Put on These - Part 2

Good evening. I'm not a Democrat, but I want to make sure everybody got a handout. It's my only joke, I promise. Believe it or not, we're running low on time already. And so I want to dive right in. You may recall the first two evenings we reviewed effectively who is the devil, what does the Bible tell us about him, what are his schemes that we are preparing ourselves or arming ourselves to do battle against.

And then last night we reviewed the first few pieces of the armor of God and expressly what are the virtues that we are being commanded to put on when those pieces of armor are described for us. And so tonight I want to complete what we began by looking at the final three pieces of armor. And I also want to continue in the chapter. Jason, could you get the doors, please?

Thank you. I also want to continue in the chapter to the part about prayer. Because although prayer isn't described with a piece of armor, I think prayer is part of what God is telling us is, what did you say? Absolutely, it's necessary. Very good. And I think it's actually part of the passage, it's just not described in the armor.

So let me read, I'll begin in verse 13 of Ephesians chapter 6. Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground, and having done everything, to stand. Stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness arrayed, and with your feet fitted with the readiness of the gospel of peace.

In addition to all this, this is where we're beginning tonight, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Pray in the Spirit at all times with every kind of prayer and petition. To this end, stay alert with all perseverance in your prayers for all the saints.

Pray also for me that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will boldly make known the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it fearlessly as I should. Let us go to the Lord in prayer now. Father, open our minds and hearts to the truth of your word. Use me to teach your word so by the power of your spirit give me unction that I may speak truthful things.

And we know that your spirit will apply to each individual exactly what they need to hear. Your word is more powerful than any two-edged sword, able to divide soul from spirit, as joint from marrow, and it discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart. So may it do so now, as you have promised it will. In Christ's name I pray. Amen. The shield of faith.

We're told to take up the shield of faith. And so the question I ask, faith in what? Any thoughts? I promise none of these are tricky, at least not intentionally. Say it louder. Faith in Christ.

I think that is exactly what he's talking about. And if there's anything more such as faith in the Word of God, it all flows from faith in Christ. The Baptist Catechism, question 91, the question is asked, what is faith in Jesus Christ? And I find this to be a wonderful, concise, helpful thing to memorize. Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, meaning that if you have faith in Jesus Christ, it's a gift from God.

That's what grace means. Whereby we receive and rest upon him alone for salvation as he is offered to us in the gospel. The gospel being that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, was buried and three days later rose again according to the scriptures. And so as we talked about earlier this week, a lot of beings believe in God. In fact, most human beings would profess belief in God, and even the ones that are atheists, God says that they know He is, and that He is God, and they'll be accountable for that.

Demons know who God is, they believe in Him. Demons were constantly recognizing Jesus for who He was, so they even know who the Son of God is. It is receiving and resting upon Him alone for your salvation that is the faith that can save Philippians 3 is a wonderful passage about faith Because I'm trying to move along, I'm going to do more reading to you rather than asking and waiting for people to be ready.

But I may call on you, Larry. So be ready, Larry. But faith in Jesus Christ. Philippians 3.9. Paul wants to be found in him, he says, not having any righteousness of his own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God on the basis of faith. And in Galatians 2.16, if you turn back a couple chapters, a long time ago a guy taught me the mnemonic device, Gepsi, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians.

That's why I still remember those four. In Galatians 2.16, Paul writes, Know that a man is not justified by works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we too have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law. Because by works of the law, no one will be justified. So our faith is a shield. It is one of our devices to defend against Satan.

So does anyone have a testimony before we continue of how they have seen victory over temptation or victory over something, a device of Satan that you can attribute to faith Faith that you want to share, because I hope everyone has examples of it. You may recall in Revelation 12, Satan was called the accuser of the brethren, right? Well, if you have faith in Jesus Christ today, then no one can bring a charge against God's elect.

So your faith actually has already purchased victory over Satan and all of his accusations. You realize that Satan can credibly accuse you of sin. You do sin. Even as a Christian, we've all committed sins and continued in them sometimes for a time. Satan has watched us do these things. He has often facilitated the temptation or created the system that made the environment that we use as our excuse to sin and to give in to it.

And yet, faith in Jesus Christ has already won victory for you. Look at 1 John 5, 3 and 4. For this is the love of God that we keep His commandments, verse 3, and His commandments are not burdensome. And then in verse 4, because everyone born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith. So faith gives us salvation in Jesus Christ.

