Scripture: Ephesians 6:10-14
Listen Link: www.lcepc.org then look for “sermons” tab.
Ephesians 6:14, “Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist.”
I once had a conversation with an engineer. He was highly intelligent, highly skilled in construction techniques, sort of like our good friend Lee Reibels, except that my friend in Maine was not a Christian. He once shared with me his ideas about faith. He said faith is what you’re using when you look at train tracks and it looks like they come together in the distance. You know what I mean right, when you look at a long straight pair of train tracks, stretching straight out all the way to the horizon, it looks like out there in the distance they get closer together, it even looks like maybe they get closer and closer together until somewhere far out there in the distance, they meet.
Then he says to me, “Well, you know seeing is believing, right? So, if you see that, then you are going to believe that they really do meet! That takes faith!”
I said back to him, “Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. Faith is knowing that even though it may look like the tracks come together out there, you know the truth. They do not. If you didn’t have faith in that truth, you’d never ride the train! Seeing is not really the same thing as believing. Appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes you better not believe what you see. But you should always believe the truth, because your eyes can fool you, but truth is always true.”
Truth is exclusive. Truth is the foundation for life. Truth is the protector of your will power. Let me tell you what I mean.
Truth is exclusive. A lot of people today don’t believe that. They believe that all truth is relative and cannot be objectively known. In fact, even among people who think they are Christian and identify themselves as evangelicals, a recent study revealed that 32% believe that religious belief is a matter of personal opinion, and not objective truth! Now for everybody else that’s understandable because what they believe is a matter of personal opinion. But the survey means there are Christians who don’t believe in absolute truth!
But Christians have to believe in absolute truth because Jesus said, “I am the way, the Truth, and the life.” If Jesus is the Truth, he is the Truth for everybody! That is the only way that he can be the one who died for the sins of the whole world. If God so loved the world that whosoever believes in Jesus shall not perish but have eternal life, then that must be as absolutely true as 2 plus 2 equals 4!
Because if John 3:16 is not absolutely true for everyone, then you can’t know that it is true for you. It’s not true just because you believe it. Your faith in it doesn’t make it true. Your faith could be wrong, because you’re only human. The only thing that makes anything absolutely true is if it is absolutely true, whether anybody believes it or not.
That’s why the Reformers decided to reject centuries of traditional Catholic teachings that got added to the Bible and agree with Paul when he said that “all Scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching correcting and training in righteousness.” They said that salvation can be known only by reading the Bible, Sola Scriptura! There is no other literature so especially inspired by God. The Bible alone is the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine and conduct. The Bible is the only source of absolute truth about the most important questions about human existence. Only the Bible tells the whole truth about God, creation, rebellion, sin, the problem of evil, and God’s solution in Christ alone because he loves us so much.
It only makes sense that in the presence of many religions and all kinds of idolatry in the world. When men have all kinds of crazy ideas about who God is and what he is like, the only way we’re really going to know the actual truth with any degree of confidence is if God himself speaks.
Oh, we can know certain things about God, because His existence is evident in all of creation. It’s like if you had my wallet, you could know how much money I had and certain things about me because of the cards I carry like my driver’s license etc. But if you really want to know me, you have to let me speak and tell you who I am and what I’m like. And if God was going to speak, he wouldn’t give bits and pieces here and there. A good God would tell the whole truth all in one place, so we can know for sure. That’s the Bible. Many people think that other religions have parts of the truth. That may be, but those are just lucky guesses. Everything not directly inspired by God is just guess work and fuzzy memory blurred by pride and sin.
But in our day, a lot of people who think they are Christian evangelicals have been affected by the general culture’s thinking, that there are many ways to heaven or enlightenment. Just because there are many religions, people like to conclude that we have to be fair and allow that any or maybe all of them are legitimate. The same study I quoted earlier showed that 30% of evangelicals say they question if God is a perfect being who cannot make mistakes. 48% believe the Bible contains myths. 67% think Jesus is just a created being, but that would make him, “not God.” 66% say most people are generally good, in other words they deny the Word of God’s declaration that none is righteous, no not one. And 65% agree God accepts worship from all religions, as if there are other ways to salvation besides through Jesus. To that I say, Jesus did not die on the cross just to become an option.
People don’t like it that the Bible makes such exclusive claims to truth. But there’s nothing wrong with exclusion if that’s the truth. Truth is exclusive because even though there are many ways to be wrong, there is only one way to be right, the true way. Think of the entry way into any store or business, unless there’s 2 doors like at Walmart, there’s really only one way that customers can legally get into the store, the front door, the one marked out for that purpose. That’s pretty exclusive, you can’t walk through a wall or climb in a window and you can’t use the service entrance if you’re just a customer.
