Morning. Before I begin, I’d like to make one announcement: I’m engaged. No, just kidding.
I had to do that. On Wednesday night at the prayer meeting, the two Russian brothers, Yuri and Tada, will be sharing. So I want to encourage you to come out and find out what’s happening in Russia. The brothers are doing well, so I would encourage you to come and hear what’s going on.
I want to do a couple of things when I start, okay? I have a lot of verses today, so instead of turning to them all, if you’re a person who likes to write them down, they’re all there with great illustrations. Incidentally, the top one is not a Band-Aid.
Let’s read a verse first: 1 Timothy 6:12.
Fight the good fight of faith;
lay hold on the life eternal, whereunto thou wast called,
and didst confess the good confession in the sight of many witnesses.
Let’s pray.
Lord, I’m here to testify that Your love is steadfast, like we sang today. Your steadfast love is great, and, Lord, it has endured with me. I know, and I want to thank You and testify that that is true.
Now, Lord, we come to Your Word today. We don’t want to make it a bunch of information. We don’t want to handle it ourselves. So I come and give it into Your hands and ask, Lord, that You will take it, break it, and do with it as You want.
Lord, I pray that Your Word would be that which brings life to us, encourages us, and draws us to You; and that it would contain that seed of life which will bring forth fruit unto You and unto Your glory. Lord, these things are impossible for men even to think about happening. So, Lord, I give them into Your hands. We ask that You will bless us through this time that we have today through Your Word. In Jesus’ name, amen.
I was reminded by a brother—don’t worry, Jack, I won’t name who it is. He said, “You know, about three months ago, you said you had three more messages.” Oops.
But Paul said “finally” a number of times, so I feel that that’s okay. But I do feel that I have one more after this, so don’t hold me to it.
Today, as you can see from the little diagrams here, we’re looking at Ephesians 6:10 through about verse 20. This is a part of Scripture that, a lot of times, we take out of context. We look at it simply as armor and stuff like that, but we don’t ask where it comes in the section of the book.
As we finish this letter to the Ephesians, we have to realize that it started out by setting us on high and showing us where we are in Christ. We are in the heavenlies. We have redemption, the sealing of the Spirit, forgiveness of sins, and we are joint heirs and fellow citizens—all these wonderful things that are ours.
Then Paul brings us to the point of saying that it is not good enough simply to know these things. They have to be worked out in our lives. He goes on to tell us about walking—walking worthy of this calling that we have.
Finally, after he has spent a couple of chapters telling us how we should walk, he brings us to the place of saying, “All right, now it’s time to go.” As we start to walk, we find out that we have an enemy.
Brothers and sisters, we are not aquarium fish. God did not take us out because He likes colorful little fish, like the ones you see at the dentist’s office to take your mind off what is going to happen to you. God has not bought us as aquarium fish. He has put us out in the ocean to be lights to who He is.
So, as we look at this last section of Ephesians and think about what Paul is saying to us, let’s keep in mind that we are being set out. As we are set out, we come into a warfare.
Let’s read Ephesians 6:10-20.
Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.
Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Wherefore take up the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand.
Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness,
and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
withal taking up the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one.
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:
with all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints,
and on my behalf, that utterance may be given unto me in opening my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel,
for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.
Paul begins this last section by saying, “Brothers and sisters, now you have to be strong.” It would be really nice if, once we got saved, we lived a life with no hassles. But that is not true. In fact, once we get saved, it can seem as though our lives have more hassles. But that is the way it is supposed to be, because Christ is birthed in us through these trials.
His last exhortation is this: be strong—not in yourself, but in the Lord and in the power of His might. We have not been left to ourselves. We have the Lord in us; we have the Lord for us. And if God is for us, who can be against us?
Then Paul says, “Put on the whole armor of God.” The Greek word for armor is related to our English word panoply. It means the full array: put on everything. It is the complete equipment used by heavily armed infantry.
But before we get into the armor, I want to say a little about our enemy. I am not going to spend a lot of time on him, because that is not the purpose. The purpose is to look at what God has provided for us.
