Isn't true spiritual warfare rare?
When many Christians think of spiritual warfare, they often think of some surreal kind of cartoon battle of "good angel" versus "bad angel" in the invisible spirit world. Others imagine some kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets X Files meets Blade encounter. Still others conjure up thoughts of movies like the Exorcist, where good meets bad in a battle for the body. As a result spiritual warfare seems like it's rare. It seems like an X-Men adventure in the underworld underground. The result? Most Christian teens don't take it seriously.
That is a mistake.
The Bible says something very interesting about spiritual warfare. According to God's Word this unseen battle takes place in the context of relationships and the brain.
Ephesians 6:12 shows us that this spiritual battle is in the middle of everyday relationships with people,
"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."
Those relationships that you are struggling with, that brother who keeps picking on you, those students at your school who are making fun of your Christianity, that teacher who verbally criticizes your belief system in class, all have an invisible reality behind them. You see, our problem is not with "flesh and blood". In other words, our problem is not with people. Our problem is with the devil who uses those relationships to discourage, distract and deceive us. Relationships are a battlefield for spiritual warfare...and so is your mind.
2 Corinthians 10:4 and 5 makes it clear that your brain is a battlefield,
"The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ."
These verses are filled with military terms. God tells us that we have powerful weapons to bust through Satanic strongholds in our brains. What is a stronghold? It is a wall of wrong thinking that keeps God out. It is the moat around our minds that refuses to allow the Word of God to penetrate. It is the iron gate of sin, built by Satan himself to keep your thoughts worldly.
When you became a Christian your soul was saved. You were adopted as a child of God and your sins were nailed to the cross. You became a new creation in Christ. You have a new Father, a new home in heaven, and a new path to walk. But you need a new mind as well. Satan has lost your heart to Jesus and the last thing he wants is to lose your mind to Jesus. So he establishes strongholds (walls, moats, gates, etc) of wrong thinking to keep your brain thinking wrong thoughts about God, life, relationships, movies, music, sin and him.
How do we break through these strongholds? We use our weapons! We use the catapult of God's Word and the ramrod of God's Spirit to break through the gates and shatter the walls and we capture our thoughts for God! Your brain is a battlefield!
More Questions:
For every truth of God Satan has an arsenal of lies. In other words there are more than ten questions when it comes to the devil and spiritual warfare. What's a Christian teenager to do? Measure everything you hear by God's Word. New bank tellers are trained to spot counterfeit money, not by studying counterfeit money, but by becoming familiar with the real thing. The same is true of spiritual warfare. The way you identify Satan's lies is by becoming super familiar with God's truth. The more time you spend studying God's Word, depending on God's Spirit, the more you will be able to tell a counterfeit from the real thing.
