Walk in Peace

Read Ephesians 6

My brother had a habit when I first got married. Every time he came to visit us he would wear the worst shoes he owned and played on my wife’s heartstrings to go buy him new ones. My wallet was a little lighter every time he visited. Having said that, today we will look at the armor of the sandal, or the feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. It is often said the peace is not the absence of trouble, but the strength to pass through the trouble. To a certain extent that saying is fairly accurate. In biblical times warfare was obviously not carried out with missiles that could travel thousands of miles. It was carried out in hand-to-hand battle.
What I believe Paul was trying to say was that even though you stand in the midst of the battle, if you had prepared in the gospel of peace, you would stand strong. Peace, in the Greek, means ‘a harmonized relationship between God and man”. The gospel simply means “good news”. Paul is saying that it is good news to have your relationship harmonized with God before you go into battle. I have often said that the thing that is most lacking in churches and saints today is the lack of confidence in the personal relationship of an individual and God. All too often, men and women worry about what someone else is doing, saying or how they’re being used. Too often we compare ourselves to someone else. God did not design us originally to be a horizontal people. He designed us for himself, which must be a vertical people.
Satan wins every time he gets us to look on a horizontal venue. When we begin looking at each other or even when we spend most of our time looking at ourselves, he wins. No matter how ‘spiritual” someone is, they are still human, and there is not one person better than another. Everyone has the same opportunity to reach God. The people that don’t think that they are worth anything are the people that spend the majority of their time focused on themselves or others instead of God. When your relationship is right with God, it doesn’t matter what others think, say or do because you know exactly where you belong. No matter what storm arises or what battle is raging, you have peace because you’ve prepared to walk in that personal relationship with Him.
The warriors of that day had no time to think once the battle began. They basically fought on instinct because things would move so fast and any step could be their last one. Paul is telling us that when we go into battles have your feet, or your mode of transportation, where God is taking you, wrapped up in that harmonized relationship between you and Him. I believe there are a great deal reading this today that would do a great deal of conquering if you just had confidence in your relationship between you and God. You have walked in trepidation because you feared what someone else may say or do and you have dodged the battle that needed to be waged because your travel was not done in confidence. The only way to become confident is to spend time with each other and listen to each other. I pray that every person reading this would become so strong in his or her relationship with Him that when he spoke we jumped. We remove the worry of who is watching. We erase the doubt of talent. We get rid of the thought that we aren’t qualified to do something. Listen; when God asks you to do something, you better believe that He trusts you. Why don’t you trust Him? Most likely it is because you have not prepared the gospel of harmonized relationship on your mode of travel.

“The feet of the humblest may walk in the field Where the feet of the Holiest trod, This, then, is the marvel to mortals revealed.”
- Phillips Brooks