We are exhorted to hold up the shield of faith in all circumstances, to extinguish the arrows of the evil one. Just what are those arrows? Attacks come in many forms, including accusations, deceptions, distortions, distractions, false assurances, and temptations. How does faith in God act like a shield in these attacks? We can draw on the heroes of our faith and on Jesus himself to consider how we, too, might stand against and be empowered to overcome these attacks to produce lasting fruit in the Kingdom of God.
Sermons from October 2021
Join us for a very special Family Sunday in which we invite the children to demonstrate all the pieces of the Armor of God, and we hear a short devotional from Pastor Jay Oertli on what it means to have shoes made of the readiness given by the gospel of peace.
Jesus reigns and He is near to all of His followers. Yet, when difficulties come, it’s natural to get distracted from this central reality. Anticipating hard seasons, Paul used a quill to remind us of several exquisite everlasting facts of faith which he calls the armor of God. This week we will learn why we desperately need to embrace, in our challenging days, God’s breastplate of righteousness
How do you know what is true? In the “information age”, where we have constant immediate access to the media, it can be difficult to untangle the objective reality from our limited knowledge and personal experience. In his concluding message to the Ephesians, Paul calls all believers to armor themselves against the lies and confusion of their day. He warns the only way to stand firm against spiritual attack is to bind our faith together with the fundamentally important belt of truth.
Kids are to obey parents, students are to obey teachers, employees are to obey employers and citizens are to obey governments. God wants us to obey all whom He puts in authority, assuming they allow us to obey Him, our greatest authority, and He wants us to do it in a Christ-like way because obeying them is ultimately obeying Him. Similarly, God wants parents, teachers, employers, and governing authorities to use their authority in a Christ-like way so that both our obedience and our authority imitate Christ and unite us in Christ.