Standing Up To Fight….

   For the next two days I walked around our house like a ghost, I just did what I had to do and spoke only if spoken to. Eventually God broke me down, in a way only he can, and revealed to me what the real problem was. I couldn’t be mad or frustrated with anyone but myself at this point. When I stopped and took a really honest look at myself, I realized that as much as I was praying to God, reading my Bible, singing worship songs, and telling others about his love each day, I hadn’t really let him help me do all these things. I was still resting on my own strength and knowledge. The funny thing is, I had no idea I was doing it until last week. All the little random things that had started to bug me about those I am living with, or with the ministry we were doing, or just about where we were living, were nothing more than the childish attempt of Satan trying to distract me from the mission God has for me this year.

   He has also been attacking each one my teammates in different ways, trying to destroy us and separate us from God and each other. And to be honest he did a really good job for a while. But thankfully God was still fighting for us and never left our sides during all of this, and he never will. God reminded us that the more powerful we become as a body of believers, the more people we bring to his Kingdom, the more love we show, the more prayers we pray, the more we realize that the Holy Spirit lives inside each of us; the more Satan will try to attack us and stop us from doing God‘s work. But the good news is that we can just ignore all these small little attacks from the evil one, because God has already fought and won the war for us. He sent his son Jesus Christ to earth to free us, to cover us with his never-ending grace and love. We just need to keep hungering and thirsting after him, learning to become more like him each day, and together we can win the small daily battles in our minds and all around us.

   This can seem like a very daunting task, I know, and it will never stop being a struggle to suppress our earthly and humanly natures that so easily trap us, but I do promise that if you can just take each day one at a time it wont seem quite as scary. Every day we wake up we are hit by Satan’s childish attacks to bring us farther away from our father God. One of the biggest ways he will do this is to put little lies into your minds about those you love, those you work with, those you go to church with, or even those you just pass on the streets. He will start with a small lie about how your husband/wife reacts when you cook them dinner, they just don’t seem to be as appreciative as you think they should be. Later on he will tell you that since your husband/wife didn’t compliment you on the way you looked during your date night, then obviously they don’t find you attractive anymore. Just any small way to start building up a wall between you and your spouse. Eventually it will have built up so big in your mind that you find yourself wanting a divorce because they didn’t take out the trash without being asked to. This is how the devil works, he starts out small and just continues to build up his evil lies until you look around one day and have no idea how you came to hate someone so much.

   Instead of coming to your spouse, in love, each time a frustration or lie from Satan comes up, we tend to harbor these feelings and don’t take the time to deal with the situation at hand. We forget that God tells us not to lay our heads down at night while we are still angry with our brother or sister in Christ. Ephesians 4:26-27 :

   We forget that we are to love like he loves us, unconditionally and without ceasing. God never tells us to just love each other when they are nice to us or when it is convenient for us. He calls us to love everyone who is mean, rude, and down right evil towards you. Matthew 5:44 :

“But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

     This is all good and fine when we read it in the Bible, but when we try living it out in our daily lives that is when we tend to fail miserably at it. One of my favorite verses to describe this task of loving each other on a daily basis through all the little annoyances that come our way is Ephesians 4:2-3 :

   We must be patient with one another, we must look past the things that annoy us, we must make EVERY effort to keep the unity within the body of Christ. Not just once a week or once a day make the effort, it is EVERY effort constantly throughout each day.