A man who operated a tattoo parlor was asked, “Why do you think so many people come in here to get tattoos?”
The man replied without any hesitation, “Because before there is ever a tattoo on the body, there is a tattoo on the mind.”
In other words, he was saying that people display on their bodies what they have already pictured in their minds. What we think often shows up in our five senses as something we can see, touch, taste, hear, or smell. That’s why the next piece of armor we need to strap on in this spiritual battle is a helmet. We read in Ephesians 6:17, “Take the helmet of salvation.” This is because a helmet not only covers the head but also protects the mind.
The main purpose of a helmet—in battle, sports, or work situations like construction sites—is to protect the brain from injury. A football player’s helmet is padded on the inside to help it absorb the shock when he gets pounded to the ground. The brain must be fiercely protected because once the brain becomes damaged, body function also becomes damaged. A football player suffering from too many concussions can no longer play at the level he once could. In fact, he may not even be able to play at all.
With the helmet, Paul has once again used a physical example to illustrate a spiritual truth. He demonstrates that just as the brain is the control center for the rest of the body, the mind is the control center for the will and emotions. The mind must be protected with a helmet that’s able to absorb the shocks of being hit by the enemy and even knocked to the ground in the spiritual realm.
The Influence of the Mind
You may have a relative who has suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. If you do, you are acutely aware that Alzheimer’s is one of the leading debilitating diseases of our day. Notable people who have suffered from the effects of this disease include former president Ronald Reagan, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, and actor Charlton Heston.
With Alzheimer’s, the brain is no longer able to function as it should, so it deteriorates over time. As Alzheimer’s sets in, patients become less able to control or care for themselves. The worse Alzheimer’s becomes, the less control the person has over his or her life.
Likewise, when spiritual Alzheimer’s sets in, we gradually lose control of our own lives. When our mind no longer functions as it was designed to, it impedes our will and emotions from doing what they should. This, then, influences the body as it responds to the will and emotions. So it’s no surprise that one of Satan’s primary strategies is to attack our mind. In fact, this is such a critical area that each of the different pieces of spiritual armor relates to our mind.
Satan doesn’t care how he accomplishes his goal. He will use a fiery arrow of spiritual Alzheimer’s, a conflict leading to a concussion, a poison dart of paranoia, or a battery of mental disorders and strongholds. Any damage to the mind that keeps us from knowing and operating the way God intends can lead to defeat. Satan will use any of these weapons to attack our minds.
But God has told us to put on the helmet of salvation as protection. In fact, He has even provided an illustration of the essential nature of putting on this helmet—the game of football. (Sometimes I think God created football just so preachers like me would have plenty of illustrations.) You see, in football, the quarterback is the leader on the field. He calls the plays so the rest of the team can hear them and then respond.
Because the quarterback runs the plays, he is constantly under attack from the opposing team. The defense is constantly trying to sack him, knock him down, block him, move him out of the pocket, intercept his pass, or strip the ball from his hands. The defense wants to make the quarterback eat dirt on each and every play. That is their objective. If they can do that, none of the plays will be effective. The quarterback’s team will be unable to score, and they will eventually lose the game.
However, sitting in a booth high above the quarterback is a man who holds the title of offensive coordinator. The offensive coordinator’s job, among other things, is to communicate with the quarterback during the game, warning him about what might be coming at him. The offensive coordinator has already spent hours studying the strategy of the opposition, and his job is to accurately predict and relay their moves to the quarterback.
Talking directly into the quarterback’s helmet through the use of sophisticated technology, the offensive coordinator tells the quarterback how he is to move, what play he is to call, how he is to function, what he is to avoid, where he is to put up his guard, and where the weak points in the defense are that he is to try to exploit. One reason the offensive coordinator can do that so well, besides having studied the game film, is that he is sitting high enough to view the entire scenario below him. He is seated up above—in football’s “heavenly places”—with a perfect view of what the enemy is doing down below. He analyzes every movement of the opposition in order to inform his quarterback which strategy to employ to overcome their attack.
Have you ever seen a quarterback in the middle of a very important game start waving his arms up and down to the crowd? He is signaling to his fans that they are being too loud and that he can no longer hear what is being spoken to him through his helmet. The quarterback wants the crowd to quiet down.
Similarly, people’s voices—their opinions, thoughts, accusations, or even attempts at being helpful—will often drown out what God is trying to speak to a believer in his or her helmet of salvation. People may have excellent intentions, and they might even be trying to cheer you on, but in the middle of the battle, you must hear God’s voice. If a believer cannot hear God clearly, just like if a quarterback cannot hear the offensive coordinator clearly, the result will be defeat.