Even at Tasty Treat, our local ice cream shop, there’s two front doors but only one is the entrance you’re supposed to use. You can’t say, “There are many ways into Tasty Treat.” That’s just not true. There’s only one legitimate entry point and that’s pretty exclusive. One door is for entry and ordering. The other door is exclusively to exit, and nobody is lined up at that one! And don’t even think about cutting in line. That’s a pretty exclusive rule, too! But you don’t hear customers complain about that. They accept that truth. They even enforce that truth! There are people who don’t accept that and would try to sneak in or out another way. They are thieves and robbers. Ain’t that the truth?
Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist. The Truth in God’s Word is the one and only absolutely irrefutable truth because it comes from God. This is true: Acts 4:12. “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” That’s not exclusive because it’s bigoted. It’s exclusive because it’s the plain and simple truth.
Truth is exclusive. Truth is the foundation for life. In Paul’s imagery he chose the belt to represent truth because the Roman soldier’s belt held everything together and held things up to give him freedom of movement when he was running into battle. The belt comes first because the truth comes first. The belt is the foundation for the armor and the truth is the foundation for the lives we live in Christ. The truth is both the Truth from God that sets us free and it is also our sincere lives lived by that Truth truthfully.
Truth is the foundation for life. Everything you do, every choice you make is the result of what you believe to be true. Why don’t you jump out of an airplane without a parachute? Because you believe that gravity is a true force that will lead you to a grave situation if you jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Sky diving without a parachute, not a good idea, and that’s the truth!
Now that’s an easy one. Here’s another. Why do you count the change that you get back from the cashier? Because you believe in math. You believe you should get the right amount of cash back after you give more than the transaction required and you believe that the cashier might have made a mistake. You count your change because you believe all that, and you act on your faith in that.
Faith in God comes a little harder because there is a spiritual battle all around you trying to get you not to not believe that truth. “Whoever belongs to God hears what God says.” That is true. But we do have a problem. The spiritual battle in which we are embroiled is a battle over what is true. And satan, the father of lies is very good at lying and very persuasive about getting us to believe his point of view. So, Jesus goes on to say, that those who do not believe in him have the biggest problem. “The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.”
Jesus makes it very clear just how different we are from Him in our natural state. We do not speak His language. We do not understand Him. We cannot even hear Him. We are not tuned into His message. It's not just that our sin causes us to see Him through fun house mirrors, but everything about us distorts how we see and hear and experience God. We are warped and defective receivers. We cannot function as we were intended until we allow Christ to do the needed repairs, fixing our brokenness so that we can be useful, through obedience, to Him.
So, first, believe the gospel that saves your soul. Then you can start hearing and believing everything else that God says is true about you. This is critical because, in Christ, you are not shaped so much by your environment as you are by your perception of your environment. Life's events don't determine who you are; God determines who you are. That is a very important piece of truth that we need to bear in mind. God determines who you are! And He always tells the truth. That’s the foundation for life.
Truth is exclusive. Truth is the foundation for life. Truth is the protector of your will power. Now, your interpretation of life's events determines how well you will handle the pressures of life. Back to the railroad tracks. It looks like they come together, and if you believe that lie, you won’t ride the train because it looks like it can’t get very far down that track without a crash. You might even suffer an emotional panic if somebody tells you that you have to get on that train. Your emotions are responding to the perception that leads you to believe that there’s going to be a derailment. But if you believe the truth, if your perception of reality corresponds to the truth that the tracks never meet, because of what you know about depth perspective, then you can relax and ride the train.
In reality we have very little control over our emotions. They just well up in us based on what we perceive. But we do have total and willful control over our thoughts, and our thoughts determine what we perceive which governs our feelings and our responses. That's why it is so important that you fill your mind with the Truth of the knowledge of God and His Word. You need to see life from God's perspective and respond accordingly.
A quick observation of this point is this. This is a familiar illustration, but I tell it a little differently. A butterfly is not called a caterpillar saved by grace. It’s a butterfly, a completely new creation that has left the old life and the dead cocoon behind. Similarly, in spite of what you may have heard and how we commonly talk about it, the truth is that a Christian is much more than just a sinner saved by grace. A sinner is what you were and saved by grace is what has changed you into the new creature that you are now. And what you are now is a child of God. You’re not a sinner who believes in Jesus. You’re a Christian who still struggles with sin but will win over that as you grow in Christ, and in his victory over sin and death. There is a difference in that perspective. What you are now, if you have truly given your heart to the Lord, you are alive in Christ, not dead in sin!
