Ephesians 6:15 “and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.”
What the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, has done is to have achieved peace with God. This is what the Bible affirms in many places, for example, in Romans 5:1, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is something every Christian possesses. Paul joins himself in solidarity with the entire Roman congregation of believing men and women, slaves and free, the illiterate and the poets; he assures them, “All of us now have peace with God and it’s through our Lord Jesus.” It wasn’t because of Paul’s blameless Christian living and years of self-denying service that he had peace with God. It was only because of the life and death of the Lord Jesus. The Son had propitiated the wrath of God which is revealed from heaven against our ungodly and unrighteous lives, and he has done this by taking our sin and dying under the judgment of God upon the cross. Jesus has taken responsibility for all our guilt and answered God’s demands in his own body by his life and death, and God is totally and completely satisfied to look on Jesus and pardon us. His anger towards us has been replaced by peace. He now loves us with the same love with which he loves his own Son, because he sees us in his Son, clothed with the righteousness of his Son, as blameless as his Son, as lovely in his eyes as his own dear Son. There is peace with God though the achievement of Jesus Christ alone. That is the message of Christianity. You can know the peace of God and the love of God though your sins are uncountable. But you must face up to that guilt. You mustn’t play games with God pretending everything is fine and that your sins have only been little pink sins and that “it doesn’t matter to God how men live, and that it’s his job to forgive us.” It is not like that with you. It is not like that with anyone. It has never been like that nor ever will be. Your sins are as red as scarlet when the thrice holy God looks at them. The very angels hide their eyes in his presence, but you were born in sin and shapen in iniquity. You’ve never
done anything wholly free from sin, and while you are rejecting the Son of God you will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on you (Jn. 3:36). Your only hope is to cry mightily to God. He may hear you today. He may give you assurance of his forgiveness today. But there is certainly no peace with God without Jesus Christ. Look to him! Pray the publican’s prayer until you know you’ve been forgiven, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
So this is the peace that our verse is talking about. It is not our feelings of peace but the good news of peace with God through Jesus Christ for every sinner who trust in him. That is the message of the gospel; “there is peace for you brother, and peace for you sister; there is peace for the vilest offender; there is peace for the chief of sinners as long as they confess their sin and cast themselves on the mercy of God. Come from the war-zone of your daily life; come from the tension and guilt of not doing what you ought to do, and doing what you should not be doing. Find peace with God through the person and work of his beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Cast yourself on the merits of Jesus the great peace-offering.” That is the message of the Christian soldier. That is the gospel of peace.
The half boot of the Roman legionary. It was made of leather; it left the toes exposed; it had thick studded soles and was tied to the ankles and shins with straps. With these boots the legionary marched from Rome to Wales and stood solidly on them while engaged in warfare with the ancient Brits! Shoes have to be fitted individually on the feet of soldiers. One style, officially issued, and provided by the powers that be - your own trainers or loafers are strictly forbidden - but the sandals are all different sizes and get creased and worn in different ways. You understand the analogy? There is one gospel of peace with God through Jesus Christ. One only-begotten Son of God; one Mediator with God, the man Christ Jesus; one name under heaven given amongst men whereby we must be saved; one way, truth and life; no man comes to the Father but by him alone. So there is only one gospel boot for every Christian to put on, but all of us are different personalities with different gifts. We have come to God from different backgrounds at different times in our lives. When I look at a congregation I don’t see a page of postage stamps, rows of identical people all looking back at me. Everyone is different, but no one may say, “Well. I think of the gospel like this. .” The Christian gospel has been defined for us once and for all in the Bible and we have to adjust and shape ourselves to receive and serve it. Our feet are ‘fitted’ with one style of gospel boots, but each one of is different, with different gifts and abilities.
So what is this “readiness” that Paul speaks of here? You notice that the apostle doesn’t urge us to “put on the shoes of peace.” It is more interesting than that. We are being urged to be fitted with “the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.” You see advertisements for perfume or clothes and they suggest that you will possess a poise if you put on this product. It is not just a garment you are wearing but confidence and style, so that you enter a room wearing this and people’s heads will turn and you will be surrounded by fascinating people. That is the gimmick of the advertiser to encourage you to purchase his product. Paul is not selling us anything here; these are not Nike half-boots, but he is telling us that receiving this gospel of peace as your gospel gives you the only foundation for a successful life as a Christian. It will make you ready for the challenges and opportunities in this fascinating pilgrimage of being a Christian. You will be fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. Now what does he mean by this?
i] GOSPEL SHOES MAKE US STEADFAST.