It is our entrance into the kingdom of God. And to be transferred from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of his son is begun by faith. Faith gives us the victory over the devil. It gives us victory over sin. It gives us victory over self. We're commanded to live this way.

Habakkuk 2.4, you can look that one up later, but that's the just shall live by faith, quoted by Paul in the book of Romans, and it was the instrumental verse in Martin Luther's conversion. Many of us can thank the life we have today to things that started with Martin Luther in Galatians 2.20, Habakkuk 2.4, we live by faith. So everything you do today, you're supposed to do it by faith.

Romans 14 says anything not done from faith is sin. So you are to live by faith. Faith is quite the weapon of defense in that it protects us from the devil's primary scheme, which is deception. Keep your faith guarded. Keep your faith in the Lord Jesus, your thoughts, your belief in what he has told us is true. I see a lot of overlap with truth and faith, with the armor.

But faith always brings us back to settled and established truth in the Lord. So you may have moments of confusion. Some of you are younger. You don't know who to marry. You might not know exactly how to discipline your child in the stage of life they're in right now. You don't know what job to take or whether you should start a new thing.

Faith brings us back to what has been settled and established by the Lord and His Word So that we're not always worried about what's going on. We're not always so uncertain. There's a lot of uncertainty as part of the world. That's how you grow in wisdom is by living in uncertainty, functioning, and then learning. But faith brings you back to what the Lord has done, His work, and His promises.

Because God cannot fail and His promises will all come to pass, Faith is simply the logical acceptance of these truths applied to everyday life. You may not know who you're supposed to marry. You may not know what job to take, what college to go to, all those kinds of things. But what you can know is that the God who keeps his eye on the sparrow is going to keep his eye on you.

And as long as you're striving to walk with the Lord in some of those uncertain situations, he watching over you and taking care of you Any comments on faith Thoughts on faith Yes God of all grace, who is called to you in His eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore you, be confirmed, strengthened, and established. Amen. Amen. And that's a wonderful reminder that faith in God's word will tell us that you're going to suffer.

And if you know you're going to suffer because you believe it, you won't be so shocked when it happens, and you may walk through it much more successfully. Good comment, Jeremy. Let's move on to the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. So I think I have the wrong verse. It should be John 17, 17, which is one of the verses we read the first night.

Sanctify them by your truth, your word is truth. Jesus talking to the Father in his high priestly prayer, praying for his people, tells God to sanctify them by the truth. He says, your word is truth. So it's by God's word that we're sanctified. So we may recognize something that is true, which is that there are things in this world that God creates or puts in your environment that forces you to be sanctified.

So oftentimes spouses, as in love as they are when it first begins, they find out that, wow, this person actually challenges me in a way I don't like. And it sanctifies you. Well, your spouse is a means that God's provided to put you in an environment to expose your need for sanctification and your need for God. But it's His Word primarily that He sends to change you.

It's one of the reasons you need to come to church. You need to sit under good preaching. You need to sit under men who will teach the word faithfully so that you will avail yourself of this good gift of God, of the sanctifying grace of his word. One of the reasons you show up at a Wednesday morning or Wednesday night meeting, all the different things you do as a Christian throughout the week that aren't required, but these are parts of how you grow.

And so Christians are to be admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, and we're speaking the word of God to one another. You should feel very comfortable when a friend of yours brings up a topic in life to respond with sections of the Bible that you're properly applying to them. And you should feel comfortable if you bring up a situation in your life, if a friend of yours, a Christian friend, brings the Where is the Bible back to bear on your life?

That should be what we want from people. It's almost as if we've been given the medicine that heals us by the perfect and great physician, and we don't want it because it tastes bad. So let God's word sanctify you. Psalm 119, 9 through 11, that's David. I believe it's David that wrote this psalm. He doesn't sign it, but he says, How can a young man keep his way pure?

By guarding it according to your word. So how do you live in a pure way? Guard your ways according to God's word. Take every thought captive to obey Christ. You have no reason to live part of your life by faith. Let's start with that first part of the book.

When we read the book, we're talking about the part of the Bible that God says, I'm going to fill you with faith. Like, you know, I'm going to go to church, and that's going to be filled with faith. But then, another compartment of your life where you kind of keep God out of it. That's what we tend to do. I think all of us have that tendency where there's that one part where we still think we're in control.

