THE SHIELD OF FAITH

Eph.6:16 with Heb.11:1-12:3

 

INTRODUCTION

“It’s all to do with confidence—or the lack of it.”  That was how one economist summed up the reason for the credit crunch.  For years banks had been borrowing from each other in order to lend to us.  But too many us over-stretched ourselves and found we were unable to repay the mortgage.  When the banks realized that they weren’t going to get their money back, they stopped lending to each other.  Without that money they couldn’t lend to businesses, like Woolworths, which relied on borrowed money to purchase the goods it sold in the high street. 

 

It’s all do with a collapse in confidence.  No one is sure they’ll get their money back, so they are very reluctant to lend it. 

 

Another way of putting it is that there is a lack of faith.  Until recently we had faith in our banks; faith that when we deposited our money with them we’d get it back, with interest.  But recently we’ve heard some heart-wrenching stories of depositors with the Icelandic banks losing their life’s savings.  A lot of people had faith in Gordon Brown’s dictum that there would no longer be any “boom and bust”.  That claim now rings hollow. 

 

To have faith in someone is to have confidence in them, to believe that they will do what they said they would do.  In Eph.6:16 the Apostle Paul compares faith to a shield that can deflect Satan’s fiery arrows.  This evening we’re going to consider what he means by that.  Where does our confidence lie when Satan tempts us to sin and to disown our Lord? 

 

RECAP

We’re thinking through the reality of spiritual warfare.  As Christian soldiers we have our orders.  We are to be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.  We are to:

Put on the full armour of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.

 

Of the individual pieces of that armour so far we have considered the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, and the gospel of peace, which like the spiked the boots worn by Roman soldiers, gives us a good grip, and enables us stand our ground. 

 

This evening we move on to consider the shield of faith.  And before we go any further I want to repeat something I’ve said before, because it’s relevant here.  When we refer to the armour of God we don’t just mean the armour which God supplies; we also mean the armour which is God himself, the armour which reflects or signifies the nature and character of the Lord Hosts himself. 

 

We saw this with the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness.  It’s true as well of the shield of faith.  To Abraham, the Lord says:

Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield, your very great reward.  (Gen.15:1)

And several times the Psalmist says of the Lord: he is my shield.  (eg. Ps.18:2)

 

Remember, it is never our faith, our ability to believe, which is the shield that protects.  Our shield is the one we believe in, the one we have confidence in.  Our shield is the Lord. 

 

What we’re going to do tonight is think about why temptations are compared to flaming arrows; and then see how faith acts like a shield against them. 

THE SHIELD

First of all, a word about the kind of shield Paul has in mind.  Don’t think of the small round shield, the targe, used by our Highland ancestors.  Think rather of the long Roman shield, the “scutum”, four feet long and two-and-a-half feet wide.  It provided protection for the whole body.  It was slightly curved allowing it to absorb heavy blows better, and also to deflect arrows better. 

 

Most interesting from our point of view, the shield was covered with a metal lining, rendering it fire-proof.  If the enemy started raining down fiery arrow upon the troops, they’d close ranks into a formation called “the tortoise”, raising the shields above their heads, reminiscent of the hard shell of a tortoise. 

 

So the apostle tells us to take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

 

Like a long shield, faith will protect us from Satan’s assaults. 

 

FLAMING ARROWS

If you think about it, comparing Satan’s assaults to flaming arrows is a very good analogy.  Arrows are swift and silent and catch the enemy unawares.  Flaming arrows are doubly dangerous, doubly destructive.  Satan knows that if he can catch us by surprise then he has a better chance of tripping us up and causing us to sin.

 

All of us have found ourselves in situations where evil thoughts have come to mind seemingly out of the blue.  I was saying the other week that sometimes I think there is a rope attached to my knees so that every time I bend them in prayer a bell is rung in hell.  Immediately all sorts of distracting thoughts fill my mind; and not just distracting thoughts, unworthy thoughts too. 

It’s amazing how cruel and unkind thoughts can enter our heads at the most unlikely times.

 

Think too about spiteful words spoken in the heat of the moment.  We thought the thought and immediately we fired it from the mouth.  It’s the same with certain actions.  A situation arises and although we know it’s wrong, we figure we can get away with it.  So we take what is not ours to take or keep what is not ours to keep.  It’s done so quickly we can hardly believe it.

 

Sometimes these temptations come to us from a mere glance or from something over-heard.  Think of King David.  One evening he can’t sleep so he goes for a stroll on the roof-top of his palace.  By chance, at that very same moment, in a neighbouring house, a woman, Bathsheba, is having a bath.  And David catches sight of her. 

 

David hasn’t sinned.  This isn’t something he was looking for.  He didn’t go up to the roof-top in the hope that he’d catch a glimpse of her.  It was all unexpected.  And if he had immediately averted his eyes, turned around, and went back to bed, that would have been the end of that. 

 

But he didn’t.  He didn’t shield himself from temptation.  He stayed and he stared. That’s what led to adultery and to murder.  How true it is, that like a spark blown by the wind setting light to surrounding buildings, one sin leads to another. 

