Priscilla Shirer – Girded in Truth

“God is the God of “right now.” He doesn’t want you sitting around regretting yesterday. Nor does He want you wringing your hands and worrying about the future. He wants you focusing on what He is saying to you and putting in front of you … right now.”
― Priscilla Shirer, Discerning the Voice of God: How to Recognize When He Speaks

Truth. But there is a standard, an objective standard that has to be the guideline for our lives.
And here’s the thing, y’all, you can be in church every Sunday and still not be a person who is girded in truth.
You can be in Bible study every Tuesday and Wednesday.
But but never be a person that is girded in truth. You can have been at all.
Let’s see, about 14 hours of revival we’ve had over the past few days and have celebrated all the messages and all that good singing and still not be somebody who is guarded in truth.
Still be somebody that the enemy can just run roughshod over your life because you have not made a choice.
And here’s what it means to be guarded in truth to make sure that God’s standard is the compass for your life, no matter what politics says and no matter what is politically correct or not, no matter what the other ideals and values and morals are that everybody else in your office or in your university has you have decided like Joshua as for me in my house, what we gonna do is we’re gonna serve the Lord, we’re going to follow God when you make that choice, which is only a choice, you know, whether or not you have made in your heart and your mind, it does not matter how I feel.
It doesn’t matter what sounds rational to me. It doesn’t matter what my friends think. It doesn’t matter.
I’m going to always ask my God, what is your opinion?
And then I’m going to align my behavior to that opinion. That means you’re girded in truth.
Y’all let me tell you why this is critical and that, that is the first, uh the first stop for the enemy in your life.
Yeah, because his M O, the enemy’s M O is deception.
That’s his M O OK.
And here’s the tragedy and the hard thing about deception, y’all embedded embedded within deception is a blinding agent so that the person being deceived doesn’t know it.
See, that’s what’s so hard about deception.
You’re on the edge of the cliff, but you don’t know you’re on the edge of the cliff.
You think you can take another step.
Now, the people around you, they can tell you’re on the edge, they can tell you’re about to fall off the brink.
They can tell that relationship is no good for you.
They can tell that’s not the job you’re supposed to take.
They can tell you don’t need to live on that side of town in that house.
They can tell the contract, you’re about to sign has some fine print that you have not quite read yet.
Everybody else can see it clearly except the one being deceived.
Oh, y’all the enemy is a master illusionist.
He causes you to think things are there that are not, he causes you to hear things that are not as they really are.
He causes your perceptions to be misaligned so that they are skewed just enough to take you off to the left or to the right of what is God’s will a standard for you.
He is counting on you trusting in your own feelings, leaning to your own understanding because then he knows he can take you on a ride.
But for a person that is girded in truth, that always checks back with the compass of God’s word, he knows he’s been blocked before he’s even really begun.
So there’s this movie named uh called Inception.
Do you remember that from several years ago? Leo Dicaprio is the star in inception.
I will tell you that I have not seen that movie because when I go to the movies, I want to see something that requires no brain capability at all.
That’s the kind of movies I like anybody know what I’m talking about.
I want some hot salty buttery popcorn. I want a good Coke and a smile.
I wanna enjoy myself and relax. I ain’t trying to think and have to figure stuff out.
So dad told me about, about inception.
He said, Priscilla Leo Dicaprio’s character uh is in reality, but often when he’s asleep, he’ll have a dream that takes him to an altered state of reality.
He’s in a dream, but everything is so real in his dream that he thinks he’s in reality.
He has no way of knowing whether or not where he is is real or if it’s a dream.
He said, if that’s not confusing enough, sometimes he’s in a dream and has another level of dreaming.
So now he’s not just in a dream, he’s in a dream that is within a dream that was within his reality, but in the dream, everything looks like it’s real.
So he’s making choices and decisions as if he’s in the real world with actuality.
He’s not in the real world so that those choices are getting him in trouble.
