We need to understand the name of each piece of armor and what it stands for, what it protects and what we are appropriating. Each piece of the armor we have to deliberately put on. We put on an attribute of God as we identify with Him. It is not inherent in the old nature, the nature we inherited from the first Adam.
The armor is entirely transference from the Lord to us (the transferring of something from one place or person to another). To put on means to clothe ourselves with, this is talking about our soul. About our mind, a mind set.
The attributes of God flow into our spirit and then into our soul so that we are conscious of them.
As we begin to understand the armor of God and learn how to put it on, it is going to set us free from the weight of shame and guilt that clothes us, when we are aware of the futility of the human nature to please God. We need to get out of self-awareness into God awareness as we learn how to clothe ourselves with the armor of the Lord.
Whenever self-condemnation rules, real repentance has never occurred. Through repentance we get rid of it.
Repentance is a gift from God, The word repent in the Greek is metanoeo-it consists of two words; the first word is meta- it means close association or relationship. It speaks of accompaniment, implying companionship, fellowship. It also means- after- implying change, to perceive afterwards. It is translated mostly as- with.
The second word is noeo -which means to perceive with thought coming into the consciousness. It is translated as- mind, think, understand, consider.
To repent means- with thought coming into consciousness. The thoughts of God flow into our spirit and then our mind so that we agree with them.
The enemy is able to work through transference if we have the wrong focus. Self-awareness will work against us; we need to get out of ourselves and into the Spirit. Self either feels guilty or feels proud, but when we are aware of the presence of God, His life flows into us. We have to tune into what is going to work for us.
Jesus defeated Satan for us. Therefore, it is not a matter of our strength; it is a matter of our appropriation. To appropriate means to take possession of.
Our identification with the Lord releases the transference. We are strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. We war against principalities and powers, but we do it in His might. If Satan can get us to move in self we are defeated.
Evil spirits can usurp only as much power as we allow them, because their authority has been removed from them when we became a part of the family of God. Jesus spoiled principalities stripping them of all their authority. All of the manifestations of evil spirits that we see in the world are the usurped power people let them have.
We have to stand in the victory of the Lord; we have to learn how to lay hold of it. We activate what we think and what we speak; words can be living or they can be deadly. If Satan can get us to open our mouth and speak discouragement and unbelief, we are activating death, turning loose the things of death. We give place or power to the enemy by what we speak and what we believe.
When we learn how to minister in the Spirit to a person, the minute they open up to receive the ministry of the Spirit in us, the thing of transference can become so strong that our spirit can feel what is happening in theirs. We can sense what they believe for. We can become aware of what they are thinking. It is not a matter of mind reading; that is on the soul level.
We become identified with the person we are ministering to, we can feel their pain. We are members of one another, so we begin to feel and react as they do. These are the gifts or abilities of the Spirit of God. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are capabilities which we have within the Body of Christ to move by the Holy Spirit. These are experiences we grow into when we set our hearts to minister God to one another.
We have the choice of identifying ourselves with Christ or of identifying ourselves with the human nature. If we learn how to walk by the Spirit, we will manifest in the whole of our life the nature of Jesus Christ; or, if we walk in the soul, we will manifest the nature of the first Adam.
We actually have one line of heredity on the soul level, and one line of heredity on the spirit level. What we appropriate from the activation of our spirit affects our soul and affects our bodies.
One of the problems we have in our walk with God has been the deep-rooted, subtle efforts of Satan to bring deception, to bring some way to trick us. We need to be able to sense the satanic schemes that are being worked against us. We need to be aware of the satanic schemes being worked in other people’s lives and how they are being drawn into them without realizing it. Satan waits for a moment of discouragement, resentment, or bitterness, to reach in and try to take over a person’s life.
Eph 6: 11Put on(command to begin this moment, not repeated action, enter into, be clothed with as a garment, coming under His authority) the whole armor (complete armor, offensive and defensive) of God, that ye may be able (denotes purpose, to have power) to stand (specific point, to cause to stand, to place-as opposed to falling)against (motion towards)the wiles (methods, schemes, the craft of deceit) of the devil (the accuser).
We do not get up every morning and put on the armor, it is in the aorist tense, a decisive act with permanent results. As the Spirit of God reveals to us the armor of God, through the revelation comes the impartation to put it on and keep it on, it is a part of our abiding in the Lord.
The enemy will come in with his schemes and try to trip us up with just one little thing. We need to be continually yielded to God and to learn how to continually draw upon the strength of the Lord. This strength is something we appropriate from the Lord to meet the test. But we won’t be able to appropriate it if we are deceived by Satan so that we do not realize what the battle is.
