Graduation Day

Put on salvation as your helmet.   Ephesians 6:17

It’s one thing to start; it’s another thing to finish. If you are to sustain a lifetime of useful service to Jesus Christ, you will need to overcome discouragement.

There will be times when the results of your work will be disappointing. Prayers won’t seem to be answered as you had hoped. You will find yourself facing problems to which there are no obvious answers. Tiredness will cloud your judgment, and you may begin to despair. Paul knew all about this (see 2 Corinthians 1:8-9).

The apostle was writing to believers, so when he said, “Put on salvation as your helmet,” he was not inviting them to come to Christ to be saved. They’d already done that. The Bible talks about salvation in the present and the future tense. When Paul writes about salvation as a helmet, it’s the confident expectation of final victory that he’s talking about (see also 1 Thessalonians 5:8). When the immediate outlook is bleak, take time to meditate on the final outcome.

Students struggling through their final exams do well to think about graduation day. That was Paul’s regular practice. He placed his present sufferings alongside the glory that would ultimately be revealed and concluded it was well worth the cost of staying in the battle every time: “Our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18).

That’s how you stand—with rigorous honesty, uncompromised personal integrity, total commitment to the advance of the gospel in all circumstances, unity with other believers, and confidence in the final outcome of the battle. When the armor is in place, you will stand. And if you are standing, you will be in a position to go on the offensive, using “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17).

For further reading, see 2 Corinthians 4