How much can we truly know about angels and demons?
WATCH
What We Believe, 11 of 11 from August 31, 2025
"Our unseen spiritual battle is to stand anchored on Jesus' truth and work."
Angels, Satan, Demons by Michael Lockstampfor (@mikocks)
SUMMARY
This sermon explains that angels and demons are created spiritual beings who operate primarily in the spiritual realm but can influence the material world. While angels serve God's purposes, Satan and his demons—who make up one-third of all angels—rebelled against God and now work to deceive humans through disguise, dialogue, doubt, and denial. Pastor Michael highlights that our spiritual battle isn't to fight these unseen enemies directly but to “stand anchored on Jesus's truth and work,” remembering that Christ has already disarmed these spiritual authorities through His work on the cross.
REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
💬 How does your understanding of future events impact your willingness to share your faith with others?
💬 What thought patterns regularly draw us away from trusting God’s truth?
💬 Are we trusting Jesus to bring us into His victory over our true enemies?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
📖 Angels and demons serve God's purposes (Job 38:1-7 & 1:6)
📖 God is demonstrating His character to angels and demons through His work saving humanity (Ephesians 2:9-12)
📖 Our fight is to stand firm in what Jesus has said and done (Ephesians 6:10-20)
📖 Jesus has disarmed every opponent by his crucifixion (Colossians 2:13-15)
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Well, hey, y'all, I'm glad to be together with you. If we haven't met yet, my name is Michael, I think, and I'm one of the pastors here at Neighborhood church. I want you to picture with me.
A red carpet. We got a black limousine pulling up. We got a red carpet. We got it lined with all these photographers. We got paparazzi ready to go.
We got security coming, and they're walking around the side of the limo. They're opening the door, and out are coming who?
Movie stars. Fancy people. You think about like, the Academy Awards or some kind of big ritzy ceremony or something like that. You've got awards for the best director, so the person, like, behind the scenes, that's telling everybody where they ought to be. You got awards for the best lead actor or actress, like best actor, the one who, like, stole the show.
You've even got awards for best supporting actor, which feels kind of like a slight. A little bit. And you weren't famous enough to be in the lead role. Maybe you did some other movies that were good, but now you're in a supporting role or whatever. Like, it's just like.
That seems kind of weird, right? You having any difficulty at all picturing that scene now? Okay, who's missing? God. God and Jesus.
Okay, yeah. Who's missing? What's crazy to me is we do all of these big Sharma's. Like, I need to be there. I am missing.
What's crazy to me about these big awards ceremonies is that we give these awards to the people kind of in front of the camera. However, the person who's missing is the person that's actually pushing the record button on the camera. Who's the person that's behind the camera pushing the thing and making sure it gets connected. Now, I appreciate Best Director because the director has to have a relationship both with the actors and with the camera person in order to be able to make that happen, right? Like, if the director.
Like if the cameraman won't listen to the director, then nothing happens, right? There are no movies that get made. And if the actors don't listen to the director, what quality movie we get may vary, right? But, like, the camera people are the people that we don't really think about very much. And wouldn't it be weird if there was a whole movie where the cameras were turned backwards, just pointing at the camera people looking in the frame.
Like, would we want to see that movie? Okay, all right. We live in a YouTube era. We wanna see everything. I would love to see just cameraman faces focused in, locked in gash.
Well, then, okay, you might want that. But we're gonna talk today about angels and Satan and demons. And the difficulty of having this conversation is that I think of these people or these entities as camera people. They are in the background of everything that happens, but very rarely do they ever actually make it into the frame. And when they get into the frame, they're not the main character.
They're not the one who we want to hear the story about. We're looking at a different story and they just happen to be there. So when we come to a series that we've been in called what We Believe, where Wenna answer the question, what does the whole Bible teach about a certain topic? This one is really difficult. #ult because there's not a single passage that I can go to that's going to give you a full biography of what's happening here.
