- [Mark] I am way beyond a fanatic, I'm God-possessed, get it straight. There ain't a demon on the planet that likes Mark Barclay anymore. If that's you, clap and shout once. Say I am God-possessed!
- [Congregation] I am God-possessed!
- [Mark] You better get ready. Did you bring a Bible?
Praise God, I hope you're doing good today. I call you blessed. I'm Doc Barclay, welcome to the broadcast. We work hard, my whole team, my whole church family, to bring you this free of charge. Our partners help us do it. You can become one of those if you want to. Or any time you feel like it, you can sow financially into the ministry here to help just keep pumping out the word of God. Many people do, you're certainly welcome to. And if you choose to, when the seed comes, when your finances come, I personally pray over it. That's no exaggeration. I personally pray over it and ask God to bless you in return. Plus the satisfaction of helping us reach so many people. I'm holding in my hand, the series "Ignorant No More." That's what we've been preaching on. That's what the Holy Spirit through Paul said to the church. "Let's not be ignorant about spiritual things." We live in a dark, dark day spiritually, many other ways, and yet it's time to break out and live in the light. And that is not just big talk. Jesus came on purpose to change your life and mine. We're going to talk about that through this telecast. Get on social media, get on your phone, call, text, tell everybody about this program and get them hooked up to it right now. Here we go, we're going to study together and God is going to help us. Amen. Okay, 1 Corinthians 12, did you find it? That's our theme verse, we've read it, this'll be our 12th time now to read it. How's it start out? Tell me.
- [Congregation] "Now concerning-"
- [Together] "Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren I would not have you ignorant."
- [Mark] "Not have you ignorant." All right I want you to turn with me please, and put a thumb or a ribbon or something in Ephesians 5, and then go quickly over to the next page, Ephesians 6. You can just put your thumb there or your finger because we're going to run to Ephesians 4 but first, excuse me, Ephesians 5. But first we're going to read Ephesians 6:10. We're in Ephesians 6:10 "Finally brethren, be strong in the Lord" Huh. That must mean there's a way to be in the Lord and not be strong. This didn't say beg God that he'll make you strong, this said be strong. This puts it back in your lap. This is back, this is shoved back now in my lap to be strong in the Lord. So if there's a commandment like this to be strong, then there must be a way, there must be a reciprocal to this or the backside of the coin. There must be a way to be weak in the Lord. I know many people, some of you are sitting here right now that are strong in the Lord. One of the strongest pastors I know is sitting back here, pastor Coleman, he, man some of the battles him and his family have been in and he just, man, he just keeps on marching. He refused to resign, refused to quit, he refused to hide. He refused, he just keeps swinging, man. A few left jabs, uppercut, knock you alongside the head with the word of God, you keep on marching. That's a strong man, that's strength. But I, and some of you are the same way, I'm your pastor, I watch you. You're strong in the Lord. Now other people, they're weak. The opposite of strength is weakness. They're weak in the Lord. They have weak church attendance, weak Bible time. They're weak, every little thing upsets them. And someone looks at them from across, you're sitting here, and they're way over there, and you looked over there to see some action going in at the nursery, they're sitting over there thinking you're staring at them and they get offended. See, they're week in the Lord. That does happen in church. But this said be strong. Now the other thing I'd like to point out here, it says be strong in the Lord. Amen. Not on your medicine. Now I'm not telling you to quit your medicine, I'm not a medical doctor, I wouldn't do that. I just pray over it until you don't need it anymore. Let your doctor tell you, you'll know if you don't need it because your body will start to reject it, and you'll say, "I don't need it anymore." And then they'll say, "Well, you don't, we're going to cut this down. We don't need this, we're going to cut this." And pretty soon the same doctor that gave it to you. If you're healed, he'll take it away from you no problem. That's not what I meant. I mean don't be running to the medicine cabinet all the time and use it as a constant help to calm your nerves, take away your stress. Amen. You're so quiet, you a bunch of druggies tonight or what? In the Lord, he didn't say in porn, it said in the Lord. Amen. Be strong in the Lord, it didn't say be strong on the beach as your getaway. It's okay to go to the beach, it's okay to have a vacation, but not if you're running to your little recreational things instead of getting relief from the Almighty God. You know what your brain will teach you if you let it? Your brain will teach you that this is part of the taxation and burden on your life, coming to God's house. So when you don't feel good, you don't want to be around people, you don't come here. Your brain taught you that. That this is part of your duties, it's part of your hassle. If your brain and the devil can get you to do it, they will make church your problem, or someone here at church, your problem. Now don't, you know, I don't want to be teaching now on the unjust servant who was forgiven but refused to forgive, that's pretty tough. All right, marching on. "Be strong in the Lord," I'm still on verse 10, you better pray that this, that I go a little quicker than this. "Finally my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might" verse 11, "Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of your mother-in-law."
