Ready for the Ground Ahead
“I’ll march this road, I’ll climb this hill”
~ The Call, “I Still Believe (Great Design),” Reconciled
A soldier preparing for battle is not the first image that comes to mind when we think about peace.
By the time Paul reaches the third piece of the Armor of God, he has already told us to fasten on the Belt of Truth and put on the Breastplate of Righteousness. Truth establishes reality. Righteousness brings our lives into agreement with that reality. Now the Christian is dressed to stand in a world that remains hostile to both.
Paul has made no attempt to soften the situation. We are to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.” We put on the whole armor of God so that we can stand against “the schemes of the devil.” Our struggle reaches beyond the people and problems immediately in front of us to “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Paul tells us to withstand, to stand, and then, once again, to stand.
Then he reaches the soldier’s feet:
“Stand therefore… and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace.” ~ Ephesians 6:14-15
Peace?
Courage would make sense. Strength would make sense. Determination, toughness, even endurance would seem at home in a passage about warfare. But Paul puts peace on the feet of a soldier, in fact the shoes of the Gospel of Peace.
That is not a break in the metaphor. It tells us something about the kind of war this is and the kind of people we must become if we intend to remain standing in it. The armor does not merely protect what we fight for. It begins to determine how we fight.
Christ Is Our Peace
Before asking what peace does for the soldier, we need to know what Paul means by peace. Fortunately, he has already told us.
Earlier in Ephesians, Paul describes people who were alienated from God and from one another, “having no hope and without God in the world.” Then comes the turn: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”
What follows is stronger than simply saying Jesus gives us peace.
“For he himself is our peace.”
Through the cross, Christ has broken down hostility and reconciled us to God. He has made peace and preached peace to those who were far away and those who were near. Paul makes the same point in Romans: “Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Colossians makes the cost of that peace unmistakable. God has reconciled us to himself by “making peace by the blood of his cross.”
That is where the Shoes begin.
We tend to think about peace primarily as a feeling. I have peace when I feel calm. I lose it when the diagnosis comes, the money gets tight, the argument begins, the future becomes uncertain, or the phone rings in the middle of the night. Paul starts beneath our feelings. Christian peace is first an accomplished reality.
Peace begins with something Christ has done, not something I feel.
John Chrysostom, the fourth-century bishop and preacher whose surviving sermons include a verse-by-verse treatment of Ephesians, noticed the strange relationship between warfare and peace in this passage. The Christian is at war with evil precisely because the deeper war between himself and God has ended. Chrysostom summarized the situation in five words: “Already is the victory won.”
That changes the posture of the soldier. I do not enter the battlefield wondering whether God is for me, or fight to persuade him to receive me. I do not fight to make peace with God. I fight because Christ already has.
There is another dimension to Paul’s argument that we miss if we make this entirely personal. Ephesians 2 is not simply the story of an individual sinner getting right with God. Paul is talking about Jews and Gentiles, people divided from one another, being reconciled through Christ. The cross brings both to God and creates “one new man” from people previously separated by hostility.
The gospel creates a reconciled people.
That matters in an essay about spiritual warfare because division is not incidental to the battle. A church filled with people who claim peace with God while remaining consumed by hostility toward one another would contradict the very gospel strapped to its feet. The peace Christ gives us is vertical, but it refuses to remain there.
News From the Battlefield
There is another story behind Paul’s choice of words.
Centuries before Ephesians, Isaiah imagined a messenger running across the mountains toward Jerusalem:
“How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of him who brings good news,
who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,
who publishes salvation,
who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’”
~ Isaiah 52:2
Paul knew the passage well. He quotes it in Romans 10 when speaking about those who proclaim the gospel. Its presence behind Ephesians 6 helps us understand why peace belongs on the feet.
The messenger is not running toward Jerusalem to win the battle. He is announcing what God has done. That is what a gospel is. It is news before it is advice.
At the center of Isaiah’s announcement are three words: “Your God reigns.”