I want to finish up by listing a few more Scripture verses that are really and deeply true about the child of God. In the spiritual battle, we face struggles and difficulties, challenges that mess with our perspective and can cause us to doubt God’s love and who we are as his kids. It can feel like the foundations of your life are giving way. We need a belt of truth, the real foundation of our lives, to hold us together and bolster us up when things get hard.
The first piece of armor for the Christian warrior is the belt of truth. Jesus said, "I am . . . the truth" (John 14:6). And because Christ is in you, the truth is in you. However, continuing to choose truth is not always easy. Since Satan's primary weapon is the lie, your belt of truth (which holds the other pieces of body armor in place) is continually being attacked. If he can disable you in the area of truth, you become an easy target for his other attacks.
You stand firm in the truth by relating everything you do to the truth of God's Word. If a thought comes to mind which is not in harmony with God's truth, dismiss it. If an opportunity comes along to say or do something which compromises or conflicts with truth, avoid it. Adopt a simple rule of behavior: If it's the truth, I'm in; if it's not the truth, count me out. And if I don’t know, I will keep studying the Truth until I do.
It is good to remember that our foundation is firm, based on the finished work of Jesus Christ for us. There are some things that remain true, at all times and for all of God’s children no matter what. It’s good to let your mind and your heart rest in these truths. Let these truths be a belt around your waist holding you together and providing a firm foundation on which you can stand against the devil’s efforts to discourage you.
Remember:
You are loved. Jeremiah 31:3 says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.” You are loved!
You are secure. In John 10:28-29, Jesus says, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.”
You are forgiven, and that will never change. Colossians 2:13 says, “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins.” You are forgiven.
And God is with you. In Hebrews 13:5, God says, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” God is with you always. Jesus promised that too. And there are many more wonderful truths in Scripture that you can base your life and decisions on, that will bolster your faith. Dig them up. Learn them and believe them!
Never forget these truths and keep them handy for when the storms come. Paste them in your journal. Tape them to the bathroom mirror. Anything so that you remember these truths at crucial moments. For the storms will come. The wind will howl, and the waters will rise. And Jesus, who calmed the storm, who is indeed able to calm all storms, is now and ever will be your ever-present help in times of trouble. Truth is exclusive. Truth is the foundation for life. Truth is the protector of your will power. Believe it and be strong in the Lord. Amen.
Listen Link: www.lcepc.org then look for “sermons” tab.
Ephesians 6:14, “Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist.”
I once had a conversation with an engineer. He was highly intelligent, highly skilled in construction techniques, sort of like our good friend Lee Reibels, except that my friend in Maine was not a Christian. He once shared with me his ideas about faith. He said faith is what you’re using when you look at train tracks and it looks like they come together in the distance. You know what I mean right, when you look at a long straight pair of train tracks, stretching straight out all the way to the horizon, it looks like out there in the distance they get closer together, it even looks like maybe they get closer and closer together until somewhere far out there in the distance, they meet.
Then he says to me, “Well, you know seeing is believing, right? So, if you see that, then you are going to believe that they really do meet! That takes faith!”
I said back to him, “Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. Faith is knowing that even though it may look like the tracks come together out there, you know the truth. They do not. If you didn’t have faith in that truth, you’d never ride the train! Seeing is not really the same thing as believing. Appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes you better not believe what you see. But you should always believe the truth, because your eyes can fool you, but truth is always true.”
Truth is exclusive. Truth is the foundation for life. Truth is the protector of your will power. Let me tell you what I mean.
Truth is exclusive. A lot of people today don’t believe that. They believe that all truth is relative and cannot be objectively known. In fact, even among people who think they are Christian and identify themselves as evangelicals, a recent study revealed that 32% believe that religious belief is a matter of personal opinion, and not objective truth! Now for everybody else that’s understandable because what they believe is a matter of personal opinion. But the survey means there are Christians who don’t believe in absolute truth!
But Christians have to believe in absolute truth because Jesus said, “I am the way, the Truth, and the life.” If Jesus is the Truth, he is the Truth for everybody! That is the only way that he can be the one who died for the sins of the whole world. If God so loved the world that whosoever believes in Jesus shall not perish but have eternal life, then that must be as absolutely true as 2 plus 2 equals 4!
Because if John 3:16 is not absolutely true for everyone, then you can’t know that it is true for you. It’s not true just because you believe it. Your faith in it doesn’t make it true. Your faith could be wrong, because you’re only human. The only thing that makes anything absolutely true is if it is absolutely true, whether anybody believes it or not.