 

But not all temptations take us by surprise.  Some of them are very familiar to us.  There is what Paul calls indwelling sin, the sin which seeks to master us, to control us.  All of us have certain temptations which plague us every day of our life, a particular sin which we must conquer in Christ’s name from the moment we rise in the morning to the moment we go to bed at night. 

 

For example, some us may be by nature very proud.  Perhaps just by the way we’ve been brought up we have a very high opinion of ourselves and our abilities.  Other people would say we are quite sure of ourselves.  Christians like this have to work at listening to others; they have to suppress feelings of jealousy when others are praised.  By God’s grace they learn not to boast, not to be pushing themselves forward all the time.  Indeed, by God’s grace no one else would ever guess that inwardly they battle against this spirit of pride. 

 

A Biblical example would be Abraham, who was prone to telling lies in order to extricate himself from tricky situations.  Twice he told his wife Sarah to be economical with the truth to save his own skin.  It wasn’t a one-off with Abraham, it was a pattern.  Telling lies was not out of character for him.

 

When Satan fires his flaming arrows he is attempting to light a fire that will destroy your witness.  He succeeded with Abraham.  Any reputation that Abraham had as a righteous man in the sight of those he lied to was burned to tinder. 

 

William Gurnall puts it like this:

Temptation doth not fall on us like a ball of fire on ice and snow but as a spark on tinder or as lightening on a thatched roof which is presently on flame.

 

As James says (1:14,15):

but each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he is dragged away and enticed.  Then after desire has conceived it gives birth to sin and sin when it is full-grown gives birth to death. 

 

Gurnall also makes this interesting observation about the Lord Jesus Christ.  He says the reason he didn’t sin when tempted is because there was no combustible material in him for Satan to work on.  There was no indwelling sin in Christ to catch fire.

 

One of the reasons why so many Christians fall prey to Satan’s attacks is that they fail to recognize the reality of indwelling sin.  All it takes is one flaming arrow and their house is on fire.  They may be faultless in so many other areas of life—a faithful husband or wife; an obedient child; meticulous in their finances; a model employee.  But they have their Achilles heel, their weak spot—be it pride, gluttony, laziness, being argumentative, envious, whatever.  And every time Satan takes a pot shot at them, they fall. 

 

Whether the temptation comes out of the blue or whether it something we wrestle with day in day out, we must take up the shield of faith against it. 

 

FAITH

We’ve already come across faith in this letter.  In 1:15 Paul tells the Ephesian Christians that ever since he heard about their faith in the Lord Jesus he had not stopped praying for them.  In 2:8 he explains that we are saved by God’s grace through faith.  He says in 3:12 that in Christ and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence. 

To have faith in someone means you believe that they will do what they’ve said they’ll do.  When we go under the scalpel, we are expressing faith in the surgeon, that he or she will remove the diseased heart and replace it with a healthy transplant.  Every time we sit in the passenger seat of a car we are exercising faith in the driver to take us safely from one place to another. 

 

Faith always has an object.  We have faith in a chair to support us and not collapse; faith in a bag to hold the shopping and not drop it.  Usually our faith is justified; but not always.  Chairs do sometimes collapse and the bottom does sometimes fall out of bags. 

 

When it comes to our salvation, the only legitimate object of our faith is God in Christ.  To quote Eph.2:8 in full: For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and this not of yourselves it is the gift of God

 

We are saved by grace, by God’s grace; it is his gift to us, his undeserved mercy towards us. 

We are saved through faith; that is, by believing we are saved by grace. 

 

In other words, faith kneels before God with hands empty and open wide, and says, “I believe you when you say that I can do nothing or bring nothing that will earn me salvation; I believe you when you say that you are willing to pardon my sins for the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, who died on the cross in my place.” 

 

To put it more succinctly, faith simply says “Thank you”.  That’s saving faith.  It tells God, “I believe you”.  It’s all about confidence; confidence in God and his word. 

 

But faith doesn’t stop with salvation.  The whole of the Christian life is one of faith.  We live by faith, not by sight says Paul to the Corinthians (2Cor.5:8). 

 

That’s what Heb.11 is all about.  It’s about men and women who lived by faith not by sight:

            Noah who built the ark before one drop of rain fell from the sky

            Abraham who left his homeland without knowing where he was going

            Joseph who gave instructions that his bones should be returned to the Promised Land while his people were still settled in Egypt

            Moses and the Israelites walking across the bed of the Red Sea

            Joshua and his people marching round the walls of Jericho for seven days

            Gideon dismissing the majority of his army before going into battle. 

 

11:1 says Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. 

 

Noah didn’t wait till it started raining; Abraham didn’t wait to be given a specific location; Joshua didn’t wait for a crack to appear in the walls.  They were sure of what they hoped for, they were certain of what they did not see. 

 

Why?  Were they just among life’s great optimists?  Did they have faith in a benign universe where everything always works out of the best?  Was their philosophy, It will be already on the night?

 

A lot of people are like that.  They say they have faith; but what they mean is that they are hoping for the best.  Their faith has no real object. 

