Be Strong In The Lord And The Strength Of His Might

So this morning, we're going to be addressing the question, how am I supposed to fight sin? Like, how am I actually supposed to do it? It's one thing to see a sin in your life, to feel convicted of it, and even to know that you should resist it, that you shouldn't do it. But none of those things actually tell you how to fight, how to resist. And it's worth noting that a desire to fight sin is not sufficient. To win the fight. In Numbers 14, Moses recorded for us the Israelites coming out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the land of Canaan. And as they were approaching, the Israelites sent out spies into the land of Canaan to seek out the land. And Caleb and Joshua were two of those spies. And they went with a number of other men and they spied out the land. And what they saw in that land were basically two things. One, It was a wonderful place, a land flowing with milk and honey. And two, there were big, bad people that lived there. And the fruit of all of their observation was that when they came back to report their findings, all except for Joshua and Caleb were scared and said, we can't go into that land because they'll kill us. Joshua and Caleb, on the other hand, said, no, no, no.

we can go into that land because the Lord's going to go with us. And we can take that land because he promised us that land. But the people didn't listen to Joshua and Caleb. And so they said, we aren't going to go into the land. Well, when they made that decision and they refused to live by faith and to fight the battle that the Lord had set before them and the strength he would provide, he cursed them. And he said, because of your faithlessness, because you won't go fight, because you don't trust me to... go with you and to fight for you, all of the men in this tribe, in this people, all of them over the age of 20 will not enter that land. They will die except for two, Joshua and Caleb. And so instead of going in, what you're going to do is you're going to wander for 40 years in the wilderness as a judgment. And many of you will fall. And many of them did fall while they were in the wilderness. So they hear the news and what do they do?

Oh, no, no, we're going to go fight. We'll go fight. We were wrong. We'll go fight. And the Lord says, no. And Caleb and John say, no, don't go. Don't go. If you go, you're going to be destroyed. No, no, no, we're going to go fight. We're going to go fight. And so they went and they fought. What happened to them? They were laid bare. They were laid low. They were killed. Why? Because they didn't know how to fight. They thought, we'll go in there with swords and shields and bows and arrows. And they didn't care a bit. or didn't take into account whether or not the Lord was going to go with them into battle. And so when I said just a moment ago, a desire to fight sin is not sufficient to win the fight, you have a picture of it in Numbers 14, where the Israelites wanted to go in after the Lord said, well, if you don't trust me, then you won't go in. They said, no, no, no, we'll go in. He says, no, no, you won't. They didn't know how to fight. And so as a result, they went in their own strength.

And they lost. They were decimated because they weren't fighting the right way. And too often, we lose our battles against sin for the very same reasons. We're not trained well for the fight. We don't take the right weapons into the battle. We fight the wrong things. And we end up losing. And so this morning, my hope is that God will equip us to gain a greater victory over our sins, the sins that so easily entangle us. But to do that, we have to know what are we fighting and how are we supposed to fight it. We're fighting sin. We're fighting the devil. We're fighting temptations. These sorts of things. But how? That's the question today. Our text is Ephesians 6, verses 10-17. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of God so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood.

but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the full armor of God so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand firm, therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness. And having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace, in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one, and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So as we start...

Paul begins by saying to the Ephesians, be strong in the Lord and the strength of his might. And then he says, you're going to battle. And he tells them who they're going to fight and what they're going to need, what their armor consists of. But before we get into that, I want to start by asking you, how do you fight sin? Practically, actually fight in your life. When you identify sins, something you shouldn't do or say or think, what do you actually do to resist it? Good. I'll tell you what I do most of the time. I take a deep breath. I steal my nerve. And I just go, we're going to get through it. We're just not going to do it. We're just going to soldier through it and muscle through it. And I've heard a couple of you say yes. And I've looked at a couple more of you shake your heads. And I know I'm not alone. And I think this is a very, very common way to fight sin. If we're going to fight it at all. Maybe we see the temptation to sin and we go, I'm not going to fight.

