Book of Common Prayer
God’s complete armor
10 What else is there to say? Just this: be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his power. 11 Put on God’s complete armor. Then you’ll be able to stand firm against the devil’s trickery. 12 The warfare we’re engaged in, you see, isn’t against flesh and blood. It’s against the leaders, against the authorities, against the powers that rule the world in this dark age, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places.
13 For this reason, you must take up God’s complete armor. Then, when wickedness grabs its moment, you’ll be able to withstand, to do what needs to be done, and still to be on your feet when it’s all over. 14 So stand firm! Put the belt of truth round your waist; put on justice as your breastplate; 15 for shoes on your feet, ready for battle, take the good news of peace. 16 With it all, take the shield of faith; if you’ve got that, you’ll be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is God’s word.
Prayer and peace
18 Pray on every occasion in the spirit, with every type of prayer and intercession. You’ll need to keep awake and alert for this, with all perseverance and intercession for all God’s holy ones— 19 and also for me! Please pray that God will give me his words to speak when I open my mouth, so that I can make known, loud and clear, the secret truth of the gospel. 20 That, after all, is why I’m a chained-up ambassador! Pray that I may announce it boldly; that’s what I’m duty-bound to do.
16 This, you see, is how much God loved the world: enough to give his only, special son, so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age. 17 After all, God didn’t send the son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved by him.
18 “Anyone who believes in him is not condemned. But anyone who doesn’t believe is condemned already, because they didn’t believe in the name of God’s only, special son. 19 And this is the condemnation: that light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because what they were doing was evil. 20 For everyone who does evil hates the light; people like that don’t come to the light, in case their deeds get shown up and reproved. 21 But people who do the truth come to the light, so that it can become clear that what they have done has been done in God.”
Scripture quotations from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011, 2018, 2019.