Book: Ephesians

Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs
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Summary

This passage examines the command to sing from Ephesians 5:18-21 and Colossians 3:16-17, revealing that singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs is not optional but a vital part of the Christian life. We are reminded that singing is a sign of being filled by the Spirit, a God-designed means of ministering to one another, and a powerful tool that shapes our attitudes and actions toward thankfulness and righteous living.

Key Lessons:
1. Singing is a direct result and evidence of being filled by the Holy Spirit with the word of Christ — a spirit-filled Christian is naturally a singing Christian.
2. God designed music as a unique delivery system to embed theological truth deep into our hearts in ways that mere words cannot accomplish on their own.
3. Singing is not just vertical worship to God but horizontal ministry — we are commanded to teach and admonish one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
4. A legacy of hymns stored in the heart provides an anchor during seasons of depression, anxiety, grief, and even at the point of death.
Application: We are called to develop a personal and family legacy of singing by learning psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs — not just on Sundays, but daily. Fathers are challenged to lead worship in their homes. Each believer should invest time learning songs so the word of Christ dwells richly within, producing thankfulness and Christlike living.

Discussion Questions:
1. How often do you sing hymns or spiritual songs outside of Sunday worship, and what would it look like to make this a daily practice?
2. Can you think of a time when a song anchored you during a difficult season? How does this connect to Paul’s command in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3?
3. What practical steps can you take this week to begin building a shared body of songs within your family or small group?
Scripture Focus: Ephesians 5:18-21 and Colossians 3:16-17 form the central texts, teaching that Spirit-filled believers will sing to God and to one another with thankfulness. Lamentations 3:19-24 illustrates how song lifts believers from despair to hope. 2 Chronicles 20:21-22 demonstrates how praise and singing preceded God’s deliverance in battle.

Outline
Introduction

Let’s start with a word of prayer.

Father, it’s a privilege every once in a while to examine how we worship and to examine why we do the things that we do in worshiping you.

Lord, we desire to do everything according to your word and worship in song. Although it’s only one part of the worship overall we offer to you, worship in song is part of worship.

And Lord, help us as we look at these scriptures, as we examine our own worship, to see whether or not we match what you have laid out for us in your word.

We desire to do your will and to have all the blessings that you’ve made available to us in song. I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.

The Power of Music

Well, I’d like to start out today by asking you a question: who here has ever had an earworm?

An earworm. One of you has had an earworm. Okay, that’s disgusting. No. An earworm is not a literal worm in your ear. Although, interestingly enough, there is a worm called an earworm.

An earworm is a term that is used to describe a song that repeats endlessly in your head. Okay? It just gets stuck in your brain and has this sort of infinite loop quality. You sometimes can’t get rid of it. Some songs just seem to have this quality. Some of the canonical examples of this are the Macarena, which maybe if you’ve gone to a wedding and they play that, it just kind of plays endlessly in your head.

Who let the dogs out?

I remember when I heard that song, I just kept woofing.

Or the all-time champion of all earworms: Baby Shark. Who said that? Baby Shark.

That’s right.

If you search up—don’t do this now—but if you search up earworms online, you will find a fascinating rabbit hole. How to get rid of an earworm, how to create an earworm, and even Spotify playlists full of earworms for your listening pleasure.

Just goes to show though how powerful music is. And although many of you I’m sure do not want to be singing Baby Shark in your head all day, there are better songs that you could have in there. And that is really the whole message I wanted to get across today: don’t play Baby Shark, play something else.

“God has lovingly created this tool called music as a critical tool to build believers up in this life.”

In fact, God has lovingly created this tool called music, not only to entertain us or maybe sometimes annoy us, but as a critical tool to build believers up in this life. And the question I’d like for you to consider today with me is: are we using that tool as effectively as we could be?

To consider this question, I’d like for you to turn with me to two scriptures.

Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs Defined

But first, let’s turn to Ephesians chapter 5. Ephesians chapter 5 on your pew Bible will be page 1173 if you are turning there. And I do encourage you to turn there. We’ll have it up on the screen, but it’s better to look at it in the text. I’ve entitled the sermon today Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs because this is a phrase that appears twice in the Bible both from the Apostle Paul, once in Ephesians 5 and once in Colossians 3. In both command, in both cases, it is a command to sing. It is a command to sing. It’s not a suggestion. It’s not a recommendation.

It is a command.

“It is a command to sing. It’s not a suggestion. It’s not a recommendation.”

Now, these two sections are parallel sections, which means they share similar context. They share similar structure.

And we’re going to look at both verses today so that we can get a more complete picture of what the apostle has in mind when he describes this curious phrase, psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

Let’s read Ephesians 5 first. I’ll read it for you. Ephesians 5:18.

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the spirit, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God.

Even the father and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ. And we’ll flip over if you can just keep your finger there and flip over to page 11.

I’m sorry I got the page wrong probably.

Well that’s probably 173. This one is 1180 before one of those two. You can take a look. Colossians 3:16, it says, “Let the word of Christ dwell richly within you with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your heart to God. Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.

So, as we begin to break down some of the truths that the Lord has for us in these two passages, I first want to explain a little bit about this phrase, Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

What Are Psalms?

The word psalms probably refers to the Old Testament book of Psalms, primarily written by King David. These are the songs that the Israelites themselves would sing from during their temple worship and their festivals and other events. They would sing corporately and they would sing with instrumentation most of the time. And if anything about the psalms that they were written to express a huge range of emotion. There’s joy, there’s triumph, there’s sorrow, there’s fear, despair, lament, depression, anxiety.

And many of the songs we sing today are either borrowed directly from the Psalms or perhaps repeat the same themes.

“The psalms were written to express a huge range of emotion — joy, triumph, sorrow, fear, despair, lament.”

What Are Hymns?

We did that this morning. Now, this word hymns, this word hymns is probably referring to songs that showcase and recite theological truths. Hymns have meat to them. There’s theological meat.

And there’s examples of hymns scattered throughout of scripture. We’ve been going through the book of Revelation in one of our sermon series. And Revelation has six in that book alone of just hymns. Just one example, Revelation 4. This hymn is fascinating because it is sung by a mixed choir of angels and humans.

And Revelations 4:8, very familiar hymn.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.

Worthy are you, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things.

Just these two verses of what they’re singing or what we will be singing in heaven is a theological treatise.

Revelation 4:8: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”

In fact, just looking at what it says just in these two verses, he’s holy.

He’s thrice holy. God is eternal.

There’s no beginning and no end. He’s worthy.

He’s sovereign.

He’s the creator.

That’s incredible. Just in those two verses, you could preach six messages on that.

What Are Spiritual Songs?

And the last term, spiritual songs, refers to songs where God’s acts and his favor towards us are remembered and praised. This is probably a more personal type of song of song has a more personal feel sometimes might be even in the first person. And there are examples of this in the scripture as well. In Exodus 15, the song of Moses, that is the first song we encounter in the Bible.

And the song of Moses remembers how God was faithful to Israel in delivering them from the hands of the Egyptians and parting the Red Sea.

And Mary’s Magnific Magnificat in Luke 1 is another example of a spiritual song where she expresses her joy at God’s blessing. There are many, many others.

“Spiritual songs are where God’s acts and his favor towards us are remembered and praised.”

Why God Put So Many Songs in the Bible

We could go all day. Hundreds, not an exagger, not an exaggeration to say hundreds of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs packed into the Bible. And the question we have to ask is why did God put so many songs in the Bible?

Well, the obvious answer is that God wants us to sing. Both in this life and as we saw in the life to come, God loves music that honors his name.

“God wants us to sing — both in this life and the life to come. God loves music that honors his name.”

In fact, singing, as we’ve gone through Revelation, it struck me that singing seems to be one of the primary activities in heaven.

And it’s no exaggeration then to say that if you don’t rejoice in singing now, you may not have a lot to enjoy in heaven. Think about that.

There is a lot of music and singing and praising the Lord.

And so even now today as you sit here, I want to tell you that God wants you to be a singing people. He wants you to be a singing people.

Singing Is a Sign of Being Filled with the Spirit

So from our text today in Ephesians 5:1 18, I want I want to bring out for you three reasons why Christians such as ourselves are commanded to be a singing people. Three reasons why Christians are commanded to be a singing people.

Commanded.

The first reason number one is that singing is a sign of being filled with the spirit. Singing is a sign of being filled with the spirit.

“Singing is a sign of being filled with the Spirit.”

Verse 18, do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the spirit.

Speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Paul says, “Don’t get drunk with wine.” We know why we are not to get drunk with wine. Because when we become intoxicated with wine, we yield up what? Our self-control.

And we become controlled by the wine. We all know this.

But instead of being filled by wine, Paul says to be filled by the spirit. Or put another way, came up with this myself, put down the gin and pick up the guitar.

Whereas wine will lower your self-control and will tempt you to act according to your flesh.

Being filled with the spirit actually has the opposite effect. It increases your self-control. It gives you greater self-control to think and act according to the will of God, which is what you want anyways if you’re a Christian. If you get filled with wine, you will do things that later you will regret. But if you be if you’re filled by the spirit, you’ll do things that later you rejoice over both in this life and the life to come.

So what does it look like then to be filled with the spirit? What does it look like? And in our culture today a lot of people think this looks like rolling on the floor, foaming at your mouth, speaking gibberish, and it has nothing to do with this.

If that’s happening to you, you should be worried that you might be filled by an evil spirit, not by the Holy Spirit.

Filled by the Spirit with the Word of Christ

So what does this mean? Well, it turns out that in the grammar, many commentators have commented that it might be better here to read filled by the spirit instead of with the spirit.

That is, instead of the Holy Spirit sort of filling you in a metaphysical sense, the Holy Spirit is filling you with something.

You’re being filled with something. And to see what that is, we can now turn over to our Colossians 3 sister verse for a clue. And let me just read that again to you, which is right there. I think I’ll put both of them up there so you can reference them. It says, “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you.” So what are we filled with?

We are filled by the spirit with the word of Christ.

“We are filled by the Spirit with the word of Christ.”

So what is the word of Christ? I think we talked about this a little bit in the Sunday school.

It’s everything in the Bible.

Everything in the Bible that has to do with God’s plan and the truth of Christ and what he’s done for you. What led to his coming. Everything about who Christ is and everything about what he will do.

The Gospel Message at the Center

Most critically, it’s this gospel message.

The gospel message, as we talked about a little bit before during worship, is that although you are a sinner deserving of eternal wrath, of eternal judgment, your creator God sent his son, Jesus Christ, who himself was God in human flesh to live a sinless life for you that you should have lived. And then he died on the cross to pay for the death that you should have died.

And if you confess your sin and you confess your guilt and you believe in the work of Jesus Christ, your debt is instantly paid and you come into eternal life.

“If you confess your sin and believe in the work of Jesus Christ, your debt is instantly paid.”

Or just as we sang, his robes were mine. A wonderful exchange. Clothed in my sin, Christ suffered neath God’s rage. Draped in his righteousness, I’m justified. In Christ, I live. For in my place, he died.

Singing from the Heart

A natural result of being filled by the spirit with the word of Christ, it says back in Ephesians 5:19, is that you will sing and make melody with your heart to the Lord.

That’s the natural result. You will make melody. You’ll make music because music is the language of our emotions. You see, the truths of God’s word rightly understood ought not to just live here but it will touch your heart here.

God designed music so that it can uniquely express a type of beauty and a type of joy and a type of emotion in a way that mere words would struggle to do.

“God designed music so that it can uniquely express beauty, joy, and emotion in a way that mere words would struggle to do.”

And don’t get me wrong, this is not talking about the mechanical act of producing the music.

It must be with your heart. It must be with your heart. It must be heartfelt. In other words, God wants you to sing like you mean it. Like you mean it.

Worship Requires Both Spirit and Truth

True worship contains both logic and emotion and spirit and truth.

It’s worship in spirit and truth. It’s not enough just to acknowledge the facts about your salvation or to acknowledge the facts about Christ. You need to feel the right way about them.

“True worship contains both logic and emotion — spirit and truth.”

In fact, if you don’t feel something about them, then there is something profoundly wrong with your spiritual state. I I once was talking to one of my close friends who we went to their wedding a long time ago, many years ago.

It was a beautiful wedding.

Unforgettable.

Many years later, I was talking to the same friend and I casually came up how’s your marriage going? And let me be clear, there’s no obvious problems, but the he looked at me in the eye and he said something to me that I’ll never forget. And he he just looked at me and he said this. He said, “Well, look, at least I’m not cheating on her.

That’s not love, is it?

But that’s what it looks like when Jesus, but you worship with no passion.

It’s not love. And neither is that true worship. A spiritfilled, truthfilled Christian is a singing Christian. That’s what what it’s saying.

If you’re filled with the truth by the spirit, you can’t help but sing. It’ll burst out of your mouth.

And remember, this is not something that I’m talking about that really only happens on Sundays. This is something that should be happening every day of your life.

Singing Is a Mandated Means of Mutual Ministry

So singing is a sign of being filled by the spirit. But there is more because the second reason we see from this text that we are commanded to sing is number two singing is a mandated means of mutual ministry. I’m quite proud of that. Got four M’s in there. It is a mandated means of mutual ministry.

Look again at Ephesians 5:18.

Paul is not merely commanding us to sing for our own benefit, is he?

But he is saying to speak to one another.

And likewise in our parallel verse in parallel verse in Colossians 3:16, it says to teach and admonish again one another.

Colossians 3:16: “Teaching and admonishing one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”

Singing as Corporate Testimony

So not only do we have a vertical component of singing where we worship up to God, there is a horizontal component, we sing to each other to encourage, teach and counsel one another. And here we realize how we sing, bringing back to Sunday mornings, how we sing to the Lord on Sunday mornings is a powerful testimony to those around us.

If you are sort of barely moving your lips, that says something about how you feel about the Lord.

Remember, the testimony is not about the musicians up here. We’re just sort of providing the music. What makes our time really special that really is unique that no one else in the world can do that only we can do is that Calvary Community Church, God’s church here, lifts our voices together and we give him praise.

We sing to each other with one voice and we lift up that voice collectively to God. You are participating not only in an individual worship experience, but we are together worshiping God as a church.

“We sing to each other with one voice and lift up that voice collectively to God.”

Your voice is only one out of many in the choir.

It is the church praising God.

That’s one aspect of this. But this isn’t talking just about Sundays. Okay?

The word Sunday does not appear in that verse.

I think Paul has a deeper meaning in mind and I think this applies outside of our gathered worship.

Paul’s Use of Song Lyrics

And for a long time I think I struggled to understand this. I didn’t really understand what Paul meant here by teaching and admonishing until I noticed Ephesians 5:14.

And I think there’s a slide here. You can go up in your if you’re in your Bibles just look up three verses.

Look up at Ephesians 5:14. This is really cool to see. I was surprised.

Look at Ephesians 5:14.

Just to give you some context, verse 13, Paul is telling them to stay away from deeds of darkness.

Similar to what we learned in Sunday school, actually, stay away from the deeds of darkness. Why? Because everything is going to ex be exposed to the light of Christ. Okay? So if that everything is going to be exposed to the light of Christ, you’re not going to be sneaking off doing deeds of darkness over here. Well, he wants to make his point. And how does he choose to make his point? Verse 14.

For this reason, it says, “Awake sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Now, where do you think that quote is from? You can look through the Bible.

It’s not there.

Paul is quoting a song. He is quoting a hymn that they would have known, that they would have been familiar with. And you see, when Paul tells you to teach and admonish one another with songs and hymns and spiritual songs, he’s doing it right there.

Ephesians 5:14: “Awake sleeper, arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

He’s bringing out a song lyric that they would know.

And he does this actually quite often.

Once to look for it, you’ll find it.

It’s not the only time.

So what is he doing by reminding them of the lyric that they already have been singing, he causes them to hear the song in their mind, and they’ll sing it to them to themselves over and over and then they will remember his message.

In other words, he’s tying his message to their version of an earworm.

I think that’s cool.

So, Paul says, “You do that, too.” Okay.

Building a Shared Body of Songs

Understand though that implicit in this command here is that there’s an expectation that the church will have a shared body of hymns or a shared body of songs to draw from so that when we reference a verse you’ll know it. Although when we come on Sundays we do try to teach you some songs, we probably don’t sing these songs often enough for you to really know them. You probably do need to take some time at home.

In fact, there have been some studies on this that show it takes about 15 repetitions of a song not too far apart for you to really start to understand the tune and the words from memory. There’s just no way we can repeat a song that often just on Sunday mornings. I look through, and even the most overplayed songs we have, we do like five or six times a year. So you probably have some homework to do to truly learn these songs. And I do have a recommendation this morning.

“It takes about 15 repetitions of a song for you to really start to understand the tune and the words from memory.”

Just a few weeks ago, the Gettys, who we sing many of their songs, came out with the sing hymnal and we have a few of them in the book nook at a very discounted price because we had the launch price. If you want to pick one up, you can. We don’t make any money off of them. But the nice thing about it is that it has a lot of the songs that we sing as a church, both the older hymns and the newer ones that we sing today. And it’s also very beautifully done.

As a personal testimony, my family bought a bunch of those copies for each person. Every night we make it a point to sing a hymn together, and it’s been a blessing to do that. I would actually encourage you to consider making that a practice in your own family as well because this teaches our kids the hymns and we should be teaching them to our kids because the alternative that they’re listening to is much worse.