Because they're not the main character, they're the camera people in the background. Okay, so that's kind of what we're gonna do. If this is the last week in our series that we've called what We Believe, we've got the doctrinal statement here, we've got the doctrinal statement there. If you've been interested in any of this, there's more of these in the. The entryway.
This is the last one. If anybody wants one of these. Jesse's got one too, but you can kind of follow along if you have missed something. Almost all of them are on our podcast. Something else that you may not be aware of is that every week we take the transcript of the sermon and publish that as a blog summary.
So it's a much shorter read, it's much more condensed, and I find those to be helpful. Even as somebody who's preached some of these messages, you go back and read to somebody like, oh, yeah, I put a lot of extra fluff in that that we didn't need. So those are available on the app. If you hit the menu button at the very top, the first thing is gonna be on your street blog and there's summaries for all of these that are all there. Do that so that you've got the resources to go back and kind of see these things in a way that is accessible.
If you are a person who your primary attendance of church is during Christmas time. Or an Easter time, then you think that angels are in every story. But those two are really the only ones where they show up. And so there's all different other kinds of Biblical passages that like angels and demons show up, or angels and demons are not showing up directly, but they do happen to show up in those two. So I think that's why when people think about Christian faith in our culture, they're like, oh, the angel's gotta be in there.
Because they're familiar with two of the stories and angels show up in both of those. But there's all different kinds of ways that people take that little bit of information and twist it. Okay, so this is not in my notes, but it just occurs to me that everybody has seen some kind of movie about some kind of demon or some kind of angel or some kind of whatever. And so let me just say at the end of service today, if you've got a question or something you wanna know about this topic, I can't do it all today, but I'll stick around and we'll do like a Q and A after the service today if you wanna ask questions about angels, demons, or anything else that we've talked about. Just so that.
Because I know I can't say everything. All right. Is that cool? All right, good. I just made that up.
Let's pray.
Before we pray, I have a warning in my notes, and this is coming as somebody who's been actively preaching consistently for the last 10ish years or so. So here's my warning. This morning, you will get unnaturally sleepy. Today, you will get a distracting text message. This morning, while we're here together, there will be a strong summons coming to you, ringing out from the bathroom that you need to attend to.
Right? And I know this because every time we talk about spiritual warfare, every time we talk about the enemy in a direct way, there are all of these other things that show up. And so just before we get there, you should know ahead of time that those things are coming. And I'm just gonna ask you to hang through. Cause there's really.
There is some important stuff. That's why it's in the Bible. But hang through and hear me. So as we get into that, let's pray together. It's our habit to pray the disciples prayer as a church.
And so I'd encourage you, I'd love it if you prayed out loud with me. But more than just using your words, let's take a deep breath and let's remember that we're speaking to the creator of the universe.
And let's pray together.
Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our deb as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
The statement in our charist commitment to common identity regarding angels, Satan and demon is God created a multitude of spiritual beings called angels. Righteous angels continue to serve God and work both in the heavenly sphere and on earth. By his disobedience, Satan, a fallen angel, became the adversary of God and God's people. Carrying with him a procession of demons. Jesus Christ has overcome Satan so that the final judgment and doom of Satan and his demons are certain.
So that's kind of the statement overview. Spoilers. This is where we're gonna get to by the end of it, but I'd like to invite you, if you would just briefly, to turn with me to the book of Job. This is gonna be in the Old Testament in the Hebrew scriptures. Job, chapter 38.
Job, chapter 38. And I think. Did I put it on the screen? I did. I put it on the screen for you.
So what you should know about the book of Job is the book of Job was probably the first piece of scripture that was written. This was probably written down at the time of Abraham. And you're like, well, Abraham is in Genesis, but Genesis was written by Moses, who was later than Abraham. So this is one of the earliest pieces of scripture that we have written down. And it wrestles with the question of, if God is all powerful, why is there evil and suffering in the world?
