According to the law of first mention, the church is primarily about spiritual warfare.

"I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it"

We are the returning, alien, invading army of the rightful king, having been called out from under the government of darkness.

Many years ago the Lord showed me that spiritual warfare can have 7 dimensions:

Prayer, Unity, Proclamation, Counsel, Education, Care and Service.

The weapons of our warfare are very strange!  Remember Gideon and his torchbearers or Joshua and his linen clad musicians?  Our identity and our weaponry are both defined by one thing - the truth! We are people of the light, and the threat that we pose is always that we are likely to shed light on the situation!  Notice that nearly all the items of defensive clothing in Ephesians relate to the truth.  More particularly the items of clothing relate to the truth about us!  Wait a minute, wasnt this the battleground, the very reason for the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness?

What are the enemies arrows?  Why, they are accusations - untruths about us.  Isnt his name Satan, the accuser of the brethren?  So then if we can repulse those accusations by our defensive weapons - our clothing and our shield - then we can advance on the enemy territory without fear.  Indeed one of the Roman methods of attack was to put shields together and form a battering ram.

Our ability to push forward depends on the strength of our defence. What is the state of our clothing and our shield?

Ah, now its all making sense.  They overcame the wicked one by the ....blood of the Lamb.  From which we get the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, the Gospel,  and the finished work of Calvary as the basis for our faith.

So whilst it is important to repulse the enemies attacks, it is even more important to pray that we dont give him any access in the first place:  "Lead us not into temptation".

Pray that we all understand, remember and meditate on the work of grace - making us unblameable and unreproachable in his sight - notwithstanding the fact that in ourselves we are the opposite.  In other words, blunt Satans attacks by agreeing with his assessment of our goodness in ourselves, then pointing to grace and the righteousness of Christ as the bedrock of our personality,

The proof of the truth of all this is in the "word of our testimony".  God testifies to his justification of us by the blessings on our lives, to which in turn we testify in the most incontrovertible way - we are prepared to be martyrs rather than deny the truth of what we affirm.

Faced with such truth, the "Father of Lies" can only run.  He is truly resisted when we SAY,  No thats not the truth, this is what is written.  He runs!  This is the thrust of the sword of the Spirit, but we cannot advance and thrust like this confidently unless we are clad with the clothing that derives from the blood of Jesus.  Just as new clothes gives us a new self-image, so the armour of God gives us a new, true, image of ourselves:  righteous, saved.