“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does”
2nd Corinthians 10:3
Sometimes I look back at my life, completely stumped as to how I got here. I remember buying a backpack and a sleeping pad, diligently researching each and the cheapest ways to go about buying them. I remember saying goodbye to people, preparing for a years worth of emotional detachment from life in the States. I saw to my support raising obligations, I warned my bank that I’d be out of the country, I cleaned up my room to the best of my abilities, and I even begrudgingly spent the $25 to get 6 passport photos. But somehow, suspiciously absent from my pre-race preparations was any acute war-time training or precluding discipline in military engagement.
Silly me, for thinking this was simply a save-the-world engagement or a “spiritual growth” period. Turns out, there is nothing silly about it.
The Holy Spirit is at war. In fact the whole world is at war, in an alarmingly real spiritual engagement, whether we realize it or not. And our failure to realize it, and our noncommittal disengagement, is a fatal reflection of our misunderstanding of the weaponry we take up when we don the title “Christian”.
For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does, This. Means. We. Are. Waging. War. Or at least we are supposed to be. And this means there is a war going on, to be waged. Our ignorance and blindness to this war causes vast amounts of energy and effort and time to be spent focusing on the wrong things, fighting the wrong fights. And our failure to engage in this war, as it is happening around us, has devastating consequences for the victory and dispersion of the Kingdom that God has entrusted and empowered us to bring to earth.
God has shown me this war and I refuse to stand on the sidelines any longer. And it’s something… we intrinsically know this, as Christians, but it’s something that we can know, but at the same time not KNOW, you know? We pray against the petty things every day, and yet we continue to be consumed by them. We pray for more Spirit and for God’s will, yet we walk in steps that are entirely our own. We familiarize ourselves with the spiritual armor of God and yet we use them to fight fleshly battles of utter inconsequence.
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
Eph 6:12
I’ve read that before. We all have. Right before the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness and the feet and the shield and the flaming arrows, right, we know. But this month, I picked my armor up and finally saw what we were really fighting, and I found I had no idea how to use it. And when I tried, I could barely move the next day I was so exhausted, as if I had just gone into the gym for the first time and bench pressed everything in the room.
It goes like this.
Spirits are real. And so are demons and darkness and light and angels and witchcraft and curses – they all are real and they all have spiritual weight. God wins, always. Light casts out dark, angels protect against demons, the name of Jesus dispels the dark powers and spiritual authorities and demonic strongholds that Satan has built up on this earth, his domain. God has dominion over the earth and everything in it, and He has granted that dominion to us as early as Genesis 1. Thus the Holy Spirit works through us, reestablishing the Kingdom on earth as it was in Eden through the power of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, because God has granted us that authority.
One of Satan’s most prolific lies has been in making us believe that he in fact isn’t here. And the comfort we have eased ourselves into, in the ignorance of the larger war at hand, has rendered us ineffective against the strongholds he has built here on earth.
I rebuke that lie in the name of Jesus, and I call everyone reading this with ears to hear, to wake up to the war being waged around you.
We have prayed long and hard about the way to be most effective for the short time we’re here, and the answer we keep coming back to is by the Spirit. Our actions, on their own, mean nothing. And any work we do in the flesh can die or be swept away in days. This is a reflection of the misalignment of our initial priorities, that we thought we could “ministry” our way to effective Kingdom work. But God says otherwise, He says “fight the fight I am fighting, in the spiritual domain where I have called you to establish my Kingdom, with the weapons I gift you by the Spirit, by the strength you get when you focus on me and me alone.”
And when we do, the effort is exhilarating, the results unbelievable, and the power of exertion exhausting. So we transitioned to intense sessions of prayer and worship, arming ourselves in Spirit rather than in flesh, with words and declarations and prayer rather than in sessions and forced conversation and meetings.
We shout praises in the streets, we worship on the corners, speaking words of life over tired, battered bodies. We call restoration out of the streets, salvation out of the walls, praise out of the gates. We build up and we fervently pray, before we speak to people and after, that God use our words, our actions, our intentions; that the Spirit give life, that He opens ears and visits in dreams, that He makes himself known through children and through the dogs that wander the streets, that He bless this place with newness and restoration. We pray for believers and we pray for those standing dead before us, that God uses them, radically, that He confronts them and affects them and empowers them, that He saves them and washes them and teaches them and builds them and restores them and heals them and brings peace and that He plants His Kingdom in this place and that He be faithful to water it and see it grow, and we demand that in Jesus’ name.
We speak by the Spirit. We let no words come out of our mouths that our only our own. We plant ourselves in the righteousness that God extends by the justification of His Son’s blood for our sins, and we shout, as sons and daughters of the living God, in a battle cry that shakes the spiritual foundations of the worldly ground we fight to reclaim.
We War for this place.
And when we do, we see strongholds crumble, we feel demons flee, we see the anger and retaliation of the Devil himself, roaring in rage as He’s kicked out again and again. We see children and men and women come to us and ask us to pray with them, that they might have the same freedom they see in us. We have songs being sung they never knew, power being accessed from Scripture they’ve never read, whole families warming up to the idea that life is here and now offered freely by the radically transforming blood of Christ, and that they have access to it by the Holy Spirit, now coursing through this land, white hot seeds beginning to sprout and grow into oaks of righteousness we won’t be around to see reach full maturity.
As we prepare to leave this month, we prayerfully and powerfully seal the work the Spirit has done here, leaving in full faith of the beneficence our fighting has brought and will bring. This is the war we wage. This is the war we are called to engage in. And as the Lord trains us and sharpens us to perceive this war and be of use in it, His trust empowers us to higher levels of authority and victory in our own lives and struggles, freeing us from things we didn’t even know we needed freeing from, that we might continue to bring greater and greater amounts of freedom to the children He so desperately wants to redeem.
We do not wage war as the world does, but make no mistake, we do wage war. Pray, as our endurance and stamina is stretched, that our faith keeps us fighting the good fight that God is calling us to fight, and that He is faithful to see His children through to the glory we have called out of this place.
Love,
Danny