Right. Which is an appropriate question. I'm not gonna address it today exactly, but I will say that we are gonna do a sermon series in October that looks at that question and looks at the book of Job in detail. So that's coming in October. But for this morning, job, chapter 38, there's this whole long thing where Job has had bad things that happened to him.
He's asking God why his friends come and comfort him. They tell him not good advice. And then finally, God shows up to answer the question of why is there evil and suffering in the world? Like, I didn't know that was in the Bible. That sounds great.
Well, then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Dress for action like a man. I will question you and you make it known to me. Well, that just tells me this. He's not gonna answer the question the way I want him to. Right.
I ask God, why is life not fair? And he shows up and says, let me ask you a couple of questions. Oh, okay, gotcha. All right. So this is what he says.
He's gonna ask Job these questions. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding, who determined its measurements? Surely you know, or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all, all the sons of God shouted for joy. So the. Oh, I didn't do it. Yeah, I did. Okay.
So as Job is asking, why is there evil in the world? God responds, hey, let me just double click here and ask you where you were when I was making everything. When I was, like, creating dirt out of nothing and fashioning it into a place where you could live and breathe and ask these deep philosophical questions. Where were you when I was actually doing the work? Right.
And he says, when I was doing the work, the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. So as God is describing the creation of our world, the creation of our reality, he says, when I was making it, there were these other things that were singing together and shouting for joy as I was doing it. So you can kind of picture God, like, setting things in order, but he's surrounded by a stadium of cheering fans. You're like, what? I don't remember reading that in Genesis.
Well, you wouldn't read about the cameraman becausee he's just directing or he's just clicking record. Right? But he's not just clicking record. The camera people are praising God for the work that he's doing while it's happening. You're okay, but that's morning stars and sons of God.
Why would you say that those are angels, Michael? Why would you draw that conclusion? The book of Job starts all the way back in chapter one, as most books do. And in Job, chapter one, there's this big assemly where it kind of tells the story about Job, but then the camera shifts to heaven and shifts to God and says, now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before God and Satan also came among them. So the book of Job uses this term, sons of God, to refer to these spiritual beings that Satan is also a part of.
Right. Are we tracking so far? So at the beginning, all it said, Let me go back all the morning, the morning Star saying together. And all the sons of God shouted for joy. So when God was making stuff, all the angels who were present were like, God, you're so good.
That's awesome. And in fact, in Genesis chapter three, we see that God saw that was. Or in Genesis chapter one, Genesis chapter one, he says that everything was good, good, good, good. And on J6, it was very good. There was nothing that God had made that was not good.
So sometime between where God created everything and GenesisAppter3, where we've got an enemy in the garden, there's been something that's happened where all of the angels that were created who were singing craie for God, some of them become opposed to the work that God's doing. Rather than cheering him on, they are working actively against him. All right, so you see why. I mean, it's kind of difficult to talk about this from like one passage. I'm having to fill in a couple of things, but consist through consistently throughout Scripture we have a story that fits together.
And every time these beings come into the frame, there is a consistent picture about who they are and what they're like and what they're trying to do. But there's lots of words that we don't use to talk about angels. And there's a number of reasons for that, but there are all different kinds of words. We got angels, we got sons of God, we got evil spirits, we got thrones. Who would call an angel of throne?
That's a weird thing to say. You've probably heard Beelzible demons, Satan watchers, the accuser, the adversary, devil, Morningst stars, deceiving, spirit powers, rulers, authorities. Like there are all different kinds of words that the Bible is using to describe these beings that we don't have an exhaustive description of. Is that frustrating to anybody else. Okay.
I think that the fact that we want more specificity about these creatures should let us know that that's a natural thing. But let me warn you, at this point, anybody who comes and tells you exhaust. I've got an exhaustive encyclopedia of all the angels who've ever existed. And this is all their stories. You should know that what they're writing down is fiction, not scripture.
