Join Pastor Jack Hibbs on Real Life Radio as he explores the gripping themes of spiritual warfare and victory in Christ. In this episode, Pastor Jack delves into the story of David and Goliath, offering profound insights on how ancient battles can reflect our current spiritual challenges. Discover how to confront the Goliaths in your life through faith and divine strength. As Pastor Jack continues his series through the book of First Samuel, you’ll learn about the significance of spiritual readiness and God’s promise of victory. Whether you’re dealing with personal fears or societal pressures, this episode provides encouragement
Satan sees to it that he infiltrates the pulpit, Christian service, churches. He doesn’t care about the people that are in paganism or the occult. He cares about you. He wants to attack you.
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This is Real Life. Welcome to Real Life Radio with Pastor Jack Hibbs. I’m David Jay, thanking you for joining us today as we listen, learn, and are challenged by God’s Word, the Bible.
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Your week is packed. You’re running on empty, and sometimes Sunday already feels like a distant memory by Wednesday. That’s exactly why real-life devotions exist. Each week, Pastor Jack Hibbs brings you a short but powerful moment in God’s Word designed to encourage, equip, and refocus your heart. It’s not another podcast or a long sermon. It’s a few meaningful minutes that meet you right where you are. Whether you’re on a commute, going for a walk, or you just need a reset in the middle of your day, Real Life Devotions are ready when you are. Fresh encouragement straight from the scripture. And it’s all just one click away. Check out the newest devotion now at jackhibbs.com. That’s jackhibbs.com. Your place for real faith, real encouragement, and real life. That’s Real Life Devotions at jackhibbs.com.
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on today’s edition of Real Life Radio. Pastor Jack continues now with his series called First Samuel and a message titled Winning the Battles of Life Part Two. Samuel of the Old Testament was the last judge of Israel, and he was the first of its prophets. So here, as we continue in Chapter 17, we enter the battle between David and Goliath. Now, you see, the enemy will appear bigger than life to get you to become overwhelmed with anxiety and fear. The situation may even appear big when it stands or loud when it speaks. Whatever the enemy of our spirit says, it’ll be said with the intention of our destruction. So today, Pastor Jack teaches that like Israel, we have an enemy. Satan is ruthless, and he’s going to tell us that we’re powerless and we’re weak. A war is raging all around us still. We’ve got to enter the battle because the Lord tells us that the war has already been won. Now, with his message called Winning the Battles of Life Part Two, here’s pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs.
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1 Samuel chapter 17, and tonight we are in part two of our message as we’re going through a series entitled Winning the Battles of Life. And we come tonight to an exciting portion as this entire chapter, which by the way, it’s a huge chapter, 58 verses. Tonight, though, we’ll be looking at verses 8 through 11. In our study together, but before we dive into that and the study this evening being the challenge to enter into the battle, we remember a few key things. In verses 1 to 7, we learned last time that the Christian is involved in an invisible war. And we see the typology that is laid out before us as David comes up against Goliath. And as God had been preparing David’s life, so the Lord has been preparing your life and my life to be engaged in spiritual battle. And we mentioned that last time, and I could see on some faces how uncomfortable it was for some people to entertain the thought that we’re involved in a spiritual battle. Then I went on to say that it’s possible, highly probable, if not certain, that in this room right now, in the spirit realm, are angels. We talked about how there could be an angel sitting right here in the pulpit, looking around at you. Because we dwell, as it were, between two worlds. There’s the host of God and the angelic soldiers of God’s heaven, and then there’s the demonic forces of Satan. And they battle together. And we learn from the book of Daniel that there is warfare in the atmosphere, in the spiritual realm. And as we began to talk about that, I saw some of you kind of wanting to whistle and hum and kind of entertain yourself like, this can’t be real, no, uh-uh, that kind of scares me, no way. But it’s true. The Christian is involved in a spiritual and invisible war. And we talked about three things that we learned about, and that was that it’s all about territories. God is advancing your life, you are growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus, and the enemy wants to take that back. And though he cannot rob you of your salvation, he’ll do everything possible to sterilize you so you are not effective. It’s all about territories. That’s why you and I as Christians struggle with the old sins of our past life, because Satan, the world, the flesh, does not want to lose that ground. We talked about that. We also learned that it’s about defending what God has given to us. God gives it. God has given us the victory like he gave Israel the land. But there’s a war to be fought. There’s a battle to contend over and for and with against an enemy. And you and I are in that warfare and it is about defending what God has given us. And it’s a fight. We also learn that it’s about something bigger than us. When Goliath is to stand there and be in all of his giant state, we realize quickly, as David will apparently, in the sight of the human eye, look absolutely hopeless and helpless to the natural eye. We are no… contender for the spiritual world without Jesus Christ and without the Holy Spirit. We will lose. I see people like you do on certain television programs, or maybe you came from a certain hyper, perhaps Pentecostal background, and you’ll see or hear people saying, I rebuke you, Satan. I rebuke you, Satan. Nowhere do you see that in the Bible, by the way. In fact, when Michael the archangel was fighting and warring against Satan himself, Michael didn’t say, I rebuke you, Satan. I think that’s how Michael, he didn’t sound like us. He didn’t say it either. He said, the Lord rebukes you, Satan. Listen, Christian, contending in spiritual