Summary
Eph 6:10-18
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen. Thank you for worshiping with us.
If you have a child that wants to be dismissed to Children's Church, my wife will be taking them back now. Now, if you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Ephesians chapter 6. Logan did not know this.
He didn't read my notes beforehand, but Ephesians chapter 6, verses 10 through 18 is where we're going to be at.
And for sake of time, he's already read it, so I'm not going to read it again. That helps me out a little bit because I was telling Scott right beforehand, I said, you know, I normally have a specific amount that I have prepared,
and I have about twice as many notes that I have today than I normally would on a normal Sunday.
So I may go a little longer. I don't know. It's maybe a two-part message.
We may get halfway through and we pick it up next week, but we're going to see where the Lord leads. Yeah, he's shortening things down.
Scott said he would take my notes and take about half of them away for me. So he's going to take every other page away.
But for sake of time, we're not going to read it because it was just read. We're just going to jump right into the message, Ephesians chapter 6. You can have it there, verses 10 through 18.
And what I want to start out by saying is we are in a spiritual battle every single day of our life. We must know who the Lord is.
We must recognize who our enemy is. And God has given us this equipment in Ephesians chapter 6 that allows us to be ready for the battle that we're going to be in.
And most importantly, as we bring all this together, hopefully today, it all must be devoted in prayer. Everything we do, everything we say must be specifically and through prayer.
Now, we live in a world that doesn't like to talk about this. We live in a world that doesn't like to talk about spiritual warfare, that doesn't like to talk about certain things in life. There's two sides to this camp.
The first side is over here, and they say that some people will believe that demons are behind every single corner. All right? The door accidentally shut in my room. It must have been a demon. Right?
It couldn't have been the wind. It couldn't have been the negative pressure in the house when the air conditioner kicked on. It's got to be a demon. Every problem is a demon. The other side of the coin is there are people who believe that we don't have any spiritual battle whatsoever.
Like, this is all just made up, and we don't have to do anything, and we're just going to go through life. So, what does the Bible say about this? How do we have a balanced view in our life in how we should look at spiritual warfare? The Bible, Paul here in Ephesians,
does not tell us to become obsessed with Satan. And I want to make this clear as we start on the outset. He's not saying, let's try to figure out all the schemes of the devil. He just wants us to be aware of the devil in the world. What Paul is telling us to do is,
three times in this passage, he tells us to stand in Christ. In verse 11, he says, stand against the darkness of this world. In verse 13, he says, and doing all this, take your stand. In verse 14, he says,
stand therefore with the truth of the armor that he has given us. So, I want to tell us, the goal here is not to become spiritual superheroes. I love Marvel movies.
I am a Marvel hero through and through. I'm a DC comic through and through. Me and my sons went and watched, or my family went and watched Spider-Man. It was great.
There was some bad parts about it, but Doomsday is coming up, and I can't wait for the new movie to come out. We've been watching the shows and preparing and getting ready.
The Bible is not saying, hey, you're going to come in, and you're going to be this superhero that's going to save the world, that's going to save all of humanity because you do these things. He is simply telling us that we must be standing when the battle comes. The battle's going to come.
Satan's going to attack us. The world's going to attack us. We must be ready to stand. And so, when we begin to go through this, we begin to look and say, okay, how can I stand, but also have prayer attached to this? And Paul, through this Bible,
through this book, as Logan read for us, connects this in verse 18 with the prayer that we give. I want to preface one thing that I say today. John Piper gave a message back in 1980-something on the wartime walkie-talkie. It was at a presidential prayer breakfast that he gave it.
I'm going to reference some of that. I just want you to be aware of that. But Piper describes this, and we're going to go through it.
So, how does the Bible tell us, and what does the Bible tell us to do? There's three main things that we're going to look at with some sub points, and we'll get through as much as we can.
I may talk on double speed, and so you pay attention well, and we'll get through it. The first is this. We must be aware.
Verses 10 through 13 tells us that we must be aware of the things that are going on. It says, Finally, brethren, be strengthened by the Lord in His vast strength. Put on the full armor of God that shows you can stand against the schemes of the devil. And so, before anything happens,
before we begin to put on any of our armor, before we begin anything, we must know who we are fighting.
