Stand Firm in the Face of the Enemy

Priscilla Shirer (Passion Conference) and T.D. Jakes (Sermon Series: Crushing) teach on the unseen spiritual battle. Listen in as they teach how to stand firm in the face of the enemy.

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What the enemy hopes is that the sight of them will cause you to shrink back in so much fear and insecurity that you’ll never step up to the plate of being who God has called you to be.
Listen, if you place faith in Jesus Christ, I hope you know that the enemy understands. He cannot destroy you.
And the enemy always has some sort of tool or memory or situation that he uses to terrify you even though the good times are here and the dream is there, the blessing is there and the goodness is there.
But there’s always this haunting nagging defiance. So I have three boys.
It’s a little bit scary to me that they are nearly, it will be very soon in the next few years will be about your age.
Three sons. The distinguishing characteristic about my boys is that they are giants. They are huge boys.
My 15 year old is six ft two inches tall. He wears a size 14 men’s shoe.
My 13 year old is about 61. He wears a 13 men’s shoe and uh they tower over me.
I have a nine year old who’s coming up in the ranks with his brothers. They are tall boys.
Somebody come help me feed these people and one of the distinguishing characteristics about or what makes their size work for them rather is that they do love sports.
So, whatever sport is sort of in season, that’s what we’re playing at the time.
My second son for a lot of years, he’s into basketball now.
But for a lot of years, baseball was his thing and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed baseball season.
I like going out there for spring ball.
I like spring ball because you go sit in the cool of the evening while your kid is practicing.
I remember all those years of, of little league when he was just coming up and we’d sit out there in the cool of the spring evening under the lights of the bleachers, watching him practice and enjoying just, uh, that, that whole atmosphere.
I like spring ball so much.
The only problem with spring ball is that it is going to become summer ball.
And I don’t know what happens where you live, wherever you’re coming from.
But I can’t tell you in Dallas Texas, which is where I still live and where I was born and raised in Dallas Texas in the summer time, it doesn’t warm up slightly, it gets hot.
I’m talking about slap your mama hot, that kind of hot, the kind of hot where you feel like the sun must be mad at you about something like you did something to the sun and the sun is trying to get you back all summer long.
That’s what it feels like. And you’re sitting out there at a game trying to enjoy your kid’s game and it really still is ok when there’s just one game.
The problem is that at the end of every season, there’s a tournament.
So you gotta be out there on the Thursday at eight AM and 10 AM and noon and two PM.
And then depending upon how your kids team did, you’re gonna have to come back on Friday at eight AM and 10 AM.
And then they give you a little lunch break, but you got to come back for the two PM game, the four PM game.
And then if your kid’s team had the nerve to do well, you got to come back again on Saturday for the eight AM game and 10 AM and noon and two.
And man, you’re sitting out there under the blazing sun trying to be happy that your kid is doing well.
Really? You’re wondering if it’s ever ok to pray they lose. So you can go home.
I will never confirm nor deny that I have ever done that.
But I will tell you that we were sitting out there at a tournament.
So several years ago, sun was blazing.
We were so excited for the lunch break just because that meant we would be able to go to a restaurant where there would be air conditioned and ice water that actually had ice in it.
We got refreshed. We came back, we drove our S U V up into the parking lot, opened up the back of the S U V so that we could pull out all the gear that we needed to go to the next game in the tournament.
We were three days into the tournament. Hot sweaty. They were doing well.
We were trying to be excited about it ready for the next game.
I was walking behind my son to get from where we had parked the car over toward the dug out where the next game was gonna be played.
And so I gathered up all the stuff, you know, the ice chest that you have and the, um, the umbrella that you might have to go over your head and you know, the water bottles, the, the backpacks, the, the baseballs, the mitts, all that stuff.
And I was following behind my son. My second son, Jerry Junior is a fairly gregarious personality. He’s outgoing.
He’s excited for a challenge. So I could see that in his step.
As I followed behind him, I could see a skip in his step, his chin was up, his shoulders were back.
He was excited about the next game. And I got, I tell you, he’s pretty good in baseball.
He has a natural knack for it.
