We have been talking about the reality of spiritual warfare, and how the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world are in conflict with each other. We learned that when we do things to build God's kingdom (like healing the sick), those same actions tear down the devil's kingdom. In other words, the devil feels attacked by our kingdom activity, so he is likely to fight back by counter-attacking us. God knows those battles will come and He doesn't want us to be taken out by the enemy's attacks. So He has given us spiritual weapons that we can use to defend ourselves. That includes the spiritual armor of Ephesians 6. It also includes things we can do to prepare ourselves for battle, so that we will prevail when the enemy attacks us.
Lesson 10 shares nine things we can do to prepare ourselves. They are:
- Don't Be Caught Off Guard, Prepare For Battle.
- Be Spirit-Led In Your Activities.
- Keep Spiritually Attuned
- Practice Prayerful Self-Examination To Close "Open Doors" The Enemy Can Use To Attack Us.
- Routinely Break Any Curses Spoken Against Us.
- Live Healthy.
- Stay Covered By Prayer
- Stay Closely Connected With Other Believers.
- Understand Your Spiritual Atmosphere.
We already looked at the first one in the previous lesson. So lets pick up from where we left off...
BE SPIRIT-LED IN YOUR ACTIVITIES
Be careful to be led of the Lord rather than manipulated by the needs of others. We need to strive to be doing what He is doing and to avoid doing things that He is not doing.
Never forget that the Holy Spirit is the One who empowers you to do the mighty works that Jesus did; He is also the One Who releases the authority to defeat the devil when he attacks. Remember what Jesus said in Acts 1:8, "But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth."
The power that He gave us did not come until Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to live inside of us. But when the Holy Spirit came, so did the power (including healing the sick). Since the indwelling Holy Spirit releases' God's power and God's authority our life, doesn't it make sense that we should use what He gives us under His leading and direction? In short, we need to be Spirit-led when we use God's power and authority.
In fact, Jesus Himself was led and empowered by the Holy Spirit when He ministered on this earth. Acts 10:38 says, "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, Who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him."
The Holy Spirit led Jesus in His personal life and in His ministry, and He wants to do the same for you--because you belong to Jesus and are called by His name. He is faithful to lead and guide; and we need to be faithful to follow Him, no matter where He leads us.
There will be times when the Holy Spirit leads us into warfare or into some type of direct confrontation with the devil. But when He does that, it is not to destroy us or to abandon us, but to help us win a victory. The Holy Spirit did that with Jesus (led Jesus into spiritual warfare) when He was preparing for His public ministry. Look at Luke 4:1-2a, "Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being tempted for forty days by the devil."
Since the Holy Spirit led Jesus into warfare, we shouldn't be surprised if He leads us there as well.
I want to clear something up so that there won't be any confusion. I am not suggesting that we should only be Spirit-led when we do power stuff (though we do need to be Spirit-led for that). I am suggesting that we should be Spirit-led all of the time. We need to submit every aspect of our routine day-to-day lives to Him; we must allow the Holy Spirit to break into our day whenever He desires and allow Him to change our plans. We should do whatever He directs and we should be "on call" and at His disposal 24 hours a day.
God expects us to be Spirit-led; He expects us to submit to Him in every aspect of our life. And as we do this, He gives us all sorts of amazing benefits. Let me share a few of them with you.
One of those benefits is freedom from condemnation. That freedom is a very powerful thing, because condemnation is a biggie in a lot of people's lives. In fact, condemnation is one of the most powerful tools that the devil uses against us to take us out. He accuses us when we fail or fall short, and his accusations feel so real. They make us want to give up hope and even to pull away from God. But the truth is that the power of condemnation was broken when Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead.
That truth doesn't just apply to our eternal disposition--it also applies to our day-to-day lives. Look at Romans 8:1. "There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit."
