The Breastplate of Righteousness

One of the critical pieces of spiritual armor God provides us Well, we've begun to look at this section here in Ephesians 6, where Paul is encouraging the leaders to be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might, to put on the whole armor of God. Now, we're aware of the fact that the apostle Paul uses pictures, he uses metaphors in order to teach, and does so with great effectiveness. He uses athletics with frequency, architecture, agriculture, and also, as here, warfare.

Warfare. As we noted last time, the full armor of God has a picture by which the reader may attach identification in the Roman soldier. But in actual fact, the underlying picture is probably that of the valiant warrior that is described for us in the Psalms and in the Prophets. Now, it is important to recognize that Paul, in writing in this way, is writing to those who are in Christ—to those who have, as he puts it in verse 13 of chapter 1, heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, as he puts it, and they have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. And as a result of that, to stick with the metaphor, they have been enlisted as soldiers in Christ's army.

And having been enlisted, they are then provided with all the resources that are required for spiritual warfare. As I reach that point in my thinking, I paused, and I paused purposefully. And I want to do so with you also.

Let me say this. I want, throughout the course of today, for us to try and answer three questions. Question number one, am I a soldier of the cross? Question number two, am I wearing the breastplate of righteousness? Question number three, am I guarding my heart from the schemes of the devil?

And I will spend virtually the greater part of this morning on this first question. Am I a soldier of the cross? I take that, actually, from the opening line of a hymn by Isaac Watts. Am I a soldier of the cross, a follower of the Lamb? And the reason I stop here is because some of us, if we are honest, have to acknowledge the fact that for us to consider what it might mean to wear this armor is actually premature.

And for this reason. Because some of us, by our own testimony, are not actually members of the army. The real question is, have we believed? Have we believed? You see, when the Bible uses believe, it doesn't use it simply in terms of an intellectual assent to various propositions or ideas or doctrines. To believe or to have faith means to transfer trust from self to Christ. Every so often, perhaps in the realm of moving from one place to another, you may have had occasion to take what was yours in a bank in one state and make sure that it was placed securely in a bank in another state.

It was once there, and now it has been moved to there. And that lies at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian soldier. And I want, without embarrassment, to ask you to ask yourself this question, Am I a soldier of the cross? Now, a soldier of the cross, someone who's enlisted in Christ's army, will not be saying things like this. And this is routinely said by many. Because I have lived a pretty good life up until now, I'm sure that God will be gracious to me and make up any deficit that there happens to be.

And hopefully, I'll be fine. The kind of approach that says, in relationship to our consideration of religion and of the Bible and of the Christian gospel, well, I believe in a God who helps those who help themselves. Or an approach which comes to the gospel and says, As best I understand it, if I do these certain things or don't do these certain things, then God will do his part. In other words, it is a sense of self-reliance, or even a reliance on religion, or even a reliance on a conviction about certain ideas. Now, the Bible is full of illustrations of those who were not soldiers of the cross and who never considered themselves to be remotely near to it.

And that may be you. And you're saying, I'll be the last person ever to become a follower of Jesus. You mean like Saul of Tarsus, who was very, very convinced of his position as a religious man, as an orthodox man, as a clever man? And in fact, he relied on all of that, and he tells us in his writings that that was his whole perspective on life.

And what changed? Well, he met Jesus. He actually came face to face with Jesus. And then he says, My entire perspective on the world and on life and on heaven and on hell and on Jesus was radically changed. When he writes to the church in Rome, he puts it with great clarity.

Listen to what he says. No one can justify themselves before God by a perfect performance of the law's demands. Indeed, it is the straight edge of the law that shows us how crooked we are. You see, people come to church, and they come with this notion that they say, I think if I go there, I might feel better about everything. And then they don't actually feel better about very much at all. And they're very opposed to the idea that they would ever feel worse about anything in order that they might feel better about everything. When in actual fact, the story of the gospel makes us feel worse before we feel better. And you will never feel better until, first, you feel worse. That's why the law of God, in all of its demands, confronts us with our own crookedness.

Because it is so straight, because it says, You will have no other gods before me, then we realize, but I've got all kinds of little substitute gods. That you shouldn't covet other things, but I'm often jealous. That you should be truthful with your neighbor.

