The Helmet of Salvation
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In the Bible, the Apostle Paul writes about the armor of God. He explains the reality of evil and the resources Christ offers for protection. If you're a Christian, Paul has given you everything you need to stand in the battles of life. So then why do so many of us feel ill-equipped for the troubles we face? Today, join us as Tim Keller explores how we can make use of the amazing resources God offers us in Christ.

After you listen, we invite you to go online to gospelandlife.com and sign up for our email updates. When you sign up, you'll receive our quarterly newsletter with articles about gospel-changed lives as well as other valuable gospel-centered resources. Subscribe today at gospelandlife.com. The passage of scripture we're looking at, we're going to consider now, is Ephesians 6, 14 to 18. And it talks about the armor of God.

And let me remind you that the armor of God is a metaphor that Paul uses as he speaks to us and asks us to put on the armor of God to describe how, though we are believers, though we're Christians, and though when we become Christians we receive great benefits and privileges, we actually have to learn the discipline of using God.

Those benefits and privileges. We've got resources with which we can meet any battle and address any enemy in any kind of fray or conflict. But unless we learn how to use what we have, we'll be defeated. Let's read as we have been going through this passage and read verse 14 to 16. And we're going to look tonight at one particular piece of the armor as usual. Stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist.

with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and pray in the spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayer and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. This is God's word.

I want to look at the helmet of salvation. What does Paul mean when he says, put on the helmet of salvation? How do you obey that? Now, the problem you have initially when you're trying to understand what Paul means here is that the word salvation is very, very broad. The word salvation literally means to be rescued from a peril. It means to be taken out from under the baleful influence of some particular danger.

And therefore, the word salvation actually refers to everything God does to us. It's a very broad term. The reason we've got to try to narrow it down a little bit is to try to find out what exactly salvation means in the Bible. We realize that in the Bible, salvation is a broader term than we usually in the Christian church use it.

Most of you my guess is if you are in churches or if you've come from churches or if you've come from circles in which the word saved is used I know a lot of you come from churches where you wouldn't be caught dead talking about the word saved However, if you if you are around churches that use the word saved it's almost always a past tense I've been saved people say when were you saved? I was saved at this time. So we talked about in the past tense and

And if you're accustomed to using it in the past tense, you might get rather confused when you see that very often in the Bible, the word salvation for Christians is used in the present or the future tense. Do you get a little confused when you read, let's say, Philippians 2.12 that says, work out your salvation in fear and trembling for God is at work within you both to will and to do his good pleasure? Or do you get confused when you read Romans 5.10 that

Where Paul says, if we've been reconciled to the Father through his death, how much more will we be saved by his life? We'll be saved. I thought Christians were saved. And then you have, for example, Romans 13, where Paul says, the night is far spent, the day is at hand.

It's time to wake from your sleep, says Paul, because our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. Now, how can Paul talk about salvation in the future? And the answer is because salvation in the Bible has three tenses. There's a past tense, a present tense, and a future tense for Christians. There's a sense in which we have been saved. There's a sense in which we are being saved. There's a sense in which we aren't saved yet.

What are those three senses? You have to understand it like this. First of all, remember that the thing that the Bible always says we're saved from is sin. Now, the word sin has got a tremendous public relations problem in a place like New York, anywhere in this culture. But what the Bible means by sin is when you separate from God, all the deterioration, all the alienation, all the disintegration that happens when you're separated from God,

You know, for example, if you suddenly are put into a vacuum and your lungs are separated from air,

What will happen? Well, I suppose it would take an expert in physiology, especially an expert in respiratory systems, but they'd tell you. And it's probably pretty grotesque and pretty awful, and I don't know enough. I didn't look it up, so I'm not here to tell you about it. But there'd be all sorts of things that would happen. Things would happen right away. Then things would happen a little bit later. Things that would happen a little bit later, and eventually all the deterioration and all the death that would occur. When a person simply decides to live a life independent of God...

You're separating from him. You know, the parable of the prodigal son, the parable of the prodigal son is supposed to be a perfect illustration of sin. Do you remember what the son did? The youngest son was one of two sons and they had a wealthy father.

And they were living in the father's wealth, you might say. They were living in the father's home and they were living in the father's inheritance. And both sons knew that by law, each one of them actually owned a particular percentage of the net wealth of the family. But as long as the father was alive, both the sons had to live there and they lived in their own wealth and yet they had to live underneath in submission to the father. When the prodigal son said, give me my portion of

so I can leave he wasn't asking for anything technically illegal what he was saying is I want the wealth that I always had but I want it independent of you I want what you've always given me but I don't want you to be around I want to be my own father I want to be my own master I want you to get your clammy hands off of my life and you see what the son did was he simply decided to live life independently

And that is a picture of sin. That's what the scripture says sin is. As soon as you do that, as soon as you do that, there's a disintegration that happens. And the Bible insists that every problem there is, spiritual, psychological, social, and physical, and cultural problems,

Every problem you can imagine is all the results of the deterioration of the universe and the human condition that comes because of separation from God. Everything. If you don't understand that, you can't understand salvation. You can't understand the breadth of salvation unless you understand the breadth of the biblical concept of sin. Because the term salvation means to be saved from sin. If you don't know what you're saved from, you have no idea what the salvation means. That means, friends, everything from measles to racism is a result of sin.

Everything from your guilt feelings to war and poverty is a result of sin. It's all part of the breakdown. And therefore, in order to save us from sin, we have got to have a set of processes. There's got to be a set of stages. Imagine, for example, that a major corporation, through both moral and legal violations, has polluted a particular part of the environment.

Done a heinous deed against the environment and therefore against all the world. So what happens? The EPA comes and the EPA says, you owe us a fine and we're going to take that fine and we're going to, I don't know what they do with the fine. They're going to clean up the environment and pay probably a lot of our officials there for a couple of years. But the point is, we're going to levy a fine. Until you pay the fine, you're under the penalty of the law.

As soon as that corporation pays their fine, the law no longer has any hold on them. In a sense, they're saved. That means to say that the law no longer has any hold on them. But now it's going to take years to use that money to clean up the environment. It's going to take years to actually apply the salvation. The Bible says that every Christian stands in the middle of three tenses of their salvation.

You can't understand the glory and the beauty of it unless you see it. In fact, you won't be able to understand the scripture and you won't be able to understand what's happening to you if you don't understand. First of all, on this side, or maybe it's this side, there's the past tense. And the past tense is, it's true, the Bible talks about you have been saved, but saved from what? You've been saved from the penalty of sin. You've been pardoned. Jesus Christ has stood in your place and has taken away the writ that was against you.

Now, the magnitude and the radical nature of the past tense of salvation is something we've talked about because the breastplate of righteousness, which we've been looking at, dealt with that. Put it this way, Romans 8:1, "Not one of your violations, nothing you do wrong can damn you if you're in him. There now is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." What's that mean? Let me put it as radically as possible.

You see how different this is than the religions of being a good person and being a decent person. The Bible says there's no condemnation for you, that you're accepted in the beloved. We saw this morning in one of our services, we saw that Jesus says that when you receive me as Savior, the Father loves me even as he loves you. He loves you even as he loves me. The minute you receive Christ as your Messiah and your Savior...

You are as loved and accepted by God that moment as you ever will be. There is no change in his acceptance. It's perfect. There's no change in his love for you. You're adopted into his family. He completely welcomes you. That means the Bible says you're justified by faith. That gives you a radically different self-image. That gives you a radically different approach to the world. And we've talked about that incessantly. That's the past tense. You are saved.

But then there's a present tense. You have Philippians 2, which says you're being saved. You work out your salvation with fear and trembling. What does that mean? Well, you see, unlike that corporation that had to pay the EPA, we don't pay our own debt. We can't afford to pay our own debt. In a sense, we're like a corporation that's polluted the environment, and it's going to cost $2 billion to come up with the amount of money to clean up the environment. And our net worth is $500. Right?

In other words, there was no way we could pay that debt. Jesus paid it for us. But now the cleanup, now the restoration, we're polluted. The scripture says, for example, you don't know that you're polluted. Look at your lack of self-control. Look at your lack of joy. Look at your lack of courage. Look at the fear. Look at the anxiety. What do you think that is? That's pollution. One of the ways to put it is you're saved, but you're being saved. The fire is out. But now how are we going to clean up the place?

We put the fire out. We've taken away the guilt. See, there is now no condemnation, but there's a lot of pollution. You're not like Jesus. You don't have his courage. You don't have his grace. You don't have his graciousness. You don't have the wholeness of life that he's got. Anybody, anyone who's objective looks at Jesus and says, I'm not like that. That's because of pollution. Now comes the cleanup. The Holy Spirit comes into your life.

And through a process that we have talked about under the shoes of the gospel of peace, we've become more and more and more like Christ. But now there's also a future tense. And this, I think, is what Paul's talking about. The future tense is we will be saved. We have been saved from the penalty of sin. We are being saved from the power of sin. But eventually we will be saved completely from even the presence of sin.