You cannot recognize who your enemy is if you don't know who that enemy is to begin with. And so, you must be someone who is so in tune with what the Lord is telling us that when an adversary comes against you, you can prove what is right and what is wrong.
And so, we must be aware in the battle. The first thing we must be aware of is by knowing the Lord. We must know the Lord in all that we do. The Bible says, Be strengthened by the Lord and His vast strength.
Notice what Paul is telling us here. He is telling us that where we find our strength is not in ourself.
Now, if you're like me, you like to handle things as much as you can by yourself. You don't like to ask for advice.
When me and my sons are tinkering and we're working on things, I don't like to go to YouTube first or I don't like to call someone first. I want to try to figure it out.
And then when I can, I'm like, all right, let's go to YouTube. Let's figure out how I can work on this. Let's pull up chat and figure out what I should do in this situation.
How do I handle this? We like to handle things in our own strength. And oftentimes, in the spiritual battle, we try to correlate this over in our own strength. We like to say, you know what? I have enough personality. I have enough experience.
I have enough willpower that I can handle this on my own. But Paul is saying here in verse 10, put your own strength aside. Be strengthened in the Lord.
And this is the first principle that we'll have to look at. The battle that we have is spiritual. So our strength in this battle must be spiritual as well. If we're fighting a physical battle with,
I'm sorry, if we're fighting a spiritual battle with physical weapons, we will lose every time. We must have the spiritual strength and the spiritual knowledge that God has given us in order to fight the spiritual battle.
Paul does not say, be strong in yourself. He is simply saying to be strong in the Lord. And there's a huge difference in this. The Christian life was never designed to be lived in our own strength. I want to apply it like this. When a soldier goes into battle, when a soldier joins the military,
recently, Jackson, he signed his life away for a couple of years. And when they signed him and he swore himself into the military,
they didn't ask him, okay, Jackson, how many guns do you have at your house? How much ammo do you have at your house? Because when you go to battle, you're going to have to take all that with you. No, he just signed up.
And when he joined the military, they provided him with a gun. They provided him with the ammunition. They provided him with everything that he's going to need to be successful in this battle.
And God in the same way is telling us, listen, you don't have to bring anything with you. I'm going to provide the things for you when you go into this battle because I am here for you and I am here with you. And all you have to do is stand in the Lord.
The problem is, is when we begin to get spiritually weak, where do we run to? Are we running to our own strength?
Are we running to our own knowledge? Or are we saying, God, I don't know what to do here and I've got to run to you. I've got to run to who you are and I've got to know you. I've got to trust in you.
I can't do this tomorrow when I wake up. I'm going to fail.
I'm going to struggle and I need you in my life. Who are we trusting in and where are we running to?
Number two, we have to know the Lord, but we also have to know the enemy. If you don't know the enemy, you are going to be in a world of trouble. The Bible says that the schemes of the devil are around us.
And I want us to understand the scripture is not saying that the devil may attack you. The Bible is saying that make sure you stand against the schemes of the devil. He is assuming that as you're a Christian,
the devil is going to come after you. He's going to have problems and he's going to have difficulties for you and so you must be ready. And he uses this word schemes.
He uses it in a specific way because he is saying that Satan is deceptive. He likes to deceive us and to go around a little bit and he likes to ask questions like this.
He likes to say things that seem somewhat true but are not true. He likes to say this, you deserve it. Don't you deserve what, I mean, you've worked hard. Don't you deserve that raise in your classroom?
Don't you deserve that new computer that everyone else got that you didn't get? And all of a sudden, Satan begins to come in and begin to tempt you in just simply asking questions. He may say this, no one will ever know what's going on.
You can do that little thing and no one's going to hear about it. He may ask the question, is it really that bad? He may ask the question, can you trust God?