There are several books and ancient books that are popular for people to talk about right now. I'm thinking specifically of the Book of Enoch, which. The reason why people gravitate to the Book of Enoch is because the Book of Enoch gives a ton of extra information about these angels and these demons and these things that we are curious about. But which God has says you don't need to know. And so.
Well, I'm interested. I wanna know more. Like, okay, you can know more, but you can get more knowledge than God has given. And so let me just warn you about that ahead of time. Okay?
We tracking. Here's the big idea. Our unseen spiritual battle is to stand anchored on Jesus s truth and work. Okay, there's this thing that's going on that I'm not aware of. It's unseen.
Maybe I feel it sometimes, but I don't really like to talk about it. Gives me the heeie jeebies when the pastor's talking about demons. I'm afraid how this sermon's gonna go. Here's the big idea. Our unseen spiritual battle is to stand anchored on Jesus truth and on his work.
So hopefully that's helpful. Here's the deal. When we think of creation, what are some words that come to mind as we think of creation? And maybe hypothetically, imagine that we haven't been talking about angels and demons already this morning. Like, what are some things that come to mind when you think of creation?
Water, Water, food, animals, dirt, everything being pure. Okay, so other than the purity thing, because you're always trying to come at a diagonal, and I love that about you. Like, we think of stuff when we think of creation. When I think of creation, I think of rocks, I think of mountains, I think of rainbows and things that I can see. I think of stuff.
But what scripture tells us consistently is that creation is not just stuff. It's not just materials. It is both material and spiritual. I like to call it the fabric of reality. But let me completely exhaust for you the information that I know about fabric.
This is literally all I know. It fits in one picture in fabric, the fabric that we make. The difference between a pile of string and fabric is that fabric has been organized into a pattern that is both a warp and a weft or a warp and a woof. And there's reasons why English is hard. I don't know, but those are the words that we have.
Warp and woof. And when we think of creation, we usually think of material stuff. But I think the fabric of reality is made up of both spiritual stuff, which is not actually stuff, spiritual reality, and a material reality woven together over top of it. And my inclination is to look at this diagram and go, okay, the material stuff is the warp. It's the solid parts that stay still.
And the spiritual stuff weaves around it. But in fact, I think the nature of reality is that the spiritual stuff is stagnant and solid. And all of the material stuff is woven around it. Right. If you're tracking.
God is doing things in this room right now. So this is everything I know about fabric. But the thing is, like, when we look at the world, we see the stuff, and the stuff is not actually the thing that is stable in creation. It is the spiritual realm that's actually stable. That's why our Lord leads us to pray.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth. Material stuff as it is in heaven. The way that things work in heaven is how it ought to work on Earth, which should tell us that the spiritual realm is more stable than the material realm. Now, I listened to some crazy podcasts, and I could tell you that there are all kinds of, like, theoretical physicists that lose their mind over the nature of reality and whether solid stuff is actually solid or whether everything's just air. And I don't have time to get into all of that.
But here's the deal. Reality is made up of both material and spiritual planes. They are interconnected, and they are inter influential, which I thought was a word I made up, but I looked it up and it exists. Interfluential means they both influence one another. Interconnected, inter influential.
Both spiritual material realms are subject to God's sovereign rule, and both are inhabited by native creatures. There are creatures that are native to the material world, and there are creatures that are native to the spiritual world. And we can argue about it later. I don't have time. But I think animals are native to the material realm, and I think angels are native to the spiritual realm.
And what makes humans unique is that we are both.
We both have a body and a spirit, and that makes us weird, right? So why does all this matter? There's a letter that gets written in Ephesians. We call it Ephesians. It is written to the church in Ephesus.
And Paul is explaining why he is made a minister of the gospel. He says, there's this good news that we proclaim that Jesus is saving people. And I've been entrusted with the responsibility to communicate that message of salvation. But it's interesting why he's been entrusted with that message of salvation. He says, I was made a minister of the good news to bring light for everyone.