The Story of Joni Eareckson Tada

And to give you sort of an idea of the impact this could have, I want to tell you a little story I recently heard by Joanie Ericson Tatada. Joanie became a quadripollegic at the age of 17 when she broke her neck in a diving accident and she lost the the use of all her limbs.

After that, she spent many years in the hospital battling depression.

But listen to how she describes what really got her through those years. She said, “My mother was always singing.

Whether doing housework, unloading groceries, or driving in the car, the words of hymns were always on her lips.

And during my long years of being in the hospital, she never spoke words of defeat or despair.

She always borrowed words of hope from the stanzas of old hymns.” And she continues, “And so when I was in the hospital fighting back tears at night, I would sing these same hymns from my childhood. The stanzas were an anchor for my vacasillating emotions as I battled depression.

Help of the helpless. Oh, abide in me.” Or, “Here’s my heart. Oh, take and seal it.

Seal it for thy cords above.” These rock solid words kept me anchored whenever I felt my emo my emotions taking me down a dark path.

“These rock solid words kept me anchored whenever I felt my emotions taking me down a dark path.”

How did Joanie get those hymns in her heart?

They were taught her by her mother.

What a blessing that turned out to be.

Fathers as Worship Leaders at Home

And just want to make a quick aside, men. If you’re a man here, if you’re a father, you cannot leave it to the mother. I want to challenge you as fathers to be the worship leader of your own homes and take the lead on this, to teach your family some good songs. Amen.

“Fathers, be the worship leader of your own homes and take the lead to teach your family some good songs.”

I’ll borrow from the late Voddie Baucham. You either say amen or you say ouch.

But I’m convinced that if the psalms and the hymns and the spiritual songs are in your heart, they will greatly strengthen not only your family but our church.

Singing Affects Our Attitudes and Actions

Well, we’ve seen so far we’re commanded to sing because one, singing is a sign of being filled by the spirit. Two, singing is a mandated means of mutual ministry. And lastly, singing affects our attitudes and actions.

Look in verse 20 of Ephesians 5:20. After Paul commands to sing, he says this, “Always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God, even the Father, and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.” Here the chain of events he’s laying out for us is this: you’re filled by the spirit. This leads to singing. This leads to thankfulness. This leads to righteous action. In this case, he’s going to talk about right living and submitting to one another and husbands and wives and all of that. But I want you to notice that it’s all connected. It all goes together.

The parallel verse in Colossians is even more explicit than that. And it puts it in this way in verse 16 of chapter 3. Singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.

Here, if you look at that verse, it says with thankfulness. That is how you ought to sing. You ought to sing with the attitude of thankfulness. And that’s the attitude that’s cultivated in you by the songs. And this thankful heart will then lead you to righteous action. In Colossians, it’s everything you say or do, you will do in the name of the Lord Jesus. That is, you will represent Jesus.

“Sing with the attitude of thankfulness — and that thankful heart will lead you to righteous action.”

You will do what he would do or say what he would say.

And all this started in the beginning by having the word of Christ dwell richly within you. It all comes back to the word of Christ.

Music as God’s Delivery System

In this case though, that word of Christ is packaged into a song.

You see, in the wisdom of God, music is God’s delivery system to get those truths to absorb into our hearts and to stay there.

One preacher put it this way, and it resonated with me. He says this: it’s like you might be the best preacher in the world, but very seldom will people leave your church chanting your sermon, but they often leave your church singing your songs.

“Music is God’s delivery system to get those truths to absorb into our hearts and stay there.”

Singing Instead of Anxiety

I want to bring you now to an idea that some of you might think is a bit radical, and you may forgive me if you do, but I do want you to chew on it a little bit. See if this makes sense to you. And that is that many of our modern problems—we have anxiety and depression more than ever—we’re trained by society to think that the answer to these problems lies in a pill.

But we have to realize that these are not new problems in any sense. In fact, we are not the first generation to struggle with anxiety or depression, are we?

Men and women of the Bible dealt with this all the time. And what did they do? Well, they seem to have done a lot of praying and singing.

“Men and women of the Bible dealt with anxiety and depression — and they did a lot of praying and singing.”

Praying and singing. Let me show you a few examples.

Biblical Examples of Praying and Singing

Just take Jesus the night he was betrayed. When he was afflicted with deep sorrow, it’s notable that he sang a hymn with the disciples and then he prayed in the garden.

Paul and Silas in Acts 16:24 were arrested and tortured. And before they knew whether God would rescue them, what did we find them doing? They were singing hymns of praise to God and praying, singing hymns of praise to God. That’s verse 25 of Acts 16. And actually the words after that are also striking: the prisoners were listening to them.

And you see, if you deal with your problems in God’s way with praying and singing, you can be a witness as well. In fact, when the world sees that you deal with your problems in the biblical way, they’ll want to know how you’re doing it. They want to know whether or not there is something to this Jesus thing.

“If you deal with your problems in God’s way with praying and singing, you can be a witness as well.”

Let me give you one other example.

Jehoshaphat’s Battle Cry of Praise

Earlier today in our very long scripture reading we read in 2 Chronicles 20. If you were paying attention you saw that King Jehoshaphat and the people of Judah at that time had a problem. And their problem was that they were anxious.

They were fearful for good reason. They were surrounded on all sides by enemies, by nations, hopeless odds.

And you see, God had not commanded them to suit up and pick up their weapons and go out and fight, but he actually commanded them to do the opposite. He said, “Don’t prepare for battle. Just go out there.

Simply trust me to deal with your enemies.” Now, this is an insane act of faith. You understand? You’re surrounded by enemies. They’re all armed. They all have weapons. They’re all coming against you. They want to kill you.

It’s not like hidden. They actually want to kill you. And God says, “Just go out there and stand there.” The people were fearful for good reason. I think I would be afraid.

So, what did Jehoshaphat do? I want to remind you in verse 21, he appointed those who sang to the Lord and those who praised him in holy attire as they went out before the army and said, “Give thanks to the Lord for his loving kindness is everlasting.” And when they began singing and praising, the Lord sent ambushes against the son of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah. And so they were routed.

Think about this. This was their battle cry. They went out there completely unprepared for battle. And God says, “This is your battle cry. Give thanks to the Lord. Give thanks to the Lord to remember that God will love them faithfully forever. Remember God could have destroyed their enemies at any time.” But the scripture says he waited for them to begin singing. He wanted them to sing that song. And that is the very same spirit of thanksgiving that Paul is telling us to have here.

“God could have destroyed their enemies at any time, but Scripture says he waited for them to begin singing.”

As a result of our singing and our thanksgiving, God will take care of your enemies.

We are also at the front lines of a spiritual war. Don’t forget the enemies are aligned up against us also, are they not? The odds are hopeless.

So when you’re up against it and when the chips are down, trust him. Turn to prayer and praise to supplication and singing.

Well, so far we’ve seen three reasons that we are commanded to sing. First, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs is a sign of being filled by the spirit with the word of Christ. Second, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs is God’s mandated means for mutual ministry. And third, singing affects our attitudes and our actions to fill us with joy and thanksgiving and spur us on to live for Christ.

To close our time today, I want to show you a few vignettes. I want to show you actually one of my favorite songs in the Bible and its legacy that it’s had.

Jeremiah’s Song of Hope in Lamentations

This is in Lamentations 3.

When was the last time you read the book of Lamentations? Lamentations 3. Let’s see if I can get a page number.

Let’s try to turn to it. If anybody has a page number, shout it out.

Okay. 822.

Lamentations 3. The book of Lamentations was written by the prophet Jeremiah.

The context of the book is that he was overlooking the destruction of his home, Jerusalem, by the Babylonians. As he watched his friends, his family, his countrymen, including children, being tortured, enslaved, and slaughtered, while he was watching the young women of Jerusalem be raped. It tells us that explicitly in Lamentations 5. Jeremiah was struggling with grief and confusion.

Why would God allow this?

Jeremiah is sitting just outside the city watching all this happen and he is in a place of deep despair.

You see this from the text in verse 8 of Lamentations 3. He’s expressing his frustration that God doesn’t seem to hear his prayer and even seems to be an enemy to him. He says, “When I cry out and call for help, he shuts out my prayer. He is to me like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in secret places.” This is graphic language to speak about God, isn’t it? I don’t know if I could speak about God that way without being a little afraid to be honest.

Just skip down to verse 18. Verse 18, I think for me, is one of the most haunting lines in the entire Bible. He says this, “For I say my strength has perished and so has my hope from the Lord.” Jeremiah was in such despair that he says his hope, the prophet of God spoke to God, “My hope in the Lord has died.”

Maybe you can relate to what Jeremiah feels.

Now remember, I want you to know that this whole book of Lamentations is a song book. Did you know that Lamentations is a song meant to be sung?

Chapter 3 itself is a song.

So why would he include this in a song?

Well, to get above his despair, I want you to look at what happens in verse. Sorry, I lost my place here.

Okay, let’s see. Verse 24 or here we go.

The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him. It is good. Okay. Yeah. Let’s do verse 19. Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and bitterness. Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down before me within me. And then he says this, this I recall to mind. Okay, so that’s the turning point. I would think that if this was a song that maybe this is the moment where the music would change from maybe a minor key to a major key and the strings would swell and start to build. This I recall to mind. This I recall to mind. Therefore, I have hope.

The Lord’s loving kindness indeed never ceases. For his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.

Lamentations 3:22-23: “The Lord’s loving kindness indeed never ceases. His compassions never fail. Great is your faithfulness.”

The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore, I have hope in him.

What happens to the hopelessness and the despair?

Well, he recalled certain things to mind.

As Israel sang this song in their worship, they would all be reminded that this is the way out of hopelessness.

This is a biblical counseling session compressed into a song.

And this is what songs can do for us.

Great Is Thy Faithfulness

They can remind us of the truth and it can drill deep into our hearts. In fact, this part of scripture is what inspired the modern English hymn known as what?

“Great is thy faithfulness.” That song, by the way, was written by a New Jersey resident.

Thomas Chisholm lived in Vinland, New Jersey in 1923, not that long ago. His problem is that he had a lifelong struggle with health issues and accompanying financial problems. Sounds familiar, right? Left him bedridden and in and out of the hospital and eventually forced him to step away from his ministry, which he was only in for one year.

After that, he became a life insurance salesman to pay the bills. Not that long ago, but his real passion was writing poems and hymns. To counsel himself from all of these struggles that he was having, he wrote this hymn based on Lamentations 3.

You see, the best hymns are just mini sermons pressed down, bottled up, and encapsulated for us into a compact song.

“The best hymns are just mini sermons pressed down, bottled up, and encapsulated into a compact song.”

This hymn went viral and became actually one of the top five most popular hymns today.

Singing into the Arms of Jesus

Incredible legacy. But I want to give you one last story about this hymn as we close.

This story is one I once heard from Paul Tripp who says his mother had a legacy of singing hymns all throughout her life. She didn’t just know the hymns. He says she knew the number of every hymn in the hymnal.

And when she was on her deathbed, her family was around her singing the hymns and they sang through the entire hymnal. He describes this moment when his mother was no longer responsive in any physical sense. She was basically unconscious. But as they were singing that song, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” he looked down at the seemingly comatose woman and she was mouthing the words. No song, no sound was coming out.

And he says this: “Because of the legacy of hymns in her life, she sang her way into the arms of Jesus. She was able to sing the rest of ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness’ to Jesus face to face.” Since hearing that story, I’ve often thought to myself, that’s how I want to go out.

“Because of the legacy of hymns in her life, she sang her way into the arms of Jesus.”

I want to go out with a song of praise on my lips.

Conclusion

So then brothers and sisters, how about you? Will you now develop a legacy of songs and hymns in your life?

If so, here’s what you should do. You should get a hymnal. Doesn’t have to be that one. There are also great resources online.

You should learn some psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Pick good ones. Let some of those words burrow in your head.

Do it with your family and friends. It’s more joyful together.

And through those many songs, let the word of Christ dwell richly in your heart, filling you with thanksgiving and renewing you with the strength to fight.

“Let the word of Christ dwell richly in your heart, filling you with thanksgiving and renewing you with the strength to fight.”

And then on that day when it’s your turn to lie on your deathbed and you are just about to be ushered through that great veil that separates life and death, may you too have a joyful song on your lips and you can finish triumphantly as you greet your savior face to face.

Amen. Let us pray. Father, we are so grateful for this word and we’re so grateful for even your gift of music. You have designed such an ingenious system.

Lord, there’s so much of the world’s music coming through our ears all the time. Some of these things can be entertaining, but they can also be a corrupting influence on us. I pray, Lord, that you would help us to develop in our lives a legacy of good spiritual songs and hymns so that the word of Christ may dwell richly in us and that we would be motivated and inspired to thankfulness and obedience. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.
October 5, 2025
Vital Characteristics for Mothers to Walk Wisely

In this special Mother’s Day sermon, Pastor Babij teaches from Ephesians three vital characteristics of a Christian mother who walks wisely:
1) She walks carefully before God in order to please Him
2) She walks in a controlled manner with God as a Spirit-filled believer
3) She walks compliantly before God in reverential fear

Full Transcript:

This morning, grab your Bible, grab your iPhone, grab your iPad, whatever you’re using this morning. Turn to Ephesians chapter 5. Today we’re going to be looking at the vital characteristics for mothers to walk wisely.

I’m thankful very much for my mother and thankful for the example she’s been. The other example that I have of a mother is my own wife. She has been a great blessing in mothering our children. Then I have tons of examples in the congregation over the years. All the mothers that I have observed in our congregation that have raised children and dealt with difficult situations and and how they weathered through that, especially in their trust in the Lord and their understanding and knowledge of Scripture. That really was the key and that will always be the key, to trust the Lord, to follow His word, to put those principles into practice. They can be used to be passed on to the next generation, so we can truly, with God’s help, raise the next generation to love the Lord and to follow His precepts and His Word and to carry the baton of the gospel to those that we can, and to continue it on until the Lord comes back. That is really the purpose of part of mothering, is to raise up their children to love Christ, and at least to be an example of what it means to love Christ.

So today let’s have a word of prayer as we look into Scripture today. Lord, thank You so much for this opportunity that You’ve given today to bless us. You’ve given us this venue so we can get the word of God out in an instructional way. Lord, even though it is not what we’re used to and it’s not fellowshipping together with each other, I pray that we would anticipate that day that you bring us together and all these restrictions would be lifted and we get back to normal very soon. I just pray You give us wisdom on how to do that. And I pray that You would be with those who lost loved ones and are even sick right now, just bring Your comforting hand upon them, put it upon them, Lord. I pray you would raise up those who have gotten sick. Thank you Lord for preventing many of us from getting sick, and I just asked You Lord that You would continue to do that, as we just come to trust You everyday for our very life, our very breath, for everything You’ve given us. Lord, now as we come to Your word, please use it to edify us and bless us for Your sake. I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.

So this title of the vital characteristics for mothers to walk wisely assumes and presupposes that mothers already know how to live wisely. That is they know the difference between a foolish walk, a naive walk, and a wise walk. The wise person in Scripture is not necessarily someone who has great intellectual attainment, but one who has moral and spiritual perception, one who fears the Lord, and is the beginning of knowledge. Therefore, a wise mother knows in order to be pleasing to God, her life must demonstrate three vital characteristics. Now in implementing these characteristics, I believe that all mothers are going to have influence over their family, their children, over other people. I was reading this article about a pastor in England many many years ago, G. Campbell Morgan his name was. He had four sons, and four of his sons all became preachers and ministers of the gospel, which was amazing. One day, a person came up to one of the sons and said to him: of all the four sons, who is the best preacher? And he looked and thought for a minute and he looked at his father who was standing there and he said: the best preacher in our family is our mother. Now, she never came behind a pulpit to preach. She never led a men’s group or anything like that, but she preached in her home by the life that she lived and that life poured into her four boys, raised up four preachers of the gospel. That’s amazing. The boys knew where give the credit when it came to the example that was set before them on what it means to be godly, what it means to be a Christian, what it means to live for the Lord, what it means to live a really simple life for the Lord. So those same principles are ours today that we can use to build up the next generation.

As we look at Ephesians chapter 5, the first vital characteristic of a woman who wants to walk wisely is a woman who has a careful walk. If you notice in verse 15, it says:

Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil.

In other words, a wise mother knows that she needs to walk carefully before the Lord. Actually, the Greek term here, a familiar one to us, is the word akribos, which we get the word acrobat. It carries the idea of accuracy with care. An acrobat brings to mind someone who does difficult and hard moves with precision and accuracy, like a person who walks on the high wire or somebody who walks the balancing beam. It takes a lot of skill, when you look at the olympics and those people are flipping on over on this little beam and landed perfectly and all those kind of things. It takes practice. It takes discipline. It takes just the needed organization in one’s life to be able to do that with skill. Now, without much practice, their moves could be fatal. I would not want to try to do that if I didn’t practice it for many many months and years, because I’d probably break my head, and so would you. Then, a wise mother really walks carefully and with accuracy and desires to practice walking more skillfully each and every day.

