THE PROTECTIVE POWER OF RIGHTEOUS LIVING

Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on January 28, 2024 under 2024 |

Bethany Bible Church Sermon Message from January 28, 2024 from Ephesians 6:14b

Theme: Jesus’ followers will only stand in battle against spiritual attacks if they’re faithful to wear the protection of a righteous manner of living.

(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve been considering a very important matter in our Christian life. It’s so important that the apostle Paul saved it for the very end of his letter to the Ephesians. It was the way that the Holy Spirit led him to conclude what he had written about the rich spiritual blessings that are ours in Christ.

And dear brothers and sisters in Christ; we ignore what he said to our own spiritual peril.

He had spent six chapters of this letter telling his readers about all of the wonderful spiritual riches that are theirs through a personal faith in Jesus Christ. He urged them to rise up and live victorious lives in the light of all that God has given them through His Son. But at the end of it all, he warned them that they do so while in the midst of an intense spiritual battlefield. The grace that God has shown them in Jesus is an enormous threat to the devil and to the spiritual forces under his rule. And so, as Jesus’ followers, they have become the target of the devil’s most intense hostility. They’re called to live for Jesus while on the alert against constant attacks from a powerful enemy whose own eternal judgment in the lake of fire is imminent … and who “knows that he has a short time” (Revelation 12:12).

Paul’s warning, then, is worth looking at repeatedly. In Ephesians 6:10-13, he wrote;

Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God … (Ephesians 6:10-17).

Last Sunday, we started looking closely at each of the pieces of spiritual armor that we’re urged to take up—the armor God has provided to us so that we will ‘stand’ on the day of battle. We’ve already considered the first piece of armor—the belt of truth. We learned that it’s an essential piece by which other pieces are held in place. And today, we’ll look at the second piece. It’s the piece mentioned at the end of verse 14; “the breastplate of righteousness”.

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In ancient times, a soldier would never go into battle without some form of bodily protection. Sometimes, it was a ‘coat of mail’—an arrangement of rings of metal or links of chain that were all strongly secured together into a very heavy vest-like garment that draped over a soldier’s body. Later in history, soldiers wore a ‘breastplate’—a large plate of thick leather or metal that was crafted to fit over the body and protect the vital organs—the heart, the lungs, and the stomach. Sometimes, it was made of two large plates secured together in order to cover both the front and the back. And sometimes, it was made from pieces of leather or metal that were shaped to fit strategically over particular areas of the body, and held together by straps into a whole system of body armor.

There are several places in the Bible that mention this important piece of battleware. In 1 Samuel 17:38, the young shepherd boy David was sent by King Saul to go into battle against Goliath; and before he went, Saul tried to outfit David with a “coat of mail”. But it was too big and cumbersome for David to use. And after David killed the giant Goliath, we’re told in verse 54 that he took Goliath’s “coat of mail” as a prize. And at a later time in Israel’s history—at a time when the people of Jerusalem were under constant threat of attack from surrounding enemy nations—we’re told in Nehemiah 4:16 that Governor Nehemiah ordered half the people to work on rebuilding the city wall, while the other half “held the spears, the shields, the bows, and wore armor”.

And the same is true even today for those in combat or threatening situations. Though the nature of the things that might strike them has changed over the centuries, the principle is still the same. Soldiers or law enforcement officers won’t venture into dangerous conflicts without wearing some kind of tactical vest or body armor. It’s designed to save their lives; because it protects the vital parts of the body from targeted and truly life-threatening attacks. Soldiers in Paul’s day also wore body armor. It may have been that—as he sat in prison and wrote his letter—he was looking at a Roman soldier who was wearing just such a piece of armor.

Now; I’m a simple man. I’ve asked myself, “What is a breastplate meant to do?” And I came up with a simple answer. A breastplate is meant to make bad things bounce harmlessly off of you so that they don’t get inside of you. And in our passage this morning, the apostle Paul urges his Christian readers to remember that there’s a very fierce spiritual enemy out in the world who hates all of us who love and follow Jesus, and seeks to strike harmful blows at us in order to penetrate us and destroy us from our innermost being. We need protection so that the bad things bounce off and don’t get in.