Eph 6: 17And take (to accept an offer deliberately and readily, to take to oneself what is presented) the helmet (about-head) of salvation.
We need salvation for our head. The new born spirit has a yes in it to the will of God; it is our soul that needs to be saved. The problem centers in our mind. It is our thinking that must be delivered from all the whiles of the devil. We are transformed by the renewing our minds.
God desires to give us His mind. We have to learn how to think like God does. God wants to direct our thinking; we are to think God’s thoughts after him. When God reveals something to our spirit, then we have to learn how to mediate upon it. We have to learn how to meditate upon His word. We do not want to lean upon our own understanding, but look to Him for wisdom and for guidance.
People get into problems because of deception, through the desires of their soul and their flesh. We are responsible for the desires we let become the motivation of our lives; our actions become based upon these desires, if we are not able to keep them in check. Evil spirits can only get in us if they are able to work upon a lust, a desire, a motivation of the flesh. It is only when a familiar spirit can find an inroad that they can begin to direct our life.
We have to take the helmet of salvation, put on the Lord Jesus Christ. When our spirit is born of God, we have two heredities—one from Adam, and one from the Lord Jesus Christ. As we become aware of the Spirit of Christ we can put Him on.
When we are in the Spirit, we can reach in to appropriate certain things. When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we are accepting His righteousness, and all the attributes of His Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is the nature of our Lord being fulfilled in us. His love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, temperance, and faith begin to grow in our life.
To put on the Lord is to tune into one of His attributes, so that it is transferred to us. As we learn how to walk in His attributes we are beginning to manifest our heredity as a child of God. We are appropriating it.
We need to learn how to hide in the Lord. When a turtle is afraid, the feet and head draw in and all we can see is the shell. When the battle is raging we need to learn how to hide in the Lord until the intensity of it passes. Sometimes our emotions become disturbed so we have to learn how to distract ourselves from what is bothering us by not being focused upon it, until we can renew our strength in the Lord.
When we are not aware of the Lord, or filled with the Spirit, we need to draw away from the battle; we do not want to fight in our own energy. If we try to overcome the flesh in our self we will fail. The enemy wants to draw us out so that we fight him in our own strength as if the battle was between us and him.
We are in Christ, so the conflict is between Satan and Christ. We will begin to overcome one thing after another when we stop fighting the battle on the soul level. Self confidence and self-sufficiency does not work in this war. The devil knows exactly how to overcome us; he has had six thousand years of experience in tripping people up. He knows all the tricks. We need to be aware of his whiles.
How do we overcome the whiles of the devil? We withdraw into the Lord. Knowing that we fall short, we are not moved into action in ourselves, but we withdraw into the Lord and trust Him. We wait upon Him. We believe Him. We draw His armor upon ourselves.
We make wrong decisions because we make them on the basis of what looks normal and right on the human level, rather than just seeking God and saying, “Lord, You show me. You lead me. You tell me what I am to do.
We cannot reason things out in our walk with God. Only in retrospect can we look back and see where we have missed the will of God. We make a lot of wrong decisions because we think it is the will of God, and now we can see how we were deceived so that we can help others not make the same mistakes.
The wiles of Satan can cause us to use human reasoning, instead of following divine revelation and miss God’s perfect will for our life.
It is imperative that we meet all our battles and all our problems in God and not in our own strength. The devil does not grow weary as the human flesh does. If we come against the enemy in our own strength and will power, he can wear us down. Human strength, human reserve, and human will all have an ultimate end, and Satan knows that if he stays at it long enough, he can get to us. So the answer when we have done everything is this: stand firm, because we stand not by exhausting ourselves, but by expending divine energy. It is in the power of the Lord that we stand.
We have to learn how to draw upon the power of God. It is like breathing: if we are able to draw in, then we can give out. The word for spirit is breath, when our spirit is active it is like breathing, we can sense the infilling of God in our spirit, and the releasing of our spirit in God when we speak. Our spirit has to reach out to God, we can do this by worship, or waiting on the Lord where we receive revelation. We have to make contact with the Spirit where we are receiving from Him.
The joy of the Lord is our strength. We can feel encouragement when we are aware of His presence. Until we learn how to get into God’s presence where we are experiencing Him, we have not yet learned how to draw the Spirit. We have not learned how to breathe in. When we are filled with the Spirit then we can move in the Spirit.
When we learn how to maintain a right spirit, we can feel the attributes in our spirit. A right spirit is a spirit in contact with God; we can sense the strength of God in our spirit.
