56:10 Put On the Whole Armor of God

Sorry, I have not been as regular in sending out these devotional this summer:

Today I want to share a devotional which I received today from Bill Bauerle.


Good morning friends,


Ephesians 6:11

Put on the whole armor of God ,that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.

There have been many helpful expositions on the armor of God so I am sure I will not add much to what has been said. As we enter into this section, however, I want to emphatically point out that this is the armor of God and nothing we have in-of-ourselves. The “schemes” of the devil, or wiles as in other translations, are for the most part subtle. We think most often of the work of the devil as blatant darkness, however, his most destructive work is done through the ways of the world. Schaeffer notes: If we are to resist being dirtied by the spirit of the world, we must not only reject its essential characteristic, but search out and resist the special form it is taking in our own generation…We are naïve if we do not realize that we too are surrounded by a uniform culture (I sometimes call it a monolithic culture), which claws at us from our birth to our death. Not only in obvious ways we can easily comprehend but also in subtle ways, a thousand voices expressing its mentality. Yet when we translate what we hear, we discover that there is really one voice, the spirit of the world, and the particular from that world takes in our day.” The only way we will ever be able to stand against these subtle schemes is as we appropriate the armor of God. Yes the battle is real and the stakes are high. And while the battle is real it has also been won by Christ when he arose from the dead and we continue to stand when we continue to put our faith in that finished work.

Bill