“It’s a Battleground Out There” (Ephesians 6:10-17)

 We preachers are always looking for good illustrations for our sermons. I went online recently and it took me hardly a second before I was confronted by a whole boatload of collections of sermon illustrations. They came with titles like The Preacher’s Sourcebook of Creative Sermon Illustrations, Hot Sermon Illustrations, Encyclopedia of Sermon Illustrations, The Ultimate Book of Illustrations and Quotes, 500 Sermon Illustrations for Busy Pastors, 1000 Illustrations for Preaching and Teaching… And if those weren’t enough, there was the blockbuster: 6000 Sermon Illustrations. At a sermon a week, you’d have enough illustrations to see you through more than a century!

 Of course Jesus was the master of the illustration. Who doesn’t remember his parables of the farmer scattering his seed over the various types of soil, of the shepherd who searches high and low for his lost sheep until he finds it, or of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus at his gate?

In our passage from the sixth chapter of Ephesians this morning I can picture the apostle Paul pacing back and forth in his prison cell as he draws towards the conclusion of his letter to the young community of believers living in Ephesus. And I imagine him scratching his brain for an illustration to conclude all that he has been writing—something that would stick in the minds of his readers, something that they would carry away with them, perhaps for the rest of their lives.

In the previous five chapters he has covered a vast expanse of ground. The great nineteenth-century biblical teacher Handley Moule summed it up like this:

He has been telling them, from the beginning onward, of the secrets of eternal grace and love, of the wonder of their salvation from spiritual death, of their peace and life through faith, of their sealing by the Blessed Spirit, of their union with Christ their Head, of his blissful indwelling in their hearts, and then of the resultant life of humility, purity, love, truth, and every gracious duty of social holiness…[1]

When you look back on it, he has given them a whole wagonload of vital truths to consider and challenges to act upon. Now Paul needs to draw all that he has been writing to a conclusion. What can he offer them that will help his readers to retain all this in their minds—and, more importantly, to put into practical action in their daily lives?

I can imagine Paul pacing back and forth in his cell. Then, deep in his thoughts, he pauses for a moment and glances around. And suddenly it comes to him. It was one of those head-slapper moments. Of course! How could he have missed it? The perfect illustration! There it was, staring right at him! It had been within feet of him all along: the Roman soldier standing guard at the door of his cell! As Paul’s eyes rest on the guard, it all becomes clear…

Paul lists six pieces of armour in all: the belt, the breastplate, the boots, the shield, the helmet and the sword. We don’t have time in the space of one sermon to examine them all, so this morning I want us to focus on just three of them: the breastplate, the helmet, and the sword.

The breastplate: protecting the heart

So first, the breastplate. This piece of armour covered the chest and shoulders, and was constructed out of a horizontal series of circular strips of iron fastened together with leather straps. The breastplate was designed to protect all the vital organs. But the most important one, and the one I want to focus on this morning, was the heart.

Were you aware that the word “heart” occurs more than eight hundred times in the Bible? And in almost every occurrence it is referring to something much deeper, and much more vital in many ways, than the physical organ that pumps blood through our bodies. For in the Bible the heart is the seat of the will. In biblical terms, it is the core of your inner being, the source of your emotions, your morals, your sentiments, your courage, your convictions and your resolve. The heart is what makes you “you”.

For this reason the Bible places enormous emphasis on what goes on inside our hearts. Here are just a few of the hundreds of examples you can find if you take the time to look for them:

·    “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5)

·    “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

·    “With my whole heart I seek you…! I have stored up your word in my heart,  that I might not sin against you.” (Psalm 119:10,11)

·    “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind …” (Jeremiah 17:10)

·    “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13)

·    “Yet even now,” declares the Lord,  “return to me with all your heart … and rend your hearts and not your garments.” (Joel 2:12-13)

·    “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” (Psalm 14:1)

The book of Proverbs sums it up well for us when it warns, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23) And so it is that over our hearts we put on the breastplate of righteousness.

Of course the righteousness to which Paul is referring is not our own. That is self-righteousness. That is the righteousness of the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, who stood in the temple apart from everybody else and prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” (Luke 18:11).

