Gear Up

JOHN MARK CATON, PhD

Suiting Up to Stand Firm Against the Enemy

GEAR UP

Copyright © 2024 Cottonwood Creek Church ISBN: 978-1-955362-21-4 All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

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Author Credits to Dr. John Mark Caton (www.johnmarkcaton.com) Cover design by Pie in the Sky Studios (www.pie-in-the-sky.com) Published by

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv Preparing for Battle CHAPTER ONE.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Belt of Truth CHAPTER TWO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Breastplate of Righteousness CHAPTER THREE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Shoes of the Gospel of Peace CHAPTER FOUR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 The Shield of Faith CHAPTER FIVE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 The Helmet of Salvation CHAPTER SIX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 The Sword of the Spirit CHAPTER SEVEN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Prayer ABOUT THE AUTHOR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Introduction

PREPARING FOR BATTLE

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I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace.

In this world you will have trouble.

But take heart!

I have overcome the world.

— JOHN 16:33

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The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you.

— C.S. LEWIS

On an evening roughly two thousand years ago, Jesus sat with His disciples in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem.

They had gathered to break bread together, in observation of the Seder meal that commemorated the beginning of Passover—the seven-day festival that honored the liberation of the Hebrew people from the bonds of Egyptian slavery. In the Apostle John’s Gospel, that night around the Passover meal spans a significant portion of his whole book, beginning in John 13 and concluding with Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane in John 18.

Throughout those chapters, Jesus washes His disciples’ feet, tells them of the promised coming of the Holy Spirit, prays for the unity of what would eventually be called the Church, and much more. In His lengthy set of parting words to His disciples, knowing that Judas already set His betrayal in motion, Jesus makes a statement promising His disciples—and us, by extension—two things: 1) that we will have trouble in this world; and 2) that we can have peace because He has overcome the world.

The first promise sounds a lot more familiar than the second, doesn’t it?

Survey after survey overwhelmingly testifies to the fact that we are overburdened, exhausted, and filled with anxiety and fear. It doesn’t take much convincing for us all to acknowledge that this world is indeed full of trouble. And our “first-world problems” here in the United States and other parts of the Western world are nothing compared to the persecution and violence our brothers and sisters in Christ experience in other parts of the world. For them—just as it was with the apostles—the trouble to which Jesus referred is literally a matter of life and death. But Jesus acknowledges that reality. In fact, He doesn’t just acknowledge it, He guarantees it. Elsewhere, Jesus went as far as to promise His followers that they would be hated because of Him (Matt. 10:22; Luke 21:17). Talk about a sales pitch!

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Gear Up | Caton Jesus says life is going to be chaotic, …it is going to be ugly, …it is going to be messy, …it is going to cause you to be fearful, …and it is going to cause you to worry.

The world is going to throw its worst at you, but Jesus promises that He has overcome the world. Note that Jesus said these words before He even went to the cross. That’s how confident He was that the salvation plan that was about to unfold to redeem humankind was going to work.

Jesus promises that in Him you can have peace. That peace is not simply the absence of worry. Instead, peace in Christ is that all things are restored to completeness and wholeness as they were designed to be.

Jesus promises that what lies ahead in our Christian walk is a battle. But it is a battle where, through Him, we already have the victory. Paul elaborates on the details of how we’re to gear up and fight in the Spirit in his letter to the Ephesians. He likens the process of gearing up for spiritual battle to a Roman soldier suiting up in his armor, in preparation for war.

That prepared state, when we have taken up the full armor of God, is how we walk in the peace promised to us in Jesus, who on that night died as our Passover Lamb and who, three days later, was raised as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

While Paul’s armor metaphor is described in Ephesians 6, the whole letter to the Ephesians is a helpful guide for understanding how to walk in the victorious life offered to us by Jesus. In chapter one he tells us that you and I, as followers of Christ, have been blessed with every spiritual blessing.

In particular, I love Ephesians 1:3-5: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—”

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When was the last time you hopped out of bed in the morning, fully aware that you were chosen by God? And you weren’t simply chosen by God to tend to His business or property like a hired hand. You were chosen for adoption. The term for adoption in the Greek is a legal term that referred to a son adopted into a Roman family with the full benefits of being an heir, as though he were born into the family.

Before we were even created—even before there was an Adam and Eve or a garden—you and I were predestined for adoption. We were marked out like an adoptive parent who sees their new daughter or son for the first time and resolves, “this child is ours.” There’s nothing special the child has done at that moment, but it is the loving fixation of the parent, coupled with an internal resolve, that will do whatever must be done to bring that child into their home.

In the same way, God fixated on you and me before we were even in our mother’s womb (Jer. 1:5) and said, “this one belongs in my family. I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure that happens.” Before the foundation of the world, God thought that about you and me. It’s mindboggling. You were set apart for daughtership and sonship, to be full heirs in fulfillment of God’s covenantal promises (cf., Gal. 3:29).

You’re blessed. You’re chosen. You’re beloved. You’re redeemed.

Paul follows this line of thought throughout the letter, training the young church in Ephesus how to live together in the family of God in a way that brought mutual flourishing to each other and was a witness to the onlooking culture as a testimony to the greatness of God. When Paul gets to chapter six, he describes how being a son or daughter of God also requires that we fight to walk in the peace offered to us in Christ. He acknowledges that Satan, the adversary, is determined to undermine your and my identity as children of God and throw us off track so that we lose sight of Jesus and the salvation He offers. Satan is determined to erode the witness of the Church in the eyes of an onlooking culture by distracting God’s people from the main thing—the Gospel.

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Gear Up | Caton So, Paul charges the believers in Ephesus to gear up for battle. One piece of armor at a time. In Ephesians 6:10-18 he describes the spiritual tools at the disposal of every Christian: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore, put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.

Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the Sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.”

Throughout the rest of this book, we’re going to look at each of these pieces of armor that Paul admonishes us to put on. I believe that God is calling His people to recognize the battle we’re in and gear up to wage war together in the spiritual realm. Before we get into the details, however, I want to offer four reasons why we should bother with gearing up for battle in the first place.

Gearing Up Allows Us to Live with God’s Power When we look at Paul’s opening line to this section, he encourages us to be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. What follows is built on this truth. We could reasonably say, “Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty

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power…so put on the full armor of God.” Putting on the full armor of God is how we walk in the power of God. The word “finally” is quite a forceful stamp, too. This is Paul’s conclusion to the chapters that preceded. This is his call to arms for the Ephesians.

It is our call to arms today. If we want the blessings, unity, and power spoken of in the preceding chapters, we’d better heed the “finally.”

It’s worth noting here that while Paul mentions the enemy in his discussion on spiritual warfare, he is not “enemy obsessed.” His admonition is incredibly Jesus-centered instead of Satan-centered. That may sound obvious; but when talking about spiritual warfare, some people can become so obsessed with the war and the enemy on the other side that they lose sight of the King in whose name we wage war. Paul doesn’t do that. He doesn’t shy away from recognizing where the attacks come from; but at the end of the day, Paul recognizes that the power in which we wage war comes from the Lord.

We would do well to maintain that focus on the source of our power.

It’s important to avoid sinning, but you can avoid sin and lose sight of Jesus. If you keep your life centered around Jesus, the sin thing has a way of getting worked out, too. You can focus on fending off the attacks of the enemy; but if you lose sight of Jesus, you might miss when He speaks.

If you keep your life centered around Jesus, you’ll hear His still, small voice and stay connected to your source of power to fend off the attacks of the enemy. Spiritual warfare is Jesus-centered, not Satan-centered.

Gearing Up Allows Us to Stand Up to Satan’s Attacks Gearing up for war prepares us to stand up to Satan’s attacks.

Verse 11 explicitly says this. We put on the armor so that we can stand up to the attacks of the enemy. Child of God, regardless of where you live, how long you’ve been following Jesus, or how holy or unholy you think

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Gear Up | Caton you may be; I can promise you this: Satan is going to attack you. I don’t know how or when, but it’s a guarantee. Even now, the enemy is plotting and planning to tempt you and to take you out. But Jesus.

Paul’s admonition calls us to put on the full armor offered to us by our salvation in Jesus. We have the armor because of Jesus. We wage battle in the name of Jesus. And we have victory because of the power of Jesus.

Note that Paul says to put on the full armor of God. Not just the shoes.

Not just the helmet. The whole thing. He’s not suggesting you and I can à la carte our way onto the battlefield. Because each and every piece of the armor of God is made to work together, interdependent with the others.

We stand against the attacks of the enemy by taking up the full armor of God. When he seeks to attack you, Satan usually runs one or more of the same three plays. He has a very small playbook, but that speaks to how effective those plays are, not a lack of creativity on his part. Scripture actually tells us what those three plays are in 1 John 2:16: “For everything in the world— the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.”

People sometimes get tripped up at this verse because of the word lust— they naturally think of sex. But, more broadly, lust speaks of a sinful appetite. Lust is a deep yearning to take something for oneself. In his so-named book (Harper Collins, 1985), Richard Foster accurately puts these three plays into modern language: Money, Sex, and Power. Each of these things are more than just what we think of: 1) What’s in my bank account?

2) Adultery and pornography 3) Abuses of position

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More broadly, money refers to matters of dependance on God and others, sex on matters of being known by God and others, and power on how we position ourselves in relation to God and others.

When Satan runs one of these plays, he attempts to derail us from living in union with God and in unity with others, both of which are God’s good, created design for humankind. But Paul reminds us that by taking up the full armor of God, we are geared up to resist the attacks of the enemy.

Gearing Up Allows Us to See Beyond Our Present Circumstances “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”

— EPHESIANS 6:10-13

A lot of times when we find ourselves in a battle, we think it’s us versus whatever person we’re dealing with: me versus them. But Paul reminds us in verse twelve that gearing up means looking beyond our present circumstances—learning to see with our spiritual eyes rather than just our fleshly eyes. Paul says our struggle is not against flesh and blood. It’s not me versus them. It’s Christ in me versus the scheming of the enemy. Paul says that the real war is against rulers, authorities, powers, and spiritual forces in the unseen realm.

Perhaps no one exemplified this way of thinking better than Jesus, who— while on the cross—prayed for forgiveness for those crucifying Him. In Luke 23:34, He says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” While being nailed to a wooden cross, Jesus recognized that

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Gear Up | Caton His captors were unwittingly participating in the losing side of a great cosmic battle.

It’s important that when we talk about waging war, we gear up in such a way that separates the malevolent forces of wickedness from the people participating in that wickedness—all of whom are image-bearers of God—people for whom Christ died. This does not mean that they’re “of the devil.” What it means is that each of us, you and I included, can be used unwittingly as a tool in the hands of the enemy to break someone else.

Our brokenness can be exploited to inflict pain on others. This doesn’t mean that we’re not responsible for our own actions, but it means that people operate in the flesh and often ignore the much greater ramifications of what is happening in the spirit—where the real war is.

It’s incredibly easy, especially when we are hurt, angry, or fearful, to fail to look beyond our present circumstances—to look beyond flesh and blood— into what the enemy is attempting to do in the spiritual realm. Knowing that the enemy, who Jesus likened unto a thief who sneaks in to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10), wages war under our unsuspecting noses, should give us pause whenever it comes to what we choose to align ourselves with in this world.

A cause, an ideological group, a political movement, a charismatic leader, etc., can exploit our angst over present circumstances and can cause us to allow the enemy to get a foothold in our lives, our families, our churches, and in society. Like Esau who traded his birthright to appease a temporary hunger, so too the enemy will happily accept a trade of winning our present circumstance at the expense of conceding the war in the spirit.

Gearing Up Allows Us to Stand Our Ground Finally, gearing up for battle allows us to stand our ground.

In verse 13, Paul tells the Ephesians that they put on the armor of God so that when (not “if”) the day of evil comes, we can stand our ground.

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The imperative couldn’t be clearer. It is a call for an absolute refusal to retreat. If that weren’t enough, Paul reiterates the statement: “and after you have done everything, to stand.”

There is a sort of fortitude-inducing, straighten-your-spine tone to Paul’s writing. It reminds me of the Finnish word sisu. Sisu doesn’t have a good English equivalent, but it refers to an internal “gut posture” where one is calmly unwavering in the face of adversity. It epitomizes the culture of Finland—a relatively small nation nestled between Russia to the east and its Scandinavian neighbors to the west.

It was sisu that defined the Finnish people when they were invaded by the U.S.S.R in 1939, just a few months into World War II. Joseph Stalin thought he could absorb Finland into the Soviet Union with a quick invasion, given the fact that the world was otherwise preoccupied. Despite possessing an army roughly half that of the Soviets, and very few tanks or aircraft, the Finns repelled the Soviet invasion while inflicting nearly five times as many casualties on the Soviets as they took themselves. Where the Soviets had overwhelming force, the Finns had sisu.

That’s the sort of calmly unwavering resolve—a refusal to concede to the attacks of the enemy or be deterred because of those attacks, which comes from the peace we have in Christ—that Paul is calling for. As we embark on this journey of putting on the armor of God, I want to begin with these words from Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

Let’s suit up.

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Have I not commanded you?

Be strong and courageous.

Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.

— Joshua 1:9

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Chapter One

THE BELT OF TRUTH

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Gear Up | Caton Satan is a schemer.

He deals in the art of deception and will do everything he can to attack you. Not only is Satan a deceiver and a schemer, but he is also a student.

He’s not a student of philosophy or mathematics. Satan studies you. The enemy is looking for your weakness. He is looking for your Achilles’ heel because, when he finds it, that’s precisely where he will attack.

James 4:7 reminds us that, if we resist the attacks from the enemy, he will flee.

But Scripture is also clear that he doesn’t stay away. While James promises us that Satan will flee if we resist his attacks, Luke 4 tells us the rest of his plan.

At the beginning of His public ministry, Jesus went out into the Judean wilderness to fast and pray. While He was out there, Satan showed up to tempt Him—not just once, not twice, but three times. Each time Jesus stood against the temptation of Satan with Scripture. But if you go look at verse 13, it says that Satan left Jesus until at a more opportune time (ESV).

He may have left Jesus alone for a moment, but he was already planning to scheme again and come back with another attack.

Preparing for Battle When we talk about putting on the full armor of God, it is with the understanding and in anticipation of the fact that Satan is going to come after us. Not just once, but over and over. It is important therefore, that we see the world we live in as a battleground.

On this battleground, people are not the enemy we wage battle against. It’s important for us to make that distinction. Before Paul ever gets to naming the armor of God, he makes clear in Ephesians 4:12 that, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Our battle is against Satan and his army that stands in opposition to God. And like a kid on a playground who pushes you around and challenges you when no one is looking, Satan wages war against God’s people, often without many people even noticing.

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That’s why we constantly and consistently need to do what Paul says in Ephesians 6. That’s why we need to put on the full armor of God. You see, when we have the armor of God, we have the power to resist Satan’s attacks. We can resist the “cosmic bully,” no matter how many times he challenges us. But not only does putting on the armor of God give us that power to resist the devil, it also gives us the power to make peace—the peace that God wants to bring you and me. It is a peace between us and the Lord, and also among each other.

Satan’s power is real, but it is limited. And while he may be God’s enemy, he is not God’s equal. His power stops dead in its tracks at even the mention of the name of Jesus. This should cause us to rejoice instead of being scared. If we are willing to put on the full armor of God, we can withstand anything and everything that Satan brings our way.

Suiting Up for War When Paul wrote these words to the Ephesians, he did so from a Roman prison. While writing this list of six pieces of the armor of God, he is almost certainly looking at his Roman guards and taking note of everything they’re wearing (we can’t know for sure if he was looking at them in the moment, but we can be sure that he had them in mind).

So, while the Romans soldiers dressed in armor physically, Paul encourages the Ephesians (and us, by extension) to dress in this armor through preparation in prayer, each and every day of our lives. And it isn’t enough to put on one or two pieces. We must completely suit up, prepared to wage war in the spiritual realm as the Romans did in the material realm.

It’s not enough to grab your sword and run out into battle—that’s what soldiers did when they were ambushed and forced to fight unprepared.

A breastplate alone does little to fend off an attacker. And can you imagine running into battle armed with nothing but your shoes? No. Paul says to put on the full armor of God. Why? So that when the day of evil comes—not if, but when—you may be able to stand your ground. And ultimately, standing our ground—that is, enduring faithfully until the return of Christ—is a significant part of the Christian life.

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Gear Up | Caton When a Roman soldier suited up, helmet, shield, breastplate, and all—he was putting on armor that weight about seventy-five pounds. That’s a lot of weight for a person to carry around all day, every day! It is interesting to note, therefore, that of all the pieces of armor that the Apostle Paul details, he starts with the belt of truth. For dramatic effect, you’d think he would start with the sword or the shield, maybe the helmet.

But a belt? Why? Because, for a Roman soldier, the belt was the foundation of their armor.

The belt held everything together. Without the belt, a soldier could not wear his sword at his side and his breastplate would not stay in place. Even his tunic would not be properly fastened. Like learning the fundamentals of his or her sport, starting with their belt, for a Roman, was the fundamental first step in suiting up for war.

It is no wonder then that Paul calls it the belt of truth. Like a belt, the truth is a fundamental (and often overlooked) part of the Christian life. As sons and daughters of God, truth is where our identity comes from. We identify with Jesus the risen Christ and that He Himself, in fact, is the truth. The recognition that Jesus is the truth (cf. John 14:6) is the core of who we are as children of God. And just as that truth is the core of our identity in Christ, so too a Roman soldier’s belt protected his core.

Have you ever watched someone who lifts weights competitively? I’m not talking about your average gym rat. I’m talking about a man or woman who lifts serious weights. They always wear a weight belt. Why? For similar reasons that the Romans wore theirs and for similar reasons that Paul admonishes us to wear the belt of truth. The belt is the connection point between the upper half and lower half of the body. It is what allows weightlifters to lift incredible amounts of weight. The belt secures the body from momentary weaknesses that, without it, could yield catastrophic consequences. It is what gives them the stability to stand firm. The same was true of the Roman belt. The same is true of the belt of truth offered to you and me.

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When Paul says to put on the armor of God, and starts with the belt of truth, it is because we cannot neglect the fundamentals. We cannot neglect our core—the truth. Instead, we must strengthen our core so we can stay connected with God’s will and God’s way for our lives. That all begins with cinching up the belt of truth. But we live in a world with a flabby core. We live in a world with a loose and wishy-washy relationship with truth.

This is not new. In fact, the modern world’s relationship to truth is not a whole lot different than the Roman world of Paul and Jesus. It was Pontius Pilate, in his interview with Jesus before His crucifixion, who asked the Son of God “Quid est veritas?” (“what is truth?”, See John 18:38). It’s important that we answer Pilate’s question to understand what the truth is.

Then we will look at where we can find the truth and, finally, why we even need the truth in our lives to begin with.

What is Truth?

Simply put, God’s truth is the truth. His perspective and His Word are ultimately what truth is. His reality is the “capital R” reality because He is the only One who knows all. His divine perspective affords Him the power and capability to determine truth, even when we don’t see it. His truth, not our subjective truths, are ultimately what matters.

I love what the psalmist says in Psalm 119:160: “All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal.”

God’s perspective is the truth.

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In every matter of life—in relationships, on money, on your attitude, and about your words.

2. In those things that are good for you and those things that are bad for you.

God’s perspective is what matters. Because God’s perspective is truth.

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Gear Up | Caton God’s truth is always relevant to your life. God’s truth is relevant to your kids’ lives. It’s relevant to your marriage, to your job, to your finances—to everything.

But it’s worth noting that, while God’s truth is relevant, it is not relative.

God’s truth is God’s truth for time and for eternity. It doesn’t change with the changes of culture, though over time we can come to understand God’s truth better. In every culture, in every time, Christ seeks to transform human lives and human societies with His truth.

What is Truth?

Simply put, God’s truth is the truth.

His perspective and His Word are ultimately what truth is. His reality is the “capital R” reality because He is the only one who knows all.

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God’s truth doesn’t change because culture changes.

2. God’s truth doesn’t change based on who you follow on Instagram.

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God’s truth doesn’t change based on what someone posted on Facebook.

4. God’s truth doesn’t change based on an interview you saw on cable news.

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God’s truth is ultimately relevant to our lives, but it’s not relative to what’s going on in the world around us. We live in a time when people have a troubling, muddy kind of relationship with the truth. People will reject something that can be objectively proven as true because of the source.

People will dismiss something truthful if it doesn’t resonate with their feelings or experiences. Our society is doing everything it can to dismiss the truth. We as God’s children, therefore, must seek to understand God’s perspective—His truth on every matter in our lives.

One of the ways Satan comes to attack us is to muddy our understanding of the truth. Satan will always shade the truth in your life. From the very beginning, in the garden, the serpent’s tactic to deceive Adam and Eve was to question their understanding of God’s truth: “Did God really say…?”

(Genesis. 3:1). He will show up by weaving a thought or an idea into your mind, or he’ll whisper some deceiving or deceptive thought in your ear.

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Satan will show up and tell you that you should stay in the abusive relationship you’re in.

2. Satan will show up and say that your hidden addictions are okay.

3.

Satan will show up and tell you not to seek out a qualified counselor because only weak people do that.

4. Satan will tell you that your alcohol abuse isn’t that big of a deal.

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Satan will try to convince you the pornography you’re looking at won’t destroy your marriage and that it isn’t really exploiting women like people say it is.

6. Satan will always show up, and he will weave in deceptive lies and tell us things that will hurt us and ultimately not help us.

He’ll suggest that a little white lie—whether on your taxes, to your boss, or to your spouse—isn’t really that big of a deal.

7.

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Satan will try to convince you that all those arguments that you find yourself in aren’t really your fault. They’re your wife’s

Gear Up | Caton fault or they’re your husband’s fault or it’s the fault of your coworkers.

8. Satan will show up and try to convince you that you’re always the victim and never the victimizer.

Perhaps most of all, Satan will show up and try to convince you that your truth is God’s truth. If he can do that, he can keep you from discerning God’s truth. Satan deals in deception, and deception is a powerful drug.

We resist the potency of Satan’s deception through clinging to God’s truth.

But where do we get it?

Where Do We Find the Truth?

We find God’s truth in God’s Word In John 17:17-18 Jesus prays: “…Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”

We find God’s truth first and foremost in God’s Word. The Scriptures are the plumbline for every decision that you and I can make. It is what keeps everything in order in our lives. When this world gets out of whack, God’s Word is ultimately our plumbline for the power and peace we need. When the world is falling apart, I can dive into God’s Word, and it will refresh and renew me and give me instruction for the day. It is, as the old acrostic implies, our “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”

We’re all going to leave the Earth someday. Between now and then, I want to live as well as I possibly can with incredible relationships in my life.

I want to steward well what God has entrusted to me. The stewardship of our lives begins with knowing that truth is God’s perspective on every matter as revealed to us in God’s Word.

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We Find God’s Truth In His Creation Psalm 19:1-2 reminds us that, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.”

Long before the modern conversations about care for the environment, God entrusted creation to us to steward faithfully and to reveal Himself to us. The psalms are filled with images drawn from God’s very good creation to describe to us aspects of who God is.

The created order in which we live screams of the existence of an intelligent and personal Designer who created you and created me. Long before telescopes, the Scripture says that the heavens scream out the works of God’s hands. Often, Christians posture the Bible against science and view new scientific discoveries with fear or suspicion. But that’s nonsense.

The Bible and science are not in opposition to one another. In fact, often science is only describing mechanically what the Bible has long described poetically.

Think of it this way: if you hold the hand of a loved one—a spouse, a child, a parent, whoever—you can describe that experience as the exchange of bacterial material via skin-to-skin contact. You can describe the shedding of skin cells that inevitably transfer from one to another, or you can describe the heat exchanged from hand-to-hand contact. You can describe the falling blood pressure you experienced. You can describe holding hands in very scientific terms. Or you can speak about the warmth you felt in your soul, the depth of love and affection you feel for your loved one, and the calm you experienced by holding their hand. You can describe (as we more often do) holding hands in very poetic terms.

Both are absolutely true. But they are two very different ways of describing one singular experience. The same is true when the psalmist declares the skies scream out the glory of God and the scientist describes the

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Gear Up | Caton composition of gasses in a newly discovered nebula. Both are true. But they are two very different ways of describing one singular phenomenon.

If we truly believe God exists, there is no reason to fear science because science will always point to a Divine creator, that this all could not happen by chance. So not only do we find God’s truth in God’s Word, we also find it in His very good creation.

We find God’s truth in God’s Son—Jesus.

On opening his gospel, the Apostle John tells us in John 1:1,14: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Word was God…The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Truth is not just a word written in Scripture. It’s not just the created order.

Truth is a Person. If you want to know who God is, you should look no further than Jesus the Christ. John reminds us that Jesus perfectly held together the beauty of grace and truth. We too must hold both grace and truth together. We often think about the two as being in tension with one another, but that’s not true. Grace refers to the unmerited favor of God, not the idea that we must accept everything. Nor does embracing truth imply that we’re to hate everything that’s not like us. Walking in the grace and truth of Jesus means we extend the unmerited love of Jesus to people, but we don’t have to approve of sin to do so.

Loving someone rightly sometimes involves confronting something in his or her life, in the context of a relationship. Our culture says that if you love someone, you will approve of every decision they make. But that just doesn’t hold water. In the way of Jesus, we find the perfect embodiment of both grace and truth—a deep love and regard for others through the truth of who God is and what He wants for each and every one of us.

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We Can Find God’s Truth in God’s Church.

This is why the People of God come together each and every week—so we can open God’s Word and discern together God’s truth. The Church does not create truth. The Church defends and proclaims the truth.

As a pastor, when I preach, I am not the arbiter of truth, dispensing it as I see fit for the congregation to receive at face value. My job in preaching the Word is to defend and proclaim it; and the job of a God-honoring, biblical church is to wrestle with and study and discern God’s truth together. Paul admonishes Timothy, his pastoral protégé, to correctly handle the Word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15). That’s good advice to any pastor, and it’s good advice for a congregation to hear their pastor receive. Our job as pastors is not to create truth, but to proclaim and defend it.

Many churches in our crazy culture are like Waffle Houses—they waffle and waver and cave and compromise and shade the truth, so they don’t hurt anybody’s feelings in the name of preaching “felt needs” over the uncompromising Gospel. I’ve resolved as a pastor that serving waffles is not something I’m willing to do. Sooner or later, we must realize that syrupy-sweet messages that give us three points and a poem but are void of the power of the Gospel ultimately leave us empty of the power of God necessary to defend against the attacks of the enemy.

Our call is to not to minimize sin but to confess our sin. That said, our call is also not to maximize someone else’s sin and maximize our judgment on their sin. It’s equally alluring in today’s churches to hear sermons about all the sin out in the world, so long as the preaching never turns to our own sin.

Earlier in Ephesians 4, Paul reminds the church that the pastor’s job is to equip the people for the works of ministry so that the body of Christ would be built up into maturity. This is how God wants us to act and how I want to live and walk and operate. That’s my hope for the Church—that we would not shy away from defending and proclaiming the truth and instructing one another into maturity in God’s truth.

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Gear Up | Caton Why Do We Need God’s Truth?

This question may seem on the nose; but if we’re honest, we have all wrestled with the temptation to live out our own “truth” instead of clothing ourselves in the belt of truth.

Ultimately, we need to understand truth and know truth as God sees it, firstly, because of our predisposition to be deceived by Satan. Satan is a liar, and as a master liar—a master deceiver—you can be sure he is going to lie to you and attempt to deceive you.

Have you ever watched an illusionist? I’m not talking about your uncle who pretends to pull a quarter of your ear at family functions. I mean someone that is really good. Really good illusionists can blow your mind with the things that they do. You leave the act absolutely dumbfounded as to how they managed to perform their tricks. That’s exactly what Satan will do to you. He will sit here and do this and do that and he’ll talk in your ear until you’re distracted. And when you’re distracted, he’ll make his move to destroy your life. And he will do it all with a smile.

In John 8:44, Jesus said: “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Lying and deception are the native tongue of the enemy. So, we need to discern God’s truth and build our foundation from it to avoid his deceit.

The second reason we need God’s truth is because it frees us to enjoy life.

I mean really enjoy life. A lot of times we think that truth means a bunch of rules and restrictions. But knowing the truth frees us up to enjoy our relationships like we otherwise could not. Jesus promises us in John 10:10 that while the enemy desires to destroy us, walking in the way of Jesus produces abundant life—life, as some translations put it, “to the full.”

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When a Roman soldier was getting ready for battle, he would wrap up all the loose ends of his tunic, cinching them up in his belt. The truth of God does that for us. It binds up all those false things in our lives that may or may not be destructive on their own, but if left to their own devices could be unhealthy. The belt of truth binds those up under God’s perspective and transforms our desires into Christ’s. Jesus wants to gird you with His truth because He wants to free you to live as only He could let you live.

The belt of truth binds those up under God’s perspective and transforms our desires into Christ’s.

A third and final reason we need God’s truth is it brings us salvation.

1 Tim. 2:3-6 says: “This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed at the proper time.”

God’s truth ultimately is what leads us to salvation. God wants all people to be saved but the truth is clear in God’s Word there is one mediator between God and humankind, and it is Jesus Christ.

Truth comes through one person—Jesus. Jesus said in John 6:47: “Whoever believes in me has eternal life.” That “belief” does not mean believing that

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Gear Up | Caton He exists but placing your trust and loyalty in Him. That’s a truth we can sink our teeth into. When the world puts a weight on our shoulders and Satan wants to pull the rug out from under our feet, we will be able to stand firm on the truth that Jesus is who He says He is and that He will do what He says He will do. And when He says that all who place their loyalty in Him will be saved, that is a truth that will undergird us and serve as a foundation for the rest of our Christian walk.

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Chapter Two

BREASTPLATE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

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Gear Up | Caton

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

— JESUS MATTHEW 5:6 (NIV)

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“The paradox is that God must destroy in us, all illusions of righteousness before he can make us righteous.”

— MARTIN LUTHER

Following the belt of truth, Paul tells us to put on the breastplate of righteousness.

The Greek word for breastplate is thōrax, which if you’re familiar with anatomy (or insects, for that matter) is probably a term with which you may be familiar. The thoracic region of the spine is that area that is between the neck and the abdomen. It is a crucial area for a soldier to protect because injuries to that region are most deadly.

So, when Paul associates the breastplate of a soldier with our righteousness, it should cause us to stop and take note. If the breastplate protects the most crucial parts of a person’s physical body, so too righteousness guards the most crucial parts of a person’s spirit. Take note though that Paul calls it the breastplate of righteousness and not the breastplate of judgmentalism.

He is not talking about the breastplate of legalism. We’re talking about righteousness.

Righteousness is not feeling superior to others. It’s not looking down your nose at someone who has fallen into sin or simply sins differently than you do. It’s not even about towing a moral line of not listening to certain music, saying certain words, associating with certain people, or seeing certain movies. Those choices can sometimes be the fruit of a righteous life, but in and of themselves they do not constitute righteousness.

Righteousness is not something we can conjure up. It is a state of right standing before God. It is the ethical and virtuous posture of our heart that has been cultivated by the Holy Spirit so that it bears good spiritual fruit (see Gal. 5:22-23). Righteousness, biblically speaking, really has two dimensions: a spiritual dimension and a practical dimension. By the spiritual dimension, I’m referring to the inner work God does in each of us, conforming us to the likeness of His Son, Jesus (Rom. 8:29). It is what Dallas Willard called in his so-named book: the

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Gear Up | Caton Renovation of the Heart that the Spirit does in each of us as we draw closer to Christ.

Practical righteousness has to do with how we live out that inner work with Kingdom-shaped ethics, virtues, and justice toward the outside world.

In fact, Jesus’s references to righteousness in the Sermon on the Mount (e.g., Matt. 5:6) are closely related to the biblical concept of justice. So, biblically speaking, righteousness is an inward renovation of the heart from the Holy Spirit that bears fruit in the Kingdom-shaped outward actions of our lives.

