It Starts Small

The King James version says:

 And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;

Ephesians 6:15

The term “shod” is the Greek word that simply means strapping on your sandals. The Roman soldier wore sandals called caliga, which were thickly studded sandals with cleats on the bottom of them. Those cleats were to dig in and stand in the face of battle. That is what the sandals were made for. The verb “having shod” is an aorist middle participle, which means do it on your own accord.

This means we do it because Jesus means something to you. We do it because we have a high view of salvation. We do it because God says to do it. That is the only way we are ever to obey—because God said it and out of our love for Him.

The word “PREPARATION” gives us the meaning of what he is saying here. The word “preparation” is the Greek word that refers to the basis of something, to the foundation of something, to the firm footing of something. It implies a firm and solid understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what causes us to dig in.

When the devil comes at me with all of his deception, we have an understanding and a grasp and are rooted and firmly founded upon what the gospel is. Then we can stand firm in the midst of all of his deception. In other words, the cleats on the believer’s sandals is a firm grasp on what the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a gospel of peace.

So then, just as you have received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in him,

Colossians 2:6

We do not want to try to journey through life with bare feet! Paul says we have received Christ, and we need to continue to walk with Christ.

Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel I preached to you, which you received, on which you have taken your stand ² and by which you are being saved, if you hold to the message I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. ³ For I passed on to you as most important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.

1 Corinthians 15:1-5

Jesus died and lived a sinless life. He died, was buried and raised from the dead, ascended and glorified. This is the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. But the gospel for the person who has received it has a step two. Step two is the living out of that gospel. If we do not understand how we are saved, then we have no clue how we are supposed to live.

There are many people who do not have a firm grasp on what salvation is all about. They have no high view of Christ. They have no high view of salvation. They do not understand when you get saved you are drastically, radically transformed. You are made into a brand new creature. The Holy Spirit of God comes into your life. You can no longer habitually sin and call yourself a believer. You can’t live lawlessly.

⁴ Everyone who commits sin practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. ⁵ You know that he was revealed so that he might take away sins, and there is no sin in him. ⁶ Everyone who remains in him does not sin; everyone who sins has not seen him or known him.

⁷ Little children, let no one deceive you. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. ⁸ The one who commits sin is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God was revealed for this purpose: to destroy the devil’s works. ⁹ Everyone who has been born of God does not sin, because his seed remains in him; he is not able to sin, because he has been born of God. ¹⁰ This is how God’s children and the devil’s children become obvious. Whoever does not do what is right is not of God, especially the one who does not love his brother or sister.

1 John 3:4-10

When we have truly received Christ, there is something uniquely different about us. We were saved by abandoning ourselves.

“God, I repent of my ways. I receive you into my heart. I am a sinner. I have missed the mark. God, thank you for what You have done for me.”

That is the way you live, moment by moment by moment.

There are a lot of people, Paul says who started off in the Spirit and who are now trying to accomplish righteousness in the flesh.

Are you so foolish? After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh?

Galatians 3:3

This is why Paul wrote Galatians. If you don’t have a grasp of salvation, if you don’t have a grasp of the gospel of peace (peace meaning to be able to walk in such a relationship that there is nothing in between that causes friction), then you are going to get messed up in warfare. You are going to get off on every tangent you can think of. Having your feet shod means being fully grasped and firmly rooted into an understanding of what the gospel is all about.

There are a lot of people saying a lot of things about the gospel of Jesus. To some people the gospel and receiving the gospel is no more than joining a church. It is something you do and then some day you reap the reward of it. It is like purchasing an insurance policy except that it is a free one. You get a free insurance policy from hell. They think that is all the gospel is about. We need to rethink what the gospel is. We need to understand from Ephesians what the gospel means. A person who has received it must have a firm grasp of it.

Just because a person prays a prayer does not mean he has received the gospel.

What a person prays does not save them. It is what he knows in his heart and what he expresses in his heart. God knows the heart of a man when he is surrendered to Him. When he is bankrupt, when he recognizes his utter hopelessness and sees what Jesus has done for him, he understands his life compared to what God requires. It is filthy rags. Then he cries out and says,

“Oh, God. Thank you for paying a debt that you didn’t owe when I owed a debt that I couldn’t pay.”

The overwhelming gratitude of that salvation begins to formulate a motive of living day by day for what God has done in a person’s life.

You see, there are all kinds of deception in this world. I need to go out first of all with my loins girded with truth. I need to be so committed to truth that I can recognize error and I can be appalled by deceit and recognize when the devil is trying to lie to me, when the devil is trying to send me a message that didn’t come from God and didn’t come from His word. This will cause me to live a lifestyle of righteousness which will become a breastplate to protect my heart and my motivations in life. Also this will give me a firm grasp and a grip on what salvation is all about, the gospel of peace, how it is received, how it is lived in my life.

I wish sometimes that we could just ask,

“What do you think about the gospel of Jesus Christ?”

and let people stand up and say what they think the gospel of Jesus Christ is.

It is not only the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus
but how it is received and how it is lived out in the life of a believer.

It is incredible the misunderstanding of this. People who get messed up in warfare are people who do not understand the Christ-life. They do not understand the gospel. They do not understand the high view we ought to have of salvation. They do not understand being transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son, taken out of Adam and put into Christ. They are wide open to every avenue you can think of that will undermine what God could have given them to give them a firm footing in the gospel of peace. We have to have that firm grasp on what the gospel of peace is all about.