December
14, 2003
In the first days after 9-11, one of the things that got a lot of attention
was the blame game. How did this happen? What should we have done to prevent
it? And many well-known military leaders were shown to have been warning Americans
for the last 20 years that some sort of terrorist attack was going to happen.
The most compelling of these warnings was a speech I read in which this particular
leader chronicled how again and again, America had come under attack in lesser
but no less deadly attacks, both at home and abroad in our embassies. He
said that we have been at war for 20 years, but we had been trying to pretend
that we were not.
Of course, in the blame game, the thing that was said repeatedly was that
in the past we failed to act when we should have, and this is why nearly 3,000
of our innocent citizens were killed. President Bush said that was not going
to happen again. We would not ignore the clear dangers. We would not do
what we had been doing for 20 years, which was nothing. And so we did something.
And we continue to take the battle to our enemy.
Our theme this Christmas has been to see that when Christ came to Earth,
it was like D-Day. It was an invasion into enemy territory, and the battle
between Christ and Satan has been raging ever since.
We live on a battlefield. We are called to do battle. We can try to pretend
that we are not in a war, but if we do that, only bad things will happen,
just as they did to the United States on 9-11.
We have been looking at some of the strategies and attacks of Satan on us
in an effort to prepare ourselves to defend both ourselves and those we love
and to extend the kingdom of God. Last week we looked at some of the armor
of our warfare that Paul outlines in Ephesians 6, so we want to continue with
that this morning. Turn to Ephesians 6:10-18:
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 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 then, firm, 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.
There is a progression here. We looked at the first two pieces of armor
last week. The picture is of a soldier on the field of battle. He is alert.
He has on the belt of truth. He has on the breastplate of righteousness.
The belt of truth means being aware of the unseen world around him. It means
being renewed in our minds so that we are actually living by faith—living
by the truth that God has revealed to us, the person of Christ Himself.
The breastplate covered the body from the neck to the thighs. It was known
as the heart protector. It protected the major soft organs of the body from
lethal assault.
The breastplate of righteousness in the spiritual battle in which we are
engaged is the piece of armor that makes it possible for us to fight. Why?
Because we know our vitals are protected. We know we can take blows and we
won’t be killed.
Such a piece of armor is why David could say: "The Lord is my light,
and my salvation – whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life
– of whom shall I be afraid?"
Such a piece of armor caused Paul to write words like this: "If God is
for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but gave
him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him graciously give us
all things?/For I am convinced that neither life nor death, neither angels
nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height
nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us
from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
This piece of armor enables Paul to write things such as this: "We do
not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in
the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability
to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt
the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves
but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril,
and he will deliver us."
Paul says he was under pressure that was beyond his ability to endure. But
what happened? He endured in spite of himself. Why? Because of the righteousness
he had in Christ. Even though he felt despair, he looked past his dire circumstances,
his feelings, and all that was happening, and he trusted in the righteousness
that God had given him. He trusted in his standing and security in Christ.
We must do this also.
But this is linked with the next piece of armor that is mentioned in verse
15: “and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel
of peace.”
How are we to understand this aspect of our armor?
Notice that the armor here is not really a piece of hardware. It’s something
internal. It’s something of an attitude. It’s a psychological thing. It’s
a readiness. It’s related to our feet because our feet have to move if we
are going to do anything.
Notice that this readiness comes to us from the gospel itself. From the
good news and, in particular, the good news of peace.
So to understand this readiness, we need to understand the peace of the
gospel.
The peace of the good news of Christ has several facets.
Peace, at its essence, means a lack of conflict or division. It means to
be undivided, not torn between two opinions or two of anything.
Jesus, through His death and resurrection, through His immediate and eternal
presence, and through His pronouncements to us, brings us this kind of peace
in several ways.
First He gives us peace with God. Romans 4:25 and 5:1 say: "He was delivered
over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification. Therefore,
since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this
grace in which we stand."
We are now of one mind concerning God. We have laid down our weapons against
Him. We are no longer rebels. We have acknowledged His divine right. We have
acknowledged that He is right about us. We have acknowledged that He is right
about Himself, in speaking truly to us. We acknowledge that He is right about
everything else. This brings us peace.
