The Whole Armour of God Part 4

The Helmet of Salvation and the Sword of the Spirit

Helmet and Sword

5.      The Helmet of Salvation

Ephesians 6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

The helmet protects the head representing the mind or the thought life. We must know how to protect our minds.  Satan will attack our minds with such things as mistrust. That is one of his favourite weapons.  We begin to mistrust our wife, our husband, our fellow Christians, our pastor. . . Then comes suspicion and then fear and doubt and depression. Depression is surprisingly common in Christians.

Derek Prince tells how God set him personally free from years of depression which also affected his family life, using two scriptures. 

Isaiah 61:3 The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

Joel 2:32 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered…

In Isaiah 61:3 he read this phrase: “The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.” And when he read that word “the spirit of heaviness,” it was.  like the Holy Spirit said to him, “That is your problem. It is not you, it is not psychological, it is not mental, it is a spirit, it is a person. He saw the real identity of his enemy was a spirit of depression and he reminds us that ‘Evil is not something, it is Someone.’ Derek then realised that he needed one more thing and that was Joel 2:32 ‘’It shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered.” And Derek was completely delivered from the spirit of heaviness (depression). He also pointed out the need for Christians to develop their own healthy thought patterns over a period of time.

Ephesians 6:17: “Take the helmet of salvation.”  This is God’s protection for our heads. This ties in with 1Thessalonians 5:8 But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation. The helmet is hope and we have got to cultivate hope. Hope, in the Bible, is a confident expectation of that which is good. Faith in our minds does not work. Faith has to be in the heart. But the protection for the mind is hope. Now somebody said everybody is born either a pessimist or an optimist. 

For a Christian to be a pessimist is a denial of our faith. Why?  Because Romans 8:28 says, “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to his purpose.”

Romans 8:24: For we are saved by hope.

Ephesians 2:12 that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

Romans 8:24: For we are saved by hope . . . (KJV) No hope, no salvation.  Ephesians 2:12, speaking about those without Christ, the unsaved. Paul says: That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. (KJV). From this we can see three things.  Without Christ, without God, without hope. They go together. We can see clearly, no hope, no Christ then our salvation hinges on hope. I am saved by hope. If I am without hope, I am without Christ.  And if I have Christ, I have hope.

 Hebrews 6: 19 says: Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast…  If a ship is to be secured, it has to have an anchor which passes through the unstable medium of water and fastens into something stable and secure such as a rock. If we want security and stability, we have to have an anchor that passes through time into eternity and fastens in the Rock of Ages. And this anchor of hope takes us beyond the second veil into the Holy of Holies, into the immediate presence of Almighty God where Jesus, our High Priest and forerunner has entered for us. Now when your anchor is fastened there, we can smile at the storms of life. But the anchor is hope.

6.      The Sword of the Spirit

Ephesians 6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

For the first time we are passing out of the purely defensive into something that could be in a sense called aggressive. Because a sword you can use aggressively and defensively against your enemy. But a sword by itself is limited because it will go no further than your arm can stretch. 

Now in Greek there are two words for ‘word.’ One is logos, which means counsel, reason, a set truth. We often use it to describe the written word. The other is rhema, which means specifically a word that is spoken. The word that is used here is rhema. The sword of the Spirit is not the eternal logos, it is the living word of God when you speak it.  And if you do not speak it, you have no sword. I think the best example of this is Jesus confronted by the devil in the wilderness.  Each temptation He met by saying, “It is written.”

 Satan knows it is true. When Jesus said, “It is written, it is written, it is written.”  Satan backed off.  And we have to do the same as Jesus. We have to know the Word of God and not just have the Bible resting on our desk at night but speak the Word like a sharp two-edged sword out of our mouth. And then at least we can keep the devil at bay.

Amen

Personal Prayer

In Part 5 (our final part) we discover how to put on all the armour and how to enter into thje battle.