Morningview Baptist Church

This year’s men’s conference was excellent!  If you are a man who was unable to go, let me encourage you to get the CD and listen to all of brother Tom Ascol’s messages.  I promise that you will be greatly encouraged to press on in faithfulness to the Lord Jesus Christ in the face of Satanic opposition.  Here’s a short recap of what we learned from Tom this past weekend.

Christians have three great enemies: (1) their own sinful natures, (2) this wicked world-system, (3) Satan and his demons.  Satan uses our sinful natures and this wicked world as the means to tempt us to believe his well-crafted lies and to live in both subtle and open rebellion against God’s good commandments.  Of these three enemies, Satan is the only super-intelligent one.  He is brilliantly crafty and masterfully strategic in all his efforts to deceive us.  Therefore, we must be on guard!

There are two deadly mistakes, however, that Christians make about Satan and his evil forces.  Some Christians overestimate the devil, while others underestimate him.  Christians who overestimate Satan end up putting him at the center of their thoughts and theology, rather than Christ.  Overestimating Satan is actually a form of Satan worship, which we must studiously avoid!  But, underestimating him is an equally perilous danger.  Christians who underestimate Satan run the risk of being ensnared by his deceitful schemes.  We must therefore avoid both overestimating him and underestimating him through rigorous Biblicism.  We must know and understand what the Word of God tells us about our enemy.

In order to fight Satan, you have to understand his goals.  Just as Satan’s original goal was to destroy the work of creation, his goal is also to destroy God’s gracious work of redemption.  Satan tries totally to reclaim believers.  He thinks of believers as defectors from his army and that we should be chased down, caught, and reconscripted into his forces.  Even though Satan knows he can never finally succeed in this goal, his impulsively wicked nature is such that he will never stop trying, and because of his relentless efforts, he does achieve certain levels of success.  Satan attacks believers by trying to deceive them, by obscuring their vision of God, by causing them to misunderstand themselves and by blinding their understanding of how sin is at work within them.  Satan tries to get Christians to surrender to their temptations and to lead them into all kinds of lawlessness.  He tries to convince Christians that their sin and guilt make them too bad to drink from the delicious springs of divine grace, that they must clean themselves up before they bathe in Christ’s blood and before they warm themselves under the garment of Christ’s righteousness.  The devil makes us think that our repeated sins disqualify us to receive forgiveness and that we should look away from the gospel to some other idolatrous motive in order to achieve outward obedience.  Satan does all of this under the cloak of darkness and secrecy, working hard not to be detected.  The only way to fight this cunning attack is to feed on God’s Word, flee from sin, be satisfied with and nourished on the grace of Christ, commune with Christ in prayer, and to understand the gospel deeply and never move beyond it.  We must be satiated with Christ himself, realizing that God is not against our pleasure, but that he is for our pleasure in Christ through His glorious gospel of grace!

The weapons God gives us to fight the attacks of Satan are described in Ephesians 6:10-20.  God gives the Christian powerful and effective weaponry.  He gives believers the belt of truth.  Believers must not merely hold the truth of Scripture; rather, they must be held by the truth of Scripture.  Divine truth must “grip” believers, such that they have deep and earnest conviction of it.  God complements the belt of truth with the breastplate of righteousness.  This righteousness is the righteousness of Christ, which alone protects our vital spiritual organs from destruction.  Only the righteousness of Christ can protect us from the devil’s accusations.  The believer’s personal inherent righteousness could never stand against Satan’s charges because it falls far short of the righteousness God requires.  But the believer is protected from being cut to pieces by Satan’s accusations because of the righteousness of Christ, which alone fills up the standard of God’s justice.  God further gives us the shoes of the gospel of peace.  Believers must stand on the gospel, and walk in the gospel, just as we walk in our own shoes.  Unless the gospel undergirds and directs our every step, then we walk in futility.  We must set our minds and hearts firmly on the gospel of Jesus Christ and resolve never to move beyond it, since doing so would strip us of God’s own protection and open us to Satan’s attack.  The gospel, and nothing else, must fill and form the very center of the church’s proclamation and life.  God also provides believers with the mighty shield of faith.  The shield of faith protects us from the fiery deceptive darts of the devil.  When we trust the promises of God in Christ, we are shielded against Satanic deception.  God further supplies us with the helmet of future salvation.  We put on the helmet of salvation by living in light of the hope of future glory!  Satan wants us to think that this fallen world is all important, but God calls us to live in the light of the hope of our inheritance on the last day.  Finally, God gives us the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.  The sword of the Spirit is the only offensive weapon in the Christian’s armory.  The word for “sword” here refers to a small sword, which must be wielded with deftness and acute precision.  Believers must study diligently the Word of God to know how to apply it with surgical accuracy such that Satan’s dark kingdom must fall back in defeat.

By: Tom Hicks, Jr.