Going Beyond Ministries with Priscilla Shirer - The Armor

[Applause] [Music] today we are so blessed to be able to have with us one of the great gifted and blessed speakers on the face of the planet I mean she could be anywhere she wanted in the world but today by God's purpose God's design she is here she and Jerry her husband have three sons gifted communicator of the word God how many people saw war room you you saw war room come on was that not like the greatest movie I mean just challenged we took our whole staff and it just so motivates you to pray to call on God she's a gift to the kingdom we are blessed to have her to today would you join me in welcoming priscilla shirer come on give it up we got priscilla shirer [Music] well hi y'all it's great to be here food from Dallas last night the privilege to be able to come and be with our Springfield family we'll just go ahead and y'all didn't adopt me but I adopted my own self into James River because we just love your church so much we love what God is doing through you to minister to the lives of so many people outside of your walls see sometimes when you're in a church you don't actually realize the extent of what what you're doing how it's impacting others but those of us on the outside are blessed because we see what God is doing through you in many aspects in my life specifically through the women's ministry at this church very few churches minister to women the way James River does and I'm so thrilled about that and excited about that and it is a privilege to be able to share with you on this Sunday under the leadership of your your pastors and your leadership team at this church I want to share God's word with you but before I do I want to tell you this I I have the privilege to be in a lot of different settings a lot of churches and y'all need to know that every Church does not have leadership that actually has integrity like I mean the person you see when they're standing on the platform is a completely different person than the person that is in the back of the greet in the green room or at their home and the fact that at this church you have a couple leading a team of people who are walking in integrity and have character and all are the real deal come on y'all that's worth celebrating right there that's worth celebrating right there yeah [Music] yeah we salute you we salute you and your whole team for your integrity for we do we salute you I appreciate integrity my parents have integrity I'm so glad I want to share with you God's Word this morning because I believe in the power of the Word of God I believe it is living and that it is active and sharper than any two-edged sword and I believe today he's going to give somebody a word what that means is you don't just hear the general simple little message I'm going to share with you it takes the Holy Spirit to take one little word and divide it 2,000 different ways so that all of us in this room all of you at the West Campus and the two or 300 of you that are here with us but in the building across the parking lot that all of us hear it together and I'm gonna pray for that this morning Lord Jesus thank you thank you that we your daughters your sons can hear you speak we are I am moved Lord I am beyond shocked that you the God of the universe would let us hear from you so today Lord our ears are open because we need a word speak where your servants and we're listening in Jesus name Amen in light of the happenings of our week I'm from Dallas so it has hit particularly close to home this week I ran across this post from Natasha I do not know her but I reposted it because one of my friends posted it and I read it and were moved by it an african-american lady named Natasha wrote this so this morning she says I went into a convenience store to get a protein bar and as I walked through the door I noticed that there were two white police officers one about my age and the other several years earlier older they were talking to to the clerk at the store who was also an older white woman she was behind the counter and they were talking about the shootings that have gone on in the past few days not only in Dallas but in different parts of our nation so when I walked through the door Natacha writes they all looked at me and then fell silent I just went about my business to get what I was looking for and as I turned back up the aisle to go and pay the oldest police officer was standing at the top of the aisle and he was watching me as I got closer to him headed toward the register he looked at me and said how are you doing I replied I'm ok how are you he paused for a moment looked at me again with a very strange concerning look in his eyes and he asked me again no really how are you I looked at him and I said I'm tired actually his reply was me too then he said I guess it's not easy being either of us right now is it I said no it's not and then the police officer hugged me and I cried scheanette setup' says I have never seen that man before in my life I have no idea why he was moved to talk to me all I know for sure is that he and I a white police officer and a black woman in a convenience store in the middle of Dallas in an early morning hour shared a beautiful moment together no judgments no justifications we just knew that it wasn't easy being either of us right now it occurs to me [Music] it occurs to me that in a group this size with black people and white people with Hispanic people with Asian people with every Creed and class and background and culture and color that no matter if you're single or married and taller or short no matter what side of town you live on where you came from how well-educated you may be or may not be it occurs to me that no matter who you are it's not easy being any of us right now not only because our culture and our country is in trouble but the reality is our own homes are in trouble that our marriages are under assault that our sense of peace of mind and peace of heart our financial stability every part of our lives is being shaken up and if you and I is the Church of Jesus Christ if we