Ephesians 6:10. Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. We review this Scripture each time, for we do not engage in the war against principalities and powers in our own strength. The pieces of armor are appropriated from God, and we take God’s attributes, His qualities, and use them.
God has an amazing way of impelling us to be more and more like the Lord by getting us in situations where we are less and less adequate on the human level. Then we either give up or we appropriate God to meet the situation.
Every time God puts you in a corner and the enemy comes against you and you do not have enough wisdom, ask the Lord for it. Then there will come an infusion of wisdom.
You ask for His strength, for His blessing, and then you prevail; you are strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. It is the only way to war if you want to win. At no time should a human being, no matter how stirred up they are, approach principalities and powers in their own strength.
Even when Satan stood at the right hand of Joshua to accuse him, the angel of the Lord said, “Satan, the Lord rebuke thee” (Zechariah 3:1–2). Never engage him the way he wants to draw you out. The battle is already won! You have lost the moment you try to fight it in your own strength. You have won the moment you hide in the victory and in the power and in the blessing of the Lord. It is He who is in us who prevails. Because we are born of God, we overcome the world (1 John 4:4); and this is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith (1 John 5:4).
Each of the various pieces of armor covers a specific area which, according to the Scriptures, is subject to a certain openness. Now we come to another piece of armor, a very beautiful one: … in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming missiles of the evil one. Ephesians 6:16. We need to learn how to put out the fires from the flaming missiles which come from the enemy.
The missiles used in warfare sometimes were literally aflame, but they were not necessarily burning wood. Imagine someone putting a dart in the fire first and shooting a missile with a red-hot point. That would hurt. We have flame throwers today, but soldiers in biblical times had ways of pouring boiling, flaming pitch over the walls against those soldiers who would try to scale the walls. War then was just as brutal as it is now, but I think it is more deadly now than it was then.
Always war is merciless, and the enemy comes against us ruthlessly to destroy us. We have to find this piece of armor, which is the first and the only piece of armor that is movable. A shield can be moved to whatever part of the body must be protected from the assault coming against it. The breastplate remains constant; the helmet and the rest of the pieces are stationary, but the shield of faith is movable.
In 1 Thessalonians 5:8 the breastplate is referred to as faith and love instead of righteousness. But in a sense, our righteousness is by faith, so this is not contradictory. But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation.
Why is faith mentioned as both a stationary (a breastplate) and a movable piece of armor (a shield)? Because there are ways in which faith constantly gives you your position before God. Your heart is set before God by faith and love. But there is another way in which faith becomes a defensive piece of armor, inasmuch as your faith comes into play to stop what is coming against you. And in that sense, it becomes a defense very much.
FLAMING MISSILES
Now, let us get into a description of the flaming missiles that come against us and see how faith can be brought to bear against them. The flaming missiles coming at us are things that burn, things that torment.
But when we come to this defense piece of armor, we understand that Satan is doing what he can to create as much misery, as much torment as he possibly can. Satan is going to hell, but he does what he can now to create a hell for those who serve God. It is the same burning type of missile that comes against us.
These flaming missiles can come in many ways. Psychic and demonic assault continually comes against the Body of Christ. You can know the hostility of thoughts coming against you. You are aware of the demonic assault that comes, but sometimes it goes beyond that: it becomes a matter in which you have failed. Your conscience will burn and you cannot get rid of it. It torments you; it burns.
Let me point out an example of how the enemy can take advantage of a situation. In the church at Corinth there was a man who had committed a sin. He had committed fornication with his father’s wife (we assume it was his stepmother), and the church went their way, uncaring, as if it were not their problem. But after Paul corrected them and the situation was put under judgment (1 Corinthians 5), the church obeyed immediately and took punitive action.
Then Paul wrote, But I determined this for my own sake, that I would not come to you in sorrow again. For if I cause you sorrow, who then makes me glad but the one whom I made sorrowful? And this is the very thing I wrote you, lest, when I came, I should have sorrow from those who ought to make me rejoice; having confidence in you all, that my joy would be the joy of you all.
For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears; not that you should be made sorrowful, but that you might know the love which I have especially for you. But if any has caused sorrow, he has caused sorrow not to me, but in some degree—in order not to say too much—to all of you. Sufficient for such a one is this punishment which was inflicted by the majority, so that on the contrary you should rather forgive and comfort him, lest somehow such a one be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.
