5 Nov 2011
Ready for action
As I mentioned in passing yesterday, there are a number of Christians who see the world soley as a battle between angels and demons. This approach to thinking about faith negates my responsibility for the choices I make, and reduces me to a puppet.
I’ve been doing a series of short thoughts on Ephesians 6 and the Apostle Paul’s approach to spiritual warfare after realising just how practical it was.
The third piece of armor is actually more a readiness for action:
your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace (Ephesians 6:15)
There are a couple of things about this that interest me. The first is the sense that in order to live faith we need to be ready to move at any point. The picture I have is of someone on the balls of their feet ready to spring into action.
Mother Theresa said:
God’s is love in action. He can move you any time to serve a need. If he shows you a need to be served, he will provide the resources. So you trust totally. What do I do? According to the needs, wherever Jesus wants me, I go? If you do it for Jesus and you do it with Jesus, everything is possible.
One of the characteristics of religion is a set of predictable principals. That is not faith. Faith is a readiness to move in response to Jesus. It is a willingness to live on the balls of your feet.
The other thing I am interested is that Paul calls it the Gospel, the Gospel of Peace.
Gospel simply means Good News, but Peace for the Hebrew meant something quite different to how we use the term. Peace or Shalom meant a wholeness or all aspects of life being as they were meant to be. As Paul wrote the phrase he wasn’t talking about an absence of conflict, he was talking about a readiness to look at all areas of your life and the world and to move to help them be as Jesus created them to be. He is envisioning action.
Thomas A. Kempis said:
“All men desire peace, but very few desire those things that make for peace”
Paul seems to be indicating that an essential part of spiritual warfare is a readiness to move in order to help things become whole.