- [Congregation] "of the devil."
- [Mark] "of the devil." I repent, I repent, I repent. "for we wrestle not against flesh and blood," that's people, "but against principalities," that's demons, "against powers," demons, "against the rulers of the darkness of this world," that's demons, "and against spiritual wickedness in high places." Demons. We don't get in wrestling matches with people. If people are misbehaving, it's mostly because they're being pushed by demons. Harassed by demons, oppressed by demons, possessed by demons agitated by demons. And demons are setting up all kinds of schemes and trips or tricks for them to fall into traps and wiles, trickeries and schemes. And most people, they misbehave because they're being pushed around by evil forces. But rather than deal with the evil forces, they take the role of Cain and they want to kill Abel. But it wasn't Abel that rejected Cain's offering. It was Cain's God. So why did he take it out on Abel? Because that's the human nature. Is I gotta swing on somebody, might as well be you. Verse 13, it gets better, hang in there. "Wherefore take onto you almost the whole armor of God." How much, how many pieces?
- [Congregation] All.
- [Mark] The whole armor of God. "That you may be able to withstand in the evil day." So this armor of God is very important and it gives us the ability to stand in the evil day. "And having done all, to stand- stand therefore." Now turn the page where, you've probably forgotten now where I told you to put your finger. But turn one page back to Ephesians 5 and look at verse 11. Ephesians 5:11. "And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness," unless they drink your kind of beer.
- [Congregation] No.
- [Mark] "And have no fellowship," That's what people do, I'm sorry. "And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather," what's it say?
- [Congregation] "reprove them."
- [Mark] Reprove here means to expose. The word reprove here really should have said expose. Go study that out. You should expose them. Now that doesn't mean you run all over town. You don't tell everyone else about someone's sin, you get in their face about their sin. Amen. I don't mean to condemn them and judge them to damnation. You don't have a right to do that. But the Bible says you've been given the highest authority on the planet that is to remit sin or retain sin. Let's put those in modern words. You can, with the authority you have in Christ, you can relieve someone of the wages of sin in their life by helping them meet Christ and or restoring a backslider. The Bible says, if you restore a backslider back to Christ, it's equal to, for him getting saved the first time, go read that for yourself. James refers to it and the book and Peter refers to it. So you have to expose it. You don't tolerate it. You're not the judge. You don't cast the judgment, "well this is going to cost you. This is the penalty." But if you keep hanging around with people and I'm not talking about sinners, there is no reason to confront sinners about their sin when they have a blind mind. Did we not cover this already? I thought we did in this series, in this series, we taught one whole session on the blind mind, the blind mind, that guy, he can't see what you're saying about Christ any more than the naturally blind man can't tell you what color shirt you got on. You can explain all day long, but he can't see it. The blind man. Now, if he has a blind mind, you can try to explain this to him and tell that sinner all day long, what he's doing wrong. And he's not going to get it. You can, you can tell him all day long. "Hey man, I'm born again." "What's that? Do I go in my mother's womb again?" See, that's how blind their mind is. Amen. But what we can do, this is not talking about judging people. This is talking about people, you know, people you fellowship with that you expose. In other words you say to that person, "I'd love to fellowship with you, but I don't believe in drinking and you do. Maybe another time. I'd love to fellowship with you, but I'm not going to ride in your car. You've got marijuana in the car." See you're exposing to them. "I, you know what? I don't have any problems being your friend, but you know, you got a big mouth. You gossip all the time. And I'm just going to tell you, I'm not going to fellowship." Now, let me keep reading. "Have no-" this has everything to do with the armor of God, by the way, "and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness." How much fellowship?
- [Congregation] None.
- [Mark] How much? Pretty clear to me. You can write your own Bible if you want. And many are nowadays. "And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them" or expose them "for it is a shame even to speak of those things, which are done of them in secret." Now, why did you throw that in the midst of explaining the armor of God? Oh, because did you notice that Ephesians- And I know you know this because you're a deep spiritual church. Did you know that Ephesians 5 was written before Ephesians 6? How many, how many of you discerned that? You knew that. Okay. Did you know that Ephesians 5 is the same letter as Ephesians 6? If I wrote you a letter, you wouldn't read page six first. And then you'd say, "what's he talking about? I better go back and read the rest of the letter." You'd start in the first page. The reason that this is in Ephesians 5, along with other things that we won't deal with tonight, is because it's setting you up and leading you up to why you need the armor of God and why the day is considered evil and how badly you can get hurt living today. People are losing their minds. People are falling apart. Have you noticed? People are self-destructing. You can ask Vicki. I said, at home, I'm serious. I said at home, "I think I spend a lot of my time shaking my head. My two strongest muscles are right here and right here." Just, this is my third one. I don't, I don't understand it. Even good preachers. They're losing their mind. I'm telling you they're going berserk. And they're- I don't know. It just doesn't make good Bible sense other than we're in the last of the last days, and you don't have to fall prey to the wiles of the devil. You just put on the armor of God, this spiritual, wonderful protection, uniform, that God gave us. Amen. Amen.
