When I attended this last Women’s Retreat, I reacquainted myself with two old friends and met a new one. While all three are soldiers of Christ,two of these women are armor bearers. How do I know this? The Holy Spirit revealed it to me.
Not knowing what an armor bearer was, I knew it was a new path of study for me. And that’s just what I did. While not much Scripture is given to mentioning armor bearers as such, we can glean from what our studies reveal. The dual word “armor bearer” means ‘To lift, to carry, to take”.
First, every soldier has at least one armor bearer who walks with him/her. The soldier cannot carry the load of weaponry required to be a good soldier by himself; thus the armor, or weapon, bearer gets to carry the rest. The soldier goes into battle wearing the basic gear, as outlined in Ephesians 6:10-20. Commanders had several armor bearers to carry their stuff.
Second, slain does not mean killed. It could be that as a man went into battle against the enemy, it was enough to just knock the opposition down and keep on going forward, pressing in until the last was down. The armor bearer would be the one to make sure the foe did not get back up again.
While we know that soldiers wore protective gear, such as breastplates, greaves and helmets, we are not sure the armor bearer did. The soldier used a hand sword, a dagger, when slashing while holding a shield in the other hand. It stands to reason, though, that smaller shields, or extra shields (in case one broke) would have been carried, and perhaps used, by the armor bearer(s). But, the weapons they carried were different. Clubs and knives for in-you-face dispatch. After all, the enemy was on the ground; the armor bearer just had to dispatch him.
But, just what does it mean to us as Christians? By looking at the definition of armor bearer, we see we are to lift, to carry, to take. How do we lift? We lift each other up in prayer. We lift the heavy load on our pastors and teachers by helping where help is needed. We lift up our pastoral staff and ministry teams in prayer, real prayer.
We meet the needs of our pastors and leaders, when we tithe out of our income into the offering plate/basket. That offering pays the bills of the church. The missions offering goes into the mission field to financially help support the missionaries who are using your offerings to lead people to Jesus. The building fund offering goes back into the church to keep the roof on, the walls up, the furnace running and the windows intact. It is also there for emergency repairs.
We tithe our time. We go door to door telling folks about Jesus. We hand out Bible tracts while we shop, walk or dine out. We send Come and Visit postcards to new residents of our towns. We reach out into the community using whatever means is at our disposal to do so, in the hope that our words and our actions would draw someone to Jesus.
We carry our church leaders with emotional support. We tell them we love them on a regular basis. We thank them for all the work they do that many times goes unnoticed. We honor them by using our gifts and our talents which God has given us to help the church to grow. We carry them in our hearts and in our thoughts, sending up little prayers throughout the day as The Spirit leads. In their social media pages we post encouraging little notes. We carry out the trash, vacuum the floors, wash the windows, clean the bathrooms.
We carry water bottles and cool, damp towels for our leader(s) because the anointing oil is warm when The Spirit falls and the preaching begins. We have our soldier's back, when an enemy comes against them, protecting them with kind words, putting their foe in confusion and keeping them at bay. We stay near our soldier, without hovering, ready to go where we are directed and do what needs to be done.
We take up the slack when our leaders need to be absent from within our church walls, whether due to illness, family emergencies, vacations, speaking engagements or for whatever reason they cannot be with us at that time. We teach. We preach. We praise.
It doesn’t matter how old we are or how limited our abilities are. We may think we can do nothing, but we limit God, and our soldier, when we say or think such thoughts. We are the people God has called to be the support staff for our leaders. Whether that leader is our minister or our president or our king.
We are the armor bearers. We are the prayer warriors. We are the church.