What is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places? This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. So Paul says the reason he's been entrusted with the message of the gospel is because he wants to make it clear to everybody that God has made that. What God is doing in the church is illustrating his character to. What's the word?
Rulers and authorities. So are we talking government officials here? Well, there's a bunch of other contexts that I'm not gonna address directly, but I think we're talking about angels and demons. Rulers and authorities are words that are used to describe these spiritual beings. So God is saying, the thing that I'm doing in the church is illustrating something according to my eternal plan, of the kind of God I am to these spiritual beings.
O okay. All right. We good, everybody? Alrigh. Okay, I'm goingna take things off the screen.
So angels are created spiritual beings which serve God's sovereign decrees in all of creation. So they're created. God made everything in heaven and on earth, which includes the things in the spiritual world and the things in the earthly world. So they're created beings. Right.
So God made them, and they serve God's sovereign purposes in all of creation. So angels apparently have the ability to impact that inter. What was the word I made up? Inter. Influential nature of material and spiritual.
Angels can operate in both somehow. So all of them are created by God. They are all creatures. They are natives of the spiritual plane. So they're able somehow to interact with our material world.
They appear at times to have a material form. There's a story where Abraham feeds a couple of angels and they appear to eat. So they appear to have some kind of a material form, but they're unlike God in that they are limited to one place at a time and they have to travel in between places. So here's where I'm outside of my pay grade of like, they are spiritual beings, so they do not have a physical body, but they are limited to one place at a time and have to travel to places they're not everywhere all at once the way God is. They have to travel.
And these angels do not reproduce. They're not. In fact, every single time that an angel is described having a physical appearance in scripture, it is a male. So you should be suspicious of female angels. I'm just gonna throw that out there.
But every time in scripture that an angel is described as having a material form, it's described as a man. I don't know why, but they don't have genders. They do not reproduce. Which means that all the angels that existed were all created at one time and they live forever. So there's a set number of angels, there's a limited number of angels, limited edition.
There's only one run of them, and they all live forever, but they're confined to an individual space. They can't be everywhere at once. All right. Is that helpful? Some.
Okay. They are. Scripture describes them as being organized by ranks of power or by authority. So it seems like there's some kind of tears of authority in the spiritual hierarchy specifically. I have no idea what it is.
And I actually don't know if we're talking about ranks or whether we're talking about species. I just don't know. Are these just different species of things or are they actually ranks? Like, I don't know. The scripture doesn't tell me.
But it's it clear that they are organized and some are more powerful than others. I think about this in terms of like military rank. There are some generals and there are some lieutenant colonels. I was thinking of the bottom ones. Privates.
I was thinking there's privates and there's generals. And there's a big difference between the two. Right. Angels may describe many different number of species. There are different types of angels, but different types of angels may be that that's actually their form or it may be that the same angel can take multiple kites of forms.
I have no idea. I just know that they're described differently in different places sometimes and I don't know why. So anyway, they were present during creation, which we've talked about, but they rebelled against Yahweh before humans did. So there was a rebellion in the spiritual realm before humans rebelled against God. The rebellion was followed by an immediate irrevocable judgment.
So when the angels rebelled, God judged them all immediately and made it so that they can't change. So if you were on God's team, you're locked in on God's team. You don't have the opportunity to not do what God says now. And if you decided to rebel against God at that moment, you were locked in on the enemies team. You cant t change.
So there'no conversion between the angels and there are no free agents. There is no neutral angel. So if you're talking to an angel, you should be aware there'only two options of who they are serving and you're not either of them.
Though we do not know the total number of angels, what we do know is that a a third of the angels rebelled against God. Led by a high ranking archangel who we call Satan or the Devil. His Latin name is Lucifer, you might know that, but it's not actually his name. It's just a Latin translation of a description. And demons, so which means there's one third of them that are demons and 2/3 of them that are angels still serving God's purpose.
