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 must deliberately put on. We put on an attribute of God as we identify with Him. It is not inherent in the old nature, the old man which has been crucified with Christ but is inherit in the new nature we receive when we are born from above.
The armor is entirely transference from the Lord to us (the transferring of something from one person to another). To put on means to clothe ourselves with, this is talking about our soul. About our mind, a mindset.
The attributes of God flow into our spirit and then into our soul so that we are conscious of them, and then they clothe us.
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.
As a result, we see who we are in Christ, and then we stand during the trials of life and pass the test having the character of Christ established in our lives.
The enemy can 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 must 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 our self, independent of the Lord 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 the manifestations of evil spirits that we see in the world are the usurped power people let them have.
We must 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 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 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 carried out 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.