It says, with all my heart, or God writes behind David, but with all my heart I sought you, do not let me stray from your commandments. Then the next verse, I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. If you were taken away tonight, and you were put somewhere without your Bible, How much of the Bible do you have memorized to sustain you in a hard situation?

In the history of Christianity, it's rare to be someone that just sits and enjoys peace. And right now, all around the world, as Jeremy just read, brothers and sisters are suffering greatly. Many of them without a fraction of the Bible. We have dozens of Bibles on our shelves in different versions, right? There's people that have a fraction in their language, and it's so precious to them, and they've memorized it, and they're able to go to prison, and they're able to recite it to themselves, if need be.

When Paul was in jail in Philippi, they were singing hymns. Sometimes I get frustrated. At church, I'm singing a hymn we've sung a bunch of times, and I still can't remember the words. 1 Timothy 2 Timothy 1 John 3 John Carl 2 Timothy 1 John Israel 3 John 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 Timothy 2 Timothy 1 Timothy 1 John 6 7 9 10 It not a magic spell that we can cast to send the devil scurrying along It is to be read meditated upon understood studied taught and lived out Your effectiveness at averting the devil's schemes depends on this.

Some people, I think, believe that they can just say Bible words to cast the devil away. So they memorized enough scripture to treat it like a witch's spell. And you'd have to evaluate your own use of it to see if that's what you're doing, but that's not how God intended his word to be used. It's not a magic spell where the words have this power to go and do things on their own.

The word has power because God has made it understandable in the minds of men So that when it's preached and taught and spoken, men who can understand the language the words of God are being preached in, then the Spirit takes that understanding and deepens it in their heart and opens their eyes and minds to see things that they need to see. If it was true that God's word was just a magic spell, then we could go to faraway countries and we could preach God's word in English, trusting that it'll do its magic, and we'd never get persecuted because when people didn't understand us, they wouldn't want to kill us, right? It's not how it works.

God's word works through the understanding of men. It's one of the reasons why we teach children at a different vocabulary level than we would teach adults. It's a reason why we don't assume a little kid that can't even speak yet has believed the gospel, because they need to be able to communicate the truth of God's word back to us, for us to trust that he really does understand it in God's word.

So I can't think of any particular examples off the top of my head, but there is a way that we can treat God's word as a magic spell. Another one, just off the top of my head though, is sometimes we say, in Jesus' name I pray at the end of a prayer, and we don't even think about it, it's just a habit. It's almost like something we just tack on at the end.

I think we can be a bit blasphemous in our casualty towards God's name and how we use the name of His Son. In 2 Corinthians 10, continuing on the sword of the Spirit, For though we live in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh. 2 Corinthians 10.3 parallels what we just read in Ephesians, before the armor of God, we don't battle with flesh and blood.

We don't wage war according to the flesh, Paul says, so it's not about the physical armor. He says the weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the flesh. Instead, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every presumption or every lofty argument set up against the knowledge of God. And we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

So by faith, every decision you make is before the eyes of God. To the point where you have to sit and think about a decision to make sure it's faithful, God honors that. And as you continuously practice righteousness, as you continuously get washed by the word, as you confess sin and you grow, as you repent from errors that you do make, You start to build habits where you more habitually do things without so much thinking that are good things.

That we really want to become habitual righteous workers. So any thoughts on the sword of the Spirit? Anybody have a testimony how maybe the Word of God came to you at an unexpected time and helped you with a temptation? For me, a couple of years ago, when I had hernia surgery, and then I had another hernia surgery a couple of months, a number of months later, to him, whatever my God ordained to write was something that I listened to on repeat.

And knowing that God was not surprised, was completely in control of the situation as I went into the surgery, not knowing if the doctor was going to make a mistake, and it turned bad a couple of months afterwards, and all of that. The doctor was getting pretty old, and I think you just never know about those things. But listening to, in particular, that hymn that reflects on scriptural truths, And with the word brought forth, you know, my life in that season ended in a lot of peace.

And looking back, you know, he was faithful through that. You know, I'm thankful for the healing I've had and being able to keep on working and providing for my family. So something in the moment that just seemed overwhelming, you trust that it'll pass. In the grand scheme of things, whether it goes well or it goes poorly, our trajectory is ultimately to live with our blessed Savior.