 

The object of Noah and Abraham and Joseph and Moses and Joshua and all the rest was in the Living God.  They knew him and trusted him.  So 11:10 says of Abraham:

For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

 

Again with regard to Abraham, he was willing to sacrifice his only son Isaac because, v.19:

Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead

 

The point is this, that believers trust God implicitly in every situation they find themselves in.  Faith is not just something that belongs to our past (when we came to faith) but to our present and our future.  It’s all about confidence; confidence in the Living God. 

 

SHIELD OF FAITH

How, then, does faith in God act like a shield against Satan’s flaming arrows? 

 

Well, by faith we see sin for what it is.  Let’s face it, the reason we fall into Satan’s trap is because we’re attracted by what we see.  In our mind’s eye we see an outcome that is to our advantage. 

            We boast because we think that people will be impressed by what we’ve done. 

            We create divisions because we think that will enhance our influence.

            We tell lies because we hope that will divert blame away from us.

 

We’re told that adultery will spice up our lives; that ruthless ambition is the only way to the top; that the only way to be popular is to be one of the crowd.

 

Faith sees through all that.  It goes behind the stage curtain and sees sin in the dressing-room, before it’s been to make-up.  Listen to Heb.11:24-26:

By faith, Moses, when he had grown up refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.  He chose to be ill-treated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time.  He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking ahead to his reward.

 

Faith sees that the rewards of sin are short-lived.  Short-lived because life is short.  In faith we are willing to put up with unpopularity in this world because we are looking ahead to the “Well done good and faithful servant” promised us in Christ Jesus.  Faith sees that solid joys and lasting treasure none but Zion’s children know.

 

This coming year I predict that many of us will be shaken by the financial crisis and Satan will tempt us in ways that he would never have dared during more prosperous times.  Worry may overcome us as we doubt God’s ability to care for us.   

 

Faith reminds us that God loves us.  Mt.6:30:

If that is how God clothes the grass of the field which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 

 

And as times get tougher and we tighten our belts, faith teaches us that our true comfort and contentment do not come from anything this world has to offer.  If only our nation, our politicians, our bankers had listened to Christ:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal.  (Mt.6:19,20).

Faith reminds us (2Cor.4:16-18):

Though outwardly we are wasting away yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us and eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

 

The shield of faith enables us to quench the flaming arrows of the evil one.  By faith, sin looses its allure.  Like a cunning chef, Satan smothers rancid sin in a tasty sauce.  But faith has a nose for sin and isn’t deceived. 

 

USING THE SHIELD

We can’t finish without noting that the apostle specifically says, take up the shield of faith.  That’s different from the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness.  In a sense, the soldier always has these on.  But the shield is not attached to his body, and during a lull in the battle, he may lay his shield down.  Even as Christians there are times when we fail to act in faith.  It’s not the having of a shield that defends us, but holding it and wielding it. 

 

So how do we use this shield of faith? 

 

We use it when we pray to God for help.  James 4:2:

You do not have because you do not ask God. 

 

We use it when we remember God’s promises, particularly in relation to the believer and sin.  For example, Rom.6:14:

For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.

 

We use it when we remind ourselves of God’s power.  The battle belongs to the Lord, and Satan is no match for him.  That’s why Paul prayed (1:19) that we would know God’s incomparably great power for us who believe.  

 

And we use it when we plead the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Why did Christ die? 

Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.  (Tit.2:14)

 

Remind yourself that Christ died to redeem you from all wickedness and on come the sprinklers, dousing the flames of sin. 

 

CONCLUSION

As we draw to a conclusion I’d like to encourage any brother or sister here tonight who might be feeling very weak and vulnerable in the face of Satan’s onslaughts.  I’m picking up on something that Gurnall says. 

 

He says take encouragement from this: that if you are indeed a believer then sin is not as strong within you as it was before you trusted Christ.  Though thou are not what thou wouldst be, yet also thou art not what thou hast been.  Sin is no longer king in your heart; Christ is king.  As he brought the Hebrew slaves out of slavery in Egypt, he has liberated you from slavery to sin.  He will also, then, lead you through the wilderness, to the Promised Land, to the place he is preparing for those who love him.

 

Remember, it’s not about faith in yourself; it’s about faith in the Lord.  And you can have confidence in him.

 

Let me end with this challenge to anyone here who has not deliberately placed their trust in Jesus Christ.  I know you say you have faith.  But to be honest it’s really just faith in faith; faith that things will work out for the best.  It’s certainly not a faith that protects you from temptation.  It’s not a faith that enables you to see sin for what it really is. 

 

What you have is a paper shield.  It may look good.  It may even bring you some comfort.  But in the day of battle it’s useless.  And on the Day of Judgement your faith will go up in smoke.

 

You need to place your confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ.  You need him as your shield.  Only he can render Satan’s arrows ineffective; only he can save you from the lake of fire which is hell itself. 

 

You can have confidence in Jesus; he will never fail you, he will never let you down.  You can trust him with your life now, and in the life to come. 

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for