And demons, including Satan, are not responsible for all, all the evil in the world, but they are responsible for some of it. So they are active moral agents, which means they can contribute to evil, but they're not responsible for all the evil most of the time. The Devil made me do it. He doesn't have to help you too much. You did a whole lot of evil by yourself.
So what you should know, the big thing for me, that I hear over and over again, that I feel like I should just say while we're talking about this, is that angels are not former humans. You will not become an angel. And neither will any of the people that you know. They are completely different things. They are native inhabitants of the spiritual realm.
And humans, which temporarily inherit the material realm for a time, but also have a spirit, like God's goal in people is that they would have a permanent material body too. So we have a temporary one, we're going to get a permanent one, but we're always going to be both spirit and stuff.
So. But humans are a completely different creature, completely different than the created angels. So they're not former humans. Angels belong to spiritual realm, animals belong in the material realm. Humans are a union of both material and spiritual, created by God to reflect his image.
And it just occurs to me that as humans are made to reflect his image, he makes them male and female, which angels are not. So there's something about our reproductive ability that reflects our special relationship with God. But that's a different sermon. Okay, that takes us through most of our statement. Our statement being God created a multitud of spiritual beings called angels.
Righteous angels continue to serve God and work in the heavenly sphere and on earth. By his disobedience, Satan, a fallen angel, became the adversary of God and God's people, carrying with him a procession of demons. So what? Why do you care? Why have I taken this time?
30 minutes already. Can you believe it? We've been together 30 minutes already. Together this morning. Why would we talk about this?
Why does this matter? Why should you care? I think it's helpful to know that we are not alone. That whatever it is that we're walking into this week, we do not walk into this week. Unobserved that whatever we do is observed by both angels and demons, and that what they watch and how they observe us relate to God is informing how they give God glory.
It's helpful to know that we're not alone. Angels watch. Angels help.
Have you ever just been driving and you, like, wake up and you're like, oh, I should have just died, Like, I just missed that car or something and I overcorrected and you're like, bl. I'm not opposed to saying that an angel intervened and moved your car where you ought not to have been. Like, there are many times where I have avoided an accident and I have no reason to attribute it. And I suspect that at times God will use angels to do that. So angels help.
They watch, they help, and they celebrate. The biggest party the angels ever get to throw is when a human decides to turn from their sinful nature and embrace the salvation that Jesus gives them freely. They throw up party. They know that that is a miracle. They're excited about that.
It's helpful to know we're not alone. Would you say, okay, it's helpful to know to me that our allies outnumber our enemies. There's 2/3 of good angels still serving the Lord and there's one third of the enemy. It's helpful to know that our allies outnumber our enemies, at least to me. And the last thing that I think is really significant is that our adversary is not God's equal.
Our adversary is not God's equal. And he wants you to believe that's so bad. He wants you to think that he is everything that God is in oppos and he is not. God is uncreated, who sees the beginning from the end. God is all powerful who speaks and light comes into existence.
And the enemy is a created creature rebelling against God. The enemy is not God's equal. He has no equal. We sing that occasionally. He has no rival.
There is no competition between good and evil where there's a possibility that evil could win because there is no power of darkness. The power of darkness is only ever the absence of light. And God said, let there be light. So I think that that's helpful. Our spiritual battle, our unseen spiritual battle, is to stand anchored on Jesus s truth and on Jesus work.
So as we're thinking about this and as we're kind of processing maybe some new information, what credit do we wrongfully give to Satan and his demons?
Because there's times where I'm like, oh, especially with technology, I'm pretty sure that demons have Complete authority over printers. And I don't know why the Lord in his sovereign will has allowed that to happen. But I do spiritual battle with every printer I've ever encountered. And that's silly, but you know it's true. What credit do we wrongfully give to Satan and his demons?
Let's just assume they have the printers, but what things don't they have that we say that they do?