The wiles of the devil are his schemes. I would suggest another C. S. Lewis book for you: The Screwtape Letters. If you want to know about the wiles of the enemy, read The Screwtape Letters. You see the scheming and conniving against this believer as Screwtape and his underling Wormwood converse about how to trip him up, get him down, and destroy him.
That is what the enemy is after. The enemy comes to kill and destroy, to take away, and to rob you of what is yours.
Again, it says that we wrestle. Wrestling is not like the stuff you see on television. Watch a high school or college wrestling match. You have two or three-minute periods, and you are on your own. You have nobody to blame. In basketball, you can hide behind a bad pass or a referee’s call. In wrestling, it is just you and the other person. You cannot hide.
There are three positions. You start upright; sometimes you start down with the other person on top of you; and sometimes you start on top with the other person underneath you. Brothers and sisters, you do not want to be on the bottom in a wrestling match, because then you spend all your strength trying to get away. You want to be on top.
Another thing about our enemy is that he never dies. You need to understand that. There was a movie with the governor of California—Schwarzenegger—where the thing coming after him could not be killed. Every time you shot it, it came back to life.
The Terminator—right. The Governator, the Terminator. In that movie, you could not kill that thing. It is the same with our enemy. You will never kill him. He will always come back. You may think, “Oh, I finally got rid of him,” but you will never get rid of him until the Lord comes back.
It is as though he never sleeps. In C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra, the second book of his space trilogy, the character Weston is a personification of the enemy, the devil. He never sleeps. He waits and waits until the other person wakes up, and then he goes right back to his attack.
The enemy is oppressive. In a wrestling match, the person on top has the advantage. That is an oppressive weight. The enemy wants to be on top and make it so that you cannot move, so that you cannot even breathe. He wants to thwart everything that God has done and is planning to do.
That is who we are fighting against. We might say, “Oh, this is terrible. This is a rotten way to live.” No, it is not, because God has given us everything we need to fight.
Paul says, “Put on the full armor of God.” In 2 Corinthians 10, it says that the weapons we use are not carnal, but spiritual. We want to look at these spiritual weapons.
We are looking at each piece individually, but when you look at a soldier, you see everything together at once. The full armor of God is complete equipment used by heavily armed infantry.
Who is infantry? The common soldier. Brothers and sisters, this is not for the Christians we think are big, high, and heavy. This is for the common Christian. This is for all of us. It has been given to all of us when we enlisted—or when we were drafted—into this wonderful life that we are in. This is GI, general issue, to all of us.
First, there is the belt, because it says we are girded with truth. Notice that it does not say, “Girded with the truth.” We may think immediately of the Word of God, but I do not think that is what is primarily on the Lord’s heart here.
Psalm 51:6 says:
Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts;
And in the hidden part Thou wilt make me to know wisdom.
To be girded with truth means no double life. That is what it means. Our life is true; it is real. It is not half here and half there. The Lord has given us one life, and we are to take up that one life.
Hebrews 12 says:
Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses,
lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us,
and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.
And 2 Timothy 2:4 says:
No soldier on service entangleth himself in the affairs of this life;
that he may please Him who enrolled him as a soldier.
The whole thing about a belt is that it keeps your pants up. I know you are laughing, but it is true. When a soldier went out, he had to gather up his garment so that his legs would not get entangled in it.
Think about hip-hop culture. The style is to wear pants down low. My wife teaches fifth grade, and she tells about these little guys in hip-hop style trying to play basketball. They have one hand holding their pants up and the other hand trying to play basketball. That is pretty tough to do.
That is what Paul is talking about. You cannot get entangled. Have you ever been entangled in something? You can get tangled so that you trip, stumble, and fall; or you can get tangled so that you are snared and cannot move or get out.
If you are trying to run from a dog while holding up your pants, you are meat. The same thing is true spiritually speaking. If our lives are not true, if we are entangled in the things of this world, we are meat. We are ripe for the picking. We cannot do what we want to do.