He said, but if that’s not confusing enough, sometimes when he’s in that second layer of dreaming, he has another dream.
So now he’s three layers deep in dreaming and he cannot tell what is real and what is not.
And he’s trusted in his own understanding, he has trusted what he can see and what he can hear and what he can feel.
And it has gotten him into trouble. I just wonder if anybody’s feelings have ever gotten him into some trouble.
I mean, you thought it was real when you said yes, but it ended up being, being not what you thought it was, but it felt good to you.
And your feeling said go and your feeling said yes, your understanding your perceptions to you made you think you were in walking in the truth.
When actuality, there was fine print on that contract you sign and you didn’t know it until it was too late.
So Leo’s character has this spinning top.
He takes it with him wherever he goes and he spins the top on a table top and he watches it.
If it spins ends endlessly and never responds to gravity, it never slows. It never topple over, topples over.
He knows he’s in a dream because he can’t do that in real life.
He knows if he spins it and it ends up falling. Ok, I’m home, I’m in the real world.
What he does not do is trust in his own perceptions.
He has something outside of himself that he can look to, to determine whether or not where he is is real or not.
The enemy hopes that you will not have an objective standard.
Something that you go to and say, wait a minute. This looks like a good opportunity.
This looks like a good relationship.
This looks like where I should go and what I should do and how I should be feeling.
But before I make a decision as to whether this is a dream or reality, I’m going to pass it through the objective standard of God’s words.
That’s how you urge yourself in truth, you make a choice, not just to be in church on Sunday.
I hope you are not just to be in Bible study on Wednesday.
I hope you are not just to be at the New Year’s revival. I hope you will be next year.
But I’m so praying that in your life on Monday through Friday, you’ve made a, made a decision that as for me in my house, this is the compass.
Paul says after you guard yourself with truth verse 14, he says you need a breastplate and your breastplate is called righteousness, Jerry and I live with um live in a fairly rural part of Dallas Fort Worth.
We like it that way kind of out in the country. It’s close enough to the city 10, 15 minutes.
We can get to everything we need really easily.
The Barnes and Noble and the Starbucks and the Super Target and all this stuff.
It’s, it’s all right there, but we feel like we’re worlds away.
We just kind of drive back on this little two lane road.
We live on a little quiet two lane road and somebody got horses over there and there’s some cows over there.
And I have a neighbor across the street who is one of my closest friends and she has a pond on her property.
I think the last time I was here I told you guys that I like to go fishing with my boys on this pond.
We have a couple of fishing poles that we bought on sale at the local Super Walmart.
Have a tackle box I also found on sale one day.
There’s some extra hooks in there because we always seem to need extra hooks and we have extra bobber things because we always lose those little bobbers and we need more.
I also have gloves in that box because y’all know I don’t mind going fishing, but I ain’t gonna touch no fish.
So we take all of that.
I send one of the boys over to the, the refrigerator to get whatever leftover hot dog meat there is from the week.
That’s our bait and we go and we stand on the edge of the shore most of the time of the pond and we put the line in and fish.
But beside us on the pond, my neighbors also have a uh little rowboat.
It’s a metal old boat they found on Craig’s List. No big deal. It’s just a shell really.
You could just sit inside and push out when you want to and fish uh from the middle of the pond every now and then when I’m feeling particularly adventurous, that is what we will do.
I will see that boat there and I’ll say boys, let’s get in the boat today and go fish in the middle of the pond.
The boat is always turned upside down, the owners leave it that way and it makes sense because if there is water that had collected during the last time it was out, it needs to be drained.
And also if they left it up, right. And it rained, it would just fill up.
So it makes sense, they leave it up ended that poses a problem for me because in order to get in it, I’ve got to turn it over.
I know that since the environment created underneath that upturned boat is damp and moist and cool and shady.
I know that when I turn it over there on the edge of a pond, something is either going to hop out from underneath it.