And that means that as long as we're here, there's always effects of sin. Physical, everything I said from measles to racism is still with us. But someday, the scripture holds this out. Unlike anyone with a circular view of history, Christians have a linear view of history.

Very, very different than any other worldview. The circular view of history says, basically, we might go on and go on and go on. And of course, the Eastern view is that we go on getting ourselves purified until we finally move out into the all soul and we lose our individual consciousness and we go off into the great oneness of nature. That's the circular view. The Bible will have none of that. The Bible says there's a linear view. There is a day coming.

in which when you are completely eradicated from, pardon me, out of your life is completely eradicated all the presence of sin, you will be a glorious person. You will be a bright stainless mirror reflecting back to God his own boundless goodness and power and energy and delight and wisdom and nobility. You will be not, you won't become God. You will become like God. You will not move into the all soul and lose your individuality. You'll actually finally be a self.

That's what Paul's talking about when he talks about the helmet of salvation. How do we know? Because, you know, there's two other places where Paul talks about armor. Romans 13 and 1 Thessalonians 5. And in both cases, he talks about the armor. For example, in 1 Corinthians 5, he says, put on the helmet of the hope of salvation. And best of all, in Romans 8, pardon me, in Romans 13, which I already quoted, he says, the night is far spent.

The day is at hand. Our salvation is almost upon us. And he's talking about the perfection, the glory that comes in. He says in Romans 8, all of nature is standing on tiptoe. Nature is also been, the Bible says, you might say entangled in our fall. Nature isn't what it ought to be. Nature is full of death and decay, just like we are.

But the day is coming when our salvation will be coming and there'll be a new heavens and a new earth and a new Jerusalem and a new body and a new soul and we'll all be renewed. And then Paul says, therefore, since the day is at hand and the night is almost over, do not wear the deeds of darkness, but put on the armor of light. And that clearly shows that what Paul means when he says put on the armor is he means the day is at hand. Live as if the day is about to show up.

Success, true love, and the life you've always wanted. Many of us have made these good things into ultimate things. We've put our faith in them when deep down we know that they cannot satisfy our longings. The truth is that we've made lesser gods of good things, gods that can't give us what we really need.

In his book, Counterfeit Gods, Dr. Keller shows us how a proper understanding of the Bible reveals the truth about societal ideals and our own hearts, and that there is only one God who can wholly satisfy our desires.

Dr. Keller's book is our thank you for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the power of the gospel. So request your copy of Counterfeit Gods at gospelinlife.com slash give. That's gospelinlife.com slash give. Now, here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching.

Now this makes it impossible. I was telling my wife about this because this is an old illustration that we've used for years. And I know I've used before, but it's impossible when you read what Paul says not to use it again. The illustration is actually out of C.S. Lewis' article on the second coming of Christ called The World's Last Night. And he says if you want to understand what Paul's saying, if you want to understand what it means to put on the helmet of the hope of salvation, it means to be a person who's always living in the future.

And the best illustration that Lewis brings up with is he thinks that he's, he's, uh, he uses the illustration of a woman using a makeup mirror. See, he says, here's a woman and she wants to, she's making herself up and she's in her apartment and it's say early in the morning and the sun's not really up yet. And she's in the apartment and the lights are on, but she knows that what looks good in here would not look good under the light of the full sun.

So what she does is she buys a makeup mirror. Now, this is my theory. I haven't any, you know, firsthand experience with this. The theory behind the makeup mirror is you turn that thing up and you create almost an artificial environment in the little apartment. You create the simulation of the sun. Why? So you can dress yourself for the light that is to come. You could dress yourself in such a way that is fine for the apartment, but you know that any minute the sun will be up.

And what Paul is saying here, when he says put on the hope of salvation, he means you need to live on the one hand with the purity, but on the other hand, with the hope and the urgency of knowing that any minute that irresistible light could come crashing through the ceiling. I tell you, friends, someday it will. That's the linear view of history.

See, the cyclical view of history says it goes on and on and on and on. The Christians have a completely different approach. They have a linear view of history. That means that any minute this could be the last act. The curtain could come crashing down. That irresistible light will someday, of God's glory, will someday come crashing through the ceiling of time and space in solid blocks of intolerable edge and weight. And it will reveal everything.

And if you have been living for yourself, whether you be a king or a president, whether you have a monument in Central Park for you, under that solid light of intolerable edge and weight, it will all look like froth. It will all go to fizz. And anything that you have been doing, loving God and your neighbor in the name of Christ, will suddenly be revealed. Things that were always obscure will suddenly be revealed in that light. And so you want to dress as if that light could come any moment. You ought to dress...

