Be Strong, Stand Firm

the following message by aleister begg is made available by truth for life for more information visit us online at truthforlife.org i invite you to turn with me to the acts of the apostles and chapter 19 and as we continue our studies in the book of ephesians we read this this morning as something of a context for us acts chapter 19 and we'll read from verse 1 to verse 20. and it happened that while apollos was at corinth paul passed through the inland country and came to ephesus there he found some disciples and he said to them did you receive the holy spirit when you believed and they said no we've not even heard that there is a holy spirit and he said into what then were you baptized they said into john's baptism and paul said john baptized with the baptism of repentance telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him that is jesus on hearing this they were baptized in the name of the lord jesus and when paul had laid his hands on them the holy spirit came on them and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying there were about 12 men in all and he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of god but when some became stubborn and continued in unbelief speaking evil of the way before the congregation he withdrew from them and took the disciples with him reasoning daily in the hall of taranas this continued for two years so that all the residents of asia heard the word of the lord both jews and greeks and god was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of paul so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them then some of the itinerant jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the lord jesus over those who had evil spirits saying i adjure you by the jesus whom paul proclaims excuse me i'm sorry seven sons of a jewish high priest named siva were doing this but the evil spirit answered them jesus i know and paul i recognize but who are you and the man in whom was the evil spirit leapt on them mastered all of them and overpowered them so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded and this became known to all the residents of ephesus both jews and greeks and fear fell upon them all and the name of the lord jesus was extolled also many of those who were now believers came confessing and divulging their practices and a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all and they continued and they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver so the word of the lord continued to increase and prevail mightily amen let me invite you to turn back to ephesians and to chapter six and i'll just read the three verses beginning at verse 10. excuse me finally be strong in the lord and in the strength of his might put on the whole armor of god that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against the rulers against the authorities against the cosmic powers over this present darkness against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places therefore take up the whole armor of god that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand firm father we pray now for your help both in speaking and listening and understanding in trusting and in believing the bible we pray that beyond the voice of a mere man we may hear from you that christ may be our preacher through the word to this end we seek you in his name amen well we are back again here we're certain we've parked here and i recognize that uh purposefully so and i hope that the message is dawning i hope it's dawning upon me first of all and i want this morning to just recognize that there are imperatives in this and two in particular first of all be strong and then stand fast that really would be the title for this morning although having gone through this once i realized that it's much more about the first and about the second uh nevertheless here we are martin lloyd jones years ago in preaching on this passage to his congregation made this acknowledgment he said we tend to be always feeling our own pulses and talking about ourselves and our moods which i think is true so he says forget yourself and your temporary troubles and ills forget them for the moment and fight in the army forget them and fight it's quite an exhortation and it is the exhortation of this passage that is what paul is saying it's important that we remind ourselves of the obvious that he is writing he's writing from jail in about the middle of the first century he's writing to real people who live in a real place at a real point in time and the ephesus to which he writes is the ephesus to which he had come as described in the passage in acts chapter 19. he had gone there from corinth and he had begun his teaching ministry in the synagogue as was his pattern that lasted three months luke tells us before he was essentially kicked out and when he was moving on from there he moved to this lecture hall of tyrannis and we're told that for two years he taught the bible faithfully he was explaining the old testament because that was the bible they had explaining that the messiah had to suffer and to die and then he would say and this messiah is none other than the lord jesus christ the jesus who had made himself known to him and transformed his life and who is now transforming the lives of others now the people who were living at that time in ephesus were living in a really nice place uh ephesus in the first century was a significant city a jew and gentile rubbed shoulders with one another in the everyday events of life it was cosmopolitan it was wealthy it was in every sense luxurious it was at the same time though a very superstitious place and a place that was marked by all kinds of pagan and magical portions and notions and this largely represented in the temple of artemis or the temple of diana and if you visited ephesus you'll have seen evidences of this along with the large open air arena which had a capacity for some of somewhere between uh 20 and 50 000. so it wasn't some little backwater place with a few strange individuals just kicking about it was a significant spot and the temple bedazzled people by its marble splendor as the sun shone on it and it also cast a large shadow over the city itself because everyone in the city was aware of these dark forces and many of the people were afraid of them they were magical they were demonic powers and when in certain cases their lives were impacted by the gospel there was a radical shift from that and that's why i read this morning from acts chapter 19. there's just one little verse but it says a lot doesn't it and luke says and many of those who had been practicing these magical arts have brought their books books that were significant books and sold for significant money and they brought these books luke tells us and they burned them and they burned them in the sight of all so that the community of ephesus realized something radical has happened to these individuals there is no reason why they would do such a thing uh 50 000 drachmas a drachma or 50 000 silver coins a drachma was essentially one day's wage so if let's let's say that they had a uh 15 minute 15 an hour minimum wage for eight eight hours a day 120 120 dollars a day times 50 000 that was a 6 million dollar bonfire nobody was in any doubt that they had now moved from where they once were to where they are now and paul has pointed that out earlier when he says them at one time you were darkness but now you are light in the lord and they lit up ephesus with this great bonfire a beautiful picture of the change that had happened now they had been brought from the domain of darkness transferred into the kingdom of his beloved son well then what did that mean did that mean that they now uh were going to live a tranquil kind of life that they would just be transported to the skies as the hymn writer puts it on flowery beds of ease no if they'd ever thought that was the case they found out quickly that that was not the case because far from them being moved from the realm of a battle they were placed at the very center of a conflict zone and everyone who is transferred by grace from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light who everyone who becomes a citizen of christ's kingdom is caught up in a cosmic conflict of eternal significance now we know what it is to be involved in arguments and discussions and conflicts that will eventually peter out most but the the battleground that we're considering here in ephesians 6 is a battleground of eternal matters and these eternal matters are being worked out in everyday life that's why we've tried to make sure as we have moved into this final section of six that we do not dis disengage it in our minds from what he has been saying in the second half of five and into the beginning of six which if you don't know if you look down at your bible you'll see that he's been addressing uh the the area of marriage husband and wife of family life parent and child and of the workplace employer and employee and so what he's actually saying is you you will have noticed i'm sure that this scheme of the evil one to disrupt is not taking place in some peculiar category but you will find it's taking place in the warp and woof of your daily existence so for the believer he may say to himself or to herself why is it so hard to be married why is it that our children do not turn out exactly the way we had planned why is it that work can be such a raging area of discord why is it so hard to be the church in a contemporary world such as our own and this is not the entire answer but the answer is not complete without this element namely that we are up against the schemes of the devil that we are up against the evil one himself the evil one has been unable to prevent us from becoming the children of god but given that that is the case he is now seeking to do everything in his power to prevent us from living as the children of god that's important that's that's a worth worth the price of admission right there if you get that sentence that he has been unable to prevent us from becoming god's children but he is totally committed to trying to disrupt and to destroy what it means for us to go out into the bonfire of our world and say no i am a follower of jesus christ i am no longer what i once was and all hell is let loose against that now it's for that reason that we've tried to take time to make sure that we understand what we're up against and last sunday we recognized the fact that satan is a real and a vicious enemy that he does not act alone that he trades in doubt and in division and in destruction he comes at us both morally and intellectually he seeks to rob us of our assurance of our purity in doing so he possesses supernatural power it is not unlimited but it is supernatural and it is ultimately under the control of the fact that jesus came to destroy his works first john chapter 3 and verse 8 the reason the son of god appeared was to destroy the works of the devil so the powers of darkness are defeated they are not yet finally destroyed the reason that christ came was to destroy the works of the devil the last enemy to be destroyed is death it is clearly not destroyed because people keep dying the victory is absolutely assured like checkmate in a chess game although the evil one and his minions still want to keep playing the game still want to do pawn to king four and so on move the rooks and their castles around and their bishops and so on do what all they want to do but they cannot affect the outcome that is the position of the believer and it's a wonderful thing when that dawn's on us i'm very grateful for the fact that from my earliest years i was given songs that reinforced this for me i was thinking this week of being you know like a nine or a ten-year-old boy uh singing at the bible class on a sunday afternoon on the victory side on the victory side i wasn't sure what that was but i like the song no folk and daunt me no fear can haunt me for with christ within the fight will win on the victory side and my voice was substantially higher than it is now and so it carried all the force and impact of that you know on the big tree side on the victory side yeah i haven't said i don't know what that is but i know what it is today and thank god that i had my own vacation bible camp where my parents were crazy enough to think it'd be good for you to get in there i don't want to go in there like i said it would be good for you to get in there don't give up young parents now given that that is the fact it is imperative then that we heed the exhortations that paul provides and the first of these is straightforward be strong be strong verse 10 be strong in the lord and in the strength of his might is this is routine for paul you remember when he says be being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might he's reminding timothy who is aware of his own weakness that the strength is found in the lord in the same way as he writes to these ephesians he's not giving them a sort of ethical list to try their best with but he is reminding them that they have been placed in christ and therefore this is available to them this is something vastly different from a kind of pale reflection that you find when you read different books for example if i had if i had a class that i was teaching i might give them this quote and ask them if if this was in keeping with ephesians 6 10. it goes like this believe in yourself have faith in your abilities without a humble and reasonable confidence in your own abilities and powers you cannot be successful or happy that's actually norman vincent peale okay that is the power of positive thinking that passes for christianity in many places that you come in and it's an encouragement for you to feel better about yourself to engage with yourself to find your real self and so on have you ever found your real self how did you feel about that on that rainy tuesday afternoon when you found your real self exactly do you feel ex amazingly powerful no it really is a crock isn't it but that's not what paul is saying you see paul has already laid the foundations that's why he wrote at the beginning in chapter 1 and prayed for them and when he prayed for them one of the reasons that he prayed was that their eyes of their understanding might be enlightened so that they might understand something of the immeasurable greatness of god's power that's ephesians 1 and verse 19. the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who are in christ who believe according to the working of his great might that he worked in christ when he raised him from the dead and seated in his right hand in the heavenly places so in other words he's writing now to them he's saying earlier in my letter you remember i was praying for you that you would have an understanding of what is yours in jesus in other words that you would understand the indicatives that you would understand the what-is-ness of it now in in relationship to what is true of you my exhortation is is simply this make sure that you find your strength in god alone now you take that and the you think of it in terms of what it means to apply first of all think of what it meant for these ephesian believers uh to receive this exhortation now they are no longer part of the mainstream if we create uh two fictitious characters that were very very good friends benjamin and levi and benjamin and levi used to do everything together not least of all read the magic books together they used to go together to the temple of artemis and now as they make their way down a familiar pathway they come to a crossroads and uh and uh benjamin he moves off uh to go into the temple and levi he does not go into the temple and benjamin says what are you doing now well says levi have become a follower of jesus i said well that's okay you can be a follower of jesus and a follower there are a number of gods there's a number of things you can do i'm just thinking this morning about one of our missionary uh folks in bloom fontaine in in south africa working in an environment where one of the biggest things they're up against is ancestor worship and the idea that it doesn't really matter you can both worship jesus and worship your ancestors so it wouldn't be uncommon for for this fellow to say well you don't have to separate because of that oh yes he said i i have to separate because of that and then his friend says well how many how many come to your little thing well there's there's a group as many as come to the temple no and what do you do in your little group well we we uh we read the old