Faithful One, so unchanging;
Ageless One, You're my Rock of Peace.
Lord of all I depend on You, I call out to You, again and again.
You are my Rock in times of trouble;
You lift me up when I fall down.
All through the storm Your love is the anchor, my hope is in You alone
Brian Doerksen © 1989 Mercy Publishing Thankyou Music
Thank God for being able to always depend on him.
We come to the last part of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Here Paul gives us an illustration of how God equips each of us, so that together we can show the world what God is like. Read Ephesians 6: 10-20
In this letter Paul has used the phrase ‘heavenly realm’ five times. He uses it to both describe the place where angels serve God, but also to describe the heavenly realms where “the powers of this dark world and spiritual forces of evil” live. My local co-op along with many other places has a magnificent display using pumpkins to celebrate this dark kingdom. There has always been interest in what we call the paranormal – if you can remember back 8 weeks to the Sunday when we looked at Paul’s arrival in Ephesus – we read that those who became Christians showed how much their lives had been transformed through faith in Jesus by burning their books on Halloween and other aspects of the occult.
They recognised that they were now ‘Children of Light’ (5: 8-11) and they were to have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness. Now whether carving a pumpkin is celebrating the fruitless deeds of darkness, that’s for you to decide, but you need to bear in mind that we are described as ‘Children of Light’ because we have God’s Holy Spirit dwelling in us.
When the New Testament focuses on the devil and demons it is usually for only two purposes: To say that evil has been defeated and to warn us not to be enticed by evil. Christians, you and me, are people who believe Christ has already conquered the dark powers of evil so we need to give evil, the devil and demons the same emphasis in our lives that we find in scripture. Evil should not be taken lightly - it is a destructive power, so we need to be vigilant (cautiously alert), but not unduly afraid, because our Saviour Jesus has defeated them.
We are constantly in a battle with evil, we are in battle, because as one bible scholar put it “you can drift into sin, but you never drift into righteousness” (Leon Morris). The battle is to live righteously – to live the right way and so reflect throughout our lives the characteristics of God and not drift towards evil. To keep this battle in the right perspective we should never find the devil more interesting to us than our interest in discovering more about God revealed to us through Jesus Christ. We place our focus on God, not on evil and Paul helps us in our bible reading to do this through showing us how God has equipped us.
While a Roman soldier’s armour may seem very foreign to us the words Paul associates with this equipment shouldn’t be strange at all - truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation and God’s word. These qualities provide us with all the protection we need to repel evil and shine God’s light into the world, but Paul also adds another way in which God equips us.
God equips us with Prayer. We are to pray on all occasions with all kinds of prayer, so your kind of prayers are just as essential as my kind of prayers. Prayer is the equipment which powers-up those other pieces of equipment.
Use these familiar lyrics to lead you into asking God to show you how you can more effectively live a life which glorifies him.
Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
be all else but nothing, except what thou art;
be thou my best thought in the day and the night,
both waking and sleeping, thy presence my light.
Be thou my breastplate, my sword for the fight;
be thou my whole armour, be thou my true might;
be thou my soul's shelter, be thou my strong tower;
O raise thou me heavenward, great power of my power.