Standing Firm in Faith Through Hardship and Community

But now, great to see you, Mosque Lights. Is that how you say it? No, I called the Pullmans the Pulmonarians. They say they don't love that yet, but they'll grow on them.

Uh, blessed to be here though, my goodness. Um, I wish it was under better circumstances with Josh. He didn't have to have a heart attack to get me to get here. I would have come over if you would have asked, but you know, he's a pretty dramatic guy, sounds like.

No, but uh, it's great to be here. Um, you know, I'm so glad that our churches are working together. I think it's important that, you know, life is just too short to not be unified, and the mission is too big to not do it together.

And so to be able to come here and represent Real Life Pullman to you all is a blessing, and I hope it's something that encourages us to continue to cultivate relationships with one another because that's important. You agree with that? Amen? That we need to work together?

Amen. I think the Palouse needs our churches to partner together. I think that's an important thing.

Well, let's dive into it, shall we? Who's ready? You all right? Let's do this.

So, helmet of salvation. Let me start off with a little story. So, I have three children. I have a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and next month I will have a one-year-old. My wife is around here with the baby somewhere, so if you see a blonde lady walking around with a little one-year-old, that's my wife, or a good chance it's my wife at least.

But when my boys were little, especially the firstborn, we used to go swimming quite a bit. He didn't have a lot of confidence when we first started swimming, so what I would do is I would put him on my back, and he would wrap his little arms around my neck, and then I would kind of walk through the pool with him. He would kind of float on the top as I walked, and it was acting like he was swimming.

And of course, as a dad, I would start to kind of put him into positions where he had to really learn how to swim. So, I would slowly kind of tuck down into the water. You know, we were only about four feet of water at this point, tucking down into the water, and I could feel his little hands start to get tighter and tighter and tighter around my neck as I got lower and lower and lower in the water.

And you start to sense the panic as well in his little voice as he starts to say, "Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad," as I get deeper and deeper in the water. Little did he know that I was really in four feet of water, and I'm six foot four, so we really weren't in peril. But for him, in a way, he was perceiving the things around him. He thought he was going down and under and beyond anything, beyond, you know, going way too far for his depth is what he was really feeling and experiencing.

How many of us in our life, as we are swimming through life, wrapping our hands around Jesus, walking through the water, do we feel like, "Boy, I am starting to get out of my depth"? Oh boy, I'm starting to get way above what I can handle here. How many of you have said yes, "I'm going to follow the Lord Jesus," only to come to a place where you go, "I did not sign up for this. This was not presented to me at the pulpit on Sunday. This is way out of my league. This is way too deep for me. I cannot do this."

I have been there many times. I have been there many times. And I think the context of Ephesians 6, as we look at the armor of God, a lot of times that Paul is encouraging us to stand firm in the depths of life. How do we stand firm when my arms are wrapped around Jesus, walking in the waters, realizing this is way beyond anything I signed up for or thought I could handle?

You know, in life, we have things happen to us that are beyond our control. You know, we lose jobs, we lose relationships, things are lost, people get sick, pastors have heart attacks. I had a senior pastor—the thing that launched me into ministry was my senior pastor passing away of a heart aneurysm, just gone in a moment. But a month later, I was sent out to a church because of that.

But the deep grief and loss puts us in a way and a feeling that's way out of our depth. You know, I had a 17-year-old niece in February of this year. The day actually I got the call from Real Life Pullman saying they wanted me to come in April. So, in the morning, I get this call from Gary, who's our chair elder over in Pullman, and he says, "Hey, we want you to come. We think you're the guy." You know, talk about a radical rise in emotion, right? Yes, this is so exciting.

Four o'clock later that day, I get a call. I'm actually on a call with my mom because my 17-year-old niece was killed in a car accident. Talk about the highest of highs and the lowest of lows all within a 12-hour period. I definitely fell out of my depth.

Ten years of ministry, walking with people in the worst days of their lives, and now something was happening in my life that I felt this is way too deep. This is way too real. I don't know how to stand. I don't know where to stand. I feel lost, confused, disoriented. You guys ever been there? A few times, right?

Like my son thinking they were going too far into the pool and out of our depth. Things like this that hit us in life, the things that cause us to shake are scary, disorienting, confusing.

