Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. -- Ephesians 6:18 (KJV)
Count the alls. Praying always. All prayer. All perseverance. All saints. Four times in one verse, immediately after the equipment has been handed out, and the effect is that the armour never quite closes around a single man. It opens outward.
Then He Asks for Himself
Read one verse further, because Paul does. “And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds.”
The man who just described the whole armour of God asks the church at Ephesus to pray for him. He is in chains while he writes it, and what he asks for is words rather than release.
That settles something about intercession. If Paul needed carrying, then the steadiest believer you know needs carrying, and so do you. “Supplication for all saints” takes in the people you had filed away as fine.
This kind of praying stays unremarkable. It sounds like a mother going through her children's names before the house is up. It sounds like somebody asking God to steady a pastor, or a friend inside a temptation nobody else has noticed, or a teenager under a pressure he has no words for yet. “Watching thereunto with all perseverance” means staying at it past the point where one sentence would have felt like enough.
Shield and Buckler
Psalm 91 answers from the other side. “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.”
Notice what does the shielding. His truth — the same truth Paul buckled around the soldier's waist in Ephesians 6:14, working here as shield and buckler. One thing, two jobs: it holds your own kit together, and it stands between you and what gets thrown. The covering is His. Dwelling in the secret place is the part left to you.
Monday named an enemy you had been misreading. Friday hands you a list of names that are not your own. The armour was issued to a church, and Paul spends the next verse asking to be included in it.