These Roman soldiers’ shoes helped them to grip the ground when they fought. So the Christian too must have stability; you have a foundation of peace with God through the Lord Jesus on which to build your entire life. The hymnist Edward Mote affirms that truth in these familiar words,
“His oath, His covenant and His blood,
Support me in the ‘whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand.”
God has given us some fine stepping stones through the quicksands of life.
The first is that God is, and that he is love and that he grips this world and so our lives have a purpose. Another is that he has spoken to us by prophets and apostles and his Son so we know his mind. Another is that God has told his creatures what is right and wrong; he has told us how we should live in ten great stepping stones. There are more; he has told us what he has done through his Son Jesus Christ to make us right and that we need to entrust ourselves to him. There is no need for any of us to sink. There is another great stepping stone; he has put the Spirit of truth within us, and so with what he has given us in his wise law, and what we have within our hearts in a biblically enlightened conscience it is like having a permanent personal foundation to stand on
day by day. I go to work and face all the moral dilemmas of relationships with other people, and there are moments when I feel out of my depth. I am going under, but no, God gives me a foundation; it is the sandals of the gospel of peace, on which I can stand secure day by day. You can stand your ground. You have a wonderfully strong but maneuverable and flexible foundation.
ii] GOSPEL SHOES MAKE US ABOUNDING IN GOD’S WORK.
“What then is the spiritual application? The point, clearly, is that we must not be slow, we must not be heavy-footed, there must be no dragging of the feet. There is nothing which is so fatal to successful progress as a sluggish, lifeless Christian. Ask the average man in the street why he doesn’t come to a place of worship, why he is not a Christian, and you will find that the answer he is most likely to give you is that it is all so dull, and so dead. He says there is nothing in it, no life. And of course there is much to justify what he says. You have but to compare and contrast a typical sample of worldly people with a typical sample of Christian people to see the basis on which he makes his statement. Look at the enthusiasm and the vitality of people who watch the football on Saturday afternoon in the winter, or the people who go to the races. Listen to the shouting and the excitement! Look at those people who go after their sports or whatever they are interested in! They want to be there in time, they want the best seats, and they want the sport to go on and on, and are disappointed when it finishes. Contrast that with Christian people who seem to think they are doing something wonderful by going to a place of worship on a Sunday morning. They are not quite sure whether they will go or not when they wake up in the morning, but at last, as a matter of duty, they decide they will go — hoping the service will not be too long. Isn’t that the position?
“Do we give the impression when we come to our places of worship that we are doing the most wonderful and thrilling thing in the world? Are we alive, are we rejoicing? How do we compare with these other people? A staid, lifeless Christian is a denial, in many respects, of the Gospel at its most glorious point. To be heavy-footed, slow-moving, lethargic, having to be whipped up and roused constantly, and urged to do this and that instead of running to it, and rejoicing in it, is a sad misrepresentation of Christianity.
iii] GOSPEL SHOES MAKE US EVANGELISTICALLY SUCCESSFUL.
“Our feet are fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.” You are ready for action. You are standing on this great objective reality that it is well with your soul and God. Peace with God is crucial to inner peace. I say to you that if a man is torn up inside by guilt feelings, God’s pardon alone can bring him peace. If you’re full of anxiety and despair about the future, I say that God’s strength alone can give you energy to go on. Lack of peace with God is a dangerous state to be in; it can sometimes move you to do things that are self-destructive or harmful to others. Something inside us tells us that if something is wrong, somebody’s got to pay for it - so we either put ourselves through needless suffering or we make other people suffer by being cruel to them. But once you know that Jesus has suffered for you and paid the price to give you peace with God, then you can have this inner peace. It passes all understanding. Guilt is replaced with assurance, anger with compassion, fear with courage, despair with confidence.
When God makes a peace treaty with you and you feel his peace in your heart, you become a soldier for God. Satan loses his ability to intimidate you. Satan will attack your heart, but you keep working for your master. You fall into various sins, but you confess them to God each day and you keep working for the Lord. If your feet are fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, your inner peace will help motivate to keep working for him.
