Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Spiritual Warfare

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

The devil. Spiritual warfare. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, most places in the world, the idea of spiritual warfare—of a conflict between spiritual good and spiritual evil—is not an unusual concept. Many people in many parts of the world think this helps make sense of reality. But here in the Western world, we find it a foreign concept.  Let’s look at this passage on spiritual warfare, and let’s notice 1) whom we fight, 2) what we fight, and 3) how we fight. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on January 29, 2012. Series: A Study of Ephesians: Who is the Church? Scripture: Ephesians 6:10-13. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. How hopeful are you about the future of the Christian Church? The book of Ephesians gives us an incredibly inspiring vision for the Church, showing how it has the capacity to be a new humanity and a community of astonishing beauty. Join us today as Tim Keller preaches from the book of Ephesians. Scripture reading is taken from Ephesians chapter six, verses 10 through 13. Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh

and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything to stand. This is the word of the Lord. So,

devil. So, devil. Was that a little too big a change in? I'm not sure that was a change in subject. The devil. We're in Ephesians. And we're getting to this week and next week a passage on spiritual warfare. Now in Africa, Latin America, Asia, most places in the world, the idea of spiritual warfare,

of a conflict between spiritual good and spiritual evil is not an unusual concept. Many people in many parts of the world think it really helps them understand, make sense of reality. But we here in the Western world find it a foreign concept.

So let's look at this passage. This is the first part. Next week we'll look at another section on this. And let us notice what? We struggle, you know, spiritual warfare. But let's notice who we fight, what we fight, and how we fight. Who we fight?

Our struggle is not with flesh and blood, but with spiritual forces of evil. What we fight? The devil's schemes. How we fight? Do everything. All right, first, who do we fight? Yeah, you see here in verse 12,

our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, authorities, powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil. Now, when Paul says this, and he says, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, he doesn't mean that we don't wrestle with any flesh and blood version of evil.

He's not saying that. I mean, he's not saying that evil doesn't take flesh and blood form. He has struggled with people who imprisoned him and who flogged him and who, you know, stoned him. So he certainly opposed flesh and blood evil. But what he is saying is we wrestle not only with flesh and blood evil.

That when evil takes flesh and blood form, war and cruelty and violence and greed and strife and racism and crime and poverty, when it takes those flesh and blood forms, he is saying they participate in something that's above and behind and beyond that is more than merely human and natural, that the flesh and blood behind it is something that's not flesh and blood.

And until you recognize that dimension of evil in the world, you will not be able to understand its depth and its pervasiveness and its intractability. So, that's what he's saying. Now here in the West, modern Western world, and its intractability. So, that's what he's saying. Now here in the West, modern Western world, we have trouble with that. Because the modern Western mindset is this,

that everything has a natural cause. And therefore everything has a scientific explanation. If everything has a natural cause and a scientific explanation, then crime and violence and greed and racism and war and cruelty, all those things must have a natural cause. And what is that natural cause then? We say it's bad psychological factors. You were raised right, you weren't educated right,

or bad sociological factors, bad social systems. And we say there's gotta be a natural cause to all this and we can figure it out and we can fix it. That's the Western mindset. But it's wearing thin. Andrew Delbanco, who's one of the, a great intellectual scholar type who's at Columbia University some years ago,

wrote a book called The Death of Satan. And even though he says, in the book, I'm a secular liberal, okay, he wrote a book called The Death of Satan, and the first line in the book is this. He says, a gulf has opened in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources to cope with it. And then he goes on and says this, that we've jettisoned in the West the idea of cosmic evil or transcendent evil or supernatural

evil. We don't believe in that. In fact, we don't even like to use the word evil. And the reason we don't like it is because it implies value judgments and moral absolutes. So we use medical terms. We talk about dysfunction. We talk about pathology. And we don't use moral terminology, but Delbanco says

as the 20th century has gone on it's gotten harder and harder to say that Holocaust and ethnic cleansing and serial killing is just bad psychological and sociological adjustment. Delbanco turns in his book he turns to a very famous interaction it's in the book Silence of the Lambs, and of course it was also depicted in the movie, the Silence of the Lambs. It's the place where the young policewoman, Officer Starling, goes to meet for the first time the monstrous serial killer Hannibal Lecter. She goes to the cell and she's looking at him and hearing what he's done and says,

what happened to him to make him so twisted? What happened to him that he could be so cruel? And he heard her. Big mistake, Starling. And he begins to speak. And this is what he says, and it's very hard to read this without hearing Anthony Hopkins, I know.

