STASIS

Last night I had the awesome privilege of speaking to some high school students and young adults at a brand new ministry called STASIS. This ministry was created to help keep the young people out of the bars. Here in Alberta the legal drinking age is 18, and as most of you know, booze does way more harm than good. I have never seen alcohol bring something good into the life of a person or a family.

So I was asked to speak on the Armor of God. The armor of God is found in the 6th chapter of the book of Ephesians. Ephesians only has six chapters, so I explained to the young people that if we jumped right into studying the armor of God, it would be like picking up a novel and reading the last page. Sure you understand how the book ends, but you don't have any clue on how that ending ties into the book, and you may get the wrong idea about the ending because you don't even know the theme of the book.

So we looked at the theme of Ephesians and that is Unity. Unity in Christ and Unity in the church. It told them that Ephesians has two parts. Chapters 1-3 is all theology, chapters 4-6 is the application of that theology. We also looked at a very important phrase in Ephesians and that is the phrase, "In The Heavenly Realms" This phrase happens 5 times in the whole book.

1:3 God has given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.
1:20 God seated Christ at His right hand in the heavenly realms (to be at the right hand of God means to have the most powerful seat. It shows ultimate authority next to God)
2:6 God has seated us with Christ in the Heavenly realms (where is Christ seated ?)
3:10 the church will show the manifold wisdom of God to the demonic forces in the heavenly realms

The demonic forces once knew what is was like to be in the presence of God. They were angels who decided to follow the Liar, Satan, and they left heaven and every spiritual blessing they knew. Now we as Christians have all of this above, and we as the Church are showing them the wisdom of God. Do you think they are happy with that? Do you think that like it that we have something better than they once had? The answer is no, and they hate us for that. So that brings us to the last phrase:

6:12 - Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers and powers and authorities in this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

So now that we have an understanding of what is going on in Ephesians, we can now take a look at the Armor of God.

The Belt of Truth
The Roman soldiers would put the belt on first because it connected the upper and lower armor. It brought unity to the armor.
We saw that Truth is not a concept. Truth is a person (John 14:6) We are to know Truth, live Truth and speak Truth (John 18:37, Jeremiah 9:23-24)

Breastplate of Righteousness
The Roman Soldiers would wear a breast plate to prevent spears and swords from penetrating the vital organs. We need to put on the breastplate of righteousness to prevent the enemy from destroying us from the inside.

We are given Christ's righteousness when we begin a relationship with Him (2 Corinthians 5:27) We need to be pure (1 John 1:9, Isaiah 1:18) Righteousness means to be right before God.

Shod your feet with the shoes of the Gospel of peace.
We looked at the idea of shoes in in the Bible. God told Moses to take off his shoes because he was on holy ground, Boaz took off his shoe and gave it to the other Kinsmen Redeemer, and now Paul is talking about shoes in Ephesians. Shoes in the Bible represented freedom. You could travel much farther with shoes on than without shoes. Shoes to the ancients were very much like a drivers license to a teenager today. It brings freedom, and that is exactly what the Gospel does, it brings freedom to your life.

We saw that we are to be prepared to share the Gospel at all times (Isaiah 52:7, Romans 10:15, 1 Peter 3:15) We need to be prepared daily to do this.

The Shield of Faith
Faith is the assurance of all things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1) Brian Lloyd, one of the host parents last night, is a Mac man and everybody there knows it. He is an advocate for the wonderful machine known as the Mac. I asked him in front of everybody if he had a conviction that Mac is better than PC? Of course the answer is yes, and so I posed the question, would we believe your conviction if you said that Mac is better than PC, but you owned a PC instead of a Mac? Of course the answer is no. So I posed the question, "How many Macs do you own?" "In this house we have 3 macs, I have one at work, and I facilitate the Mac lab at Medicine Hat College."
We can see that faith is the application of our beliefs. If we aren't applying to our lives what we say we believe, we lie to ourselves and to God and our faith is dead. (James 2:26) A dead faith means that it doesn't exist and you are still dead in your sins. Just because you say you're a Christian and go to church doesn't mean that you are a Christian because without faith it is impossible to please God. (Hebrews 11:6)

The Helmet of Salvation is the knowledge of the Gospel and my hope in Jesus Christ (1 Thessolonians 5:8, Philemon 6). The biggest spiritual battle will always be in my head. (Romans 12:2)

The Sword of the Spirit.

This is the only weapon in the Armor of God. The sword was actually a type of dagger that was meant to be used in close, hand to hand combat. The dagger was between 18 and 24 inches long. The Sword of the Spirit is both the Bible and Prayer. (Ephesians 6:17-18) We need to be training daily in the use of our swords. (Joshua 1:8-9)

I finished the Bible study with these four questions; please take the time to answer them for yourself.

1. How am I doing in these areas?
2. What do I need to stop doing?
3. What do I need to start doing?
4. When am I going to do this?