As he looked at Eve in the garden and as Eve was standing there beside the tree that she knew she shouldn't be at, she looked and said that it was pleasing to her eye and Satan looked at her and said,
did God really say? And in that moment, the schemes of the devil came in and began to doubt all the things that the Lord had told her that she knew was right and in that moment, she said, you know, it's not really that bad. Maybe the Lord is hiding something from me.
Maybe the Lord does have my eyes blinded and if I do this thing that I've told not to be done, it's going to open my eyes and I'm going to be able to see as God sees.
And in that moment, she sinned because the devil comes in and the devil gave her a scheme and tempted her and I'm here to tell you this morning, church, the devil is always a liar. The devil never has your best intentions for you.
The devil never has anything that is going to help you and benefit you in life.
Jesus called Satan this. He called him the father of all lies and we have to know our enemy. We have to know who we're facing against because the devil, when he comes into our life, this is his goal. His goal is never to destroy our life.
His goal is to distract us from the main point of our life.
And if he can distract you in one area of living for Christ, now all of a sudden your entire day, your entire week is all messed up because now you have been distracted from what the true purpose is
and now your eyes are no longer fixed on Jesus as we look at oftentimes Paul,
I'm sorry, Peter, who is walking on the water and he's looking at Jesus but the moment his eyes are taken off of Jesus, he begins to sink. And Satan comes in and he's trying to get our eyes taken off of Jesus so that our life will begin to sink.
So we have to know who the enemy is, we have to know the Lord but we also, number three, we have to know who the battle is. We have to know what the battle is in our life.
The Bible continues on in verse 12 and he says this, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood but it is against the principalities in the world that we are in.
And I'm almost certain this may be one of the most important verses in this entire passage because he's telling us that people are not our enemy.
Oftentimes you may think well this person is out to get me. These things are out to get me. My job is out to get me. My co-workers are out to destroy my life.
And though they may hurt us, I'm not saying people can't hurt you, but what happens is is people begin to show up and we begin to see that our enemy is, if Satan can distract our eyes and say that this person is our enemy, then we will no longer look at
him as the enemy. People can lie to us, people can betray us, people can persecute us, but people can never destroy our soul.
We have to understand this as we go through life because Satan is the one that is coming in and trying to destroy us. This is what Satan wants us to do.
When Satan wants to destroy a marriage, he comes in and he goes to that husband and he says, can you believe your wife did that? And all of a sudden the wife begins to think,
you know, I can't believe my husband did that. And all of a sudden Satan begins to take the man and he becomes the enemy to the woman and the woman, she becomes the enemy to the man and now they begin fighting and infighting and now the marriage begins to fall apart.
Not because he came in and did something
just drastically over the top, but he began to place doubt in each of their minds. When Satan wants to divide
a church, he begins to go to a brother and say, can you believe that person said that about you?
All of a sudden he begins to come into a council meeting and he goes, you know, can you believe that girl said that thing about you?
And all of a sudden one begins to pit against the other and there's disunity in a church and when Satan tries to begin to come in and destroy a family, he goes to the children and he says, you know what, can you believe that your parents are so mean to you?
Didn't that person over there, didn't they get all these things? Why didn't you get those things? It's because your parents don't love you.
It's because your parents don't care about you and all of a sudden Satan comes in and he begins to sow this discord
inside of the family and they begin to look at each other as the enemy and they begin fighting each other.
And church, when we don't know what the battle is, we begin to be like a soldier who's going through the war and all of a sudden he sees someone who he thinks is the enemy and no one told
him that that was actually his counterpart, that was actually his comrade in battle and he pulls his gun out and he begins to shoot friendly fire against his own person. And until he was told that that was his actual comrade and battle in arms,
he thinks he's the enemy because no one told him that. And we must be informed by who our enemy is and we must be convinced that Satan is our enemy and we must not fight against each other but we must fight against the enemy that the Bible tells us
is the spiritual things, the principalities of this air and Satan wants to get us distracted.
He wants to get our eyes off of Jesus, he wants to get our eyes off of our mission, he wants to get our eyes off of the things that God has called us to do as a church.
And in order for us to not be distracted, Paul comes in in verses 13 through 17 and he lays out this armor that he has laid out for us.