But she says, what happened to him to make him so twisted? And Lecter responds, quote, nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences. You've given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You've got everyone in moral dignity pants. Nothing is ever anybody's fault. Look at me. Can you stand to say I'm evil?

And Delbanco, who's quoting this, says, modern people, the modern West, cannot answer the monster's question. And he's right, he says, as the 20th century's gone on, what we said 100, 150 years ago, that all evil has got natural causes, scientific causes, psychological, social causes. He says it's wearing thin.

You know, one of the things we used to say is that racism and violence comes from a lack of education, a lack of civilization, a lack of culture. It's only primitive, uncivilized, uneducated people are like that. And then we had World War II. And then we had the final solution, and the Holocaust, and the death camps that arose out of perhaps

as educated as cultured a nation as there was on the face of the earth. And then we had Marxism. And Marxism says, ah, the reason for all the problem, it's not psychological or educational, it's social. We have to put the means of production in the hands of the proletariat, not in the hands of the capitalists,

but we did, they did, and of course the proletariat was every bit as oppressive and violent as the capitalists were, and now Marxism has been thrown onto the dustbin of history basically. And over and over again, everything that says, oh, it's psychological, it's social, Delbanco says, we cannot today in the West account for the depth and

pervasiveness of evil. But the Bible doesn't have that problem. The Bible says, here's where evil came from. It came from the free will of two races of beings that God created, angels and humans. And some of the angels fell by exercising their free will and turning away from God. And the fallen angels, the devil and his demons, are personal supernatural beings.

And then on the other hand, we have the human race, and we turned, and now sin and evil is in our heart. It's deep in our soul, which is still spiritual roots. And therefore, here's what Christianity says. Yes, psychological and sociological factors can aggravate, they can accentuate, and they can shape the innate self-centeredness, the innate self-absorption, the innate blindness and self-centeredness, the innate self-absorption, the innate blindness and self-delusion,

the innate radical insecurity in the human heart, but those factors don't create it. And that stuff that's in the heart aggravated by the devil is what makes the world the way it is. So that's enough on that. Point one, we wrestle not only with flesh and blood. So let me just push this home to you. There is a devil, there are demons.

You need to see that. I know there's gotta be people listening to me or who will listen to this recording that have a lot of trouble with the idea that there's a personal devil or believing in a personal devil, believing here what the Bible says. But let me actually suggest four things to you real quick.

Number one, if you struggle believing in the devil, would you please at least consider that you're being simplistic? New Yorkers wanna be sophisticated. New Yorkers wanna be nuanced and sophisticated, not crude and unsophisticated. But is it possible that perhaps, by not realizing the multi-dimensionality

and the spiritual depth dimension to human evil, you are being simplistic and you are being naive? And not the people who believe in the demons, that they're not being the unsophisticated crude ones, but you are? Here's a second point. If you struggle with believing in the personal devil, consider that you might be culturally narrow,

because white Western people have a lot of trouble believing in the devil. That's not true of most people in the world. Africa, Latin America, Asia, they have no trouble believing in spirits and demons and things like that. And they've got wisdom too, don't they? I mean, are you really going to just look down at all that wisdom?

Why not be open culturally to what other cultures tell you about this? To paraphrase Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your psychologies and sociologies. Here's a third idea that you ought to think of. If you struggle with the idea that there's a real devil, personal devil, do you believe in God?

You say, oh yeah, I believe in God. Well, if you believe in God, isn't it a little inconsistent if you believe in good personal supernatural beings, why there couldn't be bad personal supernatural beings? I mean, where's the, isn't it a little inconsistent? But here's the main thing I want to say. If the Bible's true, if the Bible's right about this, and it is, then you will not be able to understand, let alone defeat, on your own the darkness in your own heart, in your family, in the city, in the world.