There is a great exhortation of Peter in his first letter about this readiness to speak the gospel of peace. What are the methods he suggests? Is there some surefire, copper-bottomed, guaranteed way of witnessing so that whenever I speak people become Christians? No there is none of that, but he mentions essentials that we dare not ignore. “In your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience,” (I Pet. 3:15&16). What does he say? Five things:
Firstly, to make sure that in our hearts Christ is set apart as Lord. Our religion isn’t one interest among many to be picked up and laid down as the mood takes us. We don’t embrace Christ for a time, just while on our way to something else which is more important to us. Christ is set apart to a special place in our life and that special place is his Lordship over us. He is Lord of every part of our beings, our time, our desires and ambitions, our possessions, our relationships, our enthusiams and pleasures. Christ is total and absolute Lord of our lives, and if we find something coming in and taking over and easing him off the throne of our hearts then we hear all sorts of alarm bells ringing. We will never be effective in spreading the gospel unless Jesus Christ is set apart in our lives as our Lord. There is that earlier incident in the life of Peter himself that he might have been reflecting on here, when God gave Peter a vision of a sheet coming down from heaven with all kinds of animals on it, and God said to him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” And Peter’s response was “Surely not, Lord!” (Acts 10:14). “No . . . Lord!” You surely see the impossibility of that attitude. If he is your Lord then it must always be, “Yes.” Either the lordship is going to end the disobedience or the disobedience will end the lordship. Peter eventually does what his Lord says and then he is able to go to the house of Cornelius and preach the gospel to the Gentiles. Christ must be set apart as supreme Lord of your life for any success in evangelism.
Secondly, Peter says to be always ready to answer our questioners. We may be ready to answer when we have attended a particularly helpful meeting. We may be ready to give a reason for our faith the week after we have attended a weekend course in how to witness, but when we are lying on the floor of despondency, overwhelmed by our sense of failure, conscious of how poor we are as believers, that we have served God so unprofitably, then when the questioner says, “Don’t you go to church? Why do you go?” Then are we ready? Is the gospel true on a wet February Monday? Is there peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ when our hearts are as cold as refrigerators? We have to be always ready because we don’t know when a question about our faith is going to be asked. We can't tell when the conversation is going to move around to faith and church and Christianity, and we cannot dictate that it has to be at our best times and on our terms, and so we have to prepared always. Our feet must always be fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace
Thirdly, Peter says, with gentleness. Amazing! Here is a soldier in all his armour and with his sword in his hand, but he is not like other soldiers, he is gentle. Why does Peter say this? He is reminding us of the personalness of the testimony. Always remember it is a human being you are speaking to; always consider his worth and his dignity. Always remind yourself that though this man is not a Christian that does not give you the right to speak to him from a position of conscious assured superiority. You know only too well that he may be a human being in the depths of degradation - it may be that - but you know that there but for the grace of God go you. Your attitude to men and women is that you esteem them better than yourself.
It seems to me exceedingly important - even psychologically - that those to whom we are speaking have the true impression that they are very important to us, that they matter to us, and our regard for them is very high. We are not approaching them with any presumption, far less with any consciousness of our superiority, but we approach them with gentleness, not sectarian pride or intellectual arrogance, but meekness, considering our own weakness and unworthiness.
Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city” (Provs. 16:32). The City of Man is always besieged and taken by gentleness.
Fourthly, Peter says, with respect, or literally with ‘fear’ or awe. I don’t think that it means that we witness with a fear of those to whom we speak - it’s not the fear of cowardice, or the fear on a human level of the person to whom we are testifying. It is the fear of which Paul speaks about on other occasions when he says, for example to the church in Corinth , “I was among you in weakness and fear and much trembling.” Now Paul wasn’t frightened of the people of Corinth one little bit, so where did the fear come from? He was overwhelmed by the greatness of his responsibility, that knowing the momentousness of the issues it should be up to him to bear witness to a living soul. Our hearers will live for ever in either heaven or hell and this may be the only chance they have of hearing of Jesus Christ. How solemn and fearful that is, and how great the issues
Fifthly, Peter says, you keep a clear conscience. If you are a hypocrite, witnessing from under layers of fresh guilt and failure, then you are not going to speak with any conviction about the saving and keeping power of the Lord Jesus. You confess your sins to God; you put things right with the people you have offended.
Peter tells us this is the way to readiness and evangelistic success. It is very disappointing isn’t it? No ‘three laws’ or ‘four methods’ or a course of study and a meal in which to win people for Christ. Rather, gentleness, fear, a clear conscience and Christ as the Lord of our hearts. This is the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. How very searching, that these are the means God blesses to present the gospel of peace to others. This is how the kingdom of God advances.