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Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in Paul's letter to the Ephesians, the sixth chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 10. "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For

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we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand. Stand therefore, having girded

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your loins with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace. Besides all these, taking the shield of faith with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. Pray at

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all times in the spirit with all prayer and supplication. And to that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints and also for me that utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly as I ought to speak.

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And may the same spirit that inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. She was an older Christian lady and she lived in a third floor apartment. And she was sitting on the balcony of her apartment one day and she chanced to look down and there sitting

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on the curb was a rather poorly dressed man who seemed very dejected. She wanted to do something to encourage him, but she also had concern for her safety. So she took a $10 bill and with it put a note on which she wrote the two words, "Don't despair." And then she dropped the note and the money down to him. He looked up, smiled, said, "Thank you," and

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was gone. The next day she was in her apartment and heard someone calling outside. And she went out to the balcony and looked down and there the same man was standing, his face all smiles. "Hey lady," he said, "you won some money. Don't despair came in first and paid off eight to one." Well, it would be very nice if all the despairing circumstances

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of life ended up so easily taken care of and so profitably. But if you are a Christian, you understand that that is not so. And if you are a Christian, you understand that we are living in the midst of very troubled, tough times. If you are serious about your faith, you are affronted by the unabashed carnality of these days. You are appalled

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by the watering down of theology, by the hypocrisy in places of religious zeal, of the crude mixture of religion and patriotism, which is nothing more than a paganism in our time. You know what it's like to be besieged by a rampant consumerism and the confusion of license with liberty and that arrogant selfishness, which is so much a part of these days. And

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if you're serious about your faith, you're saddened when you see systems and establishments that operate more toward evil than toward good. Advertising, which deliberately preys upon the weaknesses of people, big business and big education going in a kind of tandem treachery against the little man, and government and servants of government ignoring the constitutional

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mandates of this land. All this kind of thing is going on about us all the time. There is no way for us to avoid it. And if in the midst of it, we are going to try to live a Christian life, then quite frankly and simply, we are at war. Now for seven Sundays this summer, I have thought with you about the armor that Paul

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says Christian warriors are to wear, that catalog that I read to you just a moment ago. I want to conclude our series this morning with one last word of Paul from this passage. Paul says, "Take the whole armor of God to be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand." Now notice he says, "Take the whole armor of God," not just part

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of it. We are to don the girdle of truth that gives us unity, even as the dry bones were pulled together in Ezekiel's valley, so the word of God integrates a life. We are to strap on the breastplate of righteousness, not our righteousness, but the righteousness of Christ, and to allow the Holy Spirit to grow in our lives until we become like vessels at sea

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who can say to smaller disturbing craft, "I am the Begum of Bengal, 120 days out of Canton and homeward bound." We are to put on the sandals of peace that give us that wisdom which leads us not to try to fight where we know not of the territory, and leads us to understand that a good offense can oft times be the best defense, and teaches us how to

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float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. We take the shield of faith which leads us to make our hearts into Christ home. It leads us to build resolute Christian character so that not only what we think, but what we do is right, and we learn out of character that when it's dark enough, you can see the stars. We've talked about putting on the helmet of

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salvation which is of hope, and how when a person has hope, they have possibilities, and how when they are without hope, they are lost in defeatism. And we talked about how that hope is light in darkness, even that light which irradiates and illuminates the deep darkness of death itself. And we talked about skill in swordsmanship, depending upon

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the sayings of God, not only as they are recorded in scripture, but as they come to us by the whisper of the Holy Spirit. And we have learned to listen to these things with a kind of questing orthodoxy, in a great confidence in the "Gladia Spiritus Verbum Dei." And we have talked about and thought about, and Paul calls us to remember, that each one of these pieces of armor is

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to be put on with prayer. A prayer which doesn't seek to change the mind of God, but rather to be changed by the will of God. A prayer which becomes so precious to us that we do it without ceasing. It becomes a lean of our souls, and a prayer which is constantly for all of the saints. These then are the items in a Christian's armor, and we're to wear

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all of them, not some of them, but all of them. For this conflict we're in is a life and death matter. When I taught for ten years on a Christian college campus, I saw the same phenomenon happen every year. The freshmen would come and would be very enthusiastic over the fact that they were out from under the thumb of

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mother and dad. And this new freedom was quite exciting. And there weren't homework assignments every night, just a few papers to be handed in by the end of the term. And they would enter into a very enthusiastic experience. And then about six weeks after school started would come midterm examinations. And a lot of them who had found a boyfriend or a girlfriend,

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but had not yet found the library, a lot of them who were having a ball but not yet on the academic ball, went down to failure at that time of testing. Now there are a lot of people who enter into the Christian faith, and when they come in they have great joy, which is what they ought to have. They have found something new and

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freeing, a happiness which is different from any happiness which the world has to offer. But then oft times after they're in the faith for a while, they discover what it is to be attacked by that which is contrary to faith. They are at war either with the world or with culture, or they enter into some serious illness or they lose someone that they love through

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death or some temptation confronts them that they have not known before. Suddenly they're in the midst of very tough times. And if all they've had until this time is freedom, if they've had with it no discipline, then they're not able to withstand in that day. You see the Christian life is not a stroll, it's a march.

