The Christian life, in the first place, is a warfare, it is a struggle. “We wrestle.” The whole section is designed to impress this fact upon us. There is no grosser or greater misrepresentation of the Christian message than that which depicts it as offering us a life of ease with no battle and no struggle at all. There are types of holiness teaching that teach just that. Their slogan is, “It is quite easy.” They say the trouble is that so many Christian people remain ignorant of this fact, and therefore go on fighting and struggling. That is the essential characteristic of the teaching of the Cults. That is why they are always popular. “Quite easy! a life of ease!” You cannot fit that into this Epistle with its “We wrestle!” “Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand.” The first thing we have to realize is that the Christian life is a warfare, that we are strangers in an alien land, that we are in the enemy’s territory. We do not live in a vacuum, in a glasshouse. The teaching which gives the impression and that pathway to glory is all easy and simple and smooth is not Christianity, it is not Paul’s Christianity, it is not New Testament Christianity. It is the hallmark of the quack remedy always, that it cures everything so easily! One dose, and there is no more trouble!
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “The Christian Warfare: An Exposition of Ephesians 6:10-13,” pg. 20
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