I remember at 10 years old was the first time he got a good hit and sent it sailing over the fence line at 10 years old.
And I think it’s partly because of his size, just a lot of power behind his swing, great as a first baseman.
So we were really excited about his success in baseball and, and I watched him as he kind of hopped and skipped over to the next game.
Just excited about the next challenge in the tournament.
But because I was following behind him, I had my eyes glued on him and I could see when something changed, I could see that as we took the short walk from where we parked the car over to the dugout.
I could see that his shoulder started to hunch over and his head hung down.
I could see that, that, that skip that had been in his step, it changed.
He was kind of walking like he was nervous. He was wringing his hands a little bit.
I saw that he was looking around, his eyes darting and looking a little bit sketchy.
I was trying to figure out what happened to my boy.
It was a short walk from where we parked the car over to the dug out.
And all of a sudden his countenance had completely changed.
So I started looking around trying to figure out what was going on.
Why did he look so insecure and fearful?
All of a sudden, I realized that as we were going toward the dug out.
We were walking past some kids from another team.
They were all laying on the grass underneath the shade of an oak tree getting ready for the next game.
As I passed them, I could see this was the team we were about to play next, kept walking and I kept getting a look at these boys.
And when I looked at them, I realized what my son’s problem was.
We had faced this team before we had faced them earlier in the season.
And when this team had played my son’s team earlier in the season, they had annihilated us.
It had been a complete embarrassment, a complete upset.
This team right here, y’all, they were serious baseball players, but we had to walk right by them to get to the dugout.
As we walked past, there were two players, they were talking to each other, one was whispering to the other.
I think he thought he was whispering, but we could hear him.
He leaned over to the other one and he said there goes that big kid from the Red Sox team.
Is he the one that hit the ball and it went over the fence?
Yeah, he was the one at first base.
The one that caught any of the outs that we got in the game. That was him.
So that’s Jerry Shire. When my boy heard his name cross the lips of the opposing team members, those shoulders that had been hanging down.
All of a sudden, I watched them pop back again. I watched his chin go up.
I watched him get a little swag back in his step as he headed over toward the dug out.
In fact, we had to bring him down a few notches before the game started.
It’s amazing really how your countenance changes when you really overhear and understand what the enemy thinks about you when he sees you coming.
It doesn’t mean that the challenge goes away. It means that in the face of it, you’re different.
Your stance is different because you recognize that when the enemy sees a daughter or a son of God coming his way, he’s shaking in his boots.
Not because of you, but because of the Holy Spirit of God that lives on the inside of me.
I came to tell somebody today that even if you don’t believe what it is that the word of God declares to be true about you, you need to know that the enemy does.
He knows that every single thing that God’s word declares to be true about you.
Every word that has been declared over you in these last few days of this conference.
Even if you’re not convinced about it, the enemy is he knows that you have been forgiven.
He knows that there is therefore now no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus.
He knows that you have been given the victory.
He knows that you have been made competent by the spirit of God.
He knows that there is therefore now no condemnation for you or for me. No shame, no guilt.
He knows that you have not been given a spirit of fear, but of power and love and of a sound mind.
And y’all he knows that in the end we win.
And I’m saying what ashamed it would be for the enemy to believe more about your potential than you do.
What a shame it would be for us to go out of here with all of this inspiration that we have been given this investment of God’s word that he has gathered us together over the course of these days to worship in spirit and in truth and to hear his word declared true over our lives, what a tragedy it would be for us to walk out of here and still live like we were before we came through these doors.
So what the enemy will do is scatter challenge in front of your life because listen, you’re going back home to challenge y’all do know we’re going back home in a little while, right?
And don’t we wish we could wake up to this every single day?
Don’t we wish that we could have God’s word spoken over our lives with this much authority and power every single day and be in the presence of leaders who can lead us into the presence of God and worship every single day like this.
But the reality is we’re going back home.
The challenges of your university campus, the challenges of your home, your relationships, your friendships on your job, those challenges will be sprawled out in front of you when you get home.
And let me tell you something, what the enemy hopes is that the sight of them will cause you to shrink back in so much fear and insecurity that you’ll never step up to the plight of being who God has called you to be.
