In this episode of the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, host Greg Ryan expands on the theme of spiritual warfare, emphasizing that believers must first recognize the reality of three enemies—Satan, his lies, and the world’s deception—and then defeat them by immersing themselves in the Word of God. He recounts his personal transformation after accepting Christ, describing the death of the "spirit man" and the birth of a new creation placed in the body of Christ. Ryan distinguishes true discipleship from merely making converts, urging listeners to make disciples of all nations as commanded in the Great Commission. He stresses the necessity of daily engagement with Scripture, likening it to a daily bath that removes Satan’s influence, and introduces Ephesians 6:10‑18 as the biblical blueprint for putting on the armor of God to stand against spiritual forces. Throughout, he uses vivid analogies—spiritual battles, the punk as a liar thief, and the need for continual spiritual hygiene—to motivate listeners to prioritize Scripture, prayer, and obedience. The episode concludes with a prayer and a reminder to continue the journey of truth in the next episode.
Welcome to episode 262, In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ.
Here's Greg. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I'm continuing to talk about our enemy, or actually our three enemies, and how we can defeat them using the Word of God. And the first thing we've got to do when you start battling an enemy or an opponent is you have to at least recognize that they're real. And I believe that is a key to finishing this work here on earth, is we have got to call the punk out. We have got to know that he's a real entity. We also have to know and be reminded multiple times that he is defeated, that it's— the Bible is clear, it says, greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world.
And I've—
that's how I've got it memorized. It may not be exactly verbatim, and you'll see If you're just visiting with me on the first time with this podcast or this episode, you're going to see that I have a lot of scripture inside of me. It may not be exactly right, and when I start getting a little twisted up, I go to the word of God and I read it and I just sit there and I meditate on it. And I want to encourage you to do the same thing. And I call this a soapbox moment, and that's because that's exactly what it is. I jump up on this soapbox and I say, look, you have got to be in the word of God. There is no other way to defeat evil than the Word of God. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." And we talked about that in the previous episode where Pilate was saying to Jesus and to the crowd, "What is the truth?" And he mocked, really, the truth. And Jesus is the truth, so he was mocking Jesus. And I want you to notice that Jesus didn't tell Pilate, hey, I'm the truth, I'm the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus did not argue or did not defend his position. Jesus was there that day to die. So Jesus was not going to take himself off of the cross. He came to die a death that you and I deserve to die, but he took our place. And that is what makes God so wonderful is that love story that when it— when we were separated, when Adam and Eve bit from the fruit off of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes were opened and sin came into the world. And I've got to picture everything. I know that if you've been here with me for a long time, you'll know that I got to kind of see a picture of everything. And I picture when man bit that fruit His spirit man just died. It just went dark, it went black. And I don't know, kind of like what right now, I can't feel my spirit. I know my spirit man is alive because that's what the Bible says. I, I could tell there was a difference when I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and as my Lord and Savior. When I did that, something changed. And then I started getting into the Bible, and I think there was two transformations. And I don't know that a lot of people talk about this, and that's why I'm kind of wanting to open this up. When you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, your spirit man was dead and it became alive. I believe you were totally changed. You became a new creation, or a new creature in Christ Jesus. You were placed into the body of Christ right then, just exactly at that split second When you accepted, you died and became alive again in Christ. So now you are in the body of Christ. I just want to give you this picture because I've got to picture everything, but I have been placed in the body of Christ. And I'm not placed in the body here one day and over here the next day, and I'm a little toe today, but tomorrow I'm going to be a nose, and next Thursday I'm going to be an eye. No, I've been placed in the body of Christ as God saw fit, and I have been put there to help build God's kingdom. And you are the same. You have been placed in the body of Christ, and one of our jobs is to figure out where we are and why God called us into this. And I believe the reason that I'm here is to help encourage, empower, and inspire you to get into the word of God. There's a battle going on. You can watch this on YouTube You can pick up a book, a magazine, you can read a blog post, but when you start picking up your Bible consistently, you are going to have opposition. I don't know if you've ever noticed that, but there's a hundred different things, maybe thousands, that get in the way of you reading the Bible, and you've got to make up your mind because we are told to make disciples of all nations. That's the Great Commission when Jesus said, hey, You go make disciples of all nations, teaching them all the things that I've commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. And that is found in Matthew 28, I think it's 16 through 18, I don't know. But that's the Great Commission where Jesus said that we were to be— to make disciples of the nations. And disciples is totally different than making babies. It is easy to make babies here in the real world. In fact, I would argue that's the fun part, is making babies. When the baby is born and when the baby starts growing, then we start protecting, then