2026_02_01 God's Armor: Truth

``Today, we continue our series entitled the spiritual war. And our topic is today, the armor God's armor, truth. And actually, we're gonna be focusing on one aspect of truth today. This will be a two part sermon. We've been studying Ephesians chapter six verse 10 to 20. A key passage the primary passages, in fact, in the bible that speaks about spiritual warfare. [00:30:48] (25 seconds)  #LiveWithIntegrity

And we've seen that there's this invisible epic war that's going on between the forces of good and evil in the unseen realm. And while God is all powerful and through Christ Jesus, he's conquered the work of Satan, the battle continues to rage. [00:31:13] (16 seconds)

Paul warns us to watch for the devil's schemes. Over the past several weeks, we've been looking at the eight schemes of Satan that he uses to destroy our lives, our marriages, our families, our churches, the church worldwide. He's against us. All those schemes are important, but the first two that we looked at are foundational to how the enemy works. Satan works through deception to bring destruction. [00:31:44] (34 seconds)

We need to have this armor on so we can stand our ground in the day of evil, the day of temptation, the day of attack, and after you've done everything, to stand. There's a day called the day of evil, the time when Satan attacks. And we don't know when the attack will come or where it will come from, so we need to be prepared and on our guard, lest we be vulnerable and not ready and allow Satan to wound us and to gain ground in our lives. [00:37:55] (39 seconds)

So it brings us to our second point about the belt of truth. We must put on our warriors belt so we are ready for battle and won't trip. Paul says, stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist. [00:39:17] (19 seconds)

A Roman soldier had a leather belt that was underneath his breastplate and that, underneath his armor. And that leather belt had these strips of leather hanging from it. And the purpose of this was to protect the his waist and the lower part of his body above his knees when he was in battle from the swing of a sword. The leather would stop that. And so it was a a protective for him physically. And it was the first proof of the armor that he put on, and likewise, this truth is foundational in Christian living. [00:39:36] (33 seconds)

But the belt was also important for another reason. It gave a soldier ease of movement. People back in that day, men and women wore robes. And if you're if it was the wintertime, they would wear long and heavy robes that would go down to their ankles. And if you're in battle with that robe hanging down, it could literally be fatal. You could trip over your robe, fall, and that could be the end. And so what they would do, they would lift the robe up to wrap their knees, and then they would take a sash, a belt, and wrap it around their waist to hold that, that robe above the the ground so they wouldn't trip over it. This was not only done by soldiers when they're going into battle, but pretty much by anyone who was preparing for hard work or task or running, fishing, tradesman work. They would regularly pull up their robe. They would gird, as the old King James version says, they would gird up their loins. [00:40:09] (61 seconds)

And so this phrase, and it's literally a verb here in this text, it doesn't actually say belt, it says gird up your loins, but we know they used a belt to gird up their loins. It became synonymous with get prepared, which is is an idiom. You know, someone said, well, curl up your loins. It means get ready. And, of course, it was also a very practical thing for workers. [00:41:10] (25 seconds)