Tonight was our student ministry's discipleship time that we call "Rooted". This is a time of no fluff. We sit down, pray, and break open God's word together. We have been going through a series on the armor of God from Ephesians 6. We are calling it "basic training."
Tonight's topic was the shield of faith spoken of in Ephesians 6:16 which says...
"In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one" (NIV).
I really enjoyed studying for this message. There is so much good stuff in this verse that I found it hard to keeping it to a respectable length. The main thought that I think God was wanting us to deal with is this issue of faith. The faith that Paul was writing about was more of a verb than a noun. We can say that we have put our faith into Jesus Christ all we want, but what do the actions of our life say every day?
When there is an issue that comes up in our life or decision that we have to make, where do we go to first? Our friends? Our family? Our pride? Facebook/Twitter? I would hope that as a follower of Jesus, that we would run to Him first. Now I'll be the first to admit that I don't run to Jesus first with everything in my life. I wish that I could say that I do, but I can't and be truthful. To say that Jesus Christ is the Lord of our life is to say that He is in control... He calls the shots... He directs the path. When we go to Jesus first, we are showing the world around us that He is the one that our faith rests in solely.
We find that when we properly put our faith in Christ, it acts as a shield that not only protects us from the pointed tips of Satan's darts, but it extinguishes them! This means that it will save those around us a lot of heartache because they are not getting plastered by the flaming tar from those arrows.
May those of us who claim the name of Jesus and say that our faith is in Him be found true. May the words of our hands and feet show that Jesus is truly first and calling the shots in our lives. It's easy to say that our faith is in Jesus; it's a whole different thing to show it by our actions.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this passage of Scripture, my thoughts, or anything else so please feel free to leave a comment.
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