What I want to teach us today is that we need to realize that we are on the shoulders of someone who has given us the greatest and most unshakable foundation anywhere within creation—His salvation. That His salvation that we have received by grace through faith in Jesus is represented in Ephesians 6 as a helmet to put on. It is the thing that we can stand on, the greatest stand firm in the depths of life.

That when it seems too deep, do we stand firm in the salvation we received in Jesus? So let's start with what helmets serve as. I know many of us are very aware that helmets protect our minds—a very important thing to protect. But I want to also talk about how helmets are an identifier on the battlefield, especially in the ancient world.

Helmets served as an important identifier in ancient battles. So I have two helmets that I want to talk about today that are identifiers. So let me nerd out a little bit, if that's okay. In the ancient world, that was my background. My undergrad was all in ancient history and the Hellenistic period, so let me just allow me to nerd out for a minute, okay?

So let's pull up the picture of these two helmets real quick. So I have two helmets that I want to speak on because, again, in the ancient world, helmets like these served multipurpose. One was the protection of the head, but also as an identification.

So the one on the right, this is a Roman centurion's helmet. This was the one basically on the front line with the troops, guiding and directing the cohorts of Roman legions as they were marching into battle. Battles in the ancient world were horrifying, scary, confusing, dusty places. If you were lined up along with your fellow soldiers on the battlefield, you likely had very little idea of what was going on six, seven ranks ahead of you.

You heard things, you saw some things, you knew there was danger up there, but you weren't exactly sure where. The Roman centurion's helmet has a large plume on the top that goes this way as an indicator, showing the troops behind them and around them, "This is the rallying point."

So when things were confusing, people were breaking through the lines, things seemed out of control, there was a figure in the front of the line in the cohort where people could look at and go, "There's my rallying point. There's the person I need to rally around. There's the direction that we're going."

Is that way, which is why the centurion's helmet was made the way it was and why that person was very important to be in the front, because he was the rallying point. The helmet is an indicator of where we rally around and the direction that we go.

And the helmet next to it, this is actually a reproduction of what they think Alexander the Great's helmet looked like. Alexander the Great, the great Greek conqueror of the ancient world, brought Hellenism to the outreaches all the way to India, never lost a battle. Famously wore this helmet in battle to encourage his troops.

He wanted his warriors on the battlefield to know that he was in the fight with them, so he wore this great plumed helmet that showed who he was on the battlefield. It would encourage and rally his troops in the hardest moments of the battlefield. Historians will write how it was these types of things that encouraged his troops to get through some of the toughest battles they would ever face through multi-years of warfare and campaigning from ancient Greece all the way to the borders of India.

It was by him doing things like wearing the plumed helmet that would show them how he was in the battle with them, that he fought in the battle with them, encouraging them to stand firm in the face of the daunting things that were ahead of them.

It was meant to be an encouragement when the battle was difficult and they wanted to quit. In the same way that these ancient helmets functioned, I think our salvation, rooted and found in Jesus Christ, serves similar purposes.

So let's talk about that. Let's look at first at the centurion's helmet, the rallying point. Let's call the centurion helmet the rallying point and how salvation in Christ functions like a centurion helmet in that it gives us a point to rally behind.

Because when the dust and the chaos of the spiritual warfare of life, when we get out of our depths, we have to have a point to look at, a rallying point to go, "This is where we're going. This is the direction we're headed. This is where I'm going to run to when I get confused and lost in the chaos of battle."

And it also says a lot about where you're supposed to be in the chaos of battle. Because a lot of times what I've noticed, especially when you're dealing with grief or dealing with confusion or disorientation in life, it's easy to lose who you are and who God has created you to be.

I have a little analogy to teach you, and if you're from Pullman, you've seen this before, so bear with me. But this is a coin. I tried to get the biggest coin I could find. This is a coin my grandfather gave me. It's got Lady Liberty on the front of it, you know, an image. This is an image that represents Lady Liberty, represents what this coin is supposed to represent.

And this coin has value. If I was to go and buy something with this coin, I could get something with it, but nowadays probably a gumball or something. But it's got value, and it's got worth. You know, when we think about the word salvation or the word saved, it's the word "soter" or "sozo." I actually named my cat Sozo because of this type of terminology, and it means to be delivered. It means to be rescued, to be saved.

