Lesson 20: The Shield of Faith, part 4

Ephesians 6:16 - In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one;

We will, WILL, experience Satan’s attacks every day. When Satan came to Eve, what did he say? “Did God really say?” Basically, “can you not see there is something wrong with God? I am telling you this is beautiful to eat, it is a delight to eat, you have a right to eat it. And the fact that God does not allow you to eat that, tells you there is a flaw in Him. He is withholding something beautiful and something good from you.”

That is what Satan was doing with Eve. Those are the fiery darts. What extinguishes them is faith – believing that what God says, and that God's way will be best for you. That is faith. This means that when you sin, whom are you believing? You are believing Satan. You placed your faith in Satan, not in God, and this is the mistake Eve made.


Today the enemy assaults us with temptations to immorality, hatred, envy, anger, covetousness, fear, despair, distrust, doubt, pride, and every other conceivable form of sin. We live in a world that is controlled by the devil and thus in many forms (television, billboards, internet, media, magazines, etc.) he is capable of continually bombarding us with a wide variety of temptations ("I am not as attractive as that actor", "I am not as rich as that man", "I am not satisfied with my…” Therefore, we must take up the shield of faith and stop dancing with the enemy! He knows we all have lusts within us which are easy to ignite. All that is needed is the tiniest flame and we are a roaring fire. So, we are assaulted with flaming arrows of sensuality, foul, diseased shafts of degrading passions, smoking arrows of materialism. And we burn so easily! One of our biggest mistakes is that we do not extinguish that dart immediately, by faith, with the shield of faith.

We try to justify our choices. We marry a lost person and try to justify it by talking about how much we love the other person. We gossip, and we justify it by talking about how concerned we are about the person. We do ten thousand other things and try to justify them in countless ways. And God says, "Do not do it and Satan says, "Do it, do it, do it." Whom did you believe? God or the devil? That is the question we all should ask, and it is so simple. When you sin, you believe the devil; when you obey, you believe God. And the act of saying no to sin and no to the devil and his flaming arrows is putting up the shield of faith. It is the act of believing God's Word that the shield flies up and the arrows fall to ashes. The only way to quench the darts of the devil is to believe in God and His Word and what He says about life.