testament scriptures uh we we have a a service and and we sing oh he says that doesn't sound very exciting to me certainly not excitingly what we do over here at the temple of artemis it's shades of the prophets of baal isn't it elijah and the prophets of baal on the one side you've got all these prophets exciting and dramatic and making a great hullabaloo and over on the other side he says there's one character you know with a bucket of water and the world looks on and says it's got to be on this side that the impact lies it's got to be the temple of artemis what are you doing isn't that what your friends say to you i can imagine that the levi would have said and how many of the significant citizens of ephesus come to your little thing how many of the intellectuals come to your little thing well we got a few you have a not like over here you say well you weren't in ephesus you you're just there's conjecture well it is conjecture but we've got to apply it now are you following the press in the last couple of days with the internment of uh stephen hawking the great cosmologist and physicist a remarkable man by any standards both in terms of his ability to overcome his physical impairments and and to make advances in in the realm of of uh physics that took him to a place that basically nobody else really understood the the carved in onto a piece of caithness slate that was laid over his his mortal remains next to sir isaac newton's grave and along the road from darwin they carved one of his formulae that nobody understood really except himself and they were very quick to point out in the press that some of the nation's greatest minds were present i read it and i said this is remarkable the established church of england rings the bells and in terrors a professed atheist a man of great wisdom a grant of men of great intellect no question but but this is and i went to my book i knew i'd written it down some years ago and i found it again this is stephen if there is no god and we have evolved by chance and incidentally when he says if there is no god it might just as well said since there is no god because he believed there is no god if there is no god and we have evolved by chance through millions of years then everything that happens good or bad must be viewed as simply the result of random pitiless indifference from this perspective to ask why is not only meaningless it is irrelevant he also said that belief in the afterlife was a fairy story for people afraid of death but the society looks on and says my my look at these great minds at his actual funeral in april when eddie redmayne who played his part in the movie read from the scriptures he read from ecclesiastes 3. the press described it as a tear jerking reading i wonder if some people didn't cry because the spirit of god penetrated their stony hearts has remained read he has said eternity in the hearts of men said eternity in the hearts of men isn't it a strange thing that they had stephen hawking's voice then sent via a french satellite towards one of the nearest black holes that he had found in his intellectual pursuits what is this you see the whole world says this must be right what are these people doing here these people in corinth now some of you are involved in science many of you are i deal with this on a daily basis your friends must say to you but you're so jolly clever are you telling me that you believe that stuff what is this this is a battleground what are we to do be strong i'm not strong that's right joshua you're taking over from moses i will not leave you or forsake you be strong and courageous he doesn't say be strong or courageous he says i will never leave you or forsake you be strong or courageous same thing as picked up in hebrews 13 i will never leave you or forsake you the the writer quotes it so we can confidently say he says the lord is my help or i will not fear what man can can do to me you see we're strengthened in the strength of his might strengthened in his grace the grace that is made clear to us in the gospel knowing that god loves me forgives me helps me comforts me enables me secures me and not on account of my merit but all on account of his mercy there is strength in the grace of the lord so be strong and in a word or two stand firm this picture of standing is straightforward put on the armor of god that you may be able to stand verse 11 that you may be able to withstand verse 13 that when you've done everything you'll be standing firm some of you will remember the book by the very very effective chinese christian watchman knee came out in the 60s i think i remember reading it it was called it was his reflections on the book of ephesians it was called sit walk stand in the first section on sit he was describing the believer's position in christ raised with him to the heavenly places in christ jesus in the second section under the heading walk he was tackling the ongoing experience of life in the world ephesians 4 walk then and not according to the way that you previously did and then stand his section on our attitude towards the enemy how are we going to stand how are we going to make sure that we can withstand these attacks this is eternal in its significance the answer is by putting on the whole armor of god by taking up the armor of god as he puts it in verse 13. you say what's the balance here well the balance is always good in the bible resting in what is provided and yet doing uh what is required resting in the provision that is ours and then doing what we're asked is philippians