Something is going to waddle out from underneath it or worst of all, something’s going, y’all know.
So I scoot to the very, very back of the boat. I let the boys get the sides.
I stand way back on the edge of the boat, we flip it over and inevitably something comes out from underneath the boat.
I am always amazed that I have never once had to send out a clarion call into the brush nearby to tell the critters we have arrived and that they are welcome to join us.
I have never had to write out an invitation.
A golden sealed invitation and send it into the woods so that they know that they can come and join us on our fishing trip.
I’ve never had to do it.
All that has to happen is the environment has to be created and the environment is invitation enough.
Righteousness is right side up living that invites the favor and the peace and the presence of God.
Unrighteousness is upside down behavior that creates an environment that invites demonic activity into your life.
Listen, you don’t have to invite Satan into your mind and your heart and your marriage.
You don’t have to send a clarion call or a golden sealed invitation to the demons to come and make themselves at home.
You just have to choose unholiness.
You have to decide that you are not going to align your behavior with the truth of God.
When you walk in on righteousness, you have created an environment that not only invites the demons but tells them to stay and make themselves at home, which means y’all, this means we can be praying and rebuking the devil and casting out demons and all that from one side of our mouth.
But if in the other side of our life, we are living in unholiness, we have wasted our time in prayer.
Righteousness is your breastplate.
When you make a choice in your attitudes and your actions to just live in a way that honors God not to gain his approval.
You already have that. It’s because you want to invite his favor and because you don’t want to make a place for the demons to fester in your life.
So righteousness becomes a breastplate.
The Roman soldier no matter how strong he was, no matter how much, um, training he’d had, no matter how smart and wise he was regarding the tactics that they had planned against the enemy, no matter any of that one blow to the heart and he’d be taken out.
It didn’t matter how smart he was, how well trained he was.
Didn’t matter how many classes he’d been to on being a soldier, none of that mattered.
One blow to the heart and he’d be out what the physical heart is to the physical body.
Y’all with me, the spiritual heart is to your spiritual body, your spiritual life, all of the vitality that you need to function victoriously in your spiritual life is connected to your heart, which is why the writer of the Proverb said in Proverbs 423, guard your heart for from it throws the wellsprings of your life.
I have often always wondered what in the world does the Proverb writer mean guard your heart?
How do I do that? The Apostle Paul comes along and Ephesians and he tells you how he says you live, right?
You turn that boat over, you live in a way that aligns with the truth of God.
And you have put a breastplate over your heart so that the enemy does not have access to a full frontal attack in your life.
Listen, this is a 12 o’clock service. So I have a few more minutes y’all.
All right. Listen, hang with me. Hang with me.
Listen, your heart is the centerpiece of your soul. The, it’s the hub of your soul.
Listen your soul. You know this in this Bible teaching church. I know your pastor has taught you this.
We were just talking about it last night.
Your soul is comprised of your mind, how you think your will, what you purpose to do your emotions, how you feel and also your conscience, your conscience is that thing when your mama told you growing up, if you get somewhere with your friends and you just don’t feel good about being there, you don’t have to be able to explain it.
It’s just something you goes, my mama would say, girl, you don’t have to explain it, just call me, I’ll come get you from wherever you are.
She was saying you have a conscience, right? Your conscience is not the voice of God.
Your conscience though is the microphone that the Holy Spirit uses to help you hear the voice of God.
Ok? Which is why if I were your enemy more than anything, I would be after your heart.
Because if I get your heart, that means I have already crippled your ability to think clearly.
I have already tampered with your ability to function in emotional health.
I have already stripped from you the opportunity to walk in the will and the purposes of God.
And more importantly, I have short circuited the wires that allow the whole holy spirit to be able to speak to you clearly so that you can hear the voice of God.
So now, not only can you not think clearly and not only do you not have emotional health, you also can’t even hear a word from the mouth of God.
