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

After all of this armor — belt, body armor, shoes, shield, helmet — we take up the sword. The sword is the only offensive weapon in our arsenal; everything else is armor for protection. That’s because it’s all we need. They had knives, spears, and clubs, too, but the word of God is all we need to fight our battles.

The word of God is what we use to fight off the enemy when he gets too close.

Remember we use all this stuff in order to stand firm. Paul doesn’t have us marching off into battle somewhere; he has us standing our ground. God’s doing the heavy fighting (we can’t even see the enemy) but He wants to make sure we stand strong and don’t lose any ground.

So whenever the fight comes to us, we have the word of God to fight back against the lies of the enemy. And that’s what the enemy uses most on us. He is the father of lies.

Hebrews says that “the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. ” (Hebrews 4:12). The sword of the word of God cuts to the heart of an issue. It shows us what is wrong about our thinking as it straightens out the lies of the devil.

The word of God keeps us on track.

I had a mother who was a walking Bible. We often joked that if we ever had to run to the hills and hide in the caves, we wanted my Mom in our cave because we wouldn’t need a Bible. One of her favorite verses was, “I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11). The idea of having the word in her heart is the operable thing here. The word was not just in her head; it was in her heart, and when she shared it with you, it came out of her heart, and people knew that. She spent hours on the phone with women she was teaching and her speech was always laced with the word of God. You never knew when Leta stopped and the word began.

So much so that when she died and a memorial service was held in the church where she had served for over 50 years, tons of women showed up who were part of a home Bible study she taught late in her life before dementia set in, that few people in the church and even in her family, knew about. The people running the service set up a microphone in the center aisle for people to comment and may have regretted it later, because a steady stream of women no one knew, lined up from that study, and the service went on for over two hours. Why was that? Because my mother had touched them from the word in her heart.

This is when the word becomes a part of you — a part of your inner being. We bring it out for discussion and learning what it means as we seek to apply it to questions in our lives. We use the word of God, not as a club to bash someone over the head, but as a probe to understand ourselves and others better and to find out what to do to please the Lord.

And then, because the word cuts through to the joints and the marrow, we can identify when the enemy is trying to dupe us into believing a lie. The word cuts deep into things and shows us the truth.

Now can you see why, with all your armor on and your sword in your hand, that you are ready for battle. And believe me, if we ever needed to be thus prepared, it is now.