“Therefore you must wear the whole armor of God that you may be able to resist evil in its day of power, and even when you have fought to a standstill you may still stand your ground.”

Ephesians 6:13 (Phillips Translation)

The invitation to put on something new to wear is always beguiling.  Newspaper and magazine advertisements and TV commercials make the new styles and seasonal changes of clothing very compelling.

But St. Paul’s exhortation here in the closing paragraphs of his Ephesian letter to put on the whole armor of God may not be too enticing to us.  For one thing, it may sound a bit too flamboyantly categorical: “Put on the whole armor of God.” But worse still, the words suggest climbing into something like those coats of mail we used to see in Museums and musty old Victorian homes.  All that is terribly passé.

My great-great-grandfather in a letter to his son, the first Paul Tudor Jones, when the boy was away from home at boarding school back in 1845, wrote that a younger son, still at home in Bolivar, Tennessee, had ordered a new waistcoat from Memphis to be shipped by boat up the Mississippi River, then into the Hatchie River above Covington and on to Bolivar.  Here’s what he wrote: “Let me know, Paul, how you have replenished your wardrobe to make yourself comfortable.  Mont sent to Memphis, by boat, to Ridley and got a satin waistcoat and broad cloth pants for $10.00.  Good articles and a good fit.” That $10.00 price tag lets us know that was 140 years ago.

Mediaeval coats of mail, and pre-Civil War waistcoats and britches, and St. Paul’s armor of God are equally passé and not very inviting for you and me.

But the point that St. Paul is making here is really up to the minute and one to which we can give wholehearted agreement.  It is just this: a person should be appropriately dressed for any occasion.  It makes a whale of a difference how you dress if you are going skiing or skin diving, or parachute jumping, or just about town shopping.

All St. Paul is saying is that the Christian life is neither a dream nor a party.  It is a fight – a warfare.  Therefore, to be dressed appropriately and adequately neither pajamas nor blue jeans will suffice.  The Christian must put on his fighting clothes.

Furthermore, the nature of the Christian’s adversary and the character of the encounter further qualify what is appropriate and adequate armor.  To those early converts to Christianity at Ephesus Paul wrote: “I expect that you have learned by now that our fight is not against any physical enemy; it is against organizations and powers that are spiritual.  We are up against the unseen power that controls this dark world and spiritual agents from the very headquarters of evil.” Since it is a spiritual warfare essentially, weapons from material arsenals are no good.

Who are the unseen, spiritual enemies with whom the Christian must be prepared to join battle? — “Spiritual agents from the very headquarters of evil.”  Does that mean the devil and his angels?  Or is this reference to the evil encrusted in the institutions and customs of society – the kind of demonic pressures people feel when they say, “I know it was wrong, but I was not free to do what I knew was right?”

Oglivana Wright in her book, The Struggle Within, says: “We live in a psychological jungle.  The slightest thought, sensation, emotion, desire may cause unexpected consequences.  Unwittingly we may step on a cobra or in our folly pull the whiskers of a lion.”

The wild ferocious beasts of our psychological jungle attack from within.  Anger, resentment, jealousy, prejudice, lust, greed, hatred – how to handle these unseen, but real assailants is our biggest problem.  Paul knew these enemies within would do us in unless some inner armor of the spirit were perfected.

Was the enemy that destroyed the crack basketball player, Len Bias, coming at him from within or from the outside?  What sort of defense would have saved his life – some power within or without?

For us what is adequate defense against peer pressure to join the crowd embarking on a cocaine induced high? I heard a woman say while watching the graduates of a girl’s preparatory school march in for their commencement exercises: “I’m praying for each one going down that aisle, and the prettier they are, the harder I pray.”  St. Paul was convinced that nothing short of the armor that God supplies would be adequate defense against our most dangerous enemies.  “Be strong,” he writes the Ephesians, “not in yourselves but in the Lord, and in the power of his boundless resource.  Put on the whole armor of God.”

There is an old Korean proverb counseling courageous perseverance, which runs something like this: “When your teeth wear out, use your gums.”  St. Paul would approve, but he would insist that a person is a fool to trust in oneself and one’s own resources alone to handle the monstrous problem of evil in one’s own personality as well as in the world without.

From time to time we hear about people who are troubled by anonymous telephone calls, or threatened in letters describing dire things some unknown, unseen enemy is plotting to spring on them.  What do people do in such emergencies?

A friend of mine in North Carolina once received through the mail a threatening letter.  It contained this message:  “Put $3,000 in a manila envelope, and put the envelope with the money in it in the crotch of the lowest limb on the big gum tree in the vacant lot in front of your house by nine o’clock tomorrow morning, or take the consequences.  I can get at you or any member of your family to harm you in a hundred different ways.”