One reason God wants us to wear a helmet is that the enemy is trying to stop us from accomplishing the things God has for us to do. God wants to speak truth into our minds. He sits up high—in the heavenly places—and views the scene below. He can see the field of life much better than we ever could. He can examine the opposition’s strategy much better than we can. He has studied the game film much longer than we have. And because of this, God has a few secrets He wants us to hear. They are secrets because often what God has to say to you is meant only for you.
Have you ever seen a football coach during a game speak something into his headset microphone that he doesn’t want the television cameras to pick up and broadcast to anyone else who might see it—especially the opposition? What does that coach do? He covers his mouth. He places his hand or a clipboard in front of his mouth. By doing this, he keeps the information—the truth that he wants to apply to this specific situation—a secret.
It isn’t that the truth itself is a secret—every football coaching staff and player has access to game film and plays, and they all understand the rules and fundamentals of football. The secret is the implementation of that truth. We’ll talk more about this in the next chapter, but that is what theologians call the rhema—the spoken word of God.
The deciding factor in victory or defeat is the mind. If the mind, the spiritual expression of the brain, operates on a false grid of reality and truth, then the body will also function according to that false reality. In other words, if a person’s perspective is errant and his or her mind-set is flawed, that person’s function will also be flawed.
If a person says, “My name is Alec, and I’m an alcoholic,” he is identifying himself wrongly. He runs a higher risk of giving in to another drink because what he is thinking tells him that he is inclined to give in anyway. The truth for a believer would be stated differently. It would be, “My name is Alec, and I am an overcomer. I have struggled with alcohol, but I am a blood-bought child of the King who can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Those are two very different ways of summing up the same situation.
Proverbs 23:7 strongly warns us to guard our minds: “As he thinks within himself, so he is.” In our football illustration, that would be translated to say, “As he hears from the coaching staff, so he executes the play.”
Essentially, we do what we think. The Emancipation Proclamation is a perfect example of this. We all know from history that the Emancipation Proclamation was a document issued by President Lincoln proclaiming the freedom of slaves. But we also know from history that being legally free might be an entirely different thing from being functionally free.
News of the slaves’ freedom didn’t reach Florida until several months after the Proclamation was drafted. News didn’t reach Texas until Union soldiers marched into Galveston a full two years after the document proclaimed their freedom. For years, legally freed slaves remained in bondage simply because of what they thought was true. Even though they were technically free, they had remained virtual slaves—trapped in a false reality because they did not possess knowledge of the truth by which they could escape their bondage.
Have you seen any of the newest virtual reality games? They are nothing short of astounding in their depiction of reality. In these games, you can be sitting as still as a rock in the comfort of your own living room and think you’re on a roller coaster because that’s what you’re seeing through your headset. Your stomach starts to feel ready to come up through your mouth just as if you were on a real roller coaster. You’re not actually on the ride, but the game makes you think you’re on it. And because of that, you start moving, shifting, screaming, and responding just as if you were really on the ride.
What Satan wants to do is to keep us from wearing the helmet of salvation so that what he shows us through his own headset becomes the reality through which we interpret and respond to life.
Salvation: The Valuable Weapon
Jed Clampett was a hillbilly who lived in Tennessee. One day, as he was out hunting for some food, he saw something black bubbling up from underneath the ground. “Oil, that is—black gold, Texas tea.” Selling his land, Jed moved with his family out to Beverly Hills, where they lived the life of millionaires.
The question is, when did Jed become a millionaire? Was it when he discovered the oil? Or was it when he acquired the land?
Jed became a millionaire when he acquired the land. However, because he didn’t know the value of what he had in his possession, he lived for years as a hillbilly, struggling to simply find his next meal. In fact, Jed had gotten so used to the life of a hillbilly that even when he moved to Beverly Hills, he didn’t know how to live up to what he had acquired.
Many of us are living today without the full knowledge of what we have been given in salvation. We are living hillbilly lives—struggling to get by—when all that we could ever use or need has been made available to us through the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. One reason we have failed to recognize the magnitude and relevancy of this gift is that we too frequently limit our understanding of salvation to going to heaven. Salvation does include eternity, but it also includes much more.