Life has a way of presenting us with competing claims to sovereignty. A diagnosis can feel sovereign. So can a financial problem, a broken relationship, politics, the approval of another person, or fear itself. The thing keeping us awake at three in the morning can become so large that it appears to have swallowed the rest of reality.
The gospel does not ask us to pretend these things are not real. The Belt of Truth has already taught us better than that. It tells us they are not ultimate.
Your God reigns.
The gospel of peace is news from a battlefield whose decisive victory has already been won. Christ has come. Sin has been confronted. Death has been defeated. Reconciliation has begun. The Kingdom has broken into history. The battle continues, and anyone who has lived very long as a Christian knows that it can be brutal. But we do not enter it wondering who ultimately sits on the throne.
A man who knows that puts his feet down differently.
Ready for the Ground Ahead
The word Paul uses for “readiness” in Ephesians 6:15 has generated a fair amount of discussion. It can carry the sense of preparation or preparedness, and interpreters have differed over whether Paul’s emphasis is primarily on firm footing or readiness for movement and proclamation. We should probably be suspicious of interpretations that force us to choose too sharply between them.
Paul clearly wants the Christian to stand. He has repeated the command throughout the passage. But prepared feet are not immobilized feet. Isaiah’s messenger is moving, and the gospel itself moves outward. The gospel gives us somewhere to stand and therefore makes us ready to move.
William Gurnall understood this particularly well. A seventeenth-century English pastor, Gurnall spent years writing The Christian in Complete Armour, a massive treatment of Paul’s few sentences in Ephesians 6. When he reaches the Shoes, he describes the Christian made ready by the gospel “to do or suffer what He calls to.”
That last part is easy to pass over: do or suffer.
We tend to think of readiness as preparation for something we are going to accomplish. God may be preparing me for a new responsibility, a difficult conversation, an opportunity, a calling. Gurnall reminds us that Christian readiness also includes the possibility that obedience may lead through suffering rather than around it.
Yesterday morning I was mountain biking on trails I know well. I’ve ridden nearly every trail in this particular park, but knowing the trail does not mean knowing exactly what the ground will give me on any particular ride. Hard-packed dirt turns to moon dust, then tree roots, small rocks, or stretches of solid rock. The same terrain shows up on climbs, steep descents, jumps, and twisting sections where choosing the right line matters. Add weather, and everything changes. Wet rock and roots I’ve crossed many times can put me on the ground quickly.
What I noticed yesterday was not really the trail. It was me.
Depending on how I’m feeling, there are sections I’ll ride without much thought and others I’ll hesitate over or avoid. If I’m following a friend through one of those sections, especially when he is choosing the line and setting the pace, I can feel uncertainty rising. None of this is new ground. I’ve ridden it before. I know what I’m capable of riding. But knowing the trail does not keep the terrain from getting inside my head.
Somewhere in that ride I began thinking about Paul’s shoes. Peace does not change the surface beneath the tires. A wet rock is still slick. Loose dust still moves. A bad line can still put me down. Peace is not pretending the terrain is safer than it is. Maybe it is something closer to being settled enough that the terrain does not become my commander.
That distinction reaches well beyond a mountain-bike trail.
That is not the kind of preparation most of us ask for. I would prefer God to prepare the road. Remove the conflict. Change the other person. Lower the risk. Give me enough money. Make the decision obvious. Guarantee the outcome. Take away the possibility of rejection. If suffering lies ahead, reroute me.
Then I will move.
But God does not always prepare the road. Sometimes he prepares the man.
John Bunyan understood something about that road. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, his seventeenth-century allegory of the Christian life, the central character, Christian, is traveling toward the Celestial City when his path leads directly into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Bunyan borrowed the name from Psalm 23, but he gave David’s familiar image a landscape and made Christian walk through it. The valley is dark, dangerous and filled with reasons to turn back.
There is no alternate road to the Celestial City. Christian does not discover a path around the valley. He has to go through it.
That is easy to miss in David’s familiar words: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”
Through.