Now this wisdom of a careful walk is really manifested in two ways in our passage. The first one is that a mother who desires to be wise mother understands the preciousness of time. For it says here:

making the most of your time,

That wisdom here is really the skills for living, the skill for doing God’s will and pleasing Him. There’s a passage of Scripture in the Old Testament in Psalm 90:4-12. This is a psalm that Moses tells, spoken of him, telling forth of how difficult it was in the wilderness. There was many funerals in the wilderness and how precious time was to do what is right. This is some of the things in Psalm 90. It says about how short life is:

like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night.

Verses five and six:

like grass which sprouts anew. In the morning it flourishes and sprouts anew; toward evening it fades and withers away.

Verse nine:

we have finished our years like a sigh. As for the days of our life, they contains seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away.

And verse twelve:

So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.

So there’s the goal of redeeming the time in our life and realizing time is precious, is to offer to the Lord a heart of walking skillfully through life by using the principles God has given us in His word to do so. A wise mother knows she’s working against the clock, and that time is irreversible and it marches on unwilling to wait for anyone to catch up. So what does she do? It says in Ephesians 5:16 and for anybody who’s walking in the Spirit: make the most of your time. She redeems the time. Redeem has the idea of buying up the time or taking advantage of the time. She strives to make the right use of every opportunity. The old english word “opportunity” means toward the port. It suggests a ship taking advantage of the wind and the tide to arrive safely in port. So that’s what she does. Her goal is to please the Lord. Verse 10 of chapter 5 of Ephesians it says:

trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.

A second thing under a careful walk is that a wise mother is not ignorant of the presence of evil. Life is filled with evil. And because she desires to be wise, the only solution is to make the most of her time. She is aware of that time is short and the days are evil, bad, wicked, sinful. There is wickedness in high places and the evil one is active in fighting for the battle of the mind. That is what he desires. The real evil she is concerned about is the evil of ignorance about God and the foolish trends and people and circumstances to which people quickly succumb to, which deepens their ignorance and inflamed their passions to desire substitutes instead of the true and living God. She wants to steer her children away from foolishness in order to live wisely, because in the study of proverbs we know that there are really three persons there. There is the naive, and all children are born naive. All children are born foolish. Some children go on to be scoffing children, and she wants to steer those children away from being naive, being foolish, being a scoffer, and she wants to raise a wise child, to steer the child away from foolishness in order to live wisely.

That means there’s an understanding that one learns from Scripture to be able to steer a child and even your own heart away from what characterizes a foolish person. What does characterize a foolish person? There are several things. The first one could be that a foolish person is generally governed by feelings. Proverbs 1:22 tells us:

How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded? And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing and fools hate knowledge?

She wants to get them to love the right things, not to be just guided by feelings that would usually lead down the wrong path. Also, a foolish person is guided by desires. I must have what I like. That is really foolish because Proverbs 14:12 tells us:

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

Also, a foolish person regularly is governed by impulses and instincts. So feelings, desires, impulses, and instinct, they all kind of go together, but many times that’s what leads them. Like Proverbs 26:11 tells us:

Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.

He does not learn from past mistakes, does not learn from even his own mother and father and them giving him wisdom, but ends up repeating foolishness over and over again.

Also, there is an inadequacy in their thinking. They think inadequately, where it says in Proverbs 18:2:

A fool does not delight in understanding, but only in revealing his own mind.

They never think ahead – gets an idea and doesn’t even think through it or to the outcome or the implications of what they’re deciding to do. They just jump right in and and not think what danger they would end up in if they follow that course of action.

So the fool doesn’t really consult the plans and the specifications laid out in the Bible. Usually, they don’t usually listen to anybody. They don’t even think. They surely don’t think – what does God think? They surely don’t desire to please the Lord. Also, the fool is someone who lacks balance. It says in Proverbs 3:35:

The wise will inherit honor, but fools display dishonor.

In, other words she’s armed with, in Scripture, this knowledge and with this knowledge she’s able to walk carefully and does not want to walk carelessly. That is without proper guidance and forethought. She wants to be someone who is awake, like it says in verse 14 of Ephesians chapter 5:

For this reason it says, “Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

So she is not a sleepwalker. She is awake. Wise women look around and see what is going on so that they don’t live like fools and they’re able to teach their children not to live like fools or to stay naive, especially not to become a scoffer. So these things – the shortness of life, the presence of evil, do not make her crazy or frantic or even dismayed. At least it should not. It leaves her focused upon the Lord and dependent upon Him to accomplish His will through her.

That leads me to a second vital characteristic of a wise woman. That is that they have a controlled walk. Verse 17 through verse 19, it says:

So then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord;

The wisdom of a controlled walk is really manifested in several ways. The first way is a wise mother understands the will of the Lord. For it says:

do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.

Now understand here means to comprehend. It means to perceive or to have insight into. The word suggest using your mind to comprehend intellectually and to discover the will of God. Now when it comes to the will of God, Christians are not to seek mystical experiences or to rely on hunches or feelings or just inner leadings – follow your heart type of thing. The will of God here is to be equated with Scripture. According to Deuteronomy 29:29, there are two senses to God’s will. It says there:

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.

So the secret will of God, we don’t have to worry about that. That is the decreed will of God. Like it says in Psalm 115:3:

But our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases.

God is because God is God, and He will do His will no matter what. But the revealed will of God, that is the prescriptive will of God. The perceptive will of God, that’s in his word. We all have His word. We can follow His word. In fact Paul tells us in Romans:

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

In fact, a parallel passage of Scripture to the Ephesians passage of Scripture is Colossians 3:16, where it says:

Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

So the word-filled Christian and the spirit-filled Christian produce the same results, which is that teaching and singing to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

There was a person who wrote a book once called I think “Finding the Will of God”. And in that book, God’s will for us is to be saved, to be sanctified, to be serving, to be suffering, and to be Spirit-filled. Well, this passage of Scripture picks up the last one specifically, that God has given us a mind and our minds are to discover the will of God in the word of God. Therefore, the Christian woman can walk carefully and accurately because she knows what God wants her to do.

The second way a controlled walk is manifested is found in verses 18 and 19. That is that a wise mother continues to be filled with the Holy Spirit. That is God’s will, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. She is known by living free of fleshly and sinful controls, where it says in verse 18:

do not get drunk with wine. for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit,

A command given there, that a wise woman gives herself over to the control of the Holy Spirit who lives in her. She wants to be controlled by God’s Spirit and not her flesh, not her old way of life, not her old sins, her old habits. She wants to be controlled, strengthened, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Of course the Holy Spirit is not going to violate His word, so she wants to be word-filled and spirit-filled to live the Christian life and to be involved with Christian service and to raise her family in the will of God. That means she put herself at the disposal of the Spirit so that she is constantly controlled by the Holy Spirit. That means that she is not controlled by evil forces, by strong drink or drugs, or anything that can control her outside of herself or in her body other than the Spirit of God and the word of God, or being controlled by the baser desires of her flesh. And why is that? Because she wants to be controlled by the Spirit, and He leads out of her the nobler instincts and capacities of her soul. It’s like it says in Galatians 5:16:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh.

That walk is really the direction of one’s life. It’s the quality of how they walk and how they live their lives. And so that’s what it’s saying. Don’t be controlled by other things, but be controlled by the Spirit. Be filled with the Spirit of God.

Now, to be filled with the Spirit of God, that means something is going on inside of that person, inside of all people who are walking in the Spirit. Actually, there are three results of walking in the Spirit or being filled with the Spirit. The first result is found in verse 19. It’s the result of being full of joy. She is known for her spiritual conversation. Verse 19:

speaking to one another in psalms and hymns…

When the focus of the believer’s heart is the Lord, then Christian joy is always present. In spiritual fellowship, we address one another, not with worldly chatter, but really in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. So the word “speaking” here is really a word that is an imperative. It’s a command that means to talk or to converse with. Implied is the purity and the joyful simplicity in which someone has a conversation with others about her Lord, about their Lord. In which ways? It says in three ways. In psalms. Now psalms are usually spoken of the nature of the work of God the Father. If you take your Bibles very quickly and turn back to Psalm 95:1-6, you get this sense there, in this passage of Scripture, that it is directing the praise there to the Father, in His work. For it says in Psalm 95:1:

O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord, let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving, let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.

There it is. And then it says:

For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods, in whose hand are the depths of the earth, the peaks of the mountain are His also. The sea is His, for it was He who made it, and His hands formed the dry land. Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.

Here, when one is being led by the Spirit, is walking in the Spirit, they are talking about the nature and the works of God and they learn to praise God for all the good things that He has done and is doing in their life presently.

Then the next word is that they sing hymns. Often hymns are directly to the redemptive work of Christ, not necessarily specifically every single hymn, but God the Son is often exemplified in hymns. Like it says in Acts 16, when at midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise to God and the prisoners were listening to him. So they were singing to the Lord, even being in a very bad situation being in jail, and they’re praising God for allowing the Lord to use them and give His word to others. And because of it, they were putting in jail. Yet their hearts were not moved. The heart still sang praises to the Lord.

Also a woman would be known for her spiritual songs. It says in Ephesians 5:19:

and spiritual song, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord.

Here, spiritual songs, possibly directed at the Holy Spirit of God or things pertaining to the Spirit, singing with thankfulness in your hearts it says in Colossians 3:16. She is a woman who joyfully converses with others, exhorting them to worship her Lord, and practices Christ’s consciousness in her home. All this music originates in her heart. When any person is at peace with God through Jesus Christ and they’re in the word of God and the word of God is washing their mind, it’s transforming their mind, then the outcome and the results of that is that she will be a person who definitely has joy in her life. It comes right from the depth of her heart. Now tell me that is not going to influence children in the home, when you have a wife or a mother whose mothering her children, and she is joyful. Where are they going to learn joy from? They’re going to learn joy from her example and how she dealt with things in the home.

So the evidence to recognize a spiritual mother is that she knows how to live joyfully. That means the object and the focus of her life is the Lord. She’s not focused on the problems. She’s not focused on herself. She has an an occupation with spiritual things and enjoyment of them. She has a joy inside of her that is expressed outwardly in the fellowship with her family, with her husband, with her children, with her neighbors, with the brethren in her church. She has a joy about her.

So the definition of Christian joy is really an emotion springing from a deep deep deep down confidence that God is in perfect control of everything, no matter what is happening and going on. In fact, there’s no event or circumstance that can occur in the life of a Christian that should diminish a Christian’s joy, except one area. And that is the area of sin. When sin is in our heart, joy seems to be trumped and is not there. So sin has to be looked for and repented of and cast out and put to death. Then joy returns. That is important. So Christians are to have a joyful heart, and a joyful heart is beneficial to our physical health. It’s beneficial to our spiritual health. Even in Proverbs 17:22 it says:

A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones,

So if a woman could exemplify that to her family, that is great tremendous influence upon the minds and hearts of those who are observing it.

A second result of being filled with the Spirit of God is to be grateful for what one has. It says in verse 20 of Ephesians chapter 5:

always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father,

Gratitude is the second result of being filled with the Spirit of God. There are a few times and few circumstances in which a person does not give thanks, or she does not give thanks. In fact, she has a constant character about her. She is always thanking the Lord and the Father for all things. And it is true that a grateful person is probably a godly person, and that godliness and gratitude seem to go hand in glove or hand in hand. In fact, as our text communicates, thankfulness is the preeminent sign of being filled with the Spirit of God. That also means, back in the Thessalonians chapter 5, to quench the Spirit of God is not to be thankful. So it has been said that thankfulness is the least of the virtues and ingratitude the worst of the vices. It is probably thought to be an easy virtue, and yet there are few people who are distinguished for thankfulness. It’s sad to say that people are more notable or noted for their whining and their complaining and their grumbling and their nagging than they are their thankfulness. Those are not fruits of the Holy Spirit. Those are fruits of the flesh. Those are fruits of self. Those are the kind of things that we have to put to death in our lives and mothers need to put to death. Because if you are going to be like that before your children, you’re teaching them something. Whether you have them in a classroom or not, they’re watching you every single day. In fact, it was the apostle Paul in Romans who said that unthankfulness is linked to dishonoring God and suppressing His truth and reveals a foolish heart. For he says this in Romans 1:21:

For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

So their heart of foolishness became more darkened just by them not being thankful. It is tragic, but true, that there is little thankfulness in the world. But the woman of the Spirit is characterized by constant thankfulness because she is rooted in Jesus Christ. She abounds therein with thankfulness by all the things that God has done in her life, all the things that the Lord has taught her, all the things and the precious things the Lord has brought into her surroundings. She is overflowing with gratitude, as it says in Colossians 2:7. It means to be exceedingly rich in something. It’s almost like saying the woman of the Spirit is an expert in thankfulness.

A last vital characteristic in Ephesians 5:20-21 is that of a compliant walk. A careful walk, controlled walk, and now a compliant walk. The bottom line is that a wise woman lives her life as if she is accountable to God for all things, for her very thoughts, her actions, her words, her feelings, and her example before her family. Therefore, she lives a life of reverential compliance, and she is known for two things.

Now this brings up a third result of being filled with the Spirit of God. And what is it? To live with harmonious relationships. Notice what it says in verse 21:

and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.

You cannot have harmonious relationships unless one person is willing to submit, to put themselves willingly under something, under someone. So she is known by submitting to others, meaning she learned and is learning to live selflessly. It’s not self who’s first. It’s others who are first. Christ is first. She focuses on the needs of others. Unity is essential and the result of the Spirit is dealing with people in that way. So she is subject to others in the sphere of Christ, meaning she is a God-fearer. A person walking in the Spirit has learned to walk in the fear of Christ and wants to model it before others.

Now make no mistake that the fear of the Lord needs to be taught and modeled before others. That is not something that comes naturally to anyone. It needs to be taught when the human being is a child, if you have that opportunity – a tender shoot just sprouting up. So moms, to teach your children the fear of Christ when they are young, that is when they can be molded and shaped in that fear. A good definition of the fear of God is that the fear of God is to be afraid enough to care what God has to say and to be humble enough to submit to the Lord’s authority. It encompasses both fear and trembling, but it also includes an awe and a reverence. As it says in Proverbs 1:7:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Proverbs 28 verse 14:

How blessed is the man who fears always, but he who hardens his heart will fall into calamity.

In other words, the fear of God will keep one from having a hard heart. Proverbs 14:2:

He who walks in uprightness fears the Lord, but he who is crooked in his ways despises Him.

See, the fear of God will keep one on the straight path and from despising God. Then Proverbs 19 verse 23:

The fear of the Lord leads to life, so that one may sleep satisfied, untouched by evil.

One who properly fears God, both in a trembling way because of how awesome God is but also in an awe and reverential way. The fear of God will keep one living right and sleeping well, being able to put your head on the pillow after living through a day and just trusting the Lord, knowing that you have done everything God want you to do that day and honored Him.

So she’s known by submitting to others. And then in verse 22 of Ephesians 5, she is known for submitting to her husband, just like she does to her Lord. It says in verse 22:

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.

So what is submission? Submission is actually honor and reverence. Verse 33 tells us that. It says:

Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.

Full Transcript:

To walk in the Spirit, in the same context, is to be submissive to your husband. Of course I’m not really talking about the husband’s right this morning, but the thing is that if a husband is a loving leader and if he is a loving learner of his wife, then he will be a person who a woman could very easily submit to in honor and reverence. It’s an attitude first and it shows really confidence in his decision. It is also grateful; it’s thankful. Submission is also a willing choice. The Greek word really is hupotasso. Hupo means under and tasso means to place. It means to arrange oneself under someone and of course it implies the wife chooses to submit herself to her husband willingly. Why? She does the same thing to her Lord that she’s now doing to her husband. She’s just being a consistent example.

Submission is also a spiritual matter. In verse 22, it says “unto the Lord”. So the motive is obedience to God. You can’t be right with God if you don’t do this. Really, a woman who’s unwilling to be submissive to her husband cannot be right with God. She cannot submit to God unless she’s doing both.

Also submission is comprehensive. It says in verse 24 of Ephesians 5 “in everything”. They are to submit in everything, all categories of life, obviously excluding sin. Parenting, finances, sitting down and discussing with her husband these things. She’s very dedicated to her husband because they’re teammates. She completes him and put her gifts at his disposal. Husbands and wives who are fighting with each other, resisting each other, not implementing these things in front of their family and in each other and in front of the church, and they’re never coming to the place where they’re loving one another and submit to one another are not exemplifying a spiritual life at all whatsoever. Don’t even think you are. Don’t even think you’re walking a holy and godly life. You’re not because right there you need to get down and repent of your sins, get that things right and work on your relationship as a husband and wife because that’s God’s will for you is to do that.

Also submission is God’s way of attaining and maintaining function in order in the home. The reversal of the roles is what causes turmoil in the family. It started in the garden, and that has been the problem all through human history. God is not the author of confusion. He wants unity in the home. He wants the home to function with order. Also, it is the best way to influence the husband. In 1 Peter 3:1 you see submitting women influencing their husband in the right way because of their willing submissive attitude before God. God does something in that relationship and brings them together to get things done.

It also includes being a homemaker. When a wife, wise woman is submissive, that the home is her greatest sphere of influence. That’s her primary domain. It is her priority. Whatever else she’s doing, whatever else she’s involved with, even if she is working outside the home, her primary domain and responsibility is to be a homemaker, to make sure everything is going the way it ought to be going at home. When she does that, it sure brings a balance and a peace to one’s life.