We also have in this peace a clear conscience. We have the peace of knowing
that God has removed our offenses. He has declared us not guilty on the basis
of the work of His Son.
We are free from condemnation, free from guilt.
We are free from worry and fear. How often Jesus told His disciples, “Don’t
be afraid,” and how often He speaks the same words to us if we are listening.
Jesus said that we are to live in a distinctive way in that we are not to
worry about what most people worry about. We are not to worry about the future
– what we will eat, what we will wear, and so forth. We are instead given
the promise that if we live in connection to Him, we can live without worrying
about those things.
All of these things are aspects of the peace that the gospel produces in
us.
None of these aspects of the gospel is automatic. They are intended to be
the normal possession of the believer. They are intended to be the normal
way we live and approach life.
But we all know that many, many believers do not live this way. Many believers
are riddled with guilt, condemnation, fear, worry, and all the things that
are antithetical to this peace.
The first two pieces of armor are there to help us possess this peace. If
we learn to use the belt of truth regularly, if we keep on the breastplate
of righteousness, they will help us to live normally in this peace. It takes
practice, but this is what God intends. This does not mean we will do it perfectly.
Remember what I read of Paul even earlier when he said: "We were under
great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even
of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened
that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has
delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us."
But the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness protected Paul,
and he was able to endure. And he had peace.
I believe that it is important to understand that the use of those weapons
makes it possible to possess this peace of the gospel. As we possess that
peace, and by possess I mean as it becomes a more normal way of living our
lives, then it produces this other piece of internal armor that Paul calls
the readiness of our feet.
What does this readiness look like in our lives? I think there are at least
two aspects to this readiness.
The first aspect of readiness comes through surrender.
The readiness that Paul is talking about is nothing less than the readiness
to live the Christ life. Our ability to have that readiness depends very much
on our surrendering ourselves to Christ.
You see, we don’t really know what life is until we surrender it to Christ.
That is what the vine and the branch analogy that Jesus gave us means. We can’t live true lives without being attached to
the vine, and attachment means surrendering ourselves to that vine.
Please get out of your head the idea of surrendering your life to Christ
as being something negative. You know the old thinking. Someone says in a
moment of inspiration, “I will go anywhere God wants me to go!” Some Christian
responds, “Be careful what you say. God will send you away as a missionary.”
What a horrible thought behind that! In other words, Jesus is waiting for
us to surrender to His control so He can make us do something we will hate.
No, it’s quite the opposite of that. It’s in surrendering to Christ that
we really find out who we are. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Until you have given
yourself to him, you will not have a real self.”
That’s much closer to the truth.
Jesus does not destroy us. He makes us alive. He makes us into what He always
intended for us to be.
The incident that helps me understand this is what happened to Peter after
the resurrection. Remember, Jesus appeared on the beach and fixed the disciples
a tasty fish breakfast because they had been out fishing early. Jesus repeated
the miracle He had done years before by giving them a net full of fish after
they had fished all morning without catching a single fish. Then Peter came
back, and Jesus restored him. He restored his peace. He assured him that
his denial was not the end for him. He even commissioned him, “Feed my
Sheep!” Then He told Peter, “Follow me!”
Then we read this:
Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following
them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper table
and had said, “Lord, who is going to betray you?”) When Peter saw him, he
asked, “Lord, what about him?” Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive
until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.”
What was Peter doing when he saw someone else and asked the question, “Lord,
what about him?”
He was shopping. When you shop, you are looking for the best deal. He saw
the other guy and wondered if he had a better deal than Peter had.
When we look around at other people and their circumstances, or wonder why
something good is happening to them that we wish would happen to us, or
any number of other things, we are shopping. We are saying in effect to
Christ, “I wonder, Jesus, if I might get a better deal than the one You
are giving me.”
In other words, we haven’t really surrendered. We haven’t really come to
the place where we say to Christ, “I have one life to live, and I am putting
it in Your basket because I think You know what You are doing and I don’t.
I leave in Your hands the impact, the fruit of my life, the circumstances
of my life, everything. I will follow You no matter what!”
This is why this piece of armor is related to the peace of the gospel. When
we live in the peace of the gospel, we are not of two minds. We have stopped
shopping. We have stopped wondering about whether there are better deals out
there to be had with our lives other than living the life of Christ.
And then we become ready to live the life Christ has called us to live.
What happens when we keep shopping around? We miss the life that we have.
We are so worried about finding a better deal, the life that is before us
slips by us.
We are not really ready to live, because we are distracted by other things.
The opportunities that are presented to us slip by us because we are not
really looking at what is there. We are not really ready to live fully alive
to God, in the life that God has given us. We are too busy thinking about
the life God hasn’t given us.
One of the marvels of the life Jesus lived is that He was surrendered to
the Father in this way I am talking about. He lived fully the life the Father
gave Him. This is why He could be on the road through Samaria, and He could
want to get some rest, but He saw the opportunity to minister to a poor, outcast
Samaritan woman. He was fully alive to that opportunity. I think that many
of the people Jesus met and ministered to in the gospel were under the impression
that Jesus had all the time in the world just to talk to them and listen
to them and be with them. Jesus was not distracted. He had a readiness to
live the life the Father had given Him. And so He was tuned in.
Have you really surrendered your life to the Lord Jesus in this way? Or
internally are you still shopping around?
There are many things that will present themselves as shopping opportunities
if we are not careful. We may not even recognize that is what is happening.
Think about your circumstances. What is it about your circumstances that
you don’t like right now. What would you change?
Maybe it’s people in your life. Maybe it’s your outward circumstance, your
job, or your home. Maybe it’s Decatur.
First of all, have you prayed about it? Do you
pray about it regularly?
If not, why not? Jesus said that we are to pray that God’s will can be done
on Earth as it is in Heaven.
It may be something that God is very willing to change, but He is waiting
for you to begin to seek Him and depend on Him – because He wants to be near
you and this will help you draw near.
I am not saying that being surrendered to Christ means we become passive
people. The Lord’s Prayer and the amazing promises concerning prayer in the
Bible certainly do not mesh with a passive view of life. Quite the opposite.
But beyond praying about it, then we leave it in God’s hands and we are
ready to live the life God has given us.
It can be other things besides circumstances.
For instance, it can be regrets. We can feel bad about what we perceive
are our past failures. It may even be that we think that the most negative
circumstances of our lives are because of our own failures.
So what do we do? We focus on that, and we get distracted by that, and we
fail to live this moment.
This is a more serious issue than just going around sad or depressed. It
defeats us. It hinders the work that God wants to do in us and through us.
Even if it is true that we are in the midst of negative circumstances that
are, in part, of our own making, do we really believe that God is not able
and willing and eager to redeem those circumstances? But we get distracted.
We think about our regrets. We feel sad. And what happens? We lose our readiness
to live. We stop believing in the great God we profess to believe in. We stop
praying earnestly for His redeeming work in the situation. And so we miss
opportunities to see the kingdom break forth in new and powerful ways in
our lives.
This is a spiritual battle. Satan is highly involved at least in the background
in these kinds of things. If he can get us looking around at everything but
what is right here, right now—everything but the life we actually have, even
though it is far from perfect—then he wins, and he has succeeded in taking
another soldier out of the battle. We will just shuffle through life, always
waiting for something else, some other circumstance, instead of being alive
to God in the moment He gives us.
This explains why people do many of the destructive things they do.
People will look at the imperfections of their marriage instead of living
right now in a way that brings redemption and strength and beauty to the
marriage they have.
People look at their kids with guilt or regret or even disappointment, instead
of entering the battle for their kids, praying for them, supporting them,
continuing to express love and admiration and delight in them.
People do the same things with their jobs, their churches, their families,
almost anything. There is a spiritual battle behind it. We fail to possess
the peace of the gospel, so we fail to be ready to live.
I think Paul had to learn and grow into this readiness. In fact, he came
to the place where he learned to look at these kinds of things in almost the
opposite way that most people look at them. For most people, our own weaknesses,
being insulted, encountering hardships, being persecuted, and getting into
difficulties, all become tremendously distracting. The distraction hinders
our readiness to live. Paul realized that this is when God delights to pour
out His power. This is exactly when he needs to be ready to live and to be
alive to God because this is when God prefers to work.
In a dramatic episode in Paul's life, Jesus spoke to him and said, “My
grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
After he had time to process this, Paul stated his new way of looking at
his life, his new readiness to live life this way: "That is why, for Christ’s
sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions,
in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” This same phenomenon
of being ready to live is an important character trait of courage.