The Shepherd does not promise that the path will avoid every valley. His presence is what makes the valley traversable.
Bunyan understood that Christian formation happens on that kind of ground. There are places on the road toward God that cannot be crossed without fear, uncertainty, opposition or suffering. The promise is not that faithful Christians will be routed around them. It is that they do not enter them alone, and the road through them still leads toward home.
That makes Paul’s choice of footwear even more fitting.
We do not need to overwork the Roman military imagery to understand him. A soldier expected to stand and move over difficult ground needed his feet prepared for it. Beyond that, elaborate claims about hobnails, traction and particular battle formations can easily make the historical detail carry more theological weight than Paul gives it.
The simple image is enough. A soldier who cannot keep his footing cannot fight very well.
Charles Spurgeon, the nineteenth-century Baptist preacher, caught both the stability and movement in Paul’s image. In a sermon called “Shoes for Pilgrims and Warriors,” he wrote, “A soul at perfect peace with God is in a fit state for the severest movements.” He pushed the idea further: “A sense of pardoned sin and reconciliation with God fits us for anything and everything.”
Reconciliation creates readiness.
The man who knows where he stands with God does not need favorable ground before he can obey God. That does not make him reckless, immune to fear, or indifferent to consequences. It changes which reality gets the final vote.
Perhaps I have spent too much time asking whether the road ahead is safe enough to walk and too little time asking whether I trust the ground Christ has already placed beneath me.
Peace is not the removal of difficult ground. It is what makes a man ready to cross it.
When the Terrain Tries to Command Us
We all have ground we would rather not cross.
It may be a conversation we have postponed because we know what needs to be said but cannot control how the other person will respond. It may be a decision with no risk-free option, a season of suffering that is not going away, financial pressure, family tension, workplace conflict, failure, criticism, uncertainty, or the possibility that obedience will cost something we would rather keep.
Eventually difficult terrain begins making demands of its own. Fear tells us to retreat. Anger tells us to hit back. Resentment tells us to remember the offense. Anxiety insists that we take control. Approval tells us to keep everybody happy. Pride tells us that winning matters more than how we win.
If we obey those voices often enough, something subtle happens. The terrain becomes our commander.
We may still say that Christ is Lord, but criticism determines how we speak. Fear determines where we go. Anger determines how we respond. Approval determines what we are willing to say. Uncertainty determines whether we obey. Suffering begins telling us what must be true about God.
This is where peace becomes spiritual warfare.
The enemy does not always need to knock a Christian to the ground. Sometimes it is enough to convince him that he can only stand on favorable ground. Fear, accusation, outrage, division, resentment, uncertainty and offense can move us from the ground Christ has given us without our realizing that we have moved at all.
The gospel says otherwise. We know where we stand. Christ has made peace. We have been reconciled. God reigns.
The terrain around us may change. Where we stand with God does not.
When the Battlefield Gets Inside Us
There is another danger on difficult ground. We can survive the battle and still become shaped by it.
Someone comes at us angry, and anger rises to meet anger. Someone treats us with contempt, and our own contempt suddenly feels justified. Someone lies about us, and bending the truth in our defense no longer seems quite as wrong. Someone hurts us, and resentment becomes something we protect because releasing it feels too much like letting them win.
The battlefield outside begins reproducing itself inside.
Augustine, the fourth- and fifth-century bishop whose thought has shaped Western Christianity for more than fifteen centuries, understood peace as something much deeper than emotional calm. In his reflections on Jesus’ Beatitudes, he describes the peaceful person as someone whose life is being brought into proper order under God. When persecution comes from outside, Augustine says the enemy finds itself “unable to shake anything in that edifice.”
That does not mean a Christian stops feeling fear, grief, anger, pain or confusion. It means those things do not get the throne. Peace is not the absence of pressure. It is a life so ordered under God that pressure does not get to reorder it.