But isn’t submission the way of all believers? We submit to government. We submit to teachers at school. We should submit to the elders in the church. We submit to bosses. So submission is around us everywhere. We are all practicing it in some way, but this kind of submission, submission that is letting guided by the Holy Spirit of God. I would have to say this too – that submission is not always fair. It doesn’t mean because you submit, everything is going to go your way or people are going to respond to you the way you want. No, we just need to trust God that this is God’s way. When we submit to the Lord and submit to His authority and to things God’s placed in our life, then we find out that this actually becomes a tremendous privilege, to willingly put ourselves under someone else and esteem them higher than ourselves.

And of course, it’s also important in the area of testimony. When you live this way, you are a testimony to the world. You are testimony to the church. You are testimony to the children.

So this morning I pray that these vital characteristics will be developing in your life as you grow in and walk with the Lord – the vital characteristics of a careful walk, of a controlled walk, and a compliant walk.

I just want to say to all mothers happy mother’s day. God bless. Enjoy your day. And children, make sure you say something to your mom about how great she is. God bless.

May 10, 2020
Your Call to Ministry

In this sermon, David Capoccia teaches on God’s design for the church as revealed by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:7-16. Specifically, David Capoccia explains why all believers should obey the call of Christ to use their gifts to minister to His church:

1. Christ conquered to give believers their gifts
2. Christ gave teachers to train believers in their gifts
3. Christ designed believers’ gifts to help the church reach maturity

Full Transcript:

Let’s go to the Lord in a word of prayer as we begin our time today. Father, we come to church to worship You and as we sang that we want to know You more, we look forward to the day when we get to Heaven and we have all eternity to get to know You more. As we open Your Word this morning, help us to comprehend it and be attentive to the things You have for us. I pray that You would change our lives so that they would be more pleasing to You. In Christ’s Name, Amen.

Well as a church we have been going through a series on the purpose of the church for the last few weeks. Today since it is my turn to open the Bible with you and being that I am up here most weeks leading you in worship, we thought it would be appropriate to talk a little about worship. Every week as a congregation, we sing four or five praise songs so that we worship God. Let me ask you, have you ever considered whether God accepts your worship? Here is the thing, when you look at the Bible you see that it is littered with examples of God rejecting worship. It is sobering to realize that.

A few examples include Cain in Genesis 4, and Israel in Isaiah 1:13, where God says:

Bring your worthless offerings no longer.

In Jeremiah 6:20 it says:

Your burnt offerings are not acceptable And your sacrifices are not pleasing to Me.

In Malachi 1:10 it says:

Oh that there were one among you who would shut the gates, that you might not uselessly kindle fire on My altar! I am not pleased with you," says the LORD of hosts, "nor will I accept an offering from you.

Amos 5:21, 23 says:

I hate, I reject your festivals, Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies. Take away from Me the noise of your songs.

This is a consistent theme throughout Scripture and Biblical history that people have been getting this worship thing wrong. It turns out that it is actually pretty hard to get it right. No one thinks as they are worshipping that they are getting it wrong; no one sets out to offer unacceptable worship before God. Everybody thinks they are doing the right thing and today it is the same thing. Modern Christians in America seem to completely take for granted that God will accept whatever is thrown up at Him. It is true that because of the cross, some things about worship have changed. But it doesn’t meant that God’s standards for worship are lower.

In fact, I think God’s standards for us in worship are higher because we have more information and less excuses. Now this morning I want to turn the mirror on ourselves and I want us to think about what makes us so sure that our worship is acceptable before God.

To begin to answer this question, we need to start with a Biblical understanding of worship. In the Bible, there are few words actually that are even used to describe worship. Most of these words mean to fall down before, or bow down. One word means to kiss towards. All of these words are painting this picture of you appearing in the throne room of a king and the first thing you have to do is bow towards the king and kiss his ring. This shows loyalty to the king, and if you don’t do this it’s an immediate death sentence.

That’s a pretty Biblical image of worship to have in our minds. Falling down before something declares that that thing is more worthy than you. Therefore, you will give it your admiration, honor, and respect. The word worship comes from the worthship. That talks about ascribing worth to something, and declaring worth for it. Honor and respect is given to something of supreme with in worship.

It’s possible then, when looking at this definition of worship, to worship things other than God. What’s one thing people worship other than God? Self, money, prestige. That looks like all of your thoughts, deeds, and service goes toward the acquisition of more wealth. For other people it could be a political cause, and it could even be your kids that you put in a place of worth above God.

When we worship something other than God, the Bible calls that idolatry. It is possible to be idolator without ever seeing or touching a carved image. Let me show you this in Colossians 3:5, which says:

Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.

In this case the idol in question that Paul is addressing is sex or sensuality. Paul is talking to believers in this passage. It is possible for believers to be engaged in idolatry as well as nonbelievers. The way you do that is by putting something in your life in that place of worth above God. When we talk about worship, it is really important for us to understand that worship encompasses your whole life. It is the way you think, speak, spend your time, what you pursue and value. You are always assigning worth to something.

When we talk about worship, we are not talking about what we do for 20 minutes on Sunday mornings. What we do for those 20 minutes better be an overflow of the worship that’s already going on in your life. That 20 minutes should be an overflow of the 10,060 minutes that you have in the week. Musical worship is just the tip of the iceberg that you can see, where as the rest of the iceberg below is a mountain of worship propping that up. If not, then this here doesn’t mean anything. It’s just empty words.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine that your husband or wife ignores you for seven days a week, and does not acknowledge your wants, needs, or acknowledging your presence, and even runs around with other people behind your back. But for ten minutes a week when all of your family is over and he or she wants to look good in front of them, your spouse comes to you and tells you that they love you. Would you appreciate that? No! That would be offensive to you; what are they doing for you the rest of the week?

How would you expect God to accept your worship if the other 98% of the week you are prayer-less, don’t care about the Bible, entertaining idolatry in your heart, not loving or serving the people we are called to, we’re not concerned with God’s Kingdom and we don’t restrain our fleshly impulses. If we do that for 10,060 minutes a week, then when we come and worship for 20 minutes a week, it just doesn’t make sense.

We sing about wanting to know Jesus and God’s probably up there saying that we could have used 10,000 minutes getting to know Him. So why don’t we stop singing that song and just go get to know Him? We have to be careful. Acceptable worship must be whole life worship. You may think that that might be all God requires. It is a pretty big requirement, but it’s not all for your worship to be acceptable.

You can say that you are not one of these people, because you serve God throughout the week, you pray, and you share the gospel, etc. But guess what, that alone is still not enough to be acceptable worship. If we just left there, you might think that all that matters is a lack of hypocrisy. Yet there are a lot of sincere people within the Bible and today whose worship God rejects. That’s not all God is looking for. Let’s meet one of those people right now in John 4. Pretty much any discussion of worship should start with this passage. This is what Pastor was quoting while He was praying in the pastoral prayer. This is what Jesus was saying about true worship.

In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well. Samaritans are a mixed race people, part Jew and part Gentile. That means that they are between two worlds. To those Jews, they were Gentiles and to the Gentiles, they were Jews. They had no where to go and were rejected by both sides.

Historians tell us that there was a lot of bad blood between the Samaritans and the Jews, so severe that it often descended into real violence. The historian Josephus actually records that the fighting because so severe at one point that Roman soldiers had to go in to stop the fighting. The way they stopped the fighting is by beginning to crucify the leaders on both sides. Because of this bad blood, the Samaritans were not welcome to worship with the Jews on the temple mountain. So they set up their own worship mountain on Gerizim.

Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well and makes quite an impression on her because He reveals that He knows things about her that no one else knows. He knows the secret sins of her heart and the woman is convinced that Jesus has a special connection to God. She doesn’t know yet that He is the Son of God, but she does ask Him one question. If you had one question to ask Jesus, what would you ask?

On the spot, I don’t think I would come up with anything that deep. I think I would probably come up with a hundred things to ask him ten minutes too late. Maybe I would waste my question on something like, “Lord would you say that cereal is a type of soup?” That’s something I was thinking about this week.

But this woman is clearly quicker on her feet than I am. She asks the one question that has been on her mind since she was a child. To her credit, the reason she picked this question is because she is sincere in wanting to worship God the right way. This is her question in John 4:19-20:

The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.”

The question is, “Lord, where is the acceptable place to worship You? The mountain of the Jews or the mountain of the Samaritans? I want to make sure I get this right.” Jesus answers her in John 4:21-:

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

Jesus doesn’t dodge her question. He tells her that she got it wrong because salvation is from the Jews. The right location at that time to worship God was in Jerusalem. That’s what God had prescribed at the time in history. People had to go to the temple multiple times a year because God said so. He’s the One being worshipped so He makes the rules. But look what it says in John 4:23:

But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.

Jesus is saying that something is coming that is going to change everything and He is talking about the cross. The barriers between the Jews and the Gentiles will be shared and the location where true worship can take place is decentralized from Jerusalem to now any place in the world. The cross is what changed that.

I want you to notice something subtle in the text. Jesus calls the worshipers true. Think about what that means, that just as there was true and false worship in that time, there is also going to be true and false worship in this time. The distinguishing characteristic for true worshipers is that they will worship in spirit and in truth. This wasn’t happening in either Jerusalem or Samaria.

The Israelites worshipped what they knew, they worshipped in truth; but not in spirit. Multiple times Jesus calls them out for their hypocrisy and their desire to be seen before men. But on the other side are the Samaritans, who are compassionate, emotional, and sincere. But they didn’t have the truth. Jesus says that God is seeking worshippers who are worshipping in both spirit and in truth.

God’s expectations weren’t lowered because of the cross, they were raised. You and I must get right what the Jews and Samaritans got wrong; we need to worship in spirit and in truth. For the rest of our sermon, we’re going to unpack what that means a little bit more. Let’s take on truth first and then we’ll talk about spirit.

To worship in truth means to worship God with accurate doctrine. Imagine your friend comes up to you and says that the other day he ran into Pastor Babij in the supermarket and had this awesome conversation. You tell him that is great, and he identifies him as a short bald Chinese guy. You are taken aback because that is clearly not your pastor. By the way, I’m pretty sure Pastor Babij hasn’t gone to the supermarket for thirty years, so that would have been your first clue.

But your friend might then go on excitedly about the conversation he had with your pastor, but by then you’ve tuned him out because that’s not the pastor you know. He was talking about someone else. In the same way, we must get our facts straight about God. Being excited about God when you have the wrong facts about Him is just empty emotionalism. It’s not acceptable worship. The fact is that you are not worshipping God, but instead a god of your own imagination. If you look around you, we see that so much of worship culture in our day is this kind of worship. This is the god of popular Christian media: soft, fuzzy, nonjudgmental, positive, encouraging, basically a life-coach in the sky. It doesn’t matter what your doctrine is because “God is here to help you live a better life.”

In that kind of worship, where is the mention of sin, holiness, wrath, judgment, hell, or repentance? You would be far pressed to hear any of that. If you take all of those things away from God, then you worship a different god and have a different gospel. If you are to worship God, you must know who He is as He is revealed Himself in the pages of Scripture. He is the Triune God, self-sufficient, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, holy, just, righteous, and whose justice requires that He meets sin with eternal punishment for each and every one of us who is a sinner. We’re all guilty of sin.

But this is the same God who sent His Son Jesus to come to earth, born of a virgin, fully God and fully man. His Son who lived a righteous life, died on the cross, and paid the penalty that God requires of us. Only because of His death is it possible for us who believe in Jesus to worship God. He broke down that barrier that sin had erected between man and God. Whoever believes in this Jesus, He becomes Jesus’ disciple, friend and brother, and will inherit eternal life.

If you don’t agree with any element of that, the Trinity, the eternality of God, the sovereignty of God, the incarnation, the substitutionary atonement, and the propitiation of sin, then you are not worshipping the God of the Bible no matter how much energy you are singing with. It doesn’t matter how much passion you have, you are just worshiping a God of your own imagination. Doctrine matters. The philosophers of our age are telling us that truth is fluid and relative, and it depends on your background and experiences. Everyone can have the same truth, and the church to a large degree has bought into a large part of that.

Truth has become a bad word. It’s rare today to see a church take a strong stance on creation, eschatology, reformed theology, or even the depravity of man and the perseverance of the saints. It would be unusual to walk into a church and happen upon a sermon on the trinity, or the holiness of God. In fact, in many churches it is frowned upon to bring up doctrine because it is divisive. I’ve been personally told when I was at a sound church, that talking about these doctrines get in the way of loving Jesus because that’s all we want to do, right? But my question would be, which Jesus are you loving?

There’s an amazing verse in Hosea 6:6, which says:

For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, And in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

The knowledge of God is what delights God. You knowing about Him delights Him. That’s worship! You can’t acceptably worship without truth. Truth is the engine that drives your worship, and the more truth you know the richer your worship will be. This is how John MacArthur puts it:

“The deeper your understanding of the truth of God, the deeper your understanding of God Himself, the higher your worship goes. Worship is directly correlated to understanding. The richer your theology, the more full your grasp of Biblical truth and the more elevated your worship becomes. You don’t have to turn the music on for me to worship. A low, superficial and shallow understanding of God leads to shallow, content-less hysteria. You can create that kind of frenzy but it has nothing to do with worship. It’s sheer hysteria in a mindless expression.”

Do you see how good intentions are not enough. You must worship God with accurate doctrine. There’s a second thing that it means to worship God in truth. You must worship using His prescribed methods. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the pages of Scripture are filled with corpses of people who presented God with an unprescribed method of worship. To see this, let’s look first at Leviticus 9, where there is a worship service going on. Leviticus 9:22-24 says:

Then Aaron lifted up his hands toward the people and blessed them, and he stepped down after making the sin offering and the burnt offering and the peace offerings. Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting. When they came out and blessed the people, the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people. Then fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the portions of fat on the altar; and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces.

Wow that’s incredible. How would you like to be in a worship service like this? The glory of God is visible, fire coming out from Heaven and people shouting and falling on their faces in worship. It’s joyful, emotional, and heartfelt. Things are going great in this worship service. Now let’s turn to Leviticus 10:1-2 and look at what happens next:

Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took their respective firepans, and after putting fire in them, placed incense on it and offered strange fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them. And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

Wow talk about a buzzkill right? The worship service was going great and these sons of Aaron just wanted to worship without meaning to offend God. In their zeal to worship, they did something that God did not prescribe. Their father is the high priest of Israel! But it doesn’t matter who your father is, it matters who your God is. We see this pattern again in 2 Samuel 6 during another time of celebration featuring King David. David is being obedient to the Lord and God just gave him a great victory when they got the Ark of the Covenant back from the Philistines. Let’s pick up in 2 Samuel 6:3-5:

They placed the ark of God on a new cart that they might bring it from the house of Abinadab which was on the hill; and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were leading the new cart. So they brought it with the ark of God from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill; and Ahio was walking ahead of the ark. Meanwhile, David and all the house of Israel were celebrating before the Lord with all kinds of instruments made of fir wood, and with lyres, harps, tambourines, castanets and cymbals.

Just stop there for a second. Imagine the level of this celebration with all the instruments. There is great, transcendent music that is fit for a king! They even put the ark on a new cart because of their love and respect for God. But look now at 2 Samuel 6:3-5:

But when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out toward the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen nearly upset it. And the anger of the Lord burned against Uzzah, and God struck him down there for his irreverence; and he died there by the ark of God.

Here they are walking along a road and they come across a bump which makes the ark start to slide off the cart. Uzzah in his respect and love for God reaches out to the ark because he doesn’t want the ark to fall on the floor. He reaches out to stop it from falling. Except that God had said previously that you could never touch the ark. Shouldn’t this be a special circumstance? No.

Understand that it was King David that created this situation. God had commanded that it be transported by people on sticks and rods. David thought it would be more convenient if this just put it on an ark and let oxen carry it. What did David learn from this? Look down in 2 Samuel 6:9:

So David was afraid of the Lord that day; and he said, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?”

Let me now ask you, when you worship God, how much fear are you experiencing? A lack of fear of the Lord is a problem in a lot of worship today. Because we have no fear of God, our generation has made worship about the people, about man and his experiences. It’s about feeling a sense of emotional catharsis. But if we feared God, what people would understand is that worship is not about us or about our preferences, or our catharsis or convenience. It’s not even about what kind of music we like. A fear of God understands that worship is for God. It’s not for you. Because it’s for God, it must be done God’s way.

Let’s look at this. What are the ways that God has prescribed for acceptable worship? Hebrews 10:25 tells us:

Not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.

1 Timothy 4:13 tells us:

Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching.

The Bible is to be explained and preached, like where it says in 2 Timothy 4:2. We confess our sins, like in Joshua 7:19. In Colossians 3:16, songs, hymns, and spiritual songs are sung. Matthew 21:13 says that the church is to be a house of prayer. And Philippians 4:18 says that individuals are to be giving from their finances. And 1 Corinthians 11 tells us we need to partake in the Lord’s Supper.

Those are the things that God has prescribed for us. If you are a Christian, you are not free to say that you don’t like organized religion, church, or waking up on Sundays. You can’t say that your time of worship is doing your own reading, and listening to the radio and call it a day. You’re not free to do that. It doesn’t matter whether it is convenient or not or if you enjoy it. It’s because God commanded you to do it a certain way.