It's kind of a Christianized word that we use a lot—salvation, to be saved. But it also has a connotation of being brought back to original intent. Now think about that. When you think about salvation, that God is bringing us back to original intent, what could that possibly mean?

Well, I think it's talking about here is that we were made in the image of God, just like this coin has an image on the top of it. We have value, we have worth, there's purpose. And this is what it means to be a human. This is what it means to be created in the image of God, that you are representatives of God in creation.

That is a powerful statement, is it not? To say that where you go, you were created to represent the creator of all things, to steward, to rule over, to be caretakers of creation—a great job that every human has.

Well, what happens in life, especially post-Genesis 3, we have a thing enter in the world called sin. And the sin that we conduct, either we do it ourselves, we decide, "Hey God, you know, my way is far better than your way." We have sin against us, people sin against us, they oppress us, they cause injustice against us, they break relationships with us.

This image becomes harder and harder to see, where abusers misuse, and all of a sudden what used to be an image still has worth, rights, still value there, but it's really hard to see what this was. The image has been covered up. It's very difficult to see what this is.

And a lot of times, this is what happens in the dust and confusion, the pain and the brokenness, is that we have lost who we are. It's hard to see it. We don't have the rallying point anymore of where we're supposed to go because everything's covered up. We've lost our identity in a way of who we are, of who God created us to be.

We're still humans, and we still have value, but it's difficult to see it, right? But this is what the beautiful thing that salvation does. This deliverance and this return to original intent is now here comes Jesus, God made flesh, into the world, and He says, "Hey, that thing that I created, humanity, I'm going to reclaim it. I want to clean it up and to show them who they really were created to be."

So He comes, and He lives a perfect life, and He willingly goes to a cross, perfect and sinless in every way, never covered up by the brokenness and sinfulness of the world. He goes and dies on a cross. There's something that happens. Success is rallied around, and on the third day in the tomb, He rises from the dead, from the grave in a resurrection.

And all of a sudden, there's access to life and life eternally, and He says, "That thing that I created, that human that I created, full of worth and value and who they were supposed to be, now can be seen again for who they were created to be, which is an image bearer of our God."

Which is why we can be made in the image of Jesus Christ, now seen for who we are, who we were supposed to be. The rallying point to where we're supposed to go is salvation in that we have been liberated from sin and death, that the image that God created us to be can be observed and seen.

Here is a rally point of who you are in the midst of the destruction and brokenness of sin and hurt and whatever you're dealing with. The helmet of salvation represents the rallying point of salvation, of remembering who God created you to be and what He did to get you there.

The salvation, the coming back to original intent, being who God created you to be, is that what you think about in the hardest moments of your life? When 17-year-old nieces pass away, when jobs are lost, when chaos and confusion and disorientation enter your life, do you see yourself in the eyes of God saying, "I have cleaned you up. I am with you, and I know these things are trying to cover you up again. I know you want to run. I know you want to hide."

Because remember, that's the first thing Adam and Eve do in Genesis 3, right? As soon as sin covers them up, they go, "We run and hide." And God's famous words are, "What? Where are you?" He knows where they are. He's not playing hide and seek, right? He knows where they are.

But the thing that He's created has been covered up. "Where are you?" He says. And the helmet of salvation is the rallying point, the place we go to, the place we see, the place we look at and say, "No, I know these things are coming through my life. I know they're difficult, but I have been cleaned. I have been saved. I have been rebuilt, being renewed into something great, something I was created to be."

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the person is a new creation. The old things have passed away. The black marks, the things that used to define us are washed away. Behold, new things have come."

When you're in the midst of a spiritual fight, when you're in the midst of going into the waters, when it seems too deep, remember that the Lord has put a rallying point called salvation ahead of us that we can look at and we can know for a fact that we have a direction to go, which is that we have a new life, a new creation, a rebirth in Jesus.

I think walking through the toughest times with Lexi's passing, my niece, the thing that kept me grounded and rooted was knowing that she knew the Lord Jesus. I do not know how I would have gone through that without knowing that, knowing that I knew that she knew Jesus.

