Fastened At The Back

Twenty minutes before it starts and there are nine parents on their knees on a school hall floor, which is a thing nobody warns you about.

Somebody's laminator has been going all week. There is a table by the piano with paper crowns on it and a jug of orange squash and those plastic cups that split if you hold them wrong. A boy of six is standing very still with his arms out like a scarecrow while his dad works round the back of him with safety pins, because the tabs on the cardboard have gone soft and there is no other way.

The boy says, without much interest, what is this bit for. His dad says it is the front bit. The boy says what does it do. His dad says it stops things, and then hears himself, and stops.

Because there it is, on a Thursday morning, in a hall that smells of floor polish and satsumas. He has been told to fight since he was about that height. Fight the good fight. Be a fighter. Stand up and fight for your family, your faith, your marriage, your kids. He has taken it seriously his whole life, which is why he is so tired. And in forty-one years, in every room where somebody told him to fight, nobody once told him what he was fighting, and nobody ever told him what he was wearing.

He straightens up. His son runs off to be a knight at the squash table. And he stands there in the middle of a school hall with three safety pins in his hand and thinks: I have been swinging at something in the dark for four decades and I do not know its name.

Maybe you have been in that hall. Maybe you were handed the same instruction, by people who loved you, and no equipment list came with it. And maybe the tiredness you carry is not the tiredness of losing. It is the tiredness of a person who was never told what any of it was.

What it is not

Let us take the wrong thing off first, because much of the weight being carried here is not armor at all, it is the wrong fight.

It is not a person. Whatever you have been told, whatever the last ten years have felt like, the thing you are up against is not your wife, your husband, your son, your neighbor, the man at work, the person who did the thing you cannot forget, or the group you have quietly filed under the cause of all this. Paul is explicit about it in the sentence right before the armor: the wrestling is not against flesh and blood. Not partly. Not mostly. Not against people.

That matters here more than anywhere, because a fight aimed at a person cannot be won and cannot be put down. It just goes on, at the kitchen table, for years, and it will take everything a person has. The written word puts the struggle somewhere other than people, and the Holy Spirit has never once helped anybody win a war against their own household.

You are released from a fight you were never assigned, and the release is not something you have to earn your way into. Scripture puts the struggle somewhere other than flesh and blood, in plain words, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that land in a man who has spent a decade aiming at the wrong thing.

And I will say this too, plainly, before anything else: if your home is not safe, if somebody is hurting you or the people in your care, none of this asks you to stay in it or to be quiet about it. Please tell somebody who can actually help today. That is not a failure of anything. Safety comes first, and it comes before every other sentence in this message.

What it actually is

Now the armor, and the surprise of it.

Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.Ephesians 6:13

Go through the pieces and notice what is missing. A belt. A breastplate. Shoes. A shield. A helmet. One sword, and it is named as the word of God, which means the only offensive item in the kit is a sentence God said. There is no maneuver in the list. There is no formula. There is not one thing in it you could perform correctly or incorrectly.

And notice the verb, because Paul repeats it until it cannot be missed. Stand. Withstand. Having done all, stand. Four times in a few verses. The whole assignment, the entire thing being asked of a person in armor, is to still be there.

You have already been given every piece of it, and it is on you now, whatever this morning felt like. The written word calls it the armor of God rather than the armor of the believer, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a person able to remain standing inside something they did not assemble.

Whose is it? Read the name again. The armor of God. It is His. It is His property, His design, His righteousness on the chest rather than yours, His salvation on the head rather than your track record, His word in the hand rather than your best argument. You are not standing there in anything you made.

Fastened where you cannot reach

Here is the part I want you to hold on to, and it comes from the hall floor.

Nobody dresses themselves in armor. It is not physically possible, and it never was. The straps are behind the shoulder blades. Somebody else does them up. A child stands with his arms out like a scarecrow and a parent works round the back with the pins, and the boy does not need to know how the tabs go, because he is not the one fastening them.

You were dressed by God, at the back, where your own hands do not go. That is the written testimony about the armor, and the Holy Spirit is the One who did the fastening while you were busy trying to work out what you were fighting.

Which also means this: you cannot lose it by not knowing what it was. Forty-one years of not being told did not undo a single fastening. The armor has been on you through every one of those rooms, and the tiredness in you tonight is not evidence that you are standing there in nothing.

No technique goes with this. I am not going to hand you steps, and there is no procedure in this message you could get wrong. If a thing can be performed badly it puts the weight back on you, and this weight is not yours.