Victory Church: Paul Daugherty · Victory Church

WHO'S AT THE DOOR? | PAUL DAUGHERTY | EPHESIANS 4:17-32

·1 hr·5 clips

Watch as Pastor Paul demonstrates how the devil only needs a crack in the door to gain a foothold in your life.

Ephesians four gets loud fast. The message opens with Oklahoma banter, campus greetings, and a quick return to the call to grow up spiritually. Then comes the knock. Paul builds the sermon around Ephesians' warning about giving the devil a foothold, with the charge to shut the door coming back again and again. He makes temptation feel physical, like an unwanted visitor standing close enough to knock and wait for a careless opening. The tone stays warm, but the pressure does not let up. Spiritual maturity is not treated like church vocabulary. It is daily surrender at the door. Then the hamster story swerves in. Paul remembers wanting to mount his dead hamster on the wall, and the absurd image becomes a clean picture of how people keep dead habits nearby. The joke gets a laugh, but it has teeth. Missing the old way of life starts to look like dragging a corpse back into the house after Christ has made someone new. He names the fight without dressing it up. The flesh still wants what it should not want, and Romans 7 gives people a way to tell the truth without pretending holiness happens automatically. Nobody gets much room to posture. If every thought hit the big screen, the room would feel it, so the invitation is not public shame. It is honest repentance. The old self has to come off. The new self comes as mercy, forgiveness, salvation, and a life made in Christ instead of run by impulse. The closing prayer stays direct. Paul leads listeners to repent of living their own way, confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, and open the door to the Holy Spirit. Mercy gets the last word, but the response is still practical: change what needs changing, pull out what needs pulling out, and put in what belongs there.

As heard by us

A direct sermon about shutting the door on old habits and choosing change.

The sermon starts in Ephesians 4 and keeps the focus on a simple question: who is at the door? It takes Paul's warning in verse 27 about not giving the devil a foothold and turns it into a direct call to shut the door on what should not stay.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a blunt, Scripture-first sermon about shutting the door on the old life.

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