And he says, in order to fight against these things, you must be equipped. Not only must you be aware, you can't just know these things but you've got to begin to be equipping yourself in what you're doing. Paul says this, that you must take up the full armor of God.
Notice the word here he uses is full. He doesn't say that you just can pick up one armor and put it on.
He doesn't say just pick up a couple of things that you really like that you think are pleasing to you and put it on.
No, he says you must take the full armor and put it on because God has given us everything in this world necessary to stand if we simply trust in him and take up his armor. The armor belongs to God.
It doesn't belong to us. And he says, listen, God has provided this armor for you. All you have to do is take it up and put it on and stand against the devil. It seems really simple but we don't invent these weapons. We don't invent these things.
God says that I am supplying them for you. The problem is is we fail to pick them up and we fail to put them on. God is challenging us through the writings of Paul to pick up his armor and to put it on and to give it this opportunity for God to work in and through our life.
So what is the pieces of the armor? You know these. You've studied them.
I'm sure you went to a Bible school lesson one year where they had all of them broken down and so we're going to give some practicality to these things. I'm going to help you out. The first one is this, the truth that protects us. Verse 14, he says, stand therefore
with the truth like a belt around your waist. What did I say that Satan loves to do? He loves to tell us lies.
The Bible calls him the father of all lies and the first thing that Jesus gives us, the first piece of our armor is something that gives us stability. It's something that gives us strength in our loins, the Bible says.
And this would have been the thing that held all of the armor together. It would have been the belt that held all of the undergarments around and would have girded everything and it would have prepared this soldier for battle.
And the thing that can hold each and every one of us together is the truth. The truth of God's word, the truth in each other's life,
the truth that begins to drive these things home in our life when we begin to be honest with one another and we begin to tell each other exactly what is going on.
One of the most confusing things that you'll ever go in life is when you begin to deal with a situation and one person tells you something and you're like, you know what? I believe everything they're saying.
Why would they lie to me? And then you go and you deal with the other side of the story and it's like, well this is the opposite of what that person told me. How can they both be true?
And oftentimes in marriage counseling and things that I go through, I have to be the person that has to dissect what the truth is and begin to work through this truth.
And we have to be people who are not confusing our truth with whatever we want, but understanding that truth is God's truth. and living and learning to love the voice that matters the most.
The voice of God's word, the voice of the people that are around us that are trying to encourage us. Oftentimes we get confused because we interpret the wrong voices in our life.
We hear the voice of social media, we hear the voice of the world, we hear the voice of emotions,
we hear the voice of our friends who are convincing us to do something we shouldn't do, and all of a sudden our voice that we think is true is actually false voices from the world. And God says that the only thing that is true in this life is God's word.
And we must be anchored in God's word and this must be the thing that protects us in everything we do.
The second thing we see here is the righteousness that guards us. Righteousness is the armor that goes around your chest. The Bible calls it the breastplate of righteousness. And this is the thing that would have cared for all the vital organs.
Your lungs, your heart, everything that controls all the central organism of your body. He is calling this the breastplate of righteousness.
And look at how he connects these two. He says righteousness is the protection that we have in our life.
He's saying that you don't earn this salvation by being good, but you have the righteousness of Christ applied to your life that allows you to have salvation because you are trusting in the Lord and you're not trusting in yourself.
We must be practicing righteousness every single day of our life. Sin makes us vulnerable and when sin begins to come in we begin to tolerate things that we would never tolerate before.
Satan gives room for us to be able to tolerate things that we shouldn't be tolerating.
I want to illustrate it like this. You're in the middle of a gunfight and you have to decide whether you're going to put on the body of armor in that moment or if you're going to wait until later. Most of us
if this were to happen you would say well Pastor James why wouldn't I have already had it on?
Why wouldn't if I woke up that morning and put the breastplate of righteousness on so that I would already be ready for this fight that's happening?
And this is what Paul is telling us when you get up you've got to put this body armor on so that when the battle comes you're already prepared. You don't have to wait and say hold on Mr.
Person that's trying to hurt me can you wait like three minutes so I can go get ready for the fight?