If you Google an image of a Roman breastplate, what populates is some really cool-looking Roman artifacts, as well as a bunch of pictures of guys modeling recreated breastplates for Roman costumes. These dudes always have ripped abs and amazing pecs, leaving the impression that either 1) only men that look like that can wear a breastplate or 2) if you wear the breastplate you might look like that. Advertising agencies want you to think of the second option. But most of us internally assume the first. Spiritually speaking, we do the same thing. Because our spirit doesn’t look like Billy Graham or Mother Teresa’s spirit, then there just isn’t much point. We may think, “Yeah, I wish my righteousness looked like that” but assume it never will.

Most of us feel kind of plain and ordinary in our spiritual walk. But I’ve got some great news for you. That’s precisely the sort of people God is looking for. While the Body of Christ needs Billy Grahams and Mother Teresas, Jesus is not looking for you to be them. He’s looking for a redeemed and renewed you. He’s not looking for you to change the world—He’s looking for you to be faithful and obedient where He has placed you and in what He has called you to. The beauty about the Body of Christ is that, because we are knit together as His family, our collective obedience and faithfulness—our collective righteousness—is precisely what will change the world, through the enduring work of the Holy Spirit.

So, knowing that the breastplate of righteousness is not just for the spiritual giants of the faith, but for each and every one of us—knowing that it is not for judgmentalism and self-righteousness, but for inner holiness

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and outward goodness—I want to pose a couple questions about the breastplate of righteousness and walk through the answers with you: 1.

Why did Roman soldiers put on a breastplate?

2. How can we put on our spiritual breastplate?

3.

How do we live out our righteousness now?

Why Did Romans Put on a Breastplate?

Whenever a man enlisted in the Roman army, he was given a breastplate.

Fundamental to Roman warfare was that a soldier would never go into combat without his breastplate secured. The reason why was that the breastplate covered his most vital organs, in particular the lungs as well as the heart.

As we journey through life, you and I cannot go on without our breastplate of righteousness. Just as the Roman breastplate was given by the Roman general, so we receive ours from the Captain of the Hosts: Jesus (c.f., Josh 5:14). But just as the breastplate of the Roman was not to be kept in a tent as a private souvenir, so too our breastplate of righteousness is meant to be lived out in front of our family, our friends, and those we interact with daily.

Just like a Roman soldier would put on the breastplate of righteousness to cover his heart, so too do you and I, as children of God, put on the righteousness of God. It is for the very same reason: to guard our heart.

Solomon wisely noted that it is from the heart of a person that everything we do is produced (Prov. 4:23). Long before the New Testament church was ever around, King Solomon warned us to guard our hearts. We know that if the heart stops beating, it does not take long for us to die. If the heart fails, everything follows suit.

The human heart has four chambers: two on the top and two on the bottom. These four chambers work to move blood throughout every corner

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Gear Up | Caton of the body. If the whole process fails to work the way it is designed to, it does not take long for us to physically falter and fail.

While our heart has four chambers in the flesh, it also has four “chambers” in the Spirit. If you look in God’s Word, you’ll find that the cultures of the Bible associated the heart with four different ideas. First, they often associated the heart with the mind—that is, those things that you think about. If we are going to put on the breastplate of righteousness, we have to guard our minds, which in Hebrew thought was seated in the heart. Paul warns us about guarding the mental chamber of the heart in his caution to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:2-3: “Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”

We often love to cite this Scripture when we’re looking at the state of the world and its love for ideological echo chambers that are scratching the ears of the masses. Or perhaps we think of this passage when we think of the rise of “influencer culture” in society—platformed for their charisma instead of character, or their ability to ride the waves of the latest hot take more than having much in the way of substance.

But Paul is speaking to us. He’s warning Timothy about the state of the church.

But maybe, knowing this warning is to the church, we look across the aisle at our brother and sister in Christ—maybe they have different opinions on current events, or they worship differently, or are from a different culture—and we might think they’re the ones Paul is talking about. But getting serious about guarding our mind and heeding Paul’s warnings requires that we don’t look across the aisle but in the mirror. Are the voices in our lives—including the sermons we sit and listen to every Sunday— challenging us deeper or confirming our biases?

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Guarding your mind requires sitting under the preaching of the Word and being willing to say, “the pastor is speaking to me.” Guarding our mind does not mean that we only listen to that with which we already agree, but biblical truth that: 1.

Corrects

2. Encourages 3.

Rebukes

4. Gives you something to think about The second spiritual chamber of our heart involves our will. While your mind is what you think about, your will is the motivation that produces your action. Note that it’s not what you do (the action) but the motivation that produces the action. It is the often-overlooked step between what we think about and what we do. You see, the more I think about something, the more my will is cultivated, which increases the likelihood that I will act upon my will.

Take advertising for food, for example. By design, pizzerias and fast food restaurants inundate the airwaves with images of perfected versions of the (often very imperfect!) food they sell in their stores. If they can get you thinking about the food, they can cultivate an appetite—a will within you to motivate you to take action (buying their food). Companies like DoorDash and UberEats make their money by minimizing the barrier that exists between your will and your action—so, whereas before you might think “Meh, it’s too cold outside to run to Taco Bell,” now you can just grab your phone and a Crunchwrap Supreme shows up at your door in thirty minutes. Advertising bridges the gap between your thoughts and your will while delivery services and other conveniences bridges the gap between your will and action.

Paul talks about the struggles of his own will in his letter to the Romans 7: 15-19:

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Gear Up | Caton “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

Here is Paul, this spiritual giant, who is writing the book of Romans (who many consider to be the greatest work of theology in the New Testament), acknowledging that within his heart there is a battle that wages between his mind and his will.

He reminds us that we must always guard our heart, including our will. That is good news to us all, as we each have areas of life that we often struggle to surrender to the cross. In effect Paul says, “Join the club.” What a refreshing display of honesty in his walk with God, not waiting to share with his church in Rome about something that he struggled with and overcame decades ago, but something that was a struggle for him in the present.

The third spiritual chamber is our emotions—how we feel about things.

Have you ever noticed how the way you feel affects what you say and what you do? I know I have. God’s Word is very careful not to condemn emotions. We’re not supposed to be like Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek series who mastered the art of suppressing his emotions. Nor do the Scriptures suggest that we should try only to experience the “positive emotions” (joy, love, happiness, etc.) and avoid the “negative emotions” (grief, sorrow, worry, etc.). It’s worth pointing out here that an entire book of the Old Testament is called Lamentations!

Scripture doesn’t condemn emotions but teaches us to discipline our emotions—to bring them under healthy regulation. Are you worried? Cast your anxieties upon the Lord (1 Pet. 5:7). Are you mourning? Turn to the Lord, who is a healing balm (Ps. 147:3). Are you in love? Bridle it with selfcontrol until the proper time (Songs 8:4).

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Solomon reminds us of the need for the healthy regulation of our emotions in Proverbs 25:28: “Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control.” Solomon’s point here is to communicate, just like a city whose walls are broken down, a person who lets emotion drive their life. If we’re to take up the breastplate of righteousness, we have to be careful with what we think about, we have to be careful with what we do, but we also have to be careful to always regulate our emotions. If we don’t—if we let our feelings of anger, lust, envy, strife, excitability, and passion go unregulated—we will always ultimately be led astray. A well-regulated, disciplined emotional life is evidence of a wellregulated, disciplined human being—and a component of the righteous Christian life.

The fourth and final spiritual chamber is the conscience—that is, your measure of right and wrong. Paul alludes to this also, in his writings to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:1-2: “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.

Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.”

Paul is warning Timothy of the potential for his congregation in Ephesus— and by extension, us all—to abandon the prodding of our consciences in favor of deceit. He goes as far as to say that the teachers have seared consciences. If you’ve ever grilled a well-prepared steak, you know the value of a good searing. Searing creates a protective barrier around the steak, preventing moisture from escaping. So too are the consciences of these teachers.

In the cultures of the Bible, as with many cultures around the world today, the idea of a conscience isn’t simply a private, individualistic regulation of one’s behavior. Conscience was influenced by the input of one’s community—through the wisdom of spiritual leaders, through the counsel of one’s elders, and more. What Paul is saying here is not only have these hypocritical liars cut off their listening ear from the Holy Spirit, but they’ve

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Gear Up | Caton shut out the wise and Godly counsel of the Christian community as well.

We would do well to regulate our consciences. Does the Holy Spirit convict us privately and individually? Of course. But allowing our consciences to be shaped by the Godly, wise, and healthy voices within the community of faith is crucial to living a righteous life.

How Do I Put on the Breastplate of Righteousness?

The natural tendency when answering this question is to “try harder”—be more like Jesus, love Him better, don’t do this, and make sure to do that.

But the Christian life is more than just trying to attain moral perfection.

That pursuit can land us in a place where we are striving and striving, only to wind up discouraged. But God’s standard for you is not 100 percent perfection. He’s more aware of our imperfections than we are! God is not trying to make you into a perfect person because Jesus took on that obligation on your behalf. I want to recommend three steps toward putting on the breastplate of righteousness that are not rooted in striving, but rather in Christ’s finished work on the cross and in the empty tomb.

First, we must admit that we’re sinners in need of forgiveness. 1 Pet. 2:24 reminds us that, “He himself bore our sins” in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.” Once we admit that you and I are sinners in desperate need of forgiveness, we begin the path toward a real relationship with Jesus.

How do I put on the righteousness of God? That begins first by refusing to ever forget that, when Jesus Christ died on the cross, He died bearing your sins. Jesus paid the full price for all our sins and so what do I do as a result?

If I’m going to walk and live in righteousness, it starts with me recognizing daily that I am a beloved son or daughter of God, saved by His grace.

Second, I must believe in Jesus Christ as my Savior. Paul tells the Corinthians that in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” When we recognize this fact and choose to place our trust in Jesus,

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we begin a path of walking in His righteousness—of taking up the breastplate of righteousness in our lives.

What happened at the cross was seemingly the worst trade in the history of the universe. I was able to take all my sinfulness and give it to Jesus, trading it for His perfect righteousness. What we often call “the great exchange” is a mind-boggling debt in sin and rebellion paid off in full by the grace of Jesus Christ.

While we often associate “belief” with a mental affirmation, this is not exactly what Paul means when he refers to believing in Jesus in his writings (e.g., Rom. 10:9-10). The Greek word for belief is closely associated with the words for faith and faithfulness. Believing in Jesus is more than mentally acknowledging what He did on the cross. Instead it refers to entrusting your confidence, your fidelity, your allegiance, and your life to Him. When you commit to follow Jesus, it is a choice to reorient the whole course of your life around the truth of the Gospel and the recognition of His lordship over both your life and over all of creation.

Third, I must commit to follow Jesus by faith today. Far too often people will sit where they are and say, “I understand that I’m a sinner and I’ll fix things up. One day, after I’ve gotten my life straightened out a bit, I’ll pray a prayer, walk down an aisle, or join a church.” But that misses the idea of the salvation offered by Jesus. He comes to us when we acknowledge and fully recognize that we can’t earn God’s grace. The only thing I contribute is my sin that necessitated my salvation and my faith that is a response to my salvation. That’s it!

Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 6:2 by saying: “now is the day of salvation.” Taking up the breastplate of righteousness begins with taking that step toward following Jesus.

How Do I Live Out the Righteousness of God? While the second question answers how to put the breastplate on, the third question deals with how to live while wearing it. How do I live out

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Gear Up | Caton God’s righteousness in my life? Remember the difference between the spiritual dimension of God’s righteousness in my life—the embrace of the finished work of Christ as well as the ongoing yielding to the Holy Spirit’s cultivation of righteousness in my life—and the practical dimension— those actions I take as fruit of God’s righteousness in me. There are three ways I believe we are to walk out the righteousness of God daily in our lives.

First, acknowledge that righteousness is not the same as perfect living.

God doesn’t expect you to be perfect. That’s not what righteousness is.

Righteous living—walking with the breastplate of righteousness strapped on looks like walking in the direction of Jesus. It means walking toward His transforming power instead of away from it. It means yielding to the work He desires to do in our lives.

I’ve been a pastor for a very long time; and even I could promise you that if you hung out with me seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, it would not take you many days to identify my imperfections. I’ve walked with Jesus for years and devoted my life to His church, yet I still say things I shouldn’t when I get angry. I do things that fall short of representing Christ well. If I believe righteousness is the striving of my own attempts to keep my salvation through perfect living, I’m setting myself up for profound disappointment.

But this practical dimension of righteousness simply means that I need to be willing to start living in a way that I believe is 1) pleasing to God, 2) edifying to His Church, and 3) a Godly witness to the world—when I do this, I recognize I don’t need to be perfect today. I don’t even need to be perfect a year from now. But rather, can I identify the ways I’ve grown in those three areas in the distance from today to a year from now? The trajectory of our spiritual growth matters more than the present condition of our moral uprightness.

It’s like if you’re a parent with a child who listens in school, takes notes, studies for a test, and gets a B on the test—are you willing to accept that your child has done their best and be proud of them? If the same child

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didn’t study, didn’t listen, and went to take the test and cheated and got the same grade—which is the more righteous B? The end results are the same, but how the child produced the grade are worlds apart. God is more generally concerned with the means than the ends.

Husbands: you’re not going to be a perfect husband. But you can develop practices, habits, and attitudes that cultivate growth between last year and this year. Or between this year and next. You may not be the perfect employee, but you can posture yourself to grow, not just in output-based performance, but in how you live in your workplace.

Often righteousness is not measured quantitatively, but qualitatively.

Quantitative thinking asks, “how much?” or “how many?” It is the type of thinking that looks at your Bible reading progress at the end of the year and sees how much of it you actually completed (or didn’t). It is concerned with quantities, frequencies, and other measurables that easily fit on an Excel spreadsheet.

Qualitative thinking asks, “in what way?” or “to what extent?” It is the type of thinking that looks at your Bible reading progress and takes note of how you’ve grown in your consistency of reading and in the depth of your engagement during your devotional time. It reflects on where God has brought you during your time with the Lord. It doesn’t always fit well on a spreadsheet, but qualitative thinking often better captures what God is doing in our lives, helping us identify how we’re growing into His likeness.

Do I have a gentler spirit? A more loving attitude? A more caring heart?

This gets down to the nitty-gritty of what righteousness looks like. You’re not measuring your spiritual growth against Mother Teresa or your friend on Instagram. You’re measuring your spiritual growth against your former self.

Second, never abandon God’s working righteousness in your life. I love what Peter said in 2 Peter 1:5-7:

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Gear Up | Caton “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.”

Peter is saying that if we want to grow our righteousness daily, we must commit—adding effort, being a willing and active participant with God by being willing and eager to allow the Spirit to cultivate righteousness in us.

This means that we determine that we’ll commit to a local church, find a group, find a daily devotional practice, share your faith with your friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors who don’t know God. It is a matter of committing to be an active participant in your own spiritual growth.

Third, let your imperfect righteousness shine before others. That’s right.

I said your imperfect righteousness. Living out our walk with Jesus, dressed in our breastplate of righteousness starts with us not pretending we’re perfect. It continues with us committing to allow the Spirit to cultivate His righteousness in us day by day. But the righteousness of God reaches its greatest beauty in us when we allow for opportunities to let our imperfect light shine before others.

You see, when I’m not pretending to be perfect, I can live my life before people with consistency and integrity. When they call me out on something I said or something I did that I shouldn’t have done, I don’t have to feel the need to keep up appearances. I don’t need to double down on what I did or attempt to justify it by twisting Scripture or making excuses.

Instead, I can just say, “Yeah, I see what I did wrong. I am working on that area in my life.” Notice what Jesus said in Matthew 5:16: “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” That light is the testimony of our righteousness before God. Notice that Jesus doesn’t say “perfect deeds,” but “good deeds.” Our willingness to walk humbly before God and others as redeemed “works in progress” goes a long way to bringing glory to God and pointing others toward Him.