Not only that, you dress, I said, that's with the purity of it. But to put on the hope of salvation also means to dress with the hope of it. Look, what is the hope of salvation? What is the glory that Paul talks about? Well, one thing is that Paul talks about the glory of we're going to get new bodies. There's a lot of people that think that Christians have a negative view of the body.

Some people have told me, of course Christians have a negative view of the body. Look at their attitude towards sex. They say you can only have sex in marriage with one person. What a negative attitude. You think sex is dirty. Makes no sense to me. I mean, you know, here's the Ming vases in the Met. Why don't we let people check them out every night? Why can't people check out priceless Ming vases the way they check out books out of the library? Because we think they're dirty?

Or because we think they're marvelous, they're wonderful, they're special. We just, we have to be careful about the conditions in which they're looked at and observed and used. Scripture tells us that God both created both your soul and your body, and he's going to redeem both your soul and your body. One is not more important than the other. And those glorified bodies, the Bible tells us, will be continuous with your existing body. First Corinthians 15 says this mortal body will put on the immortality. All we know is that we'll recognize each other.

Remember how Jesus, when he had his glorified body, the disciples from Emmaus didn't recognize him until he began to say some things. Then they looked and they said, it's you. You know, if you look at your baby picture and then you look at yourself now, you know, you look at them and you say, yeah, yeah, it's the same person. There's a continuity.

The scripture says that every one of us is going to become a glorified self and we will still be us. We don't lose our individuality. We don't slip into some kind of all soul. That's the reason why we like the idea of people. That's the reason why all those great parables in heaven where people come up to each other and they look at each other and they grab each other and they say, it is you, isn't it? I knew you could be like this. On earth, I saw flashes of this in your best moments, but now look at you.

It's going to be a glorious body. Jonathan Edwards says, here on earth, we've got five senses. It's most likely that in heaven, we'll have two or three thousand. Can you imagine that? Of course you can't. You can't tell a person who's been born blind and has never had the faculty of sight what it's like. You can't do it. Have you ever tried? One time I heard a person who was born blind say, I think red is like the sound of a trumpet. And all you can say is no. There's a whole dimension of reality you don't even know.

The Bible says we will run and not be weary. We will walk and not faint. There's going to be a new glory to it. Not only that, we're going to have the beatific vision. The Bible says that we won't just have glorified selves, but we will have a glorified relationship with the Lord and with each other. Jonathan Edwards in his book on heaven says, the love you've got now in the very best moments

is as far below the love that you will have there as an oil rag is below a wedding dress. And he says, no, it's too much. But the beatific vision is the thing that the Bible says is the thing that will really satisfy you. First John 3 verse 2 says, we don't know what we're going to be like, but we know that when we see him, we will be like him for we will see him as he is. Whoever hopes

In that way, he purifies himself as he is pure. That's an amazing statement. 1 John 3 says, even the desire to see God face to face is going to start to purify you right here. How much more transforming is it going to be to have it? To actually see him will be to finally have what you've always wanted and what you've always been after. You know, most of you realize that this is a thread that comes through a lot of my preaching. And that is, when I go on vacation...

When a dog that you like dies, if you're really thinking as a Christian, if you really have the hope of salvation, you don't spend a lot of your life in regrets. You know why? Everything, anything that you have ever loved will be in the face of Christ. The only reason it's glorious here, the only reason you like it here, the only reason you love it here...

It's because it's a reflection of, it's something that gets at your soul. And there's a soul's hunger that only the face of Jesus Christ will satisfy. And that's the beatific vision, the Visio day that we're going to have when we get there. It's the reason I don't take pictures sometimes on my trips. Because anything I love here, look at that mountain. Look at this view. Look at this place. And you know what? As soon as you say, I don't want to leave here, you suddenly say, it's ridiculous. This is just a shadow.

of what I'm going to have forever in the face of Christ. Now, what does it mean to put on the hope of salvation? I've got to conclude this way.

Karl Marx believed because some people really did misuse the hope of glory to keep people down and to justify keeping people enslaved by saying, oh, well, we'll Christianize them and in the next life they'll live happily ever after. There were people who did that. That was terrible. That was tyrannical. That was self-serving. But because of it, Karl Marx said, religion's the opiate of the people. It's a bad idea to believe in an afterlife because it makes you passive.

toward trying to do something here on earth. Nonsense. On TV, I saw some kind of, on one of the cable stations, I saw a program by the Humanist Society that said the biggest problem we've got is people believe that there's a supernatural, there's a heaven and a hell. And they don't see that the only heaven we have is this earth and the only hell we have is this earth until we realize that all we've got is nature. All we've got is this world. We're not going to make it the great place it ought to be. But I want you to consider for a minute how illogical that is.