No, like the breastplate that is put on from without, the righteousness that Paul was writing about is a righteousness that does not come from within, but is conferred upon us. It is not my righteousness; it is Jesus’ righteousness, by which he and he alone protects us from all the evil that can so easily strike to the core of our being. So it is that in the words of John Wesley we are able proclaim,

Jesus, thy blood and righteousness,
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.

The helmet: protecting the mind

We move on, then, from the breastplate, which protects our heart, to the helmet, which protects our head. Like the breastplate, the helmet is a vitally important piece of our spiritual armour. And as with our hearts, the Bible has a good deal to say about what goes on inside our heads.

Earlier in this letter to the Ephesians Paul has called upon his readers to “to be renewed in the spirit of your minds” (4:23). Elsewhere he warns, “Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:5-6) And then he cautions us “not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word” (2 Thessalonians 2:2). He challenges us to “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2). “Who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” he queries. And then he boldly answers, “But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:16).

So what does it mean to have the mind of Christ? Many years ago I was helped in this through a book by a lamentably little known author by the name of Harry Blamires. Blamires was both a student and a friend of C.S. Lewis and he wrote a number of books, one of which was entitled The Christian Mind. Here is one of the things he had to say on that topic:

The Christian mind sees human life and human history held in the hands of God. It sees the whole universe sustained by his power and his love. It sees the natural order as dependent upon the supernatural order, time as contained within eternity. It sees this life as an inconclusive experience, preparing us for another, this world as a temporary place of refuge, not our true and final home.[2]

Blamires was writing more than sixty years ago. Yet I dare to say that the principles he was articulating may be more crucial now in the twenty-first century than they have been at any time in the past. We live in a day when false notions and false ideas proliferate more than ever before—and as Christians we are not immune to them.

Our Lord Jesus himself warned that “false messiahs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24)

Today we are being bombarded from every direction with falsehoods dressed up in the guise of truth, immorality purporting to be virtue, reason being drowned out by emotion. Issues of human sexuality, abortion, and euthanasia are just three areas of many where our society is deeply divided, to the point where it is often difficult (if not impossible) to engage in rational dialogue—and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

What I am saying may seem very dreary and pessimistic, so let me cheer you up with another book I’ve been reading. It’s titled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Its author documents how in recent years a number of leading intellectuals have begun seriously questioning the false assumptions that have taken hold of so much of our western thought, and are finding themselves attracted to the Christian faith. He asks whether we might be seeing the first ripples of a new wave of faith. Pray to God that that might be so!

Whatever the case, we need to have the helmet of salvation fitted firmly over our heads and to be actively seeking the mind of Christ. “Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul wrote to the believers living in Rome, “but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

The sword: our only offensive weapon

We have looked at the breastplate and the helmet. Both are defensive gear, to protect the soldier from attack. Now we turn to the only offensive weapon in Paul’s list—the sword. The sword that Paul’s guard would have carried was not a long, heavy sword like you might imagine in Robin Hood or Braveheart. Rather, it was a little less than two feet long and weighed less than two pounds. It was ground razor sharp on both edges, with a sharp point; and the soldier carried it not at his hip, but over his shoulder, so that he could whip it out at a moment’s notice.

And that is exactly what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of Jesus’ betrayal. Matthew’s gospel doesn’t tell us who the guilty party was, just that “one of those who were with Jesus” reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear (Matthew 26:50).

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)

And here we have the example of our Lord Jesus, who, though he carried no physical weapon, was adept at wielding the sword of the Spirit. When the devil sought to tempt him away from his God-given mission, Jesus’ defence was not with any sophisticated philosophical argument, but with the words of Scripture. Each time his reply began, “It is written…” “It is written…” “It is written…”

Clearly Jesus knew his Bible. And if that was the case for him, how much more for us, as we are confronted with the innumerable falsehoods and temptations with which life in the modern world confronts us. For this reason I can’t recommend highly enough a practice, not only of reading the Bible daily, but of committing it to memory. In my own Anglican tradition we have a prayer in which we ask that we may “hear, read, mark (that is, pay attention to), learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures. That means taking the time and the discipline to allow the message of the Bible to soak into us, to become a part of our very being.

