Stand and Fight

 This morning we continue our study in Spiritual Warfare. Last week we saw that the real battle that we fight is not with other humans, but with spiritual forces that work against the glory of God. Since we now understand who it is that we fight, we need to ask what this battle looks like? What do we do in this fight against the spiritual forces that are set against Christ and his church?

Unfortunately, much of the way we view spiritual warfare in our day has been shaped by popular horror movies like “The Exorcist”. While there are times when evil manifests itself in physical ways, more times than not, Satan is at work in the small, ordinary things we experience in this life. After all, it would be very easy to avoid the influence of the devil if he caused people to turn green, levitate, and scream in an other-worldly voice. This morning, I want to understand how Satan fights and how we fight against him by reading Eph. 6:10-12. In this passage, there are three actions that Paul says the Christian should take against the works of Satan: we are to be strong, to stand, and to wrestle.

First, Paul says in verse 10 that we are to “be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.” The phrase “be strong” here is used throughout the New Testament to refer to being strong in the faith. Paul charges Timothy, in 2 Tim. 2:1 to “be strengthened in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” So first, understand brothers and sisters, that the battle we wage against Satan is a battle of faith. One of Satan’s primary strategies is to deceive unbelievers and distract believers by warring against the Gospel. As we saw last week, 2 Cor. 4:4 says that Satan has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the truth of the Gospel. This is why we must bathe every evangelistic effort we make as a church and every individual effort we make to share the Gospel with prayer. If we make a move to share the Gospel, Satan will rise up to resist it. He will sew dissention, make it inconvenient, and disrupt in any way he can.

Not only will Satan fight to keep unbelievers from hearing the Gospel, but he will also distract believers from the certainty of the Gospel. 2 John 7-8 warns that Satan has sent out many deceivers, therefore we must watch that we will not lose the hope of the Gospel. Satan’s strategy for the church is to make us ineffective for the work of the Lord. He does this in two ways. One way is to raise up false teachers who distort the Gospel.  There are far too many false teachings for me to list in this sermon, but let me give you a good measure to judge false teachings by. If a teaching or teacher brings in a “fresh word” or a new concept, and that concept diminishes or eliminates the importance of Jesus Christ or the importance of the glory of God, that teaching is very likely a false teaching. In other words, if the teaching focuses on some small concern of the church or some small section of Scripture and makes that the main focus of teaching and says very little about Jesus or the glory of God, then it is a false teaching. If you get hung up on the same subject all the time, whether it be end-times speculations, cultural concerns, or even a pre-occupation with spiritual warfare, then you could be allowing Satan to distract you from the heart of the Gospel.

Another way Satan distracts the church from the Gospel is through personal or congregational sin. I heard a statement once about the ways that Satan lies to a woman about abortion, and I think that it applies more broadly to all sin. The saying says, “Satan tells the woman going into an Abortion clinic that there is no sin, and on coming out, that there is no forgiveness.” Satan will convince an individual or a church that there is no sin, no need to worry with sin, no need to be disciplined or to practice holiness. Then, when that individual or that church falls into sin, he will convince them that there is no hope of redemption. He will use the shame and guilt of that sin to keep them from faithfully walking in the Gospel.

Against these attacks of Satan, Paul gives one simple command. We are to “be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.” The way to defeat the attacks of Satan against our faith is to trust even more so in the Gospel message. There is a beautiful new hymn called “Before the Throne of God Above” that gets at how we can be strong in the Lord. It says, “When Satan tempts me to despair, and tells me of the guilt within, Upward I look, and see Him there, Who made an end of all my sin. Because a sinless Savior died, My sinful soul is counted free, For God, the Just is satisfied To look on Him and pardon me.” The way that we remain strong in the Lord is to rest in what Christ has done for us. If you feel the guilt of sin bearing down on you, if you feel that there is no way that you could ever be worthy, if you feel that you cannot share the Gospel because of your tainted past; remember the Gospel! Remember that Christ did not die for you because you were pure or worthy, but because you were a sinner in need of salvation!

The second action that Paul gives us for this battle against Satan is to “stand” (v. 11). Paul is moving into an analogy that he will work out through verse 20 in which he compares the Christian to a Roman soldier. This word, “stand”, has a direct relationship with the way that the Romans fought their battles. The Romans didn’t train their soldiers to fight as individuals. Rather, each soldier was given a shield (much like the riot shields police use today) and a sword, and they were trained to stand in what was called a “phalanx”. A phalanx was a V-shaped formation where each soldier would lock his shield against the soldier beside him, effectively forming a human spear. Then, in unison, the soldiers would all take one step forward. As the enemy would make assaults against them, the soldiers would dig in and stand firm against calvary, spears, arrows, and whatever else might come their way. Then, they would take another step. Step by step, they would resist each attack and move forward until they had taken the whole field.

In the same way, each individual Christian is a soldier in the army of God, and we are each called to stand. So, you might be wondering, how do we stand? Some have proposed that we stand by taking political action and voting our moral convictions. While there is nothing wrong with that, I don’t think that’s at all what Paul has in mind here. Rather, I think Paul has already given us the ways in which we stand. First, in Eph. 4, he told us that we should have unity within the Body of Christ. He told us to be united around “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (v 5). He told us to use our gifts for the building up of the body of Christ (v. 12). So, we stand by being bound together. Just like a Roman phalanx is ineffective if the individual soldiers all go their own way, so too the church is ineffective if there is disunity.

Second, Paul has already told us in Chapter 5 to live in submission to one another. We are to do that in every aspect of our lives. We are to submit to one another in the church. We are to submit to one another in the marriage relationship, in the family, and in our lives out in the world. Brothers and sisters, I know that this sounds strange, but our primary way of resisting Satan is to live differently than this world. The world says that we gain influence through power. But the Gospel says that we gain influence through submission. Jesus taught this very thing in his ministry. The first are not the greatest in the kingdom, but the last are. The meek inherit the earth. The widow and her two pence gave the most. The master washes the feet of his servants. The king dies for his people. So, we overcome our enemies by loving them. We change culture by being light in this dark world, by living in peacefulness and unity while the world around us rages and divides. Notice, these things are not done by changing government policies or through a vote, but through each of us living out our faith in this world.

Finally, in verse 12, Paul says that our fight against Satan is akin to “wrestling”. The word “wrestle” here means literally “hand to hand combat.” Paul compares the fight against Satan as a grudge match. It is up close and personal. It is a hard, daily struggle. This means that the fight against Satan is a fight for every Christian. Satan does not fight with air campaigns or bombardments, but with bloody trench warfare. I take this to mean that we fight in the smallest of things we do. Every act of good that we do for our neighbor is a slash of the knife against the powers of this world. Every cup of water we give to the needy is sand in the eye of our enemy. Every time we tell someone about Jesus, it is a stab through the heart of the evil one. I know, there are times when our small acts seem like a drop in the ocean of wickedness in this world. But, just imagine how one Roman soldier would feel as his friends drop around him and he feels the pressure of the enemy pushing against his shield. He may be tempted to think that his army is losing the battle, but what he cannot see is the whole picture. He cannot see that though his battalion is feeling the heat of the fight, his army is winning. In the same way, our small acts, no matter how insignificant they may seem, add to the battle. And, I’ve read the end of the story. Spoiler alert: God wins!