Our Spiritual Warfare
Dear Friends in Christ,
You may recall that I’ve mentioned a couple of times this fall in my preaching, examples of people who underwent great torment for the sake of their faith, or bore witness to Christ under the weight of some kind of persecution. The purpose for telling such stories has been in some instances to show what a sincere, yet misguided, belief in God can do, and in others to give examples of the power and courage of faith in the face of persecution. The faith Christ Jesus spoke of as capable of moving mountains (Matthew 17:20). We at Pioneer live in a time and place, however, where the challenges to our faith are more often things we wouldn’t normally think of as being all that powerful. We know that as people of Christ in this age we need to be awoken to the fact that we are engaged in a holy war, fighting not against flesh and blood but against the daemonic powers, “against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). The fact that it for the most part doesn’t feel like or look like our standard idea of earthly battle makes it all the more difficult to remain engaged in the warfare. In the same way that it would be, as Baudelaire wrote, “the devil’s cleverest while, to convince the world he does not exist,” it is another of his subtlest tricks to use peace itself as a weapon of war. As Luther said in his Sermon on the Day of Holy Innocents,
“When the tyrants rage against the Gospel, they do no more than blow into the ashes whereby the fire grows and the ashes invade their eyes. This is what befalls their tyranny: When they spill innocent blood, this blood of Christians becomes like dung which fertilizes the field so that it is enriched and yields a good crop. Through persecution Christianity grows, but where peace and tranquility prevail, there Christians become lazy and idle.”
We are so coddled in certain ways by the time and culture of relative peace in which we live, that the devil is able to use things like idleness, laziness, inattention, false evaluation of priorities, etc. as weapons in a battle we’ve largely forgotten we’re even in. This is not to diminish the struggles, challenges, and battles we do have in our life and faith. Only to point out that when the field beneath us itself has shifted, we need to be aware that the war itself is going to look much different.
I want to propose a challenge to the members of Pioneer Lutheran, to consider the extent of your dependence upon God, and look for the angles the devil has taken to try and undermine that dependence. Examine whether the state of your life–your thoughts, actions, attitudes, desires, and commitments–matches up with the calling you have been issued by God to serve his kingdom above all others. And consider that you have a good Shepherd, upon whose guidance your life depends. Above all, “Consider him who endured such hostility from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Hebrews 12:3).
God bless you and keep you, in Christ,
Pastor Tyler
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