God has given us a true life, a new life. We cannot say, “On Wednesdays and every other Friday, I am for the Lord, but at school I am for myself.” We cannot do that. It ensnares us, and it will entangle us sooner or later.
How do we stay on target without getting all wrapped up and becoming very legal about it? Psalm 139:23-24 says:
Search me, O God, and know my heart:
Try me, and know my thoughts;
And see if there be any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.
Brothers and sisters, we have been given a Helper: the Holy Spirit. He searches us. He knows how to look and what to look for. He points things out, and He convicts.
Anything that should not be there, He will convict in our hearts, and we will know. Our part is simply to respond positively. When He shows us what He wants out—when He says, “This needs to go”—we submit to that, because He is Lord.
We confess; we agree with Him; and then we repent. That is our part, but it is all because of what the Holy Spirit has done. Do not try to lay legal requirements on other Christians. Pray for them. Pray that the Holy Spirit will work in their lives, and let the Spirit do His work. You do not have to help the Spirit.
The second piece is the breastplate of righteousness. Notice that it has two pieces: a front and a back. We like the front piece. It looks good in the front, and people cannot see the back.
The first piece is the one we love. This is imputed righteousness. Romans 4:5-8 says:
But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly,
his faith is reckoned for righteousness.
Even as David also pronounceth blessing upon the man,
unto whom God reckoneth righteousness apart from works,
Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven,
And whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not reckon sin.
And 1 Corinthians 1:30-31 says:
But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus,
who was made unto us wisdom from God,
and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption:
that, as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.
We love imputed righteousness, and we should love it, because it truly is our salvation. Without this righteousness, how could we ever appear before God?
But if we only had a frontal piece, what would happen if someone sneaked up from behind? We would be dead. The breastplate has two parts because you can get at the heart from either direction—from the front or from the back.
The back piece is the one we have a tough time with. We have been made righteous so that we can be made righteous. Do you understand what I mean? We have been made righteous so that we can come into the presence of God and God can come and live in us. We have been made righteous so that we can be made righteous.
There is going to be a working of the Holy Spirit in us. Nothing is without the Holy Spirit. This is nothing of yourself. It is the gift of God, and the Holy Spirit in us is God’s gift to us for righteousness.
He wants to work practical righteousness in us. It is not simply that we have a façade. The worst thing you can be called is a Christian hypocrite—someone who wears the façade and says, “I can do as I please. I am righteous on the outside, but I can live however I want.”
Paul was accused of teaching that grace meant people could go out and live in all sorts of sin. But he said, “May it never be.” We have been made righteous so that we can be made righteous.
What is practical righteousness? In a short definition, it means that you do what is right in the eyes of God. Your actions and motives are pure.
How do we always do what is right? Again, we have been given a Helper. Romans 6:13 and 16 say:
Neither present your members unto sin as instruments of unrighteousness;
but present yourselves unto God, as alive from the dead,
and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
Know ye not, that to whom ye present yourselves as servants unto obedience,
his servants ye are whom ye obey;
whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?
Our part is that we give ourselves to God daily—even hourly. Do you not find during the day that you have to turn to God again and say, “Please get me back on the path”? It is a daily fight, an hourly fight, a minute-by-minute fight.
What is His part? Hebrews 12:11 says:
All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous but grievous;
yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that have been exercised thereby,
even the fruit of righteousness.
Chastening means discipline or training. We have a Trainer: the Holy Spirit who lives in us. He trains us. He witnesses, “Do not do that.” He urges us to do things and act according to what we have read in the Scriptures.
If we yield to His working in us, the fruit is righteousness. Notice that it is peaceable; it is not haughty. If it were us doing these things, we would be like the Pharisee praying, “I am glad I am not like these other men. I fast twice a week. I give tithes.”
It would be terrible to live with us. But when we are acting according to what the Lord is doing in us, we do not get a big head, because He does not let us see half the things. Others are the recipients of the actions through which the Lord reaches out and touches them. Therefore, we have no reason to be haughty.
