“The Breastplate of Righteousness”
“Battle Lines” #3 - December 6, 2009
OPEN: Satan and his forces are not fighting a battle against you not from a distance – we wrestle with an enemy that stands against everything that God is doing in your life. You and I live I a war zone – and the war is active and aggressive and the enemy is powerful and can be overwhelming and will stop at nothing to undo what God is doing in your life. God has provided for us an armor that is so marvelous in its design that the enemy will not only not prevail, but we will emerge on the other side of the battle still standing. It is matchless in its effectiveness. Nothing can defeat – nothing can penetrate a believer who is protected with the armor. That really is the whole point of this entire section of Scripture -- Put on the whole Armor – It’s vital. No matter how proficient your theology is, no matter how solid the foundation of your comprehension, no matter how much you know about the Scripture, how much information you have regarding God's truth, you are still potentially a loser. Because this is a war that is won and fought really on a day to day basis. So all of the resources that you have intellectually, in addition all of the resources that you have spiritually in the power and presence of the Spirit of God can be set aside even by a believer to the point where we begin to lose the battle. And so Paul reminds us that we must be very much aware that the Christian life is war, and the sooner we learn it the sooner we will experience the victory that God has for us.
Who Would Go Into A Battle Unprepared?
“Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. (Luke 14:31-32)
What king ever entered into a battle without a careful examination of his resources? And a development of his strategy? In essence that is exactly what we're doing in Ephesians chapter 6. Having the given that we are in war we must also add to the knowledge that this is war a careful evaluation of the strategy, the plan, the enemy and the resources available to us to win the war. Satan wants you to sin – God wants you to win.
Last week we looked at the first piece of the armor – the belt of truth. Stand then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist – having girded your loins with truth – aletheia. You equip yourself for battle by focusing on what’s true and what’s false. And I think that you’ll face more problems in your walk with Christ over this one issue than anything else. There’s nothing that the world hates more than a person who stands up and says I know the truth. You’ll never face more ridicule and be the object of more mockery than when you say “I know the truth.” And when you say that by the way, you are saying something true – because you know Jesus. Jesus is truth incarnate. If you know Jesus, you know the truth. Every other religious idea known to man is not true and is a form or deception in one way or another.
- What’s the purpose of the breastplate? It provides for you vital spiritual protection, right? Roman soldiers had different kinds of breastplates, some of them were made out of linen, a very heavy linen that hung down very low and it would be covered with the hooves of an animal and they would slice them into slices rather thinly and then they would hang them, hooking them together so that it was almost like shield - using material either from the hoof or from the horn. Additionally they sometimes used a chain mail kind of thing. Sometimes they would use the linen and they would hang little pieces of metal on it. Then of course the most familiar one that we know about is the molded metal chest plate that goes all the way from the base of the neck to the top of the thighs, covering all that entire vital area.
Now let me just talk about this concept of the breastplate of righteousness for a minute. Obviously we’re talking about protecting the area from the neck down. The helmet would protect the head area and the breastplate the area below the neck - what the Jewish people used to call the bowels; it meant the mid section where all of the other organs are, the functional organs of the body. And so 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, “As a man thinks in his heart so is he.” “Out of the heart proceeds evil thoughts” The heart was seen as the thinking aspect of life, the heart in Hebrew means the mind. “The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” Thinking was associated with the heart. We still use that same kind of language today; “Well what does your heart tell you?” We’re really talking about the mind. To the Hebrew, the bowels were associated with feelings and emotions. It talks about the bowels of compassion or shutting up the bowels of love And this is because emotions give us feelings in our stomach, don't they? Emotions hit us in the stomach; we ache in our stomach when certain emotions are felt and so to the Hebrew this was a good way to demonstrate it. - Now you’re probably not going to impress someone today if you use this kind of language. I.E. – if you say to your girlfriend “I love you with all of my bowels” she’s probably not going to be very impressed. But it might have impressed the ladies then. 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 our thinking, two, in our emotions.