You won't be able to do that. The dark is beyond you. We're in over our heads unless God is helping us. It's not going to just take psychology and sociology. Okay, that's who we fight. It's not going to just take psychology and sociology. Okay, that's who we fight. Secondly, what is it we fight? And what we fight, it's actually listed there, the devil's schemes.

Alright, let's spend some time on this. The word scheme, sometimes it's called wiles. It's a word that means, the Greek word is methodia, method. But it's a word that means, the Greek word is methodia, method, but it's a word that means strategies. The devil therefore must have an arsenal of weapons or the devil must have a portfolio of various strategies. He throws out, it's very interesting. There's a place in 2 Corinthians 2 verse 11 that says,

do not be unaware of the devil's devices. We should, do not be ignorant of his devices, the old King James says. So what is that? Obviously the devil's got devices, we have to fight them, what is that? There's two errors we must fight and two sets of strategies we must fight.

Two errors that the devil wants us to fall into. And two sets of strategies that he throws. Okay, first the two errors. Now, the two errors are actually inferred. You can infer them from the balance of what Paul is saying to us about the demons and the devil. On the one hand, he doesn't want us to overestimate. On the other hand, he doesn't want us

to underestimate their power. So for example, he doesn't want us to underestimate their power. So for example, he doesn't want us to underestimate the power. It says, you know, it says, our struggle is not with flesh and blood. The word struggle there is not the normal word for struggle, it's a word that actually means wrestling with your bare

hands on the ground. You know, if you're shooting arrows at somebody, that's a battle. And if you're fighting them with a sword, that's a battle. But when you get to the place where you're on the ground wrestling with your enemy, with your bare hands, that's the most desperate life and death close moment, and that's the word Paul deliberately chooses to talk about, the spiritual warfare.

And then look at the words he uses. Why doesn't he just say demons? Instead he says the rulers, the authorities, powers of this dark world, spiritual forces of evil. He's trying to show us how formidable they are. Just racking up these impressive words. He's trying to show us, do not underestimate them, but on the other hand,

he actually says, don't overestimate them. Be strong in the Lord, meaning, you know, don't be afraid. You know, don't run, don't be cowardly. And then he says at the end, he says, for when the evil day comes, and you've put on the full armor of God, and you've done everything I'm telling you to do, you will stand.

He doesn't say you might stand, he says you will stand. Expect success. Now, some of you have heard this. C.S. Lewis, in the introduction to his book, Screwtape Letters, says there are two equal and opposite errors you can fall into with regard to demons and demonic, the demonic. And what are those two opposite errors?

The ones that Paul's trying to help us avoid. On the one hand, you can overestimate their strength. You can have what C.S. Lewis calls an unhealthy interest in them, or ascribe all evil to them, or ascribe too much power to them. On the other hand, to disbelieve in them, to not believe in them at all.

One you could call superstition. One you could call substition. One is over belief, one is under belief. And Lewis ends his little quote by saying, they themselves, the devils, are equally pleased with both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. Now, why are both these errors bad?

I'll tell you why. Because they reduce evil. And the key to fighting successfully, all the things that are against us, all the spiritual forces, is to actually have a nuanced and complexified understanding of evil. And if you say, oh, everything's the devil,

or there's nothing the devil, you're actually, you've reduced things. And you really are, oh, everything's the devil or there's nothing the devil, you're actually, you've reduced things and you really are, you've got a simplistic understanding of what goes wrong. I often refer to this, well, I don't know how often, if you've been around, you've heard me refer to it before, but some years ago I read a sermon by Richard Baxter who was a 17th century British Puritan minister,

you know, 1600s, and he wrote a book on melancholy, which of course is our word, it is an old word for depression. And he was a very good pastor, and he knew how to work with people. And so the sermon says, well, what are the possible causes of depression, melancholy? And he named four.