No Satan's not waiting for you he's coming at us the schemes of the devil are coming at us and we must be prepared for this fight. We have to decide beforehand if we're going to be ready for this and put the righteousness of God on us.
Number three we must be ready through the gospel readiness comes through the gospel. He says in your feet sandaled with the readiness of the gospel of peace.
this is an idea that you have to understand that the soldier in this time was never a stationed soldier that wasn't prepared to move at any time.
He had to be ready to get up and go at any moment at any notice that the commanding officer tells him hey I need you over here ASAP and all of a sudden this soldier would have got up
and had everything ready to go and he's telling us that we must have the sandals of righteousness the sandals of the gospel on us so that we can be ready to go at any time.
There may be someone that's right across from us at the gas station or right across from us at the convenience store that just needs us to encourage them and we must be ready with the gospel to help them out.
We can't help them in and of ourselves it is only through the gospel that we carry that we're able to help them in their life.
Our mission statement is to preach the word to penetrate the darkness and to practice hospitality and this is the gospel in work it is seeing people who are around us who are struggling in need and we're saying how
can I preach the gospel to them how can I give them the hospitality they need how can I penetrate the darkness in their life by me being the light of the world we're not supposed to hide in barracks
we're not supposed to hide in a room in a dark room all by ourselves we're supposed to be out in the world giving the light of the world Jesus tells us this he says that you must be a
light on a hill not covered up by a bushel but being going out and telling people who I am and how they can live this life because we are to be on the battlefield of this world telling others about who Jesus is
are you equipped this morning to go out and tell someone and do you know the gospel itself so that you can be the one that shares it with other people
he goes on number four and tells us that we have to have this shield this faith that begins to shield us notice what he says here he says that with this shield you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one
he gives this phrase here all of the flaming arrows
Satan has a desire to attack us there is an enemy in this world we have to deal with it every single day of our life we have this enemy of selfishness we have this enemy of only having our own selfish desires and we have to put it away we also have this
enemy of Satan who is coming at us and the Bible says that all of these flaming arrows are coming at us and God has given us this defensive measure this shield that we get to put up which is the shield of faith that we get to attack all these arrows through this shield
maybe a question like this did God really say that? did God really say that you were supposed to do that?
all of a sudden we put that shield of faith up that shield of faith blocks those arrows that are coming at us and we must be a people who are constantly saying I don't have all the answers but I know who does by faith
we must be a people who are saying I am going to trust in the one by faith and in Christ alone through faith alone is my salvation and we must be a people who are saying I want to
trust in him now faith doesn't mean we don't ask questions
many people and I was raised this way if I were to ask a question I was rebellious I was the one that was trying to constantly sow division just because I asked a simple question
and the Bible is telling us that listen we have someone who has all the answers we don't know everything and we have a God who wants and welcomes our questions
and we have by faith we get to trust in him I preached through just a couple of months ago that upper room discussion of in John 13 14 and 15 where the disciples constantly were asking Jesus questions
and what did he do I can't believe you were asking my questions no he looked at them the Bible says with compassion and understanding and answered them
he wants us to come to him in questions he wants us to come to him and say how can I go through this life I want to learn how to grow in you and this faith begins to shield
us in this area you see this shield was designed to prevent the enemy from completely overtaking us it was not designed so that nothing would ever attack us it was designed to stop the battle stop the fiery darts that were coming we're going to have those fiery darts
some of them are going to get past that shield and we must be ready and presented to have our faith so secure in who he is which leads us to the next one is what secures us our salvation
the Bible says that then we put on the helmet of salvation that protects every bit of our life that protects our mind that protects our thoughts that protects everything that we're going through because it gives us the security
of the believer the helmet begins to protect our head which in reality what this is doing is it is giving us a new identity
the thing that people struggle with the most right now in this world I like statistics and I like looking at these things but the number one thing that young people and teenagers in college and young people in college are struggling with is their identity and who they believe they are
and the helmet of salvation gives us the identity of who Christ is