If all we've got is nature, there's no way to judge what's right and wrong here. The same program goes on to say racism and class oppression is wrong. Christians know that, but you know how we know that? If nature's all you've got, then how in the world do you decide what's right and wrong in nature? Nature is full of stronger preying on the weaker. Marquis de Sade was right. He said, if nature's all we have, what is, is right. Lenny Bruce said the same thing. What is, is right, because there's no bigger world from the outside to tell us

Judge us and say this part of nature is right in this part of nature is wrong the mother Teresa's of the world the people who know that there's a heaven the people who know what's in store for them are the only people with a powerful enough motive to Sacrifice for other people here all the way to the end of their lives if this world is all there is you can do a little bit of sacrifice to help the needy you can do a little bit of sacrifice stuff you can't go all the way you can't give it all away and

Paul could because Paul gave it all away. He gave up his career. He gave up his reputation. Then what did he say? He says, I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed. He put on the hope of his salvation. See what he's doing? Paul says, your life is a ledger book. If you want to know how a corporation is going, you can't just look at the expenses. You've got to look at the assets.

He says, I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed. I reckon, I account. Paul says, I can handle my sufferings because I weigh them against what I know is on its way. You see, Christianity isn't a mystical experience. You know where Paul got his power? He was thinking. He added it up. He reckoned, he accounted. Does it work? Friends, all the Christians of the first century who went to the lion singing,

It was because they had a hope of glory. God gave them a hope. Paul gave them a hope. Jesus gave them a hope. They were able to give away their goods to the poor. They were able to live lives of sacrifice. They were able to die with a song on their lips. Why? Who else in the world would do that? Except people who know that this world is just the anteroom of their whole life. It's silly to say, it's silly to say that to believe in the hope of glory makes you passive. How can it make you passive?

Finally, you can be active. Finally, you're afraid of nothing. Let me tell you who should be afraid. People who say, all I've got is 70 or 80 years and I'm trapped in this time period. I don't know if there's anything past that. And therefore, I've got to get all my happiness right here. And if anything goes wrong with my happiness, if anything goes wrong with my health, I'm finished. Who's anxious? Who's scared? Who's passive? Who's bound? Not the person who puts on the hope of salvation. Friends.

We're going to stop now and we can come back to this later. But I just want to ask you to think about this for just a moment and for just a second. Do you have that kind of hope? Christianity is not a mystical thing. It's not like, oh Lord, just give me the peace, zap it. No. Paul says, I reckon, I think out the truth, I have the truth, I believe what's coming, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to think it up until the glory of it overwhelms everything I have. All my problems...

There's a big difference between hope and defiance. In defiance, you're just saying, I'm going to be strong. I'm just going to do it. I'm going to be tough. I'm going to keep a stiff upper lip. But hope, the hope of salvation means you think about the glory of what's there. You weigh it up and you just forget yourself. You're not concerned about it anymore. You lose that horrible self-consciousness and you stop worrying about this person has wronged me here and this person has wronged me here because you see the expense side of the ledger.

is completely outweighed by your credit side. Have you put on the hope of salvation? Do you understand what that means? You know, there's a beatific vision. The Bible also says there'll be a horrific vision. There's a place in Revelation where it says, in the last day, the kings of the earth and the rich men will run into the mountains and they will say to the mountains, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne.

See, the irony of the Garden of Eden is the very thing that you most need, the face of God, the glory glimpse, is also the thing that if you decide you must be your own boss will be the thing you hate the most. Please, friends, learn to love and desire his glory and his face in this life. Don't go throughout the rest of eternity hating it. It's your life. Put on the hope of salvation. It can handle anything. It can help you face anything. Let's pray. Father, as we...

We ask that you'd enable us to understand what this hope is. Father, the early Christians had a hope of glory that enabled them to face tremendous persecution. We admit that we're afraid of tomorrow. We're afraid of people just smirking and laughing at us. We're afraid of losing our jobs. We have not suffered. We don't have the persecution coming or the difficulties or tragedies that they faced. However, oh Lord,

We've got the same hope that they have. We could aspire and we could know the same levels of greatness that they did. Those early believers who put on that hope and that helmet, help us to do it ourselves. Help us to know it. Help us to seek and love in your appearing in your face. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it equips you to apply the wisdom of God's Word to your life. You can find more resources from Tim Keller at gospelandlife.com. Just subscribe to the Gospel and Life newsletter to receive free articles, sermons, devotionals, and other resources. Again, it's all at gospelandlife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.

This month's sermons were recorded in 1992. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. ♪