 5 and 6, he says, you’re dead to sin. And then down in verse 11, 12 and 13, he says, and therefore, count yourself dead to sin. What does that mean? It means it’s one thing to have a legal right, it’s another thing to act on it.
If you’re a homeless person, you suddenly inherit a lot of money, you’ve got to cash it in. You can still act like a homeless person. In fact, you can still be miserable. You’ve got a power, you’ve got something to draw on, but do you?
Another illustration that all those guys used to use, which I’ll just throw out here too, is the illustration in Luke chapter 8. In Luke 8, Jesus is in the boat, and he’s asleep, and the winds are rushing around, and there’s a great storm, and the disciples wake Jesus up, and they say to him, and this is just incredible, he says, master.
They say, carousel not that we perish. We’re about to die here, and you don’t give a rip. Can you imagine? Yes, of course you can imagine, because frankly, do you worry? Are you a Christian? Now, you see, if you worry, if you’re sure your life is going down the tubes, if you can’t get any real comfort out of knowing that he belongs to you, you belong to him, and he’s promised that all things work together for good, then you have gone down into the hole of the boat, and you’ve said to Jesus Christ, master, there’s a storm out there.
Don’t you care? I’m going down, and you don’t give a rip. You see, basically, that’s what you’re doing when you’re anxious. What does Jesus do? He gets up, he looks at them, and he says, where is your faith?
Then he rebukes the storm, and it goes, you know, calm. Notice he doesn’t say, now these preachers used to say, notice he doesn’t say, oh, you poor guys, you need more faith, you need more power, you need more victory.
We’ll have to do something about that instead. He says where is your faith? What does that mean? He says you’ve seen what I’ve done in the past you heard my promises You know that not one thing I’ve ever told you has ever failed to come true And you’ve heard what I said that I’m going to be with you to the end of the world You’ve told you’ve heard what I said about how where is your faith it ought to be here get it out Where is it?
Why aren’t you using it now? This is the same thing that Paul is saying in Romans 6 You’ve got something in Christ. You’ve got benefits and privileges and powers. Are you using them? Are you acting as if they’re true?
You see you’re no longer a slave, but you’re still acting like a slave Where is your faith? I don’t you don’t need more faith. You’ve got it. You’re not using get it out Why are you panicking? You’re refusing to use what you know?
and You see when you’re anxious and You say carousel might we perish Jesus looks at you and says put on the armor What is putting on the armor? The truth, as we’re going to see, the righteousness, the salvation.
To put it on means to take the privileges of the gospel and the benefits of the gospel and begin to use them in your life so as to create a new disposition, a new, habitual way of thinking about yourself and all the people around you.
You’re not accustomed to thinking about the world in that way. You’re not accustomed to looking at the entire world through that. But, you see, that is what it means to put on the full armor of God. And, see, guys like Packer and Lloyd Jones and John Stott used to say that constantly and all the time.
And, you know, the first time you realize that this is the secret, usually, as it has happened to me, and hopefully it’s happened to you, and hopefully, if not, it will happen to you. One day you sit down, you’re a new Christian, you talk to a mature Christian, and you’re all in a lather.
And you say, my life is falling apart. And if they’re a mature Christian, they’ll be very sympathetic. They won’t minimize anything you say. And at a certain point, they’ll say very gently, but now, do you believe this?
Yeah. And you do know that Jesus says this? Yeah. And do you know this and this and this? Yeah. Now, if they do this too quickly, you know, you’ll write them off as being unsympathetic. But if they’ve paid their dues and they’ve listened very carefully, finally say, do you believe this and you believe this and you believe this?
Yeah, yeah. And do you know this? Well, yeah. What’s the problem? And then you say, my gosh, I don’t know. What’s the problem? And see, what’s happened is that mature Christian is gently getting you to put on the armor.
Put it on. Putting on the armor means taking the benefits of the gospel and beginning to use them in your life. You know, in a sense, it means preaching to yourself, by the way. You see, what preaching is, you’re saying, why do I want to know?
Preaching is incarnating the truth. Preaching is taking the truth and making it vivid and real. Preaching is creating an atmosphere and presenting the truth in such a way that it becomes as real as it really is.
It doesn’t mean, I’m not saying that as you get mature you don’t need to ever get good preaching, but what I do know is what it means to put on the armory is you learn to preach to yourself. You learn how to make it vivid to yourself.
Alright, one more point. Verse 13, put on the armor so that when the evil day comes you will stand. Put on the armor so that when the evil day comes you will stand. You’re supposed to put the armor on before the big battle, not during the big battle.
See, it says, put on the armor so that when the evil day comes you will stand. See, when the arrows are flying. And the other warriors have broken in through the breach and they’re hurling their broad swords at you and their spears and so on.
That’s not the time to say, excuse me while I slip into something more appropriate. It’s too late. I do remember, I do remember very much, see Paul is using a military metaphor because in other fields when you slip up you lose money.
In this particular area of endeavor when you slip up you’re destroyed. I hate any depiction, any realistic depiction I ever see in any media whether it’s literature or movies, TV. I hate any depiction, any realistic depiction of warfare because it’s such a merciless field of endeavor.