Early in my own Christian life I was encouraged to begin memorizing portions of Scripture. I can’t tell you how many times those verses that I committed to memory have been helpful to me, particularly in times of difficulty—and more than fifty years later many of them are still embedded in my memory.

So much of life today is a spiritual battleground, and the weapons aimed against us grow daily in sophistication and menace. So let me challenge you to put on the spiritual armour with which God supplies us—the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of truth, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God—so that in the end you may shout with all the saints, “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” .

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[1] Handley Moule, Ephesian Studies, 321

[2]     The Christian Mind, 67

“Born in a Battlefield” (Ephesians 6:10-20)

I am grateful for the opportunity to come and take part in the baptism of our youngest grandchild, Avery, and to Paul Friesen for his invitation to preach once again at St Paul’s after our eleven-year sojourn in the United States. They were a wonderful, spiritually stimulating time for us in many ways, but it is also good to be back in Halifax, which became home for us during my eighteen years as rector here.

Had we been using the old Book of Common Prayer, we would be hearing these words following Avery’s baptism:

We receive this child into the congregation of Christ’s flock, and do sign him with the sign of the cross, in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end.[1]

It is a source of sadness for me that we haven’t retained these words, or something like them, in our contemporary forms of worship. I wonder if they weren’t dropped because our liturgical revisers sensed an incongruity between a defenseless baby cuddled in its parent’s arms and the blood and gore of a battlefield. If so, I don’t entirely blame them. Yet, when you think about it, that is almost exactly what the apostle Paul does in this morning’s reading from the last chapter of his letter to the Ephesians.

In the latter verses of chapter 5 and the first half of chapter 6, Paul has addressed his words to Christian households, to the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and slaves. The whole emphasis throughout those verses is on Christ-like submission and service. The nineteenth-century German Lutheran pastor Karl Spitte put the picture of the Christian family into idyllic form in his hymn that includes the words,

O happy home, whose little ones are given
Early to thee, in humble faith and prayer,
To thee, their Friend, who from the heights of heaven
Guides them, and guards with more than mother’s care![2]

Yet suddenly, from that blissful scene Paul drops us into the middle of a battlefield, with the image, not of a peaceful family home but of a soldier fully armed for mortal combat.

The Action

Why the sudden shift? Handley Moule, one of the great scholar-bishops of Durham, wisely observed a century ago that it is a common experience that “the evil powers often win their worst advantages against us Christians on the quiet and common ground of life”.

Where we are least upon our guard they are most upon their watch… Just at home, alas, it is only too easy for the Christian to be inconsiderate in deed and word, to be quick or sullen in temper, to indulge self in small but dangerous ways, while yet a tolerable face of consistency is maintained in more public and exterior matters.[3]

Do you recognize yourself in the good bishop’s words? I can certainly see all too much of myself in them. Even such a one as the apostle Paul confessed to the struggle between good and evil that raged within the confines of his own soul:

I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. (Romans 7:21-23)

The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made much the same observation when he wrote,

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.[4]

As difficult as it may be to accept, little Avery has been born into a battlefield. At this stage in his life he certainly is not aware of it. But we ask his parents and sponsors to affirm on his behalf:

Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?
I renounce them.

Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?
I renounce them.

Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?
I renounce them.

The Adversary

I don’t know if it was intentional, but those words in many ways reflect the words that we heard from Ephesians this morning. There Paul warns us about the devil’s schemes, about the rulers, authorities and powers of this dark world and about the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

It is important to notice that Paul doesn’t write about evil only in vague, general terms. He speaks quite specifically about the devil. In our post-Enlightenment world we may find the Bible’s references to the devil strange, antiquated, even slightly embarrassing. We may be tempted to set them aside as part of a pre-scientific worldview. If that is the case, then we need to beware.