The next piece is the sandal. I know it looks like a monster that is half-cocked there, and you are probably wondering about the teeth. They are not teeth.
When the Roman soldier fought, he had cleats on his sandals. They held the ground when he was fighting uphill so that he could not lose ground. They dug in. That is what those things are meant to be.
Paul says our feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Most people think we are going to talk about preaching the gospel. No, we are not. The key is that it says, “Feet shod with the preparation of the gospel.”
Does that mean we do not witness? No. You witness every chance you get. Every chance you get, speak up for the Lord. But what is this preparation of the gospel?
1 Corinthians 2:12 says:
But we received, not the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit which is from God;
that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God.
That is a starting point. Again, notice the Holy Spirit. We have been given the Spirit to show us what is ours.
Colossians 1:3-6 says:
We give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you,
having heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye have toward all the saints,
because of the hope which is laid up for you in the heavens,
whereof ye heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel,
which is come unto you; even as it is in all the world and beareth fruit and increaseth.
Something happened to these people. They heard the grace of God, and all of a sudden we see fruit coming.
1 Thessalonians 1:8-10 says:
For from you hath sounded forth the word of the Lord,
not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place your faith to God-ward is gone forth;
so that we need not to speak anything.
For they themselves report concerning us what manner of entering in we had unto you;
and how ye turned unto God from idols,
to serve a living and true God,
and to wait for His Son from heaven,
whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus,
who delivereth us from the wrath to come.
What is this preparation? I believe it is our being transformed by the truth of the gospel. Our being transformed prepares the way for the gospel.
Think about that. People see that transformation in you and in me. People learn best with object lessons. The children downstairs are not merely sitting there taking notes. They have flannel boards and things they can handle. People need to see things in reality.
Part of the armor is that you are being transformed. The Spirit begins to show you what is yours. When the people came into the land in the Old Testament, God said that everywhere their foot trod would be theirs.
Brothers and sisters, that is why you have spikes on those shoes: to hold you in the ground God shows you. “This is yours. This is Mine.” You do not slip away from it. Every time you take a step, the enemy is there to meet you. When you are victorious, that is when you are most vulnerable.
This transformation is shown in the ministry of John the Baptist. Isaiah 40:3-5 says:
The voice of one that crieth,
Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of the Lord,
make level in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be exalted,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low;
and the uneven shall be made level,
and the rough places a plain:
and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together.
The valleys—your pitfalls where you do not make it—are being filled in. Heavenly spackle is making things even and smooth. The places where you think you are so hot are being leveled. The crooked places in your heart, where you are not true, are being straightened out.
When people in your workplace or family know you and begin to see the change, they see the glory of God.
When Barb first got pregnant with Katie, we went to the library and got those books with pictures of what the fetus looked like at different stages. To tell the truth, at the beginning it looked like an alien. Then it was a big head with little things, almost like an insect.
In a way, that is like us being transformed. We start out with big heads because we are getting filled up with Bible knowledge. It may be the first time we have ever read the Bible, and we get all this knowledge.
But God will not let us be a freak. He says, “This has got to decrease. I have to squeeze a little bit so the arms pop out.” That does not really happen, but you know what I mean. Knowledge without feet, arms, and legs does not count. It means nothing. It is for naught.
If we get to the Lord when He comes back and all we are is knowledge, He will be really disappointed. He does not want floppy disks or CDs. He wants people—full-grown people.
You start out as that little fetus, but when you come out, you are full. You have arms, legs, fingers, and everything. That is what is happening to us now. We are in that state of development.
Paul writes it this way in 2 Corinthians 3:2-3:
Ye are our epistle, written in our hearts, known and read of all men;
being made manifest that ye are an epistle of Christ,
ministered by us, written not with ink,
but with the Spirit of the living God;
not in tables of stone, but in tables that are hearts of flesh.
Brothers and sisters, the preparation of the gospel is that we are His epistles. He is not finished with us. That is glorious, is it not? He has more to write.
