Okay, time for a little peek under the hood here at my blog.
When I do these Monday-morning devotionals, nine times out of ten I use the pericopes that my denomination, The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, uses for worship. Every week, there’s an Old Testament reading, an Epistle reading, a Gospel reading, and a psalm. What I’ve done in the past is simply grab one of those four readings from the previous Sunday for one of the readings.
Well, this Sunday, the pericopal reading for the Epistles was one of my all-time favorites. Top five material, certainly. It was Ephesians 6:10-20. I love the imagery of the full armor of God, of a Christian getting suited up for battle. I even went so far as to write a really bad allegorical fantasy based on this passage when I was in high school. Seriously. Couple hundred pages. Really awful.
No, you can’t see it.
But I will share this: a few years ago, I did a sermon series on the different pieces of armor. See, my theory is that Paul based this passage on the armor that a Roman soldier wore. I mean, when Paul thought of armor, he would naturally think of a Roman soldier. And, if Ephesians was indeed written while Paul was under house arrest in Rome, awaiting his first trial before Emperor Nero, he would have seen a Roman soldier in full armor just about every day. It would be fresh in his mind. And if you do a little digging into what Roman armor was like, it gives us some fun insights into what each piece of spiritual armor means.
Like I said, I did this sermon series, not only for my congregation, but also as a series of chapel homilies at Concordia University in St. Paul. Someone videotapes those homilies and put them on YouTube. Even though the chaplain at CSP has changed a few times since then, the sermons are still there.
And so now they’re here to. Enjoy!