Weapons of Our Warfare - THE ENEMY

Weapons of Our Warfare

THE ENEMY

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. II Cor. 10:3-4 

I was driving, alone, singing out loud.  "Jesus is the answer for the world today ...."  Holy Spirit had been listening.  He asked me, "Really ?  Is He the answer ?"  Then He pointed out that if that was real then I do not have any problem.  Because a problem with an answer is just an equation.  We already know what the result will be.  We often endure struggles far more painful than they need to be because we have forgotten we already know the result.  ALL things are in fact being worked toward good for those who love God.  The things we are looking at in which we do not see the good ?  Those are the things about which we simply have forgotten who is the answer.   We have forgotten what the final result will be.

Perhaps the most frequent area in which we tend to forget the answer issue in the difficulties we have with other people.  And this is especially true with the people in whom we have a legitimate expectation they will be on our side loving and supporting us.  This is a situation with which Jesus Himself was very familiar.  His best friend John reported, Jesus came to His own people but His own refused to receive Him.  So, we all need to expect our wives, our children, our friends, and the folks with whom we worship will be the people who give us a hard time.  They will be the ones who reject us, belittle us, and fail to appreciate our very best ideas.  And, this is no surprise for us because these are also the people who see us when we are least on guard in our thinking and our behavior.  Sadly, unlike Jesus, when we are honest we must admit that we act unloving more often with the people we love and with whom we have become most comfortable. 

So, how do we react when we are mis-treated by loved ones ?  How do we react when people who want to be our enemies attack us ?  Paul is telling us it is not the flesh and blood that is our true enemy.  This is the reason why so many approaches bring no real solutions to our conflicts.  Physical battles do not resolve conflicts they merely imposed the will of the stronger ones on the weaker ones until the weaker ones become the stronger.  Psychological solutions simply trade one form of imprisonment for another.  Moreover, because the new prison is one of our own choosing it is all the more difficult for us to escape.  The only true solutions for our problems are the ones based in the Eternal Truth of God.

In my own life, I spent many years entrapped in a world filled with my anger and rage.  My wife described it as living beside a volcano which might erupt at any moment with no apparent provocation.  Even though all this time I knew and loved Jesus, I was a mess.  My wife suffered.  Our children suffered. Some of them still carry emotional scars based originally in my outrageous behavior.  I went to all sorts of pastors and counsellors.  Their answers ranged from agreeing with me that it was all my wife's fault to coming up with rules which were impossible to follow.  Some of their answers contained great theological insights; some were just non-sense.  But, none of them ever found the fundamental key to unlock my prison.  My wife was desperate.  I was desperate. Finally, I was taking an anger management course.  The course taught the simple principal that nearly all human anger is our normal emotional response to our fears.  And the most powerful fears are our internal fears: fear of disrespect; fear of dis-honor; fear of being de-valued; fear of feeling guilty; and the like all the way to our greatest fear -- fear of being unfit for human companionship.  

By God's grace, I knew the Scriptural answer to fear.  His perfect love casts out all fear.  So the break out from the prison turned out to be as simple as choosing to receive the Father's perfect love.  Amazing as it may seem when I made that simple spiritual break through, the pattern of rage that had imprisoned me since I was a small child fell away.  My younger children immediately saw the difference.  My wife watched carefully for a while before she came to believe in the change.  But, people who have first met me after the change can hardly believe the stories of what I once was like.  Some of the damage I did may never be healed.  Other portions of that damage are still in the process of being healed.  Praise God, I have been changed.  

Throughout that period of destruction and the period of searching for release from my trap, we tried all sorts of solutions.  But none of them could work for one simple reason.  I was always trying to find an escape from the symptoms but never recognized the fundamental problem for what it really was.  Initially I was blaming the victims of my anger.  They were the ones who set me off.  Then I was blaming myself.  I was an evil person.  My fight was always against flesh and blood, mine or someone else's.  But in fact the fundamental problem was my personal prison.  When I was a child, my parents were too busy with their business to communicate their love to me.  If my parents could not be bothered to love me then I was an unloveable person.  So, although I knew the scriptures about God's unconditional love, I lived trapped in the deception that I was unloveable.  Therefore, His perfect love could not really be for me. Of course, on an intellectual level I knew this to be utter non-sense.  But, where my soul lived on the inside, this deception was clearly true.  In that world all my self-image was based on what I thought other people thought of me.  So, when people communicated disapproval or dis-respect I was crushed and wanted to lash out in anger.

But, the enemy was not other people.  It was not even myself.  The enemy was the liar Satan and his deceiving demons who were continually working to keep me convinced that I was unloveable and therefore God could not really love me.  I lived imprisoned in that Satanic fortress.  His demons and I worked together to continually reinforce the prison walls.  My resulting behavior drove people around me to fear my behavior and withdraw from me.  Thus, even the people around me were helping to reinforce my prison walls.  If my own wife could not like me and approve of me of course I was right; I was unloveable.

But, Father God loved me.  And finally I let Him show me that His love for me was unconditional.  And those prison walls came tumbling down.  

Your enemy,  the enemy of the people you serve, it is never flesh and blood.  The enemy is always the deceiver who works to keep us believing the lies that support our prison walls.

His, thus yours,

  Stuart