- [Congregation] Amen. Amen. Now let's talk about it for a few minutes. Want to? Okay. What's the first piece of the armor that's mentioned in Ephesians 6? The belt of truth. Did you get your list out from this morning? How many of you were not here this morning? All right. Hurry up and make a list or you write I'll give it to you right now. Write it down. Number one. And then we'll talk about these, but I want to talk about how to put them on. So I want to get to that. Number one, the belt of truth. Have your loins girt with truth. That's a belt, the belt of truth. Number two, the breast plate, the bullet-proof vests the breastplate of righteousness. Three, boots called the preparation of the gospel. Shod your feet, don't run around barefooted. Shod your feet. Number four, the shield of faith, the shield of faith. Number five, the helmet of salvation, the helmet of salvation and number six, the sword of the Spirit, the sword of the Spirit. Now don't sit around picturing an old Roman soldier in a great big old lid and a great big old shield as tall as he is. That's not what this is talking about. This is talking about spiritual, supernatural protection, repellency against our invisible enemy soldier force that- you see to live on the earth you have to have a body. Your body fails you, you're leaving here. You cannot stay. You cannot stay. And in your body, you are given protections by God's creation. Every human has the same protections physically. We call them the five senses. They're not hard to understand? Want to name them with me? The five senses? Let's start with hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. If you lose any of these five, your life slows down. And one of the other parts of the five will have to pick up and make up the difference. Sometimes they say, you know, a man who doesn't hear as well has a keener eye because his body's making up to protect when he can't hear. You have five senses. They're so you don't get hurt. They're so you don't hurt yourself. Yeah. You know this, it's not deep. I told you this story when I was a little kid, grandma's said, "Don't put your hand on the wood stove. Don't put your hand on the wood stove. Don't put your hand on the wood stove." You know what I did? I put my hand on the wood stove. You know what it did? Sizzled. You know what I've never done since? Put my hand on the wood stove. Golly, Gomer. I wish I would have listened to grandma. But I didn't. I had to learn from my own five senses. Don't put your hand. If you didn't have any feelings you'd take the saw just saw through the board, cut your fingers off, wouldn't feel it. Or a number of other things, because you don't have any feeling. You don't have a touch. So you understand this. So we've been given these protection things so that our body can live on this planet and stay alive and stay healthy and stay well. Even your smell tells you if something's probably good or bad for you, doesn't it? You can taste something that's sour or bitter, spit it out. Don't keep eating it. You keep eating it, you're going to get rid of it anyways and maybe be in the hospital from some poisoning or bacteria. Your taste almost can tell you there's something wrong with that. There's something wrong with that. Okay. Well, these six pieces of armor are not a make-believe event. They're as real, if not more real, than the five senses that we live by. They're given to you to be a spiritual giant. Now, if you got all five senses working for you and the six pieces of the armor of God, you are almost, I mean, you're just about invisible yourself or, or at least you're not going to be beaten. Think about this. If you've got all five senses and you're alerted to it, plus, so you're bodily equipped. Plus you have the six pieces of the supernatural God-given armor of God to protect you spiritually. Well, what's left to attack on you? You're a well-rounded well-furnished soldier of the cross. Now all humans have five senses, but only born again Spirit-filled, Christians have an access to the whole armor of God. And even then, even then only some of them, probably a small few literally ever put on the armor of God. So here they are, these super giants, spiritually. I don't always mean prophesying and having a word for somebody in dreaming a dream. That's not what I call super supernatural. What I call super supernatural is I quit falling for the tricks of the devil. I quit falling when God, when the devil sets me up to draw me away from God, I quit falling for the schemes and the tricks and the lies. Yeah. And I don't get my feelings hurt, I don't get my focus adjusted. I don't get my faith mess with. That's why I put on the armor of God. Now what's the first piece? The belt of truth, the belt of truth. I like to picture that like the weightlifter's belt. How many of you have you ever seen a weightlifter's belt? You know, I mean, it's that fat in the back and this, and you put it on to gird your loins and especially in vulnerable areas. Because when you reach down to grab that weight, part of your back, no matter how you do it, even if you know how to lift weights, part of your back is going to bear that load. And you can literally just blow out your back and blow out your knees and everything. If you get the wrong load, too big a load or you lift it the wrong way. And so the weightlifters put this belt on, that gives them that girding. Amen. Some of you contractors, you wear bags, you know, we call them carpenter's bags. You got your tools in them and your nail pouches. And a lot of them have a wider belt or they actually have like suspenders that come over that you clip and it helps hold the bag up. And you're girding yourself so you don't hurt yourself by the end of the day, by the end of the month, after you're a carpenter for 15 years. Are you listening?
