Armor of God, part two, rightly girded. This is a good one, guys. This was meant to be another three verse in depth, but once I got into it, it turned into a verse and a half. So we're only gonna do one and a half verses today. Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth. Let's pray. Lord, be with us today. Remove me out of this, Lord, and help this to be all about you and what you have for us. Let your word come into our hearts and change how we think and how we feel. Lord, may your word be evident in this message and that we might be able to take something home and something that we institute in our lives going forward. Thank you for all that you have done and bless this time, in Jesus' name, amen. Let's do a little bit of review. Gotta catch y'all up. Some of y'all might not have been here for part one, but it's also good to review because I'm gonna reference a couple of the things going back. Captive in the church. Again, Paul is in a Roman prison in Rome. He's being watched by a Roman guard. He's writing this letter to the church at Ephesus. Ephesus is a wealthy port city. It is dealing with a lot of idolatry, so a lot of spiritual warfare is going on in Ephesus. This is the last chapter in his letter to the church of Ephesus, and this is the last portion of the last chapter. And it is finally, this is his capstone portion to the believers there at the church at Ephesus. Command for capability. Being empowered. by the power and authority of God, right? We have that. We can draw upon it. Everyone's talked about it throughout the entire Bible, talking about calling in that strength and being empowered by God. The call to clothing, it's been issued. You have the armor. You got to put it on. You can't leave it in the bag. And number three, you got to put on all of it. You can't pick and choose which one you're putting on. You got to put it all on, right? Cunning of the conspirator. We're messing with a very dangerous, capable, strategic, scheming enemy who wants to destroy you. He wants to destroy the name of God, and he wants to destroy the name of God through you. And then the conflict in the cosmos, he has an army with him. There are levels to it. They are in an organization. They are poised, ready to strike at any point. They are finding ways on how they can plan to take you down. And then the Christian's confidence. We know that God's already won the war. When he conquered death, when he rose from the grave, he said, hey, I won. It's all about me. We don't have to worry about the final outcome because it's already been decided. Oh. Huh. All right. Relevance. So in the Army, we have something called an MDMP, military decision-making process. And Ben automatically lowered his head and started shaking it. So here's the thing about the military decision-making process. The first step is the mission receipt. And with the mission receipt comes the commander's intent. Now the commander's intent is there to kind of focus your efforts, okay? If you're sitting there, and it goes with you for every step of the process, right? There's seven steps of this process. It goes with every step, and that commander's intent is kind of keep you on target or on track of what you're doing, right? It's giving you a left and right limit. I know some of y'all don't know what that means, but it's fine. It's guidelines. It's there to keep you focused, OK? And at the end of step one is the mission receipt. Step two is mission. I just drew a blank. It's gathering information. Dang it. Analysis, mission analysis, thank you, Ben. Mission analysis is step two, and the analysis that you're bringing, the information that you're bringing in to the decision-making process, if it's not lining up with the commander's intent or the commander's intent is looking for something specific, then you gotta go back to the drawing board and go get some more information to make sure that you're good. Then you move into COA development. COA is course of action, right? So course of action, development, and every step. you kind of got that commander's intent in the back of your mind and you know that you're not moving on to the next step unless you're meeting the commander's intent. Does that make sense? It's like standards at your workplace. You have standards for a reason. It keeps you in line for a reason because standards help to make sure that you're doing the job properly and in good order. Commander's intent is very important. We can't do the military decision-making process without it. And the military, the MDMP, it can last a couple hours, or it can last weeks, right? It's a very grueling process, or it can be, which is kind of important to what we're getting into. Here are our training and learning objectives. Resistance, readiness, reinforcement, revelation, reliance, and resolve. Resistance, wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day. Take unto you is to take arm, or to arm oneself. Again, we gotta take that armor, put it on, get ready to fight, right? Whole armor, we already know this, put it all on. All of it. Withstand, so this is very interesting, withstand here. When I first saw the word withstand, I kind of had the idea in my mind of you're in like riot gear, you know, you see all these riots in Chicago and New York and Baltimore and whatever, and they got all this riot gear on, and withstand means they're throwing those apples at you and you're just standing there to make sure they don't get past you, right? That's kind of what I had in my mind and what withstand is, but it's not. Withstand is more active than that. It is to oppose, to resist, to stand firm, and to refuse to yield. So in a way, it is kind of to take those apples, but it's more like, hey, you throw another apple, I'm coming at you with this baton, I'm going to put you down, right? To oppose or to resist. Evil here is exactly that. It's evil, it's wicked, hurtful, malicious, full of labor and trouble. But evil day is not some far off date that we're all training our whole Christian lives for this one evil day out in the distant future that we might or might not ever see. No, that evil day, it's talking about seasons. It's like in our Christian life, we have those hills and we have those valleys. The evil day is talking about those valleys in our Christian life, those seasons where it's just hard and you're getting attacked from all sides and you feel down and you're getting a little worn down. That's the evil day that it's talking about here. And Paul's encouraging us to be prepared for when there are hard times. There is an understanding that we will face conflict and