We don’t get to add things to worship either. We’re not free to incorporate things like prayer beads or bow down to statues of the saints. One big thing in the Church today is called Holy Yoga, where you do yoga set to Christian music and that’s somehow worship to the Lord. Your preference, convenience, and innovation is all irrelevant. Worship is for God, not for you. We worship God on His terms, not ours. To worship God in truth, is to worship Him with accurate doctrine and prescribed methods.

Now let’s look at how to worship God in spirit. This is the second thing that Jesus told the Samaritan woman. To worship in spirit is to worship God with the right attitude. It can’t be a hypocritical attitude, you have to be conscious of your life before God. I want to look at Romans 12 with you, which will help drive home the point. Romans 12:1 says:

Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.

This is what true worship is. In the Old Testament, you would have to bring animals to the altar to be sacrificed. The cross changed everything and the only thing we are to bring now is ourselves as a sacrifice. Back in the Old Testament days, you were to bring an unblemished, pure, spotless animal. So what are you to bring today? You are to bring an animal that is unblemished, pure, and spotless. That’s the point that Paul is making, this is how you are to bring yourself before God. We are to be constantly cleansing ourselves from the impurities and sin of the world.

Any kind of sexual immorality, idolatry, angry and unforgiving hearts, or envy are the things that ought to be out of your life by the time you come to worship God. In this verse, who is doing the work? You are! It’s your spiritual service of worship. Before you do that, you cannot come and worship God in spirit.

A long time ago there was a popular praise song that was called, “Come As You Are to Worship.” It’s not a bad song, but it’s a little bit inaccurate in that we are actually to be coming to God transformed to worship. When you are saved, you of course come as you are; there’s no requirement to salvation. But you better not stay as you are. If you are saved, you will be transforming and changing and becoming sanctified. Look at Romans 12:2 which says:

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

That’s a pretty high standard. You must continually be fighting to renew your minds and make it agree with what the Word of God says. God is not going to change His opinion; we have to change our opinion so that it agrees with His revealed will. The work that you must do is bring your mind in conformity to God’s revealed Word.

A similar idea is expressed in Psalm 24:3-6:

Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood and has not sworn deceitfully. He shall receive a blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is the generation of those who seek Him, who seek Your face—even Jacob.

Finally after you’ve understood the truth of God’s Word, you’ve checked that your methods of worship are according to those that God has prescribed, and you’ve checked that you’re not being hypocritical and you’ve purified yourself for worship by the renewing of your mind, now you are ready to engage your emotions. God does definitely want you to engage your emotions in worship. The very fact that He wants us to use instruments to praise Him, means that He wants us to feel emotion. Music has that kind of power to stir our hearts. Emotion is the proper response to the truth of what God is and has done. If you’re not emotional when you are praising God, it means one of three things.

One is that I may not have done a good job of picking out songs with good theological content. Or may you don’t properly understand the truth of what the song is talking about, because you don’t yet have the depth of knowledge to appreciate it. Or it means that you have checked out mentally and are just going through the motions.

True worship will engage your emotions. The first one you ought to have is fear, reverence and awe. If you look at the Bible when people encounter God or a vision of God. Fear and brokenness are the only emotions they have. Isaiah, Moses, Abraham, the Apostle Peter, and all the disciples react this way when confronted with God’s holiness. That’s the only proper response. Isaiah proclaimed in Isaiah 6:5:

Then I said, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips.”

It’s not like it’s a fear of rejection. It’s the kind of fear that you would have if someone stuck you in the same room as a friendly lion. You respect the power of the lion because you know that at any moment that lion can turn from a friendly lion into a savage one. C.S. Lewis said that the paws of a lion have two modes. They can be furry and caress, or the claws can come out to stab.

In the same way when you come to worship God, remember that you are coming before the God of all-consuming fire, that is the holiness of God. What is more, you are presenting Him a sacrifice of yourself. I find that pretty scary to be honest. But not only fear and brokenness are what we feel, but also joy. The Biblical examples are too numerous to really go into. But I’ll just give you an overall breakdown.

When John the Baptist heard about Jesus when he was in the womb, he leapt for joy. That’s the amount of joy that Jesus filled him with, as a fetus! Philippians 4:4 is a clear Biblical command, it says:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!

Psalm 97:1 says:

The Lord reigns, let the earth rejoice; let the many islands be glad.

Psalm 84:2 says:

My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.

1 Peter 1:8 says:

You greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory.

There are many more examples. Scripture is just so clear that joy is a proper response. You have to understand the holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, the price that Jesus paid for you when He brought you out of the darkness and into the light and set the captives free. O death where is your sting, and grave where is your victory, right? That’s what you’re celebrating, Christ has won the victory for you. Here’s the awesome thing, if you come to God having believed in Jesus and present acceptable worship, the Bible says that God will accept your worship. What’s more than that, God will make the worship enjoyable for you.

We are the ones at the end of the day who benefit from worship. Does God need our worship? No. He doesn’t need anything. Worship is directed at God and for God, but the benefit accrues to us. True worship is enjoying God. When we worship the acceptable way, this is how we come the closest we can on this earth to experiencing the joy of Heaven. Just to close, I want to take you to one last place in Scripture to show you what this is all leading towards. The worship we do at Calvary is just rehearsal for the worship we’ll be doing in Heaven, like what it says in Revelation. Revelation 19:1-6 says:

After these things I heard something like a loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying, “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God; because His judgments are true and righteous; for He has judged the great harlot who was corrupting the earth with her immorality, and He has avenged the blood of His bond-servants on her.” And a second time they said, “Hallelujah! Her smoke rises up forever and ever.” And the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who sits on the throne saying, “Amen. Hallelujah!” And a voice came from the throne, saying, “Give praise to our God, all you His bond-servants, you who fear Him, the small and the great.” Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.”

You know who that is, who was the sound of the mighty peals of thunder and the many waters? That was the saints! You and me! On that day, that will be our voices saying in response, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.” That’s what we are rehearsing for and I can’t wait to be there.

Let’s pray. Father, we so clearly see in Your Scripture that You don’t take worship lightly. You are serious about how Your people worship You. Help us to evaluate for ourselves and our church whether we are worshipping in Spirit and Truth because that is the only kind of worship You accept. Forgive us Lord if in the past we have offered up anything that is unworthy. Help us now to be careful to worship You with acceptable doctrine, methods, attitude, and with the proper emotions. Help us once again to do so now. In Christ’s Name, Amen.

July 21, 2019
How to Stand with God’s Armor against Satan

In this sermon, David Capoccia examines what it means to put on the armor of God. In part 1, David discusses how to interpret the armor metaphor based on how it is used elsewhere in Scripture. David also explores four of the eight holy attitudes in the passage that believers must put on to stand against Satan’s deceitful schemes and destructive desires:

1. Truthfulness (v. 14a)
2. Righteousness (v.14b)
3. Peaceful Readiness (v.15)
4. Faith-filled-ness (v.16)

Full Transcript:

Before we turn to the Word, let’s pray:

Our great God and Savior, what a joy it has been to sing about the great salvation that You have accomplished on our behalf. It is all You, Jesus. It is all Your blood. We could never have been good enough to be acceptable to You. Jesus, You had to do it all. You had to pay the entire penalty for all of our sins, and You had to give us Your own righteousness. That is the only way we could ever be acceptable. Lord, You did that once and for all by Your work on the Cross. Then, You gave that to us as a gift by faith. Lord, we are charged to walk worthy of this great salvation. Lord, I pray that You would help me to be able to explain more how to do that as we look again at the book of Ephesians. God, we want You to be glorified in our lives, and we want to experience the joy of our great salvation, not have it be taken away from us by satan or any of the demons. Lord, please build up Your church now. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Brethren, let us return to the subject that we began speaking about of our spiritual conflict with satan and the demons. Remember, we are in the letter of the Apostle Paul to these new gentile believers in Ephesus, which is Western Asia Minor.

The overarching message of this letter is broken into two halves. In the first half of the letter, Paul tells the Ephesians, and essentially, he tells us:

You gentile believers have, truly, full salvation blessing in Christ by faith alone. Just as the Jews always had, you have full salvation inheritance and blessing as do they.

Then, in the second half, Paul’s message is:

Consequently, you gentile believers must walk worthy of your salvation calling before God. This isn’t to save you, but it is a result and fruit of your salvation.

Our text, which we have been examining, appears at the end of this section, in Ephesians, as a final summary charge to the believers, and really, to us.

Last time, we looked at the introductory portion of Ephesians 6:10-13. In this part, Paul gives us one main command; then, three reasons to obey that command. The main command is: to be strong in the Lord, Jesus Christ. We saw that to be strong in the Lord means to have faith in the Lord.

As Greg mentioned, we do not have sufficient strength. You do not have sufficient strength in yourself to overcome the enemies that are before you, but as you rely upon the Lord’s strength, and act in faith, you are able to even move mountains. Rather, God is able to move mountains through you and for you.

Last time, we heard three reasons from Paul that we might be strong. In Ephesians 6:11, we saw that we must be strong in order to overcome the many schemes of satan. The reality is that we have a supernatural enemy, who constantly seeks to entrap believers by various lying temptations. He is a dangerous foe. However, he can, and must be overcome, by the power of the Lord, Jesus Christ.

In Ephesians 6:12, we saw that we must be strong in the Lord, by faith, to prevail in our supernatural struggle. The people of the world have a different struggle that they are concerned about. They use temporal weapons to overcome temporal enemies for temporal gain.

However, our struggle is different from most people. We fight against demonic rulers of this evil world system. They are the ones who stand against us, and they are dangerous and powerful foes. We don’t use temporal weapons against them, or mere human equipment. We use the strength and equipment of God. By Christ’s mighty strength, we can overcome even the demonic rulers.

Then, in Ephesians 6:13, a third reason for us to become strong in the Lord, by faith, is so that we can keep standing in the evil day. The whole Christian life is, indeed, a struggle against the evil one and his allies. However, certain periods are particularly evil. They are filled with special difficulty or unique temptation. Our goal and missions are to keep standing even in those days. To hold on as long as it takes until the Lord grants relief. To do this, we must be strong in the Lord, and we must have faith in the Lord.

Last time, we ended by drawing our attention to the second command that also appears in Ephesians 6:10-13, and it is a command that is parallel to the first. Paul not only calls upon on believers to be strong in the Lord, but also calls on believers, specifically in Ephesians 6:12-13, to put on the full armor of God.

Remember, that term full armor refers to a complete set of military equipment, not just defensive pieces of armor, but actual weapons and other military equipment. This armor is from God, and it represents, for us, complete provision and total protection from satan. We have everything we need in this armor.

To put on the full armor of God is really another way of saying, “be strong in the Lord.” As we will see, the pieces of armor that Paul figuratively describes are merely a more specific breakdown of what it means to be strong in the Lord. That is, living by faith and in the power of God’s spirit will encompass certain attitudes, beliefs, or behavior symbolized by the different pieces of armor that appear in our passage. Ephesians 6:14-20:

Stand firm therefore, HAVING GIRDED YOUR LOINS WITH TRUTH, and HAVING PUT ON THE BREASTPLATE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, ¹⁵and having shod YOUR FEET WITH THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL OF PEACE; ¹⁶in 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. ¹⁷And take THE HELMET OF SALVATION, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. ¹⁸With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints, ¹⁹and pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, ²⁰for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in proclaiming it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

In the beginning of Ephesians 6:14, the command is to stand firm. This is not the first time we see this command, and it was featured back in Ephesians 6:11 and 6:13. Again, this is a defensive term indicating resistance – holding one’s ground. In fact, Paul uses stand firm three times, and the related term resist, for a total of four times in five verses, which is significant.

Paul is being emphatic with us. He really wants to drive home, in our understanding, that our fundamental goal, as believers, is to stand firm against satan and demonic powers. We are to hold our ground. We are to push the enemy back. They will come and attack, but by God’s strength, we are to repulse them. This goal of standing firm is to be clear and ever present in our minds.

Notice the therefore that appears next in the text – stand firm therefore. Why are we to be so vigilant about standing firm? Because of satan’s schemes, supernatural struggle, and the evil day, we are not ignorant of the challenge before us, so that is why we have the idea of standing firm so fixed in our minds. As Paul is about to explain, we stand firm by putting on the Lord’s armor.

Here, we need to answer a fundamental question: what is Paul’s intended sense in using abstract concepts as Christian armor? In Ephesians 6:14-17, we have before us a belt of truth, breastplate of righteousness, sandals of the preparation of the Gospel of peace, shield of faith, helmet of salvation, and a sword of the spirit, which is also called the word of God.

Those different armor pieces all represent something abstract – a spiritual concept. Aside from the last piece, there is, potentially, some ambiguity about what Paul means. Are we to understand these terms as describing Christian life characteristics, or are they, instead, to be understood as Gospel realities to be appreciated and applied personally by a Christian? Let me illustrate what I mean by example.

Take the belt of truth. Does the belt of truth represent truthfulness – that the Christian is to be honest and sincere, or does it represent the truth – the Gospel, Christ himself, right doctrine, which a Christian is to believe and apply to himself?

Take the breastplate of righteousness. Does it represent a lifestyle of righteousness in the believer, or does it represent Christ’s righteousness on behalf of the believer, which he is to appreciate, believe, and apply to himself? What sense does Paul have in mind when he speaks of spiritual equipment intended to protect the believer?

Some interpreters try to figure out what the theologians are saying, and some interpreters lean one way, some lean the other way, and some say it is both. At first, I found myself taking that third position. I couldn’t figure out a way, from this passage, to rule out one sense or the other.

As I looked at how similar spiritual armor metaphors are used throughout the Bible, I began to change my perspective. So, I want to walk you through the context of this metaphor, so that you may understand why I’m interpreting this passage the way I am and why I argue for that interpretation. This may conflict with what you’ve previously understood this passage to mean, but I hope you can see why I am presenting it the way I am.

To start this background study, let’s turn to Isaiah 59:15-17. The context of Isaiah 59:15-17 is a prophesy about the coming of God himself to the earth as a deliverer. In the greater context of Isaiah, we know this is referring to Messiah. The Divine Messiah is coming to destroy evil and destroy all of God’s enemies. However, listen to how Isaiah describes the Divine Messiah, God himself, in Isaiah 59:15-17:

Yes, truth is lacking;
And he who turns aside from evil makes himself a prey.
Now the LORD saw,
And it was displeasing in His sight that there was no justice.

¹⁶And He saw that there was no man,
And was astonished that there was no one to intercede;
Then His own arm brought salvation to Him,
And His righteousness upheld Him.

¹⁷He put on righteousness like a breastplate,
And a helmet of salvation on His head;
And He put on garments of vengeance for clothing
And wrapped Himself with zeal as a mantle.

Here, we see very similar descriptions as we do in Ephesians 6. In fact, back in Ephesians, if you are using a NASB translation, then you probably saw that many of the descriptions are written in small, capital letters, which is the NASB translator’s way of indicating to you that the New Testament passage is quoting the Old Testament.

However, in Isaiah, the prophet says that God will put on righteousness like a breastplate. He will put on the helmet of salvation. Not only that, but He will put on garments of vengeance, and even a mantle, which is a long coat, of zeal. What do these metaphors mean?

In this context, it is pretty clear. There can be, in my mind, no argument as to understand the armor metaphor here – the armor describes the qualities of the wearer, which is God.

God is characterized by righteousness; hence, the breastplate. God brings and is characterized by salvation and deliverance; hence, the helmet. God is characterized by vengeance; hence, His clothing. God is characterized by zeal. That is, a jealousy for His own glory; hence, His mantle.

With these metaphors, the divine Messiah is pictured as a mighty warrior, who cannot be overcome by evil. Instead, roots and destroys evil. Consider another text in Isaiah 11:4-5. We hear another description about the Messiah, and notice what Isaiah says:

But with righteousness He will judge the poor,
And decide with fairness for the afflicted of the earth;
And He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth,
And with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked.

⁵Also righteousness will be the belt about His loins,
And faithfulness the belt about His waist.

Again, notice that there is a similarity in Isaiah, in the Messiah’s metaphorical equipment, to the equipment described in Ephesians 6. In Isaiah 11:4, it describes the Messiah slaying His enemies with the Word. It is possible that Paul, in Ephesians, is alluding to this when he speaks of the sword of the Spirit.

More specifically, in Isaiah 11:5, we have a belt described as righteousness and faithfulness, which somewhat corresponds to the idea of the belt of truth. However, do these terms, which describes the Messiah, describe God’s righteousness and God’s faithfulness on Messiah’s behalf, or are they intended to describe Messiah himself?

Surely, the idea is that Messiah himself is being described as righteous and faithful. These qualities characterize Him to such an extent that it is like He is wearing them on His body. The context of Isaiah 11:4 backs up this interpretation.

With righteousness, the Messiah will judge the poor. With fairness, He will decide for the afflicted of the earth. He is demonstrating His righteousness, fairness, and faithfulness. These are the actions of a righteous person in a faithful King. Thus, the armor must be meant to describe the qualities of the wearer.

In looking at Isaiah, the very place that Paul seems to be drawing this spiritual armor metaphor, we see that the metaphor describes the qualities of the armor wearer, not external realities merely appreciated by and applied to the wearer. However, we don’t only see this metaphor in the Old Testament, but also in other places in the New Testament.

