You do realize that the moment you accept Jesus as Lord you enlist as a soldier in the army of the Lord? You do. Like it or not, in this life you have an enemy that will try to defeat you and defeat all those around you. And… he doesn’t play fair. He will use every trick and lie in his arsenal to get you off track and to separate you from other believers. The only good thing is that he is totally uncreative and will use the same old weapons each time. When you learn to see them then you can quickly defeat them. The good news is that ‘we win’.
However, we all don’t hold the same rank or job in this army. Just like a body wouldn’t function very well if it only had noses and mouths and not eyes and ears too, we each have our place, we each have our specialized jobs to do and we’re each equipped according to what we need to be effective. Granted we all have some of the same equipment, for example: scripture tells us that we all have a measure of faith. And we all need faith to do our particular job. But I would suggest that the first job we, individually, have is to make certain we
understand our role.
In the secular world a person who joins the military initially goes through ‘basic training’. We do the same thing as Christians. And part of the training is to discover and understand our primary equipment. As Christians we discover the equipment in Ephesians 6. One of the more interesting aspects about our equipment is that, except for one piece, it is all designed as defensive in order to protect us. Just as the military won’t place a soldier into the battle without intensive training, we shouldn’t expect to become involved with the more arduous aspects of our warfare until we are trained.
Simultaneously, we should never expect that we will always sit on the sidelines or be invisible to the enemy. That’s why we have our one offensive weapon – the sword, which is the word of God. And that’s also why we need to spend time in the word in order to be prepared. The word was what Jesus used to fight satan, and it is our weapon as well. As we train and prepare we will become a ‘fit’ soldier, able to withstand all the attempts to destroy us. Actually the more I think about this the more I realize that some soldiers are more proficient than others because they chose to prepare.