Listen, if you’ve placed faith in Jesus Christ, I hope you know that the enemy understands he cannot destroy you.
He knows his chances are over of destroying you.
So he is going to spend the rest of his time and the rest of his energy just trying to discourage you, trying to distract you so that you’ll shrink back in fear and insecurity and not step up to the plate and be who God has called you to be.
It is at least in part to this end that the apostle Paul gives us a passage of scripture that has become a lifeline for me.
In fact, I was talking with uh Christine yesterday, Chris and I have known each other for a very long time, very close friends and she was asking me what I was gonna speak on and I had several thoughts of directions that I was uh leaning toward.
But in the end, we, as we were talking, the question came up, if there was only one thing you could say to them, if there’s only one message that you ever have the opportunity to tell these students, these young people that will be gathered together on this occasion, what would that message be?
And there was one thing that immediately popped into my heart and my mind for you at the end of this year’s Passions Passion conference, the words of the Apostle Paul, he writes them in the book of Ephesians.
Listen, let me just tell you quickly before I read this passage, you got, if you, if you’ve not read the book of Ephesians, you’re gonna have to read the book of Ephesians.
Y’all. Listen, it’s, it’s like for real, the Apostle Paul, y’all know he was a bad boy.
He gave us most of what would become the New Testament letters written to first century believers that now disciple us and help us to mature as believers and as the body of Christ.
And scholars say that of all of Paul’s writing really the cream of the crop.
The cherry on top of the cake is Ephesians because in the book of Ephesians, y’all, he just spends the first half of the book just rehearsing who you are as a daughter or a son.
He wants to make sure you step up to the plate.
Rise to the occasion of who you’ve been recreated in Christ to become those of you who placed faith in Jesus Christ last night, who stood to your feet at the end of Pastor Louis message and you placed faith in Jesus, listen, the old has gone and the new has come.
You’re a daughter. You are son and you have full rights and privileges that have been granted to you.
You, the apostle Paul wants you to know what is the hope of his calling and choosing you.
He writes in the 1st and 2nd and 3rd chapter about the treasure that you have.
He wants you to know about the mercy that has been lavished upon you, the grace that has been given to you.
He wants you to know that if you’ve been rejected by everybody else, you’ve been hand picked, chosen and adopted by the one true God.
He wants you to know that if you’ve dug a pit of sin for yourself, that is so deep, you can’t find your way out of it that the mercy of God is so great and so grand that it can reach down into any pit and snatch you up out of it once and for all, in fact, Paul gets so worked up that by the time he gets to the middle of the first chapter, he bursts out in a prayer and he says, I’m praying that the eyes of your heart would be open so that you would just know what is the hope of His calling and choosing you.
And after going over and over and on and on about the lavishness, the richness, the grace, the mercy, the goodness, the adoption that has been poured out over us, the forgiveness that has been granted to us.
He’s trying to figure out how do I close this letter to make sure they step up to the plate.
How do I put an exclamation point on passion?
2018 to make sure that what God has given them, they don’t hand over to the enemy as soon as they walk out the door.
And the apostle Paul writes these words to us in Ephesians chapter six, beginning in verse 10, he says, finally, you be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.
He says, put on the full armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes.
Somebody say schemes against the schemes of the devil.
He says, we wrestle not, we struggle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world.
Forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness that are in the heavenly places.
He says, so therefore you might as well just go ahead and put down all the weapons of this world that aren’t working for you anyway and take up some weapons that actually have some power.
He says take up the full armor of God so that you may be able to resist in the evil day and having done everything to stand firm, he says, you ought to just stand firm.
Therefore, in these few verses of scripture, the Apostle Paul begins to introduce to us a concept that has not been at least in the context of thus far church uh development at that time had not been as overtly described as it is right now.
In Paul’s letter, he brings up the topic of spiritual warfare. He says you have an enemy.
He says, I want to make sure that it’s loud and clear.
There are other places in the Old Testament and throughout throughout the New Y’all where we can infer that we have a spiritual unseen battle going on.