That’s why the Reformers decided to reject centuries of traditional Catholic teachings that got added to the Bible and agree with Paul when he said that “all Scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching correcting and training in righteousness.” They said that salvation can be known only by reading the Bible, Sola Scriptura! There is no other literature so especially inspired by God. The Bible alone is the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine and conduct. The Bible is the only source of absolute truth about the most important questions about human existence. Only the Bible tells the whole truth about God, creation, rebellion, sin, the problem of evil, and God’s solution in Christ alone because he loves us so much.
It only makes sense that in the presence of many religions and all kinds of idolatry in the world. When men have all kinds of crazy ideas about who God is and what he is like, the only way we’re really going to know the actual truth with any degree of confidence is if God himself speaks.
Oh, we can know certain things about God, because His existence is evident in all of creation. It’s like if you had my wallet, you could know how much money I had and certain things about me because of the cards I carry like my driver’s license etc. But if you really want to know me, you have to let me speak and tell you who I am and what I’m like. And if God was going to speak, he wouldn’t give bits and pieces here and there. A good God would tell the whole truth all in one place, so we can know for sure. That’s the Bible. Many people think that other religions have parts of the truth. That may be, but those are just lucky guesses. Everything not directly inspired by God is just guess work and fuzzy memory blurred by pride and sin.
But in our day, a lot of people who think they are Christian evangelicals have been affected by the general culture’s thinking, that there are many ways to heaven or enlightenment. Just because there are many religions, people like to conclude that we have to be fair and allow that any or maybe all of them are legitimate. The same study I quoted earlier showed that 30% of evangelicals say they question if God is a perfect being who cannot make mistakes. 48% believe the Bible contains myths. 67% think Jesus is just a created being, but that would make him, “not God.” 66% say most people are generally good, in other words they deny the Word of God’s declaration that none is righteous, no not one. And 65% agree God accepts worship from all religions, as if there are other ways to salvation besides through Jesus. To that I say, Jesus did not die on the cross just to become an option.
People don’t like it that the Bible makes such exclusive claims to truth. But there’s nothing wrong with exclusion if that’s the truth. Truth is exclusive because even though there are many ways to be wrong, there is only one way to be right, the true way. Think of the entry way into any store or business, unless there’s 2 doors like at Walmart, there’s really only one way that customers can legally get into the store, the front door, the one marked out for that purpose. That’s pretty exclusive, you can’t walk through a wall or climb in a window and you can’t use the service entrance if you’re just a customer.
Even at Tasty Treat, our local ice cream shop, there’s two front doors but only one is the entrance you’re supposed to use. You can’t say, “There are many ways into Tasty Treat.” That’s just not true. There’s only one legitimate entry point and that’s pretty exclusive. One door is for entry and ordering. The other door is exclusively to exit, and nobody is lined up at that one! And don’t even think about cutting in line. That’s a pretty exclusive rule, too! But you don’t hear customers complain about that. They accept that truth. They even enforce that truth! There are people who don’t accept that and would try to sneak in or out another way. They are thieves and robbers. Ain’t that the truth?
Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist. The Truth in God’s Word is the one and only absolutely irrefutable truth because it comes from God. This is true: Acts 4:12. “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” That’s not exclusive because it’s bigoted. It’s exclusive because it’s the plain and simple truth.
Truth is exclusive. Truth is the foundation for life. In Paul’s imagery he chose the belt to represent truth because the Roman soldier’s belt held everything together and held things up to give him freedom of movement when he was running into battle. The belt comes first because the truth comes first. The belt is the foundation for the armor and the truth is the foundation for the lives we live in Christ. The truth is both the Truth from God that sets us free and it is also our sincere lives lived by that Truth truthfully.
Truth is the foundation for life. Everything you do, every choice you make is the result of what you believe to be true. Why don’t you jump out of an airplane without a parachute? Because you believe that gravity is a true force that will lead you to a grave situation if you jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Sky diving without a parachute, not a good idea, and that’s the truth!
Now that’s an easy one. Here’s another. Why do you count the change that you get back from the cashier? Because you believe in math. You believe you should get the right amount of cash back after you give more than the transaction required and you believe that the cashier might have made a mistake. You count your change because you believe all that, and you act on your faith in that.
Faith in God comes a little harder because there is a spiritual battle all around you trying to get you not to not believe that truth. “Whoever belongs to God hears what God says.” That is true. But we do have a problem. The spiritual battle in which we are embroiled is a battle over what is true. And satan, the father of lies is very good at lying and very persuasive about getting us to believe his point of view. So, Jesus goes on to say, that those who do not believe in him have the biggest problem. “The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.”