There have been many professing Christians in history who have suffered such blows in ways that proved fatal to their spiritual well-being. You may even know some of them personally. They used to follow Jesus very devotedly. They were faithful in the Lord’s service, and shared the good news about Him with others, and seemed to be outstanding examples of the Christian life. And then suddenly—seemingly from out of nowhere—they fell in a horrific way. Some very grievous immoral habit was exposed, some improper relationship was discovered, or some criminal activity was found out. Their reputation was destroyed. Their witness for Christ was ruined. Their ministry was taken away from them. And you look at it, and you marvel, and think to yourself, “How could such a thing happen? How could such a seemingly outstanding Christian suddenly have fallen so badly? How could such a thing have gotten in them?”

The awareness of this struck me very hard this week. I was gathering information together to help update our church family directory. I sought to draw information from my own lists of contact information for the ministry. I have a digital record of addresses, phone numbers, and emails that goes back nearly thirty years; and it contains a lot of names of people I’ve interacted with over that time—not only for past and current members of our church family, but also for several local ministers, missionaries, Christian educators, ministry organizations, Christian speakers, and teachers. I hadn’t really gone through this list—in a detailed way—for many years. And as I went through it to get the information I needed last week, I was stunned, and repeatedly grieved in my heart, to see how surprisingly many of those individuals I had known and loved and admired—in the past thirty years—have fallen away and have been removed from fruitful places of ministry because of some secret sin in their lives that destroyed them.

Going through this list then made me think back even further to a leader in the church that I attended many years ago—a man who had been my Adult Sunday School teacher—a model Christian layman whose knowledge of the Bible I had greatly admired—who had to be removed from ministry. It also made me think of a very famous and fruitful Presbyterian minister—a man who had become the spiritual adviser and pastor to a president—a man who I admired so much that he motivated me to go into ministry myself—who was later discovered to have been cheating on his wife repeatedly and had to be removed from ministry. As I was running through my digital contact list, I came across the name of a local pastor and seminary educator—a man whom I began to have contact with, and whose books I recommended to others—who I found out only a couple of years ago had been removed from ministry and set on the sidelines because of a secret relationship he’d been having.

I’ll tell you, dear brothers and sisters; I had some very mixed emotions going through me as I ran through that list. I praise God that I read the names of many dear brothers and sisters who have remained faithful and fruitful over the years. But I think I read just as many names of others who had suffered devastating losses to their ministries and their reputations

And in the end, I’d have to say that many of those losses didn’t come suddenly. They came gradually—through one little secret compromise here, and another little secret compromise there—until out on the battlefield of the Christian life, the enemy destroyed their lives with a final, well-targeted, internal blow. And it was because they didn’t consistently do what Paul said, and only went out into the battlefield against the enemy “having put on the breastplate of righteousness”.

I pray that it doesn’t happen to me. I pray it doesn’t happen to any of us here today.

So then; this simple but immeasurably crucial warning from Paul is one that we must pay attention to. As Jesus’ followers in the midst of a spiritual battlefield, we’ll only stand against spiritual attacks if we’re faithful to wear the protection of a righteous manner of living like a breastplate.

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First, let’s ask …

1. WHAT IS MEANT BY ‘RIGHTEOUSNESS’?

The word that the apostle Paul uses in the original language (dikaiosunē) basically means “justice” or “fair dealing” or “right-doing” or “virtue”. It’s the word that is, most often, translated as “righteousness” in the New Testament; and it speaks especially of being righteous as a follower of Jesus in such a way as there being ‘no condemnation’ found in us in the sight of God. And so; what we’re being told to do in this verse is to make sure that we have ‘put on’ this thing called ‘righteousness in the sight of God’ as if it were a breastplate—as if it were that necessary protection that keeps us from being struck by something bad that would get into us and destroy us from within.

Now; the Bible tells us a very wonderful thing about our relationship with Jesus by faith. It tells us that, because of all that Jesus has done for us on the cross—because of how He came into this world and lived as the Sinless One on our behalf—because of how He kept the commandments of God His Father for us in a perfect way—because of how He died on the cross for us as the atoning sacrifice to take away all the guilt of our sins from us—God the Father now declares us 100% righteous in His sight through faith in Jesus. As the Bible teaches us, righteousness in the sight of God is a completely free gift that is given to us—not through our good works—but only through faith in what Jesus has done. As the Bible teaches us in 2 Corinthians 5:21

For He [that is, God the Father] made Him who knew no sin [that is, Jesus His Son] to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).

That’s a wonderful truth. By faith in Jesus we are—right this very minute, and forevermore—declared to be 100% in His sight through Jesus. The righteousness of Jesus has been freely imputed to us by grace; uploaded, as it were, to our account before God. In fact, we’re not just declared to be righteous before God in Jesus; but are declared to now actually be “the righteousness of God” in Jesus!