keep our attention zeroed in on the people or on the physical tangible occurrences or difficulties that are right on our face every day if we turn our anger and our frustration and our attention on to the physical tangible things we can see and forget that we have an enemy that is underneath the surface that has a hand in it all if we forget that he is there we will waste all our time and energy offering the wrong solutions in the wrong places and it is to this end that I believe the Apostle Paul wrote to us in the book of Ephesians the book of Ephesians scholars say is the highlight of all that Paul wrote y'all know the Apostle Paul he was a bad brother he gave us most of the New Testament he penned incredible words letter after letter to people that he hoped would read them and their lives would be changed and transformed that they would know who they are but scholars say of all that he gave us to teach us who we are in Christ the book of Ephesians is like the cherry on top of the cake because he spends the first half of the book just rehearsing who you are as an adopted daughter or son into the family of God he just wants you to know that you were rejected that you were hand-picked and chosen by God above he wants you to know that you have been lavished upon with all the Grace and the glory and the riches of God our Father he wants you to know that you have been completely forgiven that you want chosen he says I'm praying that the eyes of your heart would be open so that you would know the bigness and the greatness and the depth and the riches of his choosing of you he spends most of the book just telling you who you are then it gets to the end and he offers fair warning he says these words and Ephesians chapter 6 the last chapter in the book beginning in verse 10 he says finally you be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might he said you put on the full armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes somebody say schemes against the schemes of the devil he says for our struggle that is not against flesh and blood but it is against the rulers against the powers against the world Force's of this darkness against the spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places he says so therefore you better lay down all your earthly weapons that do not work and take up some weapons that will actually have benefits in your life it says take up the full armor of God so that you may be able to resist in the evil day and having done everything to stand firm he says you ought to just stand firm therefore in this passage the Apostle Paul introduces almost for the first time at least this overtly he introduces the concept of spiritual warfare he says I want you to know that the enemy that you think you have the one you can see the person that is sitting next to you maybe that you think is the cause of your difficulty or your frustration or that co-worker that one that if she says one more thing to you you go knock her out that one or your boss or that person that you have contention with or that financial struggle even the struggle you have in your own mind and even your heart your own heart the Apostle Paul says would you realize that your real problem is not flesh and blood it is nothing you can see it is not the white police officer or the black police officer it is not the Asian person or the Hispanic person it it's not the government it is nothing that you can see there is an invisible enemy and he is banking on the fact that you will forget that he is there he so wants to disguise himself behind the tangible physical problems of your life that you will forget he's often the one that is influencing some of the most difficult circumstances not only in our nation but in our own homes the Apostle Paul says you have an enemy and he's very very real and he's banking on the fact that you will forget he is there so I have I have three sons my husband just text me and said that their home watching right now hi guys three boys three giant boys listen I mean giant boys my 13 year old wears a size 14 men's shoe somebody come help me feed these people so I have Jackson I have Jerry jr. and I have jooge a C is 11 my middle son is 11 here is a size 12 shoe already my seven-year-old stands up tall to me and these boys are just getting so big and one of the things we like to do around the Halloween time as we go to a harvest festival that's at a small church right down the street from us and we go there cuz it's just kind of fun and quaint and we like it I can keep an eye on everybody at least when they were smaller and I needed to really see everybody as they're running around this small church environment gave me the chance to do that and and what it is that the church does is a trunk-or-treat does anybody know anymore what I mean when I say trunk-or-treat okay some of you remember that not a lot of churches do it anymore but this church still does it's where they get volunteers from the congregation who agree to pull their parked car into the parking lot on Harvest Festival night and they open up the trunk of their car and they prepare a game of some sort a carnival game or a fair sort type of game so that kids can line up and do the game and then whether the kid wins or lose they load the kid down with a bunch of candy and we the parents are so grateful so anyway a couple of harvest festivals ago I'm standing in line with my boy behind one of the games this one was in the bed of a truck this was the longest line everybody wanted to play this particular game the proprietors of this particular game what they did was they put a stepladder right there at the bed of the truck so that a kid could climb up into the bed of the truck turn to the side and they had placed a tabletop or a wooden board that's basically the same size as the bed of the truck they had attached it to the side of the bed of the truck cut holes in the top about six of them draped it with some fabric and then out from the underneath the holes every now and then a puppet would pop through the hole they would give a huge plastic mallet to the kid as the kid would stand there and try to hit the puppets on the head it was a homemade whack-a-mole game is what it was so this line so long we can't wait for our turn little Jude was maybe four at the time he was so excited about this game behind us there was probably a four or five year old that was talking to his mom and it was hysterical all of us in the line were laugh thing long line and this four-year-old was so frustrated mom I came to this carnival to have fun I can't believe I have to stand in this line mom how about you stand in the line while I'll go over here and play some other games then I'll come back when it when our turn is next mom this is not what I came to the car before mom are you sure I have to stand in this line and wait my turn but he was not only frustrated because he had to stand in the line he was frustrated as he watched the game because Mom I don't understand this game why in the world what is the point of me popping these puppets on the head if when they go down they're just gonna come back up in a few minutes I don't understand why I would even do this why are we playing this game mom I don't understand what the point is in this game so we are laughing at this four-year-old just going off as he's waiting in line and before any of us could really think or see straight I just saw a four-year-old flash by my peripheral vision as he ran forward grabbed the drapery off of the tabletop and pulled it clean off underneath there were three adults puppets on each hand y'all we got such a good laugh but we also learned a good lesson that there is always something you cannot see controlling what you can and if you spend if I spend all of my time and all of my energy popping at all of the symptoms of the problem just dealing with those things that are occurring and erecting in our marriage and and our finances in our struggle and we spend our time and our money and our resources and our human rationale to figure out the problem we will at best exhaust ourselves when we haven't even begun to tap into the root of where the world real problem is stemming the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians chapter 6 he says come on y'all pull back the curtain and let the enemy know we got our eyes on you but it's not your spouse who is the problem there's an enemy it's not your boss who is the problem there is an enemy it's not even your own personal internal turmoil that is the main problem there is an enemy who lives to stir dissension and division in to see jealousy and envy to call to you and I not to have any peace of mind and peace of heart and the enemy wants her Paul wants you to know how strategic the enemy is y'all because he says listen the enemy is scheming against you somebody say scheme listen if I find out that somebody has done me wrong I mean I'm upset but I can get over that but if I find out somebody has been planning to do me wrong now that's a whole nother story I find out you've been scheming against me meaning you've been sitting back studying my tendencies in my patterns you've been watching for where I come and what I go and you've been trying to take advantage of what the weaknesses of my flesh are you've been looking into my personality to figure out what would be the best way to throw me off course when I find out that not only have you been studying me but you've been studying my husband trying to look into his history so that you can figure out given my history and his history the best way to make explosions of anger happen in our family when I find out you've been trying to explore his weaknesses so that you can tempt him away from his heart and his emotions being at home with me when I find out that not only have you been studying me and my man but you've been also looking into my three boys these little men has given me to raise in the fear of God and you've been trying to figure out the best way to sort them from reaching the destiny that God is assigned to them you're trying to figure out the best way to take advantage of their fears and their weaknesses and their deficiencies when I find out you've been studying me and the people that I love you got to believe that now a holy indignation rises up on the inside of me I'm just gonna stand back and let you run roughshod over my family I'm not just gonna stand back and let my city decline continuously and just act like you were not there playing us for the fool I will be the one and I pray the Church of Jesus Christ will be the one that will stand as gatekeepers in our community and say God today [Applause] and so I've got the word the enemy once it's a war he will have not by our strength and not in our power but by the power of God's own spirits the victory is already won and we have the privilege to claim that victory and experience it as a regular part of our lives so would you know everything that has happened this week y'all all the devastation and all the tears that have been cried all the lives that have been lost underneath it all it's not about officers and it's not about racial division there is an enemy trying to stir up trouble and if we turn our attention on each other instead of pulling back the curtain and say uh-huh we got our eyes on you and we're coming after you with weapons that work the Apostle Paul says put down all of the weapons that are futile they're just popping it's symptoms and they may take care of them in your marriage or in your city or in your home they may take care of them for a while but you better believe when one goes away there's another one coming right back up Paul says I'm gonna give you some weapons that work and he gives us traditionally people say six but really I believe there are seven pieces of armor I want to tell you briefly what they are he says you need to make sure that you stand firm in verse 14 gird your loins with truth he says then you need a breastplate call righteousness but he doesn't stop there he says you need something for your feet they better be shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace then he says you need a shield and it's