spiritual warfare, that we should be ready. The verse... Oh man, I switched it on my slides. Oh, I guess y'all copied it. It's fine. Hey, I'm gonna go to 1 Peter 5, 9 first, so go to that second bullet point. This is the verse right after Satan is roaming to and from seeking whom he may devour. This is the verse right after it. Whom there is talking about Satan, whom resist steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world. We're all getting hit. It's not just you. Every single Christian is getting hit. Every single Christian is getting targeted by Satan and his army, right? And we have to resist steadfast in the faith. By the way, this resist here is the exact same Greek word as withstand. The exact same resist here in James 4, 7 is the exact same word as withstand. It means to resist. So it's a more active opposition to Satan and what he is doing. James 4, 7, we all know this one. Submit yourselves therefore to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Key point there, you gotta submit yourself to God first, right? And this whole verse kind of sums up the whole idea of why I even started looking at the armor of God. You see, in the military, we have something called a deliberate risk assessment. When you get higher up in the ranks, you become part of that planning process. And there are always risks to mission. There are always things that you know are going to affect whether or not you're going to be successful when you go to accomplish a mission. And that deliberate risk assessment says, hey, the weather's going to be bad. Hey, there's going to be dusty roads. Hey, there's going to be this. Hey, there's going to be that. Hey, this is what we're going to do. to plan against it or to lessen it or to be careful so that we don't fall into that trap, right? So when I was talking, I think it was with Doug, I know it was with our Thursday night group, I was talking with them and so much of my job, even at Springdale Schools with security, so much of our job is thinking about risks that could affect what we're doing. And how do we plan against those risks? And I was thinking, there's got to be some sort of spiritual correlation to what we can do as Christians to prevent against the risks that we know are coming. Because we do have risks to mission. Christians as we walk in our spiritual walk and and the armor of God this series and specifically this verse is kind of the reason why I started looking into this to begin with and and this is two years in the making so it's it's it's cool that it's here Readiness, stand therefore having your loins girt about with truth. Loins is the part of the body from the bottom of the ribs, right? So the bottom of your ribs to your hip and everything in between, right? It's not just like this midsection where you're, it's the bottom of the ribs all the way to the hips and kind of everything in between. It's the loins represent your core strength or your vital center. Ancient thought considered the loins to be the seat of physical and generational strength, also known as the seat of power. Your loins are known as the seat of power. Girt about, meaning to girt around, fasten tightly, prepare for active service. Now this is interesting. I see these all the time, like what kind of part of speech it is, but I never put it in. But I thought it was very interesting that it's a verb of intentional readiness. So, and that makes sense when we get down here a little bit more. The phrase gird your loins has a physical action and a mental metaphor with it, right? It's a symbolic call to be ready, mentally alert, and spiritually equipped. Essentially it's, hey, there's the girding your loins of taking your tunic and fastening it around you, but it's also like, It's time to man up. It's time to get to work. Let's go. Does that make sense? It's not just, I'm going to fix my tunic and get that ready. It is a, hey, it's time to work. It's time to man up. We're going to battle. Get yourself right. Get your mind right. For those of y'all who like pictures, I know in the Army we like a little bit of poster board and crayon sometimes, I got you some illustrations on what girding your loins might look like, right? They have the long tunic and if you can imagine trying to run or trying to lift or trying to do any kind of physical labor with that big long tunic, it's kind of gonna get in your way, right? It's gonna slow you down, it's gonna constrict your movement. So in order to, be physically ready, they would take the tunic up, they would tie it a certain way, and then they would fasten it to their belt so that they would be ready to do that physical labor or that action, right? Is everyone good here? Is everyone done reading the, all right. So the last thing that they do, soldier's last physical action of gurning their loins would be to fasten the tunic to their belt. Now, again, Paul is in a Roman cell. He is looking at a Roman guard, right? Someone who is watching him. And he's looking at this Roman bell. It was used to hold the sword sheath and other weapons like daggers, whatever other tools, support the breastplate and fasten the tunic that was girded. So the belt was kind of integral to the whole armor system. Without the belt, the armor is going to be loose and it's going to shake. So when you go run in battle, that breastplate's all wobbly and everything. So I'm going to give you all a little illustration here. Those of you who are hardcore in the Army, there's three of us. Well, I guess we're not hardcore in the Army anymore. We're too old for that nonsense. And I'm retired. When you go on long ruck marches and you have all of your gear on you, one of the things that we do is we tighten it down really tight, almost to make sure that the rucksack and the body armor and our flick and our gear, all the stuff that we're carrying that can be in upwards of 70 pounds of extra gear, we have to tighten that down so tight that it almost becomes part of our body. The reason we do that is when we start running and we start moving really fast, if we don't have it tightened and it's loose, it's sitting there working against your body. So you're working muscles that you shouldn't be working just to move 10 feet down the road. It tires you out a whole lot quicker. You're not able to run as fast. You're not able to move quickly as far as agility wise. tightening down the armor, this belt is super important to make sure that everything is balanced, is tight, and you're not gonna be, you know, slow. So the belt's really important, right? Revelation. Truth, that which is unconcealed or evident, reality as it truly is, not hidden, not distorted, not deceptive. I put in the root here, because truth is really important. And it looks like that last word is cut off. It's a negative participle meaning not, and then hidden. So the literal meaning is not hidden, not concealed. Truth carries both moral and relational dimensions. It's faithfulness, sincerity, trustworthiness, and divine reality revealed. Truth is really important. Now, while I was going through my research, just like I found that withstand is the exact same Greek word as resist, mentioned two other times in the Bible, I started going through other verses that had truth in it, right? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me. Now, I know this verse. I've known this verse forever. In fact, it's the only verse that I know in both English and Spanish, right? I never once did I put two and two together. The belt of truth and Jesus being the truth. And then I started thinking, I was like, man, I wonder how far and how deep this goes, so then I started going verse by verse. John 1, 14, and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, and the glory is the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him, but ye know him, for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you. Oh, I got more. John 15, 26, How be it when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth. John 16, 13, But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me. And then Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Psalm, all talking about God, the Father, the Spirit, and Jesus being the truth. Now relate that back to the belt and how integral the belt is to the rest of the armor. See, Jesus, the truth, holds everything together. It keeps everything balanced. It makes sure that you don't unravel and become slowed down. Jesus is the key to wearing all of the spiritual armor. So in order to be ready, you need that relationship with Jesus. So then I was like, man, if Jesus is the truth, he's probably hitting all the other pieces of armor because we know that the belt is so integral to the rest of the armor. Reliance. Belt of truth, we already know that one. We've gone over it. Breastplate of righteousness, for he hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. So Jesus is integral to being righteous. Shoes of peace, but now in Christ Jesus, ye who sometimes were far off were made nigh by the blood of Christ, for he is our... Oh, that's cut off. Peace is that last word. And that's Ephesians 2, I believe. Shield of faith, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Helmet of salvation, neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. Sword of the Spirit. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus is the integral part of the armor that we're putting on. If we don't have that relationship with Jesus, everything else kind of falls to the wayside, right? Man, and then Peter comes up talking about pawn scum, talking about how that relationship with Jesus is so important. And if you don't have that relationship with Jesus, you're gonna kind of grow that nasty film. Well, guess what? If you don't have that relationship with Jesus, your armor is gonna come off and the Satan and his angels are gonna find a way to get an advantage of you, right? We learned that last time. They're looking for ways. They're looking for holes. They're looking for ways to take you down in the name of Jesus with it. So if you don't have that relationship with Jesus who's tightening everything against your body and keeping it close and keeping it unraveled, then you're leaving yourself open. Is that making sense? Without Jesus, righteousness collapsed. into self-righteousness. This is the view of you are a Christian, you are saved, you are part of God's army, you raised your hand, you said, I am going to be a Christian. I do want to follow Jesus. I'm sorry for my sinful life. If you try to do it all on your own, you're just going to be self-righteous. See, without Jesus, salvation feels uncertain. And man, there's no greater illustration than what Peter and Stephen did during the house of destiny. And Stephen was there, just doubt, get in here, come in here and mess with this guy. They're looking for ways to make you uncertain about your salvation, where you stand with the Lord. If you don't have Jesus, then faith is going to falter in non-belief. Without Jesus, peace turns into anger and violence. Guilty. Without Jesus, the sword of the spirit becomes dull and meaningless. You can sit there and read a verse, but if you don't have that relationship with Jesus Christ, those words don't come alive the same way that they would. Colossians 117, and he is before all things, and by all things, and by him all things consist. You see, Jesus has given us the commander's intent, right? The commander's intent is his word that he left with us specifically to guide us and focus us on what we should be doing so that we can accomplish the mission. and needs to go with us every step of the way, starting at step one for mission receipt, when we were given salvation, all the way until the end, when that op order is published. And by the op order published, I mean, you know, when it's all said and done, we're up in heaven. Every step of the way, Jesus and his word and his commander's intent needs to go with us. and we need to be evaluating what we're doing based off his commander's intent. And here's our resolve. Friends, when we speak of Jesus as the belt of truth, we are declaring that He alone brings strength, stability, and structure to every part of our spiritual walk. Last week, we learned that the Christian's confidence rests in Christ, who won the war when He conquered the grave. Today, we've seen that this confidence becomes firm only when Christ is fastened around our lives, when He becomes the one who braces us, balances us, and keeps us from being shaken when we wrestle with the darkness. Just as the commander's intent shapes and guides every step of the MDMP, Christ should steady and guide every step of our walk with him. He is the belt that holds everything together. He closes up the loose places where the enemy would try to pull us down. So I ask you, what is your resolve? Will you simply admire the armor, or will you gird up your loins with Christ himself, allowing him to guide your heart, your habits, your mind, and your daily life? My prayer is that we leave this place determined to wrap our lives in Jesus, to make him the center and core of our strength, so that when the evil day does come, we will stand firm and faithful because we have chosen to be rightly girded in the truth.