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We would do well to take our cue from the Apostle Paul and take up the breastplate of righteousness. It is God’s righteousness that guards our heart, providing an environment for the Holy Spirit to cultivate His virtue in our lives so that our actions can reflect the goodness of God and be a confirmation to the truth of the Gospel. Just as a Roman soldier never went into battle without his breastplate, so neither can the Christian live her or his life without a continued cultivation of the righteousness of God in their lives.

Just as a Roman soldier never went into battle without his breastplate, so neither can the Christian live her or his life without a continued cultivation of the righteousness of God in their lives.

When the breastplate of righteousness is on, we can be assured that our heart is completely protected. We can walk with grace and confidence knowing that the same God who spoke the world into existence has offered His righteousness to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Because of this we are called into a continual partnership with the Holy Spirit to work His righteousness into our lives.

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Chapter Three

SHOES OF THE GOSPEL OF PEACE

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The Gospel is not just the illustration (even the best illustration) of an idea. It is the story of actions by which the human situation is irreversibly changed.

— LESSLIE NEWBIGIN

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“Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you.

Otherwise, you have believed in vain.”

— 1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-2

After the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness, Paul commands us in Ephesians 6:15 to make sure our feet are “fitted with the readiness that comes from the Gospel of peace.” Other translations refer to our feet wearing the “shoes” of the Gospel of peace. Paul says that, in addition to our belt and breastplate—as it pertains to our walk as a follower of Christ— we should never leave the house without the right footwear. But this sort of shoe isn’t just your run-of-the-mill Nikes. Paul is talking about fitting our feet with the Gospel of peace.

Not long ago I was drawn into a deep dive on the history of the shoe.

I found out that the earliest shoes were made by people taking animal skins and just sort of wrapping them around their feet. The climate in which the people lived would often determine the type of animal skin they would use. The Egyptians were the first to develop what we would call the sandal, while the Greeks were the first to develop the boot (though, I admit, I was hoping it would have been the Texans!).

While the Greeks invented the boot, the Romans perfected it. A Roman boot had strong leather laces and a thick sole. Protruding from the soles of the Roman boots (the sort of boots Paul would have had in mind here), were thick spikes (a sort-of ancient version of the cleat). These spiked boots were not made with gardening in mind. They were specifically designed so that, as a Roman soldier was in battle, he could dig his heels into the ground and not have to forfeit territory to the enemy.

This is the image Paul is passing down to us—that we as God’s children need to spiritually dress our feet like the Romans, not with household slippers or basketball sneakers, but with spiritually spiked boots that dig into the ground, not conceding an inch to the advancements of the Satan’s

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Gear Up | Caton army of darkness. In Ephesians 6:14 Paul gives us a very practical image for how we are to “stand firm” in our faith.

Have you ever been out and about, only to realize you made a terrible choice in footwear? I sure have. Maybe you’ve worn dress shoes, only to realize the event you’re attending requires a lot of walking. Or maybe one of your kids walks out the door on their way to school only for you to realize they’re wearing sandals. Or perhaps worse, when it starts to downpour and you’re wearing shoes with no tread that are about as waterproof as wool.

While we can’t always predict the weather, Scripture repeatedly warns us that we are in a spiritual battle. So, while we can’t always know the proper shoes for every occasion physically speaking, Paul gives us precisely the right footwear for our spiritual lives. And that is the shoes of the readiness of the Gospel of peace. But what does that mean? What does it mean to be ready with the Gospel? I want to offer seven truth statements about fitting ourselves with the Gospel of peace so that we can be ready.

Fitting Ourselves with the Gospel of Peace In his letter to the Romans, Paul says in Romans 5:1-2: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.” According to Paul, we become ready to stand by accepting God’s offer of salvation, His gracious unmerited favor, that is, His grace. We respond to that grace with believing loyalty—a steadfast devotion, or faith, in Him. There’s nothing we can do to earn God’s grace. That’s the scandalous nature of the Gospel; it comes to us all freely. We then respond to that grace by our faithfulness to Jesus the Messiah. The Gospel is the news of this peace that Christ’s salvation brings between you and I and God, as well as between us interpersonally living in covenant with Him.

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Romans 10:9-10 expounds upon this further: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.”

Remember from the last chapter that the words belief and faith share a common root, pistis. Both are associated with allegiance—with loyalty to Christ. And notice Paul’s mention of both the mouth and the heart.

Acceptance of the gift of salvation involves both an outward confession and an inward motivation of believing loyalty to Jesus. Paul is not suggesting a formula for a particular kind of sinner’s prayer, because he’s saying that the sort of faith that responds to God’s grace with an inner motivation that results in outward demonstration is what it means to live the truth of the Gospel. And he calls everyone who accepts this salvation to live here and now as agents of His reconciliation as we await His return.

The truth of all this—that Jesus is the risen Savior who offers His salvation freely to all, irrespective of socio-economic class, ethnic origin, depth of sin—is indeed the good news the world needs to hear. And “good news” is precisely what the word Gospel means.

1. The Gospel Prepares Me for Life’s Trials The first crucial word in Paul’s command for us to fit ourselves with the Gospel of peace is the word peace itself.

Remember that Paul is encouraging the Ephesians to take up the full armor of God in anticipation of the spiritual warfare they will face and the worldly trials they will endure. As we abide together, Jesus entrusts us not only with the Gospel message itself, but a message which is saturated with the peace that Jesus offers us. In John 14:1-4, Jesus promises to give us His peace. I don’t have to buy it or earn it. It’s ours when we trust Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord:

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Gear Up | Caton “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

This peace that Jesus has given to us means that, whenever I come into a space or a place where Satan begins to attack me, I can confidently stand firm. Whatever trial I go through, I can face with the confident assurance that He has overcome the world (John 16:33). This is not because of anything I can do in my own strength but because Jesus has given me the ability to stand through any trial, handle any fiery dart, or go through any temptation—if only I shod my feet with the Gospel of peace.

2. The Gospel Protects My Mind The second truth statement about what readying ourselves with the Gospel will do for you is that the Gospel protects our minds.

We live in an age of information inundation. Just a casual scroll through our favorite social media feed will afford us a cacophony of different words, different opinions, different truth claims, different topics. What’s more, the breadth of topics we are faced with is much more damaging than we perhaps realize. The first time you open your phone in the morning, your social media feed can look like this: Post 1: [friend had a baby] Post 2: [“Is World War III about to begin?”]

Post 3: [friend celebrating an anniversary] Post 4: [a tragedy has struck Nova Scotia] Post 5: [cousin promoted at work] Post 6: [uncle posts conspiracy theory]

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That’s just a normal day online or in the news media now. And on top of this, our cultural narratives preach the idea that whatever you feel is right for you is your truth and that any claims at a universal truth must be condemned (never mind that the claim “whatever you feel is right for you is your truth” is, itself, a universal truth claim). This has a profoundly disorienting impact on our ability to rightly discern truth from error—to guard our minds in Christ Jesus (Phil. 4:7) While there are definitely some practical and common sense things that we can do to mitigate the impact of the daily bath we each take from the firehose of online content, we also realize that we can lean upon the Lord as His children when we are faced with those moments that seek to break into our mind. Online content is only a small facet of this. There are seasons when we have doubt and anxiety and wrestle with any number of mental struggles.

What the Gospel allows us to do is take every one of those thoughts captive. Paul refers to this in his letter 2 Corinthians 10:5 when he says: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

This is not an idealized “pie in the sky” sort of promise. This is straight from Scripture itself—the promise that the next time someone tears you down, the Gospel promises to guard your mind. The next time Satan tries to tempt you, the Gospel promises to guard your mind. The next time you begin to believe that you’re substandard or unloved, the Gospel promises to guard your mind. When we dwell on the truth of the Gospel, it ushers in the peace that only God can bring (Phil. 4:7).

3. The Gospel Changes My Actions and Reactions The third way the Gospel readies us is that it empowers us to change our actions and reactions.

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Gear Up | Caton In 2014, the University of Kansas did a study that was published in the Journal of Research in Personality. In conducting the study, researchers wanted to know how much one could tell about people based on the shoes they wear. After a series of tests, they were able to determine that they could make reasonable predictions about a person’s socio-economic class, political leanings, and more—with 90 percent accuracy—just based on the shoes they chose.

There’s a spiritual lesson in this. If this week your co-workers or neighbors were to do a survey of who you are, could they predict based upon your attitude and your actions that you’re a follower of Christ? Is our behavior toward others aligned with what would be identifiably Christian?

Paul outlines some of these criteria in Galatians 5:22-23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Against such things there is no law.”

When someone encounters you as you go about your week are they going to get the characteristics Paul lists? Will they get gentleness? Self-control?

Kindness?

If the answer is no, we might need to consider how the power of the Gospel has yet to fully take hold of our lives—how there may be areas of our lives that Jesus still needs to transform. That shouldn’t be a source of condemnation because we all fall short of representing the character of Christ from time to time. But momentary blips of our fleshly nature are different from ongoing character flaws in need of a Gospel-reformation.

4. The Gospel Directs My Decisions The fourth thing the Gospel does for us is that it directs our decisions.

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The implications of the Gospel—that Jesus is the risen Christ and offers His salvation to the whole world—should reorient our decisions. It should tell us when to go and when to stop, as well as where to go and where to stop.

Notice what Paul says in Colossians 3:15: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.”

As we go about our business, the Gospel directs our steps. Psalm 37:23 echoes that when the psalmist says that “the Lord directs the steps of the godly.” When He is directing our decisions, we will find a whole bunch of different scenarios arise. He will call you back into realignment with His will when you step outside of it. He will bring certain things or people into our lives to grow us or for us to help grow them. There are times we get a yes from God, sometimes a no, and there are also times we get a not yet.

There are times, as we grow and our will continues to conform to His, where God asks us, “what do you want?” because He knows He can entrust us to make a decision that honors Him. That’s a part of maturing into a deepened faith in Christ where we’ve come to a place of spiritual growth where we don’t always need an explicit directive from the Lord. Our Gospel shoes are so well worn, so broken in, that our feet bear the muscle memory of walking in step with Jesus.

5. The Gospel Brings Me Peace with Others Fifth, the Gospel will bring me peace between myself and others.

If you want to improve your relationships—your marriage, your friendships, your operation at the office—shod your feet every day with the Gospel of peace. That way as you walk, wherever you walk, you bring the peace of God alongside you. You become a non-anxious presence that brings stability and calm to the storms of others rather than tumult and distress.

The peace that the Gospel gives us is not only in a vertical direction— between us and God, but also horizontally—between us in our relationships,

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Gear Up | Caton between people groups and cultures, and ultimately (at the return of Jesus) all of humanity. We walk in the promise of that complete culmination of peace by patterning ourselves after the words of the Messiah Himself, who in Matthew 5:9 reminds us, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Note that Jesus did not say, blessed are the peacekeepers. He is not simply calling for us to avoid ruffling any feathers. Peace is not simply the absence of conflict; biblically speaking, it means the presence of wholeness—that things are in harmony the way God intends them to be. So, Jesus is saying blessed are those who cultivate peace, who forge peace where none had previously existed.

If God is passing out blessings, I say I want in on that. Jesus promises blessing from God for those who are in the business of making peace. The second half of that verse says, “for they will be called children of God.” That means that when people see you not creating war all the time, not arguing all the time, but instead acting as a peacemaker, they’re going to take note.

Paul challenged us as well, when he said in Romans 12:18, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” This doesn’t mean there will never be conflict or hardship—the hardships faced by Paul and the early Christians in the book of Acts certainly attest to that. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much we try to make peace—if we hold to the truth, some people aren’t going to like it. But as far as it depends on me, I’m going to do everything I can to live at peace with everyone as a child of God.

6. The Gospel Gives Me Hope and Courage The sixth truth statement about how the Gospel readies us is that the Gospel gives me hope and courage.

Have you ever seen a fire walker? You know, those folks that walk barefoot over open coals. I was doing some research and found that the highest number of fire walkers relative to the population of the country is found in Sri Lanka. So, if you’re interested in a career in fire walking, that is the place to be! I also discovered that the preparation for the sport is very intense.

People prepare to be fire walkers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Fire walkers also never wear shoes. Why? Because the callouses on

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the bottoms of their feet are substantially thicker than normal barefoot walkers or shoe walkers. The fire walker doesn’t wait until they’re standing in front of the coals to get ready. It’s a lifestyle of preparation.

While the metaphor breaks down a bit when we’re talking about the need to put on our spiritual shoes, there’s still a very valuable spiritual lesson to learn from the fire walkers. Like a fire walker, we too must prepare ourselves to go through the fires of life. It’s a lifestyle of preparation, but not in a paranoid sense where we’re looking for the devil under every rock.

We practice a keen awareness that if we’re walking in the way of Jesus, the fires of spiritual warfare are a guarantee. The Gospel gives us the certain hope and courage to endure faithfully, even amidst the most difficult of attacks, until the end.

I’ve noticed Satan attacks me in one of two ways. Sometimes he attacks by invitation. There are times that, because of what I do, what I say, or how I live my life, I sometimes unintentionally open a door to an attack in my life. And Satan is happy to walk through that door, too.

The second means of attack is by invasion. That is, of course, when I’ve not done anything wrong to invite an attack—perhaps I’ve even done something right—but the attack still comes. Satan is going to show up either by invitation or invasion, and my job is to hold fast to the certain hope of the Gospel and have courage that the Lord is abiding with me through it all.

Paul said in Colossians 1:23, “If you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.”

That’s a truth to hold onto. The Gospel gives us hope to grip ahold of in the face of adversity. And when the Bible speaks about hope, it’s not talking about wishful thinking like “I hope I become a billionaire one day!” It is a certain expectation that God will faithfully abide with you and I, through everything we endure, until the day of Christ’s return.

7. The Gospel Gives Me Marching Orders Finally, the Gospel gives us our marching orders.

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Gear Up | Caton The beauty and hope of the Gospel message are not only something we receive, but they are something we get to deliver to others as well. In Isaiah 52:7, the prophet Isaiah reminds us of the beauty of sharing the Gospel when he says, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’ ” After having received the Gospel, we shod our feet with the Gospel and then we carry the Gospel forward to others. Jesus Himself is the very embodiment of the Gospel message we’re to strap to our feet as we go. He says in John 20:21, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”

Jesus was sent by the Father to dwell among humanity. He was not sent to wage war against it, but to redeem it—to carry the peace of the Kingdom into the brokenness of the human condition. He was sent, His own feet shod with a message of the coming of His Kingdom, where He reigns as Lord, and where His rulership will have no end. He came to beckon people to be reconciled to the Father’s house.

Jesus was sent by the Father to dwell among humanity. He was not sent to wage war against it, but to redeem it—to carry the peace of the Kingdom into the brokenness of the human condition.

Let us put our own Gospel shoes on and go and do likewise.

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Chapter Four

THE SHIELD OF FAITH

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Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.

Nothing will be impossible for you.

— MATTHEW 17:20

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“Faith is power for salvation and strength to eternal life.”

— CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA

After a Roman soldier put on his boots, he would then turn to three accessories that were crucially important to his survival: his shield, his helmet, and his sword.

After putting on the shoes of the Gospel of peace, Paul turns his attention to the first of these three accessories in Ephesians 6:16, “In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.”

Here we have the most explicit mention of spiritual warfare in this entire passage, packaged in the metaphor of flaming arrows from Satan. He reminds us that as we’re going about our day, in our relationships, in our families, at church, or at work—wherever you find yourself—Satan is either attacking or preparing an attack to attempt to thwart the work that God desires to do both in you as well as through you.

In Paul’s day, the Roman soldier was the elite combat machine around.

Unlike the enemies they faced on the frontiers of the empire, Roman legions rehearsed combat formations, just like in football—with different plays to respond to different circumstances as they arose. One formation was called a triple line, where three separate lines of soldiers stood side by side, with their shields. Their lines were organized in such a way that they could move from one area to another as needed to change the defensive posture of the whole.

Archers and javelin throwers would charge out and attack and then hide behind the lines for protection as they regrouped. Another formation called the wedge used lines of soldiers to split their enemy’s formation, dividing them, and ultimately making them easier to destroy. Yet another formation, called the testudo, required soldiers to form a sort of tortoise shell with their shields to protect one another in situations where they were bombarded from archery fire or were outnumbered.