Ephesians 6 is not the only place where Paul describes putting on spiritual armor. In 1 Thessalonians 5:5-8, Paul is urging gentile believers to persevere in holiness in light of Christ’s imminent return, and notice what Paul says as part of his exhortation:

for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness; ⁶so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober. ⁷For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night. ⁸But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation.

At first glance, this parallel passage is a little startling. Wait a second, Paul, you’ve mixed up the metaphor! It is supposed to be the breastplate of righteousness, not the breastplate of faith and love. How can you put two spiritual concepts on piece of armor, and where is the shield of faith? Paul, what are you doing?

Actually, this parallel passage is very informative for understanding of Paul’s usage of the armor metaphor in general. Please notice that first of all, the general idea of the protective piece of equipment is more important for the metaphor than the symbols of the specific item mentioned.

If Paul says the helmet of faith, the shield of faith, or the breastplate of faith, then the same basic idea still comes through – faith is part of the armor God provides to protect you from evil. Now, Paul can slightly rearrange the specifics of the metaphor depending on his audience and what he wants to emphasize. There is some significance as to where he assigns it, but he can rearrange the metaphor. There is no real contradiction or inconsistency in him doing so.

Also, the three spiritual concepts mentioned in 1 Thessalonians are faith, hope, and love. Interestingly, paralleling the grouping of abstract concepts Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 13, the three concepts here describe qualities of believers as they respond to the Gospel.

As a Christian, you are characterized by and exercise faith just as you, as a Christian, are characterized by and exercise hope. What about love? Conceivably, love could represent your meditation on and application of God’s love toward you. However, that would break the unity of love with the other two terms. Why should two of the concepts apply to what a believer does, and only the one concept apply to what God does on behalf of the believer, which the believer merely appreciates?

Would it not make more sense to simply say that all three describe the lives, qualities, and attitudes of a believer? Besides, look at the context of these verses: it is about behavior. He says:

Let us not be like those who are of the night, who sleep and get drunk. Let us not behave like the people of darkness, but overcome darkness by lives of faith, hope, and love.

Finally, this hope is said, specifically, to be the metaphor of the helmet of the hope of salvation. This description suggests that there is a connection between what Paul says in 1 Thessalonians and in Ephesians 6. There is the helmet of salvation, and in 1 Thessalonians, is the helmet of the hope of salvation, but there is probably a connection.

Thus far, we are seeing that the spiritual armor metaphor, as used in the Old Testament, and as used by Paul in certain places of the New Testament, describes the qualities of the wearer rather than outside realities appreciated by and applied to the wearer. Let me give you one more passage to drive this point home.

In Romans 13:11-14, the context is similar to what we read in 1 Thessalonians 5. Based on the great truths of salvation experienced by believers, how is the believer supposed to walk? Paul tells his audience:

Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. ¹²The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. ¹³Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. ¹⁴But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts.

This sounds a lot like the passage we just looked at, and a lot of the same terms and descriptions are used. However, notice here that we have two commands set in parallel: put on the armor of light and put on the Lord, Jesus Christ. Again, these are two different ways of describing the same thing.

Putting on the Lord, Jesus Christ is another way of saying put on the armor of light, which is another way of saying be strong in the Lord. Really, each of these phrases are describing walking by faith in the Lord, such that our faith produces characteristically righteous thinking, speech, and action.

Also, both of these commands are set in contrast to the same opposing idea, which are the deeds of darkness and evil behavior. The contrast is not specifically set against unbelief, or failing to meditate on the indicatives of Scripture, Christ’s righteous work, or your justification. Rather, the contrast is between putting on this armor of light and participating in the deeds of darkness – putting on the Lord, Jesus Christ and behaving like the people of darkness. Instead of participating in those deeds, they are to put on this armor and to put on Christ.

In order for the contrast to make sense, putting on the armor and putting on Christ means, more specifically, to put on righteous characteristics, belief, and behavior. Let me summarize what I just presented to you.

When we examine the usage of the spiritual armor metaphor, in both Isaiah, which appears to be the origin of Paul’s quotations, and in Paul’s other writings, then the metaphor is used to describe the life qualities of the armor wearer himself.

If that is the way Isaiah uses it, and the way Paul uses it elsewhere, then Paul must be doing the same thing in Ephesians 6. The different armor pieces describe, in Ephesians 6:14-17, the believers necessary life characteristics rather than salvation realities to be believed and applied to the believer.

A few follow-up questions: could the armor of God represent both life qualities and salvation realities. Well, truly no aspect of the believer’s life can be divorced from Gospel truth. For example, we indeed speak the truth because we have come to believe the truth – we will not do one without the other.

However, to say that Paul intended to communicate with each piece of armor that the believer should both be righteous and appropriate salvation realities to himself, then that is asking a lot of a simple metaphor, and it makes the passages instruction extremely complex. You must have a whole complicated system and model going around in your head just to understand that. Moreover, we just don’t see the armor metaphor used in that way in other places in Scripture.

Again, there is an indirect relation of the armor pieces to the salvation realities that we’ve come to know in the Gospel. However, I present, for your consideration, that Paul, in Ephesian 6, speaks only and directly about the Christian’s necessary life qualities via this metaphor of spiritual equipment.

Now, the other big question: if the armor is supposed to represent characteristic behavior, belief, and life attitudes, then why use the armor metaphor at all? Why would Paul say, for example, being truthful protects a person from satan? Isn’t satan’s temptation for you to not be truthful? How can an act of obedience be protection from an act of disobedience? I think this question represents the great mental stumbling block that we have to this passage.

However, I think there is an answer, and I believe the answer is this: the schemes of satan are not, ultimately, to get you to sin. Oh yes, satan does want you to sin, but that is not his end goal. Remember, in the book of John, Jesus said that satan is a murderer.

Moreover, in the book of Revelation, we hear about a demonic commander named Apollyon. Many believe, and I agree, that this is likely another reference to satan, so what does Apollyon mean? It means destroyer. Satan is a killer and a destroyer. As his goal, he wants to ruin and obliterate all that is good, which is why he hates God, believers, and does what he does.

Consider satan’s handy work throughout Scripture and look at what satan did to Adam and Eve. He didn’t just make them sin, but he ruined them and the entire human race by extension. Look at what satan did and wanted to do to Job. He destroyed everything Job had, and he wanted Job to turn against God and into an apostate.

Consider what satan did through and to Judas. He moved Judas to betray the very Son of God. Then, when Judas felt remorse, he committed suicide. It wasn’t just to make sin, but it was to destroy him, and to destroy even the Lord.

Satan is a destroyer. He never brings any good to anyone and his demons are no different. We can look at what the demons are doing in Scripture. The Bible tells us that demons turn men into lunatics, who cut themselves. Demons are throwing boys into convulsions, into the fire, and into the water. Demons are turning professing believers into liars and hypocrites.

This is the core desire of satan and his demons. Is it any wonder that Jesus said he came to destroy the works of the devil? You see, satan’s schemes are not merely to get us to sin, but they are intended to destroy us. They are intended to ruin us. They are intended to enslave us. They are intended to rob us of all the great salvation blessings that Paul has spoken about in Ephesians 1-3.

He doesn’t want you to enjoy those. He doesn’t want you to have those. By extension, satan and the demons want to destroy our marriages, our families, our churches, our leaders, our teachers, our witness, and our joy in Christ. They are destroyers. They are murderers.

If we have such mighty folks and our destruction is their aim along with blaspheming God, then what is going to protect us from realizing their desire and being ruined and destroyed? Is it not being strong in the Lord and putting on the armor of God? Is it not characteristic life attitudes? Is it not characteristic holy beliefs and behavior?

So, I still hold to these pieces of armor, indeed, to be life qualities of the believer that are to be put on, not merely so that you don’t go the way of temptation, but so that you are not destroyed, wounded, or injured. That we, as a church, are not wounded, destroyed, and injured.

Here, in Ephesians 6, are eight holy attitudes to protect you and the church from the deceitful schemes and destructive desires of satan. We see our first attitude in the beginning of Ephesians 6:14:

Stand firm therefore, HAVING GIRDED YOUR LOINS WITH TRUTH…

If we are to engage and overcome satan and his demons in spiritual combat, then our first necessary and holy attitude is truthfulness. Truth ought to be like a protective belt around our waists. Many have said, and rightfully so, that Paul probably has in mind a Roman soldier when he uses this armor metaphor.

At this time, Roman empire is in control. They were the soldiers everybody saw and knew, so if they are going to picture a soldier, they are going to picture a Roman soldier. The equipment he outlines in this passage is the basic equipment of a Roman soldier. As we go through each one of these pieces of armor, I am going to tell you a little bit about what Roman soldiers wore, and how that informs the metaphor.

In those days, Roman legionaries wore leather belts, and these belts serve various functions. The belt kept the soldiers short-tunic from snagging on anything above the waist. Typically, the belt held the scabbard, for the sword, on the right side of the legionary’s side. Hanging down from the middle of the belt were a series of leather strips covered with round metal studs, and it’s thought that these hanging strips were part of protecting the legionaries groin area.

Paul says, via God’s spirit, that honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness will aid and protect us against satan just like a Roman legionary’s belt. If satan is the father of all lies and lying, then what better way to fight back against him and his schemes than by only speaking the truth?

The irony, of course, is that people lie to protect themselves. They are ashamed of something they did, they fear consequences, they fear people, so they lie. In so doing, they neglect to fear satan, who loves lying. More importantly, they neglect to fear God, who hates lies.

Brethren, please listen to this: if the first piece of armor is truthfulness, then Paul is telling us something. If you attempt to use lies to protect yourself, then know that you are actually throwing off God’s armor and laying yourself open to the attacks and ruin of satan.

If you really want to protect yourself, resolve only to speak the truth. Let that be your attitude. Let truthfulness be your attitude. Granted that sometimes you don’t have to say anything. However, if you must speak or communicate in some way, then speak only the truth.

You cannot live as a hypocrite. Do not try to hide a double life. That is playing right into satan’s hands. Protect yourself and protect others by standing only in the truth. This will require you to trust God, and it may result in persecutions and trials. However, God will provide for you, and He will protect you from satan. Jesus says in Matthew 5:37:

But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil.

Jesus says that anything beyond the truth is not good, it is not neutral, and it actually comes from evil. You can even say it comes from the evil one himself. When you speak satan’s language, expect ruin and shame to eventually follow. However, when you speak God’s language, the truth, then expect God’s provisions and your eventual vindication.

Calvary, what about you? Have you armed yourself with God’s belt, with truthfulness? Or, do you foolishly attempt to protect yourself with lies? Escape now from this scheme of satan. If you insist on living as a hypocrite, weave your web of lies, then know that the one you are actually going to trap is yourself. Repent and be armed with God’s mighty strength and unfailing armor. That is our first holy attitude if we are going to be able to stand strong against satan’s schemes.

A second holy attitude that we need to put on like a piece of armor appears in the second half of Ephesians 6:14:

…and HAVING PUT ON THE BREASTPLATE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

A second holy and necessary attitude for us to put on before the battle with satan is righteousness. If you will put on righteous thoughts, righteous speech, and righteous actions like a breastplate, then you will be safe from satan’s schemes and able to stand firm in the evil day.

In Paul’s day, Roman soldiers were usually wearing segmented plate armor made of iron and steel bands to cover the chest, the back, and the shoulders. This plate armor was near impervious to cuts and thrusts. Even arrows could not successfully pierce this armor. The only thing that could was a ballista bolt, which is like a big catapult arrow. There’s not much you can do against that.

However, this is great armor, and such great protection was extremely important for a Roman soldier. The chest area is where the heart, lungs, and belly are. Paul says that a life characteristic of righteousness will protect you from satan’s schemes in the same way as Rome’s famed, iron breastplates.

In some ways, this concept of the breastplate of righteousness overlaps a little bit with the belt of truth. A lot of these concepts of the armor do overlap with one another, and real armor does the same thing – they overlap.

Paul is saying that if you walk with the Lord according to His righteous way, then He will bless you, He will provide for you, and He will protect you. However, if you spurn God’s way and go your own way, and if you ignore God’s wisdom and search your own experience or the wisdom of others, then expect to be pierced by the devil right through the chest. You are unarmored, and the enemy is going to take advantage. He cannot help himself, and he sees a juicy target. Psalm 32:10 says:

Many are the sorrows of the wicked,
But he who trusts in the LORD, lovingkindness shall surround him.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. The righteous will have trials and troubles. You might even have more because your righteous, but the Lord will protect the righteous one even in the midst of his trials, troubles, and specifically from satan and his schemes. The righteous one will not lose his peace, enjoyment, or full revelry in any of his salvation blessings.

Would you like to be protected from satan’s deceitful schemes and his destructive way? Then, put on the breastplate of righteousness. Repent of the ways you have trusted satan to your own hurt. Lay aside the old ways of thinking, speaking, and acting. Walk as a new creation by faith in Christ and in the power of God’s spirit. Brothers and sisters, are you wearing the breastplate of righteousness?

Though you are not perfect, is your life characterized by righteousness? Is that your fundamental attitude? Have you committed to following the Lord’s way in everything no matter the cost because you know you can trust Him and you know it is worth it in the end? Or, are you missing the breastplate?

Or worse – do you maintain a facade of righteousness as if it were a piece of armor? On closer examination, your armor is cheap imitation that will not withstand a satanic assault or satan’s ruining desires. Are you obedient in some areas, but not others? That is like wearing only half a breastplate. You are still exposed and in great danger of satan’s weapons. Where do you need to repent, so that you can be fully covered and protected by God’s breastplate?

The third necessary piece of armor that we see is in Ephesians 6:15:

and having shod YOUR FEET WITH THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL OF PEACE

The third holy and necessary attitude, for us to put on before battle with satan, is peaceful readiness. This third piece of equipment is a little less straight forward than the first two, and it takes some thinking through. Roman soldiers wore a type of sandal-boat with straps covering the feet and lower legs.

On the bottom of these sandals, are short nails that are digging into the ground, which is a bit like the modern cleat. However, these spikes are not for running fast, but for keeping the soldier’s feet planted firmly. These types of sandals help the soldier keep his footing in the heat of battle. Paul says that God has provided us with spiritual equipment for us to do the same against satan.

If we are to have firm footing, we must put on this peaceful readiness, and how we are to understand this phrase:

… THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL OF PEACE

The term preparation can also be translated readiness, which is why I’m using that term. However, what should believers be prepared or ready to do? Well, some say it is readiness to declare the Gospel that brings peace to other people, and they cite another section of Isaiah, which does use some related terms. Isaiah 52:7 says:

Many are the sorrows of the wicked,
How lovely on the mountains
Are the feet of him who brings good news,
Who announces peace
And brings good news of happiness,
Who announces salvation,
And says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
But he who trusts in the LORD, lovingkindness shall surround him.

However, the context of the passage of Ephesians is totally defensive warfare, not offensive warfare. Believers, in Ephesians are tasked with standing firm, not advancing. Moreover, our targets are not to rescue other people from satan, but to stand against satan himself. Furthermore, the quote from Isaiah does not exactly fit this passage, especially since there is nothing in Isaiah 52:7 about putting something on your feet.

Biblically and theologically, there is a sense in which we do fight, as Christians, to release captives from satan. Now, I’m going to argue that’s not the focus of the passage in Ephesians 6. Here, we are talking about holding fast against the schemes and desires of satan. I think we need to understand this phrase in a different way.

A better understanding of the phrase is a readiness to endure whatever comes because of the Gospel of peace. Because we have come to know and believe the Gospel, which is characterized by peace, that sets us at peace with God and one another, are attitudes that ought to be one in which we are ready to do anything for the Lord’s sake and the Gospel’s sake. I think of some related words from Jesus in Mark 8:35:

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.

You can’t hold anything back. You’ve got to give up your entire life if you want to save it. I also think of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 9:13:

… but we endure all things so that we will cause no hindrance to the gospel of Christ.

Whatever Christ and the Gospel requires, I’m ready. However, the passage that sticks out most in my mind, in relation to this particular piece of armor in Ephesians 6, is Philippians 4:11-13. In that context, Paul has just finished speaking about how God’s peace ought to be manifest in the hearts and relationships of believers. Then, Paul speaks about how the Lord has enabled Paul to be at peace and content with any situation. He says:

Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. ¹²I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. ¹³I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.

I believe that this is Paul’s sense when he is talking about the necessary readiness of the Christian. The Gospel should make us ready to endure any situation. To have an attitude before our Lord that says:

Wherever you want to place me, that is where I want to be because I trust you.

God’s gospel ought to give us contentment, a readiness to do whatever the Lord deems necessary, and isn’t that a basic to be a soldier? A soldier needs to be ready for whatever the commander tells him to do. However, for the soldier, who comes with pride and various expectations about what he should or should not have to endure, he will find himself both at odds with his commander and vulnerable to the enemy. That soldier, when he finds things going ways he did not expect, will soon find himself saying, “I didn’t sign up for this,” and he will abandon the faith.

Brothers and sisters, if we are to be properly armed against satan, then we need a Gospel readiness to be wherever and to do whatever the Lord wants. If we have such readiness equipped like shoes on our feet, then we will be able to stand against satan’s schemes and desires. So, do you have that kind of readiness? Do you have that kind of preparation? Is your heart content no matter the circumstances? Or, do you cling to a certain expectation saying to yourself:

I demand this condition be satisfied or else I am going AWOL!