One in the way we thinks and feel
the other in the way we respond emotionally.
He is going to try to get you to think something that God doesn’t want you to think or he’s going to try to get you feel something that God doesn’t want you to feel. he feeds your thinking processes with false information, he feeds 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 illicit 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 impregnable. 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.
Now if you just take the mind and the emotions together they encompass everything that causes us to act, they encompass the concept of knowledge, that's the first key to responding you've got to have a certain amount of knowledge, understanding, conscience, will, desires, drives, affections, feelings, emotions all those things that cause us to act are protected by the breastplate of righteousness. Satan moves into your life and he has some things he wants to do, he wants to, he wants to snatch away the Word of God from your mind and fill it with lies, right? Fill it with perversion, fill up your mind with garbage, fill up your mind with a morality that isn’t God's, fill up your mind with a theology that isn’t God’s, fill up your mind with all kinds of untruth and half-truth, so he attacks the mind. He wants you to wrongly understand things, he doesn't want you to interpret things rightly, he wants you to say about sin, oh it’s not so bad, so he literally drowns you in a sea of it so you become very tolerate of it and he entertains you with it so that you don't think it’s as evil as it really is.
So he has you laughing at sin on your television or in the movies, he has you hearing it put to beautiful tunes in music so that it clouds and confuses the clear thinking of your mind. From there he moves to destroy your conscience, to get you to do things that you shouldn’t do to sear a conscience that once warned you that soon will not warn you any longer, he wants to debilitate your will, breaking down your will, he wants to confuse your emotions by causing you to feel wrongfully toward things, he wants to corrupt your desires, he wants to draw your affections to the wrong things. And all of this attack comes by Satan in that vital area. But God has given you a protection - it’s the breastplate of righteousness.
What Is Righteousness? Webster’s says: acting in accord with divine or moral law. Rightness. Righteousness recognizes that there is a standard - a moral standard that we are expected to meet. That standard is defined by God and not by man. It is not based on some random list of codes or principles – but is rooted in God’s nature. Catch this: Righteousness flows from the nature of God. It is defined by who God is. - for God to accept anything that is other than himself would mean he would have to deny himself. Which would be intellectual suicide. So God only accepts that which he himself is. “Be ye holy as I am holy” Holiness is rightness – as defined by God. The Greek word is dikaiosune - it simply means the correct, proper, just, pure, noble, and honorable pattern for living – the most virtuous course, the most perfect means, the most correct methodology and behavior. Righteousness is the way a person ought to be. To be righteous means that we are able to stand before God without guilt and without moral culpability.
Not surprising, Scripture has a great deal of information on the topic of righteousness:
Not Attained By Obeying Rules: Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin. (Romans 3:20) – so it is not earned
Comes As a Gift From God - This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. (Rom. 3:22)
Available Only Through Christ - God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:21)
Attainable-“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled”
(Matt. 5:3) some people just want to be wrong
Top Priority - But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matt. 6:33)
Three categories of righteousness:
* Self-righteousness (Individual) – this is basically saying “I already am the way I ought to be.” Or it could be saying “I recognize that I am not what I ought to be” but “I have the ability to make myself become what I ought to be.”
* Imputed Righteousness (Imparted) – says, I am not what I ought to be, but someone else has caused me to be what I ought to be.
* Practical Righteousness –(Implemented) I am striving to live according to the standard of what I ought to be.
Let’s take a look at these three.
First self-righteousness – which is altogether useless.
In Luke chapter 18 we find the typical attitude of a Pharisee, a legalist, somebody who thinks he can make it by his own goodness, we have people like that today, in fact every religious system in the world apart from Christianity is based on the fact that man can do it himself, that he can be good enough on his own. And so in Luke 18:9 a certain parable the Lord says,
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
In other words, “I'm so glad I'm so good, I'm so happy about me, aren’t You?” “I’ve got to be me – I’m so glad that I’m me!” That’s the song of the Pharisee. I've done it on my own, I've arrived, I'm self-righteous. “I fast twice a week;” and you only had to fast several times a year but he was really going at it, “I give tithes of all that I possess.” And there in the corner was the tax collector, beating on his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.”