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Gear Up | Caton Often when we think of a shield, we might think of Captain America’s shield or some hand-to-hand combat shield, but this isn’t what Paul was talking about. The shield that Paul was talking about here was not a small one, but about two and a half feet wide and four feet in length. It protected a significant portion of the soldier’s body. It was not made for hand-to-hand single combat but was rather made to fight alongside their fellow soldiers.

It should not escape our notice that this is what Paul has in mind, therefore, when he speaks about the shield of faith. There are several characteristics of this sort of shielding faith that we will talk about in this chapter, but it’s important that we recognize right from the start that Paul is envisioning big faith. Not small, individual, hand-to-hand combat kind of faith. He’s speaking of a full-bodied, indispensable, for me as well as for my brother and sister in Christ kind of faith. But that begs the question: What is faith?

What is Faith?

Faith is one of those words we use in the Christian vernacular that we say so much it almost blurs the meaning.

It’s like if you pick a word, like the word banana. If you repeat the word banana over and over and over, you’ll eventually stop picturing the yellow fruit. It just becomes a bunch of word salad inside your head.

Some speak of faith like it means hoping to get things from God—like if I deny the reality in front of me enough and claim reality is something else, then maybe I will get God to do what I want. In that way, faith is more like positive confession, or wishful thinking, than it is what the Bible actually talks about. But in Paul’s day, the Greek word for faith (pistis), was a socioeconomic term, not just a religious term. And understanding that helps inform our understanding of what Paul means when he refers to faith.

The Roman system of social and economic relationships was what was called a “patron-client” system. If I were a baker by trade and was

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relocating my family to a town like Ephesus, I would seek out a business relationship with a wealthy and connected person in the city. If they chose to take me in, they would become my patron and I would become their client.

Because there were no business loans or free-market capitalism, my patron would extend unmerited favor and generosity toward me—he might buy my equipment for my new bakery, connect me with the right trade guilds, and see to it that my business got off the ground. That favor and generosity would be of such a huge proportion, it was called charis (the Greek word for grace). But as his client, I would be expected to respond to my patron’s grace with pistis, that is faith or faithfulness. If he was hosting guests, I would be expected to provide food. I would be expected to honor him publicly and to be fiercely loyal to him. Faith, or loyalty, is the natural response to grace or unmerited favor.

With that in mind, notice what Paul says in Ephesians 2:6-10 about faith: “And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

We often start quoting this Scripture at verse 8, but the verses before it describe Jesus in a way that Paul’s Ephesian hearers would have understood: God is our divine patron. God has demonstrated the incomparable riches of His grace, which have been expressed in His kindness to us through giving us salvation and blessing in Jesus. It’s by this grace that we’ve been saved.

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Gear Up | Caton Here, the Ephesians would have naturally understood that because of that incomparable grace, they were to respond with faith—a trusting loyalty back to God. He reminds them again that this relationship is nothing that they could have arranged on their own and in no way a result of their own doing. Instead, we were created for this relationship and God has prepared the good works we are to do to walk out faithful lives before Him. After all of God’s spiritual blessings to us—His forgiveness, His love, and most of all His salvation—Paul says what we do now is not sit around and think about and talk about how nice our breastplates are, or how nice our belts are, or how nice our shoes are, or even how nice our shields are. He says we are to take all of them into battle and use them to live lives that honor and represent God and His kingdom before the world.

Faith is the natural response that flows from a heart that is grateful for God’s grace.

Now let’s look at another famous faith verse from Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

This is where many get confused, thinking faith is something we can “manifest.” But what the writer is saying here is that our trusting loyalty that God is who He says He is—that He will do as He has promised He will do—our faith is evidenced in a bold confidence in the certain hope of God’s promises, even when they do not appear to be working out. The writer then describes what we call the “Great Hall of Faith”—women and men who were commended for doing just that: placing their trust in God’s commitment to His name and His promises, even when it didn’t look like it was going to work out.

So, when Paul describes our faith in terms of a large shield that protects us from Satan’s attacks, we recognize that our trusting loyalty in the truth of God and His Word is exactly what he is talking about. Now let’s look at a few characteristics of our faith.

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Our Faith is Defensive “And into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.

This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” ­— 1 PETER 1:4-9

First, we need to understand that our shield of faith is a defensive weapon.

Recall the testudo formation that Roman troops would take. Later cultures would adopt variations of this as well, including here in the United States. Roman infantrymen would line up shoulder to shoulder, covering themselves as their shields formed a defensive “shield wall.” This allowed them to advance, even under heavy fire, because their shields were a defense against the oncoming attacks.

In the same way, our faith functions as a defense against the attacks of the enemy. I don’t know what “flaming arrows” you might have in your life; yours might be different than mine, but we all have some common arrows—some common ways that Satan attacks us. Perhaps the most common for many people is an arrow of doubt and unbelief. The fastest way Satan can get you to lay down your shield is to convince you that trusting in God is meaningless or worthless. Afterall, what soldier carries a shield unless he truly believes it is worth it?

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Gear Up | Caton Satan will attempt to penetrate beyond your shield by causing you to struggle with mistrust and doubt. The response with the shield of faith is to choose to believe and to follow God, as Hebrews encourages us to do, even when we cannot see Him working in our lives. This play by the enemy goes all the way back to Genesis 3:1 in the Garden, where the serpent takes his first shot at humankind by asking Eve, “Did God really say [that]?”

That play is just as effective today as it was in the Garden. Satan is still attacking you the same way. So, with the shield of faith, when Satan says, “Did God really say that?” or “Does God really want you to do that?” Your response to his attack is to access the promises God has already given you, both in prayer and in His Word. Doubt is not the only offensive arrow in the enemy’s quiver. Fear, discouragement, loneliness, and more are just a few. Perhaps one of the most significant arrows being lobbed at our younger generations is anxiety, produced by an incessant barrage of comparison and content on social media and television.

But faith is the defensive tool we have at our disposal, a complete trust in God that His blessings are sufficient to carry us through. Sometimes His blessing for us is a quiet assurance; sometimes it is the help or encouragement of a brother and sister in Christ. Sometimes it is opening a door or an opportunity. And sometimes it is giving us the courage and insight to find the right help we need, such as seeking counsel from a mentor or counseling from a mental health practitioner. But our shield’s defensive function reminds us that our trust in God is not simply a nice thought—it is at the very heart of how we extinguish the attacks of the evil one.

Our Faith is Communal “Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”

— 1 TIMOTHY 6:12

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“I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong—that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.”

— ROMANS 1:11-12

The second truth about our shield of faith is that it is communal.

We are very individualistic in the United States, and because of that, we often assume that “my relationship with Jesus is my relationship.” It’s me and Him only. When we think that way, church becomes a place where we go and an activity we do, instead of a people to whom we belong. But remember the testudo formation. When combined, each soldier’s shield functioned as a necessary, but indiscriminate, part of the greater whole. When combined, a soldier’s shield ceased to be just his shield for his protection. It became a part of the troop’s collective shield for their collective protection.

It’s not all about me. How I build and use my faith impacts my brothers and sisters in Christ. Notice what Paul said to Timothy in 1 Timothy 6:12, “Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” Our faith is supposed to be communal, not privatized. Yes, it is of course my decision to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, but Jesus is not my private Lord and Savior—He’s the Lord over all the cosmos and Savior to all who call upon His name. I’m not made to do life alone. Rather I am made to walk with other brothers and sisters in the faith.

Part of the reason that this is so important to understand is described by Paul in Romans 1:12, “I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong—that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.”

Paul goes as far as saying that the practice of being together as God’s family so that we can be encouraged by each other’s faith is a spiritual gift. How I stay encouraged in the faith is by surrounding myself with others who share that faith—linking shield to shield. In the Roman testudo, there were times that someone at the front of the formation went down. When they

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Gear Up | Caton got hurt, another soldier would switch places with them, and the medical staff that was in the testudo would pull them inward and begin to care for that person. If that soldier needed to be taken away, a small group would walk that person off the battlefield. If that’s not a picture of the kind of people we are called to be as the body of Christ, I don’t know what is.

When we live our faith collectively as God’s people, there are times when you are strong in faith and may be leading the way for others. You may function as a medic who can dress the wounds of a fallen brother or sister.

There are even times when you yourself are the wounded one and have a faith community that is by your side to make sure you’re not left to die alone on the battlefield. That’s precisely the kind of people of faith God desires us to be.

Our Faith is Active “For we live by faith, not by sight.”

— 2 CORINTHIANS 5:7

“By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.”

— HEBREWS 11:4

The third truth about the shield of faith we need to remember is that it is also active.

Our shield is not something just for retreat mode and defense mode. Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 1:5:7 that we, “live by faith, not by sight.” That term translated as “live” implies action. When I am walking in strong faith, it allows me to access the promises of God. As much as the Romans had their fair share of defensive formations, offensive formations like the wedge made use of the shield to take ground in the battle. The wedge is what the Romans used to defeat the infamous Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army.

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If you read through the mentions of women and men in the Great Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11, each story involves an action of faith: 1.

Abel brought an offering

2. Enoch pleased God 3.

Noah built an ark

4. Abraham obeyed and went 5.

Abraham offered

6. Isaac blessed 7.

Jacob blessed

8. Joseph spoke 9.

Moses left Egypt

10. The people passed through the Red Sea 11. The army marched around Jericho 12. Rahab welcomed Women and men alike, great in their faith before God, were people of action. Don’t confuse that with being busy or restless. Action here is a calculated obedience at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. But child of God, if you want to be commended for your faith, action will be involved.

Our Faith Will be Tested The fourth truth you need to know about your shield of faith is that it will, in fact, be tested.

James 1:2-3 says, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.”

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Gear Up | Caton Whenever you encounter trials, James says not only should we learn to tolerate them, but we should learn to derive joy from them because testing builds up our faith, making it stronger on the other side than it was when the trial began.

The truthfulness of this principle is all around us. If you want to build muscle, those muscles first need to be torn through weightlifting to heal stronger. If you want to run a marathon, you need to start the habit of running, pressing yourself to run farther little by little. If you want to learn the piano, you first must learn to practice and repeatedly fail in those practice sessions. Trials have the same muscle-building, endurancestrengthening, skill-honing impact upon our faith.

Trials have the same musclebuilding, endurancestrengthening, skill-honing impact upon our faith.

Our Faith Pleases God “Timothy, my son, I am giving you this command in keeping with the prophecies once made about you, so that by recalling them you may fight the battle well.”

— 1 TIMOTHY 1:18

A final truth about our shield of faith is that our faith pleases God.

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Hebrews 11:6 says this, “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”

God loves our devotion to Him because He is devoted to us. He loves our faith because He Himself is faithful to us. You may reflect on the last several years of your spiritual walk and it may not seem like you’ve grown much in your faith. But I just want to encourage you with two things. First, chances are, you’ve probably grown more than you give yourself credit for.

And second, start today. Resolve that today you’re going to listen to Jesus, like the disciples in John 21 who obeyed and cast their nets to the other side of the boat. Make a conscious choice that today you’re going to begin to build your faith in Jesus. It’s the best decision you can make.

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Chapter Five

THE HELMET OF SALVATION

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The work of salvation, in its full sense, is about whole human beings, not merely souls; about the present, not simply the future; and about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.

— N.T. WRIGHT

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“And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.”

— EPHESIANS 1:13-14

Humans and helmets make for an interesting pairing.

On the one hand, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who likes wearing a helmet. Whether it is the motorcyclist, the baseball or football player, the construction worker, or your child riding his or her bike—no one enjoys wearing a helmet. Do you know how I can confidently say that no one enjoys a helmet? Because we don’t wear them unless we need them. You won’t see that construction worker wear his helmet as a fashion statement to dinner with his wife. One of the first things a football player does upon exiting the field is take off their helmet. How many presidents have been inaugurated while wearing a cycling helmet?

We don’t generally like helmets. Yet, the helmet is among some of the most important pieces of equipment in any number of professions and in many different hobbies. The Center for Disease Control estimates that helmet use, just for motorcyclists, reduces the risk of head injury by 69 percent.

They estimate that if all bikers wore helmets, the United States would save about 1.5 billion dollars in economic costs associated with motorcycle injuries. The National Football League continues to make improvements to its own helmet equipment, reducing concussions in players by 25 percent in 2020 and 2022 seasons alone—all due to a good helmet.

Helmets save lives. That’s all it comes down to. And while a helmet may not be a fashion statement, it is a necessity—quite literally, a matter of life and death in some cases. So, is it any wonder why Paul, in the list of armor he prescribes for us to put on, links the helmet with life and death?

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Gear Up | Caton Again, we must remember that the helmet Paul is talking about is the kind that would belong to a Roman soldier. The Roman helmet was made of bronze and was equipped with cheek pieces that stretched down like sideburns, protecting the side of the soldier’s head.

But there’s something very interesting in the background of what Paul is saying. His reference to this sort of spiritual armor is not new, and the one-two-punch of mentioning the “breastplate of righteousness” and then “helmet of salvation” leaves no doubt to what Paul is doing.

These are not arbitrary ideas Paul is pulling out of thin air. Instead, he is calling back to the words of the prophet Isaiah centuries before, describing how Yahweh, our warrior God, clothes Himself for battle.

Isaiah 59:15b-18 says, “The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice.

He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him. He put on righteousness as his breastplate, and the helmet of salvation on his head; he put on the garments of vengeance and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak. According to what they have done, so will he repay wrath to his enemies and retribution to his foes; he will repay the islands their due.”

You see, Paul’s charge to take the helmet of salvation shows us what is really in view, not only pertaining to the helmet, but to the full armor of God. It is not simply armor God gives us to wage spiritual war against the enemy. It is the very armor God Himself wears as He wages war against Satan’s army of darkness. We “take” the helmet of salvation because it belongs to the Lord. It is His salvation that He gives to us. Why does this distinction matter? I believe it matters for two reasons.

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1. Knowing the helmet belongs to the Lord helps us understand the security of our salvation.

If the salvation characterized in the “helmet of salvation” belongs to the Lord, salvation is something that is a fact inscribed onto the very DNA of creation by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

It is His salvation offered to all of humankind. It is not something we earn. It is not something we fumble and break. It is not fragile. It is not uncertain. It is not fickle.

Isaiah’s words, to which Paul alludes, describe Yahweh as a warrior redeemer, displeased by the injustice of the world—that the sinful systems propped up by principalities and powers (Eph. 6:12) oppress the poor, the marginalized, and the weak. Yahweh sees how no one is intervening in the sinful state of His human creation, and so Yahweh Himself suits up for battle, to fight against those very principalities and powers. While the stone sculptures of ancient Near Eastern gods portrayed these false gods as armed to the teeth with weapons of war, Yahweh is pictured here armed both with weapons of warfare and a breastplate and helmet—making our God an indestructible defense and His enemies easy for the picking.

This is why Paul says in Romans 8:38-39: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

When we view salvation as something that comes from the Lord alone, given to us, we recognize that it is not something that is fragile like glass or easily lost like sand slipping through our fingers. Our helmet of salvation

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Gear Up | Caton is a ready-made defensive weapon fashioned from the resurrected hands of Jesus our King, who rides into battle alongside us. We have the security of knowing that as we take up the helmet of salvation and run forward into battle, we don’t do it alone. The Lord is there by our side, in full battle armor, commanding His forces.

2. Knowing the helmet belongs to the Lord helps us understand the assurance of our salvation.

While the security of our salvation in Jesus is an objective fact that is spelled out right in Scripture, the enemy will do his best to rob you of your assurance of that salvation.

By assurance, I refer not to objective Scriptural truth, but to our recognition of that objective truth—the state of mind that causes us to believe or not believe in the security of our salvation.

If I were a billionaire but lived like a pauper, my state of mind would be misaligned with objective reality. I would be living and thinking differently than my financial status affords me. It’s the same with the assurance of our salvation. One of the enemy’s tactics to knock you off course in your walk with Jesus is to get you living and thinking differently than your salvation status affords you.

But knowing that the salvation we take up belongs to the Lord gives us an assurance of our salvation. It reminds you that God looked at you, specifically—not you in a general sense—but He saw you and said, “That’s my child.” Our assurance in salvation comes from the fact that salvation is not an identity we take up because we filled out a response card at church.

It isn’t because of what we share on social media. It isn’t even because of how good you are at doing all the right things and not doing all the wrong things. It is because, through the blood of Jesus Christ, the Father looks at you and calls you daughter or son. He marked you out as His own.

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In his classic work, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen describes the Father’s heart toward His children: “God is not the patriarch who stays home, doesn’t move, and expects his children to come to him, apologize for their aberrant behavior, beg for forgiveness, and promise to do better. To the contrary, he leaves the house, ignoring his dignity by running toward them, pays no heed to apologies and promises of change, and brings them to the table richly prepared for them. I am beginning now to see how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of God as hiding out and making it as difficult as possible for me to find Him, but instead, as the one who is looking for me while I am doing the hiding.”

In a well-meaning effort to underscore the gravity and seriousness of sin, we have often gotten off track from underscoring just how much the Father longs to be with His children, as the parable of the prodigal son illuminates.

What we end up with are Christians who feel so wretched about themselves that they can’t conceive in their hearts why the Father would want them.

And while sin is serious, we also must recognize the truth of that parable, on which Nouwen elaborates, concerning our salvation. The Father is not looking for reasons to reject those who come to Him. He doesn’t have a hair-triggered temper, ready to kick His kids out of the house at the first sign of wrongdoing. This is why the writer of Proverbs compares the name of the Lord to a “strong tower” that the righteous can run to and be safe (Prov. 18:10). His name, associated with the salvation offered in covenant relationship with Him, is a house of safety from the storm, not a house filled with strife in the presence of an ill-tempered father.

Our assurance of salvation reminds us that salvation is something we enter. It is our adoption into the family of God, as His daughters and sons. We’re not simply hirelings brought to the Father’s estate to work it on His behalf. No, we’re given the status of sons and daughters with all the rights and privileges thereof. When we walk in that assurance, knowing that the Commander of Heaven’s armies is not just the Father of

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Gear Up | Caton all, but that He’s also my Father—your Father—that buries an assurance of our salvation deep down in our souls that the enemy finds difficult to overcome.

The Enemy’s Double-Edged Sword In the next chapter we’ll see how Paul also describes the nature of the sword given to us, which the writer of Hebrews explicitly calls a “doubleedged sword” (Heb. 4:12).

But as was common in Roman times, the enemy is also equipped with a double-edged sword.

The very nature of a helmet is that it is meant for protection and, in the case of the Romans, a protection against the double-edged swords of their enemy. As it pertains to our relationship with our salvation, I believe there are two dangerous edges on the sword of the enemy that we need to be mindful of.

The first edge is discouragement The enemy will try to wield his sword against your identity in your salvation by discouraging you.

It may be over past (or present) failures, unresolved problems, poor health, unanswered prayer, or even simply when something doesn’t go as expected. The enemy can use that as an opportunity to strike a blow of discouragement—that somehow, we must not be holy enough or that we are not measuring up to our salvation.

But we must recognize that Scripture promises hardships. It forecasts setbacks. It guarantees failures. Paul encouraged the Galatians, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we don’t give up” (Gal. 6:9). A myriad other Scriptures (Rev. 2:3; Col. 3:21; Eph. 3:13; Heb. 12:2) testify that the litmus test of a good Christian life is not living perfectly but wrestling faithfully. God’s not

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looking for superstars who can toe the line, but He’s looking for sons and daughters who model faithfulness and fidelity. It’s really that simple.

The second edge is doubt Where discouragement is an attack at your finitude and imperfection, doubt is an attack on God’s perceived goodness and dependability in your salvation.

The enemy can exploit trials and hardships to plant seeds of an embittered doubt about the truthfulness of God’s Word, His reliability, and His love and benevolence.

I use the phrase “embittered doubt” intentionally. It is a normal part of the Christian life to wrestle with doubts from time to time. And God is strong and secure enough to handle the doubts that come with our living the life of faith. When I speak of embittered doubt, I’m referring to an extra element the enemy will add into normal doubt that sows seeds of resentment, entitlement, and ingratitude toward God. The enemy can exploit doubt as a fertile ground for embitterment against God. We combat this by remembering and rehearsing God’s past faithfulness, both in our lives individually, as well as in the life of our local church and the people of God throughout history. We’ve lost some of the value of testifying in the modern American church, but it is an indispensable practice to edify each other. When we are surrounded by the ongoing testimony of other Christians as to God’s faithfulness, and when we couple that with calling to mind God’s past faithfulness in our own lives, it gives us confidence that, just as He was faithful before, He will surely be faithful in the present and in the future.

This is noted in John’s words in Revelation 12:11 when he says, “And they overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony…”

The blood of the Lamb obviously refers to our salvation, but the “word of their testimony” part refers to how we rehearse God’s faithfulness

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Gear Up | Caton to one another and to the rest of the world. The two combined result in overcoming the plots and attacks of the enemy.

Take the Helmet So then, what does it mean to take the helmet of salvation? What does it mean to walk daily in this salvation that comes from God? I want to offer several truths about salvation that will help us know how to take up the helmet and wage war against the enemy.

Salvation Is A Point What do I mean by this?

When I say that salvation is a point, I mean that there is a point in time where we choose if we’re going to accept the salvation offered to us through Jesus the Christ. Do we want to stay steeped in the mire of our own sin? Or do we want to step into a relationship with Jesus where He washes that sin away? The message of salvation can be reasonably be summed up in five characteristics: 1.

Grace: God’s grace, His unmerited favor, is a free gift that cannot be earned or deserved (Rom. 6:23; Eph. 2:8-9).

2. Humanity: Men and women are sinful by nature and are incapable of saving themselves (Rom. 3:23; Matt. 5:48; Prov.

14:12).

3.

God: God is merciful and loving while also just (Exod. 34:6-7; 1 John 4:8).

4. Christ: Jesus the Messiah, or “Christ,” is God in flesh, who came to pay the price for our sin and was raised from the dead in victory over sin and death (John 1:1; 3:16; 6:47; 20:28).

5.

Faith: In response to the grace offered by God through Jesus to humanity, we respond with believing loyalty or “faith/faithfulness,” placing our allegiance with Jesus and His Kingdom (Jas. 2:19; Acts 16:30-1; Eph. 2:8-9; Rev. 3:20).

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There is a moment of salvation in which we decide whether we are going to place our faith in Jesus and accept the grace He has offered to all of humanity. But that is not the sum total of salvation.

There is a moment of salvation in which we decide whether we are going to place our faith in Jesus and accept the grace He has offered to all of humanity. But that is not the sum total of salvation.

Salvation is a process.

While in points in his letters, like Ephesians 2:8-9, Paul says you “have been saved,” there are other places like 1 Corinthians 1:18 where he says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” So, while there is a moment of salvation, that’s not the whole story.

In the story of the Exodus and what followed, we see there was both a point where God got the Hebrews out of Egypt and a process where God had to get Egypt out of the Hebrews! Different Christian traditions call this process different things, but most Christians are familiar with the term sanctification. Sanctification is the process of our salvation working in us, separating us from the pattern of this world—its ethics,

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Gear Up | Caton its values, its politics, its appetites, and its allegiances—and reorienting us to Jesus.

Salvation is a Promise Salvation is a fixed point in the past—where you and I accepted the free gift offered by Jesus.

It is also a process—an ongoing sanctifying work the Spirit of God does in us as we yield to His spiritual cultivation in the soil of our hearts. But Paul also addresses a third characteristic of salvation: it is a future promise.

Scripture is full of references to the future promise of salvation, but Paul alludes to this in Romans 5:9 when he says, “Having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him.” In the future promise of salvation, we place our hope. The future promise is what we hold onto in this “now but not yet” time—where Jesus has won the victory on the cross and at the empty tomb, but the fullness of that victory hasn’t yet been brought to completion.

Through these three lenses we can see the full picture of what it means to take on the helmet of salvation. It is like being administered the antivenom to a snake bite. If a venomous snake bit you, there is a poison introduced into your bloodstream (spiritually speaking, we might call this poison sin and death). Naturally, you would rush to the hospital and the hospital staff would administer an antivenom serum—we might call this the point of salvation, where the cure has been introduced but there is little evidence of its efficacy. Over the course of time, that antivenom works its way through your body, counteracting the impact of the snake venom—we might call this the process of salvation, where the cure is doing its work and visible signs of recovery are evident, but it’s not yet run its full course.

Finally, the antivenom completes its work, ridding your body of the sting of the bite and its death sentence over your life. This is the future promise of salvation to which we hold firm—that, at the return of Jesus, what He began at the cross He will bring to completion, establishing His eternal

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rule over creation and bringing an end to the sting of sin and death (1 Corinthians 15:55).

I would be remiss, in this chapter where we talk about taking up the helmet of salvation, if I didn’t pause and provide an opportunity for you to begin that journey of taking up your helmet of salvation—of beginning your journey with Jesus, coming into the family of God. You don’t pray a particular formula; but wherever you are, just simply begin to talk to God. Express your desire to place your loyalty in Him and follow Him. Ask Him to forgive you of your sin and teach you how to walk in His ways. Then I would encourage you to either reach out to a Christian you know personally or, if you don’t know any, find a good Bible-believing church and ask to speak to a pastor or church leader about your decision to follow Jesus.

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Chapter Six

THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT

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Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.

— JOHN 17:17

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“The Bible that’s falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn’t.”

— CHARLES SPURGEON

Once Paul has described how we are to put on the belt, breastplate, shoes, shield, and helmet, he turns to one last piece of armor, though he adds one final thought on how the Christian soldier waged war in the Spirit, which we will address in the next chapter.

But for now, let’s complete the task of suiting up as Paul describes in Ephesians 6:17, “Take the helmet of salvation and the Sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” My prayer is that we would see that these pieces of armor are each linked to the next one. Like the old children’s song “The Skeleton Dance” reminds us that the thigh bone is connected to the hip bone, the hip bone is connected to the backbone, etc., each of these pieces of armor are meant to be interdependent with one another. If you have one, but are missing the others, it’s a recipe for a malformed Christian life.

Think about it this way. If I have the Word of God, the Bible (my sword), but not the truth of the Gospel (my belt), I have a weapon that can do great harm to people. And great harm has been done throughout history by people who can quote the Bible but do not have the truth of Christ undergirding their soul. If I have accepted the gift of salvation (my helmet) but not the Word (my sword), my relationship with God, and my ability to fight the good fight (2 Timothy 4:7) will be limited and ultimately short-lived. Each piece Paul mentions is meant to depend upon the rest.

That is why he tells us to put on the full armor of God (Ephesians. 6:11).

If you’re like me, when you think about a sword you might think of a movie, like Gladiator. You might think of some big medieval sword wielded by the knights of the old European kingdoms. Or maybe you call to mind the shiny sabers worn by our military servicemen and servicewomen when they are in full dress.

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Gear Up | Caton And while all these swords and more, from the Viking ulfberht to the Samuri katana, all have their proper place in the history of warfare, remember that Paul has in mind the Roman soldier. The Roman carried two different swords. The first, the Roman’s primary weapon, was the Roman longsword, called the gladius—a 20–24-inch blade for longer distance combat, capable of heavy damage. The gladius was the next line of defense in battle after the heavy pikes that front line soldiers carried were no longer able to be used. The second was a short dagger called a machaira, roughly 6-18 inches in length. The dagger was carried by Romans for precise hand-to-hand combat. The machaira was sheathed tightly to the soldier’s belt and was carried at all times.

While machaira was a Greek term used to describe swords in a general sense (cf., Matt. 26:47, 51; Acts 12:2; Heb. 11:37), since this is the word Paul uses in Eph. 6:17 and considering the interdependent relationship of all of these pieces of armor meant for everyday use, it is likely that this short dagger was what Paul had in mind, rather than the longer gladius.

This short dagger was meant for close quarter combat and always worn to ensure a soldier could defend himself in even the most formidable of circumstances. Paul is describing a weapon meant to be always kept on our person, so that we’re always prepared for Satan to attack us. You see, when Satan attacks, it isn’t generally with neat battle lines drawn, battle trumpets blaring, so that you’re prepared and ready to fight. He’s going to attack you and your mind, you and your heart, you and your finances, you and your family, you and your kids, you and your job, etc. He’s going to attack not only you, but those who are closest to you. He’s an expert at surprise attacks.

So, according to Paul, our response is to unsheathe the Sword of the Spirit—a precision offensive and defensive instrument that the writer of Hebrews describes as so sharp that it is capable of piercing that which is seemingly indivisible. In Hebrews 4:12 he says, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged [machaira], it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

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He is reminding us that we can never forget to take our dagger with us—our everyday weapon of spiritual warfare, which he says is the Word of God. What I find so interesting is the term Paul uses for word in this passage.

There are three words that Paul could have chosen to use here that are used for word in the New Testament. The first is graphe, which refers to actual words, such as those which are physically printed on paper or the pixels that populate on your screen as words, such as those in book or in your Bible. But Paul didn’t use that word here. While it is good advice to carry your Bible with you, he’s not referring to always carrying your Bible with you.

Paul could have also used the word logos, which is the most used term for word in the Bible (used almost seven times more than graphe). Logos refers to the divine wisdom of God, the message of God that is embodied in the incarnate Jesus Christ, who is the Logos who became flesh and made His dwelling among us (John 1:14). But while the logos of God is essential to understand as children of God, it is not the word Paul uses here.

Instead, Paul uses a third term, used seventy times in the New Testament—a word called rhema. When it is used in phrases like rhēma theou (Word of God), as it is here, it refers to the divine revelation of God (Luke 3:2; John 3:34; 8:47; cf., 1 Kings. 17:2). The idea of rhema harkens back to the Old Testament depictions of a prophet or prophetess who hears the Word of God. Paul is saying here that when you and I take up the Sword of the Spirit, which is the rhema of God, this is not a sword that we just leave on the coffee table at the house or keep in the glovebox of our car. It is not even a robust understanding of the message of the Gospel (though, again having a Bible and understanding the Gospel are critical!).

Paul is talking about what David speaks of in Psalm 119:11 when he says, “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.”

Paul is referring to an indwelling of the spoken revelation of God deep

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Gear Up | Caton within our heart so that when Satan tempts, we are prepared in the moment to unsheathe that dagger and fight hand-to-hand in spiritual warfare. For Paul, a well-armed Christian is not simply one who owns a copy of the Word, but rather one who is owned by the Word.

If we take the words that are written in the Bible and view them as a cohesive whole, we get the message of the Bible. While that is important, we should remember that the writer of Hebrews calls the Word (logos) of God “alive and active.” The message is not simply a message like you’d receive in your email inbox. It is animated by the very breath of God Himself. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Embedding the Scripture down deep within the recesses of our spirit is how we can carve through the junk that is in this world, the competing messages and values of our culture, to discern God’s design for our lives and for all of humanity—and be empowered to walk in that design.

The words of God are more than pixels on the screen or words on a page, and they are even more than a cohesive, divinely given message, as important as both of those truths are. Scripture is not just a message about God given to us by someone else. It is a message about who God is but spoken directly out of his mouth.

To the church in Corinth, Paul notes that the weapons we have—the armor of God, including the Sword of the Spirit- are other-worldly in nature in design. He says in 2 Corinthians 10:4, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.”

That does not mean the weapons we have are for another world. Instead, they are from another world. They have been forged on the blacksmith anvils of the heavenly city-state from which we have been sent into this world as ambassadors of reconciliation, announcing the imminent rule

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of Christ the King (2 Corinthians. 5:20-21). Our weapons are divinely powered to demolish every stronghold.

When Satan attacks, you and I can unsheathe the Word of God and, by the power of the Spirit, watch strongholds be demolished, both in our lives and in our way as we walk out the faith that has been entrusted to us.