The first one he says, well, it could be your depression is caused by the physical. It might have a physical cause. In which case what you need is medicine or food or rest to be something with your body. Secondly, he says, there might be a psychological cause. You might be cast down in your temperament and what you need then is lots of love

and affirmation and just support. But number three, he says, there might be a moral cause. You might feel guilty about something or you might be angry at something and maybe feel guilty about being that angry and you need repentance and you need forgiveness and you need reconciliation. So it could be a physical cause,

there could be a psychological cause, there could be a moral cause, or he says there could be a physical cause, there could be a psychological cause, there could be a moral cause, or he says there could be a demonic cause, which we're getting to here. Now, or it could be more than one, and they could be kind of interactive. Now I challenge you to find anywhere, hardly, that level of nuance and balance.

Because you see, almost everybody falls into one of the two errors that C.S. Lewis talks about. One of the two errors that Paul's nuance and balance. Because you see, almost everybody falls into one of the two errors that CSOS talks about. One of the two errors that Paul's trying to avoid. On the one hand, let's face it, you have a lot of Christians today who actually attribute so much to the devil. If you've got a problem, if you've got a temper problem, if you've got an anger problem, for example,

it's the devil. We gotta do something about it. Well, wait a minute, what about the way you were raised? What about the bad psychology in you because of a bad family background? What about your physiology? What about there's something wrong with your chemical? No, no, it's all the devil.

So what you're doing, or maybe you're angry because you're refusing to forgive somebody and that's a moral issue and not a demonic issue. See, on the one hand, you've got believers, you've got Christians that are attributing too much. They're like, actually, weirdly enough, they would be upset to hear that, but they're like magicians, according to Lewis.

In other words, everything is magical, everything is a cult, everything is demonic. On the other hand, you've got what we have mainly in New York, and that is we don't believe in it at all. We give up on the whole thing. The whole idea is kind of silly. Both, both errors equally please the devils. They hail both with equal delight.

Why? Because you're really not able to see all that they're throwing at you, all that life is throwing at you. Most people, if you're, you can see, most people, if you're, you can see, most people, if you're discouraged, depressed, there's a super spiritual approach, it's all the devil.

There's an under spiritual approach, it's you know, just give a person medicine. It's a psychological and a physical, it's never the moral or the demonic. Oh my goodness, but Richard Baxter was biblical. Paul is being biblical. Are you being conformed to one of these errors? Stay out of them.

It's part of the method. Most people think Christianity is either incredibly inclusive or unbelievably exclusive. But the fact is, Christianity is both radically inclusive and radically exclusive. How can this be? In his short book, The Gospel on the Move, How the Cross Transcends Cultural Differences, Tim Keller shows us how we can make sense of this apparent paradox.

Through the New Testament story of Philip and the Ethiopian, we learn how the gospel allows us to humbly critique our own cultural biases while becoming a united people of God. This month we have an exclusive resource only available through Gospel in Life that we want you to share. When you give to Gospel in Life in October, we'll send you three copies of Dr. Keller's short book, The Gospel on the Move, as our thanks for your gift. This short book is a great way to present the Gospel to a friend or loved one. We hope you'll prayerfully consider who you could give each copy to and that it helps

you live more missionally. To receive your three copies of this short book, just visit GospelInLife.com slash give. That's GospelInLife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity, which helps us reach more people with the gospel. It's part of his devices. Stay out of those two errors. But now secondly, understand the two categories of lies. The devil, do you know the word devil here? Put on the full armor of God

so you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. There's two words usually used to talk about the devil. This is probably the most common one. It's the Greek word diabolos, and you say, oh yeah, I know that word, diabolical, but maybe you don't, because the word diabolos is a verb, and it's a noun form of a verb, and the verb means to lie and slander.

Now you need to understand this. You need to get away from the error. We're too skeptical. That is, here in the West we don't think the devil's ever involved unless the person's head is completely turning around, they're turning green, and they're vomiting. So then, well maybe that is the devil.

You know, perhaps. Because the devil got in there somehow. The main way the devil works is he's a liar. The word devil means a liar. It also means a slanderer. John White wrote a book years ago, Christian counselor, and said, here's how the devil works. Take a piano and open up the top

and sing a note into it. And whatever string that your voice is attuned to, you know, most of us don't have perfect pitch so we have no idea what note we're actually singing, but you can find out. Open up the top of the piano, sing a note in, and a particular note, a string will vibrate. It's the string that's attuned to your voice.