warfare, don’t walk up there and say, I rebuke you. Better to win the argument and say, the Lord rebukes you. The battle belongs to who? The Lord. Then we saw in verses three and four that in this war, there’s nothing fair. Did you know that? The enemy does not sleep. He’s always up. He’s always planning and scheming. And thus we are in a forever spiritual battle. There is nothing fair in the war that Satan wages. And we learned that the enemy is closer than you think. And we talked about the geographical location of the Valley of Elah and those two hills of which Israel was encamped on one hillside and Goliath and the Philistine army on the other side. And we talked about how many of us has visited that site. And you can talk one to another from hilltop to hilltop. And between that valley is the Valley of Elah. It’s a very condensed area. It’s pretty small. telling us that the enemy against our soul is often much closer than we think. Thus, we need the power of God in our lives. We so often get into the realm of thinking that the things that are going on around us just must be, you know, going bad because of bad luck. Did you know there’s no such thing as luck in the Christian’s life? Well, gee, I wonder why that happened. It could be that the spiritual battle’s closer than you think. We need to wake up to the reality that we are Christians, we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we are advancing the kingdom of God by the Spirit of God, and that’s going to go noticed by the enemy. I love it tonight. Did anybody drive by the property on the way into church this evening? Anyone? Did you see that crane on the property? It’s huge. They had to deliver it with multiple, multiple semis and assembled it on the site. It’s huge. I was told it’s over 300 ton crane. Huge. Where the guy sits in the cockpit for the crane, it’s in the second story. Go by there. It’s huge. I want to play on it. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I turned down from Payton Drive onto Eucalyptus, I was still about a mile away from the church, and I could see the crane. And it was on the other side of the freeway. And as I approached, I looked at it, and the thought came to my mind is, because I’m thinking about the message tonight, boy, is that gonna attract attention. And I wonder, I mean, I don’t wanna get wiggy about it, but you just wonder, you know? Lord, keep that crane safe. When they lift those walls, Lord, keep them, you know, in one place. God be there. Protect. People have been driving down the freeway. Not everybody’s for the project. And you just wonder what’s going on, you know? People have been attacking the signs that are on there. You see the signs that are on there? Prayer changes things. Some irate person nagged and nagged about America needs Jesus, and so the city asked us to take it down. We thought we’d be nice to the city and take it down. They wanted it up as much as we did, but you know what? It’s okay. The sign shows up now. Prayer changes things. And on the back side, it says, thank you, Jesus. I love it. Well, you know what? You know why the crane’s there right now? It’s just to draw attention to the sign that’s below it. Prayer changes things. And whoever was complaining is gonna drive still on the freeway every day to work and they look at it and they go, oh no! Could it be that prayer is changing that property? Where’d that crane come from? Prayer changes things. Whoever those people are that are complaining, we need to just love them. If we just knew who they were, we just need to love them. And they just need to wake up to the fact that our God reigns, you know. And the dirt that we’re building on, it’s his. It’s always been his, even though we had to buy it from somebody. It’s his dirt. The enemy is closer than we think, but God is mighty. We learned also that the enemy will come out after us. Goliath will come out. and taunt us and attack us and we learned that the enemy is more ruthless as a foe than we ever imagined and then we learned also in our third point that the enemy has resources that we don’t apparently have on the visible level we’re not very tall Goliath stood and Nine feet, six inches tall to ten feet tall is the estimation of his height. We know about his brothers and the other sons of Anak that were massive people. Beds have been found in archaeological discoveries. Beds have been found, dating back to ancient times B.C., of 14 1⁄2 foot long beds. Spears weighing 135 pounds, and they were used, by the way. They can tell by archaeological evidence that these spears didn’t hang in some palace as an ornate thing. They were huge. And they were used in war. We showed you a picture of Shaquille O’Neal, who’s a little, little 7’1″, compared to Goliath. A massive man. We are not very tall, but our God sits in heaven. We learned that we… Can’t even see sometimes our protection. We learned also that the enemy looks better equipped than we do as the Philistines had metal and they had… factories almost as it were to produce for them weaponry and sometimes we feel overwhelmed and we learned also that the enemy has a great army well tonight we come to the second part of this series of this message entitled tonight entering the battle verses 8 through 11 and it says then Goliath stood and cried out to the armies of Israel and said to them why have you come out to line up for battle am I not a Philistine And you, the servants of Saul, choose a man for yourselves and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants. But if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us. And the Philistines said, and the Philistine, excuse me, said, I defy the armies of Israel this day. Give me a man that we may fight together. And when Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid. The first thing we learn tonight is this in verse 8, that we must, we must enter into the battle because there’s a war raging. There’s a war raging. We are Christians and people, I think you know by now, that if you just look at the world around us, the war is not only raging in the spiritual sense. Jesus taught us that, light versus darkness. There’s evil increasing. But also, you see the things manifesting in the physical realm regarding war and things like We see how the United States is now embattled in a war that has really no borders. It’s the United States of America against a religious ideology. Isn’t that weird? Our enemy has no flag. He’s got no generals. Our enemy’s got no tanks. They’re, as it were, almost invisible, you know? And what a strange time we live in.