Here's the deal. God has captured his playbook, the enemy's only role, the only thing that he can do is he can deceive and he can imitate. And he wants for us to believe that he's God's equal, but he knows that he's not. And so the best thing he can do is convince you that he is and surrender your life to him, even though he's not worthy. But his playbook is actually laid out for us several times in Scripture, most clearly in Genesis, chapter three.
He takes a disguise. So the enemy dresses up as a serpent in that story, but he always disguises himself. He never shows up as he is, and frequently disguises himself as angels of light, which, by the way, if an angel shows up to you and tells you that you have more scripture and he's gonna deliver to you more scripture, you should just walk away because he doesn't have it. All right, if you didn't know, that's what the Mormons believe, but there's a whole different thing. So he takes a disguise, and then he starts a dialogue.
He wants to talk with you. He wants to enter into a conversation not for the purpose of building you up, but for seeding doubt in your Creator. And by seeding doubt, his goal is not that you would just doubt ca becausee I don't think that doubt is contrary to faith. It actually helps us. But he wants the purpose of the doubt to be a denial of what God has said.
And with that denial, we've got to make a decision. If what God said is not true, I need to decide whether I'm going to follow a lying God or not. And his hope is that you will not follow the God that he's convinced you is lying by his lies so that you will die. So that's the play. It's the play every time.
So that's why he doesn't want me to tell you. But he's gonna come in a disguise. He's gonna start a dialogue. He's gonna see doubt. He's gonna try to grow that doubt into denial of what God said.
He wants you to be captivated by deliberation so that ultimately you die. His purpose always is to kill you.
And the enemy's target is to claim our hearts by reshaping our thoughts.
I wish it was easier. And again, there's plenty of evil in the world that they don't cause, but there's also plenty of evil in the world that they are causing. And I don't think it's insignificant that the primary concern of our culture philosophically at the moment is our mental health and that our enemy's primary plan of attack is to change how we think so that it undermines how we relate to God.
His target is to destroy or to distort God's truth. He will always make you question, did God really say can you really trust what he meant by that? He'll deny or distort God's truth. He's going to discredit the testimony of God's people. He's going to say, look, God was able to start something, but he couldn't finish it.
They surrendered their life to Jesus, but look how they're living now. Like, clearly God has no power. Obviously the darkness is reigning supreme because look at all these fallen Christians. And that might lead us to depression and discouragement and destroy our enthusiasm for God's purposes. Like, why would I be on God's team?
Why would I work hard for God if ultimately the people that I care and pour into are gonna walk away like this is all pointless and so he'll dilute our effectiveness?
The problem is, as I'm preaching that to you, I don't have to hypothetically think about what those ideas might be. I recognize them from my own mind.
I have walked those paths of discouragement. I have taken my eyes off of Jesus and fixated them on the storm of crisis in people's lives and said to God, how, How dare you? How dare you leave people alone in this darkness? And only by his mercy has he said, son, I'm shining a light there.
What thought patterns regularly draw us away from trusting God's truth?
Because there are patterns of thought that we get really, really comfortable with, that we even intellectually know or opposed to God's revealed truth, and we still just kind of hug Him.
What thought patterns regularly draw us away from trusting God's truth? Cause our unseen spiritual battle is to stand anchored on Jesus s truth and on his work. Well, Michael, why would you say that it'just to stand? Because it sounds like it's a lot harder than that. I'm just taking it from the Scripture, Ephesians 6 says this.
Finally, be strong in the Lord in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to. In the evil day is today evil then withstand the evil day.
Having done all to stand, stand. Therefore, having fastened on the belt of. And putting on the breastplate of righteousness and his shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace in all circumstances, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication, praying for all the saints and also for me that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly as I ought to speak.
Our fight is to stand firm in what Jesus has said and what Jesus has done. It's crazy to me if, like, in the movie, if I were going to, like, shoot the montage of the guy dressing up for battle, I would not start with the belt. You got to have pants on before you have a belt on, right? And he starts with the belt and says, put on the armor of God. Start with the belt of truth.