Satan loves to attack our identity by saying you're not good enough you're not a good enough daughter you're not a good enough son you're not a good enough husband you're not a good enough wife you're not a good enough worker you might as well just be done
and Satan comes in and he begins to convolute our mind by thinking you know what can anyone really forgive you can you ever be good enough you're just a constant failure you're just someone who doesn't know how to do things and Satan comes in and he begins to berate us and attack us and hurt us with these identity
questions in our world today with the LGBTQism we begin to question our whole identity of everything of how God created us and that is what Satan is trying to do he's trying to come in and begin to question
these things what does the helmet remind us that our salvation is not based on what I've ever done
I can't earn my salvation there's nothing I can do I like how a pastor friend of mine said the other day if you were to take every bit of dollar and gold
and all the wealth in the entire world and put it all in one place and give that to one person he wouldn't be able to buy one second in heaven with all that money
because heaven cannot be bought it was paid for by the price of Christ on Calvary and all of our salvation is based on Christ this helmet of salvation that we put on and the Bible tells us here that
Satan is trying to get us to question or doubt our salvation because we begin to think that it's all about us but our salvation is all about Christ and we begin to begin to fight from this we begin to fight from a place of victory not a place of failure
number three the last thing here number four number five I don't know what I'm at number F on my sheet okay the scripture that arms us okay I'm trying to hurry up here scripture that arms us he says
here that the sword of the spirit which is the word of God this is the only piece of our armor that is a defensive piece that we get to be described as a weapon and notice he doesn't say
your hands that are the weapon of God it's not our fight it's not our hands he says you must take the word of God and that must be your weapon that goes against this world the only piece of
our weapon is God's word when Jesus is tempted by Satan as a model of how we should live our life the more perfect Adam Adam was tempted in the garden and he failed Satan came to Jesus and tempted
him in the desert and he didn't fail he went through all those temptations that he succeeded for our salvation in that moment what did Jesus do when he was tempted Satan came against him and said why don't you
turn these rocks into bread you're hungry and Jesus didn't look at him and say I'm God's son how dare you question me he looked at him and he said is it not written
in God's word that we don't live by bread alone but by God's holy word he attacks Satan not with his own ability but he attacks Satan with the word of God to come at him and when we begin
to look at the lies that Satan tells us and go against those lies with the truth of God's word Satan in the Bible says that he has to run and flee because he can't handle the truth
because he lives in lies and we must be a people who are living so much in truth that the sword begins to go into the enemy and the devil and begins to defeat everything he does
now the biggest question that I have to ask you is this are you able to wield the sword of the word of God if you have never picked up God's word and you don't know God's word you can't
wield God's word I can't go to Hudson and say hey here's a 25 pound sword go out there and attack the animal
he's never picked it up it's too big for him it's too much of a weight for him to be able to do he's got to be trained and worked and given the ability to be able to take that
weapon into the world and be able to use it
and we in the same way must be trained and learn to love God's word so that when the Satan comes against us we can use God's word against him
this is why our Sunday schools in the morning are so important this is why our small groups on Wednesday night are so important because we're taking God's word at a practical level in a more intentional way than I
can do on a Sunday morning and we are diving deep into his word to help each other grow in our faith
so that we can begin to have God's word in our back pocket so that when Satan comes against us we can pull out the sword of the spirit and we can begin to arm ourselves with scripture that God has given us very lastly we're going to look at one last verse verse 18
and I've got a couple sub points and I'm going to go a little longer but you just pay attention with me last one verse 18 we now must be devoted how Pastor James you've been in this series of
prayer how are you taking prayer and applied it to God's word how are you taking prayer and looking at all these different elements well he looks at verse 18 and he says this
pray at all times in the spirit with every prayer and request and stay alert with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints after giving us the armor
after giving us this ability to know who God is to know the enemy to know the battle when we begin to get all this taken care of he then begins to say I need you to pray at all
times in the morning when you get up and you start putting the armor on you better be start praying
in the middle of the day when Satan is coming at you with those fiery darts that we just looked at I hope you're praying
in the evening when you're sitting down with your kids and you're trying to talk through how the day went and all of a sudden one of them begins to argue with another one are you praying over your kids
