This passage from the precious ‘Ephesians’ letter contains an allegory. It describes the Christian soldier’s armour and who we fight against. If time allowed we could have thought about how the Christian sometimes fights battles in company and then finds themselves in single combat. How the Roman recruit was trained to march carrying back-breaking loads and how they were pushed to exhaustion, only to be encouraged by the centurion, ‘More sweat on the drill field, less blood on the battlefield’. And, as for the story behind the shield and the boots, that must wait for another time. All this must be worked out from Paul’s illustration and put to spiritual application. Otherwise we may think ‘Wonderful letter, interesting history, but where does it touch me?’. So within our time limit today we will only deal with one item of the equipment.