Well, sometimes I tell what I call white lies. And before we know where we are, we realize that we are so far in the wrong that there is no way that we could ever live long enough or do anything well enough to get our credit balance back to where we thought it ought to be. And what makes it even worse is that the wages of sin is death. Sin pays wages. Adam and Eve sin, and death enters into the world. In the day that you disobey me, you will surely die. Physical death, spiritual death, enters into the world. We are by nature spiritually dead.

We all will one day die physically. If we die physically, while still dead spiritually, we will be lost from God for all of eternity. That is what the Bible says. But, you see, the Bible does not simply say the wages of sin is death. It goes on to say the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ his Son. And that's what Paul does in that same passage in Romans.

He says, Here's the deal. Now a righteousness from God, this righteousness from God, comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, to all who transfer trust from self to Christ. You see, faith means believing that certain things are true. But the simple believing of the truthfulness of things is not the same as saving faith. It's not just believing a sort of abstract idea, or even believing that there was a Jesus, or that, presumably, he did what he said he was doing.

There's no transformation of life in that. It involves believing certain things that are true. It involves trusting in those things.

It involves entering into the benefit of these things. Can I ask you, are you a soldier of the cross? You see, this is the very beginning of serving in the Christian army, when we recognize that we come with nothing in our hands except the fact that our hands are dirty and needs to be cleansed. This is what it actually means, to wear the breastplate of righteousness. Because to wear the breastplate of righteousness simply means to keep trusting the gospel, to keep trusting that it is Jesus' righteousness which qualifies me for heaven and which saves me from condemnation. Perhaps you were the kind of person who was saying, you know, I'm actually a pretty good person. I'm not sure I need this.

It's good for some other people in my office. And it was the gospel, the law of God, that pierced your pride, that bubble. Or perhaps you found yourself coming and sitting near the back and saying, I'm in such a mess that I don't think there's any hope for me. And it's that same gospel that lifts you up and says it's about the Lord Jesus. So that one day, as the hymn writer puts it, when he will come with trumpet sound, oh, may I then in him be found, clothed in his righteousness alone and faultless to stand before the throne. That's our first question. I've spent time on it. I felt that I should. Am I a soldier?

May I urge you to seek Christ and to cease trusting in anything other than Christ, in short order to believe. Am I a soldier of the cross? Secondly, am I wearing the breastplate of righteousness? Now, this breastplate was an important, a crucial piece of the armor. It covered both the front and the back.

And sometimes it was made of very hard substances, and other times it was made differently. But essentially, it protected from the neck to the thighs, both front and back. In Pilgrim's Progress, in the confrontation with Apollyon, Bunyan makes the point that there was no protection for the back. And—which, of course, is a wonderful picture—you know, we're going on, we're going straight ahead at the evil one, you know, we don't ever turn our back on him. Yes, we do.

Yes, we do. Sometimes we're running for our lives. And it's good to know that protection goes all the way around. It protects the vital organs of our lives—our hearts, our lungs, the crucial bits and pieces.

Again, it is a metaphor. What is it, then, that protects us from the assaults of the evil one? What is it that protects us from these things? The answer is the breastplate of righteousness.

Now, as last time, we have to consider this. Do we need to determine that this is either an objective righteousness, which is ours in Christ, or a subjective righteousness, which is then ours by way of Christian character and growth in godliness? My answer to this is the same as my answer to the belt of truth—namely, that it needn't be either-or.

It is, probably, it is both-and. Because the righteousness that is required of us is not one that we can produce. But when we rest in the righteousness that is ours in Jesus, the work of the Spirit of God, then, conforms us to the image of Jesus, thereby making us more righteous in and of ourselves. So, for example, that's why in verse 24 of chapter 4, Paul is said to put on the new creature created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and in holiness.

And similarly, in verse 9 of chapter 5, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true. The point to make and to understand is that one does not exist without the other. In other words, we cannot be the beneficiaries of the objective righteousness of Christ without the evidence is present in our own righteous living. You might find it helpful to realize that the Puritans used to speak in terms of a righteousness that was imputed and then a righteousness that was imparted.

And what they were seeking to do was make the distinction between the objective and the subjective. In other words, as we have just said, there is nothing that we would be able to bring in and of ourselves to make us acceptable to God. Since God's standard is absolute perfection, none of us is able to go before God. The only way that we would be able to go before God if we were then clothed in a righteousness that is not our own—if we were only accepted in Jesus, included in Jesus, enclosed in Jesus, by grace through faith. You see, in Jesus, it is wrong for people to think that somehow or another the message of the gospel is that God—because Jesus died on the cross, God is just… He's not really bothered about sin anymore.

Nothing could be further from the truth. God is intensely concerned about sin, to the extent that the burden of my sin is borne by his own sinless Son on the cross. So this is the doctrine of imputation—that all of my wretchedness, all of my sinfulness, all of my rebellion, my transgression, my iniquity, which all of that ugly stuff has been imputed to Christ. And all of Christ's righteousness, his standing before the Father, has been imputed to the believing saint—and saint in terms of follower of Jesus. There's nothing like this, you see, in contemporary religion. Religious people often make fun of this, suggesting somehow or another that this is far too easy a thing—that somehow or another, by believing, I might be saved.

Yeah! Again, Luther. Luther was doing all the stuff you're supposed to do. He did it two times over, if necessary, until he realized, I just need to believe. Lord, I believe, thy precious blood.

We just sang about it. And what does it mean to believe? It means that I no longer believe in myself. It means that I no longer rest in myself. It means that I no longer have to boast about myself.

It means that I no longer have to be dishonest about myself or suggest to people that I'm better than I am, because I'm not. So let him who boasts boast in the Lord. A wonderful Savior is Jesus, my Lord. A wonderful Savior to me.

He hideth my soul in the cleft of a rock, where rivers of mercy I see. You see, it's Jesus! And his righteousness, which is the protection against all of the onslaughts. One of the great onslaughts of the evil one is to get us to look at ourselves, rather than to look at Christ. William Goodge, who lived in the 16th and the 17th century—he was a minister in a church in London in Blackfriars, St. Anne's of Blackfriars, for forty-five years. He wrote a book, amongst a number of books, that he wrote on the armor of God.

And he makes this point. When I look upon myself, I see nothing but emptiness and weakness. But when I look upon Christ, I see nothing but fullness and sufficiency.

You see, the gospel always turns us back to Jesus. And maybe this quote from another American theologian will help us as I draw this to a close and anticipate the third question. Brights Warfield, there's nothing in us or done by us at any stage of our earthly development because of which we are acceptable to God.

We must always be accepted for Christ's sake, or we cannot be accepted at all. This is not true of us only when we believe. It is just as true after we've believed.

It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing, nor does the nature of our relation to him or to God through him ever alter. No matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behavior may be, it is always on his blood and righteousness alone that we can rest. That declaration is the declaration of a longtime pilgrim, of a soldier who, by God's amazing grace, had ceased to trust in self and had come to trust in Christ. And as he gets towards the end of his Christian pilgrimage, he realizes, from the very beginning to the very end, all of my standing before God is in a righteousness that is not my own but is imputed to those who, in turning to God in Christ, have said, I am the sinner.

You are the Savior. I want to close with the benefits of all that becomes mine by trusting Jesus. Everything else is shaky material upon which to live life and certainly to face death. I appeal to you, if you remain standing, as it were, on the esplanade, watching the soldiers go by, step up.

Take your place. Trust Christ. A compelling charge from Alistair Begg to continue to stand firm in the midst of spiritual battle. You're listening to Truth for Life. Well, today we want to invite you to take advantage of a very special offer from Truth for Life. This is a collection of three books that comprise the classic work on the topic of spiritual warfare called The Christian Incomplete Armor.

This three book collection is an abridged version with updated language, which makes for easier reading. You can purchase all three volumes today for $10 and the shipping is free. You'll find it online at truthforlife.org slash store. This offer comes to you because of the generosity of your fellow listeners, who we refer to as truth partners. These are listeners who provide monthly giving that offsets the cost of the outstanding Bible teaching you hear on Truth for Life and materials like this one. So if you are one of our truth partners, thank you. And if you're not one of our truth partners, will you join with this important team? If you listen to Truth for Life regularly, if you benefit from the free online teaching and the at-cost books we make available, we want to ask you to pay it forward, become a truth partner during the month of June. It's quick and easy to sign up. It takes just a few minutes when you go online to truthforlife.org slash truth partner, or you can do it over the phone. Call us at 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Tomorrow, although it doesn't seem like a top priority, we'll find out how the shoes we wear into battle will help determine our effectiveness. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.