- [Congregation] Yes.
- [Mark] We said this morning, I want to repeat it. This isn't just talking about what's true, it's talking about what is Truth. There's a difference. There's a difference. We put on, we gird ourself up. When you pull up your britches, man, is what you do. Ladies. You pull up your britches. You know how we say, "pull up your britches, man." What's that mean? Grow up. Be a man, make some decisions. Let's go. Quit being a little boy scout all the time. That's what this verse is saying. Gird yourself, man, sister, pull up your britches. Tighten that belt a little tighter and get ready. Praise God for what's coming. That's what this verse is saying. So you can withstand the evil and still be standing after Satan hits you, but he can't get to you because you're living by truth. There's nothing like living by truth. You're a vessel of truth. You're born of the truth. You belong to the spirit of truth. The Bible is the word of truth. Jesus is the spirit of truth, or the Holy Spirit is by Christ, the Spirit of truth. He lives inside of you. We should know truth. We should live by truth. Not by, you know, I like the illustration I gave earlier. This is true. You can jump off the roof and you're not going to fly. It's true. You're going to crash. That's true. But that story won't be found in your Bible because it's not part of what we call Truth. You don't just gird yourself and well, "you know, you know, you know, Murphy's Law," not Joe Murphy, "but Murphy's Law, if something's going to happen. It'll happen." You know? Well, that's a true saying. In other words, people truly say that, but it isn't really Truth because a lot of times when stuff happens, it isn't Murph. It's you. Blame it on Murphy if you want to. But it's you, maybe. Your big mouth, your lack of forgiveness, you're stealing the tithe, your lack of church attendance, your lack of prayer. Your unforgiveness in your heart. Your root of bitterness. You just jumped off the roof, dummy. Don't blame Murphy. Are you listening to me? So we live- I can give you a thousand illustrations, but what I'm really trying to say to you is we live by Truth. This is the Truth. This is the only thing you should really count as being the Truth that the Bible is talking about, and that's the Bible itself. So even though other things are true. See right now, for example, it is true that the United States of America, as with almost all nations of the world are in a financial mess. This is true. This is not false. This is true. But the truth is, it's going to change. The truth is you can change it. It is true that you live in America. It is true that you live under America economy. It is true that you pay taxes wherever you live in America. All these things are true, but they're not the Truth. The Truth says that God is going to bring me through. God is going to supply for me. It's true that I'm an American tax payer, and like I've never been before, but the Truth says, "God is going to bring me through this." Now I can go by what is true or I can go by the Truth, but I've chosen not to gird myself with what is true. I'm going to gird myself with a belt of Truth and go by what the book says. I hope that's clear enough to you. It wasn't a play on words. How are you going to be known for Truth if you don't know the Truth? How are you going to live by the Truth, the word of God, if you don't know the word of God? But as for me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord. Hallelujah. We're going to study the word of God. Woo! We need the gifts of the Spirit to flow through your life in this dark day. So you have super natural God-given power to touch and help other people. Amen. You know what the Lord is saying? If you love me, then when I go through all this for you, do something with it. You do something with this to help somebody else. Turn with me, please to 1 Corinthians chapter 12, the flowing of the gifts of the Spirit. It is not the assignment of God for every ministry to be good at everything, or involved in everything. Can you say, Amen? Praise God, everybody, Doc Barclay again. Thanks for being part of the broadcast. I hope you caught the whole thing. And if not, whatever part you caught, I pray it was a blessing to you because we worked so hard to bring this to you. We really do. And it costs a lot of money. And so our partners, you can become one, if you want, our partners really help us pay for this. And you can sow any seed. You can be a constant partner and be a blessing that way, or just every so often as you feel led or even right now, put something in the mail, jump online. You can give online at our website. I want to make sure you get the series, so you can just keep studying it over and over again, "Ignorant No More". That's what the Holy Spirit said. And He said it to the church people, "Let's not be ignorant of spiritual things." Especially living today. I mean, you're living in the last of the last days. There's a dark cloud. There's a glory cloud. There are angels active. There are demons active. There are people who you can trust. There are people you better stay away from. And so, how do you navigate this? We're going to help you- I hope we are helping you- get this series. You won't regret it. We're praying for you. Please pray for us. Please send an offering to help us preach. And whether you do or not, we love you. Come visit us at Living Word and I plan to see you on the next broadcast. It's going to be just as powerful as the one we just did. Amen.