And if that's the case, you're lost to the battle. But if you think you're going, I need to fight this sin, what we think is, I'm going to grit my teeth and bear it. Or perhaps we say, I'm going to change my environment, get rid of my phone, go to bed early, set my alarm clock, leave my debit card at home so I can't wait. There's things we do practically. I'm just going to avoid it altogether. So between avoidance and just... soldiering through it, I think we found most of the ways that we fight sin. Practically. On a day-to-day basis. This is actually what we do. Sometimes we do better than that. We pray and ask God to be merciful. Sometimes we talk to people and tell them what's going on. But I think a lot of the time we don't fight sin well. We don't pray the way we should. We end up succumbing to it. Because our strength isn't sufficient to carry the day. And our avoidance tactics, our hiding from it,

It doesn't keep us out of the line of fire. What I'm trying to say to you is those are bad tactics. They are not the weapons or the tools that you need to fight against sin. They won't help you. You say, well, what else is there? What else is there? What am I supposed to do? Paul begins by exhorting the Ephesians to be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. And so the first question I have that comes to you this morning is, do you think that God is able to deliver you from sins, your sins? Do you actually believe it?

Because if you don't, that will be the catalyst that leads you to look to your own strength. Because you say, there's no strength anywhere else. I'm all I got. I'm all there is. I'm the only defense against my temptations and my sins. So do you believe that the Lord is strong and able to help in the fight against sin? And I understand that even in asking the question, you'll say, well, I used to. And I used to pray and I used to try and then I just kept falling into sin. And what we end up doing is blaming God for these things. And we're wrong to do that. We are wrong. Because we envisioned him answering our prayers as him removing our temptations. Or removing the necessity to fight. And that is not how the Lord delivers us from sin. Not in this life. In the life to come, yes. But not in this life. And so we need the Lord's strength.

To win our fight against sin. Fighting sin requires a military style of training. A very rigorous, intense, repetitive training. A training that's all-encompassing, that comes at us from every angle. Lots of repetition. Lots of practice. Lots of correction when you're doing the wrong thing. Lots of training about where the dangers lie and how to identify them. And in the midst of it, A constant refrain of your duty and responsibilities. Your duty and your responsibilities. How many of us have the ability to put ourselves through this kind of training? I don't. And I suspect not many of us, if any at all, even think we do. None of us actually have the ability. But some of us might be foolish enough to think, oh yeah, I can do it. But if we could do it, then he wouldn't have told the Ephesians or us to be strong in the Lord. And in the strength of his might, we said, well, you just need to try harder.

You just need to resist more. You and I, we don't have the knowledge of sin that God does. We don't have the will to resist it or the discipline to train ourselves to over time. The sort of victory over sin that we'd like to see is not the sort of thing that we wander into. The best soldiers, the best athletes, are not those who started out with the best natural abilities. It's true that if we were to take sports as an example, there are athletes that are very gifted naturally, gifted far above those that are around them. But the ones who do the best and who rise to the top over time are not the ones that relied simply on natural ability, but it's the ones who worked the hardest, who spent the most time on the field or in the gym.

and practiced and practiced and didn't have an off season and didn't take three months off and didn't do it for the money. Same is true of the best soldiers. And the same will be true of the most faithful Christians. You won't wander in to victory over sin. It is a battle. It is a fight. And if you were plopped down on a battlefield with no training, no weapons, and no armor, what hope would you have of living? We wouldn't. So why would we think that it's different when it comes to fighting against sin? I think often it's because we think it's not really a battle. It's not really a battlefield. That somehow there's this protective layer somewhere God won't allow really bad, tempting, difficult things to happen. But we do need his strength to fight our temptations and our sins. Or we will be lost. We'll lose the fight. Why doesn't trying harder work? Paul tells us because our struggle is not against flesh and blood.

