By: Shane James O’Neill
Spiritual Hangover
Have you ever experienced the spiritual hangover that comes from acting out lustfully or watching pornography? It’s a kind of grief that sits in the soul and pushes up into our emotions, thoughts, and relationships. Being “in a funk” doesn’t do the experience full justice, but I’ve used phrases like that one before to communicate to people that I’m not quite myself without revealing too much. There’s an aspect to lustful sin that robs the soul of confidence. We don’t seem able to stand before people in honesty and assurance, much less stand before God. In those moments we rely on time to make things right. We try and wait-out the spiked knot of shame that sits in our chest, hoping that with time it will get smaller and smaller, then just disappear.
But it doesn’t quite work like that, does it?
our soul and God’s spirit
Having your confidence in God robbed is a wrecking experience. Few things are more grieving to our souls than feeling God’s Spirit grieve through our bodies. But then it’s also cool to know we can feel what God feels. The spiritual warfare in those moments is terribly real. It’s true that God’s Spirit is lamenting within us, but the application of God’s grief is not shame — in God’s grief, He longs for reconciliation. God is hurting because of the separation the sin has caused between your soul and His Spirit. When we react to sin with shame and repression those are coping mechanisms of our broken nature, they aren’t God’s reaction nor are they what God wants.
You hurt because God hurts, your body is His home, His temple. The absolute wrong reaction in those moments is to move away from God.
Chained to a soldier
In Ephesians 6 St. Paul tells us to put on the breastplate of righteousness so that we can stand in the hardest of moments — but what was the Roman breastplate and why connect that armor to righteousness?
The Roman breastplate was very important, it was the biggest piece of armor on a soldier’s body. Yet the breastplate wasn’t bulky and heavy, it was intentionally smooth and lightweight so that the soldier would have agility and so that incoming attacks would glance off the chest. The breastplate was designed to specifically protect the core of a person’s chest, their heart.
St. Paul is sitting in a Roman prison while he’s writing to the Ephesian church (the people at Ephesus, a city in ancient Greece). Likely, St. Paul is chained to a Roman guard. If not chained to one he is sitting near one, every hour of every day. He’s observing the soldiers armor, learning it, even feeling it. He is watching to see how it works, the kind of mobility it offers the soldier, the protection, the design, all of it.
This is important: The gospel gives Christians divine resources to know God and combat the evil in this world. St. Paul is intentionally telling us how to put on heaven’s resources by illustrating those resources with Roman military armor.
So what does the breastplate tell us about putting on righteousness and how can righteousness guard the core of who we are?
Righteousness and armor
When you sin, when you wreck it yet again, the one thing that will ensure that you stay stuck in that cycle is that you look to time, shame, guilt, cowardice, and hiding as your righteousness instead of Jesus: His ugly cross and stunning resurrection. Righteousness is quite literally, right-standing with God.
Righteousness protects the core of our identity. What is that identity? 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 tells us that God has taken our past, present, and future sins and bound them to Jesus’ body. Then Jesus went and took those sins to the grave. And just as God bound our sins to Jesus, He then took Jesus’ perfect right-standing with God and has bound that righteousness to our souls. We are reconciled to God through Christ and we are now a new creation because of Jesus.
A simple transaction that has unfathomable implications — Jesus takes our place before God so that we can take His place before God.
God looks at you and cherishes you. He sees you as valuable and honorable and worth His time and sacrifice. He sees the best of who you are and has promised to get you there. He looks at you and sees Jesus.
If you believe that you are in fact righteous, then that belief will keep you from certain actions that would destroy you and those around you. Also, putting on righteousness compels us to stand up, to stop trying to pay for our sins — righteousness forces us to believe in Jesus’ sacrifice over any other sacrifice that we would try and create before God (like the sacrifice of separation).
Righteousness gives us mobility to maneuver past the various attacks at our identity, we may be struck but the blows glance past us because we care about what God thinks of us over what failure says about us. Learning to believe what God thinks about you will change the way you see yourself and it will change the way you live.
learning to put on Armor
Practicing righteousness is the practice of relationship. When we hide we are further separating ourselves from God. But God doesn’t just want to know you at your best, He wants to know you at your worst.
If you don’t tether the breastplate of righteousness onto your core identity then you will forever live a life of insecurity before God, before others, and before yourself. It is the biggest armor on our bodies and it protects the core of who we are. If you aren’t practicing putting on righteousness then you are grossly exposed to the dankest evil and your identity is misplaced somewhere in the darkness of that evil.
Put on righteousness and wage war with anything that would seek to cut you away from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
“We are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who persevere and are saved”. (Heb. 10:39)
Put on righteousness, every day. Every moment that you have, declare in prayer that you are righteous, that you are made right with God, that He loves you, that He isn’t ashamed of you, that He sees you as valuable. Ask God to teach you to see yourself the way He died to make you. Surround yourself with people who will see you and love you as God does. Put on righteousness when you wake up, as you drive, during walks, when you fail, when you have the impulse to act out — put on the breastplate of righteousness.
Sign up now for the “This is war” conference: ONly 50 spots left — Don’t wait!
We can no longer settle for the mistreatment of women and the self-abuse of lustful pornography. “This is War” is here to train men in honor and integrity and signal a battle cry for men to stand for Sexual Integrity and fight against the use of Pornography.
Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for ProvenMen Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.