We need to grasp ahold of this truth, that Scripture is God-breathed, it is alive, and it possesses the power we see modeled by Jesus Himself in Matthew 4, where, whenever he was tempted by Satan—who even used Scripture to tempt Jesus—Jesus responded with “It is written…” When we embrace the power of the Word of God, we realize that Scripture is more than a collection of books written over 1,600 years by 40 different authors in three languages and multiple cultures all pointing to one unified theme (as incredible as that is).

In addition to that beautiful truth, it is the very inspired message of God, carrying His authority and conveying the promise of His reign through Jesus the Messiah—a reign that began at His first coming and will reach fulfillment at His second coming. It carries the hopeful promise within it that as we live between these two moments in time, that the Spirit’s abiding presence has been given to us as a deposit (2 Cor. 5:5), to guide us, empower us, and protect us.

So, while it is en vogue in our culture today to pick and choose parts of the Bible to hold as true and others to discard as outdated, taking up the Sword of the Spirit means embracing the whole counsel of God’s Word, regardless of what it may cost us. And while it’s popular to write Scripture verses on t-shirts and bumper stickers and memes on social media, we must take it a step further and write Scripture on our hearts, allowing it not only to exist in our lives as a powerful means by which to demolish strongholds externally, but also that we would allow it to demolish strongholds internally as well.

In the same breath, while we can’t shy away from the “difficult” and “unpopular” parts of Scripture, part of recognizing that our weapons are

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Gear Up | Caton not weapons of this world is also recognizing that Holy Scripture is not a blunt instrument we should use to beat people over the head in the name of “standing for the truth.” Should we stand for the truth? Absolutely. But we can also make using the Bible to be cruel a sort of zen-like thing, where we feel saintlier because we’ve pointed out someone else’s sin.

We can feel we’ve “shown the love of Jesus” by how much we talk about hell and fire and damnation—how much we’ve reminded non-Christians of how we disapprove of how they live like non-Christians, while giving a pass to our Christian brothers and sisters who live like non-Christians.

Far be it of us to abuse Scripture to decry a lost world behaving as though it were lost without applying Scripture to search the thoughts and attitudes of our own hearts. After all 1 Peter 4:17 says, “it is time for judgment to begin with God’s household…” Instead, we would do well to recognize that Paul is describing a precision instrument in our Sword of the Spirit—and precision instruments are used with skill and discernment. Scalpels are precision instruments, sledgehammers are not. We would do well to apply Scripture like the former more than the latter.

At present, I want to give you six characteristics of this precision instrument Paul calls the Sword of the Spirit.

Our Foundation for Truth The Sword of the Spirit is our foundation for truth.

We live in a world right now where any of us can open our phone and receive a virtual cornucopia of opinions on life, relationships, morality, my kids, my education, what’s going on around the world, and more. And while the internet has done great things to democratize our ability to make our voice heard, it has also had the side-effect of removing barriers that used to exist that prevented a lot of knucklehead opinions from reaching the masses.

Now, a neurosurgeon and a sixteen-year-old still learning basic science in high school can give you their opinions on Facebook about

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brain chemistry. Thoughtful expertise is presented right before and after conspiracy theories. There is a bit of a death of expertise on our social media feeds, and it has done a lot in recent years to obscure truth, presenting all ideas (however credible they may or may not be) as equal.

We always need to pull out the sword of God’s Word and study it as the foundation for truth in our lives. Notice what Jesus said in John 17:17, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.” Jesus Himself says, in a prayer to the Father, that His word is true—every word of it is true, and it possesses the power to sanctify us, to set us apart in distinction and humble service to God before the rest of the world.

Jesus’s words challenge us not to look and listen to a little bit of the Scripture, but to listen to all of it. We don’t pick and choose because culture might cancel or reject us, but we also don’t need to be an only-rebuking sort of Christian, where all we do is beat people over the head with God’s Word—that’s treating Scripture like a blunt instrument. Instead, we use our sword as a precision instrument, with the double-edged blade of truth coupled with grace, recognizing its truth and applying it in love to the world around us.

Our Supply for Spiritual Growth The Sword of the Spirit is also our supply for spiritual growth. In 1 Peter 2:1-3, the apostle Peter says, “Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

If you’ve ever had a baby, you know that baby longs for nourishment—to be filled up.

One of the few instincts a child has immediately from the womb is hunger.

Seven to nine times a day, a newborn will desire food—a rate of hunger so

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Gear Up | Caton intense it is only to be outdone by the insatiable hunger when they grow to be teenagers! The fact that newborns and teenagers eat is the same, right?

But what they eat is different. Why? Because of growth.

You wouldn’t feed formula to a teenager any more than you’d feed pizza rolls to an infant. Simply because, as hunger is satisfied, it produces physical growth in the individual. And as that growth occurs, the hunger may remain, but the sophistication of what the individual eats is different.

That’s why, as adults, we generally tend to eat more salads than we used to.

Growth into adulthood (not to mention, a slowing metabolism) required more sophisticated, nutrient rich food than we needed as teenagers and twenty-somethings.

This is at the heart of what Peter is getting at, drawing a spiritual analogy from a timeless principle of physical nourishment. A hunger for God’s Word can and should remain a constant in our lives, but over the course of time, as we grow in our walk with Christ, what we derive from our time in the Word becomes more nourishing, more sophisticated. While it’s important to always remember that “Jesus loves me, this I know,” spiritual growth in the Word must move beyond that fundamental truth at some point.

Peter is saying that you and I need to crave God’s Word daily, feed on God’s Word. Just as we adults continue to eat (though hopefully not nine times a day!) for nourishment, for pleasure over tables with friends, and for the essential vitamins, proteins, and fats, we need to live, Peter is saying, children of God, if we want to stay strong in our faith, we must feed daily on God’s Word.

Whether you are a newborn baby, a spiritual adolescent who has been saved for a couple of years, or a mature adult in the faith, don’t stop feeding on God’s Word. It does not matter how old you or I get, if there is red blood flowing through your veins, you need the Word of God to grow you into maturity. Don’t stop short of just learning the fundamentals—the right things to believe or the right behaviors to do or not do—allow the Word to transform your entire worldview into one that is patterned after Jesus.

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Our Resource for Direction Next, the Sword of the Spirit is our resource for direction. If you want to know how to become a spiritual warrior and not feel like a “worthless worrier,” the psalmist reminds us in Psalm 119:105 that God’s “Word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.”

If you are struggling with whether you should go left or right, do this or not do that, work here or work there, etc., God’s Word is that direction.

Scripture will enlighten you with the wisdom for life, allowing you to act in such a way that you will live according to God’s principles.

In our individualistic culture, it is also worth underscoring the point here that the first Christians, including the Ephesians to whom Paul wrote, studied the Scripture together and sought discernment for direction together as well. Discerning God’s will was far more of a community endeavor than we often make it to be today.

In fact, much of Paul’s writings to his churches was less concerned with giving them what to think and instead was concerned with teaching them how to think together about living together in unity and being a witness to the community to which God called them. We would do well to follow their example by seeking the counsel of our brothers and sisters in the faith in our local churches as we’re discerning direction for our lives (see Proverbs 15:22).

Our Strength When Tempted The fourth characteristic of the Sword of the Spirit is that it is our strength when we are tempted.

When we are tempted, we need only pull out the dagger. Remember the psalmist’s words, that “I have hidden your word in my heart.” Why? Well, it’s not to keep it a secret. David was not the type of person who kept his love for the Lord private. It is so “I might not sin against you,” meaning that when

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Gear Up | Caton I am tempted, my response is to remove the dagger and get ready to go handto-hand combat in the spirit—to fight against Satan, not of my own accord, but in the power of the Holy Spirit and armed with the Word of God. We again can remember the responses of Jesus to Satan’s temptations in the wilderness—to quote the Scripture. And what did Satan do? He left “until a more opportune time” (Luke 4:13). Simply put, when you’re tempted— pray the Scriptures. If you’re tempted again—pray the Scriptures. If you’re tempted again and again—pray using Scripture. Praying the Scriptures is a time-tested battle tactic modeled by the Messiah Himself. We can take that to the bank.

Our Source of Encouragement and Hope Another characteristic of the Sword of the Spirit is that it is our source of encouragement and hope.

Our world today is filled with discouraging things. If all we do every day is sit around and watch cable news or doom scroll social media, we’re going to adopt a discouraged mindset. But Paul offers us this wisdom in Romans 15:4, “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.”

Paul says that everything that was written, referring to the Scriptures— every last word that was written in the past was written to develop within us endurance that we might be encouraged, both by the faith of our spiritual mothers and fathers who have gone before us as well as in the proven track record of God’s faithfulness to them throughout the centuries. That encouragement keeps us abiding in the hope that rests assured that just as God was faithful then, so too He will be faithful today as well as tomorrow.

We can look to the examples of those who have gone before—men like Elijah and David and women like Hannah and Esther—of those who lived

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faithfully before the Lord, and we can receive encouragement that if they could do it, imperfections and all, we can too.

Our Fountain of True Happiness The final characteristic of the Sword of the Spirit is that it is our fountain of true happiness.

If you find yourself in a joyless state, with a joyless mind and joyless conversations, I want to encourage you to spend time reading God’s Word. Notice what Jesus said in Luke 11:28, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”

Other translations render “blessed” as “happy” because the term implies a condition in which one enjoys a favorable regard from God. It is a condition wherein you are in the center of enjoying His covenantal promises.

The happiest people, the most fulfilled, generous, caring people in history are consistently those Christians who have the Word of God deeply embedded into their souls.

The happiest people, the most fulfilled, generous, caring people in history are consistently those Christians who have the Word of God deeply embedded into their souls. I’m not talking about the kind of person who just puts “Christian” as their religious views on Facebook or posts their daily Scripture verse meme. I’m talking about the sort of daughters and sons of God that have so immersed themselves in the truth of the Word that they can look death square in the eye and sing anyway— those are the happiest people in the world.

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Gear Up | Caton In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how a fully suited-up believer— someone taking up the full armor of God—fights in that armor. But for now, it is worth encouraging you with this very practical bit of advice: get into the Word. Don’t just get the Word. In fact, don’t just get in the Word.

Allow the Word, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to get into you. Take up your Sword of the Spirit and sharpen it daily through immersing yourselves in the Scriptures, asking first how it can change you, before asking how it can change your neighbor. Allow it to form you for battle so that you can, as Paul says, stand firm in your faith, fighting the good fight that has been marked out for us.

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Chapter Seven

PRAYER

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Praying hard is not the past of least resistance; it’s usually the path of most resistance because we engage in spiritual warfare.

In fact, when we begin interceding for others, we better make sure that others are interceding for us.

We need a prayer circle that provides a prayer covering.

— MARK BATTERSON

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“The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”

— JAMES 5:16B

When people talk about the armor of God, they often stop after the mention of the Sword of the Spirit. After all, the picture Paul paints is complete.

If you envision a Roman soldier suiting up, the sword completes the ensemble. All he must do is unsheathe his sword and he is ready to charge into battle, right? Wrong.

In fact, a soldier all suited up and amped up for war, on his own and without clear communication, is a dangerous thing. Communication in battle is pivotal, its need illustrated best perhaps by the disaster at the Battle of Balaklava.

The Battle of Balaklava took place during the Crimean War between allied forces of the British, French, and Ottomans against the Russian Empire. On October 25, 1854, Lord Raglan famously dispatched orders to the Light Brigade, under the command of Lord Cardigan, to route the Russians who were moving their artillery. The orders passed between several commanders before they reached Cardigan and, as is often illustrated by the party game “telephone,” the orders had been overly diluted in the process. By the time Cardigan received the orders, he simply heard “advance rapidly”—which was into a valley surrounded by Russian artillery and forces on three sides. It was a disastrous lapse in communication that cost the British dearly. The blunder was made famous

by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Charge of the Light Brigade”: “Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew.

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.”

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Gear Up | Caton In war, communication is crucial to the success of a battle. I have no doubt that this is why Paul finishes his discussion about taking up the full armor of God, not with the sword, but with prayer. In fact, before Paul turns to the final greetings that end his letter to the Ephesians 6:18-20, he spends more ink on prayer than on any of the individual pieces of armor that make up this section of the letter: “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people. Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.”

Prayer is the communication pipeline between you and I and the Commander of the heavenly forces—Jesus. And prayer is so indispensable to the spiritual battle you and I are in that Paul encourages believers to pray on all occasions.

He tells them to use any sort of prayer and to be alert in our prayer. Paul is not describing a boring, passively apathetic sort of “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer. He is talking about doing warfare in prayer. Praying prayers from the depths of one’s heart. He is not describing a playground of prayer, but a battleground.

Prayer gives you and I the direction and the energy needed for the battle.

When soldiers are under attack, clear communication from command can mean the difference between victory and defeat—life and death.

Consequently, if we are going to be effective in warring against the schemes and attacks of the enemy, we must be a people of prayer. Notice, I did not say people who pray. I said a people of prayer. Prayer must be more than something we do. It needs to be at the very core of who we are.

What does implementing Paul’s advice on prayer look like practically though? There are two key takeaways that are crucial: we’re to pray 1) on all occasions and 2) with all kinds of prayers. It is to these two characteristics of prayer that we will turn at present.

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Spiritual Soldiers Pray on All Occasions Paul Tells As To Pray On All Occasions He says something similar to the in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, “pray continually.” He also told his protégé Timothy that in 2 Timothy 2:1:3, “night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers.” All of this sounds great, but what does that actually mean? Scripture outlines three types of occasional prayer: 1.

Situational prayer

2. Rhythmic prayer 3.

Ongoing prayer

Situational prayer is probably what you think about when you think about prayer. It is praying regarding a situation that arises in life. We see this all throughout the Bible, but one clear example is after Peter and John are released from their arrest following the healing of the lame beggar at the Beautiful Gate in Acts 3 and 4, “On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God.” What I find ironic about this bold situational prayer is that the believers didn’t pray to be spared the persecution but rather to be filled with boldness! They didn’t pray to be delivered from the battle, but to be filled with the courage to charge more bravely into the battle. They prayed for the Holy Spirit to accompany their witness with signs and wonders as a testimony of the truth of the Gospel.

If we’re honest with ourselves, those of us who are Christians in the modern West have a lot to learn from these spiritual ancestors. We wring our hands in anguish at the slightest inconvenience we experience because of our Christian faith while those who have gone before us (as well as many brothers and sisters around the world in persecuted contexts) set their faces

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Gear Up | Caton like flint in prayer and ask God for greater boldness to endure hardship for the sake of their Gospel witness—not to win a culture war, but to win people to Jesus.

Situational prayer is the sort of prayer we pray in response to something that happens in the heat of spiritual battle. We appeal to our Commander for guidance, courage, direction, and more. And He is faithful to provide it.

Rhythmic prayer is a feature of prayer we find all throughout Scripture because it pervaded the Jewish and early Christian cultures described in the Bible. For centuries, Jews have observed a rhythm of praying three times a day: Shacharit (morning), Mincha (afternoon), and Ma’ariv (evening). We see glimpses of this in the lives of Jews in both Testaments.

Daniel 6:10 refers to Daniel’s pattern of praying three times a day. When Peter and John have their encounter with the lame beggar in Acts 3, they are coming to the temple for afternoon prayer (3:1). The psalmist alludes to this pattern in Psalm 55:17, “Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice.”

Christians have, in one way or another, continued in this pattern of a rhythm of prayer for the last two thousand years. Many Christians pray three or more times a day using liturgical formats of prayer like The Daily Office.

Others, like many Evangelicals, have a rhythm of praying at a particular time of the day, often accompanied by devotional time in Bible reading as well.

A rhythm of regular prayer ensures that we have intentional places on our daily schedule to prioritize time in communication with the Lord. The format of when, how, and for how long prayer is for your life matters less than establishing a rhythm of prayer itself.

Finally, Scripture describes a type of ongoing prayer. Ongoing prayer is not contrasted with the other two types (i.e., it’s not “pick one or the other”).

Instead, ongoing prayer is a heart posture of prayer—a sort of ongoing fellowship with God in prayer throughout the day. Paul’s references to praying “day and night,” “on all occasions” and, “ceaselessly” don’t exclude the first two types of prayer; they imply an emphasis on ongoing prayer.