It's not against flesh and blood. In our society today, if you're a conservative, it typically means that you love your gun. And I don't have any problems with people having guns. I own guns. All for you having your guns. Carry your guns legally. Practice with them. Shoot them. Great. Do that. But you do realize your gun's not going to protect you if the government comes after you. It just won't. It'll get you killed. Right away, it'll get you killed. You're outgunned. You guys do realize. Am I crazy? I'm not crazy. Maybe you'll hold them off for a little while, but in the end, you're going to leave in a black bag. So how do we fight government tyranny? With AR-15s and concealed carry permits? No. It will not work. It will not work. Can you keep a bad guy out of your house with a gun? Yeah, you might be able to do that. Am I saying that that's how it should be? No. But I'm just trying to tell you this is how it is. And if you bring a knife to a gunfight, so to speak,

You lose. And so if we bring our strength and our weapons to try to keep our flesh from doing the things it wants to do, we'll lose. Because our struggle is not against our own flesh and blood. It's not against one another. Paul tells us it's against rulers and powers and world forces of this darkness and spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. And that sort of just kind of gets off in the, I don't know what all that means. There's a war. inside of the war. There's a war behind the war. Our temptations to sin, they often work themselves out very practically and very physically. Our pride, our selfishness, our laziness, our gossip, and all these other sins that we have, our lusts, they work themselves out very practically in our lives. But they're not just physical temptations. The temptation to lust is not simply a physical It has a spiritual reality. There's a spiritual implication for you giving in to those sins. It will cause spiritual harm. But we as Christians don't think about any of that. Not as we should. We don't wake up in the morning and think, Satan wants to destroy my soul. And the way he's going to bring spiritual death to me is by causing me to lust or causing me to lie or causing me to...

becoming bitter or angry. You think, well, I just shouldn't get angry. So I'll just hold my tongue and not say anything. Let me bite our lips. But you're not really fighting the words that come out of your mouth. And keeping them in your mouth doesn't help. It doesn't help you overcome sin. You tell me. You get tempted to say something bitter and angry and you bite your lip and you go, I'm not going to say it. What happens? Two hours later or the next day, here it comes about something else. And it's like, man, whoa, you seem really angry, really frustrated, really, your anger, it's disproportionate to what's going on. Why? Because you just kept it all inside and now you've let it all come out. Martin Luther said that we ought to sin boldly and yet believe in the grace of God still more boldly. But the idea that you were going to fight sin, Luther understood the idea that you were going to fight sin simply by not doing the thing you identified as wrong.

He realized this is a losing endeavor. It's a losing endeavor. And so when he says sin boldly, he's not saying do whatever you want. The rest of the quote says, but believe more boldly in the grace of Jesus Christ. He's saying there's a spiritual work here and you need a spiritual help. Believing in Jesus Christ is a spiritual work. It's a spiritual activity that we do. And so when you're tempted to sin, the first thing you ought to do When you see it, and know that you do not see all of it, but when you see, I'm tempted here. There is something going on beneath those temptations that's far more dangerous to you and to your soul than that action. Satan and his fallen angels, his spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places, are gaining ground in your heart. And their goal is not just for you to be miserable, but to destroy your soul.

That's actually the goal. That's actually the point. When I was reading and studying on this, one of the commentators I read was talking about us fighting with Satan, and he said simply this. He's so much older and has so much more experience than you. Who in the world do you think you are to think you're going to stand toe-to-toe with him and win? He's a liar and the father of lies from the beginning. Thousands of years of experience, and here you stand at 20 or 30 maybe, and you're going to win? His tricks are far too good. His temptation is far too great. His ploys, his schemes, too appealing for you or I to resist. We won't outlast him. We will not overpower him. We won't outwit him. And so if you fight a spiritual battle with physical weapons of I won't do this and I won't do that, you'll lose every time. And that's because you aren't fighting with the right weapons. Do you remember when David came?

to bring food up to his brothers who were fighting against the Philistines, and Goliath was there. And Goliath would come out, and he would mock the Israelites, send me out, you know. And they were all scared, and they wouldn't. And David, the young shepherd boy, he comes, and he hears what's going on, and his brothers don't like him. And they say, well, you're just here to join in the battle and to be entertained by all this. And then David hears what's going on, and he goes, that can't be. That cannot be what he's saying. That's not okay. How dare this uncircumcised Philistine mock the armies of God. And so Goliath says, send me one of your men. Send me one of your men. Send me one of your men. And no one would go. No one would go. No one would go. And David shows up and David says, I'll go. And so what do they do? They say, David, you need to put on this armor. You need to put on a grown man's armor. So David puts on Saul's armor. And what happens? It doesn't fit. It doesn't fit.