But when we consider ‘the breastplate of righteousness’, this is where we need to make a very careful distinction. The apostle Paul tells us that we’re to ‘put on’ the breastplate of righteousness. And the righteousness that is ours through faith in Jesus is not a righteousness that we can ever—in any way—’ put on’ to ourselves. It’s a divine righteousness—a ‘perfect righteousness’—that can only be put on us by God the Father by grace through faith in His Son. We can’t do anything to put that perfect righteousness onto ourselves. Only God the Father can graciously give it to us as an act of His grace. Instead, what the apostle Paul calls us to do in this verse is to put on the kind of ‘practical righteousness’ in everyday living that comes as a result of our having been given the ‘perfect righteousness’ of Jesus.

A good way to look at this is to see it in the light of Isaiah 59—and particularly in the light of what it tells us prophetically about the Lord Jesus Himself. With respect to almost all of the pieces of armor that the apostle Paul mentions, there’s an ‘Isaiah Connection’ that points our attention to the promised Messiah. And in Isaiah 59:16-17, it tells us this about our Lord Jesus—the Messiah:

He saw that there was no man,
And wondered that there was no intercessor;
Therefore His own arm brought salvation for Him;
And His own righteousness, it sustained Him.
For He put on righteousness as a breastplate,
And a helmet of salvation on His head;
He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing,
And was clad with zeal as a cloak (Isaiah 59:16-17).

Here, we’re told that the Lord Jesus would come for us and “put on righteousness as a breastplate”. What an encouragement this is to us! When we put ‘righteousness’ on ‘as a breastplate’, we’re doing what the Lord Jesus Himself also did. But what kind of righteousness did He put on? It couldn’t have been the ‘perfect righteousness’ that had been His from eternity as the Son of God. He didn’t have to put that righteousness on; because it had always been His eternal characteristic before He ever came for us. Rather, it would have to have been the ‘practical righteousness’ that He daily lived out on this earth after He came into this world for us through His incarnation. It would have been the righteousness that came from always doing the Father’s will as He walked on this earth—always obeying His commandments—always conducting Himself in righteousness through the way He lived as a member of humanity—always obeying His Father’s instructions in the scriptures.

And dear brothers and sisters in Christ; that’s what it means for you and me to walk in this world—and to live in the midst of this great spiritual battlefield—“having put on the breastplate of righteousness”. It means that, as people who have been given ‘perfect righteousness’ as a gift of God’s grace through faith in the work of Jesus for us, we now ‘put on’ the kind of practical righteousness of obedience to the Father’s will that our Lord ‘put on’ Himself as a breastplate.

Think of the things that the apostle Paul has already told us about this in his letter to the Ephesians. In Ephesians 4:1, after telling us about all the wonderful spiritual riches that are ours in Christ, Paul wrote,

I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called … (Ephesians 4:1).

And what does that ‘worthy walk’ look like? It boils down to the practical righteousness of obedience to the Father in the way we live our daily lives. In verses 17-24, he wrote;

This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness (vv. 17-24).

So; that’s what it means to ‘walk worthy of our calling’ in Christ. It means that because our Savior has made us ‘perfectly righteous’ in the Father’s sight, we are now to walk in the ‘practical righteousness’ that characterized His own life on earth. As Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:8-10;

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), finding out what is acceptable to the Lord (5:8-10).

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So then; that’s the ‘righteousness’ that we’re to ‘put on’ as a breastplate. It’s the ‘practical righteousness’ of daily, moment-by-moment obedience to the will of God our Father—through the power of the Holy Spirit—that comes from having been given the gift of ‘perfect righteousness’ through faith in Jesus His Son.

But that leads to another question …

2. HOW ARE WE TO PUT IT ON AS A ‘BREASTPLATE’?

I think what I mentioned before about my own ‘simple way’ of looking at a breastplate helps. As I suggested, a breastplate—as it seems to me—is a thing that makes bad things bounce harmlessly off of us so that they don’t get inside of us. And this would mean that we so fix the practical righteousness of Jesus Christ upon ourselves—in our daily living—that when the devil flings a temptation to sin at us, we recognize it for what it is, let it bounce off of us, and refuse to let it get into us by saying a loud and clear “No!” to it. We recognize that we’ve already been declared 100% righteous in the sight of God through His Son, and we therefore refuse to yield to the temptations to sin. We simply say “No!”, let it bounce off, and obey the Father instead.

