I wonder how many of you have seen the movie Braveheart. I haven’t. But there is a scene in Braveheart I have seen, where Sir William Wallace is exhorting his troops on the morning of battle, and riding before them to rise and to stand fast for their nation. I suppose if you were English, the equivalent of that would be Henry V addressing his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. Or if you came from the Southern States, you might prefer one of the speeches of Stonewall Jackson. But all of us (certainly those of us who are boys and I suspect many of us who were once girls) have thrilled at these great scenes of which we have read or seen when a great general addresses his troops on the eve of battle and issues his final words of exhortation to them. And these verses that we just have read from Ephesians 6:10-20 have exactly this kind of ring about them. “Finally, my last word to you, brothers, is this.” And it is a rallying call to the whole church in Ephesus to be the army of Jesus Christ.  

Since childhood some of us have been taught to individualize Paul’s teaching here, and were perhaps introduced to it by being reminded that Paul is a prisoner in Rome and he is looking at the man who is guarding him and reflecting on how the individual Christian’s life is like the life of this Roman soldier. But Roman soldiers no more wore full battle-dress when they guarded prisoners in Rome than I suppose is true in military prisons today. And Paul, while his teaching certainly is to be individualized, is probably more thinking of the Roman soldier dressed in battle armament and surrounded by his fellow soldiers. And with that vision in his mind of warfare, he speaks to these Ephesians who feel themselves to be (in Ephesus at least) dwarfed by the great temple of Diana (one of the seven wonders of the ancient world), under pressure, knowing that they find themselves facing spiritual foes and forces! And he says to them, “Now my brothers, be the army of Jesus Christ. Now, brothers and sisters, stand fast in the Lord.”

And it is interesting to notice how woven into these closing verses is some of what we might call the basic military training that he has already given them in earlier verses in his letter to the Ephesians. He has already warned them against Satan, for example, in Ephesians 4:27, and now he is picking up that warning and underscoring its great significance. He has already prayed in Ephesians 3:14-16 that their eyes may be opened to the power and strength that is theirs in Jesus Christ, and now he picks that up and applies it and says, “As the army of Jesus Christ you need to learn to be strong in the Lord.” And the whole letter had begun with a wonderful unpacking of all the riches that are ours in Jesus Christ, and now he is saying to the army of Jesus Christ in Ephesus, “You will need all the riches, all the artillery, all the defense that is yours in Jesus Christ if as a fellowship you are going to be able to stand in this spiritual battle against the spiritual foes.” And so while it is right for us to take to ourselves as individuals, to individualize and particularize what the apostle Paul is saying here, we need to understand that he says this in the context of speaking to all of us as a fellowship that we are called by Jesus Christ to be Christ’s army, engaging in this great spiritual warfare.

And, as I suppose is true of any warfare, there are several fundamental principles, several important emphases, that the apostle Paul makes here that I want to have underscored for us this morning.

The Battle Location⤒🔗

The first is what he says about the location, the place of the Church’s battle. I suppose it is still true in the military world that where the battle is to be engaged very much determines your whole approach to the battle. The kind of warfare that we see today is so different from the kind of warfare that we are used to seeing in history. Guerilla warfare is different from ordinary warfare and the tactics, of course, need to be appropriate. And you notice where Paul says this spiritual warfare is located: it is, he says, in the heavenly realms. Verse 12: We are battling against “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

An interesting thing about that is that it is the same phrase he had used at the beginning of Ephesians 1 to describe what happens to somebody when they become a Christian: They are brought into fellowship with Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ in the heavenly realms they begin to enjoy every spiritual blessing.  And in a sense, the point that he is making by showing us these two bookends of this great letter to the Ephesians is that conversion – coming to faith in Christ – means being brought into the spiritual heavenly realms. But those heavenly realms are precisely the sphere in which spiritual battle is joined.

That is why we always need to remind younger Christians that life may be much more difficult for them now that they have become Christians than it ever was before they became Christians. Because they have been brought into the fellowship of Jesus Christ and because they have been released from their spiritual bondage, they become the immediate objects of enemy attack. So that while it is true that in Jesus Christ we are more than conquerors, while it is true that the great battle for our souls has been won by the gospel, we discover (as we see day-by-day in our newspapers and on the television) that the winning of the decisive battle does not mean that there are no more bloody, and sometimes fatal, skirmishes. We understand that months ago a dramatic victory was won, but what used to be called the “mopping-up operations” can be fierce and sore, and the army needs to keep fighting on. And this is what Paul is saying about the Christian life.

As our Lord Jesus taught us in Matthew 16:18, He is building His church. And precisely because He builds His Church in what was enemy occupied territory, once that Church is established, Jesus is saying, you can be sure that the enemy will persist in fighting back, even though we know that he has been defeated. And so the sphere in which this spiritual warfare against these sinister dark powers takes place is the heavenly realms into which we have been brought by faith in Jesus Christ.

But I want you to notice something else: Paul seems here to be suggesting that this spiritual battle in which we are engaged is also fought out in the daily ordinary routines of our lives. I am often interested in Paul to ask what it is that sparked off these thoughts in his mind. And isn’t it interesting that what immediately precedes this great chapter in Ephesians 6:10-20 has been his teaching to us about how to be Christian husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants? It is out of that context that he begins to speak about spiritual warfare. Why is this? It is because the Church’s spiritual warfare is not fought entirely within these four walls [of the church]; the Church’s spiritual warfare is engaged outside of these four walls in our daily circumstances. It is in home and family life that the power of the gospel in your life is going to be attacked. And in our fellowship. It is in what we are in relationship to our children or our parents that so often the enemy brings us down. It is in what we are in the daily business, whether we are masters or servants (in contemporary terms), that our witness to Jesus Christ is going to be most opposed by these spiritual powers of darkness.