Wherefore I urge you to reaffirm your love for him. For to this end also I wrote that I might put you to the test, whether you are obedient in all things. But whom you forgive anything, I forgive also; for indeed what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the presence of Christ, in order that no advantage be taken of us by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his schemes. 2 Corinthians 2:1–11.
First, the devil pushed to get the church to ignore the whole thing. A little leaven leavened the whole lump (1 Corinthians 5:6); there was nothing but harassment. Then Paul pointed out the problem and the church put the man out. He tried to repent and it made no difference. They were letting him be swallowed up by overmuch sorrow, so Paul wrote, “That is the devil’s trick, too; we’re not ignorant of his devices. Go back and affirm your love to him.”
The young man was being tormented, still burning with a sense of a defiled conscience. He had repented, but the Body was not reaching out to show love to him and bring him back into the fold. Do you see how a church can go to either extreme? They were not being legalistic, they were just ignoring him. Faithful is the love we have to help each other whenever anyone has a fault, but faithful also is the love that forgives and helps to restore.
We must be alert that only pure love is moving, or else Satan takes advantage with his fiery darts. They become a device because the Body is careless in its manifestation of love. It either ignores the situation, or it overcompensates for it and refuses to show love in restoration. Lord, give us the faith that will help us to extinguish all of the fiery darts of the wicked one. That is the key.
EXTINGUISHING FIERY DARTS
How do we extinguish the fiery darts, the things that burn and you can’t seem to stop the burn? A burn is a sustained pain that bothers you. When you burn your hand on the stove, it seems as if it keeps burning. And there are things which Satan brings, like flaming missiles that burn and will not stop. One of them is the wrongs done to you. You need faith to forgive and to forget them, because when someone has committed a transgression against you, it takes faith to stand and say, “Father, forgive us our transgressions as we forgive those who have transgressed against us.” You want God to forgive you, but you must have faith to forgive. It takes faith to forgive, and it takes faith to forget.
You may think, “Don’t give me that old saying, ‘I forgive you, but I can’t forget it.’ That’s not true. If you forgive, you forget.” No, the two do not necessarily go hand in hand. You may have put salve on the burn, but it may still be burning. The torment of it, the anguish that comes when someone has done wrong to you, may still be there.
No matter what kind of wrong is done against you, Satan will cause you to feel the anguish of certain aspects of it. People can be moved of the Lord to give thousands of dollars for a cause, but if a brother borrows five dollars and doesn’t pay it back, it becomes a fiery missile. It burns and keeps on burning, because the tendency to forgive and to forget is not a natural quality in man. There must be faith for the new nature to respond in that.
People can say that they are forgiving, but when a certain subject is brought up, obviously it was never forgotten! Other things they forget beautifully, but a wrong done is not forgotten. Yet, they proclaim that they have forgiven. Maybe they have.
God has helped me, under the worst of circumstances, to be a forgiver and to forget. I am happy when someone brings up some problem he has had and I can say, “I’ve forgotten all about it.”
It is good to be a forgiver and a forgetter, because God is that way. It takes faith to do so. God knows how to forgive us. He knows how to bury our sins in the sea of His forgetfulness to remember them against us no more (Jeremiah 31:34). And we must say, “Lord, give me that same quality.” Take faith as a shield to help you forgive and forget the wrongs that are done.
JEALOUSY
Jealousy is another flaming missile. Jealousy is a devilish, green fire that burns in the strangest places, and it does not need much fuel. But once it starts to burn, almost anything that happens will feed it. How are we going to put out this fiery dart? What extinguishes those green, burning missiles that strike us? Again, we must have faith to forgive and forget; we need faith which brings trust and confidence.
Satan tries to use against us hurts and defeats we have experienced. God has forgiven us, but Satan is in the business of throwing fiery darts not only against your brother and sister, but against you.
You prayed and asked the Lord to forgive you, but the problem is that you never forgave yourself, and Satan keeps the fire burning. Every time you think about what happened, the fire begins to burn: “I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish I hadn’t entered into that defeat. If I had it to do over, I would do it so differently.” The enemy keeps bringing it to mind. Reliving the past, over and over and over again, is no way to run a good race. You have to forget those things which are behind and reach forth to the things which are before (Philippians 3:13).
