Fight the Good Fight of Faith, English Edition

Lesson : The Equipment We Use • 

becomes at doing it. In the same way, God has granted us certain practices that form us spiritually (often times called disciplines) which increases our capacity to fight the enemy. The more we practice the disciplines of the Christian life (e.g., pray, fellowship with other believers, read, study and memorize the Scriptures, and worship God), the stronger we get and the easier it is both to recognize the enemy’s lies and to resist them by faith. Read Gal. 6.7-9. How does this text help us understand how we can grow to maturity in Christ through our steady, patient practice of the spiritual disciplines? In the last session ( The Enemy We Fight ) you learned about the nature of the enemy. In this session you will learn how to utilize the “whole armor of God,” the equipment that the Lord has given us to fight our good fight of faith. The true nature of the Christian life is warfare, not against people but against the spiritual forces of evil who withstand our work because we belong to Christ. We ought never be surprised that the enemy is relentless; his attack will be both fierce and constant. God has provided us the proper armor, the full arsenal of spiritual weapons for us to use in spiritual warfare. The fight we are in is portrayed as a struggle with spiritual forces who are determined to see us compromise our faith, surrender our commitment to Christ and replace it with worldliness and distraction. The Bible images the lies of the enemy as flaming missiles, arrows of the evil one, which can be extinguished by the shield of faith. Our faith in God is pictured as a shield that will protect us from the “the evil one,” from Satan himself. Jesus is our Lord, Divine Warrior who defeated Satan in a mighty victory through the Cross and his resurrection from the dead. We stand victorious in the great Victor himself, Christus Victor , the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, believers are spiritual warriors, soldiers of Christ, champions who are aware of what is at stake in the fight with the lies of the enemy. We must adopt a mind to fight the enemy, to represent Christ with honor in all that we do, and to stand our ground in the spiritual fight as we cling in childlike trust to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we can withstand anything the enemy plots against us. Since the most common tactic of the devil is to lie to us, our greatest weapon is to affirm the truth and refuse to believe lies, staying on the alert to falsehoods that we are tempted to accept. Each piece of the armor of God relates in some fundamental way to the truth of God in Christ. This is why we must learn about the various weapons of the armor, in order that through steady practice we can effectively employ them with skill against the enemy. The more we engage, the better we fight, as soldiers of Jesus Christ.

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