And the reason that is so is because that is where, through the faithful witness of Christ’s army in the world, the kingdoms of darkness are going to be overturned. And so Paul is teaching us very significant lessons about the location in which spiritual warfare is always engaged.

The Character of the Enemy←⤒🔗

But the second thing that we need to learn about (and I suppose this is true again of natural warfare as well as spiritual warfare) is the character of the Church’s enemy. It has always been part of good military strategy to have sufficient reconnaissance and sufficient intelligence to know our enemy. Notice then what Paul says about our enemy: “Our enemy is not flesh and blood, but spiritual forces of evil” (verse 12). Now, why is that so important for us, as well as for the Ephesians, as a Church fellowship? Because flesh and blood enemies our Church can handle. We have lawyers; we have physicians; we have surgeons; we have teachers; we have architects; we have experienced parents. If it were just flesh and blood we were wrestling about, then we can handle it. We have business strategists who can do. But we are not wrestling against flesh and blood. We are wrestling, he says, against spiritual, supernatural forces. And so, as he says to the Corinthians, the weapons of our warfare cannot simply be natural weapons. They need to be spiritual weapons.

Not only is this the case, but Paul goes on to suggest to us that the enemy is not only spiritual in nature, but he is organized in his strategy. He speaks about (verse 11) the schemes of the devil. Didn’t we notice in Matthew 16:18 the “gates of hell”? The gates in Bible language are where plans are drawn up. The city gates are where the elders make their council and their strategies. And Paul is saying this. I don’t think he even fully understands himself perhaps all that he is saying, but he does understand that since the Lord Jesus Christ is building His kingdom we can be sure that Satan has his strategies to destroy that kingdom.

Remember how he says to the Corinthians: “We aren’t ignorant of his strategies, are we?” But what are his strategies against the Church? How is it that we can say we are not ignorant of them? Well, for example, because we see them in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles (most notably in Acts 4-6), where the evil one uses three strategies that he seems to persist in using against the church. Number one is the pressure that was brought upon the early church to conform to the world. Number two is the pressure that emerged in the case of those two individuals who lied to the Holy Spirit about the gift that they had given to the Church; it is the pressure to compromise our wholehearted consecration. Number three is the pressure that emerged when the Hebrew speaking Christians and the Greek speaking Christians fell out with one another because of the distribution of the mercy ministry; and the pressure there was to produce tension and alienation and division in the fellowship.

And these are always his strategies. The strategy to make us compromise with the world under the pressure the world brings to us (“We don’t like your exclusive claims for Jesus Christ; compromise those exclusive claims”). And the Church (at least the visible Church) is in the process of compromising those claims, isn’t it? And then the pressure to compromise our consecration – to give big parts of our lives, but not to give all of our lives. And then to bring division and alienation and tension among us is the old military strategy Satan uses, isn’t it? “If I can divide, then I can conquer.” The apostle Paul teaches us these things so that we can be on the lookout for them, guard against them in our hearts, guard against them in our fellowship, that we may march strongly together in the power of the gospel.

The Sufficiency of the Godly Armour←⤒🔗

And then there is the third thing Paul speaks about. He spoke about the location in which the battle is engaged, he spoke about the nature of the enemy we face, and he speaks thirdly about the adequacy of the Church’s resources in the armour of God.

We obviously do not have time to deal with this armour piece by piece. But you notice essentially what the apostle Paul is saying here. He is saying that “Put on the armour of God” means “Put on all the resources that Jesus Christ has given to you.” Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and His righteousness will guard you against Satan’s undermining your stability. Put on the Lord’s grace and that grace will preserve you against creating tensions with one another and alienation from one another in which Satan will march through the ranks and divide you. Make sure you are wearing the shield of faith – the great big 4x2 foot door-like shield that those Roman soldiers wore particularly so that they could bring them up and protect the whole artillery army against those flaming darts that would be flung at them by the enemy. Guard one another, he is saying. Be on the lookout for one another. And as by faith in Jesus Christ the blessings of Jesus Christ that he has described in Ephesians 1 are more and more filled up in our hearts, the fellowship of God’s people moves forward as a single, glorious, united army, and at the end of the day remains standing firm.

In my early days as a young Christian, when I read this magical passage that has the smell of the battlefield and the odor of smoke and victory about it, I remember every time I read it I thought, “What an anticlimax! Is this all the Christian life and the Christian Church is, that at the end of the battle you remain standing?” But now, decades later, I sometimes think to myself, as I watch the way in which the army of Jesus Christ has been attacked in the course of my lifetime and the churches with which I have been associated undermined by the spiritual powers of darkness, it seems to me to be one of the most glorious evidences of the Christian gospel that a Church can remain standing, faithfully witnessing to Jesus Christ over the years and withstanding every attack of the evil one.

And then notice that he slips in something at the end. He says: when you begin to use the artillery the Lord has given to you, please remember two things. Please remember to pray, and please remember the preaching of the Word. Why these two things? Because he understands that these are the two resources that the Lord has placed into the hands of His people. The praying of the people of God for the blessing of the preaching of the Word, so that the Word may run on wheels that have been oiled by prayer right into the hearts and consciences of men and women, to bring them to faith in Jesus Christ and to build them up in faith in Jesus Christ and to get them a place in the army of Jesus Christ and to stand in faith in Jesus Christ.

And it is this that builds us up to be a people that walks out into the world like some great Roman army in wonderful battle order, arrayed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, holding our heads high. Not because we have those marvelous letters on our helmet – SPQR – but because we have on our helmet, The Army of Jesus Christ. Such an army is not only invincible, but marches into enemy-occupied territory and brings others by God’s grace to faith in Jesus Christ. Brothers and sisters, let us put on the armour of God, that by God’s grace we may be strong to serve Him here and hereafter.