When people see it, it softens the heart—or it hardens it. There is no neutral ground when people are truly presented with the gospel. They are either smitten by it or they hate it. That is what Paul found in Acts: people either rejoiced or kicked him out of town.
The shield of faith has two aspects. Often we are attacked with thoughts like, “You are so unworthy. How can you come before God?” One part of the shield of faith is found in Colossians 2:13-15.
And you, being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh,
you, I say, did He make alive together with Him,
having forgiven us all our trespasses;
having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us:
and He hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross;
having despoiled the principalities and the powers,
He made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.
I chose that verse because it says that He disarmed principalities and powers. This is such a powerful thing: the blood of Christ for us.
When we come under attack because of our unworthiness, we hold up that shield and say, “You are disarmed. That has been nailed to the tree. It is gone.” That is part of the new covenant. He will remember our sins no more.
We have selective memories. You would think we would remember the good and not the bad. But when the enemy is having a field day with us, we remember all the bad stuff. It comes in like a flood, and we like to play with it. We look through the old pictures and say, “Oh, yeah. Oh, I’m bad.”
But the Lord says, “Where is the shield? That stuff is gone. Put up the shield. Protect yourself so you can go on.”
The other aspect of the shield is looking back at your own experience. Has God been faithful? Has God been faithful to you?
One of the enemy’s tactics is to say that God’s character is not true. Is that not what he said to Eve? “Did God say that? He is not telling you the whole story. He just does not want you to know this.” He impugns God’s character.
Or look at the Israelites. Circumstances came, and they said, “Woe is me. Why are You doing this to me, Lord? You brought us out here to kill us, haven’t You?”
But His character is faithful. He loves us. Is that not what we were talking about this morning—the love of God for us? Romans 8 says that nothing—neither life nor death nor principalities nor anything else—shall separate us from the love of God.
That is the shield of faith. Look to your own experience. Has God not been faithful? Has God not been good? Is He going to change? He says He is unchangeable. If He changed, He would be a liar and cease to be God.
The helmet is probably my favorite part, because I have told you before that I am not really physical; I am cerebral. The helmet of salvation protects the head, where all our brain functions go on. If we are hit in the head, it affects our whole body—the way we speak and the way we move.
1 Thessalonians 5:8 says:
But let us, since we are of the day, be sober,
putting on the breastplate of faith and love;
and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.
The helmet is the hope of salvation. Before we are saved, we think of salvation as the forgiveness of our sins. But now that we are saved, our sins are forgiven. So what is our salvation?
1 John 3:2-3 says:
Beloved, now are we children of God,
and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be.
We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him;
for we shall see Him even as He is.
And every one that hath this hope set on Him
purifieth himself, even as He is pure.
Colossians 1:27 says:
To whom God was pleased to make known
what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles,
which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
This is where I am really faulty. I do not often look at the finished work. We think of the finished work as Christ dying on the cross and shedding His blood for us. That is included in the finished work, but it is not the whole finished work.
The finished work is us being like Him. Can you see that? I do not mean, “Can you see my reasoning?” Can you see the finished work?
In Pilgrim’s Progress, remember the muckraker? How many of us are muckrakers? “Oh, man, this is so bad.” But right above him the whole time is a crown, and he never looks up.
How many of us are not looking up to see what He has promised us and what is ahead? How many of us, when we think about going before Christ at the judgment seat, think, “This is going to be tough”?
But how many of us believe God—that He is able to make us into what He said He is going to make us into? That is what we are to be looking at. That is what encourages us. “I am going for this goal.”
When I was in college, we had to run Fasten Cherry Hill. It was one steep hill, and we did it about three times a week. We hated it. It was terrible. Even coming down was not fun.
But the coach said, “In March, you guys are going to be so fit.” It was the beginning of basketball season, and we were running in October. I hated it, but I held on to March. By the end of the season, we were running circles around other people. He knew what he was doing. All we had to do was submit to it.