So now you’re in your quiet time and you’re sitting there trying to read, you’re wondering if God ever has anything to say to you, but all it is to you is ink on a page.
That’s because the enemy has short circuited the wires.
So now you can’t hear God.
All the enemies don’t want you hearing God.
He wants your spiritual ear to be so dull that you can’t hear when God says go, that you can’t hear Him when God prompts you to say to forgive that person or to give that gift or to offer yourself or to stop doing something to separate yourself.
He wants it so that we can’t hear God.
So he poses a full frontal attack against your heart because when He’s got your heart, he’s got everything else connected to it.
So Paul says, you want to align of defense against the enemy, you gird yourself with truth.
But then if you do affirm the truth of God, that’s girding yourself with truth, affirming the truth of God, the breast plate then is aligning your behavior to the truth that you say you affirm.
It’s straight up old school holiness. That’s what it is.
That’s what all preachers used to say y’all. They just talked about being holy. Just living, right.
Just making choices that honor God, the armor y’all. It was heavy.
£70 about, can you imagine trying to be nimble and quick in warfare?
And you got 70 extra pounds on you? That was a lot of weight.
Most of the weight that they carried was in that breastplate, all of that weight on their shoulders, dragging them down, not allowing them to be as nimble and quick and effective as they needed to be tired before they’ve even really begun.
The weight of the breastplate.
The good thing about the belt is not only did it stabilize their core, but it also helped to take some of the weight of the breast plate off their shoulders.
It bore the weight so that they didn’t have to carry it on their own.
The truth took some of the weight of righteousness off of their own shoulders.
Listen, if you’re trying to be righteous in your own state, in your own power and in your own strength, that thing is gonna weigh you down so that you cannot function on a daily basis.
The enemy will even use righteousness on your own shoulders to cripple you with perfectionism so that you’re trying to be the perfect one.
He doesn’t want you to remember that the perfect one has already come. We don’t need another perfect one.
Listen, y’all the truth of our great God takes that weight off of your shoulders.
And the truth is that when you place faith in Jesus Christ, you already are the righteousness of God in Christ, Jesus, that the Holy Spirit lives on the inside of you.
And he’s doing the work of righteousness in you. Did you realize that?
Second Thessalonians 2 13 says He is sanctifying you?
That means he’s molding you into the image of Jesus Christ so that you can think like Jesus and talk like Jesus and walk like Jesus.
That means you don’t have to do the work yourself.
You just have to cooperate with him because he’s doing it for you.
So as you cooperate with him, it takes the weight off so that you can be free.
Perfectionism is too heavy a weight to bear.
Paul says you need a breastplate called righteousness.
And he says, shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace.
He says you need peace and they’re like shoes for your feet.
The Roman soldiers shoes had many distinguishing characteristics, but most notably, there were prongs, steel prongs at the bottom of the boots so that if they were on slick terrain or rocky, rocky ground and they were trying to endure over a long march, they had something they could dig into the ground so that they would not be able to slip and and be able to fall and trip easily.
They were able to dig themselves in and stand up no matter what kind of terrain they were traversing in this world.
Jesus said you will have trouble. You don’t have to go looking for trouble.
Just keep living trouble is gonna come and it’s gonna find you and on slick and rocky terrain like that.
Unless you have an anchor that holds you steady, you will be so easily, fell over and pushed down and tripped up.
The enemy wants you without peace. But it’s the gospel. Paul says that gives you an anchor in your soul.
In September.
My grandmother on my mother’s side went home to be with Jesus.
We knew it was going to happen.
She was very, very healthy and then she had a little minor stroke that just started a very quick decline.
The nurses let us know that was what was going to happen.
She was 97 years old had lived a beautiful healthy life the day before it happened, she had been holding her great grandkids and playing with them healthy woman.
So we were shocked when it happened.
I found out on a text message while sitting on an airplane just about to take off to Saint Louis.