A righteous man falls seven times (Proverbs 24:16)—maybe you have fallen ten or twelve; maybe you are not so righteous—but … the Lord upholdeth him with his hand. Psalm 37:24. You must believe that the Lord will forgive you. You will have to accept the forgiveness and, by faith, apply God’s forgiveness to your own spirit. What did Paul say “If you have forgiven anyone, I have, forgiven him, too.” It was something that reached out. You should say the same thing: “Lord, You have forgiven me; I forgive me, too.” Otherwise, you will have difficulty in living with yourself.
“I still feel like a third-rate citizen when I go to church, because I can’t forgive myself.” You will have to forgive yourself. Memory justification is a matter of faith. Our standing before God is a matter of faith. You can never come before Him in a sense of human worthiness, but it is difficult after you have stumbled while walking with God, for the enemy uses it to accuse. Those fiery darts of self-condemnation hit, and they burn and distract you; they take away your confidence to appropriate His righteousness and His worthiness.
EVIL PEOPLE PROSPERING
A fiery dart that gets to me once in awhile and gives me real pain is that the evil prosper without judgment. It bothered David: “Fret not thyself because of the evildoer who prospers in his way” (Psalm 37). People do things to us and get away with it, and every time we think of it, the wound burns. These must heal. We must take faith to extinguish the flames, faith to forgive and to forget it, faith to commit it into the hands of the Lord, until our memories are healed.
THE SHEILD OF FAITH
This piece of armor can be moved to cover whatever is coming against you. It is a little more versatile than the other pieces you have, because anything could come at you. When it does, you know what to do for your Achilles heel.
The story in Greek mythology was that when Achilles was born, his mother dipped him in the River Styx in order that he would be immortal. He was killed in the Trojan war, shot in the heel with a poisoned arrow. That was the only place the enemy could get him, because he was held by his heel when he was dipped into the river. So we refer to the Achilles heel, meaning there has to be one vulnerable point.
The devil looks to find the area where he can wound you, the one thing that will hurt the most. Do you know what your Achilles heel is? While you are trying hard to defend your one vulnerable area you may be surprised; the enemy may come in and find the real one. You may be defending the wrong heel!
Men in the Bible failed where they never dreamed they would. Abraham, the great man of faith, twice in Egypt lied about his wife, saying, “She’s my sister” (Genesis12:13; 20:2). He jeopardized her; all kinds of problems and situations resulted because he was fearful.
Peter was ready to stand and slug it out for the Lord. He made his strong confession, but he denied the Lord three times that night (Matthew 26:35; 69–75).
John—sweet, beloved John of love—wanted fire to burn up the Samaritans (Luke 9:54). When you think you have a strong point, beware. Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. 1 Corinthians 10:12. Right in the area you don’t expect the fiery darts of the wicked one come; and how they burn.
DELAYS
Delays can be a Firey dart, in which we need the shield of faith.
Let’s go into an area closer to home: the delays in the resolution of a problem or a fulfillment of a thing. Unfinished things that hang on bother us.
In the past there was a thing that would bother a wife, it is that the husband started to put up a clothesline in the backyard, and he only dug a hole for the post. Six months later she is still hanging clothes all over the house, and no clothesline.
The jobs that are promised and are started, and the tools that are still lying there weeks later, cause a slow boil to come up. The things not resolved are fiery darts. The same thing is true when the heart finds that an answer is delayed. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Proverbs 13:12. Almost every emotion comes into play. Fury. Despair. Discouragement. Anger beyond belief. How shall we handle the fiery darts of the wicked one?
To see the enemy delay things that God has promised you, so that they are not forthcoming-does that make you burn? Is it not a fiery dart of the wicked one? You push to see the Lord bring something to pass and it does not happen. You cannot lay it down and you cannot go on with it. It is as if someone passed you a hot potato: you want the potato, but you can’t handle it. You lose all objectivity and don’t know what to do next. Soon it is all your focus. Like the woman who wants her clothesline, you think about it at night and when you wake up in the morning.