My friend, if you have such an attitude, then you are letting yourself open to the enemy. Believe the Gospel that brings peace and teaches us that we need nothing more than God and whatever God chooses to graciously provide. Let go of every desire, every idol, and submit them all to God, so that you might say:

Thy will, not my will, be done.

He knows how to provide for you. He will give you what is good, and you will stand firm in the spiritual struggle.

A fourth, and final, piece of armor we will talk about is in Ephesians 6:16:

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.

The fourth and necessary holy attitude we are to put on before battle with satan is faith-filled-ness. We are to take up faith like an ever-ready shield. If we do, Paul says that we will be able to stand against satan and his demons.

Now, Paul gives special emphasis to this armor. He says, “in addition to all,” which is like an introductory statement as saying, “pay attention, especially to this next one.” Also, he places this piece of equipment at the end of the first list of armor. He is highlighting for us this shield, and he highlights for us just how effective it is. It says:

… with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

The Greek word used for shield pictures a Roman soldier’s shield. That is a large, rectangular shield for which the Roman men were well known. These shields were made of wood, edged with iron, and given an iron boss in the center for deflecting arrows and ramming into enemies. In size, these shields were similar to a small door, which provided Roman soldiers with excellent protection from both sword strokes and arrow fire.

In fact, when a whole line of soldiers faces an enemy, and they are set with their Roman shields, then it forms a mobile wall. Crotched behind their huge shields, given only short, quick thrusts with the sword, Roman soldiers were extremely difficult to hit. They basically have a wall in front of them. God says that is like the shield that He has provided for us.

Notice the reference here for flaming arrows. Flaming arrows were a fearful and dangerous addition to any battlefield, but they were well-known in ancient times. The flames not only added an extra bit of fear fact, but the flames were a potential counter to shield. Shields were made of wood, and wood burns. If the Roman soldier’s shield caught fire, that soldier would be forced to discard the shield, and he would be exposed.

If you lose your shield in battle, you are in a very dangerous position. It’s not like the movies where you can keep on fighting with just a sword – you really need the shield. However, there is always a counter to the counter, right? If you have a wooden shield and they fire flaming arrows, then what do you do?

Well, the Romans prepared for flaming arrows by covering their shields with animal skins by soaking the shields and the skins with water. Naturally, skins are averse to fire, and when you make them wet, it makes it even less likely that the shield will ignite. A well-prepared soldier did not have to worry about flaming arrows on the battlefield because he knew his shield would protect him.

It is the same for us as Christians when it comes to flaming arrows of the evil one. The shield of faith that God provides is able to extinguish all of the devil’s flaming arrows. By exercising faith and what God has said and believing his promises despite what our eyes tell us or what the flesh feels, we are able to overcome every scheme and temptation the devil can throw at us. We are not just shielded, but we’re invulnerable. That’s only if we use it and are prepared with it.

For Roman soldiers, the large shield was understandably heavy. If they had not prepared and trained with it, then they could not use it effectively in battle, which is also true for us. Is your characteristic life attitude to exercise faith in the Lord? In both the little things and the big things.

Before the trial and temptation comes upon you, and the battle begins, is your attitude to walk by faith, not by sight? Do you have your shield at the ready, or you not prepared to exercise faith at all? Have you forgotten or ignored the promises of God in Scripture? Have you paid no attention to all the examples of the Lord’s faithfulness to both believers in Scripture, believers around you, and in your own life? When trouble comes, are you instantly putty in the devil’s hands?

Brothers and sisters, listen to this word. If you will not exercise faith in the Lord, then you are like a soldier going into the battle without his shield. Soon, you are going to be turned into a flaming pin cushion. The devil is going to wreak havoc on you, and you will be pierced with many sorrows – you and your brethren.

Where are you not exercising faith in your life? Where have you been afraid to believe the Lord and be obedient? If need be, brethren, repent. Take up, again, the great shield of faith against, which the evil one, will have no recourse.

So, we have finished looking at the first group of equipment in this passage, which is describing the necessary attitudes we must put on – God’s panoply. If we are to be strong in the Lord and stand firm against satan’s desire for our ruin and destruction, and before the battle even begins, we must put on, as armor an attitude of truthfulness, righteousness, peaceful readiness, and faith-filled-ness.

For next time, I will give you a little preview: there are four other necessary and holy attitudes that we see in the rest of the passage that we must put on to protect ourselves against satan. The fifth piece is salvation hopefulness. The sixth piece is word-full-ness. The seventh piece is prayfulness. The eight piece is alertness.

As we conclude today Calvary, consider your own stance against satan. Do you see how the evil one and his co-lords are trying to make inroads into your life, your family, and even here in the church? Don’t think, “oh no, that’s just other churches.” No, he is trying to come here today. He is trying to spread ruin, and he is trying to hurt us here too. Do you notice and are you alert to that?

Therefore, will you stand strong against him by putting on these holy attitudes, and becoming strong in the Lord? Such is the only way to prevent satan from threshing you and us as with a threshing sledge. Remember what he did to Peter.

Also, I should say that if you don’t yet know Christ as Lord and Savior of your life, then none of this armor is available to you. Satan’s ruining desires have free reign over you. It’s only God’s grace that has prevented you from being ruined and destroyed up to now. Though, you have felt the injuries of satan’s schemes. God has prevented it from being worse just because He is a merciful God.

However, make no mistake, satan and his demons will eventually ruin you. First, in this life; then, eternally in the next. They want you to go to hell. That would please them. They will keep you out of heaven, away from God, away from all goodness and blessing if they can. Don’t let their desires be the ones that win. Repent! Turn away from your old life and old way. Be reconciled to God, so that you might receive all His blessing and His protection.

My brothers and sisters, satan’s assaults will inevitably come, and some days will be worse than others, but God has outfitted us in such a way that if we would only put on these holy attitudes, then we will overcome and continue to experience God’s salvation blessings unevaded. May God grant this to us. Let’s pray:

God, we thank You for this Word. Lord, I pray that You would protect this church, each marriage, family, and person from the schemes and desires of the devil. I pray that You would bring repentance. Cause the people to reach out to their fellow soldiers for help because we are not in this battle alone. We are in it together under our head, Lord, Jesus Christ. O, Spirit, please work among Your people. Deliver us from satan and the corruptness of our own flesh, so that we might enjoy walking with You by faith. Amen.

July 22, 2018
Biblical Fatherhood

In this special Father’s Day sermon, Pastor Babij explains how to be a biblical father. Using the Scripture, Pastor relates several “do nots” and major mistakes for Christian fathers to avoid as well as several positive principles to follow. Pastor Babij concludes by exhorting fathers to make teaching the way of God to their children a clear priority.

Note: The video’s audio improves at 17:33.

Full Transcript:

Because it is Father’s Day, I wanted to give some instruction to fathers knowing that there are some new fathers. When I became a Christian and then a father, one thing I figured out quickly was that I didn’t know how to do this, so I was scrambling and reading all of these books about how to be a father. Some things were good, but then I decided to just study Proverbs.

Over the years, I gleaned some things from that, which was helpful for me to raise my kids. If we are called to be fathers, have been a father, or whatever stage you are at in fatherhood, we do it imperfectly, but we also want to have instruction on how to do it.

Through the years and because of certain accomplishments, sometimes people give you a pen. When you graduate or do something, they give you a pen, so I have a lot of pens. However, there is one pen that is above all the other pens. It is a cross pen, and on the cross pen it just says one thing on it and it says, “daddy.”

When my kids were young and got together, they all contributed to buy me this pen, so this pen is above all pens. For one reason, and it’s because it says “daddy” on it, and as I was thinking about that, it touches you when your kids do stuff like that for you. So, I want to look at some things the Bible specifically says about fathers instructing their kids, which is what a father does as he is the leader in the home.

In our Ironman group, we have been studying through a book called Disciplines of a Godly Man. In that book, one of the chapters was on the family, and the author of the book, R. Kent Hughes, wrote this important statement to fathers:

Men, the mere fact of fatherhood has endowed you with terrifying power in the lives of your sons and daughters, because they have an innate, God-given passion for you.

He went on to say:

The terrible fact is, that we can grace our children or damn them.

Then, he continued:

As fathers you have such power! You will have this terrible power until you die, like it or not – in your attitude toward authority, in your attitude toward women, in your regard for God and the church. What terrifying responsibilities! This is truly the power of life and death.

Now, that quote should bring to the mind to fathers and parents that we have an awesome responsibility. Parenting is so important that it is a matter of life and death. Maybe you never thought about it like that, but the Bible does bring to a high level the responsibility of a mother and father raising their children and influencing their family, which influences a society, which influences the church, which influences the nation.

Maybe you are at the beginning of fatherhood, in the middle of fatherhood, maybe you are not a father at all, but you know people who are fathers. Possibly you are a grandfather or a great-grandfather, so you never really get away from the concept of father. It is always there. By our Lord’s design, the design of the family, which is the basic unit found within the broader context of society, includes a father, a mother, one or two children, or more, and sometimes no children.

As we go forward, let’s have a word of prayer:

Lord, I Thank You for the instruction that You give us in the word of God about what fathers are to be. One thing fathers are to be is to be wise. Not worldly wise, but wise in the things of God. Wise in the instruction found in the word of God. He needs to be very aware of what God requires of him. I pray, Lord, that we do feel the weight of that responsibility. Lord, in this world, there is no help. If there is any, it is very little. So, Lord, we must find help in Your word. We must find help within Your church. I pray, Lord, as we look at this passage and break it down and think about this, I pray that You would impress upon us, as fathers, that we have a responsibility and that we should be this kind of person. I pray this, in Christ’s name, Amen.

In our text, the most basic obligation children have is toward their parents, which is that of obedience. Our passage, in Ephesians, is about children acquiring knowledge to live wisely, so this passage moves us from instruction of a subordinate group, which is children, to instruction to the imperative group, which are parents. Ephesians 6:4 says:

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Here, fathers are named as representing both parents and the discipline and governance of the home are given to the father since he is the head of the home. Christ is the head of us, and the father is the head of the wife and family, which is the way God made it to be. When it functions like that, it functions quite well.

Don’t forget, the context, in which we find this instruction in the Christian family, exists in our relationship to obeying the Holy Spirit. This passage is about living a spirit filled life. As children obeying their parents, who are submitting to the Holy Spirit, fathers are given this responsibility. The passage mentions the negative and positive duties of a father.

First, we will look at the negative. The father has the capability, as the leader and authority, to do the opposite of what he should be doing. Given that anger is a fleshly and strong desire, that desire must be instruction on how to use it in the right way. Because the father is the head, and has been given, by God, authority, that authority can be misused. This authority must come under the control of the Holy Spirit.

God must take all of us and put us under the control of the Holy Spirit, so the word provoke denotes not only the cause of irritation or exasperation by parental actions and demands, but further the awakening of anger by treatment that is hard, oppressive, and often unfair. This is not to say that the father must never refuse to allow a child to have his own way or must permit a child to do wrong for fear of arousing its anger. Nothing can be unkinder than to let a child believe, by an exposition of temper, that he or she may get what they want. A father must help a child steer away from self-indulgence.

The relationship of authority and submission, which is in this context of Scripture, should exist between father and child, and is guided by a father, who desires to find what is pleasing to the Lord and what lines up with walking by the control of the Holy Spirit.

By way of practical things, the DO NOTs of fatherhood come by belittling criticism in the absence of appropriate praise, being overly strict and controlling, being overly irritable, being unpredictable, being inconsistent, or even by playing the favorite game. These are the DO NOTs that can provoke anger within your children’s heart.

In other words, a father’s submission to the Lord will be seen in the way he shows that he is humble, gentle, patient, and bearing with his child in love. Such a father will not cause his child to become angry, which is the goal. The goal is not to cause your child to become angry.

In some way, all of us have been introduced to some kind of parental approach. If you don’t know the Bible very well, get married, and start having kids, then you may think of doing it the way your parents did it, or the way you think it should be done. All of us do this: when we get older, we say we are not going to be like our parents. Then, we find out that we are just like that. As a parent, these are the things not to do.

Our parenting approach is going to be one in which you are a permissive parent with not many boundaries, too much freedom, and with some concern in love, or you are going to be a parent that is neglectful with no boundaries, no love, or no confidence or security within the children. Then, you can be one who is an authoritarian parent with lots of rules, but not a lot of love. Also, you can be an authoritative parent with high support to their children, lots of rules, boundaries to which you can and cannot do, there are penalties if you break the rules, and there is a lot of love, which produces confidence and security within the children.

Here are some mistakes: when raising our kids, we tend to raise our children the way we were raised, which is not always a bad thing if you had a good example. Secondly, we tend to develop our own methods with no foundations, such as the way we think it should go. Then, there is those who tend to compare our children with each other, which is always a dangerous thing to do. Also, we could leave our children to societies directives or to its experts. There are experts who have no founding or root in the word of God.

Now, I’d like to interject some thoughts about somethings I have wondered about while studying the word of God and raising my children. They came in the form of asking myself two questions as a parent: what am I doing right and what I am doing wrong? Then, are there right parenting formulas that guarantee you will have godly children?

For instance, some parents prefer a particular method of discipline. Others insist that a certain type of education is the key such as classical education, Christian education, home schooling, a trade school, or secular or private schools. While others still promote a specific curriculum that is guaranteed to instill godly character into children, and these parents all believe that by carefully following that prescribed system, they will be assured of success. Proverbs 22:6 says:

Train up a child in the way he should go,
Even when he is old he will not depart from it.

However, are there really any fail-safe methods of child raising? Does the Bible prescribe specific methods of parenting that promise success every time? The Biblical answer to that question is no, which may shock you a bit, but we must know that. There are no foolproof methods of parenting. The fact remains that the Bible mentions many parents who have experienced misery and sadness at the hands of their children, including our first parents, Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve had high hopes for their two sons, and they sought to raise their children to serve the Lord. While one son, Abel, honored both God and his parents, the other son, Cain, was stubborn, self-willed, and hot tempered. Ultimately, this rebellious son murdered his younger brother, and spent the rest of his life separated as a vagabond on the run from his parents and brothers, who loved him.

It is hard for you to imagine the anguish that Adam and Eve experienced. Though, it might not be hard since you have gone through the same experience, same misery, and sadness at the hands of some of your children. In order to understand the meaning of Proverbs 22:6, we need to grasp the nature of Proverbs overall.

The book of Proverbs is not a collection of promises, and some people have taken this Proverb as a promise that will be fulfilled as long as conditions for the promise are met by us. Instead, Proverbs are maximums that wisely describe, in a general sense, the way that God has made the world to operate under a curse.

Then, Proverbs 22:6 is a wise truism, not a promise, but a warning. It is true that God often blesses godly parenting. Generally speaking, children from Christian families, who honor the Scriptures, turn out much better than children raised in unbelieving homes, who reject the word of God.

However, there are exceptions. Just as it is possible for a hardworking man to remain poor, it is possible for kids, who have had faithful parents, turn from the truth. We must realize that there are no promises that God will always, in every case, save our children no matter how diligent we are in directing them to the Lord and the things of the Lord.

Perhaps you have trained up your children in the way they should go. That is our job to do so, which is the admonition the Scriptures give us, yet they have departed from it. Don’t automatically assume that their rebellion is your fault. We must consider the fact that the Bible teaches three factors, not just one, that determine how a child will turn out.

First, parents are responsible to humbly honor the Lord and faithfully obey His word in the training of their children. Now, that is a given, but there is also the child themselves, who are to obey their parents. This is in a home, which people are trying to do the word of God and want to live by the spirit, so the command must come to the child too, which is in Ephesians 6:1-3:

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ²HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER (which is the first commandment with a promise), ³SO THAT IT MAY BE WELL WITH YOU, AND THAT YOU MAY LIVE LONG ON THE EARTH.

In fact, there is a promise to this where you will live longer. This doesn’t mean that the parents will kill you if you don’t obey. Nonetheless, it brings to our attention that if the children have to obey, then there is something wrong with the child and their heart.

Parents, get this through your mind: you have children, who have sinful hearts and live in a sin-cursed world. You are sinners yourself. Even though you are redeemed, you still have remaining corruption that God is working on.

Secondly, children are responsible to humbly honor their parents and the Lord by responding in faithful obedience. This is what they are supposed to do, and you cannot make them do that. I always say to people:

When your kids are young and little, that is easy. You have control and the power, man! When they get up there, taller than you, and they think they are smarter than you, then you have a problem there since there is resistance and a little pushback.

Thus, the child is responsible for truth also, and they are not exempt. Thirdly, the Lord is ruling sovereignly over the lives of both parents and children, directing them according to His good purposes. Fathers, who are Christians, have an advantage because we are given a command by the Holy Spirit on how to parent negatively, which I mentioned. Meaning, don’t do this.

If you think about it, it’s pretty simple. In fact, the Lord just gives us one passage here. Maybe, he just needs to keep it simple for us, which brings us to the second thing: duties of fathers are to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. As men, this is what the Lord is telling us to do. As we do it, then we will do what we ought to be doing.

The father is responsible to humbly honor the Lord and faithfully obey His word in training their children. Although it is true that God doesn’t absolutely guarantee success in response to our faithful parenting, the Bible does make it very clear that parents are responsible to train their children according to God’s principles.