Through all the ups and downs that come with grief and emotion and the loss of somebody, it was that fact that kept me secure. It was that rallying point that kept me knowing exactly where to go. And in fact, it was motivating to the place where I wanted to make sure everyone else I knew knew Jesus because of how important that was, that she was a new creation, that she was a coin cleaned in the image of God, now reborn and walking in the image of Jesus Christ.

His salvation that is offered to all who receive it is our rallying point. So if you're struggling right now, I don't know what you're dealing with. If you're working through stuff, if you're experiencing loss, whatever that looks like, remember that Jesus and His salvation is your rallying point. That's the place that you go, the direction you look at, the newness of life that is before us. That's where we're headed.

It's difficult. It's hard. But the helmet of salvation embodies what that looks like. That putting on the helmet of salvation and wearing that knows that you have a rallying point ahead of us. The salvation He offers you is the place to go, so we run to it, we keep our eyes on it, and we see ourselves through the battle.

So just as the Lord creates us in newness of life and rallies us to Himself, we also know that He fights for us. We also know that He fights for us, and this is the second helmet—Alexander the Great's helmet. The salvation that promises that the Lord will fight for us.

I love that fact. I love the fact that we have a Lord who isn't distant, who isn't foreign, but is in the trenches with us. That means a lot. We walk through our spiritual battles. It's really easy to feel alone.

Anybody ever feel alone in your walk with the Lord? I raise my hand a lot. Sorry, I'm all about participation. In fact, I think it's exactly how the enemy tries to defeat us. I mean, you're not going to be able to stand firm if you feel like you're the only one holding the line, right?

You got that old military maxim, "Divide and conquer." It's very real in the spiritual world too—divide, divide, divide, and destroy. I can't tell you how many times I've walked with hurting churches and broken churches that started off with great division that I ended up having to close the doors on some of them because divide and conquer is the exact way that the enemy likes to go against God's people.

Like Alexander the Great's plumed helmet, salvation encourages us in the battle and reveals to us that we are not alone. You can almost visualize the troops standing against a great army, trying to hold the line, standing firm, kind of afraid of what's going to happen. And you see this horse rider going by with this beautiful plumed helmet, and you're like, "I'm going to be okay. He's with us. Our King is with us."

We do not stand alone, even when the enemy tries to divide us, because our God does fight for us. In Isaiah 59, it shows how the Lord is a great warrior and fights for us. It says, "Now the Lord saw, and it was displeasing in His sight that there was no justice. And He saw that there was no one and was amazed that there was not one to intercede."

Talk about alone and divided. Then in His own arm brought salvation to Him, and His righteousness upheld Him. He put on righteousness like a breastplate and a helmet of salvation on His head.

So here you have the Lord recognizing that there's no one standing in the gap for these people, and He puts on His armor and says, "I will stand in the gap for these people." That He Himself arms Himself to stand for the oppressed and the broken and those in the injustice that's going on around them.

In the context, the Lord is a warrior standing in the gap for the suffering and the oppressed. You think about this, too, the story of the Bible. The one story that comes to mind the greatest is just the Exodus story, where you have a people, God's people, for 400 years—longer than this nation has been a country—enslaved to a Pharaoh and all the oppression and all the injustices that they must have experienced multi-generationally.

And you have a God who steps in, and He delivers them. It's the same word of salvation—delivers them from the captivities of Egypt, delivering His people is what our God does best. In fact, the word "deliver," the word "deliver" from God delivers in Hebrew is the word "Yeshua," which is the name of Jesus.

So you have a Yeshua entering into the world in the flesh, delivering His people, going to battle for His people, delivering them from evil and oppression and suffering because the world can be a very oppressive place, can it not?

The world can be a very oppressive place full of injustice and brokenness. Again, in fact, this is kind of random when we go there with it. There's a root word of sin called "pesha." This is something a doctorate friend of mine worked on, a theology doctorate friend who worked on, and they were arguing that "pesha" is a Hebrew word, and it means sin.

It's translated "sin" a lot in the Bible with transgression, rebellion. You'll see it translated in different translations, but the really core meaning of it, the core meaning of this is that it's a relational breach. That sin, at its very root, the word "pesha," is a relational breach.