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Perhaps the best way to describe a posture of ongoing prayer with God is in many people’s text messaging habits. Whether you’re married and frequently texting your spouse throughout the day, or you have a close friend with whom your text thread is always active, most of us have at least one person in our lives where the communication is so frequent that, when we text them, we don’t need to preface with a “Hello ___, hope you’re doing well….”

For these kinds of relationships, it would be weird to text them that sort of greeting because the text thread never really went cold. Generation Z, the first generation of truly digital natives, is very familiar with this. They are accustomed to constantly open lines of communication with their friends via text and social media.

Another example is with marine mammals like whales, porpoises, and dolphins. Despite living in the ocean, dolphins must surface for air to breathe oxygen. But they also require sleep.

So, these marine mammals possess the capability of what is called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep—a phenomenon where one half of the brain rests while the other half remains active. Prayer is the spiritual oxygen we breathe, and ongoing prayer is like a sort of spiritual unihemispheric slow-wave sleep when, while we are going about our day, there is a part of our spirit that remains attuned to God’s ever-abiding presence.

This is the sort of continuing communication that ongoing prayer calls for. When you have a heart posture of ongoing prayer, you may not always be praying with words, but you are always attuned to God’s presence with you. You remained so attuned to His presence that, when a moment arises that calls for prayer, it seems awkward to begin a prayer with “Dear Lord, I know we haven’t talked in a while but….” Instead, it’s like broaching conversation with a loved one who has been with you the whole day.

Before we move on to the second takeaway, I want to add a caveat about what praying on all occasions is not. Praying on all occasions, first, is not about a particular formula of prayer. There are scores of different approaches to prayer, written prayers or outlines of prayers you can pray,

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Gear Up | Caton and more. None of that is bad, but it can cause some people to assume a particular sort of prayer, or a frequency of prayer, will mean we get the results from God we desire. A lot of people got hung up on the “formula” of the prayer of Jabez (1 Chron. 4:9-10) in the early 2000s, treating the prayer like a talisman or lucky rabbit’s foot that will yield a bounty of blessing from the Lord. But prayer is not a formula that unlocks the ear of God. God’s ear is already attentive to His people.

Praying On All Occasions Does Not Mean Prayer As An Empty Ritual While we don’t like the term “ritual” much in our culture, when we talk about ritual in a negative sense, we actually mean empty ritual—that is, ritual that has lost its significance and meaning over the course of time. It is simply “going through the motions.” But we’re ritualistic beings by nature.

Ritual is what binds us together, orders our lives, and helps us make sense of the world around us. That’s why we have birthday parties, graduation ceremonies, pastoral ordinations, even morning routines and more. These are all rituals, but they’re living and vibrant rituals that are deeply connected to their intended meaning. Some people reject things like rhythmic prayer because they look ritualistic. But a rhythm of prayer that is alive and active— even if you are praying Scripture or other written prayers—is a powerful part of our spiritual development. But if it slips into empty ritual—I simply have my morning quiet time because “that’s what good Christians do”—then I’m in danger of losing the power of praying on all occasions.

Praying On All Occasions Doesn’t Mean Prayer Has to be Verbose It doesn’t have to be full of words. Some people think a person who seems to be able to string together a near-endless prayer without missing a beat is the mark of a spiritual person.

But sometimes endless words in prayer are symptomatic, not of deep spirituality, but of a fear of being still before the Lord and allowing Him to speak to us.

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Spiritual Soldiers Pray with All Kinds of Prayers Luke tells a story where Jesus and His disciples were together.

In Luke 11:1 one of the disciples said, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” What Jesus gives them as instruction is what we commonly refer to as “the Lord’s Prayer.” It wasn’t that this unnamed disciple didn’t know how to pray. All Jewish boys were brought up learning how to pray. It was that this disciple wanted to know how to pray like his rabbi, Jesus.

Instruction on how to pray, what prayers to pray, and the posture of prayer, has been a common feature of Christian teaching since Jesus responded to this disciple’s request. From the writer of the late first/early second century discipleship manual, called the Didache, to Gregory Palamas, Augustine, Nil Sorsky, Martin Luther, until present works on prayer like the classic modern work by Richard Foster, simply called Prayer (Harper Collins, 1992), prayer has been an important part of how pastors and theologians disciple people.

So, while the focus of this book is not solely on prayer, I want to offer several prayer postures from which we can benefit and learn to pray in the way Paul is describing to the Ephesians—in the way that is powerful and effective as we wage war in our spiritual armor.

We should pray preventative prayers In Ephesians 6:18 Paul tells us, “Be alert in our prayer,” and Jesus calls for a similar watchfulness in Mark 14:38, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”

When I think of preventative prayers, I think of prayers that are meant to set our spiritual posture and tone for the day. I think of prayers that are spoken to ask for God’s abiding protection, favor, and blessing. I think of prayers like the one commonly attributed to St. Patrick, who was a missionary in Ireland in the fifth century. Part of the prayer is:

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Gear Up | Caton “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.”

“Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.”

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This beautiful, ancient prayer is a prayer that is preventative in nature.

Throughout the rest of the prayer, Patrick says, “I arise today,” meaning this prayer was intended to be prayed before even getting out of bed.

While this particular prayer doesn’t have to be prayed (remember, there’s no “right” formula), praying at the onset of the day is a great preventative posture to thwart the schemes of Satan before he’s even able to execute them.

We should pray prayers filled with praise Psalm 148:1 captures this well: “Praise the LORD. Praise the LORD from the heavens, praise him in the heights above. Praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his heavenly hosts. Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars. Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies. Let them praise the name of the LORD, for he commanded and they were created.”

Do you see the focus of the prayer? It’s on God, not on us.

There’s a time and a place for crying out to God, to be sure (the psalmists, especially David, do this a lot, too!). But overall, our posture of prayer should be filled with praise to Jesus. This seems like a no-brainer—prayer should be about Jesus. But isn’t it just like the scheming of the enemy to get our focus off Jesus? And he often does.

We should be actively and attentively refocusing everything we do in prayer around praise to Jesus. He is the object of our affection. He is our commander. He is our source. He is the reason prayer is even worth doing to begin with.

We should pray prayers of confession Again, we can turn to the Psalms 51:1-10 as an example:

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Gear Up | Caton “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight…Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

Confession is another aspect of the Christian life that seems like a no-brainer, but it is often sorely neglected. Especially in modern Protestant traditions that emphasize felt needs and positive aspects of spirituality.

Confession seems like an unnecessary bummer to a Christian life hyped up on promises of blessing your way to a better life.

But the practice of confession in prayer stretches back to before the birth of the Church itself, as the words of the Psalms are evidence. While private, confessional prayer is what I am referring to, we cannot ignore the role that corporate prayers of confession have played in the Church throughout history as well, reminding us that our tendency to sin does not impact us in isolation.

We should pray prayers filled with thanksgiving In the same sentence where Paul tells the Thessalonians to “pray continually” (1 Thessalonians. 5:17), he also tells them to, “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (verse 5:18).

Prayer is not simply us approaching God saying, “Hey Lord, it’s me again, here for more stuff.” Prayer should be primarily about expressing thanksgiving and gratitude to God for who He is and for His faithfulness in our lives. This act of rehearsing God’s faithfulness builds our own faith and functions as an act of worship unto God. While the role of prayer in the armor of God does not always seem obvious, neither does communication in battle. But both are indispensable to victory. In the same way, you and I can take up the full armor of

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God; but if we are prayerless, we are aimless. And if we are aimless, we are ripe for the picking by the enemy and his attacks. As the Charge of the Light Brigade reminds us, too, an armed group without the right instruction from their commander can have devastating consequences.

Weapons are to be wielded responsibly. Your sword is not yours to wield to make others feel inferior and small. Your helmet is not meant to beat someone over the head. Your belt of truth is not to whip people on the Internet. We get direction on how to use our armor responsibly—in the way God desires, through a posture of prayer.

The Armor of God “…No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and this is their vindication from me, ‘declares the Lord.’ ” — ISAIAH 54:17

“But since the adversary does not cease to resist many, and uses many and diverse arts to ensnare them, that he may seduce the faithful from their faith, and that he may prevent the faithless from believing, it seems to me necessary that we also, being armed with the invulnerable doctrines of the faith, do battle against him on behalf of the weak.”

— JUSTIN MARTYR

We find ourselves situated in an in-between space.

Throughout Scripture and in Christian history, that space has commonly been referred to as the “last days.” The last days are an in-between space because Jesus the Christ has already died and was resurrected, staking His claim as the rightful King of all creation. But we also hold to the certain hope that just as He came once as a suffering servant, so too He will come again as a conquering King. We live the space between the two comings of Christ.

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Gear Up | Caton Because we live in this in-between space, there is a very real sense that Jesus has already seated Himself as Lord of all creation. But that reign won’t be fully consummated until He returns, defeats sin and death, and destroys Satan’s army of darkness. He has signaled to Satan and his armies that He is on the move and that their days are numbered.

While Satan’s defeat has already been ensured, he will not go down without a fight. And he wants to drag you and me down with him. That is why he schemes and plots to attack the people of God and why much of the New Testament focuses on encouraging God’s people to faithfully abide with Christ amidst trials, to be alert and sober-minded, and to take up their spiritual armor to do warfare in prayer and in witness.

I appreciate how the theologian Gerard van Groningen refers to the enemy and his armies. He calls Satan and his minions “the parasite kingdom.”

I think that designation suits the adversaries of God and His people well because of what a parasite is and does. A parasite is an organism that lives on or inside of a host organism, feeding at the expense of the host.

Without its host, a parasite easily dies. That’s exactly what Satan does to you and to me. He seeks to latch on to us, feeding off us spiritually until we are depleted. When he thrives, it is at our expense. His life force is our demise.

Therefore, especially in this cultural moment, it is imperative we take up the full armor of God—that we partner with the Holy Spirit to do warfare to keep the parasite Satan at bay. And we have been given the assurance from God’s Word that one day, the King will come and destroy the parasite kingdom once and for all. Our task is to remain steadfast and faithful until that day.

As we bring this journey together to a close, I would be irresponsible if I did not offer some practical challenges for you to consider as you look to put the principles of this book into practice—taking up the full armor of God, waging war in prayer, and battling steadfastly in partnership with the Holy Spirit. So, I want to leave you with three challenges to consider.

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Challenge 1: What next step is God leading you to make?

By walking together through what it means to put on the full armor of God, you’re equipped to mature into an elite spiritual warrior.

But this requires more than simply having knowledge. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word shema, which is translated as “hear,” implies more than receiving knowledge. That’s how we use the word “hear”—when we say “Yeah, I hear you,” it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll do anything with the information. We’re only acknowledging that we received it.

But shema means a hearing that corresponds with action. It is more like saying, “Yes, I hear you and I’m going to do something about it.” My hope is that you will not simply have read about taking up the full armor of God in a hear sense, but rather that you will shema—you’ll take a next step in your life to act on the principles in this book.

Challenge 2: What priorities and practices do you need to change?

What changes in your life, habits, and choices do you need to make so that you prioritize God and genuinely grasp the importance of gearing up for spiritual warfare?

This may be integrating something new into your prayer habits—or even beginning a prayer habit. It may be setting something aside in your life that the enemy has exploited to the detriment of your relationship with God. My recommendation to you is to start with small, incremental changes and build upon your progress. Establishing and reordering habits can be difficult, but there are a few best practices to consider. First, you should consider linking a new habit you wish to establish with an already existing habit. For instance, if you want to pray through taking up the full armor of God every morning, write out your prayer on a notecard and place it near your coffee pot. Then, when you begin your morning coffee habit, you simply pray what you’ve written on that note card while pouring your morning coffee.

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Gear Up | Caton Another best practice is to maximize the influence of those who promote the healthy spiritual changes you wish to make. Being a part of a good Christian community of friends that will lift you up instead of dragging you away from the changes you want to make. This is true in any part of our lives. If Norm had wanted to quick drinking, spending all his time at Cheers would have made it very difficult. I’m not suggesting cutting people out of your life, but a rearranging of priorities often means rearranging the influence we give people over our lives.

Challenge 3: What will you do to take spiritual warfare seriously?

What should change about your perspective on spiritual warfare so that you take it more seriously?

On the one hand, people can get weird about spiritual warfare, thinking there’s a demon under every rock. But on the other hand, people can also go to the other extreme, naively thinking they’ll never find a demon under those rocks. The first group runs the risk of becoming so obsessed with all things spiritual warfare that they lose sight of simply adoring Jesus and become a bit paranoid.

The second group runs the risk of a very modernist view of Scripture, influenced more by the Enlightenment than by the Christian faith.

There’s a “middle way” in which we take spiritual warfare incredibly seriously along with the Bible’s call to be vigilant and alert about the scheming of the enemy. Alongside the vigilance, we recognize that not everything is a plot from the enemy, either. Sometimes you step on a Lego in the middle of the night simply because your kid left it there, not because the devil provoked him to do it!

A balanced approach to spiritual warfare has a keen, laser-focused understanding of the relationship between people and principalities and powers. I’ll give you an example. If you receive a negative performance review at work, it probably isn’t caused by the enemy. Your boss probably doesn’t have a demon who provoked her or him to give you that negative

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review. But the enemy can leverage that negative performance review to negatively shape your identity and your felt worthiness to be loved and accepted. He can take something that is just a natural part of life and exploit it as a tool to attack you. Separating people, created in the image of God and in need of Jesus as their Savior, from the schemes of the parasite kingdom to drain you of your spiritual vitality is essential.

It is my hope that you will take up the full armor of God. Not just once after reading this book. Not just for a few weeks. But instead, I wish for you that you would take up the armor of God as a practice of spiritual readiness every day for the rest of your life. Imagine for me, if you will, how differently things would look if all of God’s people made ready for war. Not a physical war against people. But instead, what if the Church was sober-minded and alert, ready daily to do war in the spirit against the enemy? How different might our world look?

The evidence of the war-readiness of the Church is in the practice of prayer, which is why Paul concluded his armor of God discourse about ongoing prayer. Every great move of God in history—every revival, every renewal— from Pentecost to present, was rooted in deep, passionate, ongoing prayer. What might God do in our society through his Church were we fully equipped with the armor of God and devoting ourselves in prayer?

How might we counter the advances of the enemy? How might God heal our land?

There’s only one way to find out. Let’s suit up.

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Gear Up | Caton

What might God do in our society through his Church were we fully equipped with the armor of God and devoting ourselves in prayer?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Gear Up | Caton John Mark Caton, Ph.D., is not only a seasoned pastor but also a widely recognized author and speaker.

With a profound commitment to guiding others through life’s challenges, John Mark’s influence extends beyond the pulpit of Cottonwood Creek Church to various media platforms, hosting his own podcast and as a featured guest on Fox News. As the senior pastor of Cottonwood Creek Church since 1995, he has exemplified steadfast leadership and unwavering devotion to his congregation. His tenure has been marked by a dedication to fostering spiritual growth and providing guidance rooted in the timeless wisdom of scripture.

Beyond his pastoral duties, John Mark, is a dynamic speaker and author sharing his experiences with a captivating blend of wisdom, humor, and authenticity. Through his speaking engagements, he inspires and empowers individuals to reach their full potential, offering insights into personal growth, leadership, matters of faith, resilience, and navigating life’s trials with grace. As an author, John Mark’s books build upon his life experiences and biblical knowledge to explore various topics including marriage, mental health, successful Christian living, depression, and suicide.

Through his writing, speaking engagements, and pastoral ministry, John Mark continues to inspire countless individuals to embrace faith, find purpose, and navigate life’s challenges with unwavering resolve. In his own words, he encapsulates his life philosophy: “There are times in our lives when we feel like things can’t get any worse. In these low points, it’s important to remember that your life always has purpose—God always has a plan for you.”

Outside of his professional endeavors, John Mark is a devoted family man, husband to his wife Jeana since 1990, and proud father of four children. His love for his family, combined with his passion for sports and unwavering faith, forms the foundation of his identity and fuels his relentless pursuit of spreading positivity and encouragement.

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