This is how it works: when we are Spirit-led in our day-to-day lives, He leads us into the light of God's truth, and that light dispels the darkness of the devil's lies against us. The devil's accusations and condemnations feel so "real" when the devil whispers them to us; but when we come to God's light, they become exposed for what they are: lies and falsehoods.
Jesus called the Holy Spirit the "Spirit of truth" in John 14:16. He also called Him our Helper (in the same verse). The fact is that the Holy Spirit helps us live in the truth of God's love and acceptance, so that we don't have to live under the enemy's lies of condemnation. But we need to yield to the Spirit, listen to Him and be led by Him in order to fully receive this benefit from Him.
Here are a few more benefits of being Spirit-led: freedom from fear, assuredness of God's great love for you, and access to the care and provision of a loving heavenly Father who takes good care of His children. Romans 8:14-16 promises us all of these things. It says: "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit Of Adoption by Whom we cry out, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God."
God expects us to be Spirit-led and He gives us some great benefits when we are. But at the same time, God values free will, so He won't force us to be led by His Spirit--He gives us a choice of whether nor not we will submit to Him and follow the Holy Spirit's leading. When we choose to do that, it pleases Him. But when we resist and chose to disobey Him, that choice grieves Him. Ephesians 4:30 tells us: "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." In other words, if we want to be successful in our Christian walk, we need to choose to submit to Him and be led by His Spirit.
Not Always What We Expect
We should also note that at times God's leading will be different than we expect, especially when we are moving with Him in His power and anointing. The goal is to find out what His agenda is and then do that. At times His agenda may surprise us. Let me illustrate that from the life of Jesus.
Jesus was known for healing the sick. It seemed like anytime He went anywhere, sick people would come to Him. He would be moved with compassion and He would heal them. Matthew 14:14 sums it up this way: "And when Jesus went out He saw a great multitude; and He was moved with compassion for them, and healed their sick." That type of thing seemed to happen a lot, so it is easy for us to expect that when He got around sick people, He would always be moved with compassion and heal them all.
But in John chapter 5, we have an incident at the pool of Bethesda. There were all kinds of sick people there because that was a spot where God released physical healing by sending an angel to stir the water. The first person in after the angel stirred it was miraculously healed of whatever problem they had. So there were a lot of sick people there and all of them were hoping for a supernatural healing In short, Jesus came to a healing spot where there were all sorts of people with both the faith and a strong desire to be healed--a perfect environment for healing ministry.
Given what we know about Jesus, we would expect Him to heal everyone there. But He did not do that. He only healed one person.
Why? Because God was only leading Him to heal that one man. You see, Jesus' agenda was not to heal the sick (thought He loved to heal people). His agenda was to do what the Father was doing. And in this case, the Father was just ministering to one single man. The Holy Spirit led Him to do what the Father was doing and that was all He did. He did not cave in to the expectations or desires of the people around Him. He was not led by His motivation (e.g., compassion for the sick). He was led by the Spirit. And in this case, the Spirit led Him differently than we would have expected.
God's agenda is not always what we thing it is. If we want to be Spirit-led, then we have to do His agenda instead of what we think that His agenda ought to be. And the only way we can tell what is His agenda is to let the Holy Spirit communicate it to us.
Sometimes our expectations and assumptions of what God wants to do are wrong. For example: many of us have been taught that it is always God's will to heal anyone who is sick, but that is not really the case.
Let me give you an example from the life of one of my personal heroes of the faith--Aimee Semple McPherson. Aimee was a woman who God used very powerfully in physical healing and evangelism, but she had a hard time getting started in this ministry. She and her first husband were missionaries to China and they had a baby girl on the mission field. Then Aimee's husband died and she was forced to return to the states. She remarried a Christian businessman and settled into her new life.
Aimee began to feel the call of God on her life into ministry, but her second husband was strongly opposed to having his wife in public ministry. He felt that her place was to stay home and take care of him and their children. So, Aimee ignored God's call on her life to honor her husband's wishes. Besides, she had a very real concern that if she did not honor his wishes, he might divorce her and then she and her daughter from the first marriage would have no where to stay and no one to take care of them.