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I wonder if you know the origin of the word saunter. We talk about a person sauntering through the park. The word saunter comes from the French, saunter. When the crusaders were going to the holy land, saunter, they would travel through France. And those who lived along the roads who were of the Christian faith would oft times give them accommodation

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and food for the night as they continued their journey. Well it didn't take long for some people to learn that they could pretend to be going a la saunter to the holy land. They had no real intention of going there, but this was a great way to get a free night's room and board. These people became identified after a while and they were called saunterers,

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those who pretended to be going somewhere but who actually weren't. The Christian life is not a saunter. It's not a pretense. It's not just the joy, though it has much of that in it. It is a march and for that march we are to be disciplined by wearing the whole armor, each and every part of it. Now notice secondly that this armor is the armor of God.

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That means that we go into the battle with the tough times accompanied by God. Now this is the testimony of the scriptures from the beginning to the end. The psalmist says, "The angel of the Lord encamps about you." Jehoshaphat is told, "The battle is not yours, it is the Lord's." Paul says, "Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might." Jesus says,

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"And ye shall receive power when the Holy Spirit is come upon you." Hebrews says, "God leads his sons and his daughters to victory." The whole testimony of scripture is, "Greater is he that is in us than he that is in the world." It's important, you see, when we go into the conflict that we go in the presence of the power of God. Many of you remember

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Admiral Byrd, that great explorer of Antarctica. In 1934, Byrd did something never done before and I don't believe it's been done since. He spent five months, the winter months in Antarctica alone, in a little hut buried under ice and snow in the Ross Barrier. The only living person below the 78th latitude. Temperature many days, 82 degrees below Fahrenheit. 150

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days or whether I should say 150 nights where the sun never shined once in all the time that he was there. And to make his loneliness and separateness even more perilous, he discovered that he was being poisoned. That the stove he used to heat his little hut was giving off carbon monoxide. And there was no way he could get help. The nearest help was 123

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miles away and would not be able to get to him for at least two months. And he found himself being weakened by these fumes. Many times he would find himself fainting. He would wake up on the floor. And thinking that he would surely die, he took a tablet one day and sat down to write out as a kind of last will and testament, if you will, his philosophy

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of life. And the first sentence that he wrote was this, "I am not alone." There was in him, you see, a tremendous sense of the presence of God. He remembered that teaching of scripture that the very hairs of his head were numbered. And he went on to say, "Few of us ever come close to exhausting the resources that are in us. There are wells of strength of which

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we are not aware. And experiencing and using these comes only when we turn to God." When we go into the conflict, we are not to be alone. And the fact that we are not alone enables us to do things we otherwise would not be able to do. God with us is what makes the difference in the conflict. He that is in us is greater than he that is in the world.

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Dr. Robert Coles is the professor of the humanities of medicine and psychiatry at Harvard University. He is a noted physician, a noted teacher, and a distinguished author, his multi-volume series Children in Crisis having won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1960, a federal judge ordered the schools in the southern part of the country to be integrated. And Coles went to New Orleans

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where the first integration was to occur. And on November the 14th of 1960, a little girl named Ruby Bridges became the first black child to go to a white school in that city. It was the William T. France School. Now this little girl, Ruby Bridges, was in the first grade. She was six years old. When she approached the school, she was flanked on both sides

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by federal marshals, and she had to walk down a corridor of hatred. Adults standing on both sides of her, screaming blasphemy, threatening her with death, doing everything they could to intimidate this little girl. And when she got into the school, she discovered that she was the only student there. All the parents of the white children had kept their children

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home. Now I know some of you young people would find it hard to believe that a thing like this was happening in our country as recently as 1960, but it is part of our American history, and many of us in this room lived through it. Well, when Robert Coles, this distinguished psychiatrist and educator, saw little Ruby Bridges going through that kind

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of an experience, he called her home and offered to give whatever counseling help he could to assist the little girl. He asked her parents how she was, and they said fine. He met with Ruby with the parents' blessing, and he asked her how she was, and she said, "Oh, I'm fine." He met with her twice each week, and she never indicated any fear, any anxiety. Everything

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was okay. He talked with her teacher. Her teacher said, "This child is amazing. She comes to school every day with great happiness and enthusiasm. I can't understand it." Day after day, she would walk through that corridor of racial hatred and bigotry, people calling her nigger and threatening her and her family with lynching. And she not only went through

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it when she went to school in the morning, but when she left school in the afternoon. Yet everything was always fine. Coles got her to draw some pictures because many times the inner thoughts of a child are more revealed in pictures they draw than in their words. And all he could discover from the pictures was that she thought white people were more

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powerful than black people, and she thought black people were very vulnerable to white people, but there was no evidence of fear. There was no evidence of anxiety. Then one day, Ruby's teacher called Robert Coles, and she said, "I saw Ruby talking to the crowd as she came into the school that day." When Ruby got home that day, Robert Coles was waiting

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for her, and he said, "Your teacher said you were talking to the people outside the school today." "Oh, no," she said. "I wasn't talking. I was praying." "Well, why were you praying?" "Because those people need to be prayed for." "Well, I mean, that was a rather unusual thing to be doing in such a circumstance." "Don't you think they need prayer?" she said.