Salvation
When a soldier goes into battle, any old helmet won’t do. Paul knew that when he wrote about the weapons of warfare. That is why he specifically said to take up the “helmet of salvation.” But what’s interesting about Paul’s use of the word “salvation” is that he was writing to people who were already saved. The book of Ephesians is written to people whom Paul refers to as “saints,” “faithful in Christ Jesus,” and to those who have already been blessed with “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (1:1,3). Paul is implying that a person can be an “unsaved-saved” person. Thus in chapter 6 we find him telling the Ephesian believers to pick up and put on the helmet of salvation.
Pay close attention to the remainder of this chapter because at the core of most of our problems—and we all have them to varying degrees—is our lack of understanding of salvation. Many people think that salvation simply means to be born again. And it does mean being born again. When people trust in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins, an instantaneous change occurs. This change is called justification. Justification is the removal of the penalty of sin along with a declaration of legal righteousness.
However, the important truth to note is that while salvation refers to justification and the implanting of the new life in the form of an imperishable seed within our spirit, it does not refer to that alone. “Salvation” is an all-inclusive word that summarizes all that Christ has provided for us: past, present and future.
Justification is what occurred at the point of salvation—it is salvation in the past tense for any believer. The present tense of the word “salvation” signifies the ongoing renewal of a person through the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit. This removes the power of sin over a believer and is called sanctification. Glorification is the future sense of salvation—the removal of the presence of sin. Thus, when the Bible speaks about salvation, it can be referring to justification, sanctification, or glorification.
Sanctification is our focus as we look at the helmet of salvation. We briefly touched on this earlier where we read, “In humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:21). James, like Paul, was writing to fellow believers who were already saved in the sense of justification. Salvation, in this passage, is sanctification—the process of a person becoming more like Christ.
Paul uses the same meaning of salvation when he writes in Romans 1:16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” The word “salvation” in this verse means “to be delivered.” It is the power of God to deliver from hell in the future and also from hell in the present.
There are a number of things that God may need to deliver you from in your daily life—an addiction, a wrong relationship, an unhealthy mind-set, a stronghold, emotional bondage, or any number of other things. If something is ruling you, if the enemy knows that all he has to do is push this or that button to get you to do or think something that you shouldn’t, don’t despair—the gospel has the power to deliver you.
A great verse that illustrates the multidimensional nature of salvation is one that we often quote.
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them (Ephesians 2:8-10).
Paul tells us in this passage that salvation is by grace, through faith, and for good works. All of these components are included in the package we call salvation. Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae emphasizes this truth when he writes, “Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him” (Colossians 2:6). Paul is telling the believers in Colossae that the way they were saved—by grace, through faith, and for good works—is the same way they are to function. Recognizing this critical truth is essential to living a life of victory because it emphasizes the holistic nature of the gospel. Unless we truly comprehend the multifaceted nature of salvation the way that God has defined it—by grace, through faith, and for good works—we will be grabbing any old hat and trying it on for size, attempting to pass it off as a helmet. I don’t know about you, but when I’m in battle, I want more than a ball cap covering my head. I want something strong and hard. I want a helmet.
God’s Provision Through Grace
The first concept we need to dig deeper into while we examine our salvation is grace. For starters, I want to remind you that grace has absolutely nothing to do with you. Grace is all about what God has done for you, independent of you. You have no part to play in grace. Grace includes all that God has already supplied for you. There is nothing God can do for you that He hasn’t already done. In fact, there is nothing God can provide for you that He hasn’t already provided.
Everything God is ever going to do for you has already been done. Every healing He will ever give you in your physical body has already been provided. Every opportunity He is ever going to open up for you has already been opened. Every stronghold God is ever going to break in you has already been broken. Every victory you are ever going to experience has already been won. The joy you’re desperately seeking already exists. The peace that you stay up at night praying and wishing that you could enjoy is already present. Even the power you need to live the life God has created you to live, you already have. This is because God has already deposited in the heavenly realm “every spiritual blessing” you will ever need.
Even so, I can hear your question from miles away. You are saying, “Tony, Tony, Tony—that all sounds good, spiritual, and even encouraging. But if you’re saying that I already have it, how come I don’t have it? If I’ve already got it, why can’t I seem to get it?”
The problem is not that you are lacking in grace or the things that grace supplies. The problem has to do with the way you access grace—through faith. There is only one way to access what has already been given to you, and most of our problems arise out of a misunderstanding about faith. You don’t access grace by doing good things or being a good person. The only access point to the grace that salvation supplies is faith.
Missing this fundamental distinction concerning grace is what has most of us wearing a soft cap with our own initials stitched into it instead of the helmet of salvation. That cap may have your name on it, it might be your color, and it might look good on you, but it will provide you with no protection. You cannot access grace through works. In fact, the very moment you try to access grace by works, you actually nullify grace. Grace, by its very definition, has nothing to do with you or what you do. It is what God does for you because of His unmerited favor.
