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Spiritual Warfare, Week 1
For a lot of people, the idea of spiritual warfare can be pretty scary. Most of that fear comes from the fact that we just don’t know very much about it. So we don’t want to talk about it or learn about it. We keep away from it, which only serves to sustain our fear!!
So we need to move forward in confidence and see what God’s Word says on the subject. And when we start doing this, we find that it’s not painted as a super scary subject; rather it’s portrayed as something very real, but something that we should have courage and confidence in facing. Why courage and confidence? Because we know, at the end of the day, we’re on the winning team.
In approaching the subject of spiritual warfare, there are generally two big mistakes we can make.
Here’s the exciting thing that most people don’t realize in thinking of spiritual warfare: God, who is more powerful than Satan, lives inside of us. God is not just somewhere way out there, detached, uninterested. As believers, He’s in us. 1 John says it like this: “…the one who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (4:4). How great is that?? That will be our thesis statement for the next 6 weeks—we’ll be returning to the idea each week. We have no reason to fear if God is in us.
With that said, let’s move into the subject! We’ll break it down one word at a time.
What is Spiritual?
It’s easy to be confused by this, but essentially, the spiritual is a realm of existence that is just as real as the physical world we see. In fact, we all have spirits. It’s what makes us us. When someone dies, you can see their body in a casket, but is it really them that’s there? No, because their spirit, their soul has left them.
And just as we have spirits that inhabit our bodies, there are also entirely spiritual beings, we call them angels and demons. Both these groups have a vested interest in what happens in the physical world. In a sense, they are battling for our very souls. We are caught right in the middle of the battle.
And so we call it the spiritual realm, but the ramifications for the physical world are vast. When we blow up in a big fight with our family—is there more going on there? When someone is afflicted with ongoing depression—is there more going on there? In an important moment where a lot is at stake, and everything starts going wrong—is there more going on there?
The spiritual is all around us, affecting our everyday lives. Seriously, everything we do.
What is Warfare?
We’ve all been in some kind of game. We’ve all seen the war movies. And do you know what’s true about wars and contests?
People don’t just haphazardly walk into a game or battle. You go in with a game plan, a goal, a set of tactics.
And believe it or not, as believers, we have a very real enemy who absolutely hates us. He hates us because Christ is in us, and he hates everything that has to do with Jesus Christ. So he wants to see our demise—he wants Christ to lose.
So he uses tactics, schemes to bring about our defeat. Much of the time, he actually succeeds. But why?
It’s because we don’t know his schemes. Furthermore, we don’t know what weapons we have for defense and offense. So we gotta start studying how the enemy attacks us, so we can be ready when he does. And we need to know how we can defend ourselves when he attacks. That’s what soldiers do it battle—they anticipate the attack before it even comes.
Ephesians 6:11 says, “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.”So that’s what we’ll be looking over the next 6 weeks: how to put on the Armor of God so we can stand up to Satan’s attacks.
We have no reason to live in fear—we’re on the winning team.
Questions:
