Ephesians: Disarming the Darkness - Living Truth

Ephesians: Disarming the Darkness
Part 2
“The Belt of Truth”
Ephesians 6:14
Pastor Charles Price
If you have a Bible with you, I am going to read from Ephesians Chapter 6. I am
going to read from Verse 10 down to Verse 18.
And if you were here last week, we began to look at this section, which speaks
about the battle that every one of us is engaged in.
And I have called this “Disarming the Darkness” because we fight against dark
forces, says Paul, and we fight in the strength of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And then he speaks of the particular armor that we are to wear. Let me read it to
you. Ephesians 6:10:
“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.”
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Well we must make no mistake in reading those verses that we are in a battle.
And it is not a physical battle; it is a spiritual battle in combat with forces that we
don’t see with our physical eyes other than when they manifest themselves in
physical ways.
And Paul says in Verse 12,
“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.”
We talked about that last week, a little bit about the demonic and satanic powers
that exist, not as a myth, not as a sort of a hypothetical explanation of evil, but as
real living, created beings whose origin we talked a little bit about last week.
Elsewhere in 2 Corinthians 10:3 Paul says,
“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the
contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.”
I said last week that there are three things a soldier in combat needs to know. He
needs to know his enemy, he needs to know his equipment and he needs to know
his strategy. All those three things are talked about in these verses.
And we are going to begin to talk this morning about knowing our equipment
because Paul here lists the armor that a soldier would wear. And as he was
writing this in prison, I would like to think that maybe once in a while a Roman
soldier would come into the prison with all his gear, all his armoury on and Paul
is sitting writing about that. And he sees one and says, “Aha, he has got a helmet
on; let me see what that is a picture of.”
He’s – excuse me – where do you come from, taking over my…
Now you are vulnerable. So where have you been?
I was fighting the Gauls.
Fighting the Gauls? Well they need fighting – those French, you know, they need
putting down once in a while. Hey, that’s a pretty nifty uniform you have on.
What do you call this here?
Breastplate.
Not the stomach plate?
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Not the stomach plate.
It’s as solid as your stomach though, isn’t, eh? And your shield - let me just see
how many spear marks it has on it. You haven’t been doing much, have you?
We’re not very good.
And your sword or spear – okay; nice; put it away.
You know when Paul wrote about the armor he wrote about feet fitted for
readiness. I mean those sandals are nice but Roman soldiers run around in
sandals, do you?
We’re in the sand a lot.
You’re in the sand a lot; okay; that’s witty isn’t it? Ha, ha. And the helmet –
helmet of salvation he called it, to protect your head. That’s looks heavy, doesn’t
it? I won’t put it on though because it would mess my hair up. Okay, and the
earflaps.
So if I were to punch you (do you know, I punched him in the first service and I
got a bleeding finger afterwards because he’s got all kinds of studs here that kind
of are sharp.) But if I smacked you around the head there, do you feel that?
No, it’s good.
No… good.
Well, we are going to, little by little, over these next few weeks, look at some of
this armoury bit by bit.
You have got the belt on there, which a lot of things are attached to and holding
on to. And we are going to talk about why the Christian needs to be dressed in
armor, modelled on what you are wearing. So, thank you. You are probably hot
and weary in that. Is it heavy?
Uh, it would be for you.
Well, thank you – you are probably right though. But you are a tough man, so
thank you for dropping in. And I need to get on with what I am here to do, but it
has been nice to see you and go back and give the Gauls a good kick.
Well that’s the kind of guy who probably came walking into Paul’s prison, or that
he saw when he was escorted to his prison. And no doubt this is the model that he
is writing about when he describes the armor.
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And every piece of armor, he says, has a specific function. And I am going to talk
about them one by one. And it is intriguing when you first read it to see that the
first piece of armor he speaks about is probably the last piece that you and I would
write about, which is the belt.
He says there in Verse 14,
“Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist.”
The significance of this is that the belt was not just the final piece to kind of hold
his pants up. The belt was probably the most essential piece of his armor because
everything else attached to, depended on, and fitted into the belt.
The breastplate is held in place by the belt. The sword is attached to the belt. The
shield, when not in use, would be hooked onto his belt. Any maps that a Roman
soldier might carry with him would be tied into his belt. If he had a purse of
money it would be attached to his belt.
And the significance of the belt is that everything else finds its position in its
relationship to the belt. And it is intriguing that Paul describes the belt that a
Christian is to wear as the belt of truth buckled around your waist.
Now that could mean one of two things, or it could mean both of those two things.
He might be thinking of the need to be truthful, honest. In other words, he is
speaking ethically – the belt of truth, that around your waist, whatever else you
are doing, live truthfully and honestly and with integrity.
On the other hand, he might be talking about biblical truth, not so much ethical as
doctrinal, that you need to have buckled around your waist the truth of God’s
Word because it is from that everything else is going to be positioned if you are
going to have armor that is going to be effective in the battle.
Well I think he is probably talking about both. And so we’ll talk about both.
We’ll talk first of all about the ethical dimension and then we’ll talk about the
doctrinal dimension.
The belt of truth, in that sense being that, the belt of truthfulness - we give the
devil a foothold when we surrender truthfulness and honesty.
Satan has a native language, said Jesus, and his native language is that he lies.
Speaking to the Jews one day when they were discussing whether Abraham was
their father or not, and Jesus said to them,
“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your
father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the
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truth for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native
language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
(That is in John 8:44.)
He says lying is the native language of Satan. And when you speak his native
language you adopt his native character. And when James warns, “Don’t give the
devil a foothold”; lying is probably one of the key footholds that we can give to
him.
It is the most fundamental of character failures when we feel at liberty to lie and
to create an alternate world based on deceit and pretence.
Christianity Today is a monthly magazine that I subscribe to and in May 2011 it
had an interesting article called “The Seven Levels of Lying”. I am not going to
quote it; I am adapting it.
I differ a little bit from the original article but it stimulated my thinking, and let
me give you seven levels of lying.
Number 1: you tell a lie. Now the reason why you tell the lie is because for some
reason it is convenient to do so. Maybe it gets you off the hook. It might be what
we tend to call a white lie.
A white lie means you tell a lie to produce a good effect, but it’s a lie. But a lie,
however well intended (if that is not a contradiction in terms, which of course it
is), however well intended, a lie can become a match that lights a bonfire that we
never anticipated.
Because once you tell a lie, the second level of lying is that you have to protect
the lie. And you tell more lies to protect the original lie.
Somebody has said that lies are weaklings; they need bodyguards. And so having
told a lie, you then protect that lie by building other deception around it.
And when you do that, the third level is you develop a habit of lying. That is, you
create an outer world that you know is not true but you have begun this process
and you create an outer world that is disconnected to the true inner world and you
begin to live the lie of the outer world that you have created. It becomes a habit.
Fourthly, you begin to deceive yourself. You begin to believe the lies that you are
telling; you have told them now so often, or you live within them that you just
live as though they were true and you actually even deceive yourself about them.
The fifth level is you begin to rationalize about them. Not only do you believe the
lies, but you justify them.
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And so you justify deceit in business because it actually helps the business – you
make more money this way. If you make promises that are not true or you lie
about the costs, or you lie about “the cheque is in the mail” stuff (which is a
common one of course), or you lie about dates. And lying becomes your friend,
lying becomes your co-worker, because you rationalize now that the way to
function is to include, in your arsenal, lies.
And then in the sixth level, your lying begins to infiltrate into other areas of your
life. So you lie at work because it is convenient to do so and you think it is
productive to do so and profitable to do so. But now you begin to lie at home and
you lie in your marriage and you lie in your family.
And it’s amazing how we can kid ourselves about these lies. I remember several
years ago of being in conversation with a Christian leader who had got himself
into an illicit relationship and it had been exposed.
And I met with him and we were having coffee together. It had only just been
exposed. I knew him well. And we were talking about the whole situation and
what needs to happen now, what he is going to do now, and so on.
And in the course of the conversation he said to me, “Although I have been
married for many years,” he said, “in this relationship I am experiencing love for
the first time. I have never experienced love like this. This is real love and I
never knew this before.”
And then he said to me this: “This is not adultery; this is love.”
“No,” I said, “it’s adultery. It violates your wife. It violates your own integrity.
It destroys your own honesty. It violates your relationship with God. Whatever
you call it (and we’re very good at disguising these things), it’s adultery. And
until you start at that point, there is no solution.”
The seventh level is that it becomes the duty to lie. You have now got to prop
something up although, you know, I have talked to grown children who live a lie
to protect a dark family secret and it becomes their duty to lie.
And sometimes in our work life it becomes a duty to lie, we think. But lying, no
matter how immediately it gets you off the hook or hides you behind some
protection, lying is giving the devil a foothold in your life.
I remember Stuart Briscoe telling a story, and I believe it was when he was
speaking here on one occasion, that when as a young man he worked in a bank.
One day his boss said to him, “If so and so calls this morning, I am not here,
okay?”
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So Stuart said, “Okay, that’s fine; where will you be?”
“Well, I’ll be here.”
“You just told me that you would not be here.”
“No, no, no, I said, ‘tell her I’m not here.’ I don’t want to talk to this lady.”
And Stuart said, “Well, I can’t do that. I don’t lie. If you don’t want to be here,
then go out, but if you are here, you are here.”
And his boss was angry with him and said, “I told you, you tell her I’m not in.
That’s my order to you.”
And Stuart said, “I’m sorry; I cannot do that.”
Stuart went back to his work, troubled. The guy went back to his office probably
angry. And Stuart, in the afternoon, went in to see him and he said, “I just wanted
to say this to you if I may; understand that if I lie for you, I may lie to you. But if
you know I won’t lie for you, you will also know I will never lie to you. Which
do you want?”
And Stuart said that the next day when he came into work, his boss came in and
said, “I want to see you in my office.”
He went into his office and he said, “Stuart, I am going to make sure that you rise
to the very top of this bank.”
And actually his honesty, his integrity, his refusal to lie, revealed the nature of his
character. And actually it was a few weeks later he said, “Well, I’m leaving
anyway. I am going to become a preacher.” But some preachers lie too, of
course.
But you see there is something much deeper here than what we think at the time,
this will make life easier to tell a little lie over here. You know, lying begins to
build a wall behind which all kinds of things can go on.
People who find themselves in different areas of addiction; very often it began
with deceit, with lies.
People who have substance addiction; they lied about the fact that they were
taking or drinking, or whatever it is that they are addicted to, more than they were.
People who watch pornography and find the addicting power of pornography to
get hold of their lives build a wall of deceit to hide behind.
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Those who are driven by materialism, where making money is the most important
thing, will steer that drive with deceit and pretence and dishonesty.
Parents, if I can say this to those of you who are parents of younger children,
make it the highest priority with your children that you never tolerate lying –
never, ever - and that you reserve your harshest discipline for lying.
Because if you can deal with that in your children when they are young, you will
knock down a multitude of dominoes at the same time. Your kids will grow up to
be honest and to be real and to be transparent.
Now I know of course they can run away behind your back, but when you train a
child in the way he should go, never tolerating lying is a very important ingredient
in the way we bring up our kids.
Scripture addresses this consistently. The ninth of the Ten Commandments is
“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.”
But it goes deeper than that in Psalm 51:6; the psalmist writes,
“Surely you desire truth in the inner parts.”
That is, in the inner being, not just conditioned by the convenience of the external
circumstances, but the inner integrity of the heart says, “I do not lie because I do
not lie irrespective of what the circumstances are in which it might be convenient
to lie.”
The only qualifier that Scripture gives us to truthfulness is in Ephesians 4:15
where it says – Paul writes,
“Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him
who is the Head, that is, Christ.”
Now he says speak the truth in love. Now there are some things that may be true
but would not be very kind or very loving to say to somebody.
Now if you say to me, “Boy, you are ugly”, that might be true; it’s not kind.
Actually in the text, the Greek text, of Ephesians 4:15, the word ‘speaking’ is not
there but to give it some kind of meaning in English, all the translations put the
word “speak the truth in love”.
Actually it says, “truth in love”; we might say “truthing in love”, if I can invent a
word there. That truth is conditioned by love. And a truthful heart needs to be
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lived out of a loving heart. And we can tell people things that are true, but not
very loving about it.
Psalm 145:18 says,
“The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.”
If the Lord seems distant, maybe the issue is truth. You call on Him in truth, not
just any old how. That’s why confession is so essential a part of our Christian
lives because we tell the truth about our sin to God. We confess it to Him and we
draw close to Him in truth.
You want to know what untruth does to people? Look at the story in Acts
Chapter 5 in the early church of Ananias and Sapphira. Be glad you weren’t part
of the early church.
What happened there was that a man called Barnabas had a field and he sold it
and gave the money to the church to spread the gospel, and one or two other
people did it.
And one couple who are Ananias and Sapphira – they sold a field and they kept
back some of the money but they brought the other part and said, “this is all the
money we got for the field and we are giving it for the spread of the gospel.”
Ananias came first; his wife Sapphira came later. And Peter knew this was not all
the money they had gotten for the field. And Peter said,
“Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to
the Holy Spirit?
“You have not lied to men but to God” he goes on to say.
And Ananias dropped down dead. And a couple of the guys took him out and
buried him.
And then his wife came and Peter said, “Did you get a certain amount of money
for the sale of your field that your husband has just given to us?”
“Yes,” she said, “that was the money we got from the field.”
He said, “You are lying too.”
She dropped down dead just as the folks were coming back from burying her
husband, so they had to carry her out.
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I mean would you like to have been around in the early church? I mean the
ushers were kept busy; they didn’t just show you to your seat.
You would say, “Ushers, there is one over here just fallen over. Will you take
him out please? No one over here; two up in the balcony. Ushers: two up in the
balcony. Have you got enough coffins left because there are another two going
down just over here right now.”
I mean this was a church that was alive. It wasn’t that they had to sell their field –
they didn’t. It wasn’t that they had to give all the money. No, it’s just that they
lied in saying that what they did give was all of it when it was only part of it.
The money wasn’t the issue at all; it was the deceit. And that shows you the
judgement of God on deception, on lying. “You have not just lied to men; you
have lied to God.” And, said Peter in his diagnosis, “Satan has so filled your
heart that you have lied.” Because this is the language of Satan, the mother
tongue of Satan, to lie and deceive.
And so this belt of truthfulness, this ethical issue of being honest and truthful
around your waist – if you are not truthful, your breastplate of righteousness
(which we will talk about next time) is going to not be stable and secure.
Now there’s this self-righteousness – we’ll say that then it is not a selfrighteousness,
but if you are not living an honest true life you will have no
assurance of that. Your shield, which is attached, won’t be in the right place
when you need it. Your sword – the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of
God, won’t be in place if the belt is not right.
That’s the inward truthfulness, the ethical issue. And it may be that some of us
here this morning, I don’t know what we need to seriously get right with God over
this, because you are on a path where you have begun to be deceitful about
something and it may seem only marginally different but the difference will get
bigger and bigger.
And there is a spiritual law that says this: be sure your sin will find you out.
You may get away with it for a year, two years, ten years, fifteen years, but one
day it will blow up in your face. Your sin will find you out.
But the other aspect of this belt of truth – and I think likely the aspect Paul had in
mind in particular when he wrote this, is this belt of truth as God has revealed it to
us in His Word. You see Christianity is not just a great idea; it is the truth.
I am not going to justify that statement this morning – we haven’t got time to.
But of course one of the statements that Jesus made about Himself was, “I am the
Way, the Truth and the Life. I am the Truth.”
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“Your Word is truth” Jesus stated to His Father in prayer in John 17.
Paul, in 1 Timothy 3:15, talks about the church of the living God as the pillar and
foundation of the truth. This is what gives it stability. This is why the gospel, the
Word of God, works in every generation in every culture.
And whether they are believers meeting today in some remote place in
Afghanistan or meeting here in complete freedom in Canada or under some
baobab tree in the heart of Africa, or out under the sky in a south sea island – it
doesn’t matter where they are – they will be talking about the same things if it is
the church of Jesus Christ. They will be talking from the same book. They will
be worshipping the same God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We don’t stand on speculation. We don’t stand on latest theories. We don’t stand
on culturally relevant issues that are here today and gone tomorrow. We live
within all of that context but we stand on truth. It is non-negotiable truth. It is
objective truth that we can be certain of.
Why can we be certain of it? Because the Word of God is the Word of God. We
don’t trust the Bible because of what it says and debate everything it says; we
trust the Bible because of who it is that is saying it. It is God speaking, and by
His Holy Spirit moved and directed and inspired those human authors who wrote
it down for us.
David wrote in Psalm 119 and Verse 30,
“I have chosen the way of truth; I have set my heart on your laws.”
The way of truth is the way of Your laws. And I have chosen that, set my heart
on it.
John 8:32 Jesus said,
“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
Not some latest ideas on freedom, but its truth will set you free. And you see if
the Word of God is the belt on to which everything else is attached and from
which everything else finds its stability, then the devil’s tactic is to question the
Word of God.
Have you ever noticed that on the few times that the devil speaks in the Bible –
not many times; he’s mostly operating underground but then he pops up once in a
while and he speaks. And we will look not now, but we will look today and other
days at everything the devil ever said.
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But let me give you some of them. In the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3:1,
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the animals the LORD God
had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat
from any tree in the garden?”
What is he doing? He is asking a question to throw doubt and confusion as to
what God had said. Now of course it was totally true. God had not said you must
not eat from any tree in the garden. He had said you can eat from any tree except
one – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – and the day you eat of that tree,
that day you will die.
But you see Satan’s tactic is to come to Eve, and to Adam by default, and say to
them, “Did God really say you must not eat of any tree?”
The answer is, “Well, no, He didn’t say that.”
“Oh, well then, why not eat of this tree as well?” You see it’s to throw confusion
and doubt. And the devil speaks to us like that all the time.
“Does God really say that sex is wrong?”
Well, you know the answer to that. The answer is, “No, no, no, He didn’t say
that. He made it. It’s good. In fact He said it’s not good for man to be alone.”
“Then why don’t you sleep with your girlfriend?”
It’s not God whispering to you; that’s Satan whispering to you.
“No but He created the context for it.”
“No, no, no, no, He said it was good, He said it was good. You are going to
marry her anyway, aren’t you? So why not?”
Now that’s disobedience. That is the slippery slope out of the will of God, and
many have taken it.
“Did God say money is wrong?”
“Well, no He didn’t say that.”
“So money’s okay?”
“Yeah, money’s okay.”
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But what He did say is this: the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
Why? Because if you love money, you will love it enough to lie and to cheat and
to deceive just to make more.
Do you see the whisper of the serpent to Eve? I put down this phrase yesterday
afternoon when I was preparing this – “there was a subtle slide into sin” and only
when I wrote it down – subtle slide into sin – I thought it sounds like, yeah,
“sssss”.
The devil is not so foolish to say, “Disobey God”. He will say it eventually but he
won’t say that at the beginning. No, no. He won’t whisper to you and me going
home from church today, “Hey, turn your back on God.”
No, no, no. He’ll say, “Did God really say something,” create doubt, confusion,
excuse.
He stayed underground for many years, as far as the Bible is concerned, for many
books until the book of Job. And in the book of Job Satan appears again.
On that occasion – and I mentioned this last week – God called His angels up into
heaven, including Satan, who was a fallen angel. And He said first, “How are you
getting on going to and fro throughout the whole earth?”
Satan replied,
“Have you considered my servant Job?” said God. “There is no one on
earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and
shuns evil.”
“Does Job fear God for nothing?”
That’s a question designed to cast a slur on Job. “You have built a hedge around
Job. You have made life good for Job. You have blessed the work of his hands.
You have given him all his flocks and herds. You have given him a lovely
family. But, if You were to take that hedge down and Job was to get into trouble,
he wouldn’t worship You at all. He is only worshipping You because You have
made life good for him.
And he will slur your character – that’s what the devil does – or somebody else’s
character. And he will say to you and whisper in your ear, “Oh yeah, that person
did something I don’t like. He/she is corrupt.” You’ll get some ulterior motive
behind what they are doing.
I get nice letters from a lot of you and I appreciate that. I get letters that are not so
nice from some of you. I appreciate that too, but it is very interesting how letters
that criticize almost always – 99% - will turn into an attack on character and
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motivation. It’s the devil; that’s his way. He does it here. He raises questions
designed to bring doubt.
You remember when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and the devil came to
him? How do you think the devil is going to get around Jesus? Of course he
doesn’t win anything. How is he going to even approach Him?
He says, “If You are the Son of God….” Now of course there is no question to
Jesus; He knew His identity. But then the way he tried to seduce Him is, “If You
are the Son of God, do something to prove it. Turn these stones into bread.
Jump off the top of the temple and instead of Your body crushing when it hits the
ground, You will have angels come and catch You.”
“If You are the Son of God, I will give You all the kingdoms of the world if You
will bow down and worship me.”
You see it’s questioning designed to raise doubts and slurs. Then you find he
does this – and that’s the language of the devil, by the way, so be very careful of
it. But the point I am making to you now is not that so much as his point is to
question, undermine, the word that God has spoken. That’s what his questions are
designed to do.
But then what he does; you find in these encounters that he has; he tells you that
something that is bad actually will work out for your good.
To Eve in Genesis 3:4 he said,
“You will not surely die…for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes
will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Okay, so God says don’t do it, but it won’t be as bad as you think it will be
because actually there is going to come something really good out of this. Your
eyes will be opened; you will lose your innocence; you will know good from evil;
that’s going to be good; you are going to be like God.
What he offered Jesus, of course, was the fast track. “Turn these stones into
bread.” He was hungry – it says He was hungry. And he is putting into the mind
of Jesus as a man, “Your Father has left You for 40 days. Maybe You are going
to starve in this desert. Come on, eat some bread and You will be fine. Jump off
the temple and everybody will know who You are. Man, You will get Your name
on the headlines. Everybody will know who You are – You jump off the temple
and angels catch you. Come on, this is the fast track to getting a following. You
bow down and worship me and all the kingdoms of the earth will be Yours.”
Of course one day He would say, “All authority in heaven and earth has been
given to Me” – it would all be His.
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“But here is the fast track I am offering You.” The devil doesn’t say, “I am going
to offer you something really, really bad here.” You and I wouldn’t fall for that.
He always offers you something good – apparently so.
Love with a woman you are not married to as opposed to the woman you did
marry and you don’t feel you ever were really in love with. “Well, you chose her,
but here’s something better.”
And you know he whispers all kinds of things into our minds. I guess the devil
loves the mistranslation of Romans 8:28:
“All things work together for good.”
If it’s a wicked thing, it’s okay; it’ll work for good. Actually that isn’t what it
says – that’s the King James Translation; they have mistranslated there – “things”
don’t work; in all things God works for good. That is, in all circumstances in
which you find yourself.
Not, you can go and do bad things. And I have heard people say, “Well, I know if
I do this, God will forgive me and He will probably use it for good eventually.”
That’s not the Holy Spirit speaking to a person; that’s the devil speaking. He has
spoken that way before.
So what is the antidote? Put on the whole armor of God. Stand firm with the belt
of truth buckled around your waist.
There is a translation by a man called James Moffat, which is not as popular and
well known today as it was, but I have it and I looked at it. And I love his
expression here. He says,
Tighten it.
“Tighten the belt of truth around your loins. You are in a battle. Get that
belt of truth and tighten it. Be ruthless with yourself about your ethical
untruthfulness and be solid in your holding to the truth that God has
revealed to us in His Word.”
I hope every time you come like this and we gather together on a Sunday
morning, we might be tightening the belt of truth in some way.
You know that’s what Jesus did when Satan met with Him. Remember what He
said to the three temptations? He began each response by saying, “It is written,
man shall not live by bread alone. It is written, you shall not tempt the Lord your
God. It is written.”
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And each time He says, “My Word in response is not My Word; it is the Word of
God.
Now when He says, “It is written” it doesn’t mean suddenly He was strong. He
was simply saying the issue is settled because it is written.
David wrote,
“Your word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against you.”
Because when the temptation comes, as it does, whether it’s from the old nature
on the inside or whether it is satanic and demonic on the outside – and we battle
with both – I have hidden Your Word in my heart. That is my reference point
against which I assess and judge these temptations.
You see lies are never our friend. Untruth is never our friend. It may be a
convenient friend at some time but always becomes an enemy who will always
betray.
You see the breastplate of righteousness will not be something which is secure
and defensive unless it is hooked into the belt of truth.
The shield will not be available when you need it unless it is attached to the belt
of truth.
The sword of the Spirit will not be available to you, both for defence and offence
unless it is secure in the belt of truth that is around your waist.
And I don’t know how God the Holy Spirit may have spoken to you this morning.
Maybe in the ethical areas some of us are playing fast and loose with the truth and
we have become aware of deceit, which we didn’t ever intend to grow.
But remember, a lie needs its friends to protect it; it needs its bodyguards. So you
lie to protect the original lie and eventually it grows and develops. And some of
you are playing fast and loose with things in your life because you have lost your
integrity. You have got to get back in repentance and confession, to walking
honestly, to walking truthfully.
And some of us, you know, are treating the truth of the Word of God like a
philosophy, a good idea, possibly so, there might be a better insight somewhere
else, but this is not the final revelation of God’s truth.
And you are going to slide down a road that will take you far away unless you
come back and say, “Although I don’t understand everything in this book, I trust
it because I trust its author. I trust it because I trust God who gave it to us.”
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We have to trust this book; the belt of truth has to be securely in place if we are
going to withstand the attacks of the evil one on us. And I will say more about
this on another occasion.
This armor is primarily defensive. The soldier who is on the offence is trying to
capture ground he doesn’t have. The soldier on the defence is holding ground he
already has.
We are not trying to capture ground we don’t have. Christ has done that because
Jesus Christ Himself, as Colossians 2:15 says, has
“disarmed the powers and authorities. He made a public spectacle of them
triumphing over them by the cross.”
The warfare of the Lord Jesus was offensive, but the warfare of the Christian is
defensive. We are not fighting to gain something we don’t have; we are fighting
to defend that which we already have in Christ, to hold our ground.
That’s why three times: “Stand firm then. Stand, and having done all, to stand.”
Actually four times he says it in those verses. Your position is standing on the
ground that has already been won. But you begin to lose truth and you will be
overrun and beaten. And why is it that so many Christians fall away? Because
they have not held to truth.
Why is it in our own lives we often find we become very distant from God?
Because we have stopped being truthful.
And we come back and stand our ground with this belt of truth tightened around
our waist.
And if you are not a Christian this morning, and many of you listening to my
voice on television or radio here this morning, may not yet have come into a
personal relationship with Christ. And I am primarily addressing those who have,
but if you haven’t you may do so.
You may simply recognize as God the Holy Spirit has spoken to you and you
sense He is drawing you to himself. Accept the truth of what Jesus Christ did on
the cross in disarming the principalities and powers and making a spectacle of
them and defeating sin and defeating death in order that we might share His
victory.
And in confession of our own need and acknowledgement of our own need, we
thank Him for dying for us and rising from the dead as victor to come and live in
our lives as Savior and Lord and King. And you can do that right now here this
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morning, listening to my voice wherever you are and Christ will come to live in
you. And you will begin to live a life that is characterized by His presence and
His truth.
Let’s pray together. Our God and Father, we, this morning, can only but stand
humbly before You knowing that were we to fight a battle in our own strength, we
would be fighting a battle already lost. But to fight in the strength of the Lord
Jesus, to be strong in His power, is to fight a battle already won and to be
recipients of Your victory, Your strength.
And Lord, I pray that each of us will know what it is to tighten the belt of truth
around our waist, whether it’s our ethical lives of truthfulness and honesty, or
doctrinally being certain of that truth, which You have revealed to us, that keeps
us secure and safe and stable and victorious. Make this real for us, that we
understand it, and that we live in the richness of it. For we pray it in Jesus’ Name,
Amen.
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