What religion often tries to teach us and get us to do is to access grace—God’s favor and blessings—by works. Religion says if you come to church more often, God will bless you more. If you give more money, you will get more money. If you treat your neighbor nice, God will be nice to you. Lists are made about “seven ways you can get all that you want from God” or “ten things you can do to make God like you more.” The truth is, there is no such list.
The problem is not those good things we do in themselves. The problem is in the motivation behind doing them. If you are doing good works to try to earn God’s favor so you can access His grace, you have disqualified yourself from grace simply because your actions have shown that you don’t believe in what grace truly is. Religion will defeat you because it keeps you in a posture of trying to earn what has already been freely given.
Some of us are working so hard to do better. We go to church more, read more, and do more, only to discover that we’re still not delivered. That is because we’re turning to religion to try to be better rather than letting grace do the work both in and through us.
When I was in seminary, I was determined to get A’s in all my classes. In one particular class, I remember spending an inordinate amount of time on a certain paper. Confident that I was going to get an A on my paper, I was shocked when I got it back only to discover that written on top of it was a big zero. Scribbled underneath the zero were these words: “Great work. Wrong assignment.”
A lot of saints are trying to be delivered on earth by working hard, serving hard, and giving more…all the while not realizing they’re working on the wrong assignment. We’re saved by grace, through faith, and for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Our good works must flow out of God’s work of grace in our lives rather than out of a heart that’s trying to earn His favor or reduce His wrath. It’s a subtle difference in the physical realm, but it makes all the difference in the spiritual realm. God knows our hearts.
It’s like a child trying to earn her parent’s love. In a healthy home that functions the way God designed it, the parent loves that child already unconditionally. There is nothing the child can do to make her parent love her. She is already loved simply by virtue of her relationship to the one whose love she is trying to gain.
Friend, I want to let you in on a secret that in all of my years of ministry and counseling I have discovered that few people really know: God loves you. In fact, He demonstrated it. God cannot love you any more than He already does—He showed that by sending His own son, Jesus Christ, to die for you. When God sacrificed His own son and turned His back on Him at the point of His death, He gave you all the love He could ever give you. You don’t need to try to make God love you more. You can’t do it. What you can do, though, is access His love through faith. Faith is your positive response to what God has already done. The good works you do express your faith; they don’t earn God’s grace. So when you give your tithe—and yes, the Bible teaches that believers are to give to the Lord—you do it not so you can earn God’s favor, but as an expression of your faith in Him as your Source and a demonstration of your trust in Him.
Your home is connected to a local power company. This power company supplies your home with everything you need to run everything you have that requires electricity. Let’s say you turned off all the lights in your home and were sitting in the dark. It would be foolish of you to call the electric company and ask them to give you more power. All the power you need has already been made available to you.
Instead, what you need to do is access that power. You need to flip on the switch, which opens up the flow of the power. Now, what would happen if you called the electric company and told them that all of your lights were off and that you needed them to come over to your house and turn them on for you? Do you think they would come? Most likely they would not come because their job is to supply the power, not to turn your lights on and off. It’s your responsibility to access the power.
In the spiritual realm, it’s the act of faith that accesses all that’s supplied to us by grace. It’s faith that flips the switch, releasing the flow of grace into our lives. In fact, there’s only one way to access grace, and that’s through faith so that no one can boast—not only about how we got into heaven but also about how we got delivered on earth.
Faith must always begin with a God-based understanding of truth. It cannot simply begin with facts because facts don’t always reveal truth. If a person has a headache, the fact is that the person has a headache. However, the truth may be that the person has a tumor. Yet if all we looked at was the fact of a headache, that person may settle for some aspirin when he or she really needed surgery.
The key to accessing grace is faith—faith that’s grounded in truth.
A New You
God gives grace only in response to faith. Your good works merely reflect the fact that you believe what God says about grace. You do them in response to grace, not to try to get grace.
When you fully embrace the truth that there’s nothing you can do to get God to love you more, you’ll discover the power for living a life of victory. When that truth takes root deep within you, you will have more confidence to overcome strongholds or resist temptations than you have ever known. In fact, you will become a whole new you!
The United States government has what is called a Federal Witness Protection Program. It is for individuals who are at high risk because they have testified against someone who wants to see them killed. What the government does for these individuals is literally change their identities. It changes their names, looks, social security numbers, and locations. If the people in the program don’t accept these changes, the government will not guarantee their protection. But when they do accept the changes, the government protects them.