Courage is related to this idea of readiness because courage is greatly
facilitated in our lives when we are of one mind, when we are at peace.
I think this is why people who have responded with courage in crisis situations
rarely feel as if they showed courage and often attest to the fact that in
the moment, they had a strong sense of peace rather than fear.
Think of the brave men and women who showed such courage on the 9-11 jetliner
that crashed in Pennsylvania. The dire situation, the clear moral imperative
that presented itself, made it possible for them to focus entirely on the
situation at hand. Everything else faded into the background. They knew at
that moment perhaps more deeply than they knew anything else in their lives
that they had to act. Such clarity of purpose and focus greatly enhances our
ability to act with courage.
In other words, we can better show courage when we see a given situation
like this, “This is what I am called to do, this is what I am here to do,
so I will do it with everything I’ve got.”
I think that is a pretty good description of what Paul means when he says
that the gospel of peace gives a readiness to our feet.
I think that sports can often teach us this aspect of readiness.
Much of the key to any sport is concentration, the mental discipline to
focus your mind entirely on the task at hand. If you are any kind of fan
of any kind of sport, you know that many times the men and women who excel
at the professional level are people whom no one paid much attention to in
college.
Why did they rise to the top? Usually because they had more ability to focus
and concentrate than their more talented teammates or opponents.
I was watching a basketball game the other day. I was watching in particular
the point guards on the two different teams.
One played much better, did a lot more damage to the opponent than the other
one, even though I would evaluate them as having about the same amount of
talent.
What was the difference? One was ready to play, the other was not. What
do I mean by that?
If you are a point guard in basketball, your job is to run the offense and
to break down the defense of the other team so that eventually you or another
teammate will get a good shot at the basket.
How do you do that? You have to penetrate the defense. You have to slash
through the defense, drawing opponents to yourself, and then either successfully
out-maneuver them entirely and get to the basket yourself or at least penetrate
enough so that you can dump the ball off to a teammate who is in a position
to score because of your penetration.
No doubt this takes talent. No doubt that you have to have some good athletic
skills and ball-handling skills. But if you watch basketball at any level,
skill is not always what separates the players in their performance.
It’s courage to do what they are supposed to do. Most point guards do not
have the courage to do their jobs. They are too tentative. Why is this?
They are thinking about all the negative things that might happen. They
might double dribble or travel with the basketball. They might get stripped
of the ball, giving the other team the basketball. And then people would
yell at them, maybe even their coaches or their teammates.
So they don’t do it. They don’t slash for the basket. They don’t really
try to penetrate. And what happens? Usually after dribbling around the perimeter
for a while, the team settles for a more difficult shot that might go in or
might not.
In other words, they do not do what they need to do because they are not
of one mind. They are not at peace. They are not ready.
The other player faces all the same obstacles. The other player knows that
all of those negative outcomes might happen as well. But the other player
thinks, “Too bad. My job is to penetrate, and that is what I am going to try
to do.”
Good players go for it. Sometimes they are successful, sometimes they are
not, but they are doing what they are supposed to be doing. But two wonderful
things happen. One is that they succeed some of the time, and the other is
that they get better at it. They improve their abilities.
The player who is not ready to play experiences neither of those things.
(I had to laugh at one point in this game. The more tentative player actually
slashed to the basket. He did it perfectly. Kobe Bryant could not have done
it any better. He blew by about four opponents, and he found himself sailing
up to the basket unchallenged. And then he missed the layup! I know what that
feels like. He was surprised he was successful.)
Are you living in the readiness that the gospel of peace gives us?
If we haven’t really surrendered our lives to Christ, then we most likely,
internally, are still shopping around. We are still wondering if there is
something better out there outside of the life Christ gives to us.
We live our lives tentatively. We are not really ready to live. We are not
really at peace. We go through the motions. We are not really in the battle.
We are not really ready to devote our full attention and effort to the life
that God has given us.
What has God called you to do right now? Not
10 years from now. Not even one year from now. But right now.
Are you alive to it? Are you devoting your full attention to it? Are you
alive and ready for the opportunities that are all around you right now?
Think about it.