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils,” wrote C.S. Lewis in the introduction to his spiritual classic, The Screwtape Letters. “One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors…”[5]

C.E.B. Cranfield, one of the leading New Testament scholars of the twentieth century, has written,

Here we are up against something that presents many difficulties to the modern mind, which is apt to dismiss the whole subject as outgrown superstition. It is important to approach it with as open a mind as possible. To suggest that there may be more truth here in the New Testament picture than has sometimes been allowed is not to wish to turn the clock back on scientific progress or to open the floodgates of obscurantism. The question whether the confident spread of the demons’ non-existence has not been their greatest triumph gets tragic urgency from such twentieth-century features as Nazism, McCarthyism, and Apartheid. And lest we should be prejudiced by the memory of such horrors as the burning of witches, it must be said that they were due, not to taking the New Testament too seriously, but to failing to take it seriously enough.[6]

Even a casual reading of the New Testament should leave us in no doubt that to follow Christ will inevitably lead us into conflict with the spiritual forces of darkness. Satan’s desire is to bring us down, to tangle us in a web of lies—and at times those lies can be very powerful and enticing. Yet all the while we must never lose sight of the assurance that “the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

The Armour

So how does this work itself out in practical terms? How are we to engage in the fight? Paul uses the image of a soldier—one familiar to everyone in the Roman Empire—to show how it all happens. And it may seem odd, but he begins with the belt. For the belt was possibly the most important component of all. With it the ancient warrior bound together his loose-fitting clothes and so was able to manoeuvre with nimbleness and mobility. When we buckle on the belt of truth, we are encircling ourselves with certain truths about God and about ourselves, truths that we read in Scripture and that we affirm week by week in the creeds. At the same time we are committing ourselves to be men and women of truth, people whose “yes” truly is “yes” and whose “no” is truly “no”, people who really are who we say we are.

The next piece of armour is the breastplate. The breastplate covers and protects nearly all the vital organs, especially the heart. And for the biblical writers the heart stood as the seat of the will. “In your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord,” wrote the apostle Peter (1 Peter 3:15a). Though it is the breastplate of righteousness, it is not our righteousness, but Christ’s, that protects us, conferred upon us by the shedding of his blood on the cross (2 Corinthians 5:20,21).

Third come the sandals. Just it was important for a soldier to have proper protection for his feet so that he could cross any terrain no matter how rough without causing himself pain or injury, so too we are to have “our feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace”. And so we are gospel people, good news people, leaving the imprint of God’s shalom wherever we go.

Then we are to arm ourselves with the shield—and the shield in question was a large piece of armour that covered nearly the whole body. That shield, says Paul, is faith. The word for faith in the New Testament is pistis, which can equally mean “faithfulness”. Thus I prefer to think of myself being armed not with my own faith, which is weak and faltering at the best of times, but with the faithfulness of God, which extends to the heavens and endures to all generations.

Fourthly there is the helmet of salvation. Clearly the helmet protects the brain—and how important it is to have minds that are formed and informed by the truths of God. Paul writes elsewhere of being transformed by the renewing of our minds, so that we may be able to test and approve what God’s will is. He writes of taking every thought captive to Christ (Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 10:5). How vital it is that we should be able to think Christianly, to develop our minds in such a way that we can respond effectively to the many intellectual challenges that the world places before us!

Finally, we are presented with the sword of the Spirit, which, Paul tells us, is the word of God. Commentators have long observed that up to this point all the armour has been defensive. The sword is the only offensive piece of weaponry. It was with the word of God that Jesus fought off the attacks of the accuser in the wilderness: “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only…’ ” “It is written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ” “It is written: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ” I well remember an adviser in my university days pointing out that a sword has two edges, but in most cases only one is blunt, and that is the edge facing away from us. We can be very adept at applying the Scriptures to other people, but if we have any right to do so, it will only be after we have learned to apply them to ourselves. And if the powers of darkness are to be defeated in our lives, that is the way it will happen.

All of what I have been trying to say in these few minutes is most profoundly and beautifully expressed in a hymn which we know as “St Patrick’s Breastplate”. And I’d like to use those words to pray for you and for me and for little Avery as he is enrolled as Christ’s faithful soldier and servant in the sacrament of baptism.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.[7]

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[1]     The Book of Common Prayer, 1959, page 528

[2]     Hymn 340 in the Book of Common Praise (1938)

[3]     Ephesian Studies, page 322

[4]     Both quotes are from The Gulag Archipelago.

[5]     The Screwtape Letters, page 9

[6]     The Gospel According to St Mark, 75

[7]     Hymn 812 in the Book of Common Praise (1938)