called faith he says in verse 17 you need a helmet you need something to guard your mind you need a helmet called salvation and you need a sword of the Spirit which is the word of God and while most people stop there the Apostle Paul does not he says even though these six things aren't important you need one more thing in verse 18 he says and pray prayer is the divinely ordained mechanism y'all that our God has given us it's like a key that lux the heavens and allows all the blessings that are gone already has for us to actually be dispensed to us prayer doesn't manipulate God it accesses what God has already aligned to us in our in our lives here on earth and so pray if you want victory in your marriage would you make sure you are a man or a woman of Prayer if you want victory teenage or in your high school or student at your university then you gotta become a person of prayer and if you say you want to live victoriously and abundantly and yet you don't pray that I don't believe you because prayer is how we live in the abundance of our God I wish I had time to go through all of the pieces of armor but just a couple of them that I thought you and I could talk about today in light of everything that has happened over the course of this week in particular but in general for our lives so the very first to urge us to I wanted to highlight to you in verse 14 Paul begins by saying stand firm having girded your loins with a belt called truth somebody say truth can I tell you that we will look to at a picture of the Roman soldier the Roman soldier was a ubiquitous presence in the first century meaning they were everywhere every civilian could look and see a Roman soldier just walking down the street so they would have known what these pieces of armor looked like on a Roman soldier so we'll look to that in a second but what I do want to tell you is something else that the first century believers would have known that you and I don't necessarily go to when we read this passage a very familiar scripture that I'm sure in this Bible teaching Church you guys have heard before the first century believers when they converted to Christianity when they placed faith in this Messiah Jesus Christ and became a part of the church they automatically began a rigorous study of the Old Testament so they study the prophets and they study the the words of all the works of old so that they could know what had come before them and what they were looking forward to in these prophecies and so they would study the Old Testament and can I just tell you that I love the jewels and the riches of the New Testament but if in your life in Christ you are neglecting the study of the Old Testament you are missing out on so much of what the Word of God is designed to offer because the Old Testament is like an arrow and a spotlight that points more fully to Jesus Christ and so in the New Testaments these believers would immediately start studying the Old Testament so as soon as they read this part of the letter the breastplate the belt the shoes they would have immediately recognized something that most often we do not in the Old Testament in the book of Isaiah chapter 59 the prophet Isaiah talks about our God Yahweh the one true God he paints a picture of him as a divine warrior coming with righteousness has his breastplate and with truth girded about his waist and with salvation as a helmet on his head he paints a gorgeous picture of a divine warrior in the Old Testament but in the Old Testament Yahweh came as a warrior against his people because of the rebellion of Israel so when Paul comes along in the New Testament and says uh huh you get a breast place of plate of righteousness you get a belt of salvation you get a helmet on your head when he describes it in the New Testament he's basically reminding us that the same armor that God used against us in the Old Testament now under the New Covenant of Jesus Christ blood shed on Calvary that same armor that was used against us is now given to us as a gift to stand firm against the schemes of the enemy let me tell you why this is good news because it means what we have to war against the enemy in our lives it is not some secondhand second-rate hand-me-down stuff that may or may not work if it was good enough for God in the Old Testament it's good enough for you in the New Testament my friend and that's the primary picture Paul had in his head when he wrote this it wasn't about a Roman soldier although we can use it as a realist illustration it was really about God's own armor now being given as a gift to us to wage war against the enemy so he says truth the very first thing they need if they're gonna stand against this enemy is truth he picked it first the very first thing of all of the litany of things he is going to give us as weapons against the enemy he says truth is where it starts when you saw a Roman soldier in the first century the first thing you would have noticed was a helmet with those brightly colored colored feathers that would most of the time be at the top of those helmets or you might notice the enormous breastplate or the huge shield that was big enough for two or three soldiers to get behind or the big broadsword it was about three to four feet long and they would carry it at their side there were so many other more noticeable parts of the uniform of the Roman soldier and yet when Paul was trying to figure out what is the best piece to correlate with the belt he did not are with yet with the belt he did not choose that which was most impressive that which was most noticeable or that which was most applauding when you saw a Roman soldier walking by but he didn't choose the piece that the soldier put on first before anything else the soldier would put on the belt because the belt really was the central hanging point for every other piece of armor without the belt nothing else would be in place for very long Paul says if you want any chance of standing firm against the schemes of the enemy you must first make a decision to be a man or a woman committed to the truth of God can I just tell you that I am