Thomas à Kempis brings that idea into an ordinary room filled with difficult people. The German-Dutch monk and priest, best known for The Imitation of Christ, begins one of his reflections on peace with this advice: “First keep thyself in peace, and then shalt thou be able to be a peacemaker towards others.”
The surrounding passage may be even more revealing. À Kempis knows there is nothing particularly remarkable about being peaceful around peaceful people. The real test comes among people who are difficult, reactive, suspicious, or opposed to us. Our peace in this life, he argues, is found more in humbly enduring adversity than in never encountering it.
Peace is not really tested when the room is peaceful. It is tested when the room is not.
Which raises a question worth sitting with: Can another person’s disorder recruit me into disorder?
Paul makes the question painfully practical in Romans 12. “Bless those who persecute you.” Do not repay evil for evil. Do not avenge yourself. If possible, live peaceably with all. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. Finally: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Paul does not tell Christians to ignore evil. He tells them not to be overcome by it.
There is more than one way for evil to overcome us. One is to defeat us. Another is to persuade us to adopt its methods.
The Belt is still around our waist. We do not defeat deception by becoming deceptive. The Breastplate remains over our chest. We do not resist unrighteousness through unrighteous means. Now our feet are fitted with peace. We do not defeat hostility by becoming more hostile.
This is where the pieces of armor begin to work together. The armor does not merely protect what we fight for. It determines how we fight.
Peace Is Not Surrender
If we are not careful, Christian peace can begin to sound like a sanctified form of conflict avoidance. Stay calm. Do not make trouble. Be agreeable. Keep the peace.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” He did not say blessed are those who manage to avoid uncomfortable situations.
The placement of that Beatitude should make us cautious about equating peacemaking with an easy life. Jesus moves almost immediately from “Blessed are the peacemakers” to “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” Apparently, a person can be making peace and still encounter hostility.
Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian whose Summa Theologiae remains one of Christianity’s great works of systematic theology, made a distinction that helps here. “Peace includes concord and adds something thereto,” he wrote. People can outwardly agree and still lack true peace. They can remain quiet because someone is afraid. They can even agree about something evil. As Aquinas put it, “There can be concord in evil.”
A marriage can look peaceful because neither person will talk about what is wrong. A workplace can look peaceful because everyone has learned which truths are unsafe to say. A friendship can look peaceful because one person continually surrenders what matters to avoid displeasing the other.
Sometimes peacemaking requires telling the truth. Sometimes it means confessing that we were wrong, saying no, confronting something that should not continue, forgiving someone who does not deserve it, or refusing to participate in something everyone else has decided to accept.
This is why Paul does not tell us to take off the Belt of Truth or the Breastplate of Righteousness before putting on the Shoes.
A peace built on falsehood is simply another lie. A peace maintained through unrighteous compromise is only managed conflict.
The revealing question is not merely whether conflict occurred. It is who I became inside it.
Did another person’s anger determine mine? Did fear make the decision for me? Did my need to win become more important than being righteous? Did my desire to avoid conflict keep me from doing the difficult work of making peace?
Those are not questions about temperament. They are questions about armor.
Beautiful Feet
Isaiah’s messenger is still running across the mountains.
“Your God reigns.”
He has something to carry because something has already happened.
That movement runs through the New Testament. God reconciles us to himself through Christ, Paul tells the Corinthians, and then entrusts to us “the ministry of reconciliation.” He even gives the reconciled a new name: “ambassadors for Christ.”
The gospel does not merely create peaceful individuals. It creates a people entrusted with peace.
That certainly includes speaking the good news of Jesus Christ. Isaiah’s messenger announces something, and Paul will use his beautiful feet explicitly in connection with gospel proclamation in Romans. We should not lose that. But the mission is larger than reducing the Shoes to an instruction to initiate evangelistic conversations.
A man carrying the gospel of peace should begin to leave evidence of that gospel wherever he walks.
He can enter an anxious place without feeding the anxiety, or an angry place without adding contempt. He can walk into division without immediately choosing a tribe and learning whom he is supposed to hate. He can suffer without allowing suffering to decide what is true about God. He can confront wrong without surrendering righteousness in the confrontation. He can tell the truth without needing to destroy the person who needs to hear it.