But God had plans for Aimee, and He began to increase the pressure to call her more strongly into ministry. She resisted/refused until God finally caused her to get deathly sick in His efforts to persuade her. Her health deteriorated and she was sick for months. God spoke to her from time to time but she still resisted, until she finally lay dying alone in a hospice room in a hospital. She was on what they called "final watch" where she was expected to die any minute. But God spoke to her one last time as she lay on her deathbed. He told her that this was her last chance...would she obey Him and go preach the gospel, or would He be forced to take her home?
At that point, Aimee made the decision to obey God and preach the gospel. As soon as she choose to obey God, her health returned almost instantly. She sat up in her hospital bed, which shocked/scared the hospice nurse. She was back to perfect health in a matter of days. Then she kept her promise to God and a very powerful healing and evangelism ministry was launched. She saw countless thousands of people miraculously healed and saved, and she founded the Foursquare denomination.
Aimee had a very glorious destiny and ministry calling, but she was slow to get started in it. There was a contest of wills, and God used sickness and the threat of death to convince her to stop rebelling and embrace His calling on her life. He does things like that sometimes.
Now imagine this scenario. Imagine that you move in healing and you happened to met Aimee while she was sick and was still struggling to embrace God's call and destiny on her life. Your heart might be moved by compassion at her plight (terminal sickness), and you might want to heal her. But if you tried to pray for healing for her, you would have actually found yourself working against what God was doing in her life.
We can't be lead by or assumptions or by our opinions. We have to be led by His Spirit and we need to move at His direction.
Tuning In To God
We have been talking about the reality of spiritual warfare, and how the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world are in conflict with each other. We saw that when we do things to build God's kingdom, such as healing the sick, those same actions tear down the devil's kingdom. The devil will feel attacked by our kingdom activity, and he is likely to fight back by counter-attacking us. But God doesn't want us to be taken out by the enemy's attacks, so He has given us spiritual weapons that we can use to defend ourselves. That includes the spiritual armor of Ephesians 6. In addition, there are definite things we can do to prepare for the enemy's attacks so that we will win the battle when it comes upon us. We came up with nine of them in lesson 10.
- Don't Be Caught Off Guard, Prepare For Battle.
- Be Spirit-Led In Your Activities.
- Keep Spiritually Attuned
- Practice Prayerful Self-Examination To Close "Open Doors" The Enemy Can Use To Attack Us.
- Routinely Break Any Curses Spoken Against Us.
- Live Healthy.
- Stay Covered By Prayer
- Stay Closely Connected With Other Believers.
- Understand Your Spiritual Atmosphere.
We already looked at the first two in previous lessons, so lets pick up from where we left off. We will look at number 3 in this lesson.
KEEP SPIRITUALLY ATTUNED
We talked about being Spirit-led in our last lesson. This is very important in the context of spiritual warfare, as the Holy Spirit is our Commander and Advisor, the One Who leads us in battle. He tells us what battles to fight, and what battles to rest and trust the Lord in. He gives us battle strategies. He reveals the enemy's plans to harm us and gives us strategies to counter these attacks.
But we cannot follow Him if we are not attuned to Him, if we do not know how to recognize His leading or recognize His voice.
We need to build an ongoing relationship with God in order to get to know Him well, so that we are able to follow Him when He leads us. The ability to hear His voice (to recognize His warnings, and follow His directions) is something that we learn by spending time with Him. We need to keep up our "quite times" with God. We need to spend time in His written word, the Bible, to get a good understanding of what He is like, of what He expects of us, of what pleases Him and of what displeases Him.
We also need to spend quality time with Him to build a personal relationship. This includes things like prayer, worship, and godly meditation. We spend time in prayer (talking to God and listening to what He has to say to us). God intends for our prayer time to be a two-way communication. We speak to Him and share our hearts and our struggles with Him. We bring our needs and our requests to Him. And we also listen to what He has to say to us. If you haven't already done this, you will be pleasantly surprised to learn just how much God speaks to us. He gives us direction and He encourages us, but He also likes to "small talk" with us, to talk to us about all sorts of things. Think of it like a personal friendship...we get to know each other and we share things with each other.