There are three things I want to glean from Ephesians 6:4, and the first simply says to bring them up. Meaning, nourish them, feed them, and give them the necessary things to be able to become a wise, functioning citizen within your family and broader context of the world. This may mean several things for us.

One, it may mean that we have the power to direct our children. Proverbs 29:15-18 says:

The rod and reproof give wisdom,
But a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother.

¹⁶When the wicked increase, transgression increases;
But the righteous will see their fall.

¹⁷Correct your son, and he will give you comfort;
He will also delight your soul.

¹⁸Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law.

The word vision means where there is no revelation of God or instruction from God. There are no boundaries, and sin is not restrained when that happens. In other words, to bring them up means that, as a father or parent, we have the power to direct them. Don’t leave that power to someone else. That is your power that God has given you, so you have the influence to use it when they are young. Believe me, use it. If you don’t use it, someone else will fill that void, and you don’t want that to happen.

Secondly, under bringing them up, is the power to restrain them. You can restrain your children, so do it in a calm, controlled, and respectful manner, not out of control as someone who is filled with anger, which will never produce what you want it to produce. The anger of God never produces the righteousness of God, which is in the epistle of James.

Thirdly, under bringing them up, is the power to test and judge them. So, you’re watching and looking at your kids, and you are testing them along the way. You are looking at where they are at and where they should be. For instance, are they getting the message you are teaching them? Then, you have the power to judge them. If you do that correctly and are fair and balanced in your judgement with each individual child, then you will be able to bring them up.

Second, in our passage, he says that we are to discipline them. Today, this is a subject that people often avoid, and this is where they really go wrong. People say that they can’t do something to their child because it is child abuse, or it wouldn’t be right in the society or community. However, the Bible is saying to discipline them.

Of course, discipline means to educate by training with verbal reproof and remonstrance because a child’s nature is sinful. Sin is bound up in the heart of the child, and a father needs to reprove his child from errors of the child’s own ways. Thus, we are to diligently discipline our kids in the hope that God will work through our discipline and nurture them, so that we may draw our children to God himself. The goal of all discipline is going to be conversion.

The Hebrew term, drawn from this situation, is to restrain from doing wrong and to reform by words or actions. It’s a verb that means to chasten them or bring them under something. Of course, you want to bring them under your authority and the discipline or training of an individual is in areas where he or she is unruly or does not want to be told.

Whether our children are passive or aggressive, they all have that tendency. We must identify them. Parents identify things in their children and each child needs to be directed and taught differently. This term means to correct and even to scourge, or to spank. The word is used in this way: to take one into something.

As parents, we are given that responsibility to discipline them. You cannot always speak sweet words to your children such as “honey, five minutes in the corner and everything should be fine.” Sorry, that doesn’t work with a sin nature. Christians should understand the sin nature. So, we must apply the force necessary to cause them to follow our verbal instructions.

In other words, we are getting our children to obey our voice, but before we get them to obey our voice, we have to bend them over and tend their hide for two reasons: disobedience and rebellion. We bring them to listen to our voice, so that someday they would listen to God’s voice and obey the Lord, which is always the goal.

Secondly, there is the pressure to hold them back from what they would do if they were left to their own will and desire. Again, it is that matter of the pressure we need to put, in that individual child’s life, to restrain them from what they would do if they were left to themselves. If you say, “tonight, we’re going to have steak and potatoes, but whatever you want.” Well, you know they’re going to go to the freezer and get an ice pop, ice cream, and candy. They’re not going to eat the steak and potatoes, so you must say, “no, we’re having this tonight.” You must apply the needed pressure so that they conform, and you get them to do what they normally don’t want to do.

Lastly, once you do all of those things, then there is the adjustment of pressure to evaluate how far your child has come in a specific area. As they obey and mature, you must adjust your authority and give them more and more freedom as they grow up. Then, the father decides how much freedom based on certain things such as their attitudes, their responsible behavior, and their obedience.

When you tell a child to sit down, a parent knows, in their heart, they are not sitting down, so those are the things where they can rebel against you and not say one word. As a parent, we must know the attitudes. In Proverbs, there are several passages of Scripture that bring to our attention this such as Proverbs 29:17:

¹⁷Correct your son, and he will give you comfort;
He will also delight your soul.

In other words, the rest and delight come from the child’s obedience. Proverbs 19:18 says:

Discipline your son while there is hope,
And do not desire his death.

Then, Proverbs 23:13 says:

Do not hold back discipline from the child,
Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.

Of course, this is all contained in Proverbs in the context of a wise parent, not a foolish parent, not a naïve parent, not a parent who is a scoffer, but a wise parent. Now, parents are using and observing everything, so they can properly discipline their children, not improperly.

There is no abuse in the context of Proverbs when these verses come up. They are directing their will to this narrow path where they are comfortable walking on it. The Lord encourages us to train our children because we might be the very means that He will use to rescue our children from destruction and protect them from the foolishness that resides in their heart.

Lastly, in that passage of Scripture, the Bible says that we are to instruct them. This is different than disciplining them, but it goes along with it – all three go together. Really, this is where the parent is proactive in bringing them instruction that they are going to need in life. They are going to need this in life to survive and do what is right.

First, we must develop a taste and thirst for righteousness. Parents, we can do that as we have a taste and thirst for righteousness ourselves. Remember, the Lord said in the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5:6:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

There is a hunger that we are to give our kids for doing what is right, which includes doing what is pleasing to the Lord.

Then, the next thing is that we are to develop in them a submissive and respectful demeanor. If we think about what we have been taught in 1 Peter 2, there is a godly submission that comes to all of us when it comes to authority, and your children learn how to submit to your authority. Then, we are to discipline their will toward obedience, which is all part of what we are doing. We are directing them in a course where they know what to do and what is the right thing to do.

To do that, parents must understand the fallen nature of their children. If anybody should have a good doctrine of sin, it is Christians. We know that our kids are sinners, but as we observe their sin, we must observe what the Bible says in Proverbs 22:6. In other words, each child has a way about them. Proverbs 30:18-20 says:

There are three things which are too wonderful for me, four which I do not understand:

¹⁹The way of an eagle in the sky,
The way of a serpent on a rock,
The way of a ship in the middle of the sea,
And the way of a man with a maid.

²⁰This is the way of an adulterous woman:
She eats and wipes her mouth,
And says, “I have done no wrong.”

In each one of those situations, there is a way about the thing. We can identify in our children their bents, such as what bent do they have to a specific sin? Some kids have a bent to lying about things, or someone has a bent to take things that are not theirs. One child may have a bent to be passive, but are rebelling inside of themselves, or a child is bent to being aggressive outwardly.

Thus, all those bents are identified by the parent, and by the father. As he does that, he wants to steer them away from any kind of bents to sin in that specific child. Then, we want to build godly character, teach our children wisdom, move them from foolishness, move them from being naïve about things, and from not becoming a scoffer, but a wise child, who knows how to implement and observe things to make the right decision.

We want to instill in the child dignity and respect. Also, we want to remove, in a child, all tendency of prejudice. Titus 3:2 says:

…showing every consideration for all men.

Prejudice is taught in the home, and it is also taught in society. It is a wicked thing, and it doesn’t help. When people come into the church, there is really no such thing because we have one thing in common, which is Jesus Christ. He is our Lord and Savior. It doesn’t matter the color of our skin or background. We come in the unity of the faith, and we develop and grow together as a family.

There is unity and love amongst diversity because of the Holy Spirit of God, which is what we want to teach our children. The family and the church go together. We must make sure that we connect those two things. This is what we do as a family, and part of what we do as a family is go to church, learn the word of God, implement Biblical principles in our life, and we don’t do certain things other people do because it is not pleasing to the Lord.

This is what we are communicating to our children, and believe me, it does take root in our kids even when our kids have tendencies to go off and rebel for a while. Maybe they will leave the home and are not believers, but they still have what you taught them. When they leave out that door and you taught them in the way they should go, even if they are not believers, they know what you believe, and they know what the right thing is.

Thus, their rebellion is no longer with you, but it’s with the Lord. The Lord will have to take care of them. Believe me, when your kids do leave, and you have no more restrain and power over them, that is when you trust the Lord, especially since you cannot help them or be there. You cannot lift them up every time they fall, and they are past the instruction in the sense where you tell them the way things should be.

Instead, you become wise counselors, and you give good advice to your kids wherever they are at in their journey and life. Of course, you will always want to direct them. I always do these subtle things, in text, by saying to always put the Lord first, to do what is right, to find a Christian person you can hang out with, to be going to church, and to be reading the Scripture. No matter how old they are, I always put that in there.

However, you cannot preach to them anymore. You just have to be there to show them love and be consistent in your Christian walk. If you do that, then you will definitely have a huge influence on your kids throughout your whole life.

In Proverbs, it tells us that if we’re going to teach our kids these things, then you must be learning those things yourself. You must be taught in the word of God before your children are taught in the word of God. You must live out what you are learning and teach them not by sitting down and having a bible study, but by your life, the way you respond to things, your behavior, by the words you use, by, husbands, how you treat your wives, by, wives, how you treat your husbands, and by, parents, how you treat your kids. All of it is important, and all of it is being observed.

The little minds are recording all of those things, and they will say, “that’s the way mom and dad did it.” Proverbs 1:8 says:

Hear, my son, your father’s instruction
And do not forsake your mother’s teaching

Then, this is how Proverbs 1:1-2 starts out:

The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel:

²To know wisdom and instruction,
To discern the sayings of understanding,

Wisdom is the skill of living out life beautifully, so it demonstrates to those looking on you that there is something different about you. You have a skill to be able to live life, which is a skill that doesn’t come easily. People can have a skill to be artists, mechanics, or a lot of things. When it comes down to skill for wise living, you don’t see it very much because it takes work.

Also, the wisdom and instruction are to bring them under the areas that they don’t want to be told. Then, in Proverbs 1:2, there is discernment. Meaning, to make them mentally mature. Mental maturity is necessary for spiritual maturity. It was Johnathan Edwards who said:

The way to the volition is through the intellect. If you do not understand the word of God, you cannot understand how to practice it. Our minds must be disciplined and mature for the word of God to affect our lives.

To teach the nature of life is what we ought to be doing. Then, Proverbs 1:3 gives us some instruction:

To receive instruction in wise behavior,
Righteousness, justice and equity;

Wise behavior means to be prudent. It is the ability to govern or discipline oneself by choice, which is what a wise person does. We can discipline ourselves by choice when we have thought about it, but not thinking about it in a vacuum. We think about it being informed by God’s word, and as Solomon did, by watching his father, David, and how he acted, responded to the Lord, and when he sinned, how he dealt with his sin.

Secondly, we are to teach them righteousness, which means to conform to the will and standard of God. Teach them what is right before the Lord. Then, we are to teach them justice, which is the act of deciding a case, dealing justly with people, or having a good and fair judgement in the face of God.

Then, there is equity, which simply means without wrinkles or smooth. Another way of saying equity is that which is pleasing to the Lord. They know the right way, and they know how the right way looks. Meaning, they know how to do it.

The bottom line, fathers, is to be sold on instructing the children, under your charge, in God’s way, which is the right way. Meaning, we can never let a child choose against the truth. We must insist that they do what is right, so we must expect obedience at all times, which starts when they are little. If you instruct and discipline them, then when they get older, there will be a sense of obedience in them.

Wise fathers make instructing their children in the way of the Lord a priority. Nothing is more important than teaching our children about life from God’s perspective by teaching them the realities of wisdom and of folly. Also, teaching them the realities of righteousness and wickedness. You don’t have to commit or do sin to know sin. It could be taught, and it is taught right in the word of God.

We must teach when you do the truth or error, there is implications and results that happen. We must teach the realities of God’s way and every other way. One thing we must do is teach them what God requires. In fact, God considers godly instruction to be of greater value than anything a young adult can take from the home.

If you want to give your children wealth and riches, then give them truth. If you have no money to give them and you give them truth, then they will be wealthy because they will know how to live life and hedge against foolishness and being naïve. They will know very clearly what a scoffer is, and they will stay away from them. They will pick good friends, and they will pick things in their life that will be a blessing to us as parents.

Bottom line, fathers, I want to admonish you to seriously consider your situation. If you have not, begin to implement these principles within your daily family lives. Parents are to teach into their children a submissive and obedient heart, and to drive out of them a stubborn rebellious heart, which is the bottom line of teaching the word of God.

For those fathers with young children, someday very soon – sooner than you think – your relationship with your children will change. One day, you will look up and see that your child has become a full-blown adult. At that point, you, the parent, then becomes the aged-counselor, but that is a good place to be. If all those things you have been toiling with for years to discipline, train, and instruct your children, though imperfectly, then at the end, we can pray that you will bare the fruit of a glad heart. Proverbs 23:15-16 says:

My son, if your heart is wise,
My own heart also will be glad;

¹⁶And my inmost being will rejoice
When your lips speak what is right.

Isn’t it great that some of the things you taught your kids is coming out of their life and mouth? If they get married and have children, they are doing the same thing. There is nothing more that will bring gladness to your heart than that. Then, if they open their mouth, they are opening their mouth with wisdom. Proverbs 23:17-18 says:

Do not let your heart envy sinners,
But live in the fear of the LORD always.

¹⁸Surely there is a future,
And your hope will not be cut off.

Someone who grows up like that, will have a future, and they will have a hope. I pray that the Lord may bless you fathers and mothers, and just your parenting. That I can just admonish you in just a short time to consider these things and implement them in your life. If you have already, keep doing it and don’t give up.

There will be down times, but don’t give up. Just continue to press-on and trust the Lord, which is why we must depend so much on prayer, the fellowship of believers, and the word of God to continue to keep us on the straight and narrow path. So, I pray this, and guys, Happy Father’s Day. Let’s have a hand for fathers.

Of course, we have a Heavenly Father, who is faithful to us in all ways. Let’s pray:

Lord, Thank You that Your word, Lord, is very clear in what it requires. Lord, we know that, by Your holy spirit, He causes us to put in place those things that are needful to raise our children. We do know, Lord, when we do this, the grace of God is in our home, and the possibility of our children coming to know You as their Lord and Savior is very high. Lord, Thank You for saving our kids. For the kids that are not yet saved from parents, who have diligently put these things into practice, I pray, Lord, that You not leave them alone. I pray, Lord, that they are under Your discipline now, and that You can bring them into situations that can humble them into a place where they remember what their mother and father taught them, and that they would call out to You. I pray You would do that, Lord. Our kids that have trusted You, please protect them and watch over them. I pray, Lord, for their future and hope that You give them in Christ, Jesus. I pray, Lord, that You would develop, in church, young people, who are godly and mature in Christ, Jesus. When they get married and have kids, then they will know what to do and know how to do it. Bless us in this way, in these last days. Lord, make Your church shine brightly in this area. I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.

June 17, 2018
Becoming Like Jesus

Answers Bible Curriculum Year 3 Quarter 4 Lesson 10

This week in Sunday school, we’re taking a closer look at what the New Testament epistles have to say about the Christian’s growth in holiness. What is the difference between positional and progressive sanctification? How is your own effort key in the process of becoming holy? Why is the battle for holiness in the Christian life so important? Please join us as we consider these crucial questions and more.

Our main texts for this lesson are 1 Peter 1:13-16, Philippians 3:12-16, and Ephesians 6:10-20.

June 3, 2018
Saved by Grace

Answers Bible Curriculum Year 3 Quarter 4 Lesson 7

This week in Sunday school, we return to the New Testament epistles and investigate the apostles’ teaching on the relationship of faith and works. Are Christians really saved by faith alone? Can a person be saved without a life of righteousness? And what should be the source of a Christian’s assurance of salvation? We’ll take a look at these questions and more.

Our main texts for this lesson are Ephesians 2:1-10 and James 2:14-26.

May 13, 2018
The Five Solas of the Reformation, Part 1: Sola Gratia
Pastor Babij introduces a new sermon series today on the Five Solas of the Reformation. The five solas are:
1. Sola scriptura – Scripture alone
2. Sola fide – faith alone
3. Sola gratia – grace alone
4. Solus Christus – Christ alone
5. Soli deo gloria – glory to God alone
In today’s sermon, Pastor Babij focuses on sola gratia, how salvation comes about solely by the grace, or undeserved favor, of God. As part of this discussion, Pastor Babij examines three historical viewpoints regarding the effects of the Fall of man:
1. Pelagianism: We can still save ourselves
2. Semi-Pelagianism: We were contaminated at the Fall but can still contribute to our salvation
3. Augustinism: We are spiritually dead and cannot help ourselves be saved at all
Pastor Babij demonstrates from the Bible how the Augustinian view is correct. We are all dead in our sins and must be rescued by God. God has held nothing back with the gift of His Son Jesus Christ and, for those who are saved, nothing can separate them from God’s love, since salvation is totally of Him.
August 13, 2017
Women of the Spirit
In this Mother’s Day sermon, Pastor Babij teaches how the Christian woman or mother displays three evidences of the Spirit in her life:
1. Her life exudes joyfulness
2. She lives out a thankful heart in all situations
3. She focuses on others’ needs before her own
Pastor Babij exhorts all believers to live and exhibit these attributes in their lives.
May 14, 2017
Why You Must Understand God’s Will

In this sermon, David Capoccia explores three questions regarding understanding God’s will:

1) Why should I understand God’s will?
2) How do I understand God’s will?
3) What is God’s will?

November 27, 2016