Jesus makes it very clear just how different we are from Him in our natural state. We do not speak His language. We do not understand Him. We cannot even hear Him. We are not tuned into His message. It's not just that our sin causes us to see Him through fun house mirrors, but everything about us distorts how we see and hear and experience God. We are warped and defective receivers. We cannot function as we were intended until we allow Christ to do the needed repairs, fixing our brokenness so that we can be useful, through obedience, to Him.
So, first, believe the gospel that saves your soul. Then you can start hearing and believing everything else that God says is true about you. This is critical because, in Christ, you are not shaped so much by your environment as you are by your perception of your environment. Life's events don't determine who you are; God determines who you are. That is a very important piece of truth that we need to bear in mind. God determines who you are! And He always tells the truth. That’s the foundation for life.
Truth is exclusive. Truth is the foundation for life. Truth is the protector of your will power. Now, your interpretation of life's events determines how well you will handle the pressures of life. Back to the railroad tracks. It looks like they come together, and if you believe that lie, you won’t ride the train because it looks like it can’t get very far down that track without a crash. You might even suffer an emotional panic if somebody tells you that you have to get on that train. Your emotions are responding to the perception that leads you to believe that there’s going to be a derailment. But if you believe the truth, if your perception of reality corresponds to the truth that the tracks never meet, because of what you know about depth perspective, then you can relax and ride the train.
In reality we have very little control over our emotions. They just well up in us based on what we perceive. But we do have total and willful control over our thoughts, and our thoughts determine what we perceive which governs our feelings and our responses. That's why it is so important that you fill your mind with the Truth of the knowledge of God and His Word. You need to see life from God's perspective and respond accordingly.
A quick observation of this point is this. This is a familiar illustration, but I tell it a little differently. A butterfly is not called a caterpillar saved by grace. It’s a butterfly, a completely new creation that has left the old life and the dead cocoon behind. Similarly, in spite of what you may have heard and how we commonly talk about it, the truth is that a Christian is much more than just a sinner saved by grace. A sinner is what you were and saved by grace is what has changed you into the new creature that you are now. And what you are now is a child of God. You’re not a sinner who believes in Jesus. You’re a Christian who still struggles with sin but will win over that as you grow in Christ, and in his victory over sin and death. There is a difference in that perspective. What you are now, if you have truly given your heart to the Lord, you are alive in Christ, not dead in sin!
I want to finish up by listing a few more Scripture verses that are really and deeply true about the child of God. In the spiritual battle, we face struggles and difficulties, challenges that mess with our perspective and can cause us to doubt God’s love and who we are as his kids. It can feel like the foundations of your life are giving way. We need a belt of truth, the real foundation of our lives, to hold us together and bolster us up when things get hard.
The first piece of armor for the Christian warrior is the belt of truth. Jesus said, "I am . . . the truth" (John 14:6). And because Christ is in you, the truth is in you. However, continuing to choose truth is not always easy. Since Satan's primary weapon is the lie, your belt of truth (which holds the other pieces of body armor in place) is continually being attacked. If he can disable you in the area of truth, you become an easy target for his other attacks.
You stand firm in the truth by relating everything you do to the truth of God's Word. If a thought comes to mind which is not in harmony with God's truth, dismiss it. If an opportunity comes along to say or do something which compromises or conflicts with truth, avoid it. Adopt a simple rule of behavior: If it's the truth, I'm in; if it's not the truth, count me out. And if I don’t know, I will keep studying the Truth until I do.
It is good to remember that our foundation is firm, based on the finished work of Jesus Christ for us. There are some things that remain true, at all times and for all of God’s children no matter what. It’s good to let your mind and your heart rest in these truths. Let these truths be a belt around your waist holding you together and providing a firm foundation on which you can stand against the devil’s efforts to discourage you.
Remember:
You are loved. Jeremiah 31:3 says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.” You are loved!
You are secure. In John 10:28-29, Jesus says, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.”
You are forgiven, and that will never change. Colossians 2:13 says, “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins.” You are forgiven.
And God is with you. In Hebrews 13:5, God says, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” God is with you always. Jesus promised that too. And there are many more wonderful truths in Scripture that you can base your life and decisions on, that will bolster your faith. Dig them up. Learn them and believe them!
Never forget these truths and keep them handy for when the storms come. Paste them in your journal. Tape them to the bathroom mirror. Anything so that you remember these truths at crucial moments. For the storms will come. The wind will howl, and the waters will rise. And Jesus, who calmed the storm, who is indeed able to calm all storms, is now and ever will be your ever-present help in times of trouble. Truth is exclusive. Truth is the foundation for life. Truth is the protector of your will power. Believe it and be strong in the Lord. Amen.
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