Breast Plate of Righteousness
Your heart is a muscle that courses 2,000 gallons of blood throughout your body daily, a deliverer of nutrients to your being, a home for Jesus, and the root of your desires and beliefs. A heart brings health, a heart sustains, and a heart maintains life. If your heart is for Jesus, then your words, actions, and desires will reflect as such. In the same way, if your heart is for anything other than Jesus, your life will reflect the destruction of this misalignment. King Solomon warns us of the severity of this matter in Proverbs 4:23, where he writes, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”. Trying to protect our own hearts with our version of righteousness isn’t true protection and will result in gaping holes in the armor we walk through the battle of life wearing.
How exactly do we do that? How do we become morally right, fully aligned with Christ in a sinfully corrupted world? When we rely on our own selves, guided by our worldly desires and personal willpower, we will fall short, and our hearts will be deceived as they rot in the death produced by disobeying God (Jeremiah 17:9-10).
Ephesians 6 tells us if we are to fight against the wicked schemes of the enemy of our souls, we must adorn ourselves daily in the armor of God, and our most vital organ with the breastplate of righteousness. If we are to guard our hearts properly and above all else, we must consult a perfect and all-powerful God to source our protection. He alone is righteous, and because of that, we must clothe our hearts in that purity and holiness, and only then will our hearts be truly protected. The one who defeated death, sin, and the grave is the source of our most secure protection.
Traditionally, the breastplate in a warrior’s armor is a heavy, enforced, piece of combined metal and leather that covers the organs vital for life found in the core of a soldier’s body. If we are to guard our hearts with the breastplate made of righteousness, this looks like our heart being deeply encompassed in the ethical dimension of the holiness only our sinless God possesses. When our heart is clothed in the righteousness of Christ, we will see obedience to what God asks of us as not just the only option, but the best option. On the contrary, when we guard our hearts with the breastplate of worldliness, we have a twisted view of what is right and wrong, and this bleeds into our actions, our pursuits, our attitudes, and relationships. We are vulnerable to deception and tempted to believe our salvation is to be earned when instead our God tells us that “it is finished”. John Piper says that Paul “conceive[s] of God’s righteousness as his unswerving faithfulness always to preserve and display the glory of his name”, and if our own hearts are as concerned with preserving and glorifying the name of Jesus, only then have we clothed our hearts in righteousness.
With our hearts and thus our desires fully submitted to our Heavenly Father, we are covered in His righteousness, protecting us from the evil of the air and the schemes of the Enemy.
I like that general theme you have, but it feels like you are lacking a depth that could make this really great. Why is righteousness that God guards our hearts with? Why does it defend in the battle we face daily?