so glad you are in church this morning and that you were at the West Campus or you're in the overflow here on this campus I'm so glad you were in church on Sunday I pray that you are a regular part of the family of God that you are planted in the house of God that you don't just dip in when it's convenient then dip out when you don't feel like it but that you are really here fully and completely completely devoted up you are but just because you're in Turks does not mean you are girded in truth I hope you're in Bible study regularly y'all but just because you are studying the Bible listen you can study it know it a product tell you were blue in the face but that does not mean you have made a commitment to it that you have pledged your allegiance to the truth of our great God which means you may not always be politically correct but you're okay because you've decided like Joshua as for me in my house what we gonna do is serve the Lord that's what we gonna do and it's a choice you've got to make for yourself that when the tide of the culture change who changes when the philosophies and new ideas that they are suggesting rise to the forefront of everyone's mindset in their legislating new ways of thinking and new ways of living we must be a group of people who don't just celebrate the Word of God on a Sunday when it's convenient and everybody's applauding along with us we've got to decide that when we walk out of these doors even if we have to stand alone we will pledge our allegiance to the truth of our great gods I do not describe myself as a black woman because that gives too much power to my blackness I don't want black my race to be the describing adjectives the defining adjectives of who I am as a woman I am NOT a black woman I am a Christian woman who happens to be black because it's the job of your adjective to describe the noun of who you are and if there's gonna be an adjective describing me it's not gonna be my race and it's going to be that I am a woman who believes in every single thing that my word but that my God has declared to be true and I will stand firmly on the promises of his word because I will be girded in truth so you may be a black woman a black man a white woman a white man but that should not define you so that if your race or if your political group is going in a different direction than the Word of God you don't choose your blackness or your whiteness or whatever culture you are you do not choose that or your political persuasion over what it is that God's Word declares to be true I hate to tell you this but God doesn't ride the backs of donkeys or elephants he did not come to take sides he came to take over he came to take over the reason why this issue of truth is so important is because the enemy's major calling card is deception it's how you can see them coming a million miles away the tragedy of deception y'all is that there seems to be embedded in deception there's a blinding a blinding agent so that the person that is being deceived doesn't know it see what makes what makes deception so scary is that when you're the person being deceived you can be standing on the very edge of a precipice and everybody around you knows that if you take one more step you are headed into despair if you walk one more piece into that relationship or down that path if you do it everybody out there around you can see that you're going to fall into a pit of despair but the person being deceived can't tell oh you've had this happen before cuz you've had a friend tried to describe to you why they were choosing this relationship and this relationship made sense to them and this is where they needed to be and wanted to be and this was why it was better for them to choose this path and as they're talking to you your eyebrow continues to raise higher and higher because you cannot see for the life of you how in the world they don't see this is not good for them it's because deception blinds you and the reality is some of us don't even have to look to a friend to remind to see a picture of deception the truth is if most of us just look back to a different season of our life there's a whole season in my life y'all where I look back now and I realize that I can't even believe why I would have allowed those kinds of relationships are those kinds of thinking patterns or those kinds of influences while I walk down those kinds of paths if it were not for the grace and the working delivering power of our God where would we be and I love it about how many witnesses in the house being able to stand outside of a season of your life and look back and realize that you were being deceived anybody and so since there is a blinding agent in deception since you can't tell when you're being deceived you've got to have a standard that is outside of yourself that you can look to to determine whether or not you're being taken for a ride y'all remember the movie called inception Leonardo DiCaprio was in this movie I did not see this movie because when I go to the movies I don't really want to think I came to enjoy some hot buttery salty popcorn a coke and I just want to feel good for two hours I don't want to use my brain space anybody know what I'm talking about ain't nobody got time for that I came to just relax from the day so that's why I didn't see inception dad told me about it he told me that about how complicated it was great movie he says but it was complicated Leo's character would be in the real world but then he fell asleep and have a dream and he'd be in a dream and in the dream everything was so real and so tangible that he thought he was in the real world so he would make choices and decisions in his dream world that would get him in trouble because they want designed for this world so he would be in trouble all the time and if that weren't complicated enough sometimes when he was already in the dream world he would fall asleep have another layer of dreaming so now he's two layers deep in dreams but in the dream world everything is so tangible and so real so touchable that he thinks he's in reality so he's making decisions in