so that you can be able to go against these things that Satan is trying to defy us with all of a sudden he tells us that prayer should not be an afterthought
prayer should be the thing that is surrounding us the entire battle we don't put on the armor and then go out and fight independently we're praying as we're putting on the armor we're praying that we depend on God
and we're praying that everything we do is for God's glory and his will how do we do this first we must pray continually the Bible says pray at all times not pray when things get bad not just pray
when things are good not just pray when nothing else there's nothing else to do not just pray when there's the doctors say there's nothing that we can do for you he doesn't say just pray then he says pray at all times prayer is our connection to God all the time
when life is seeming discouraging when life doesn't make sense we have a father in heaven that loves us that cares about us and he comes to us and says I want to be there I want to sit right
beside you in your darkest storm I want to be with you when you don't understand the answers we must pray continually number two we must pray completely the Bible says with every prayer and request
he doesn't say when one specific prayer is given that's when you should pray he doesn't say when one specific person is needing prayer that's when you should pray he gives us a prayer for all areas of our life
I want to list a couple of them here prayers of worship we come before God and we just want to worship him for who he is prayers of confession for those that you think that you have done wrong
prayers of thanksgiving when prayers were answered you go back to the Lord and you thank him for the prayers that he's given you prayers for petition the requests that you have that you just can't go on without it
prayers of wisdom prayers of strength prayers of protection for you and your family prayers for others
we must be a people who are not just reducing prayer to Lord bless me and keep me
it must be a intimate relationship with God through our prayers through trusting in him by saying God I am wanting to have a communion I want to have a relationship with you and the only way I can do
that is down on my knees praying to you and saying God work in my life
one of the most encouraging things for me and I've shared with you before is on Sunday morning two or three or four people will text me every single Sunday morning saying hey Pastor James I'm praying for you
I've got guys from Mississippi and guys from Tennessee and guys from Georgia who will send me a message and say I prayed for you this morning preach the word
that right there is more encouraging to me than anything else because they are praying for God's word to work in our life and in our church so that God's word is lifted high not that I am lifted high
but that his word is lifted high and we are in communion with him praying continually praying completely praying spiritually the Bible says in the spirit we should pray we don't pray as though we are trying to convince God
to care about us he already cares about us he cared about us so much that he sent his son to die for us to die on a cross for our salvation and he is telling us that our prayer
through the spirit through the Holy Spirit allows us to bring our prayers into accord with God's will
as Jesus was in the garden he looked and he prayed and he said Father let not my will be done but let your will be done
and we must be a people who are living in God's will not our wills prayer is not twisting God's arm and saying God do this for me or I'm not going to love you do this for me or
you're not going to love me in return it is a prayer of saying God I want to align my heart and my plans with your purpose not saying God I want your purpose to be aligned with my plans
saying God work in my life number three here number four here pray watchfully stay alert with all perseverance the Bible says there is this the military language just staying alert is meaning to stay awake to stay watchful to
know what's going on it is literally interpreted like this to not fall asleep on the battlefield we're in a battle
we're in a physical a spiritual battle that we will never understand and Satan would love nothing more than our church to be a sleeping church and not ready for him to come against us a sleeping church never sees
the attack coming we never have the ability to pick up that shield that we have to extinguish the flaming darts because we were asleep and not knowing it
parents in here fathers in here may we not be sleeping fathers who allow Satan to come into our families and not wield off the wheels of the devil may us be men and women in here that are standing
up for our families because too often our churches have become sleepy churches churches who as we looked at on Wednesday night who are like the Laodicean church who are lukewarm Christians who are neither hot nor cold they're just
existing and God says I would rather spoo you or vomit you out of my mouth because I just can't even handle you've been around me may we not be a people who are like that but we be a
people who are watchfully alert for what God has for us and the last thing we see here is we must be praying for others the Bible says for all of the saints Paul now takes the priority of prayer
beyond ourselves and he begins to show it toward other people we're not just soldiers fighting for ourselves we're soldiers fighting for our families we're soldiers fighting for people that are around us we're part of an army that is