That is the whole thing. We try to do all these things ourselves, and the Lord has given us His Holy Spirit to lead us. When we sense Him prodding us in a direction, we just submit to Him. There are no mental gymnastics. It is simple: I see the Spirit doing this, and I submit.
We are muckrakers, but can we look ahead? Paul says:
Forgetting the things which are behind,
and stretching forward to the things which are before,
I press on toward the goal unto the prize
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
He is calling us upward. Look up, for your salvation draweth nigh. It does not say, “Look down.” It says, “Look up. Look for Him.”
Have you seen the finished work? Hope is not a wish: “I hope I get a pony.” Hope is an expectation. Are you expecting this? Are you expecting a crown—not because you are something else, but because you are trusting God? Is He able to do these things? Can you expect this from Him? We have to change our minds and our way of thinking.
The sword of the Spirit. I did not put any Scriptures beside the sword because you could find so many. Look at Psalm 119 by itself. Read it over the next few days. It is all about the Word of God and what the Word of God is for you.
“Thy word have I laid up in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee.” “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet.” In Acts, it says that the Word is able to build you up.
The sword is the offensive weapon that we have. But it is not just Scripture knowledge. I am not saying that you should not know or study the Scriptures. But it is not just that we can spout Scripture at the enemy and he says, “Oh, I’m afraid.”
Even when the Lord Jesus quoted Scripture to the enemy, the enemy responded, “Oh, you can quote Scripture? Well, so can I.” Read Matthew 4, the Lord’s temptation.
Sometimes we think knowledge alone will make it. I remember as a young man, about twenty years old, listening to tapes on Mormonism. Then I went out looking for Mormons. You know how it is when you are young. You think, “Okay, I’ve got to get this guy off his feet.” But I came to a guy who almost knocked me off my feet.
Knowledge is nothing. But real knowledge counts, and real knowledge is experiential knowledge.
Again, I am not saying, “Do not read the Scriptures.” Read the Scriptures all you can. Meditate on them. The Lord will use that wealth of Scripture stored up in you through reading and memorizing. At certain times, boom, He will speak a word to you out of that.
Some people call that the rhema: the word for that specific circumstance. “This is it right now.” It is the key to something. It is the sword of the Spirit. It makes you go forward, not backward. You are not merely defending yourself; you are going forward.
It may be like Abraham: “I want you to leave everything and go where you do not know where I am asking you to go.” But you start going. “I have the word that He has called me out. I am going.” The fruit may not come for a while, but the point is that you act on it. That is the word for you today.
Let me give you an example of how the Lord uses this. I am not saying you should go out doing this. One real low point in my life came when I was a junior in college. I had lost my girlfriend, I was no longer starting on the basketball team, and I was miserable.
It was Christmas, and I was stuck in one of those mall traffic jams. There was a little Volkswagen Bug in front of me, and I read the license plate: “R-E-V 3:08.”
The Lord said, “Read that Scripture.” Revelation 3:8. Here I was, ready to give up and throw in the towel, and it was the very Scripture I needed.
I know thy works—
behold, I have set before thee a door opened,
which none can shut.
I was feeling that I could never get back to the Lord. That was the rhema for me. That was the sword of the Spirit that cut through all the enemy’s stuff: “I have set before you an open door, and no one can shut it.”
Now react to Me. Respond to Me. What are you going to do? If you do something with it, you will find what the Lord wants and what He is trying to give you. If you do not, He will wait for another turn on the merry-go-round until you come around again. But He is faithful.
Last, I do not have it up here: all prayer. What is different about this? It does not say “the sword” or “the breastplate.” So what is all prayer?
All prayer is the soldier in the armor. The armor itself is something to study, but armor by itself is nothing. It is what the soldier does with it. Prayer is a position of dependence.
No infantry soldier goes anywhere without being in contact with superior officers. It is the same with us. We may have all the armor, but we must also have that relationship with the One higher than us, the One who tells us where to go and sends us this way or that way.