Amen. So you said it brought peace. So now, what would be the temptation that you were facing to sin that the word brought peace as a counter to? What would it be, like anxiety or fear? What were you thinking? Yeah, anxiety and fear, those things always bleed over into your daily living, being sure with your wife. ...your kids because you don't have control like you would like to have.

Or just being dissatisfied. Other people in the body of Christ, he doesn't seem too happy or political right now. When anxiety is put at bay, all those other things can still shine through. That's great. So as you started to strive for righteousness, it led to ever-increasing holiness. Whereas had you submitted yourself as a slave to the unrighteous thoughts, you just testified, it would have led you to even more unrighteousness.

That's a good testimony, Jason. Thank you. Anybody else? I'm sure you all have examples. I understand if you don't want to share right now, but I want you to think about it on your own. You should be able to thank God.

You can turn to Revelation 12. You should be able to thank God at any time for some of the grace He's provided that you recognize. There's an infinite amount of grace you can't even name. We don't even know how good He is to us when we aren't meditating on it. But you should be able to say, you know what, God, you've brought me through some things. And I can see how it was your word.

Maybe it was something the pastor said on a Sunday morning. Oftentimes it's not just your private time in the Bible where the verse pops out at you. Half the time I'm in my private time, I'm just struggling to understand it. You're reading it and you're distracted. Sometimes it's the thing the pastor says. God's been all week working on the pastor's heart while he's preparing to preach to you.

And then he says all these things that have come out of his study, some of those things are going to be really poignant for your lives. That's why we need to listen attentively and be prepared on Sunday. If you don't go to bed early on Saturday, then I think you're mistaken. Revelation 12.10, that's my rebuke for you. And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, now we're talking about the helmet of salvation.

Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down. He accuses them day and night before our God, says they have conquered him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. And they did not love their lives so as to shy away from death.

Salvation is such a broadly used word. We say things like, when did you get saved to people? Right? And that's a valid question. It's just a different use of terms. And we can say that when we ask people, when did you get saved?

What we're usually asking is, what point in your life did you begin to have faith in Jesus Christ? When did you say, you know what, I want to follow Jesus? And that's a valid thing to answer. When did you get saved? You're also being saved. There's a phrase, we were saved, we're being saved, and we will be saved.

One day you'll be completely redeemed from these bodies. You'll have a new body, you'll be glorified. So salvation is the big word meaning life. To have life. In John 17, 3, Jesus defines eternal life not as a quantity of life. It's not a length of years.

Eternal life is to know you and to know the one you have sent, me, Jesus Christ. Eternal life is knowing Jesus Christ. It's a quality of life. You know that sinners will live on forever as well. And so if eternal life was just a qualitative thing or a quantitative thing, then they have eternal life technically because it goes on. Eternal life is the quality of knowing Jesus intimately as your Savior.

And Jesus came to give us salvation. And He tells us to put it on like a helmet. Go to 1 John 3, 8. Salvation being the gift of God that sinners who have been hopelessly fallen from standing with God that Adam and Eve had at one point can be forgiven of their sins It's not because of works of righteousness they have done, but because of the mercy of God.

We receive forgiveness of sins. We call it being saved. And it's an exciting and wonderful thing. And by being saved and meditating on that which is very similar to the gospel of peace shoes It similar to faith because faith and salvation they go together And so I want to read this passage that tells us a little bit about our salvation. 1 John 3, 8. The one who practices sin is of the devil.

We're talking about the devil now. Because the devil has been sinning from the very start or from the beginning. This is why the Son of God was revealed. To destroy the works of the devil. So by the cross, Jesus has conquered death and hell. He has overcome sin for all those who were ensnared in it.

And nothing will prevail against him and his church. If you want a defense against the devil himself, meditate on the fact that the devil is already a defeated foe. Salvation teaches us that. As strong as he may be, as vile as he may be, as witty as he can be in the sense that he can outwit us, the devil is a loser. And you, by the word of your testimony and the blood of the Lamb, have already overcome him.

So proclaim your salvation to yourself. Robert Gray, when he was here, he said, Some people in the church cannot preach the gospel to others very well because they never preach it to themselves. He said, Wake up every day and preach the gospel to yourself. Remind yourself, Jesus died for me. He paid the penalty I deserved. Jesus did everything necessary to be pleasing to God when he walked this life as a man.

And he grants that active obedience to me and credits it to my account. And he really did die counting equality with God nothing to be grasped. But he humbled himself by becoming a servant, being born in the likeness of men, And then being found in human form, he humbled himself even to the point of death on a cross. And then therefore, God has highly exalted him.