bigger than we can ever imagine your brother needs your prayer your sister needs your prayer the missionaries that we bring in they need our prayers your children need your prayers your spouse needs your prayers and the person that's sitting beside you right now in
the pew needs your prayer one of the greatest ways that we can fight for someone is by getting on our knees and saying God I can't do anything for them but I know you can
God I know that you're greater than me I know that you're better than me you're more holy than me you're more righteous than me and you can work in their life better than I can I need you to work in their life
I want you to imagine a soldier in the middle of a battle he's carrying this walkie talkie this pager this radio that he is communicating back with headquarters he's communicating back with his sergeant and he's getting orders I need you to go there I need you to go here I need
you to go in I need you to take over this place and all of a sudden everything he's getting is coming from
the headquarters and all of a sudden he gets overtaken and he radios back on this walkie talkie and he says hey I'm being overran I need reinforcements I need someone to come and help me this is the idea of prayer we get to talk to heaven and heaven gets to talk to us
he's helping us he's directing our life he's taking us where we need to go and we need to be talking back and forth with heaven when we live in this type of prayer we will begin to pray differently
we'll begin to pray more urgently we'll begin to pray more specifically we'll begin to be a church that prays differently than we ever have because we will be a people that are looking to God not just for another
silly little thing that we have but we're looking to God intently and saying God I want my will to be your will I want my family to be according to your family and how you want me to raise my family and we need to be a people who are praying
for ourselves our missionaries and those that are around us differently
as Terry comes I want us to understand a couple of things the first is this prayer is God communicating with our commander in chief
in the middle of the battle the beautiful thing here is if you look at Old Testament and you look at the Old Testament kings when the people would go off to battle the king would stay back often times he would be in a certain fortified location and he would be
off in a place that was more secure than the people that were in battle
but Christ tells us that when we go into battle he is right there beside us
he is right there in the middle of our storms he's right there in the middle of everything we're doing because he is standing there next to us and when we're reaching out to God it's not some distant God
that's away that's nowhere near us he says I'm right there beside you as I often go to in the book of Psalms where he says that he bottles up our tears when we don't know what to say
he is so intimately involved in our life that even the tears that we have coming out of our face he cares about and we must be a people who are understanding that God is right there beside us and he has given us this command be aware of the things that are around you
be equipped with the armor of God and be so devoted in prayer that the battle doesn't seem significant because we're so in tune with God and notice something important here Paul tells us that we will win the battle
and he repeatedly tells us that we must stand Jesus has won the victory he has had this decisive victory we're not fighting for the victory we're fighting from victory he says I've already given you the victory it doesn't
matter what happens here on earth it matters what happens in heaven and I'm standing in heaven and I have said it is finished and we get to fight from the victory of Jesus
Satan was defeated death was defeated on the cross Christ is the victorious the gospel is true and that's what we get to live in our salvation is secure not on anything that we have done
but on what Christ has done we just get the ability to do this little phrase that he tells us to do is to stand in Christ
as we go to school as we go to work tomorrow as we go into the spiritual battle that we go in the question we have to ask ourselves is this is that we must be a people that are so devoted to prayer that we say God I can't exist without you tomorrow
my salvation depends on you my security depends on you my everything depends on you and I'm going to live in that prayer
are we a church that is believing in God's word so much that we can say God I'm going to trust in you in everything that we do Lord we love you we thank you for what you've done Lord give us wisdom give us strength give us understanding of the battles that we face
Lord help us to be a church that is awake that is alert
that is so in tune with your word that when something is false is said we know that it's false we know your word is true and we can depend on your word
help us to be a people that trust in you more Lord if there's someone here that doesn't know you as their savior help it be today that they come to know you before they leave this place today that they would be a person that has been born again
help us to trust in you more than we ever have in your name we pray Amen
thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week to the people in the new work to the people in the new work to
the people in the new work to the people in the new work to the people in the new work to the people in the new work to the people in the new work to the people in the new work
Auto-generated transcript · 8,726 words. May contain errors. Select a timestamp to play from that moment.
Listen to this sermon