But this is the first time that an author comes right out and says, you have an enemy and he is scheming against you that when you leave this place in just a little while, when I leave this place in just a little while, you need to know that there is an enemy.
He is against you. He is not for you.
He plans to do anything and everything in his power to stir up challenge in your life enough to cause you to shrink back and not rise up and stand firm in the victory that you have been given in Christ Jesus.
That’s why the apostle Paul says, stand firm because you have an enemy, an enemy that wants you to think that just because he is invisible.
He is also fictional. He wants to be chalked up to nothing more than a caricature, a cartoon picture, a myth, a character for a kid’s nursery rhyme.
He doesn’t want you to recognize the influence that he has over your life possibly to, to cause you to never walk into the full expression of God’s grace and goodness in your life.
He is sinister. He is a master illusionist and he is a deceiver and he hopes to cleverly disguise himself behind life’s most pressing problems to where you will forget he is even there.
He wants you to point fingers at him or at her at your boss, at your parent, at that particular professor or your R A in your dorm.
He wants you to think it’s that advisor. It’s that financial problem.
Anything flesh and blood because he knows as long as we’re looking at the flesh and blood, we will direct all the wrong weapons at the wrong culprit, we’ll think our money will work.
We’ll think our rationale and logic will actually work. We think that the diploma we’re about to achieve and receive.
We’ll think the diploma will be worth it. We’ll think that the connections will work.
Anything natural, cannot take care of the supernatural.
When your problem is unseen and spiritual, you need weapons that work in that realm.
So the Apostle Paul says, you got to know first of all that your enemy is not the person you are sitting next to today that your enemy is not your parent at home.
Your enemy is not that professor that is difficult to work with.
Your real enemy is not your boss on your part time job. Your real enemy is unseen.
He is hoping y’all that we will forget he’s there. He is the master deceiver.
So there’s a little church around the corner from my house in Dallas.
I’ve been taking my kids there since they were little uh to harvest festival.
That’s basically this church’s answer to Halloween.
So we will go there for harvest festival and this church has a good old fashioned trunk or treat.
Does anybody know what I mean? When I say trunk or treat? Ok. Right.
So chun retreat for those of you who are not clear on what that is, that’s when members of the congregation volunteer, they volunteer to bring their cars into the parking lot on harvest festival night so that they can open up the trunk of their car.
So you go into the parking lot, all the trunks are open and each person has basically crafted a carnival game or some sort of fair game out of the trunk of the car.
So kids line up one trunk after the other, they play whatever the game is.
And then most of the time, whether they win or lose the person that owns that car, gives them a whole bunch of candy and sends them home we’re always so grateful.
So we stand in line one car after the other waiting on bags of candy and we play one game after the other.
A few years ago, the biggest line, the longest line at the carnival wasn’t behind the A car.
It was behind the bed of a truck. It was really clever.
A huge truck had been parked in the parking lot and they put a step ladder right at the bed of the truck so that a kid could walk into the bed of the truck.
They had attached a table top which was about the same size as the bed of the truck.
They had attached it to the side of the truck, cut six holes into it, put some fabric, some drapery over it and out from those holes, every few seconds, a puppet would pop through.
They gave the kid a huge plastic mallet and the job of the kid was to run up and down the inside of the bed of the truck as he tried to hit the puppets on top of the head.
It was a homemade whack. A mole game is what it was. And it was the longest line.
Me and Jude at the time, he was like four. Jude is my youngest.
Me and Jude are standing in line. We’re waiting on our turn behind us. There’s another kid.
He’s with his, his mom. He’s probably four or five as well.
And y’all, he was hysterical because he was annoyed at this whole situation and he was making sure she knew it.
He was first of all annoyed because mom, I don’t understand why I got to stand in this long line.
Didn’t we come to the carnival to have fun? This ain’t fun. Standing in line ain’t fun.
I have an idea. Mom. How about this?
How about I go play all these other games while you stand in line and hold our place and then when it’s our turn, I’ll come back and join you in line.
But he was not only annoyed about the line, the four year old was also annoyed because mom, I don’t even understand this game.