He's like, I can't move in this. This isn't what I need. So he took the armor off. He's going to go out and he's going to fight this giant with a sling and a stone. You say, well, a sling and a stone is not a spiritual weapon. And I say, you're right, it's not. It's a strap of leather and a rock. But he used those implements spiritually. He went out and he stood there and said, you will not defy. The living God. Who in the world do you think you are? He fought spiritually. He wasn't scared. Where all of his older brothers and all of the rest of the armies of Israel were scared, David was not scared of the battle. He went out in the strength that the Lord provided. He did what the Israelites should have done when they were going into the land of Canaan. You remember, they were afraid and they said, no, no, no, we can't. They'll kill us. And here the armies of Israel are sitting going, no, no, no, we can't go down and meet Goliath. He'll kill us. And David comes and says,

not a chance in the world, I'm going to kill that man. And that's what he did. And we look at it and we go, wow, look at David. Look at David. And I say, you can look at David, but you would do better to look at David's God. Because David's God's the one who went before him and gave him faith, gave him strength, gave him zeal, and gave him a strap and a stone. And so it's interesting. The Lord give you understanding. You fight spiritual battles both spiritually and physically. But if you only fight spiritual battles physically, you'll lose. But if you fight them spiritually and physically, in the strength that the Lord provides, you'll win. Twice in this passage, Paul tells us to put on the full armor of God. It's like he repeats himself, almost identically. Put on the full armor of God so that you'll be able...

to stand firm against the schemes of the devil and then just a few verses later therefore take up the full armor of god so that you'll be able to resist the evil day and having done everything to stand firm and so you see armor showing up standing firm showing up and the devil showing up you need armor to be able to stand firm against the devil i can go through the different pieces of armor here and we'll mention them but what i want you to observe first is that All but one of the things that he's supposed to put on are defensive. They're meant to protect. A belt, gird up your loins. Tie up your clothes so that you can fight, so that you can move, so that you can run. What is he to gird up his loins with? The truth. The truth is what will show you your enemy and reveal his weaknesses. Satan spends a lot of energy getting Christians simply to lay down the truth.

Because you can't fight when you're wearing your dress, if you will. Your full attire. So gird up your loins with the truth. What do we fight with? Paul comes sort of full circle here. He starts off saying, gird up your loins with the truth. And then he comes to the end and he says, take up the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of the God. And he's coming around to the truth again. But here in the first pass, he's saying, you're going to have to know the truth. You're going to have to bind it to you. And so when you face spiritual temptation, one of the first things you ought to do, and the way you engage the battle is to say, what does God say about this? What does God say about this? I'm angry, I'm bitter, I'm lazy, I'm lying, I'm lusting, I'm proud. What is it? The first thing you should say is not, I shouldn't do that. It should be, what does God say about this? What happens to the people in the Bible who gave themselves to this sin?

What is the danger that I'm facing? In the early chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's writing to his son about lust and about the adulterous woman, the refrain at the end of it is, they don't know that her feet lead down to Sheol. They don't know. They're ignorant. And he's saying, son, I don't want you to be ignorant. Listen to me. That's dangerous. It will destroy your soul. Oh, that's a good thing to remember the next time that you're tempted. This will destroy my soul. Gird your loins with the truth. I don't know that women wear them anymore, but you're probably familiar with the idea of a girdle. It's similar, it's sort of a woman's version of a belt for battle. The whole point of the belt that they're getting at here is sort of like a weightlifter's belt or a girdle. The sort of thing that solidifies your core so that it doesn't bend.

