THE BREASTPLATE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
In this past Sunday’s sermon, Pastor Harry covered five types of righteousness and the Christ-follower’s transformation from a dead life to a new one of truly living, enabled by the Holy Spirit. This metamorphosis is described by Jesus in the Book of John, chapter 6, verse 63: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” Because of sin, the unbeliever is spiritually dead and unable to connect with God until that individual becomes a new person in Christ. Through faith in Christ, God takes those who are spiritually dead, regenerating them through the work of the Holy Spirit and makes them spiritually alive!
As an analogy, if you have children, you have an idea of what is required of you to raise them in an environment where they will grow to be happy, secure, and well-rounded. You have an idea of what you need to do to make that environment flourish. The same principles apply for your own spiritual maturity. You can become what God intended for you by understanding what kind of relationship God wants to have with you and by letting God’s will work in your life.
We tend to think of our lives as being in several buckets. We have our spiritual lives, our financial lives, and our vocational lives, to name a few. We may try to get our spiritual lives together by attending bible study, church, praying more regularly, or in trying to master another spiritual discipline. But God intends for our spiritual life to simply be a way of referring to one’s life – every moment of it – from His perspective. What that means is that in order to have the kind of relationship with God that He intended requires allowing His will to be first and foremost in everything we do. Elizabeth Barrett Browning may have described this life model best in her poem “Aurora Leigh”: Earth’s crammed with Heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who takes off his shoes – The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.