God has raised him up. He's at the right hand of God with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him. And he will reign forever. Remind yourself of that. Tell yourself that story every day in different ways and personalize it. Yeah, Jesus died for sinners.

He died for the world. There's a way. He died for me. Say that to yourself. When you can meditate on that fact daily, you'll have a defense against the wiles of Satan like no other. And you'll also be more confident when you meet somebody who does not know Christ to be able to share that same good news with them that someone had to share with you at one point for you to enter God's kingdom.

So meditate on the gospel. Finally, prayer. Ephesians 6. A couple of notes on prayer. Go back to Ephesians 6. I gave you a few passages.

1 Timothy 2 is a really interesting passage because it basically tells us pray for everyone. And it picks some specific people that you may be most likely to just actually want to pray against at times. Kings and those in authority. Our prayers are meant to be for others with thanksgiving to God. And then Matthew 6 is Jesus' example of prayer, his model of prayer.

And I think that those two passages, if you read those every day for a month, You wouldn't exhaust the treasures that are in those passages. But in Ephesians 6, Paul says, Pray in the Spirit at all times, verse 18, with every kind of prayer and petition. So we have this tendency to just go to God and ask Him for stuff. Or maybe we just go and sometimes we're just doing the thanks.

Thanks for the food. Bless it for us, right? There's a joke on the internet. It's got this big table filled with cinnamon rolls and all this kind of junk looking food, you know. And it says, Baptists be like, bless this food, you know, because that's what we do, right? But there's all sorts of prayers you're supposed to make.

You're supposed to adore God in prayer. I've always liked the acronym ACTS, A-C-T-S. When you pray, adore. So you should have a prayer of adoration. C is for confession. If you can think of anything to confess ask God to bring something to your mind He knows alright Or ask your spouse they know right Ask your kids Hey did dad mess up lately They'll have an answer, I promise.

Confession, Thanksgiving is tea. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving. And then finally, Supplication, that's when you ask for supply. Ask Him for things. And you know what? Ask for it liberally.

It's an insult to the God who owns everything when you go and ask for practically nothing. It's almost as if you're questioning his power or you're questioning his goodness. Go and ask him for the world. Ask him for big things. He can do it. It says he'll do exceedingly and abundantly more than you can ask or think.

So make it big. If he doesn't want to, he won't do it. Don't worry. You can't pray wrong. Did you know that? I mean, I guess you technically can, but you can't get the wrong result.

God's never going to do something unwise because you asked. He'll always do what's right. You can have confidence in that. But in Ephesians 6.18, what I find super interesting is this. Paul says, pray also for me in verse 19. And what does he pray for?

He asks for prayer that when he opens his mouth, words may be given me so that I will boldly make known the mystery of the gospel. And then he says again in verse 20, pray that I may proclaim it fearlessly as I should. I want you to imagine for a moment that there's all of us here. We'll bring Tim and Andrew back in, the primary preachers here. We said, hey, somebody's got to preach the gospel right now.

Who's going to do it, right? Okay, and imagine, just for a moment, imagine you looked over and you saw the Apostle Paul was in the room. Now let me ask you honestly, I know you've enjoyed my teaching, who would you pick to preach the gospel if I was in the room and Pastor Tim, and we'll say Bodie Bauckham, okay, or whoever your favorite guy is, John MacArthur, and then the Apostle Paul, we're all in a room together, who do you pick to preach?

Yeah, we'd all pick Paul. Some of us think he's the greatest Christian to ever live. He wouldn't say so. He'd be too humble to agree with that. And the guy who died preaching the gospel, went to prison for the gospel, was beaten multiple times for the gospel, is asking normal Ephesian churchgoers, will you pray for me that I would open my mouth boldly?

If even the Apostle Paul needs prayer to do the things that he needs to do, you need it too. And you need to ask others to pray for you just like he did. And you know what? It doesn't matter. He didn't go to Ephesians' elders and say, hey, just have the elders pray for me because they're more righteous and their prayers are more effective. He's just asking all of them.

Do you know that the worst, weakest, the weakest Christian, and when I said worst, I meant like the most misbehaving Christian alive right now, has the same exact direct access to God through Jesus Christ that you have, and that the best Christian has. So ask people to pray for you. And I just think it's amazing that he asked them to pray for him. So John Calvin on this passage, he said, I think I gave you both these quotes in your notes.