I am reminded of a story I heard at a pastor's conference. I don't remember who shared it, but the gist of the story goes like this: a pastor and his wife were driving cross-country to visit some friends; lets call the friends Ted and Irma (I don't remember their real names). While they were driving out, God spoke to the pastor's wife in the car and said, "Irma has a new refrigerator with all sorts of fancy features and she just loves it." The pastor's wife spent about an hour pondering the information God had just given her, trying to find some sort of kingdom application for it. She finally told God, "Lord, I simply can't figure out why you told me that...I mean, I can't see anything I need to pray into, any prophetic message to deliver or anything I need to do about it. Why did You tell me this?" And God replied, "Oh, I just wanted to share Irma's good news with a friend."
She was overwhelmed to hear that God thought of her as a friend and wanted to simply share things with her that she did not have to do anything about. It revolutionized her perspective on her prayer life and caused her to dive into a new and deeper personal relationship with God.
God wants to that same kind of deep and personal friendship with each one of us. And the closer we draw to Him, the more clearly (and the more accurately) we will be able to discern His voice.
Worship is another great way to spend time with God and get to know Him better. Psalm 22:3 says that God "inhabits the praises of His people" (KJV). That means that when we worship God, He responds by coming to us with His tangible presence. There is nothing quite as awesome and wonderful as spending time enveloped in God's tangible presence. He reveals some aspect of Himself to us in those times and we get to see Him "close up." He might manifest His great love for us. Or He might manifest His holiness, or His power or His glory... or whatever aspect of Himself that He wants to make more real to us at that time.
We can't get attuned to God's leading without spending time with Him and developing a personal relationship with Him. We can't get good at recognizing God's voice if we don't get to know Him and develop a personal two-way relationship with Him. Jesus put it this way in John 10:27, "My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me."
There are three important things that we should glean from His statement. The first is that God expects us to have a personal relationship with Himself. We see that in these phrases: "My sheep... and I know them..." The second is that God expects us to hear His voice, as per the part that says, "My sheep hear My voice." The third is that God expects us to obey Him when He does speak to us, as per the part that says: "and they follow Me."
To summarize, we need to spend time with God and build intimacy with Him on a regular bases, as a part of our day to day lives. That way, we will be attune to Him and able to hear His voice for any warnings, leadings, or directions that He gives us.
I should also bring out one more important fact. Relationship with God is the key, not doing works for Him. God doesn't like it if we do the "works" of Jesus if we are not in personal/intimate relation with Him, led by His Spirit and following His agenda. Look at what Jesus said in Matthew 7:21-23: "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that [judgment] day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' 23 And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me.'"
We see a similar dynamic in Luke 13:24-27, when Jesus talked about entering in through the narrow gate. He explained that we can't get by on our proximity to God (like just attending Church), we have to build a real and personal relationship with Him. Jesus said, "Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. 25Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, 'Sir, open the door for us.' But He will answer, 'I don't know you or where you come from.' Then you will say, 'We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.' But He will reply, 'I don't know you or where you come from. Away from Me, all you evildoers!'" (NIV).
The simple truth is that we must develop a personal relationship with God and be spiritually attuned to His leading, as well as being quick to "obey Him because we love Him" (John 14:15). When we do that, the Holy Spirit (Who resides inside of us) begins revealing more of God to us. It is not our responsibility to somehow figure out what God wants; He will speak to us and He will show us. This is what Jesus said in John 14:26: "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you."
Of course, the more we make an effort in our day to day life to tune into God's Spirit, the easier it will be for us to hear His voice to get His direction, leading, warnings, etc. That is why it is so important to spend time each day seeking Him and developing our personal relationship with Him.
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