But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and
said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Jesus said, “I tell you, that's the man that went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone that exalts himself shall be abased; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted.” Another word for justified is made righteous. Who was really righteous? The man who thought he could do it on his own or the man who knew he couldn't? Jesus said, the man who knew he couldn't. You could call the story, “a good man that went to hell and a bad man that went to heaven.” As long as you think you can do it on your own you're stuck with your own self-righteousness, you do not have a breastplate. You will never defend yourself against Satan, he'll cast you into hell forever. Even though God has the ultimate right to do that, Satan is the one who attracts. All the best you can do doesn't make it,
The problem that you and I have is not that we don’t have righteousness – the problem is that we don’t have the right kind of righteousness. Ill. of coming up to the counter at Wall Mart and trying to pay with Russian Rubles. You won’t be able to purchase the items in your cart – because you have the wrong kind of currency. You could have sackfulls of rubles in the car – and it won’t buy you anything. You don’t need more – you need a different kind. And that’s the problem you and I have. We don’t have the right kind of righteousness. It has never been that we needed just a little bit more righteousness – that we had some righteousness and God came along and made up the difference – and topped off what we already had and kind of tipped the scales in our favor. It’s always been that we have a kind of currency that he doesn’t even accept. It’s not that we have some but not enough – it’s that we have nothing to put on the table. We somehow think we’re going to pay the sin debt but all we have to offer is counterfeit.
Isaiah 64:6 says, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”
That's the best we have. If you hope by your goodness to get into heaven you are the most deluded person of all. There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. (Rom 3:10-11) The word worthless means to go sour like milk, the whole human race has gone sour, there's nobody righteous, nobody good in the whole thing. In verse 19 of that passage it says, every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Self-righteousness is a paper breastplate. It would hold up in battles that we face.
Ill – of listening to a message on this passage. By a professor at a very well known Christian University. He used this passage to say that the breastplate of righteousness is what protects us from the wrath of God who is angry at sin all day long. I disagreed with his thesis – this passage is about defending ourselves from the attack of the enemy – not the anger of God. But nonetheless it is a reality that we tend to ignore today. His anger against the sin in our life is only deflected by the righteousness of Christ.
* Let’s take a look at the second category: Imputed Righteousness.
Turn to Philippians chapter 3 – starting at verse 4. If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.
Paul is saying, “If self-righteousness were possible – look at me – if anyone was qualified, certainly I would have a shot at it. I would probably rank higher than anyone else you could come up with. Just look at my credentials: I was a real Israelite - even from circumcision, from the time I was a baby- I fulfilled every legalistic requirement. I came from good stock – the tribe of Benjamin – a Hebrew of Hebrews – if you’ve ever seen a good Jew – it’s me, I belong to the strictest most religious legalistic sect in the whole system. I persecuted the church - I’m totally blameless when it comes to uphold Jewishness. He says if you're going to count on self-righteousness look at the guy who's got more going for him than anybody else. If self-righteousness was the way in I would really lay claim to it.
But then he changes in verse 7:
But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith (Phil 3:7-9)
Paul says, my own righteousness is useless, I must have the righteousness of God which is by faith in Christ. And when you become a believer, when you become a Christian you reach out your hand of faith, take hold of the hand of God through Jesus Christ, at that moment the righteousness of Christ is imputed to you. To impute means to make a transfer from one account where there’s plenty into an account that is empty. – an account that is empty is credited from an account that is full. Imputation is a transfer. God clothes you in the righteousness of Christ, God puts over you as it were a canopy of the absolute holiness of Jesus Christ, and from that moment to the end of eternity when God looks at you He sees the righteousness of Jesus Christ. “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” God puts a veil over you and every time He sees you He sees you as righteous in Christ.