we start teaching, then we start nurturing, and we start showing. And that's where, you know, where it gets messy, for lack of a better word. I don't know if you've ever had a child, you know that they sleep, they eat, and they mess up their diaper. I mean, that's really about all they— they cry and they, you know, sometimes they laugh, but in the early stages, really all they're— and I'm not going to say good for because I love my grandkids, I love my kids, but there's not a lot going on there. You— they are so dependent on you to take care of. When we are born again, we are babies. We are babies in Christ. We have to learn how to get into the Word of God. And I think some of the churches, they're counting babies and they're counting how many commitments they get that walk the aisle or whatever they want to say. But Jesus didn't say to make babies. Jesus said to make disciples. In John 8:31-32, if you abide in my word, You are my disciple indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Your freedom will come from what you know of the truth. And if you spend time with God— I've got a friend of mine, we've been friends ever since high school, and we would run together. We, in our senior year in high school, me and my friend, we would run together. And then we started hanging out in college., and we spent an awful lot of time together. We played softball. I mean, we did a lot of stuff together, and people would call me him and him me because they would— we— it was kind of like two peas in a pod. We would finish each other's sentences. And I don't know if you've ever had a friend like that that you spend a lot of time with, but that's kind of how the Holy Spirit and the Bible and the Jesus and the Word and Father God— when you start spending time in this Bible, you start becoming like God. And that's why the punk don't want you in there, because he does not want you to start thinking God thoughts, and he don't want you to start seeing your life as helping build the kingdom of God. He wants it to be all about you, and he wants you to get into this physical realm so he can just— and I've used this before, but he He wants to mop the floor with you. He wants to turn you into a mop, dunk you into this sin and world, and just mop the dadgum floor with you. And I just want to encourage you, you have got to get into the Word of God to fight him, because he comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy. Jesus came that they would have life and have it more abundantly. It is picking a side time We have got to either pick good or we pick evil. We pick light or we pick darkness. And when we start thinking about who we're fighting— and Paul, I think, pictured it wonderfully well in Ephesians, and I'm going to read that real quick. It's in Ephesians 6. It starts in 10. Ephesians 6:10: Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. And then it talks about standing again and then putting on the whole armor. But I just want to— I want you to hear a couple of things in these 4, 3 or 4 verses. He's telling you to be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might, God's might, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. He's not talking about the power, and he's not talking about the awesomeness of Satan. He is talking about wiles, wicked schemes. How he can maneuver and twist and manipulate. He is a punk. He is a liar. He is a thief. He needs to get his teeth kicked in by you every single day. And the only way to do that, the only way to do that, is to get into the Word of God, present yourself, your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your reasonable service. And then you can resist the devil. If you've submitted yourself to God, you can resist the devil and he will flee from you. And that is how we kick him out of our lives every single day. It's kind of like taking a bath. You've got to kick Satan out of your life every day, just like one bath a week doesn't get it covered. You have got to bathe. I hope you bathe more than once a week, but you've got to— you got to brush your teeth more than once a day. I would encourage you especially more than once a week. But there's things that you've got to do that have to be done over and over again, and kicking Satan out of your life is one of those things. You put on the whole armor of God, and we're going to talk about that in the next episode. I've talked about this in previous episodes, but I want to revisit it while we're talking about beating the punk out of our lives. I want to encourage you with the truth, because in this world with all of the chaos, with all of the fear, and with all of the misinformation. I mean, you know, and I've talked about it in our previous episode, if you can't define what the definition of a man is and what the definition of a woman is, if you don't know those definitions, then you're in trouble. You're in trouble. I'm not talking about what society says, because it's always changing, and that is why this truth. When Jesus said that you build your life on this rock, this solid foundation, that's what we got to do. You've got to know what's in this word so that you can stand on it. And if you stand on this rock, you're not going to get shaken. And you may get— people may make fun of you because they do me, and people may get angry. I'm going to talk about a scripture in the next episode It's in Ezekiel that is kind of my calling card and how God called me out in the Old Testament. And I'll talk— remind you about what God said in the New Testament. But that— I just looked up at the clock and I'm going along, and I hate when I get to rambling on, and I apologize. But let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for your word. Holy Spirit, I thank you for being here with us. You said you would never leave us nor forsake us. And Jesus, you said that where any two or three are gathered as touching any one thing in, in my name, then you are there with us. And I thank you that as this listener listens and as I'm speaking, Lord, that we are together on this one topic and you are in the middle of this topic. And we thank you, Lord. We love you. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you in the next episode.
Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.