that realm that don't work there and if that wasn't complicated enough sometimes when he is already in to deep layers of dreaming this brother has the nerve to dream again so now he has three layers deep and everything is so tangible and so real that he thinks he's in the real world but he's not he's in a dream that is within a dream within a dream within his reality so he learns about midway through the middle movie to take a spinning top with him everywhere he goes he finds a flat surface he spins it and he watches it if it spins endlessly and it never slows never topples over then he knows he's in a dream because gravity isn't working but he knows if it slows down and it falls over at some point that he's home because gravity is at work what he has learned to do is no longer lean to his own understanding he no longer trusts his own perceptions he has stopped believing that what his eyes can see your ears can hear is exactly how it is he has decided that for his own safety he better have some objective standard that he takes with him that is outside of himself that he can look to as the determining factor to determine whether or not he's being played for the fool oh the enemy hopes you will trust how you feel he wants more than anything for you and I to trust what our eyes can see or what our mind perceives what our ears can hear he does not want there to be a body of believers who have an objective standard the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth can I just tell y'all because this is the second service so that means that I have like more time they said they said you have 40 minutes I was like that's just my introduction we tell y'all something second Corinthians I believe chapter 15 verses 3 & 4 it's like Israel is in turmoil it's basically America brother fighting against brother murder and deception and lies and horrendous culture it is America and there are several reasons why that are listed in those verses and one of them is that there was no teaching priests it does not say that there were not priests it says that they weren't talking about nothing it doesn't say that their want leaders it says that the leaders were not teaching the truth let me tell you why I love James River well I love this church because you have leaders that do not share with you their opinions and their ideas they do not get up here and just try to tell you what sounds good for the day or what will be politically correct or what will put their church in the right limelight in the media they are concerned about that what they're concerned about is making sure that you have the true and can I tell you father and mother your home needs a teaching priest that your toddlers and your teenagers that ministry the enemy has downgraded ministry in our mind so that we think unless you're on a platform with a little microphone attached to your face that you're not administered but if you're sitting around the dinner table with your three-year-old and your four-year-old or your 17 year old or your 15 year old I'm telling you you're in ministry and you feed them the truth while you feed them chicken lasagna for dinner so Paul says you decide that this book is the compass for your life you wrap it around you you gird yourself in it you stand firm even if that means University student that you're gonna stand alone high school student everybody might not be your friend you say it's okay because I believe what my God has said just one more y'all okay everybody all right he says stand firm gird your loins with truth and then he says now you need you need a breastplate and the breastplate is called what righteousness Jerry and I live in a fairly rural part of Dallas Fort Worth we like it that way because I got three boys so I believe they need to go outside and play anybody still believe in outside so we purposefully moved there not for the house really our house is a really small little little house and it's just been cozy and great for us but it's small little house but I moved there cuz the backyard there's trees and bugs and mud and things boys need in their life and anytime my boys come to me and say mom I'm bored I say oh no you're not you see that tree right there go play with it [Applause] so one of the things we love is our neighbor across the street she's one of my closest friends she has a pond so she would let us take the two fishing poles I bought on sale at the local super Walmart I bought a tackle box as well you know we got extra bobber things and extra hooks in there because we catch little fish on the side of the pond I also have gloves in the tackle box cuz y'all know I don't mind going fishing but I ain't gonna touch no fish so we get all that stuff and we walk across the street and we fish normally just standing on the edge of the pond we just catch a little Sun perch and stuff like that but my neighbors bought a little metal old rusted rowboat off of Craigslist so it sits there turned upside down on the bank of the shore there the shore of the UH the pond and so every now and then I'm feeling adventurous and I'll say guys let's not just fish from right here let's take the boat oh yeah out into the middle a little bit it's a huge pond maybe five acres or so in the front of their property so you can grow a little boat out toward the middle and fish out from there so sometimes I'm feeling adventurous and I want to do that but every time I'm feeling that I actually have to think twice cause in order to get in this boat that means I have to turn this sucker over and I know that because the environment that has been created under this upside-down boat was moist and cool and damp and shaded that inevitably when I turned it over something's gonna hop out from underneath it something's gonna waddle out from underneath it or worst of all lord help me something's going to so I always brace myself I stand way back at the very edge while I let the boys get the sides so that we could turn the boat over and inevitably something comes out it has always been interesting to me that never once have I had to write an invitation and send