And there are so many times where I have been caught metaphorically with my pants down as a Christian because I have rejected the truth of what God has already revealed and have not been willing to stand on what he has told me is true. And so the battle is in the mind about what is true. And our unseen battle is to stand anchored on Jesus. Truth and work. We don't have anything else to stand on.
What else would we go to?
What other thing could we possibly do? I can't even see my enemy. That's the only way Bilbo Baggins escapes in the Hobbit is because he turns invisible. You can't fight somebody who's invisible, even if you want to kill him. And so God says that our unseen spiritual battle is to stand anchored on Jesus.
Truth and work. Which, if it were simple, if it were easy, I Don't think I'd have to tell you that. Right. But the thing is that the enemy is always going to distort the truth.
I wonder if perhaps it is not more dangerous for things to be half true, for them to be whole true. That for something to sound Christian, but to violate the word of Scripture just a little bit.
And so it can sound like I'm like, all right, well, it's all about the truth. And we gotta make sure that we nail down our doctrine and those things are true. But you need to hear that the lies of the enemy are gonna come in sounding real, real Christian. They might even play on Christian radio.
Because he can imitate the angels of light and he can speak like a church person. He knows all the words.
But our unseen spiritual battles to stand anchored on Jesus truth and work, well, that seems overwhelming. That seems like a lot. Like there's a lot of things to know and to evaluate. So let me take you to where we started together this morning in our worship gathering. We're coming into a close.
Colossians twos, 13, 15, we've already read. And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive. Together with him having forgiven us all our trespasses and by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him.
There is something that Jesus did in his crucifixion that completely disarmed the spiritual authorities. And they do not want us to know they're running into battle without swords, any wounds that we take or ones that we just have received. Which is not to say that they. They're more powerful than us, but in what Jesus is doing, he has already disarmed them. He's disarmed them and put them to open shame.
So our unseen spiritual battles to stand anchored on Jesus truth and work, because through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. Here's the deal. Wayne Grudam pointed this out to me and I thought it was crazy and just wanted to share it to you with you. God created two groups of intelligent moral creatures. One was native of just the spiritual realm.
And then we are intelligent moral creatures that are both somehow. Among the angels, many sinned, but God decided to redeem none of them.
Now, among the other group of moral creatures, human beings, we Also find that a large number, indeed all, have sinned and turned away from God.
But God decided to do more than just merely meet the demands of justice. He decided to and save some sinful human beings. And he has decided to redeem out of sinful mankind a great multitude. It is all undeserved favor. It is all grace.
The angels watch what Jesus is doing in us, astonished, because they don't have the same opportunity that we do.
And if you were a creature who had had a moment of decision a lifetime ago, and you watch God slowly walking through, patiently wooing and calling outright rebels, people who are angry and hostile and want nothing to do with him, and he just continues to patiently call them along to send his Spirit, to convict them of sin, to say, no, no, no, no, I will forgive you, I will forgive. Will you turn to me to ask and plead that you would come and surrender, but you had a moment, Wouldn't you wonder what kind of God is this? And so, my friends, are we trusting Jesus to redeem us? Are we trusting Jesus to bring us into his victory over our true enemies? Because the angels are confused and they wonder and they long to look into the mysteries that are being revealed in us this week that the God of heaven would redeem those who've rebelled against him.
Jesus, I pray that you would continue to show yourself strong, Lord, I pray that your word would be unshaken. That Lord, we would grow in our confidence of it. Lord, we would trust you in what you've said the Father, in the places where we have surrendered thought patterns to the enemy, that you would be redeeming us there.
Butr would you show us what we cannot see? Would you lead us in the ways that we cannot go by ourselves, knowing that you have the ultimate victory? The last chapter'already been written.
We pray that you would lead and guide us and direct us in these moments as we connect with you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