He can make peace because peace has first been made for him.
This is where standing and moving finally come together. Paul has repeatedly told the Christian to stand, but standing is not the same thing as staying put. The man whose footing is secure is precisely the man who is free to move. He can go toward the difficult conversation, reconciliation, confession, responsibility, the person who needs the gospel, an uncertain future, and even through suffering when obedience leads there.
There is probably some ground in front of each of us that we have been waiting to become easier. We may have been asking God to remove the uncertainty, change the other person, guarantee the outcome, lower the cost, settle the conflict, or show us exactly how everything will turn out before we take the next step.
Perhaps that is not the preparation he has promised.
The question may not be whether the ground ahead is safe. It may be whether we believe the ground beneath us is secure.
Christ has made peace through the blood of his cross. We have been reconciled to God. The victory has been won. God reigns. None of that guarantees an easy road. Gurnall was right to include both doing and suffering in Christian readiness. Bunyan was right to send Christian through the valley rather than around it. Some roads will cost us something. Some acts of obedience will not produce the result we hoped for. Some attempts at reconciliation will not be returned. Some people will remain hostile. Jesus placed peacemaking and persecution next to each other for a reason.
But hostile ground does not have to produce a hostile man.
Fear does not have to determine where we go. Conflict does not have to determine who we become. Suffering does not get to decide whether God is faithful.
The gospel gives us peace solid enough to stand on, strong enough to cross difficult ground, and durable enough to carry into battle.
Your God reigns.
Put on the shoes of the Gospel of Peace.
Take Action
Field Exercise: Cross the Ground
There is probably some ground you already know you need to cross. Maybe it is a conversation you have been avoiding, a relationship that needs attention, something you need to confess, a responsibility you have been reluctant to accept, or a step of obedience you keep postponing because you cannot control what happens next.
Name it.
- What ground am I reluctant to enter?
- What am I afraid will happen if I do?
- How has that fear been determining my response?
- What would it look like to enter this situation wearing the gospel of peace?
- What is one concrete step I can take?
Before you take that step, return to what is already settled. Christ has made peace between you and God. You do not need the terrain to cooperate before you can trust him. You do not need another person to be peaceful before you can carry peace into the room. You do not need to know the outcome before you obey.
Then cross the ground.
Tell the truth without hostility. Apologize without defending yourself. Forgive without pretending the wound did not matter. Have the conversation you have been avoiding. Make the call. Take responsibility. Serve the difficult person. Speak about Christ when the opportunity is there. Remain present when your instinct is to retreat.
The goal is not to manufacture a peaceful outcome. You do not control that.
The goal is to walk faithfully into the ground God has given you without allowing that ground to determine who you become.
Your God reigns.
Battle Prayer
Father, You have made peace with me through the blood of Christ. I do not have to earn my place with You, defend it, or depend upon the ground around me to make me secure. When fear tells me to retreat, remind me where I stand.
Lord Jesus, You are my peace. When conflict becomes heated, keep its hostility from taking possession of me. When another person’s anger invites my anger, steady me. When I am tempted to withdraw, retaliate, please, or protect myself, teach me to respond from the peace You have already given me.
When peace requires a difficult truth, give me courage to speak it without contempt. When reconciliation requires humility, make me quick to confess, forgive, apologize, and repair what I can. Keep me from confusing peace with avoidance, passivity, or compromise.
Holy Spirit, make me ready for whatever obedience requires. Teach me to stand when I should stand and move when Christ tells me to move. Send me into difficult places without allowing those places to determine who I become. Make me an agent of reconciliation, carrying the peace I have received into every place You send me.
And when the battlefield becomes loud and the road ahead uncertain, remind me of what remains true:
You reign.
Give me peace solid enough to stand on, strong enough to cross difficult ground, and durable enough to carry into battle.
Amen.
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