And whether we're talking about a girdle or we're talking about a weightlifter's belt, they're quite uncomfortable to wear. They're not the sort of thing you enjoy carrying on in because they limit your, they require certain things of you. You can't bend, you can't move, you can't breathe. But they provide support and they provide strength. And they make you able to do the thing that you need to do. And then he tells them, you need to put on the breastplate of righteousness. A breastplate we might think of as a bulletproof vest. You can get... shot in a lot of places in your body and probably be okay for the most part. But if you get shot right here, the chances of you dying go way up because inside this part of your body are vital organs, things you cannot live without. You can live without a lot of things down here and out there, but in here, you got to have that stuff or you will not live. And so he tells them, you need to put on a breastplate. You need to put on a bulletproof vest of righteousness so that you don't die. And so we could...

Understand what he's saying here about putting on a breastplate of righteousness as to say righteousness is meant to keep you alive. Righteousness is actually a protection to your vital functions. Doing the things that God commands us to do. Luis mentioned earlier prayer. When I'm tempted, we pray. That's one of the things that we ought to be doing as a regular habit. Reading and meditating and memorizing scripture. Prayer and fellowship. Public and private worship are the righteous habits that we ought to form to protect us. Obedience is the point here. You will not always feel like doing these things. You'll not always feel like praying or reading or considering or thinking about. You'll be too busy. You'll be too tired. If you were to go into the military, the way they prevent danger and prevent failure and avoid...

Conflict is repetition. We do the same things. If you've been in the military, you know men who are in the military. They just are very red. Like, this is what we do, and this is how we do it. And the reason I do it that way is because that's how I was trained to do it for years. This is just how it gets done. So that when I need my weapon, it's working. They clean it. They take it apart. They put it back together. And then later, they clean it, and they take it apart, and they put it back together. So that it's ready when they need it.

If you have a regular habit of reading your Bible and praying, thinking about what the Bible says, not just threading the words through your eyes, but going, okay, I'm going to think about what's God saying here? Why did he say that? What's that mean? Those things will be helpful to you in avoiding sin. They will fill up your time and your energy and your mind. Another way of thinking about it might be that if you find a particular time or place or occasion where you're under attack, A particular place of weakness. You might think about how to fight that temptation in terms of cultivating a spiritual discipline in that area. Maybe your temptations come to you at work. Maybe your temptations come to you in the morning. Maybe your temptations come to you at night. Maybe they come to you on the weekends. Maybe they come to you after you haven't slept well for three nights. Maybe they come to you the week before a big project is due at work or school. When do they come?

When do you face these things? What will you do to resist them? What can we grow in its place? When should we be having our devotions and when should we decide to have a time of prayer? And having done this, you should shod your feet, equip your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace. This idea of shodding your feet, we should think of it in terms of like cleats, okay? We could go into a lot of interesting exegetical sort of stuff about what this means. But basically what Paul's saying is you need to put cleats on so you don't get driven away from. When the opposition comes, you don't just get pushed over. To stand firm is to stand against pressure. And he says you need cleats on to do that. The gospel brings peace between us and God. But at the same time, it creates war with Satan. And so we need to be able to stand firm in the truth when Satan tempts us, when he pushes on us. We need to be able to hold our ground.

Take up the shield of faith, which will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows. This has to do with when you fail. You try. You're fighting. You're resisting. And yet, one of the arrows gets through. You fall. You fail and fall into sin. Then what? All is lost, throw down in defeat? No. Jesus Christ came to save you, save sinners. And you're to believe that by faith when you sin. Satan is an accuser. And he'll often tempt you or remind you of your past sins, of your past failures. When you fail, he'll say, see, I knew that you wouldn't, you couldn't. When those attacks come, only faith in God's mercy and his promises to redeem you will be able to neutralize them, to put out those lies. And Satan's quick to come and whisper in your ear. And what you ought to say when those temptations come is, you're right. You're right. I did that. That is who I am. That is what I've done.

