Stand your ground, putting on the belt of truth and the body armor of God’s righteousness. Ephesians 6:14

Now to the body armor. In Paul’s day they called it a breastplate. It protected the upper torso which houses all the vital organs. This is your main piece of armor since it protects primarily your heart. Your heart is the home of Christ and the source of your emotions. So Paul chooses to call this the “breastplate of righteousness,” or as the NLT updates it “the body armor of God’s righteousness.”

Notice how important it is that our righteousness comes from God. It’s our body armor. Without it we’re dead. If it’s anything but God’s rightghteousnesseousness we are relying on, we are dead in our sins. Christ’s death on the cross is the only thing that delivers us from our sin, and then God exchanges Christ’s righteousness for our sin, so when we trust in His righteousness and not our own, we are donning our body armor.

Why is this righteousness so important? Because Satan is the “accuser” of believers (Revelation 12:10). He knows that if he can take us away from relying on Christ’s righteousness, that we can be trapped in any number of damaging realities like guilt, depression, despair, hopelessness, doubt, and more. Without body armor, our hearts are vulnerable; with it, we remember who we are in Christ.

In this discussion about the armor of God, the operative words are “put on.” We consciously take up each article of our armor and put it in place and then we rely on it when we need to. Of course this armor is a spiritual metaphor, but it implies that we can operate without it. For instance, to spend time struggling with guilt would mean that we forgot our body armor. With Christ’s righteousness in place, thoughts and feelings of guilt would simply bounce off us. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). That’s actually fighting guilt with the belt of truth and the body armor of righteousness.

So we stand, not on our own righteousness, but on His — what we have received by grace — and that body armor of His righteousness is held in place by the belt of truth. That’s half the battle.