The sermon opens against the backdrop of that week's news of escalating war in Iran, Lebanon, and the wider Middle East, and the preacher notes an old military maxim traced back to Rome: "if you want peace, you have to be ready for war." Nations arm themselves for the sake of deterrence. Ephesians 6:15, however, inverts this logic: because Christians already stand in the midst of spiritual warfare, they are to have their feet shod with the readiness to proclaim the gospel of peace. This is the fifth piece of the full armor of God the sermon takes up in its ongoing exposition of Ephesians, following the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness, and preceding the shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit.

The sermon first establishes what "the gospel of peace" actually is, turning to Ephesians 2:13-18. In Christ, those who were once far off have been brought near by his blood; he himself is our peace, having broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile and abolished the law's enmity in his flesh, so as to create one new humanity in place of two, reconciling both to God in one body through the cross. The sermon stresses that this reconciliation is first vertical — humanity's fundamental hostility is with God himself, on account of sin — before it becomes horizontal peace between formerly hostile parties, who are made into one new man, one household of God, one body of Christ.

Returning to Ephesians 6:15, the sermon flags a translation issue: the Indonesian text reads readiness to proclaim the gospel of peace, while the ESV renders it readiness given by the gospel of peace. The preacher judges the Indonesian rendering more faithful to Paul's likely source, Isaiah 52:7 — "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news... who says to Zion, 'Your God reigns.'" That verse pictures a watchman on the tower who expects to see an approaching enemy but instead sees Israel's own army returning in victory, and runs down to announce it. Paul quotes the same image in Romans 10:15 ("How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news"). The sermon illustrates this with a story from Pastor Stephen Tong about a large Australian missionary woman whose feet, caked in mud after being pulled from a bog on a jungle mission trip, are nevertheless, in God's eyes, "the most beautiful feet," because they carried the gospel into the interior.

The sermon then turns to why readiness itself functions as armor, tracing this to the nature of the gospel: it is emphatically not the message that God loves the righteous and accepts those good enough to earn it. Isaiah 6 supplies the pattern — when Isaiah sees the Lord's holiness and hears the seraphim cry "Holy, holy, holy," he despairs, "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips." Only when a seraph touches his lips with a coal from the altar — a picture of atonement ultimately fulfilled in Christ's sacrifice on the cross — is Isaiah told, "your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for." Isaiah contributes nothing; the gospel, the sermon insists, is sola gratia from beginning to end, illustrated further by Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, where only the one who cries "God, be merciful to me, a sinner" goes home justified. Only after receiving this grace does Isaiah respond, "Here I am! Send me" (Isaiah 6:8) — readiness flows naturally out of having already experienced the gospel, "like a beggar telling another beggar where to find bread."

A second illustration follows: a woman in Singapore, herself wrestling with doubts about whether God is truly real, continued visiting hospitals to share the gospel and ended up leading a suffering couple to faith over months of patient friendship — only to realize afterward that in ministering to them, her own faith had been strengthened. This becomes the sermon's closing point: the shoes of readiness are not only a weapon for winning others but a guard for the believer's own heart, keeping it from being ruled by idols — money, power, beauty, relationships, even children or parents — good things in themselves that become dangerous the instant they, rather than Christ, occupy the throne of the heart, a dynamic the sermon illustrates with C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. The sermon closes with a pastoral reassurance: no one perishes eternally because of a Christian's failure to evangelize, since salvation belongs to the Lord alone — a truth meant to free believers from performance anxiety even as it invites them, in whatever small and imperfect way, to join God's own mission of proclaiming that Christ reigns and that true peace is found only in him.

Bible Verses Used

• Ephesians 6:15: The sermon's main text — the "shoes of readiness to proclaim the gospel of peace" as a piece of the armor of God, read against the Indonesian translation's emphasis.

• Ephesians 2:13-18: Establishes what "the gospel of peace" is — Christ as our peace, reconciling hostile parties to each other and to God through his blood and the cross.

• Isaiah 52:7: Likely background for Ephesians 6:15 — the watchman's feet announcing "Your God reigns," read as the origin of the "beautiful feet" image.

• Romans 10:15: Paul's own quotation of Isaiah 52:7, cited to reinforce the link between beautiful feet and gospel proclamation.

• Isaiah 6:1-8: Isaiah's vision of the Lord's holiness, his confession of unclean lips, the atoning coal, and his response "Here I am! Send me" — the pattern of grace preceding readiness.

• Luke 18:9-14 (Pharisee and tax collector): Illustrates that justification is granted by grace to the humble sinner, not earned by the self-righteous.