But Christ has redeemed me and saved me. He knows all the stuff you're saying. And he's loved me anyway and saved me. And finally, take up your defensive, your protective armor. Take up a helmet of salvation. We need protection in every area. We'll be vulnerable at some point or another. Our minds have to actually take hold of it. You know, there are things that carry our minds away. Worries, fears, anxieties, anger, bitterness. We lose our heads. I don't mean to stamp out feelings or to stamp out the intangibles of our lives. I really don't. But how can we expect to overcome sin if we're losing our head all the time and giving in to whatever impulses we're feeling in the moment? All of us have impulses to do things, and we go, I know I shouldn't. I know that's not good. We ought to remember. Our minds ought to inform our hearts of what is right and what is good and who God is and that he's promised.

to save us from our sins. Our feelings, our circumstances, if they cause us to lose our heads, we die. And finally, he tells us you have to take up the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. The best example of this, I think, in Scripture is Jesus in the wilderness. When Satan comes to him and tempts him, I'll give you all the kingdoms of the earth. Turn this stone into bread. Having girded his loins with the truth, if you will, he has truth to fight Satan, to go on the offensive. to push off the danger. The Word is our only weapon against Satan's lies. This is our spiritual weapon. They're not just words on a page. Have you ever said in your heart, or maybe out loud, yeah, I know God says that, but I know the Bible says, but the things that come after that but are your spiritual destruction. Because what you're doing is you're taking the conflict that exists between a holy God, your God, and your Father,

And your temptations and saying, somehow these have to be reconciled so that I can have or do what I want without consequence. I was talking with one of my kids recently about Bible memory work. And he was behind on his Bible memory work. And I said to him, honey, you've missed an opportunity to store up a weapon to fight against your temptations. And I want you in the future to not neglect that opportunity. And he said to me, well, Daddy, I memorized 1 John 1.9. And I said, honey, that's sweet. And it really was. I was not being patronizing to him. I was really encouraged. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and righteous to forgive us all of our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I'm glad he knows that. But he needs to know more than that. So I said, do you want you to work on memorizing more than just forgiveness? I think a lot of the verse of the day or Christian artwork

the sorts of things that get talked about a lot in Christian circles are of a certain flavor, a flavor of forgiveness, a flavor of mercy, a flavor of grace, a flavor of no judgment. It turns out that if we consume a diet that's full of God loves you and he'll forgive you and his mercy is enough for all that, it turns out that we don't fight sin very much as a result of it. Those verses, out of context, out of the context of the rest of Scripture, don't help us fight sin. They say, you don't need to fight sin. You don't need to worry about it. It's not that big of a deal. And so for us to fight sin, we really do have to come to the Word of God, see it as an authority in our lives, telling us what's good for us, so that we're able to resist sin. So what do you do when you say, the Bible says, but I don't want to do that because,

I'm angry or I'm scared or I'm whatever. What do you do then? Then I think you pray, like Louise said, Lord, help me to, please help me to do battle with these sins. Help me to hate these sins. Help me to trust your word and love you more. Forgive me for the ways that I've failed in the past. Remember I said at the beginning that some of us say, well, I used to do that and it doesn't work. And I want to ask a different question. Have you ever had it work? I have. And I'm not talking about some magic special sort of thing you don't know anything about. I mean, in James where he says, resist the devil and he will flee from you. Have you ever had that happen? Do you believe that God does that? He drives Satan away from you and the temptations away from you when you resist it.

Have you had the clarity of mind at some point to say, you know what, there's this thing I want and I need and I've been organizing my day or my week or my life around it and now I'm coming to terms with the fact that I may not get what I want and I'm going to serve God anyway. And it's at that point that God takes away the temptation. When Vanessa and I got together, there was a time where we were broken up and we broke up because we were counseled that our relationship was not a healthy one, not a good one. So we listened to the counsel. It was very hard and painful for both of us. But the counsel was, this relationship is an idol. It's more important to you than your relationship with God. We think you need to take a break, get a part, pursue the Lord, and forget about this. Very hard counsel. We did. And my prayer through the whole time was, before I prayed, what I realized was,

The temptation I had to deal with was, am I going to serve God if I can't have Vanessa? Because I'd come to faith through getting to know her. And so the question was, will you stick around if I take away what you want? And so I prayed and asked God to help me stick around if I couldn't have what I wanted. And I'd say by the time we finally did get back together, like seven months later, God had answered that prayer. And that's not the only example that I could give. It's one from our lives. When we got back together, you were praying the same type of stuff for yourself. God does answer those prayers. He does hear those prayers, and he's happy to meet you in your weakness and to give you strength to fight. And I'll tell you, you won't feel like you have strength. There wasn't a day in that seven months that I thought, I'm strong enough, I'm okay. Those were hard weeks and months.