What was my friend to do?  He had a large family.  Some of them were young children.  He had no idea as to the identity of this evil extortionist.

What did he do?  Why, he took the letter to the local office of the F.B.I.  They moved walkie-talkie equipment into his house.  Under cover of darkness they stationed some of their agents well hidden by shrubbery in the vacant lot.  At nine o’clock sharp the next morning they sent my friend with the envelope containing the $3,000 to deposit in the gum tree.  All day long they waited.  Nothing happened – until, just as darkness was falling, a shadowy figure of a man was seen stealthily creeping toward the gum tree.  He raised a hand to seize the envelope and in the same instant four armed agents of the F.B.I. closed in about him.

So it is also in the threatening and the defending of every human soul.  We are fools if we try to handle our battle against the unseen spiritual hosts of evil arrayed against us entirely in our own strength.  But where, to whom do we turn?

“Did we in our own strength confide,”

     cried Martin Luther,

“Our striving would be losing.

For still our ancient foe

Doth seek to work us woe:

His craft and power are great,

And, armed with cruel hate

On earth is not his equal.

Were not the right man on our side,

The man of God’s own choosing.

Dost ask who that may be?

Christ Jesus, it is He;

Lord Sabaoth His name,

From age to age the same,

And He must win the battle.”

St. Paul makes explicit the nature of this armor of God – the only appropriate and adequate armor for the Christian; the girdle of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the readiness of the gospel, the helmet of salvation, the shield of faith, the sword of the spirit.

Now, as John Calvin said, it is a great mistake to find a peculiar significance in the fact that righteousness forms the breastplate in the armor of God and that truth is the belt.  Paul might just as well have said the breastplate of truth and the belt of righteousness.

To put on the whole armor of God meant for St. Paul, as he says quite pointedly at other places in his writings, to put on Jesus Christ – to become a new man or woman in Christ – to let the mind and heart and spirit of Jesus Christ be in you.

The point Paul is emphasizing is that the whole of the Christian’s armor is pure grace – given by God, and it is not of human manufacture.  We have long ago gone way too far in pumping up the power of ideals and equating them with the essence of religion, as if we could somehow make our hope and our faith and our truth outlast and overpower the forces of evil.

The armor of God is pure grace – all given – but genuine, objective, spiritual reality.  God gives it for our defense.  “Be strong not in yourselves but in the Lord and in the power of his boundless resource.”

Yet, though it is God’s armor – we must put it on.  The armor of God is not an automatic theological straight-jacket or bulletproof vest with which the Christian is outfitted when he or she joins the church.  It is not a protective shell which grows beetle-like, willy, nilly, after conversion.  It can be put on or off by a personal act of will.

Some people think of church membership and participation in worship and prayer and Bible study and Christian service and companionship as some of life’s social extras – all right if one has time for them – but definitely extras for which they as hard working practical people have no time.

But these are the means of Grace, the channels through which God supplies to us His Grace.  When we neglect them or refuse them we are putting off the Armor of God.

William Gogh says that saints are not people endowed with special spiritual talents who perform miracles. Gogh says, “I do not believe in any kind of saints except the soldier saints – those who, in season and out of season, in defeat and failure, in triumph and success, in sorrow and humiliation, in life and in death, keep on faithfully putting on the whole armor of God.”

The armor of God.  Here is something for everyone to wear that is available and appropriate and adequate.  Whether the styles are Bikinis or space suits, waistcoats or sweaters, britches or blue jeans – put on the whole armor of God.  He supplies it.  But we must put it on.

PASTORAL PRAYER

From the busy world and all its alluring activities, Our Father, we have come apart for a brief visit with Thee and with others who share this same purpose.  Forsaking noise and commotion, we seek quiet and serenity.  Turning from the world without we would enter the world within.  Shutting our eyes on the beauty of Thy visible universe we would focus our spiritual gaze on Thy glorious invisible dominion.

But, Our Father, we would not renounce forever the busy world with its strain and stress, its beauty and pain, its privileges and responsibilities.  We would come apart awhile and draw near to Thee in order that our souls may be refreshed and strengthened, our dimmed vision cleared, and our cold hearts warmed again so that we may return to the glorious world of struggle and conflict able to see life clearly and see it whole, empowered to grasp our opportunities with something more than our feeble human grip, to engage in all our earthly relationships with affections chastened by Thy Holy love.

Come now, O Thou Almighty Merciful One, even unto us and fashion us anew after the mind and spirit of Christ and send us forth in His glorious name. Amen