Isaiah 49 gives a sweeping, panoramic view of God’s salvation. But immediately following that promise, there’s a fascinating skeptical response. This is the second of the Servant songs, a prophecy about the Servant of the Lord, who the New Testament...
Isaiah prophesies about a mysterious figure called the Servant of the Lord. In the New Testament, the writers identify the Servant of the Lord with Jesus Christ. These prophecies tell us some things about Jesus, about his work, about what he brings,...
If you thought when you became a Christian you were leaving the fight to get into peace and tranquility, Paul says you were wrong. The Christian life is a fight. But now you have divine resources. We come now to the last piece of the armor of God: “...
In the Bible, salvation is a broader term than what we usually use in the Christian church. We’re looking at the armor of God, and we turn now to another piece: the helmet of salvation. A lot of churches use the word salvation in the past tense: “I’v...
Fiery arrows do not come all throughout the battle. When do they come? Right when you’ve decided to storm the stronghold of the enemy. We’re looking at the armor of God—it’s an illustration Paul uses as a way of saying we have everything we need to...
If you’re trying to do anything more important than to just get ahead in life, you’ll know the shield of faith is extremely important. Because let’s face it: the enemy attacks at the front line. Your front line is the place where you go out on a lim...
Paul says a Christian should be characterized by readiness, a spiritual buoyancy that comes from the use of the gospel of peace. We’re looking at the armor of God and we’re in the third part of our examination of the shoes and this one little phrase...
When Paul talks about shoes, he’s talking about a kind of spiritual athleticism. The idea behind the armor of God is that God has given us all sorts of things we aren’t using. The shoes were part of the armor, and the shoes of the Roman soldier had...
Some of you may be surprised that when Paul thinks about armor, he lists the shoes. Paul goes through the pieces of equipment that a Roman soldier would wear. It’s an illustration on how to live the Christian life, and it gets at a balance that is c...
When you fail, when people accuse you, when people reject you, how do you defend yourself? How do you look yourself in the mirror? We all have a problem of feeling unpresentable, of deeply seeking to be examined and approved. In Ephesians 6, Paul ta...
If you’re on your back and you’re a Christian, it’s because there are resources in your faith that you’re not using. Paul exhorts Christians to take the benefits and resources in the gospel, and to not just believe in them but to use them—so that in...
When you become a Christian, there’s a sense in which you receive all of the blessings and all of the privileges and power and benefits instantly. But there’s another sense in which you don’t. You’ve received the armor when you became a Christian, b...
The armor of God is the benefits, the privileges, and the freedoms you have in the gospel. To put on the armor of God means to get a new mindset. It’s to look at yourself and look at the world in a new way—through those truths and through those free...
What are we supposed to do so we don’t lead defeated lives? Ephesians 6 tells us about spiritual warfare, about the problems that get thrown at us. And it also tells us about our arsenal, the full armor of God. We’re now going to look not so much at...
You make or break your life on the basis of your choices. In Hebrew Scriptures, the word for guidance is usually derived from the word for rope because the ropes were the method of navigation for sailors. They used ropes to lower or move or raise the...
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