Perhaps that sounds too simple to you. But when you think about it, it sounds no more simple than what the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 6. That whole chapter is about believing the truth of what God has made us to be in Christ; and then responding by saying “No!” to the devil’s temptations of sin so that we give ourselves over to ‘practical righteousness’ instead. In verses 12-19, Paul wrote this:

Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not! Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness? But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness (Romans 6:12-19).

Think of yourself as the ‘slave/soldier’ of Jesus Christ. You now belong to Him. And to keep yourself protected on the battlefield, He calls you to put on ‘the breastplate of righteousness’ that He Himself wore. You refuse to allow whatever the devil throws at you to get into you; because if you let it in, it will destroy you. When the devil hurls a temptation at you to sin, you let it bounce off the breastplate, you—by the enabling power of the Holy Spirit—say a loud and clear “No!” to it; and then you rise up and obey God’s word—declaring “I am the slave of Jesus Christ; and I give myself—every part of me—to His righteousness.”

It sounds simple, but that’s because the breastplate of righteousness is simple in how it works … if we will be faithful to put it on!

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Now; as we’ve said before, many have failed to put this breastplate on; and they have fallen grievously as a result. They didn’t value it as an absolutely necessary and essential protection in the field of spiritual battle. And so; that leads us to consider one more question about this breastplate …

3. WHAT IS THE PROTECTION THAT IT GIVES?

For one thing, it protects us against the accusations of the devil Himself. Did you know that the name “devil” means “accuser” or “slanderer”? As people who have been given ‘perfect righteousness’ in Jesus, the devil cannot ultimately destroy our position in Christ. But he can bring accusations against us and slander us in such a way as to destroy our witness, and to spoil our usefulness to the Lord in this world, and to rob us of eternal rewards in heavenly glory. But by putting on the breastplate of righteousness, we take that power out of his hand.

In Revelation 12:10-11, it speaks of the faithful stand of the saints during the end times—during the most fierce and intense attacks of the devil. And it tells us this:

Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death (Revelation 12:10-11).

So, one important thing that the breastplate of righteousness does for us is protect us from the slander of the devil. It takes away his ability to accuse us of unrighteousness.

Another thing it does is that it also takes away the ability of ungodly people in this world to speak badly of our faith. The apostle Peter spoke of this in the second chapter of his first letter. So often in the battlefield of faith, the ‘accuser of the brethren’ seeks to get unbelievers in this world to do his work for him. He seeks to turn them off from the gospel that we proclaim and to motivate them to slander faith and our Lord. But 2 Peter 1:11-12 says;

Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation (1 Peter 2:11-12).

So not only does the ‘breastplate of righteousness’ protect us from the things that ‘war against our soul’ from getting into us. It also takes away the tool that the devil uses to get unbelieving people to reject our faith and to speak against our Lord.

And a third way that this breastplate protects us is with respect to our own integrity as followers of Jesus. It protects us from that which would bring us into inconsistency with the life that the Lord Himself calls us to live. The apostle John wrote about this in 1 John 3:4-9 when he said;

Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness. And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin. Whoever abides in Him does not sin. Whoever sins has neither seen Him nor known Him. Little children, let no one deceive you. He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous. He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil. Whoever has been born of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God (1 John 3:4-9).

John isn’t suggesting that we’ll never sin again. We won’t be completely free from stumbling in occasional sins until the day we’re finally in glory. But instead, what John was talking about is the ongoing practices of sinful living—the ongoing ‘life-style’ kind of sins—that brings people down in destruction and into the slavery of the devil. When we make sure that we have faithfully put on the full armor of God—and particularly the breastplate of righteousness—then we’re protected from allowing the enslaving temptations of the devil to get into us and destroy our consistency with the Lord. His attacks bounce off; as we say, “No!” to them.

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Dear brothers and sisters in Christ; I hope and pray that none of us will ever end up like one of those sad stories I found on my long contact list the other day. I hope that if someone looks up our names sometime over thirty years from now, they’ll find that we had remained faithful to the Lord Jesus all the way to the end. I hope they’ll find that every one of us walked in the ‘practical righteousness’ that is our calling as those who have been made perfectly righteous in Christ.

And now is the time to make sure of it. Now is the time to make sure we walk faithfully with the Lord all the way to the end by keeping ourselves protected with the breastplate of righteousness he has called us to wear. As the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 13:11-14;

And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts (Romans 13:11-14).

AE