No assigned reading for today. Use this “free” day to catch up on your reading plan, read a Psalm or Proverb, or just pray and ask God to direct your reading for today. The important thing is to read the Word.
Daily Devotion
The Breastplate of Righteousness
By Dominic Couvion
The recent message on the Whole Armor of God has me thinking about the individual pieces. I began asking myself questions like, “How do I describe righteousness?”, and I couldn’t answer. Well, if I can’t answer then I need to figure it out.
Beginning with the basics, what is armor for? Armor is for protection, therefore what does a breastplate protect? Thorax is the Greek word that was translated into breastplate. My mind immediately remembered learning the parts of an insect. This breastplate is not protecting insects! It is defined as the chest, actually it is the sternum but I’m not writing a medical paper so I’m going to stop with the medical terms. What is in the chest? What is the breastplate protecting? Heart and lungs, breathing and blood circulation. But how does righteousness protect these organs?
Righteousness is translated from a root meaning just, right, or just in the eyes of God. Now interestingly there are scriptures that tell me some realities of my heart-“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) My translation, my heart will try anything it can to get what it wants. How do I protect myself from this? I put on a covering of the right things that God wants, not what I want. I must constantly be evaluating myself with God’s word and checking my heart to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand and I stay correct in the eyes of God. I must always be seeking for the approval of Jesus, learning through my Bible what things are approved of Jesus, and identifying when I’m not paying attention and my heart tries to pull a fast one. Jesus loves us, he knows us, he gives us the tools to counteract this, he wants us to succeed. Prayer, reading and applying the Word of God will protect us from battle wounds.