it into the brush nearby and say critters you are welcome to join us we'll be here at 1 o'clock today if any of you'd like to come please feel free to make yourself at home I never had to do it I've never had to stand on the shore and call out and say hey we're here come on never once have I had to invite them the environment created by the upside-down boat was invitation enough righteousness is right side up living that invites the Sun up God's favor and his blessing on our lives unrighteousness is upside down behavior that creates an environment that invites the enemy to come and make himself at home to where you don't have to ask the enemy to come you just choose not to live in alignment with the Word of God and you have just created an environment that has invited him and encourages him to flourish in your life righteousness is not being perfect it is just choosing as a lifestyle by the power of God's Spirit to live your life in alignment with the word garden ears guarding yourself and truth means to affirm God's standard for your life but being right just means aligning your behavior to the truth that you say you affirm there are so many of us y'all that are saying we love Jesus and we love His Word and then we go out of these doors and live and have attitudes that are completely incongruent with the truth of God and so we wonder why we're prying against the enemy we're in our war worms praying against the enemy but then we walk out of our rooms and live a raggedy lifestyle and wonder why the enemy is running rampant through our lives so if you're finding the fingerprints of the enemy in your marriage or in your own heart and mind if you're seeing jealousy and division and divisive miss and your organisations or in your school if you're finding that you can see the enemy's handiwork around you ask myself is my burnt boat turned upside down in any way that I need to realign my behavior with the truth of God so that I could invite his favor upon my life [Applause] the armor of a Roman soldier weighed about 70 pounds can you imagine trying to do battle trying to move nimbly and quickly with 70 pounds of extra weight on you most of that weight was in the breastplate most of it it's right there mostly because it needed to be the heart is the most vital organ of our bodies pumping life and vitality it didn't matter how smart the soldier was didn't matter how many muscles he had how much experience he had if he didn't have a breastplate on one blow to the heart would wipe him out that's why more than anything the enemy is tempting you toward unrighteousness because he wants you to have no breastplate on because then it doesn't matter how smart you are how many verses you read a day to keep the devil away then it doesn't matter how much experience you have how much you go to church how many Bible studies you do one blow to your spiritual heart when you are not protected in the most vital spiritual organ that you have that which pumps life and vitality and passion and gives you the fervor to continue to follow God the enemy just wants a group of people who say there are believers but have no breastplate on and so it needs to be strong and it needs to be intact in our lives and and of all of that the 70 pounds that a soldier carried most of the weight was in the breastplate if the soldier had to carry all of that weight on their shoulders he would be so tired and so exhausted before the battle even begun all that weight hanging on their shoulders was just it was just too much too much for him to carry part of the job of the belt was to take some of the weight of the breastplate off of the shoulders of the soldier so that all that weight they weren't having to carry on their own it was the belt that took that weight off and set him free to be the soldiers God had called them to be can I just tell you that if you're trying to carry your own righteousness it's too much weight for you to carry oh man if the enemy can't shackle you to sin or addictions in some part of your life he'll shackle you to perfectionism to where you're carrying this righteousness all by yourself and you can't live free and fully and abundantly because you've got too much weight on you listen you and I we weren't meant to carry our righteousness alone righteousness is too heavy a weight to carry God's standard of righteousness is perfection it's like the sealing here in the boardís building you all have here it is so high it doesn't matter if you're more athletically inclined than I am either none of us in this room could jump and reach that standard it's just too high doesn't matter how good you are how high you can jump how high I can jump none of us can reach that standard that's the righteousness of God it's too high a standard it's too heavy a weight and if you've been carrying it you know what I mean because that perfectionism will keep you up at night it'll rot your soul from the inside out but I got good news for you there's some truth that'll take the weight of that right off your shoulders and here here is the truth here's the truth that can set you free and set you on a path to finally pushing back the enemy and your marriage or in your mind or in your heart or in any area of your life where you really feel like you need to stave him off here's the truth that will begin to set you free the truth is the 2,000 years ago Jesus Christ came and He shed his blood on Calvary and let me tell you when you accept his gift let me tell you what it does it does not just withdraw sin and the debt the wages you and I are supposed to pay for our sin and our our dis repaired relationship with God he not only withdraws that from your spiritual bank account he doesn't leave you empty then he deposits the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus which means his righteousness is already in you now it just has to be on you

Channel: Going Beyond Ministries

Views: 1,901,338

Rating: 4.8600636 out of 5

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Id: ePbAv6NuKzQ

Length: 46min 55sec (2815 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2017