isn't it work out your own salvation with fear and trembling that's what we're to do for it is god who is at work in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure working out what he is working in well our time is gone so let me conclude with just a couple of comments first of all it is important that we realize that paul is writing in the plural here he's writing in the plural in other words he is picturing a united army he has written to them in chapter four that he doesn't want them to be like children anymore tossed to and fro by the waves and the deceitful schemes of the evil one but instead they are to put on the complete armor of god the full armor of god incidentally is simply faith in the gospel i'm going to show that to you in in our subsequent studies but to put on the full armor of god is not uh to sort of try and do things to ourselves or make things happen in order that we might be more acceptable and more effective no it is actually to take hold of that which has been given to us satan you see what is it what does satan want us to abandon he wants us to abandon righteousness he wants us to abandon abandoned faith he wants us to abandon the shoes of peace he wants us to abandon the belt of truth he wants us to abandon the gospel you think the great designs of his minions in churches throughout the whole western world where countless people are sitting listening to a gospel that is no gospel at all they're being told week after week after week you're a good person you're a fine person all you really need to do is just get your act together and do a little better god rewards nice people if they do their best and you are nice people and you can be sure that he'll reward you after all it's father's day and you're a great dad and the sun is shining and let's have a hot dog and let's get on with life well it's a wonderful message isn't it but the trouble is it isn't true because the average dad is saying but i'm harsh with my children what am i to do now you see the gospel is what the evil one challenges and it is the gospel if you like with which we are to clothe ourselves he's not asking as you see to take on a new battle against the enemy he's he's saying to the the readers of his letter you can stand safe and secure in the victory that has already been accomplished at the cross if you if you think about it in these terms remember when david goes against goliath and he chops his head off and the philistine armies all go running for their lives and right behind david come all the come all the soldiers of israel shout in we won we won we won someone says well you mean we won he won yeah but he won for us we share in his victory exactly what do you mean we won christ won now in christ we share in his victory therefore the exhortation to be strong or to stand firm is not an exhortation that induces despair in us it doesn't make us say oh but it's not possible to do this the hymn writers always get it helpful for us don't they stand then in his great might with all his strength endued and take to arm you for the fight the panoply of god or the whole shooting match that he's provided in jesus or in a hymn that is left alone for the longest time stand up stand up for jesus ye soldiers of the cross stand up stand up for jesus stand in his strength alone the arm of flesh will fail you you dare not trust your own put on the gospel armor each piece put on with prayer where duty calls or danger be never wanting there we tend to be always feeling our own pulses talking about ourselves and our moods forget yourself and your temporary troubles and ills for the moment fight in the army de host who followed uh hudson taylor is the director of the china england mission said on one occasion i would not appoint a man or woman to the mission field unless they had learned first to wrestle with the devil because if they do not wrestle with the devil they will wrestle with each other and you show me a disunited church i'll show you a church that has lost sight of the enemy you tell me that your biggest battle in your house is with your husband or your wife you're wrong it's with your dad or your children you're wrong it's all your boss's fault you're wrong you're fighting the wrong enemy and when we lose sight of the enemy which is part of the strategy of the devil to make us say that is so much nonsense i don't exist says the devil don't let him tell you i'm real well you're sensible people you can work this out let's pray lord god we thank you that your word is fixed in the heavens and that even as we speak and listen now we realize how completely counter-cultural and counter-intuitive it is to say these things how hard it is for us to uh go against the mainstream not because we want to be antagonistic or disruptive but just because we're no longer caught up in these things some of us can look to the fact that you have saved us from ever getting into them others because you have dramatically got us out of them but the thing that really matters is that now we find our strength in christ alone so enable us and help us to this end we pray for jesus sake amen this message was brought to you from truth for life where the learning is for living to learn more about truth for life with aleister begg visit us online at truthforlife.org

Channel: Alistair Begg

Views: 47,161

Rating: 4.8964524 out of 5

Keywords: Spiritual Warfare, Victory, Satan, Christian Life, Christian Living

Id: 5OuffdeQczM

Length: 36min 4sec (2164 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021