EPHESIANS 6:14B-16 TO WIN THE BATTLE YOU HAVE TO STAND FIRM

V14b The whole armor of God involves putting on the breastplate of RIGHTEOUSNESS, which guards like a breastplate 2co 7:1; 1Th 5:8 This means we have a right relationship with God

A breastplate covered two vital areas, the heart and the bowel area. Now to the Jew this had a great significance, symbolically the heart represented the mind. The Bible says in "Pr 23:7 For as he thinks in his heart, so is he" " Mt 15:19 "For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. "The heart is the thinking aspect of life, the heart in Hebrew terms or symbols means the mind. "The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." Thinking is associated with the heart. The bowels are associated with feelings and emotions.

The heart then means the thinking process and the bowels refers to the emotions, and if we can draw that across to our imagery in terms of the armor this is what we're saying.

Satan wants to attack a believer in two areas primarily, one, in his thinking, two, in his emotions. One in the way he thinks and feels another in the way he responds emotionally. And the believer must be protected, because this is where Satan makes his attack, he feeds your thinking and your emotions with false information, he wants to cloud your mind with false doctrine, lies, religious untruth, anything he can, and he wants to appeal to the wrong parts of your emotions, he wants to bring about evil emotional responses, he wants to twist and pervert your affections. And so the sum of it is this, if you protect your thinking and your feeling from the attacks of Satan you're protected. He'll try to confuse your mind with false doctrine or he'll try to confuse your emotions to make you long for, lust for, feel after and have affection for the wrong things.

V 15 THE GOSPEL OF PEACE

What is the first word in verse 14? Stand, this is not going, this is standing that the Apostle is speaking  in reference to. And the point here is not evangelizing the lost, the point here is not preaching the Gospel, the point here is fighting the devil. This is conflict for a Christian. He is not talking about going anywhere and preaching, he's talking about standing where you are and fighting the devil.

The idea is best in the words, expressed in the words of 1Corinthians 16:13, "Stand fast in the faith." And he is saying, because our feet are shod with the Good News of peace we stand our ground, we don't slip, we don't slide, we don't fall when we're under attack

V16 FAITH, which is like a shield

And so that's what Paul sees here, this thing quenches the fiery darts of the evil one. Now we need to ask ourselves, what are the fiery darts? What is it we're trying to stop? Well in the battle of those days the archers would get their arrows and they would put some material, some ball of cotton or something like that on the tip and it would be soaked in pitch, which would burn rather slowly but rather hotly, and then they would have that dipped and before they would shoot the arrow they would light it, and when it hit its target it would splatter the pitch and it would start little fires on the clothing of the soldier or whatever and burn him, or burn up perhaps whatever target they had in view, if it was made of wood. And so this was what was in Paul's mind, and with the deflection of a metal face on a shield or the leather that would extinguish these there could be protection.

                Now what are Satan's fiery darts? They're seducing temptations, that's all. He's simply referring to temptation. Satan fires shafts of impurity, shafts of selfishness, doubt, fear, disappointment, lust, greed, vanity, covetousness, it all comes down to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. He literally bombards the believer with the arrows, the fiery darts of seductive temptation to bring out of us ungodly, non-Christ like, evil responses. And the only defense we have at this point, Paul says is the shield of faith because sometimes it just rains temptation. We live in a world where it’s all around us and we must have the shield of faith.

Now what does he mean by the shield of faith? We understand the Roman picture, we've got the picture of the army and the arrows flying around, why is faith a shield against temptation? How does faith block the arrows, how does faith secure the victory? Well the term faith means believing God and that is the bottom line of the Christian faith, that is the bottom line of everything we believe, everything we hold to, everything we have our confidence in. The whole of Christianity is an act of believing that God is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seeking Him seek Him. Believing that He wrote the Bible, believing that Christ is God, believing that He died, believing that He rose, believing that He's coming, believing that by believing we can enter into His Kingdom. The whole thing. That's why Habakkuk 2:4 says, "The just shall live by his faith." Romans 1:17 says, "The just shall live by faith." Galatians 3:11, "The just shall live by faith." Hebrews 10, "The just shall live by faith."

The shield of faith is the consistent application of what we believe about God to the issues of life. Now if you don't trust Him then you don't know Him well enough, because if you really knew Him you'd trust Him.