Sermon Text: Ephesians 6:10-20
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Last Thursday night, with eight seconds left in the game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cleveland Browns, a Browns defensive end named Myles Garrett pulled the helmet off of Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph, and knocked him in the head with it. Rudolph is O.K. But Garrett is suspended indefinitely. What Garrett did was shocking, and deadly dangerous… and to say the least, he wasn’t fighting fair.
Brothers and sisters, by virtue of being disciples of Jesus Christ, we face an Enemy in Satan who’s deadly dangerous and doesn’t fight fair.
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood,” Paul writes in verse 12, before going on to describe our Enemy.
In a way it’s very strange for Paul to say that we “do not wrestle against flesh and blood.” After all, his entire apostolic ministry seems to bear witness to the truth that if anyone ever “wrestled against flesh and blood,” it was Paul. If you have your Bibles—and you should—please turn with me to 2 Corinthians 11, beginning with verse 23. Paul said that he experienced
far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned.
These were all things that flesh-and-blood human beings did to Paul. He goes on to say that he was in “danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city… danger from false brothers.” Look at verse 32:
