Saturday, September 22, 2012

Spiritual Combat

The Whole Armor!

Eph 6:10  Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.
Eph 6:11  Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

The whole armor of GOD.

We are in a war.  The war between God and Satan. The war between love and evil. We LIVE in this war. We are born on this battlefield and we are raised on this battlefield. Yet how many of us truly understand the war we are all participants in? Did you grow up being told that you are fighting a war? Did you grow up understanding that there is an enemy and a Savior?  Some people have grown up this way, but it's safe to say the majority of people are not raised with the knowledge that they are personally participating in a war. 

We've regulated all of our war talk to the physical realm and have neglected the spiritual. There are physical wars right now taking place where men and women are physically dying as they fight their physical war.  We know the toll wars can take, we can read the numbers and comprehend the loss of life. Losing even ONE life is a tragedy even if it does not affect you personally, the loss of ANY life is tragic.

The spiritual war we are all in rages around us at a mostly unseen level until someone or something calls attention to it.

We would be looked upon as strange by the majority if we pointed out the spiritual combat in our lives and the lives of those around us.  Some would roll their eyes and gesture that we are off our rockers and ready to be put in psychiatric facility.

People don't want to chalk up their bad days where everything seemingly goes wrong to being fought against on a spiritual level.

You're asked by someone- 'How was your day today?'  And you reply, 'Awful, I was attacked so hard by evil angels it wasn't funny! Every time things seemed to settle down something would come up. Soandso told me my hair looked kind of funny and of course an evil angel was right there to encourage me to get instantly depressed about my hair and become overly self-conscious. Then at lunch time I reached for the last piece of pie when someone else did and they rolled their eyes and me and there another evil angel was all too eager to encourage me to think the other person thought I was too fat and didn't need the pie, even though they didn't say a word. Then when I was finished with my work my boss came over and dumped another pile of papers on my desk and told me they forgot but they needed to be filed before I could leave. So, yeah, you guessed it another evil angel was right there to help fuel my desire to curse my boss, even though I did it silently. So, yeah, a pretty rough day, how was your day?'

Some will read that and instantly think that the person is just blaming 'others' and not themselves for their actions, their thoughts, their feelings. What those people don't realize is that on the spiritual realm evil angels are constantly encouraging any and all evil within us, constantly. People would rather believe that the spiritual realm doesn't exist, but it does, and it was in that realm that sin first began. 

It's a REAL place, a REAL fact, not fiction. We are just too darn spiritually blinded to want to believe in it. As long as we don't believe in the spiritual realm as a real life interactive existence then we will never fully believe in our Savior- it's impossible because He believes in the spiritual realm as a reality, He is FROM the spiritual realm. 

Jesus went about casting out demons- SPIRITUAL entities!  Do you believe that? If you believe in Jesus you have to. So was Jesus crazy for living with the reality of the spiritual existence surrounding us? No. He was drawing our attention to it, pointing it out, wanting us to recognize it.

We are told to put on the WHOLE ARMOR of GOD to stand against -

- the wiles of the devil.

The wiles of who?

The DEVIL!

That SPIRITUAL being!

So do you suppose we are to put on physical armor to stand against this spiritual being? Do you imagine there is physical armor of God? This is SPIRITUAL!

We have to pay attention to our SPIRITUAL life!

The whole armor of a SPIRITUAL God is SPIRITUAL armor for a SPIRITUAL battle.

Ignore the spiritual in favor of believing in anything but the spiritual, that's your choice and only you can make it. Let yourself be deceived by the leader of spiritual evil, again it's your choice.  You not believing in no way negates its existence. Do you know we are told this about the spiritual evil beings…

Jas 2:19  Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.

Devils believe, of course they believe! They know! Do they have the advantage of spiritual sight unlike those of us who are flesh, blood, and spirit? Maybe, but, their advantage is also their greatest disadvantage, they gave up all hope when they chose spiritual evil over spiritual love, they will never have a Savior, only us flesh, blood, and spirit beings have a Savior.

The WHOLE ARMOR of GOD is at our disposal. We all have access to this armor.  We all NEED to wear this armor because not a single one of us will escape the wiles of the devil.

We have a Spiritual Leader, a Spiritual Savior, a Spiritual Helper- we have God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. We must commit ourselves to them- flesh, blood, and spirit all of it belongs to them who GAVE us our lives, our very existence.

Tomorrow we are going to talk more on the WHOLE ARMOR of GOD, all by the grace of God as HE wills!

We have to talk about it! We have to bring it to LIFE. To so many it's like the fairy tale Pinocchio- it's a wooden thing, not really alive. It's a part of us but not really recognized in it's fullest sense. We cannot afford to let our spiritual selves be made of wood, they have to be alive IN CHRIST!

All through HIS LOVE!

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