You haven't even touched it. You haven't touched the key, you haven't touched it, and yet it's vibrating to your voice. That's what the devil does. The devil cannot make a good person bad. The devil makes a flawed person worse. The devil plays on what's already in you. He aggravates what's already in you through lies.

And that's the reason why, for example, it says in Ephesians four, we actually saw it some weeks ago, don't let the sun go down on your anger. Don't give the devil that kind of foothold. If you're bitter, that gives him the ability to aggravate and press you and push you. You've given him a foothold.

It says in 1 Timothy, don't put a young man into the eldership because he might get puffed up with pride and fall into the snare of the devil. Pride helps you fall in the snare of the devil. Now there's two ways in which Satan's lies, he says things to you. It doesn't necessarily mean he literally says things to you that you actually hear a voice, who's that?

But rather what he does is he stimulates talk that goes on in your heart. And there's two basic categories of those according to the Bible, temptation and accusation, temptation and accusation. Now listen, by the way, from here on to the end, you might get inspired, but I'm actually here to instruct and convict.

So I want you to listen, I'm trying to be very, I'm gonna be specific as I can in the next five minutes. Temptation and accusation. Temptation essentially gets you to have too high a view of yourself. So you go and do things you shouldn't. Accusation is the devil's way of trying to get you to have too low and self-hating a view of yourself

so that you'll go and do things you won't? You shouldn't. They're both ways of work. They both work. Temptation, in temptation, Satan is actually hiding from you God's holiness and how much he hates sin. He hides that from you, he plays up the love. But in accusation, he hides from you God's love. But in accusation, he hides from you God's love. He plays up to God's holiness

and his wrath on sin, and he hides God's love. That's the reason why John Newton, who was a very good pastor, was writing to a depressed young man who was a Christian and who was very depressed, and he was under accusation because he was saying, oh, I'm so awful, I'm so awful, I'm so awful, God can't love me. And John Newton knew he was under accusation. So he wrote this, he says, you cannot be too aware of all your inward

and inbred sins, but you may be, indeed you are, improperly affected by them. Here's his main point. You express not only a low opinion of yourself, which is certainly right, but you also express too low an opinion of the person, work, and promises of the Redeemer, which is certainly wrong.

Now, you say, well, how does this work exactly? Temptations, accusations are basically lies, things that Satan leads you to think in certain ways and moves you to do what's wrong, one through overview, too high of you yourself, too low of you of yourself, too high of you of God's holiness, too low of you of God's holiness and too high of you of his love, too low of you

of his love and too high of you of his holiness. How do those lies work? If you get a book by Thomas Brooks, also a 17th century Puritan, a peer of a, How do those lies work? If you get a book by Thomas Brooks, also a 17th century Puritan, a peer of, you know, contemporary, excuse me, of Richard Baxter, Thomas Brooks wrote a book called Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices.

I have chosen, he's got 50 or 60 or 70, but what I've done is I've chosen just a few from the temptation category and just a few from the accusation category, just to give you the sense of how this works. So for example, he says, how does Satan tempt us? Here's eight devices, ready? Listen, I'll give you the device

and then I'll sometimes give you the self-talk that you might be saying to yourself. The first device is he shows you the bait and hides the hook, which means he gets you to look at the short-term pleasures of what this would do and hide from yourself the long-term misery of what will happen. Come on, you know that one.

You don't know that one? Here's number two. By getting you to rationalize sin as virtue. I'm not really greedy, I'm just thrifty. I'm not really nosy, I'm just concerned. I'm not an alcoholic, I'm just sociable. Number three, by showing you the sins I'm not really nosy, I'm just concerned. I'm not an alcoholic, I'm just sociable. Number three, by showing you the sins of Christian leaders,

so you say to yourself, he did it too, nobody's really that pure. Number four, by overstressing the mercy of God, so what you say to yourself is, do it, God will forgive you, that's his job. Number five, by making them bitter over suffering. So what you say is, I've suffered, I deserve this. By the way, you know one of the reasons that powerful, prominent men always are having these affairs?