When our soul is receiving thoughts and feelings that do not originate in God and we are not able to bring them into subjection to the Christ in our spirit we are experiencing warfare, temptation. This is when we have to keep our spirit active until we can disconnect with that which is coming against our soul.
When our spirit is active and we have experienced communion with God in our spirit, when we have experienced the fruit of the spirit, then we are able to separate our spirit from our soul. Until we learn how to do this in our experience we are not going to be able to draw upon the attributes of God.
The Scriptures are inspired, God breathed. They are put in the order they are suppose to be: first we submit to the Lord, then we resist the devil and he flees from us. The word flees means- run in terror, because we are filled with the Spirit of the Lord.
First we have to submit ourselves to the Lord; then we can resist the devil. To submit to the Lord is to offer our life to Him. We say, God I submit every area of my life to you, I worship you with all my heart, I resist everything that is contrary to your Spirit.
Human reasoning tells us to resist the devil first. Then I’ll submit myself to the Lord. I will give my life to God when I quit this or that. When these thoughts are in our mind, we are still living on the soul level. We will never do it; we cannot beat the devil in our own strength. It is in our submission to the Lord that we are able to resist the devil and make him flee from us.
When our spirit is born again, there is a yes in it to serve God, the reason we are having problems is because our soul is not yet saved, and our mind is not yet renewed, because we have been living according to self will. We have been doing our own thing, instead of seeking the face of the Lord.
First we submit to the Lord, we seek His face, we worship Him, we spend some time talking to Him and listening to Him. We say yes to God as much as we can. As we draw near to the Lord, He draws near to us, and then we start receiving revelation, we start having contact with God. The day of salvation is right now. The whole purpose of the armor is that we may be able to resist in the evil day.
We are clothed with God so that when the devil encounters us he meets God. He meets the victory of the Lord Jesus Christ over him.
We are to fight the good fight of faith (1 Timothy 6:12). The battle is entirely one of faith. It is not a matter of human resistance; it is a matter of our resisting in the Spirit because we believe in the victory that the Lord has provided. We have to determine to stand in it no matter what Satan seems to do.
We need to worship the Lord and submit to Him with all of our heart. Let Satan hit as hard as he wants to—it will not be long before a peace and calm will come over us, because he has had one more encounter with the Lord and he has fled from it.
This is the way it works- we say, “Lord, I give you all my defeats and I take your victory, I put on your armor, we have to see ourselves in the Lord, we have to see Jesus in us.
Jesus died on the cross for all our defeats that He might transfer to us His victories. He made an open show of principalities and powers; the handwriting of ordinances that was against us He took out of the way, nailing it to His cross. It is all a finished, a completed thing.
Some people naturally have a strong will; they are able to quit habits with no problem at all. The strong willed person usually looks down upon the one who is having a hard time struggling with smoking, drinking, and other habits.
The strong willed person seems to be completely in control, but something happens to them along the way. Because they are doing so much in their own abilities, they are proud and expect others to respect them; they expect some kind of reward. When someone says something that offends them, they become discouraged, and head for the nearest liquor store, or some other fleshly gratification. The deliverance was not wrought in their spirit, but accomplished through their flesh, so it is just a matter of time until they fall back into their old habits.
When the victory is wrought in our spirit, we have a brokenness before the Lord, we are aware that our spirit is in communion with God, we accept our own personal powerlessness, and we reject any thinking that says we have control over sin. To yield for a moment is to become a slave. Sin is more powerful than we are. It is only as we walk completely in the Spirit, that we will never fulfill the lust of the flesh.
Sometimes we can see God in our defeats, we struggle and struggle until we finally give up and say, “Lord, I know I don’t have any willpower. Without you I can’t do anything. I’m completely dependent upon your grace. Then after God has revealed to us our powerlessness He does the work in us, and we never again have a problem with it as long as we live.
There are two ways of doing something, we can do it ourselves, or we can be so full of the Spirit of God, that He does it in us. What is born of the flesh is flesh; what is born of the Spirit is spirit.
When we do anything in God, there is only one way for it to be done, we start with deep-rooted repentance, a deep sense of human inadequacy and failure, and a sense of divine provision.
Then we appropriate His provision for us. When we then learn how to maintain this spiritual condition, then we will have something that will last for eternity.
If we have quit a habit, but we are still being tempted all the time, the root of the habit is still there; all we have done is chop it off at the surface. But the root is still there and that is what is bothering us. We need to seek the Lord as if we never had a deliverance, then He will come and rain His righteousness on us.