Why in the world would I waste all my energy running up and down the inside of that truck to hit the puppets on the top of the head.
If when I hit them on the head, they’re gonna disappear.
But then they’re just gonna come back as soon as I hit them on the head.
What’s the point of this game?
So everybody in the line is laughing hysterically because this four year old, this five year old is talking so much about all of his frustrations.
Finally, he gets so frustrated that he works himself into a frenzy to where all I saw out of my peripheral vision was a four year old flash running past me as he ran forward and he grabbed the drapery off of the table top and pulled it clean off underneath.
There were three adults with puppets on each hand.
That day.
We all got a good laugh, but we also got a good lesson.
There is always something you can’t see influencing what you can.
And if you spend all of your time, your energy, your effort trying to hit at what you see popping up in your life, you’re gonna be so frustrated and by the way exhausted because as soon as you take care of one thing, another one is coming back.
Unless you do what the Apostle Paul says, pull back the curtain and let the enemy know we got our eyes on you and we’re going to use some weapons that actually work back there behind the curtain.
You’re gonna lose everything. You won’t come out of this.
You’re not smart enough, you’re not bright enough.
You waited too late, you should have started younger.
Those are the kind of voices that we all live with. For me.
Our ministry was growing. We lived in a nice house, nice house we’d ever had driving a nice car living from paycheck to paycheck.
We’re making it every night.
I lay down at night after she goes to sleep.
I hear the voices.
Those voices are the kind of voices that stop you from buying into your own life.
Stop you from enjoying the good times and believing that they will last.
The anxiety and the pressure and the strength that it took to get from where you were to where you are, doesn’t go away.
So, so you don’t really believe it’s yours, you’re driving it, but you don’t really believe it.
Your, and you’re scared to relax and really rest in whatever it is or whoever it is because everything else went away.
Maybe this will go away too.
We talk about faith for bad times but, but you also need faith in good times to actually believe the goodness of God is not going anywhere to silence the voices.
They keep saying you’ll never make it. You’re about to lose everything. Fear gets in your heart.
See, see, I, I know what it’s like to be poor and I know what it’s like to be without and I know what it’s like not to have dinner for my kids.
Returning to that the, the idea that that could happen.
It’s terrifying and the enemy always has some sort of tool or memory or situation that he uses to terrify you even though the, the good times are here and, and, and the dream is there, the blessing is there and the goodness is there.
But there’s always this haunting nagging defiance that says, don’t you relax?
You’re not worth it. You don’t deserve it.
And it’s not going to last resting in.
What God has done is often more difficult than receiving what God has done to rest in it.
To believe that it will last to believe that you will last and love will last.
That, that, that life will last.
That, that good times will come, that things will be better is difficult because of the voices when you are what you eat and the voices are the food that feeds your faith or fear.
So if you want to change your diet, you can change your outcome.
But you have to stop talking to yourself the way you do.
Because if you continue to talk to yourself, the way you do, you will always be where you’ve always been.
It is what you say within yourself that heals you. The woman with Israel blood said to herself.
If I can be touch him of his garment, I’ll be made whole.
There was no scripture to validate that she can say she wasn’t quoting Deuteronomy or new numbers or anything like that.
It’s just something she said to herself. There was no doctrine around it.
We’ve never seen that happen before.
But she said to herself, if I can touch him of his garment, I’ll be made whole and all the while she was crawling.
She kept saying over and over again.
If I can just touch, if I can just touch, if I can just touch, if I can just touch him of the and without Jesus permission and without the support of the disciples, she creeped up on him and snatched a miracle, snatched it, snatched it because of what she said to herself.
You see those voices that say what you can’t do what you can’t have, what you can’t be what’s not gonna last.
What’s not gonna work is how the enemy pulverizes the promises of God in your life.
And it takes word to combat word.
That’s why when Jesus was in the wilderness and Satan was throwing word at him, he was throwing word back.
And what we have to do is put word on word. I’m blessed. I’m blessed in the city.
I’m blessed in the field. I’m blessed in my uprising. I’m blessed in my down setting.
I’ll be blessed into my old age. I’ll be blessed when I’m an old man. My grandchildren will be blessed.