Because what they say to themselves is, nobody knows how hard I work and how many sacrifices I make, so I deserve this. That, that's temptation, see? Here's another one. Showing, showing, by showing Christians how many bad people seem to be having great lives. And so the self talk goes like this,

I might as well do it, playing by the rules doesn't pay off. And I'll just give you one more, this is only seven. The seventh one is by getting you to compare one part of your life to another. One part of your life to another. Look, I'm very good over here, I'm very good over here, I do all that, I do all that, it's okay that I do that. In fact, you want an extreme form of that?

Mafia hitmen, I'm good to my mother. Okay, I kill people. But I'm really, really good to my mother. That's not a joke, by the way. I mean, I knew you'd laugh, that's why I told you, but it's not a joke. Well, what about accusation? Here's four from the accusation arsenal. How does Satan accuse us?

By causing us to look more at our sin than at our savior. By the way, you know all the parenting books will tell you that if you give your child one compliment for every one criticism, if you give your child one criticism for every one compliment, the kid's gonna grow up hating themselves. They're gonna grow up hating themselves. You need to give four or five compliments

for every criticism because the criticisms really lodge and the compliments don't. And there's reasons for that because the biblical reasons for that is we know there's something wrong with us and so you gotta have a lot more compliments than criticisms. In the same way, what Thomas Brooks says is for every one look at your sin,

you need to take five looks at your Savior, and the devil makes sure that doesn't happen. Number two, under accusation, by causing them, talking about Christians, to obsess over past sins that have done damage that can't be undone. Number three, by making Christians think that the troubles they're going through must be punishments.

So you say, this wouldn't have happened unless God was mad at me. Number four, by making people think that the inner struggles and feelings they have, Christians couldn't possibly have. So you say, if I were a real Christian, I wouldn't be having these thoughts and desires. Do you recognize any of these? He's playing you.

He knows what strings you've got, and he's vibrating them. You must not be unaware of his schemes. You must understand what he's out there doing. That's what we're fighting, the schemes of the devil. Now, number three, how do we fight? Yeah, you said, boy, you haven't left much time. No, I haven't.

And it's partly because of the, a little bit of our artificiality. We've broken the part of the text on spiritual warfare into two sections. This section basically gives you the problem, and next week, the full armor of God, what that is, brings you the solution. But I can tell you two things and it's the good thing about the fact that I have to, I don't have that much time and

most of this is next week, is it forces me to be concise right here. And that's helpful to everybody. Here, I'd like to tell you two things you must do if you are going to fight successfully. All these things that are being thrown at you. The one is know what particular devices Satan uses on you. I will never forget the first time I read Thomas Brooks Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices. And he's got all of these devices.

And basically they're forms of self-talk, little things that you say to yourself in your heart on your way into doing something wrong. And I'll never forget how surprised I was that I remember three of them were things that I used to say to myself, always say to myself, and they always led to disaster and I just finally got rid of them.

I never say that to myself anymore. When I start to them. I said, I never say that to myself anymore. When I start to think that, I said, that's a dead end, forget that. You know, disaster will happen now. So I'd no longer go there, and I realized that basically Satan had stopped trying those out because I'd gotten wise to them. And then I found three more.

So he's not stupid, he moves around, you know? He says, okay, okay, they got wise me on that those three fine Okay, I won't go there anymore. These are the three I said, oh no Do you know which ones he's using on you? Do you know which yours are? See, he knows what your strings are Do you know what your strings are? Do you know where you had me give him openings? That's principle one principle two where you give him openings. That's principle one. Principle two, the gospel is the armor. And do you know why?

Come on, let's do some theology here. What are the two things that he does? Temptation and accusation. He either gives you an overblown sense of God's holiness and minimizes his love so you hate yourself. Or he gives you an overblown sense of God's love and plays down the holiness so you will do things you shouldn't do and think everything's gonna be okay

and it's a disaster. He turns you into someone who either is crushed by a sense of your guilt or doesn't have enough sense of a guilt at all. Now, if you believe you're saved by living a good life, if you believe what all the other religions say, and that is basically, I will find God, I will self-actualize, I will be saved if I do these things and I do these things.

