How To Be Strong in The Lord

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Many of us have some of our spiritual armour on but in a way we are weak underneath because we haven’t done the first bit:

‘Be strong in the Lord’ (Eph 6:10)

As I shared in my last post, my husband was preaching recently on how we need to strengthen ourselves in the Lord and be dressed for battle.

I wrote about just one small part of that, which was remembering our calling. But there are more ways that he spoke about whereby we could help ourselves be strong in the Lord.

How to strengthen ourselves in the Lord

Some ways we can strengthen ourselves in the Lord are by:

  • Remembering our calling – when things get tough we need to know where we’re going, why we’re going there and that God has put us there.
  • Believing God for great things – how often do we get discouraged because we forget that God is powerful and can do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine?
  • Inquiring of the Lord – asking God what we should do next and taking our worries to Him.
  • Rising above our circumstances – we can be more than conquerors in the midst of all these things!
  • Remember who God is and trust Him – we need to remember God’s power, God’s love for us, that God is in control, that He works everything for the good of those who love Him… and trust that He will take care of us.
  • Daily seek the Lord – we can get so much strength just through prayer, through asking God and seeking His help, and through reading His Word and letting Him speak to us.

How we can waste our strength

But there are also ways we can waste our strength, and this was the really convicting part for me! Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones gives a comprehensive and challenging list in his series of sermons on this passage. See if there are any of these areas where you might be letting it leak out:

  • Committing to too many spiritual works or things
  • Too much conversation
  • Arguments, debates, wrangling
  • Laziness
  • Too much time in the wrong company
  • Too much foolish talk and joking
  • Love of money and career
  • A desire for respectability and image
  • An unequal yoking with an unbeliever
  • Ungodly entertainment
  • A wrong attitude toward or doubting the Word of God

He says, “We have to walk on a knife-edge in these matters; you must not become extreme on one side or the other. But you have to be watchful. And, of course, you can always tell by examining yourself whether your strength is increasing or declining.” (Lloyd-Jones)

I remember reading about Isobel Kuhn in her books By Searching and In the Arena. In one of these she describes how shortly after she was saved she felt a very close presence of God. But when she went to watch a movie with some friends it went away.

So she gave up going with her friends to watch movies. This might sound a bit drastic to some people, and I’m not saying you should give up movies. But I do think we need to evaluate as Dr. Lloyd Jones says, where our spiritual strength is going.

Are we wasting it? Do some things end up making us feel less close to God afterwards? What do you prize more, and what is your priority?

We need to strengthen ourselves in the Lord, and then make sure we don’t waste that spiritual strength!

If you would like to listen to more of my husband’s sermon on this, where he goes into the whole armour of God, and being ‘Dressed for Battle’ you can listen to it here. It was so good and full of great stuff that I took five pages of notes!

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