Our Spiritual War Part 2
Ephesians 6:14, “Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth.”
I am not sure about you but I know that for myself I often wear a belt. Why is it is valuable to wear a belt you ask? Well, a belt holds up your pants. For most people that creates great value in our lives. When it comes to girding our waist with truth, the same thing applies, it is the truth that holds everything else together. The belt in Romans armor held all the other pieces of the soldier’s armor together, it kept the breastplate in place, allowed the sword to be at the soldier’s side and so on. I can imagine Paul, being chained to Romans soldier when he wrote this epistle, and examining the armor he was wearing as he made the spiritual comparison.
To gird something means to bind or restrain, so having girded your waist with truth, means that you have bound or restrained yourself with the truth, or by being true. Jesus being our commander, and the one who brought grace and truth to us according to John 1, we have to believe the truth of God, and apply said truth to our lives by the power and leading of the Holy Spirit. We know from John 17:17 that God’s Word is truth, so let’s take a few moments to explore this idea.
First, we have to have an objective standard of truth. What do I mean by that? Truth must be truth, no matter what, there is no subjectivity or situational truth, truth is always true. For example 2 + 2 will always be 4, whether it is here, or across the world, or in outer space, those numbers always add up the same. Jesus is always going to be savior, sin is always going to be wrong, God is eternal, the Bible is true, so on and so forth. All of these things remind us that there must be objective truth. You don’t get to decide what is and is not true, only God gets to decide that. Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” We need to know what’s true, therefore we need to know Jesus.
Second, we have to have knowledge of the truth. Knowing that there is an objective truth is not enough. We have to know what that truth is and how it applies to our lives. There is no doubt in my mind that truth comes first in our spiritual armor, because it is of utmost importance in our spiritual war. How do we know the truth? In John 8:31-32, “Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” To know God’s truth, we must live in His Word, and in so doing He will set us free from all those things which bind us. Abiding in His Word is not a short visit from time to time, this is not letting the preacher tell you or I what to believe on Sunday morning. This is you and I in the Word every day, digging deep and letting the word of Christ live in us at all times (Colossians 3:16).
Third, we need to be truthful 1 John 2:21 tells us, “I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth.” Jesus told us to let our yes be yes and our no, no (Matthew 5:37). What does that mean to us? It means we should be honest, if we are believers and followers of the truth of God’s Word than we should be truthful as well. Being honest with others does not mean going out of our way to be insulting, but it does mean that we are honest people, we are not going to lie, be deceptive, hide things, and so on. This also doesn’t mean that every person we meet needs to know every intimate detail of our lives, use some wisdom there. However, as followers of Jesus we need to be honest with other people.
In our spiritual war truth is beyond valuable. Like the belt that holds up my pants, truth holds up every other aspect of my life and every piece of my spiritual armor. When truth goes out the window, then my spiritual armor falls apart, and I am left vulnerable. Truth, and specifically God’s objective truth, is too important for us to ignore, instead, it must become the bedrock of our lives and our faith (Matthew 7:24-27).
Image Borrowed from – Philosophytalk.com
