To Encourage You

1 Peter 4:1 “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin.”

The Christian life is often referred to in the Bible as a spiritual war.  Ephesians 6 calls us to put on the whole armor of God as we wage this battle. That armor consists of such things as the belt of truth; the breastplate of righteousness; shoes composed of the gospel of peace; the shield of faith; the helmet of salvation; the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God; and prayer.  2 Corinthians 10:4-5 refers to the warfare of the believer in the following way: “the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”  And then in the verse above we are told to “arm ourselves” with a certain way of thinking. In all three of these examples, the warfare that it is talking about occurs in the mind. That’s the primary battleground for any Christian.  It’s the way we think that will determine how we will fare against the three primary enemies of any believer: the world, the flesh, and the devil. 

The world has a way of thinking that it promotes in a multitude of ways, e.g., by way of the media, Hollywood, the people we interact with in our everyday lives, and leading figures in the worlds of politics, athletics, fashion, business, and religion.  Everyone has an opinion, and often that opinion is based on anything but God’s view. It’s a broad way with many voices, but all of it, void of the direction of God, is headed down a rat hole into destruction in the end. 

As for our flesh, we are tempted constantly by ungodly lusts.  It’s all a part of being human with a sin nature that influences every part of us, especially our minds.  That mind can run away into all kinds of fears and anxiety. It’s almost like our mind has a mind all its own! 

And of course, the devil is on a mission to kill, steal, and destroy every one of us, and he is particularly active in his attacks on our mind.  And so we are called by God to arm ourselves in ways that will combat all this.  He’s given every Christian what is necessary for victory, but if we fail to put on the armor He has given us, we are certain to be victims rather than victors. 

As the passages mentioned above have told us, so much of our battle involves the way we think.  Primarily, we are to think about the truth, and in particular, the truth found in God’s holy Word.  It is by what God has told us in this book that we are to arm ourselves with a way of thinking that can ward off the attacks that the world, the flesh, and the devil continually bring against us.  The verse from 1 Peter 4 above is a wonderful summary of this.  It tells us that we are to think in the same way as the Lord Jesus Christ did.  He faced exactly the same enemies that we do, but at a level that we will never know.  All the legions of hell came against Him. This was particularly evident in His suffering leading up to and including the crucifixion. He was assaulted with every manner of accusation. He was physically tortured unto death. He was rejected by His own nation, and even His disciples walked away from Him in fear and dread.  As He wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane with the gloom of what was coming for Him, He told His disciples, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” and “in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

So, how did He prevail in this incredible onslaught?  How did He defeat the devil and all his other enemies that were motivated by sin?  Well, in Hebrews 12:2 we are told that Jesus, “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” He knew the truth about the end result of all His suffering. He knew that eternal blessing would be His in the end.  He knew that for those Who followed Him, all suffering would one day end. He knew that the worst thing anyone could do to Him was take His life, but as He told the thief who died with Him, “today you will be with me in Paradise.”  It was all headed to a glorious end. And that’s true for every Christian.  No matter what suffering comes to us in this sinful world, no matter whether it’s persecution for our faith or the common suffering that the Fall has brought to every person who has ever lived, joy is coming in the morning.  Someday soon, for the believer, all the effects of sin will end. So we arm ourselves with this truth. We equip ourselves with the promises of God. We put on the armor of the truth God has spoken to us, and we do battle against the lies of this world. 

The late Martin Lloyd Jones spoke of all this in his wonderful book, “Spiritual Depression.” In the following words extracted from this book he reflects on the spiritual warfare described by the psalmist in Psalm 42:  “The main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Far from it. This is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problem of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment (in Psalm 42) was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself, ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ he asks. His soul had been repressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you’. Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have but little experience.

“The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’–what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’–instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God.’”

You see, it’s all about arming ourselves in a way of thinking, a way of thinking that God has provided for us in His Word, and which He has equipped us to understand and put into practice by the power of the Holy Spirit He has given to those who believe.  May God help us to arm ourselves with the same way of thinking, i.e., the way of thinking modeled for us by our Lord Jesus Christ.