The kind agents let me get off the plane so that I could rush to my grandmother’s house.
And I went there, I walked in and when I saw her, I realized everything had changed.
She couldn’t smile at me anymore. She had the day before her eyes could not really find me.
I had to bring my head to her, my face to her so she could see me.
She couldn’t speak what a difference a day makes.
So we put her in her bed and for the next four days, her Children, eight of them, her grandchildren.
No telling how many of us, her great grandchildren.
No telling how many crowded into this little three bedroom, two bath house. We snuggled up with her.
We had slumber parties. We were all in our pajamas, sleeping on the floor singing to her, talking to her.
And I watched her as she could barely make any sounds.
But I watched her smile just a bit, just curl up one side of her mouth.
Let us know that she knew we were there.
She, she um we lifted up great grandchildren’s hands, little, little newborn so that they could touch her cheek and she could feel it.
And I watched my grandmama for four days.
I watched my grandmother slip away and as I watched her and just sat in the pool of my people, my people all around me for four days and the grandkids when they get restless, the great grandkids, they were out in her backyard and of all the games they decided to play y’all.
They played lots of things, tag and stuff, but they spent a lot of time playing church.
They appointed a pastor, they appointed a praise and worship leader.
So while their great grandmother was on her way to meet Jesus, the great grandchildren were outside celebrating Jesus and I watched her cheek curl up even knowing she was on her deathbed, I watch the side of her cheek curl up in the knowledge that even though things aren’t so great.
Right now, there is a peace in my soul.
A piece that has enabled me to live so well through trials and tribulations over the past nine decades that I’ve been able to sow good fruit into my Children and grandchildren and great grandchildren so much so that now they’re all surrounding me and my great grandchildren are singing the praises of God in my hearing so that I can hear them.
And I know I’m on my way to meet him, but this is good, this is good.
And when I watched that y’all, when I watched that, I said to myself now that’s peace right there.
And I said, Lord, would you give me a piece like that?
A piece that the world can’t take away a piece that death can’t take away a peace.
So that when I’m on my dying bed, even if I can no longer talk, there is a smile that can curl itself onto my lips in the knowledge that I’ve got an anchor in my soul that makes all of this.
Ok. The Holy Spirit would offer anybody in this room today.
Yeah, I’m saying to the person that has not slept well in as long as you can remember to the person whose mind is so tormented, whose heart is so broken, there is an anchor that can keep you smiling even when things are bad.
If there is anybody in this room and you don’t have a piece like that, if there’s anybody in this room, you do not know what it is to go through stuff, but still be able to give even the hints of a smirk because you know God’s got this.
If the enemy has been running roughshod over you and, and you want victory and freedom once and for all, I cannot wait to invite you to come to Jesus.
And so if that’s you under the sound of my voice and you want to meet Jesus today and have the opportunity to walk and treat him and walk in victory.
This is your day. Would you please not walk, run down to this altar so that together we can pray for salvation in the name of Jesus.
Anybody come on, you can have peace like a river today.
Anybody need to place faith in Jesus today. This is your day.
This is your opportunity. Come on.
I know there’s someone who needs to, even if it’s just one, we will wait for you.
Yes, sir. Come on.
Come on, the enemy doesn’t have a chance.
He’s made a choice for Jesus.
Yes, sir. A couple coming. Good. Come on.
Even from the balcony y’all. Come on, if you need to meet Jesus, anybody in the balcony will wait for you.
Just come on down. Come on, sis, come on, y’all.
Come on, sis. I see you. Come on a good day for freedom.
It’s a good day for victory. There is so much power in Jesus.
Name anybody else.
I just feel a little unsettled about stopping.
We will. But I just wonder if you all would help me but just look at the person next to you and say, do you need to go, I’ll go with you.
Just ask him, do you have peace? Do you need it?
I will go with you if you need me to go with you, tell them you’ll come to Jesus.
Yeah.