When people divide, when they feel alone, when they feel oppressed, when they feel like they're brought injustice, that's the very core meaning of sin. And this is the world that God enters in and fights in the trenches and says, "I will bring an end to that. I will bring an end to the relational breaches in this world. I will bring an end to ever feeling—making ever for people ever feeling alone again."

In our spiritual battles and our deepest pains is when we need the most encouragement, and surprisingly, it is often when we see God the most. That's the paradox of this life, is that when we feel the most alone, we feel the most oppressed. When we feel the most injustice in our lives is often the place where we experience God the greatest.

I'll tell you, I don't—I’ve walked through the Lord for a long time. I got saved at eight years old at a rodeo in Utah. Fancy that. I've walked with Him for a long time. In that moment when my niece passed away, in the months after that, was the closest I ever felt to the Lord because of the brokenness, because of the death that we're wrestling with, that we're struggling with.

And that's when I felt God's presence the most. I felt His peace the greatest. And it's a paradox because you hate it, and you love it at the same time. You hate the pain, yet you love feeling so close to the Lord. The greater the pain, the greater our God is, and that's what I'm learning. The greater the pain, the greater our God is.

Our warrior King takes it upon Himself to lead the way in our liberation and freedom from sin and consequences of death. That's why Paul, when he's thinking about this, he talks about the cross being a triumph. A triumph is a very ancient Roman word. It was a celebration of victory, a conquest parade.

And he talks about how the cross was Jesus's triumph. The paradox I've seen here is someone who is willingly dying—an innocent man dying on a cross—and the triumph that's being done, the conquest and victory that's being accomplished there as well.

That it was by God's great love that He wears on a plumed helmet, demonstrating to us that He's willing to lay down His life for us. When we feel most alone, we feel most isolated in our battles, and the hardest time to stand firm, it is God's love that keeps us standing.

It is the plumed rider with the plumes of love riding through the battle with us that encourages us, that shows us we are not alone, but that we are deeply loved. And the cross is the evidence for that, the conquest and victory over death and sin in the spiritual battles.

Be encouraged by the love that was displayed on the cross. When you see that cross, with all of you probably wearing them around your necks—this was to scare all the LDS girls away when I was in college. It's true. My mom got her form when I was 18.

Now when I look at it, it's been redeemed. Now I see what I see here is the love of God demonstrated by laying down His life on the cross, a triumph of God over sin and death that helps me to stand firm in the times when I feel most alone, when I feel the least loved, when the world around me is dividing and oppressing.

It is the cross, the love that is demonstrated at the cross, that I see in the helmet of salvation that helps me to stand firm. So when those moments come, don't separate from community. Don't push away from those who want to see you come to life in the hardest and deepest and most grievous moments.

That's the easiest thing to do, is to push away and kind of hide and kind of isolate. Don't divide. Don't stop praying. I have a cancer-surviving friend who, despite going through all the stuff they have to go through to find victory over cancer, the only thing that she could do was just worship.

That she would sit in a room and just praise God and worship God. Her whole family would get together. In fact, her husband ended up coming to Christ because she just worshiped so much through the cancer.

Don't give up. The helmet of salvation displays the love of God for us. We can stand firm.

And let me conclude with this: the salvation that we receive will change the way you think. It will change the way you think. It will transform you, and it will renew you. Romans 12:2 says, "Do not be conformed to this world—the oppressiveness, the injustices, the sin of the world. Don't be conformed by things like that, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect."

Salvation is this returning to original intent, being delivered to who we were created to be, is a protection for us to choose the things that bring life, not bring death, to choose the things that God desires for us to pursue, to love our neighbors, to love recklessly, to forgive abundantly, and to pursue unity in everything that we do.

It is a rallying point. It is an encouragement to be seen, to help us to stand firm. So place upon your head the Lord's helmet of salvation. See salvation as more than just a ticket to this heaven in the sky, but it's a transformative, powerful force that stands us, transforms us, renews us in this world right now and displays God's wonder to us for all the community to see.

Because the Palouse needs people who stand firm, knowing that they are rooted, secure, and encouraged by a loving God who brings His salvation. Amen.