Taking on the armor of God = Be proactive

What excellent scripture passages for this last week! Thanks D for your comments! As I read through these scripture passages, the verbs really stuck out: take, write, lift, rejoice, gird, stand, love, cleave, repent, deal and let. Taking upon ourselves the armor of God takes a lot of work. We cannot just sit in our church meetings and expect someone to educate and inspire us, we have to be prepared to accept the education and inspiration. I think taking on the armor of God requires humility, which to me means, that you can make almost anything applicable to you and your life's moment, that you can find inspiration in almost anything.

Here's a question about the armor of God: When do we get to the point where we know the armor is on? And if we put it on one time, does it stay on? Sometimes I think life is an exercise of taking off and putting on armor. It's as much of a daily exercise as putting on physical clothing. But if we choose to put on the armor every day, the armor gets stronger making us more resilient in battle. Perhaps it follows the cycles of life. Sometimes we are ready to go for battle and sometimes we are on army reserves hoping not to be put in battle and therefore not putting much effort into preparation.

But if we want to be prepared, we must be proactive in our spiritual development. If we are not proactive with our time and efforts, our apathy and complacence allows our armor to weaken. We must take, write, lift, rejoice, gird stand, love, cleave, repent, deal and let the right things make our armor strong so that we are not caught off guard in battle, and even if we are, our chances of surviving are better with stronger armor.

As Jacob often repeats in the allegory of the olive tree: GO TO!