It says, “Take up the whole armor.” It is the whole thing, not part and parcel. “I’ll take the feet; I like that part.” No. “I like the sword; I like to play with swords.” No. It is the whole thing.
Would you like to see what it looks like when it is all put together? This is who it is. This is our armor: Christ.
He is the girding of the loins. He is that holiness. He is that righteousness worked out in us. He is that preparation for the gospel. He is that sword. He is that shield. He is everything.
This is what we have been called to: Christ in us, the hope of glory.
In closing, the armor stays the same. It is not going to change. These are all the things that the armor will ever be. But as we walk on with the Lord daily, in the strength of the power of His might, we are able to bear thicker armor—not heavier armor.
I am glad I caught myself there. It is not heavier armor, because that would suggest this weighs you down. It does not. Jesus said:
Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me;
for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.
It is thicker armor. What I mean is that the Holy Spirit is able to go deeper. He is able to go deeper.
It is like a burn. A small burn is on the surface of the skin. A second-degree burn goes below the surface, and a third-degree burn goes further still. In leprosy, the disease goes deep down. Christ is the opposite of that. He is to go deep down in us.
He is not to be a surface thing or a façade. He is to be our life. He is to go deeper and deeper and deeper. There is never an end, because He is eternal. He is great in all of that, and we will never come to the end of Him.
Another thing: there is no such thing as a one-man army. No such thing.
When an army is sent out to fight, they do not say, “Hey, Keene, you’re it.” That would be disastrous. They send out the whole body.
In Ezekiel 37:1-11, it talks about the valley of dry bones. The Lord says, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I love Ezekiel’s answer because he does not say, “Oh yeah, Lord, You are God. You can do anything.” He says, “O Lord God, Thou knowest.”
Then the Lord calls the sinews, calls the flesh, and breathes in life. It says that they became a great army.
A soldier is in an army. An army is many soldiers. Brothers and sisters, we are not called simply to be individual Christians. We are called to be an army.
An army has individual soldiers, but the army fights as a whole. If you have watched old Roman movies, you will have seen the tortoise formation. When they came into the range of the archers, the outside men put up their shields, the men on the sides put up their shields, and the men in the middle put their shields overhead like a turtle shell. It protected them because they moved together as an army.
Brothers and sisters, this is really important. We are called not only as individuals but also to become this army, this body. We cannot let it be just me.
That is the hardest thing in the world. I know, because I am a private person, and it is hard for me. But that is what we are called to, and there is glory in it.
Do you want to see the rough places made smooth? You have to be in fellowship with brothers and sisters. Do you want to see the high places taken down? You have to be in fellowship with brothers and sisters. Do you want to see the crooked ways made straight? You have to be in fellowship.
God has called us to this, and it is to His glory. It is hard enough for us to look at the finished product for ourselves. But can you imagine what God sees? All brothers and sisters made as one into that glorious bride.
For the joy set before Him, can we also get to the point of saying, “For the joy set before me, Lord, give me a vision of what You are after in me so that I can lay hold of it for myself and step up to the next rung”?
Let me have that vision. That is what we need individually and as a whole group of people. May God’s will be done.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You that even though we have an enemy who will not die, You have not left us to ourselves. We want to thank You for all that You have given us.
Lord, we want to thank You for the Holy Spirit, and we ask that we would give Him more reign in our lives. Lord, how precious it is that He dwells in us.
Oh Lord, help us to hear His voice when He convicts us, when He gives us that rhema to go on, and when He reminds us how faithful You have been. Lord, help us to see more and more of His ministry in our lives, and help us to respond more and more to Him.
Father, give us that vision of what it is that You have planned to do. Give us that vision of that completed work, where we can see that this is Your end. Then we can say, “Amen.” We can agree with You and say, “Amen. That is what I want too.”
Lord, we know that there is no condemnation in any of these things we have said. There is only the letting us know what is ours, so that we might take hold of it and be transformed into that likeness.
Lord, we thank You that You place these things before us. We ask that You would have Your way. Do what You want to do in us. Help us to give You that sway. We ask this in Jesus’ name.