Now, if you really believe that through your efforts and through your achievements and through your performance, you can save yourself, then you either sometimes feel like a sinner, oh, I've failed, or you sometimes feel loved and accepted because you feel like you've succeeded. Either you feel like a sinner

or you feel loved and accepted. But if you believe the gospel, that Jesus Christ died for you on the cross as your substitute, that he took the penalty for your sins so that when you believe in him, all of your guilt is put on him and absorbed there, and all of his righteousness,

and all of his record is brought to you so you're loved and accepted in him. Then that means every Christian walks around with those two facts in their mind at the same time. I am a sinner. In myself I'm lost, and my sin was so great that nothing less than the death of the Son of God could save me.

Sin was so bad, my sin was so bad, that God had to do that, Jesus had to do that. On the other hand, I'm absolutely loved. I'm completely accepted. I'm as loved now as I will be four billion years from now. He sees me in Jesus Christ. Now, do you know what that is? One of those facts completely demolishes temptation.

If you understand the gospel, you know that the thing you're tempted to do, Jesus Christ died so you wouldn't do that. Jesus Christ was ripped from limb to limb because of this. How can you have anything to do with it? But on the other hand, when you're being accused, the other fact completely demolishes that strategy of Satan because you are absolutely loved and accepted.

It's the gospel, you put on the gospel, and it completely defeats the strategies of Satan. Let me just give you one example of the kind of talk that you have to, what it means to put on the gospel if you're accused, if you're feeling too guilty, if you're feeling like I'll never be what I should be, if you're feeling like a failure, if you're feeling that you are,

that God can't love you, other people can't love you, you're down on yourself, this is what Thomas Brooks said, I'll close with this. Thomas Brooks, who was a wonderful, wonderful pastor, said this to people who were under accusation. He said, the remedy against this is to look upon all your sins as charged to the account of Christ. He was wounded for our transgressions,

he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. You know the wife who said to the bill collector, if I owe you anything, go to my husband. So may the believer say to justice or to the devil, if I owe you anything, go to my Christ, who has underwritten me fully.

I must not sit down discouraged, this is still Brooks talking, anything, go to my Christ, who has underwritten me fully. I must not sit down discouraged, this is still Brooks talking, under the fear of those debts which Christ, to the uttermost farthing, has fully satisfied. The remedy against this accusation is to solemnly consider that believers must repent for their being discouraged by their sins. Believers must repent for being discouraged by their sins. It springs from the refusal of the richness,

freeness, fullness, and everlastingness of God's love, and from the refusal of the power, glory, sufficiency, and efficacy of the death and sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ, and from the refusal of the worth, glory, fullness, largeness, and completeness of the righteousness of Christ given to you by faith. God did not give a believer a new heart for it to be rent and torn in pieces by discouragement.

What is that? That's putting on the armor, and now stand. Do you know how to put on the armor? Do you know how to handle the things that are being thrown at you? We wrestle not only with flesh and blood, but with the gospel, we can stand, let us pray. Our Father, we thank you for giving us everything we need

to fight the fights that are in front of us. Lord, we know it's not just the devil, there's evil in us, that's the flesh. There's evil outside of us, that's the world. There's evil above us, that's the devil. We know things are complex, we can never blame everything on the devil, oh my goodness, no.

But we recognize the multidimensionality of sin. We recognize the spiritual dimension of it. We will not make the same mistake that our whole civilization has made for the last century of underestimating the power of evil and seeing that we wrestle not only with flesh and blood, but in Jesus Christ, you disarm the principalities and power when you died on the cross. As the book of Revelation said that when you accuse us we triumph over the accuser with the blood of the lamb.

We pray Lord that you would teach us how to do that. Everybody in this room needs to find the ways in which devices are being used against them and to use the gospel in the peculiar particular ways they need to. Give them that wisdom for we ask it through Jesus in his name we pray, amen. ["The Gospel in Life"] Thanks for listening to Tim Keller

on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you found today's teaching helpful and something you'd like more people to hear, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people discover the hope and joy of Christ's love. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner to learn more. Today's sermon was recorded in 2012. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian

Church.