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Well, that continued, and a week later, he brought up the subject once more. She said, "I especially ought to pray for them." And Coles said, "Why?" "Because," she said, "I'm going to be like Jesus." And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing." And in his clinical report on this experience, Robert Coles of Harvard University

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wrote, after quoting those words, "How am I, as a psychiatrist, supposed to account for that?" Now, let's make no mistake about this. This child had never gone through a course in moral philosophy or in systematic ethics. This youngster had never read any of the great books on courage and zeal. This youngster's parents were illiterate. Neither

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one of them could read or write. But she knew God in Jesus Christ, and she went forth every morning and every afternoon armed with the armor of God. She may have been six years old, but she was wearing all of the armor of God, and she went in the presence of God. Ruby Bridges took her stand. And that's the last thing that Paul calls us to in this passage.

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He says, "And when you have done all, stand. Put on the armor, go in the power of God, and screw your courage to the sticking point. Stand!" I fight a very hard battle in my life because I am a very great sinner. It seems to me that I am endlessly at war with the sins that beset me. There are times when I make progress in

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one area only to be attacked by flaming darts from some other area. I try to wear the armor. I pray every hour of every day. And yet there are times when the battle seems incredibly hard and only to be getting harder. I'm sure many of you know just what I'm speaking of, or perhaps the battles you fight are even more intense. But I know that the evil in

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myself and the evil in this city and the evil in this time break me down till I feel like I'm in one long battle, one endless valley of the shadow of death. I put on the armor. I trust in God. And it still isn't sometimes enough for me. I find myself led only just to try to stand, to hang on with my fingernails to whatever shred of courage I have, just

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to stand. And I'm glad that the Apostle Paul understands me. That's the reason he says in this passage, "Put on the armor and go with God, and when nothing else seems to support you, then just stand. Get hold of yourself and stand." His image, of course, is drawn as all of these metaphors from the experience of the Roman army. You know, it's interesting

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when we dug up the city of Pompeii, which you remember had been buried by the residue from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Most of the people had escaped the town. They did not die there. But many did. Many tried to escape the flames and all and the lava and the like by going down into their basements. They died. Others went back for treasures

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that they wanted to take with them, and their bodies were found with the treasures still in their hands. Interestingly enough, at the gate to Pompeii, they found a Roman sentry box. And standing in that sentry box, standing, mind you, the skeleton of a Roman soldier still wearing all of his armor. Imagine, he had stood there in the gate while all of these

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people were fleeing the city, getting out of there as fast as they possibly could, running away from the black smoke and the foul ash and the choking air. But this legionnaire stood and never abandoned his post. And Paul says, "When you can't do anything else, stand." That's what Luther meant when he said at the Diet of Worms, "Here I stand. I can do no

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other. God help me. Amen." This last week, I read the personal testimony of Wallace. You remember him as the founder of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, imprisoned there by Jaruzelski and his aides for over two years, a man who's won the Nobel Prize for Peace. He's a Christian man deep in faith. And in his testimony, this is what he said, "There are times in my life

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when I feel the grace of God, but there are other times when I feel all alone, when I am a stand only on the strength of my own convictions. I don't know why I feel empowered one time and not empowered another. But I do know this, that if I just stand firm, my faith grows. Some people say I'm obstinate, but I'm not obstinate. I simply stand for

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the truth. I won't bow my head for a lie. I'm in the Lord's service as long as he wants me. And I'll stand alone or I'll stand with others. And that is what solidarity means to me." And it's to that that we're called. To stand with Paul, to stand with Luther, to stand with Ruby Bridges, to stand with Lech Walesa. And how can we stand? We can

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stand because we know we're the children of God, that the armor of God is ready for us, that he that is in us is greater than he that is in the world, and that even when nothing seems to be going as we want, pray, and earnestly desire for it to go, we can at least stand. And those who so endure will know the victory. They will be, even in tough times like these,

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more than conquerors. They will be victors on the field. Let us pray. O God, make us strong through our dependence upon thee, and in those moments when we feel most weak and our experience speaks more of your absence than your presence, even at such times, give us the courage of our convictions that we might stand, and having done all,

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we might stand to the honor and glory of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]