Let me let you in on a secret—Satan is very upset that when you trusted in Christ, you testified against him. In fact, your life is a testimony against him every day that you operate under the authority of Christ. Because of this, Satan is after you to destroy you. But God has put you in His own protection program. He can change the way you look at yourself by showing you how He looks at you. When you see yourself the way God sees you, you will begin to walk differently, talk differently, act differently, and live differently. You will live in the victory that He has already given you. And one way He wants to change you is by getting you to understand that grace comes through faith and not in response to anything you could do.
The apostle Paul spent years of his life sacrificing, laboring, and serving God, even to the detriment of his own health and comfort. He said in 1 Corinthians 15:10, “By the grace of God I am what I am.” In fact, Paul’s response to that grace is what produced the good works in his life. He continues the same statement by saying, “And His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me.”
In other words, Paul said that when he understood grace, he didn’t get lazy. He didn’t adopt a lifestyle of sin. No, when Paul understood all that grace had done for him in spite of him, he wanted to work all the more in gratitude for it.
Grace never makes a person lazy. A true embracing of grace makes us more committed, obedient, generous, and enthusiastic because when we see all that God has already done for us, we want to say thank you.
Not only is grace the channel for God extending His favor and blessings into your life, but it’s also the means of delivering us from what we often deserve.
For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him (Romans 5:6-9).
What I want you to notice in this passage are the words “much more then.” The reason why those words are so important is that they indicate that what is coming after them is even greater than what came before them. Before “much more then,” we read that when we were at our worst, God sacrificed His Son Jesus Christ for us so that whoever believed on His name would be saved (justified before Him). That in itself is more grace than anyone could comprehend. But Paul says we can have “much more” confidence that “we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.”
We are often confused about this passage, thinking it means we’re being saved from hell. But Paul has already told us that we have been justified and therefore not going to be sent to hell. Rather, Paul is saying that we “shall be saved” from God’s wrath. But what is God’s wrath if it doesn’t mean that we are being saved from hell? Romans 1:18-19 tells us:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.
Oftentimes, we think that the wrath of God will be revealed in hell, and it will—but there is another wrath that is already revealed. Many of us don’t have to go to hell to be in hell. This is because we’re living in our own personal hell with fires burning all around us. These flames come as a result of God’s wrath against sin. Sin comes complete with God’s wrath built right in it.
Another way of saying this is that sin comes with consequences. We’ve all experienced consequences from our sinful decisions. In fact, many of us have probably lived with some of those consequences for years. This is because the very sin that we committed had the consequence for that sin built right into it. It’s not that God in heaven is throwing down lightning bolts of wrath upon you. Rather, God’s wrath is an outgrowth of the sin itself.
Some people started out with only one drink, but now the drink is telling them they need to have more. Some people started out by popping a pill, but now the feeling they got when they popped the pill is telling them that they need to inject something stronger into their arms. The only way to get rid of the wrath showing up in your life is by having the power to deal with the sin—to be saved, or sanctified.
When we put on the helmet of salvation, we block the rule of sin’s consequences in our lives. When we live in the power of a life that’s responsive to God and to His sanctifying work, accessing grace through faith, sin no longer has a foothold in our thoughts, emotions, and decisions.
One day a man was given a special gift—a cruise! He had never been on a cruise before, so he was excited to take his first voyage. The cruise came at no cost to him. The person who gave it to him picked up the entire tab.
Throughout the week on the cruise, one of the crew members noticed that the man frequently ate the free crackers and juice provided on the deck. In fact, he had never seen anyone eat as many crackers as this man did. Curious as to the reason why, the crew member spoke to the man as he was disembarking.
“Sir, how did you enjoy the cruise?”
“It was spectacular,” the man replied, “I have never experienced anything like it before.”
“Very good, sir,” the crew member said, and then he continued. “I noticed that you really liked the crackers and juice on the deck. I was just wondering—why?”
“Well,” the man replied, looking down, “I saw all of the lavish meals that were being offered all week long, but I didn’t have any money. And since the crackers and juice were free, I let them sustain me during the cruise.”
The crew member replied, “Someone didn’t give you all of the information. When the price of your ticket was paid, it not only included getting on the boat and going everywhere that the boat goes but also included everything on the boat as well. Your food was covered in the price of the ticket.”
The helmet of salvation not only takes us to heaven but also supplies—by grace, through faith—everything we need while we’re here on earth. When we fail to understand the truth of salvation and wear it as a helmet, we limit the good works God will do both in us and through us.