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You’re listening to Real Life with Pastor Jack Hibbs. To learn more about this ministry or to catch up on some previous episodes, go to jackhibbs.com. That’s jackhibbs.com. And now, let’s get back to today’s message. Once again, here’s Pastor Jack.
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But there is a battle raging. And from time to time, perhaps things manifest themselves from the spiritual realm to the physical realm much more than we think. And we need to be… Sensitive and alert to his appearance. Look at verse eight, it says, then Goliath stood. I have that marked in my Bible. That’s a big thing when Goliath stands. Goliath stood and he cried out to the armies of Israel and said to them, do you hear the threatening that’s in that? Do you hear it? When Goliath stood, what did it look like when he stood up? What did it sound like? He was covered in armor. Remember we learned last time that he’s covered in brass. and he stands up, and you hear the clanking and all, and this guy keeps going up, and he stands there, and he cries out. If standing there wasn’t enough, he cries out. I think many times in our lives, the situations that appear to be Goliath, listen, when they stand up, they’re so big, they’re so huge, we get overwhelmed by them, and then they cry out to us. The very situations of our life, crying out to us. And we’re right in the middle of these things and they’re challenging us. Just moments before I came into the sanctuary while worship was going on, Lisa just told me that a friend of ours, just in her middle to late 40s, went to sleep and she never woke up. She died in her sleep. She’s got young children, husband, wonderful Christian family. She went to bed. She never woke up. Situations of life. and what that family’s coping with tonight. Even though they love the Lord, they’re gonna be waking up morning after morning with that feeling. Have you ever been there when something cataclysmic has happened in your life and you wake up and the first thought in your mind is, I was dreaming, it’s not real. Remember that? Do you know that? Maybe you’re going through that. The situation is so big that it’s Goliath. And then if that wasn’t enough, it shouts at you. The appearance of the enemy in our lives is gigantic. Alan Redpath in his commentary on this portion of scripture says, I have no other word but to describe this giant as magnificent. He was altogether awesome. And there was nothing like him in the world. So many times the things of our life, they’re insurmountable. We look at them and we go, how can we beat this? How can we overcome this? And we’ve learned by now, haven’t we, that the things of life, they are impossible without God. Don’t you think God has engineered it that way? He’s done that. We look at it and we go, God, it’s too big. And he goes, yes, it is. It sure is. So God, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? Is there a mouse in my pocket, God might say? You mean, what am I going to do on your behalf? This is what I’m going to do. Yes, we entered the battle, but the war has already been won. Amen. Keep that in mind. The Christian doesn’t come out of his corner hoping that when the rounds are completed, that we’ll be victorious. The enemy’s already been judged. He comes out swinging. But the Bible reminds us that Satan is like a lion, roaming around, seeking whom he may devour. The great thing is for the Christian, that lion has no teeth. He comes up there and he roars and he growls and then he pulls back his lips, I guess. Lions have lips, I guess. And there’s nothing there but gums. But it’s the roaring that we freak out over. It’s a giant and it’s roaring at us. And it could be a big bill or financial problem and it’s roaring at us. Or it could be maybe a ministry that you’re venturing out into and you’re scared to death. In this case, it is an enemy of faith. A man who is uncircumcised, filthy, a Philistine, wicked, and notorious. And not only that, he’s got brothers. There was more than one giant running around. That’s why David grabbed five stones, by the way. Goliath had four other brothers, and their names are in Scripture. David’s a pretty smart boy, huh? Just in case the other boy showed up, he grabbed five stones. That’s faith. That’s cool. More on that. But that’s like three weeks away, though. We can’t even talk about that yet. It’s amazing, though, when the situation is so big and it’s so loud, it stands up and it speaks to us. And what does it speak? Well, the things that Goliath will speak. Things like accusations, lies. The enemy loves lies. Misrepresentations. That’s a good one. Propaganda, we would call it. Misinformation. Misinformation. Wrong. Just a little bit. Maybe that would be where we’d file false doctrine. Just a little bit off. The enemy loves that. Flattery. Now, Goliath’s not going to flatter anybody in our story, but how many people have fallen to flattery? Doesn’t the book of Proverbs warn us against flattery? Oh, did you hear what she said about me? Oh, stop it. She says that about everybody. Oh, did you hear what he said? He said I’m the best worker in the company. By it, many people have been deceived. 2 Corinthians chapter 11, verses 13 to 15 says, for such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder Paul is talking about false representation of of spiritual matters in the church. He says, no wonder these people show up, for Satan himself can transform himself into an angel of light. Therefore, it is no great thing that his ministers can also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works. Isn’t that amazing? Satan sees to it that he infiltrates the pulpit, Christian service, churches. He doesn’t care about the people that are in paganism or the occult. He cares about you. He wants to attack you.