Then the last category – Practical Righteousness – or Imparted Righteousness.
In order for you to live the kind of life that wins the battle over Satan you must apply righteous principles available to you in His righteousness to the matter of your daily living. You’ve got to wear what you’ve been given. You know there are people who think that because they have the imputed righteousness of Christ it doesn't matter what they do. You’ve got to put it to use. You can live a righteous life; it's a matter of daily, moment by moment choices. Practical righteousness puts the armor on. The night is almost gone, and the day is near Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts. (Romans 13:12-14) The NIV says – clothe yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ. The clothing we wear defines us. We dress for our job. We dress to represent our personal style. We dress for certain activities. We dress to protect our bodies--from football padding to a firefighters coat. We wear clothes to show our affiliation--whether it's an army uniform or a basketball jersey. Paul is saying make sure others identify you by the fact that you are wearing the righteousness of Christ. He’s covered you with his righteousness – make every choice - every decision based on that reality.
When temptation comes – put on your righteous armor. When you are weak, put on the strength of Christ When you are tempted to feel condemned, put on the righteousness of Christ. When you're tempted to live for yourself, put on his perfect obedience and selfless humility. When you're tempted to conform to this world, clothe yourself with the one whose victorious death has overcome the world. When you're tempted to think you're doing well on your own in conquering sin, acknowledge your dependence and put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Make sure that your practical righteousness matches your positional righteousness.
Putting the belt of truth means we are committed to the things that God says is true. Putting on the breastplate of righteousness means that we are dedicated to living a holy life.
CLOSE:
Ill of Terry Schafer - young wife living with her husband in the small city of Moline Illinois. She had a special gift she wanted to give to her husband for Christmas but was afraid that they would not be able to afford it. She started shopping for it in Sept. knowing it was a specialized piece of equipment and not every store would sell it. She finally found it – and to her dismay it was way beyond their budget. But she came up the idea of laying it away and making payments to the store keeper. She pitched her idea to the store manager. The business man sympathized with her situation and said, “Since your husband is a policeman, I doubt that you’re going to take advantage of me. Why don’t you give your first payment today – and I’ll let you take the gift home. Make sure you make the other payments and pay it off before Christmas.” She agreed. The only problem was she was one of those people who couldn’t keep a secret. She couldn’t wait till Christmas to give the gift to her husband. That September night she stood there beaming with a wrapped present on the table of their small home. She said Merry Christmas and gave her husband a peck on the cheek.
Neither one of them realized at that moment how significant that gift would end up being. In fact in the not-to-distant future it would mean the difference between life and death for her husband. On Oct. 1 of that same year Patrolman David Schafer was working the night shift and got a call on his police radio. A drugstore robbery was in process. Racing to the scene he arrived just in time to observe the suspect getting into his car, starting the engine and speeding away. Quickly David switched on his siren and began the pursuit. Three blocks later the getaway car suddenly pulled over the side of the road and stopped. The suspect was still behind the wheel of his car as David cautiously approached. He got about three feet from the window when the suspect fired an automatic pistol sending a .45 caliber slug into David’s abdomen.
7:00 AM the next morning – Terry answered the door of their home to face a police officer telling her that her husband had been shot trying to apprehend a robbery suspect. As he detailed the news, he said he had bad news and good news. As she listened, she was glad that she didn’t wait till Christmas to give her husband the gift. David had been shot point blank with a 45 caliber pistol and survived. She was very glad the shopkeeper had let her take that gift home that day. The gift Terry had purchased for her husband was a bullet proof vest – and it had saved his life. He was in the hospital with deep bruised to his chest not a bullet wound. She had given her husband the gift of life.
The reason Christ came – was to provide for us a vest of righteousness. He paid the price with His blood that he might protect us with a shield that sin could not penetrate. Put it on. The only way you can loose is if you take it off.