But God was merciful in giving us strength to trust him. And I remember thinking in that time, if I'm not what's good for Vanessa, then don't let us get back together. And there was a point where I sent her a letter saying, I'm sorry that the ways I've sinned against you, I hope you can forgive me, and I'm sorry that your future husband will have to clean up the mess I made. I'm the husband cleaning up my own mess. But I'd made a mess. That was one of the hardest letters I ever wrote. Because it was me saying, I'm going to let go of the thing that...

I really want. And God was merciful to me, to us, and has been since then. And so if I tell you that you need to fight in the strength that God provides, and when you see your sins, you have to say, okay, that's sin. And whatever my desires are, they have to come under the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. And if I can't have those things, then so be it. A pastor during all of that time said to me, I will call them, and we'd broken up. And I said, do you have any good books on marriage and about being a godly husband? And he gently said to me, are you dating anyone or planning on getting married soon? And I said, no, we just broke up. And he said to me, then I don't think you need to read any books about getting married right now. He said, you know what you should do? He said, you should go on the internet and search all the verses that talk about seeking God.

And you should memorize them. And forget about getting married right now because that's not what you need to do right now. So I did. And I printed them out and I stuck them on my wall in my bedroom and memorized them. Because he said, this is what you need right now. This is the strength you need. This is where you need to be giving your energy and your focus. And God used those things to deliver me from sin, to deliver us from sin, and ultimately to prepare us for one another to be parents of all the kids we have and to be here. Now with you guys. Ugh, so hard. So hard. And I commend it to you. Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. If you see sins in your life, you really do have to resist them. Your temptations are not an excuse for you to go into whatever sins or temptations are familiar to you. You really do have to live by faith to submit yourself to the word of God. And when it cuts across the grain of...

your sensibilities, you have to grow at that point. You have to ask God to help you to grow. And he will. He has. And it's glorious to see him do it. And you won't always get the girl back at the end. That was his way with us. That's not his way with everybody. But the work that he did in us was sufficient for us to be willing to be a part and to serve God without one another. So be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Pursue God where he can be found, which is in the scriptures. Read them, study them, pray them. Be absorbed in them. Learn about them. I'm not telling you just learn about theology. You understand? Some of you guys love theology. Great. Study theology. But get to know God. Get to see what his word says and what he says about the temptations and the sins that you face. And you'll find victory over sin. Will it be quick? Nope.

It will not be quick. You'll be doing this the rest of your life. Will it be easy? No. Because Satan doesn't want you to kill your sins and give them up. He doesn't want you to become more holy. But this is our pursuit as Christians. This is how we fight sin. And so we need to stop thinking so short term and think, I need to settle into this battle and I need to acquire the weapons I need and I need to sharpen them and then I need to learn how to use them. Our weapon is... Against temptation is the word of God. I'll close with this. I just realized in our scripture lesson, Matthew 23 today, I know the story about Pharisees and listen to them and do what they do but not what they say. But what stuck out to me today was that they seated themselves in the throne. That there was something bad about them seating themselves in a position of power. That they'd taken the place of Moses.

And it was because of their lust for power and respect and honor. I've really noticed it before. Just sort of passed over it. I'm like, well, that's just who they are. But this time I read and I was like, wait, they did something bad here because their motivations were rotten to read and study the Scriptures. And this week, ahead, and in the years that follow, read and study the Scriptures. Ask God to help you. Know Him and His Word. Store it up in your heart. Give your time and your energies to it. However it is, you can get it into your head. Some of you have better memories. Some of you have better attention spans. Some of you have more time than others. Get in the Word if you want to overcome sin. If you fight sin and you don't get in the Word, your victory, if there's any, will be short-lived. Let's pray.