Calvin said, if at any time we are colder or more indifferent about prayer than we ought to be, because we do not feel the pressure of immediate necessity. So when do we pray? We pray when, oh, I'm sick. I pray every time I'm sick. I don't always thank God when I'm not. Okay?

We pray when we feel weak. Because we don't recognize how weak we are regularly. But listen to Calvin. Calvin says, let us instantly reflect how many of our brethren are worn out by buried and heavy afflictions. So not only the ones you know, we know plenty in this church, right? There's lots of people we know.

And Jeremy read earlier that our brotherhood throughout the world is suffering. How many of our brethren are weighed down by sore perplexity or are reduced to the lowest distress? If reflections like these do not rouse us from our lethargy, we must have hearts of stone. But are we to pray for believers only? He says, though the apostle states the claims of the godly, he does not exclude others.

And yet in prayer, as in all other kind offices, our first care unquestionably is due to the saints. Pray for the saints And I not saying pray generally Don go home tonight and say Lord I pray for the saints Because Mr Michael said pick people by name and pray for them You know what you could do? I've done this. I'm actually doing it right now again. And it's one of my favorite things.

I pick one or a couple sometimes. And I'll text them and say, I'm going to pray for you this week. What can I pray for you? It's amazing. It builds a relationship with somebody that I maybe didn't know that well. Or maybe it strengthens a relationship with someone I had.

And then they start to tell me things that maybe they wouldn't have told me otherwise. And then I start to be convicted of my prayerlessness as I realize, oh, I forgot to pray for Brian yesterday. I'm praying for Brian Savage this week. Pick somebody. Pick somebody you don't know. Pick missionaries.

Pray for the saints. And then finally, on your necessity to pray, this interaction between the reliever and Christina in the Pilgrim's Progress Part 2. If you haven't read Part 2, do it. It's a lot better than Part 1, frankly. Better, more mature man was writing it by then. Reliever says, after a few more words, this reliever said to Christina, After she had been in this real dire situation where men wanted to do evil things to her and the girls that she was with and her sons.

He says, I marveled much when you were entertained at the gate above, being as ye knew that ye were but weak women. So he marveled that these weak women, he said that you petitioned not the Lord there for a conductor. So when they left the Lord's house in this story, they didn't ask him for someone to conduct them along, a man to lead them. He says, Then might you have avoided these troubles and dangers, for he would have granted you one.

So had she asked, she'd have gotten it. And her response sounds pretty, it sounds good. She says, Alas, we were so with our present blessing, they were just so happy with what God had already given them, that dangers to come were forgotten. We were so happy. You ever leave church so happy? Everything went great, and then five minutes later, Temptation hits and you're right in it.

Maybe only me. There's my confession. I saw one head nod. I'm like, okay, maybe it's just me. She says, besides, who could have thought that so near the king's palace there should have lurked such naughty ones? Indeed, it had been well for us had we asked our Lord for one.

She goes, but since our Lord knew it would be for our prophet, I wonder he sent not one along with us. So she's basically saying, well, God would have sent one if he thought we needed one, is what she's thinking. And then in the parentheses it says, we lose for want of asking. We do not receive because we do not ask. Then the guy replies, reliever, he says, it is not always necessary to grant things not asked for, lest by so doing they become of little esteem.

So basically we take it for granted, right? God grants it, sometimes we take it for granted. He says, but when the want of a thing is felt, when that lack of the thing you need is experienced and felt, it then comes under in the eyes of him that feels it, that estimate that properly is its due, he says, and so consequently will be thereafter used. So when you feel the want of something, and then you ask for it, you'll use it.

He says, And come to him and ask. So save yourself some trouble and just ask. Ask for things you don't even think you need, but you know you want, or that you know you need, according to the word, but you're not feeling the need. Well, thank you. I wish I had time for more comments, but if anybody wants to talk after, we can talk about things. Father in heaven, thank you for your word and for the blessing it is to be able to see this passage all come together in a short period of time.

I may the word of God ring true in each of our hearts. Help us to daily think about what it means to put on the armor of God and to pray with all sorts of prayers and thanksgiving, keeping alert and praying for all the saints with perseverance. I pray that we would resist the devil, that he may flee from us as you've promised. And it's in Christ's name I pray.

Amen.