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pastor and Bible teacher, Jack Hibbs, here on Real Life Radio with his message called Winning the Battles of Life, Part Two. You know, this message, by the way, is part of Pastor Jack’s series called First Samuel. It’s a series that highlights the prophet Samuel who was called by God during one of Israel’s darkest times to bring the people back to a heart of true worship. And we’ll continue on the next edition of Real Life Radio. This December, Pastor Jack Hibbs is doing something a little different and a lot special. All month long, he’s offering a double-feature Book of the Month, two very powerful resources to help you finish the year strong and step into the next year spiritually grounded. First, Pastor Jack’s annual favorite, the one-year Bible. Every year, lives are changed as people discover how simple and doable it is to read through the entire Word of God within just a few minutes a day. Also, Pastor Jack’s going to include his brand-new devotional, Watching Waiting. It’s a 40-day journey designed to help you slow down, look up, and recognize what God is doing in your life. So, this December, why would you choose one when you can get both and grow deeper? Visit jackhibbs.com to get your December Book of the Month double feature, the One Year Bible, and Pastor Jack’s brand new devotional, Watching Waiting. They’re available for a gift of any amount at jackhibbs.com. Again, that’s jackhibbs.com. So, Pastor Jack, we have listeners all over the world. And this Christmas season, anything special you want to say to those folks that spend some time with us as Real Life Network folks?
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Yeah, I mean, it is our hope. And I hope people have come to realize this, that we’re not in this for the… for the show of it, for the microphone of it, for the light of it. We’re in this for the word of God being placed in the hearts and minds of people. We take that extremely serious. And so I hope if I could communicate anything to our audience at this time of the year, it would be, we value you so very much that we haven’t even met you. We know that Jesus told us to go into all the world and preach this gospel and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, right? In the name of the Son and the Holy Spirit. And he said, and behold, I’m with you always, even to the end of the world. I think one of the key points to having Jesus with you is doing his business. And his business is for this audience to be well taught to know that we are as much as we can be in this world that we’re with them. I know that we’re limited in time and space, but we can communicate via these platforms of media. That we want them to be strong in Jesus and know his word. And don’t let anybody or anything take that from you. Because economies come and go, seasons come and go, but the wealth of knowing Christ and being invested in his word can never be taken from you. And so I think it’d be good for us to just pray right now. Always, always good to pray, no matter what. And Lord, we come before you and in our nation and in our country and in our state and our culture, in our churches. Lord, we have so much going on. And much of it, maybe all of it, could be a distraction. Lord, we pray that you’d streamline our hearts. You just settle our nerves. Lord, that you would just cool, as it were, by the wind of your Holy Spirit, the weather that is inside of us. And Lord, that you would cause there to be a deep-seated reliance upon you, a rest, a Shabbat, a Sabbath. of soul in the Lord Jesus Christ, our relationship with him. And Father, we pray that we would enjoy you more now than ever as the waves, as it were, begin to rage in our culture and the sky is darkening. Lord, may we be able to stand bold and strong in you because you are the one in whom we stand. And we, Lord, get to be bold because you are bold. You are the King of kings and the Lord of lords. And for us, that will be enough. In Jesus’ name, amen.
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Amen. This program is made possible by the generous contributions of you, our listeners. Visit us at jackhibbs.com. That’s jackhibbs.com. Until next time, Pastor Jack Hibbs and all of us here at Real Life Radio wish for you solid and steady growth in Christ and in His Word. We’ll see you next time here on Real Life Radio.