My body is blessed. My body is, my mind is blessed. My head is blessed.
I got this, I can handle it. I can do it, bring it home here.
It is that kind of talk saying that to yourself drives back the other voices of negativity that we all have creep up behind us and tell us that we’re not capable and we’re not competent and we’re not gifted enough and we’re not good enough and we waited too late or God is punishing us to talk back to those voices, shuts the enemy down.
The pressure I was going through I was causing because the pressure I was going through was coming from the things that I allowed to reverberate in my head.
And I’m wondering if there are things echoing in your head right now that are stopping you from living your best life because you will not silence him by speaking back.
You shall have whatever you say.
So says the word of God, you shall have whatever you say.
If it’s betrayal, you shall have whatever you say.
If it’s a life without love, you shall have whatever you say, it doesn’t just work positively.
It also works negatively. You shall have whatever you say. She touched him and she was made whole.
And he says, who touched me? Which means he’s oblivious to what’s going on.
This is all happening in her head. The whole thing happened in her head.
And the Lord who is missing, ask a question who touched me and the disciples wanted to be important to answered him said, everybody touched you.
He said no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not what I’m talking about.
Everybody around me don’t touch me. Everybody around me don’t touch me.
You’ve upset everybody around me, don’t touch me just because you’re around me, don’t mean you touch me.
Somebody touched me, somebody touched me and she came out from the crowd chiefly and see it was me when I say excellent, you say excellent, excellent, excellent.
The problem is we all say the same word, but we don’t all mean the same thing because what you call excellent, what I call excellent may be two different things based on the lives we’ve lived, the things we’ve experienced, the places we’ve been exposed to our ideas of excellent may vary drastically based on how we define excellence.
The problem with the English language is that it is limited to interpretation.
So how do you know when I say I love you that, I mean, what you meant when you said you love me?
So we’re having a conversation and I’m making an assumption that your love is my love and it may not be at all or we’re planning a banquet.
And I, and I had to make an assumption that you’re excellent is my excellent.
And it may not be at all because the reality about it is your definition of excellent rises no higher than your level of exposure, whatever you’ve been exposed to, that becomes the new paradigm of what excellent is to you and it shifts from day to day and the hardest thing in the world is to have a conversation with somebody and all you have to use is words because I’m not sure.
But you mean what I mean?
When I say excellent, I’m not sure that you mean what I mean?
When I say love, I’m not sure. You mean what I mean?
When I say loyal, I’m not sure. You mean what I mean?
When I say hurt because all we have is worse.
The reality is we have to make up in our mind that whatever our definition of excellence is, it’s called change.
It’s gonna get higher, it’s gonna get broader, it’s gonna get better.
It’s going to be different or it’s gonna go down.
And a lot of it depends on who you hang around and what you’re exposed to.
There are people that take you up.
There are people that bring you down, they bring you down to their level of excellence.
That’s what, that’s what a job description for a hater looks like the job description of the hater is to bring you down to the level that they are on.
So that while they’re trying to pull you down, I’m trying to get up.
And if I’m going to get up, I have to know that there’s gonna be a cost in getting up.
I’m gonna have to put my back to it or it’s not gonna happen.
God wants somebody to work with him and give what it takes to make it happen.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. I do not want to die. Let me explain.
I, I, I was born in between two dead babies, the baby before me died, the baby, after me died, I was raised by a dying father and I do not want to live my life and die.
And at the last moment of my life, ask this question, wonder what would have happened if I’d have pushed a little harder?
I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna get down to the end of the road and, and wonder what would have happened if I’d have pushed a little harder.
I don’t want to wonder that I want to get down to the end of the road like Paul and say I fought a good fight.
I kept the faith. I finished my course.
And now later for me is a crowd of rights in the heaven.
I don’t want to get down to my last breath and wonder what would have happened if I went back to school?
If I took a course, if I worked a little harder, if I changed the way I dress, if I changed the way I talk to people.
If I forgave somebody, if I release somebody, I don’t wanna wonder about nothing because that is excellence, excellence.
It to come out with the conclusion. I have no regrets.