The woman cannot walk through her backyard without looking at the hole her husband dug. Maybe for a few dollars a neighborhood boy would help put up the pole and everything would be done, but it is the principle of the thing. And even when she becomes a little more objective about it, one day she trips over the pole lying there. Then everything rises up and she realizes that it was right at the surface all the time—the fiery darts of the wicked one.
The delays in things being resolved work on you, and faith to commit them to God is necessary. The shield of faith isn’t faith to keep them from hitting you; the Word says “faith to extinguish all the flaming missiles.” It is a shield of another kind, It is a shield that prevents your spirit from rising up in a situation and being defeated; after its full impact has hit you, your faith can still deal with it, extinguish it, end the torment of it.
Faith to extinguish all of the fiery darts of the wicked is a “putting-out” operation, because I do not think there is anyone who is not vulnerable. You cannot say they will never hit you, because they deal with the internal processes of your thinking, what you are as a person, your reaction to everything round about you. All Satan is doing is trying to get at a thing in your flesh, something in you that causes you to react this way.
A fiery dart of the enemy also is: If I step out of line in the least, the Lord deals with me. And yet, I see gross offenses in others, and judgment (the Lord’s dealings) is not forthcoming. I cannot explain the double standard that God seems to have—extreme grace to a point of license for my brother or sister, and that sharp, quick, instantaneous dealing of the Lord on me for everything that I do wrong!
Because the Lord loves you, He chastens and disciplines you. He scourges you (Hebrews 12:6). Maybe His love doesn’t reach the other brother or sister so much; maybe the other brother or sister is withdrawn to the place where God only deals with extreme things. Maybe God is trying to hang onto them—I do not know. All I know is whenever God says one thing to you and another brother enters into it, God says, “What is that to you? You follow Me.” John 21:22. In the final analysis, there are some things you must have faith to regard as not any of your business. Weigh that.
What God does for your brother or sister is between God and them. You can be a help of their faith, you can minister to them, you can bless them, but the dealings of God will be unique upon them. God knows them, He knows what they are like, He knows how to deal with them.
As a parent, you ought to know that. What can be effective and devastating to reach one child (he is in tears for days, shattered, because he is so sensitive) will not affect the next child. You could stomp on him and still not reach him, because he seems to not respond. God knows how to deal with each of us.
There is a story that one young mother said to the kindergarten teacher, “My Johnny is so sensitive. Don’t reprimand him; he will be shattered. If he does anything wrong, just reprimand the boy next to him and that will get him.”
All the dealings of God upon us and our reactions to them bring us to the place of submissive faith, the faith that reaches out to stop the fiery darts, the flaming missiles that come against the people of the Lord. Oh, we are not ignorant of his devices. Now we understand more why we must have the shield of faith as a defensive piece of armor as well as an aggressive piece of armor.
Faith is both defensive and aggressive. Faith defends us when the enemy comes against us, but faith also aggressively appropriates all that God has and seizes from the hand of the enemy that which he tries to prevent us from having. Faith is the most aggressive weapon we have, because once we visualize the promises of the Lord and they are confirmed to us, our faith moves us into the position of appropriating. That makes it the most aggressive thing you will ever know, the thing that avails. For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love. Galatians 5:6.
Faith is what avails. But I am not speaking of aggressive faith; that is another sermon in itself. I am referring to the faith which defends us, which keeps us standing in the battle.
… and having done everything, to stand firm. Ephesians 6:13. You have to do this, otherwise the fiery darts of the enemy come to discourage and cause you to turn your back to the enemy.
These defensive pieces of armor will defend you only while you face him. If you turn to run, you will be completely vulnerable. There is no armor for the back parts at all, so you had better stand firm. The moment you turn and start running, every kind of assault will come against you effectively.
Put on the whole armor of God. Be strong in the Lord. Draw what He has, so that when the battle is over, you are still standing firm.
In a prizefight, the one who wins is the man who is still on his feet. The opponent is on the floor. People have an encounter with the devil and may be knocked down, but getting knocked down once in a while is no sin if they jump back up again. The problem is in lying there and letting the devil grab them by the heel and drag them off the field.
When the battle is all over, Lord, we want to be standing. We will not be listening to the lies of the devil; we won’t fall prey to his schemes. The fiery missiles will be extinguished, for we will have learned how to put out the fires.