If I slip up with a bad sermon, I hear about it. Some people write me nasty notes. If a warrior slips up with a maneuver, he has his head cut off, maybe literally. And why do you think Paul is saying being a Christian is like being a soldier, not because he’s glorying in the military, but because he’s saying, do you realize the peril that you’re in?
Do you realize that if you are lazy about using the Bible in your life, if you are not diligent about developing a decent walk in prayer life, if you allow undelt with sins to continue to grow in your life, if you refuse to put on the armor of God, do you realize that at some point you’re going to be killed, you’re going to be spiritually wiped out, you’re going to suddenly find yourself tortured and tormented, you’re going to find yourself enslaved, you’re going to find yourself with a stake through your conscience that you can’t pull out.
I never forget two women that were both in my church in Virginia and they both had terrible things happen to them. In both cases they had a husband leave them, they had one child, one case had died, and then they both found out that they had some kind of life -threatening disease, one had cancer, one had leukemia, they were both in the hospital at the same time.
One of them was a woman who for years had been putting on the armor of God, tremendously diligent at learning and habitually reflecting and thinking through the Word of God how she was going to look at herself and how she looked at the situation.
And when you want to see her even if she was down, all you took was with a certain word of encouragement, a certain prayer, a look at a certain scripture, and she immediately became radiant. At one point she says, you know, the worse it gets, the closer he gets to me, and it’s almost like that if things get any worse, I’m going to lose the ability to be unhappy.
He’s getting so close. I feel so supported. I feel so valued by him. I feel so cherished. The other woman knew the first woman, and the other woman had spent all of her life playing Wish I Were a Better Christian, which is a game a lot of people play.
You know, they’re sporadic in their use of the Christian disciplines. They’re sporadic in their obedience to God. They’re sort of fitful and always busy. You know, they’re always saying, well, you know, I’d like to get around to really being serious about Christ, and that’s a little bit Like somebody sitting and saying, you know, somebody says, the warriors are coming.
They’re going to come any minute. You say, yeah, I should put up my armor, but I’m going to finish this book because it’s just really exciting here at the end. And that’s what Paul is trying to get across to you.
And I remember this woman who was just having so much trouble dealing with the problems in her life. The real problems weren’t the physical. She was in despair emotionally. And she said, you know, my friend, she seems to be so radiant and so picked up, and she tries so hard not to make me feel bad about the fact that God is so close to her.
What do I do? How do I do this now? And I tried my best to help her, but I knew down deep inside, you can’t put the armor on in the middle of the battle. Hey, last thing. It’s got to be the armor of God.
Whoops. You can put on the armor, God. Take the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, thank you very much, and throw it on the ground. Because you don’t need it, no. It doesn’t say the armor, it says the armor of God.
And this means that if you try to deal with this using your own weapons, if you try to deal with the problems using your own weapons, you will be defeated. You see, I think we said most all of satanic influence is basically an infection of your imagination.
What is worry? It’s an infection of the imagination. You get nothing but these vivid pictures of what’s going to go wrong. See, all these things are OK. It’s all right to be anxious. But if it’s an infection, it paralyzes you.
It’s all right to be guilty, by the way. It makes you move away. But if it’s an infection so that all you can see is how bad everything is, it’s all right actually to be angry. You can forgive, but it becomes bitterness.
When your imagination gets infected and all you can see, all you can do is replay that tape of what they did to you. And what it means to actually deal with the devil is to deal with infected imaginations.
Now take worry. Use common sense on worry. Well, there’s no use crying over spilled milk. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. Try to help somebody. that way. Or use rational logic. Say, well, you know, things could be worse, even if this happens.
You know, I know people who have had it a lot worse than that. Or use willpower. I won’t worry. I won’t worry. I won’t worry. I won’t worry. You try that and you will see immediately that the devil will always defeat you and the spiritual forces of darkness will always defeat you because the demons are of an angelical order of being.
They are inferior it only to the holy trinity. You will lose if you try to deal with your problems with common sense, with willpower, with anything but the armor of God it’s provided. You’ve got to come to the word.
You’ve got to have your privileges in the gospel. Or you will be eternally and utterly defeated. But Jesus Christ is the captain. Nobody’s ever had a captain like him. You know, they say the Trajan. The great Roman captain, when he was on the field of battle, would take his own armor off and put it on his wounded men.
He’d tear his own garments up and use them as bandages, but that’s nothing compared to Jesus because Jesus Christ tore himself to deal with your wounds, you see. And he took the spear that was meant for us into his own heart so that all of our debts could be paid, put on the full armor of God because Jesus Christ made himself vulnerable for you, you can become protected in him.
Now we’re going to go through, bit by bit, and show how you can put on each piece. But for tonight, you go to the Lord’s table. What I suggest you do is you say, Lord, take these truths that I’m going to sing about and think about.
Help me to put them on. Help me to face the world with them this week. Help me to put on the full armor of God so that in the evil day, and who knows, tomorrow may be an evil day, you can stand, let’s pray.
Now, Father, I ask that you grant that we might really put on the armor as we partake of your supper, and we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.