TV 1772 | Called to Be Warriors Part One

devil has fought hard, but that's pretty good indication that he didn't like what was said. And so, we're just going to look to the Lord and pray that he will continue to add what he wants. You know, I won't go through all of what we said, but obviously we talked about the fact that the world's system is a spiritual order of things ruled over by a fallen angel, we know as Lucifer or Satan, a devil. And he has a kingdom built upon with the loyalty of other angels who fell with him or rebelled with him. And there is a spiritual order that is designed to use, abuse, and destroy humanity. All I want to do is use their own evil desires, and if they kill us, great, go on to somebody else. But we talked about how I think we many times aren't aware of the reality of the kingdom of darkness. We think of the devil in some vague generalization, but there are real spirits that actually attack and work on and approach individual people, and that God wants us to be aware of that. Now I know you can go in two different ditches. One is that we just ignore the devil and it's all about Jesus. The other is that everything is, "Oh my God, there's a devil under here." It just gets down to ridiculous stuff. But God does want us to be aware, doesn't he? Be sober, be alert. Well, there's got to be something to be alert for, and he doesn't say resist the thought, he says, "Reduce the devil." And so there's another, in other words, there's an inspiration behind things that trouble us, that hold us back, that keep us in a place of bondage. And so the Lord wants us to come to a place of greater freedom. What would happen if the Lord had more of a hold on us, and we were freer in Him? Do you think maybe we might be able to help other people and have more of an impact on people, and the Lord could do more? You know, so many times I think we settle in and say, "Well, this is as good as it gets,

and when the Lord is wanting us to take new ground." Now we know the condition of the world. There are people who are in terrible, terrible spiritual prisons. God could use some of us to help some of them. We get out of our own prisons, and I believe that's what the Lord wants to focus on a little bit. And I think if you've served the Lord any amount of time, you know that when we're saved, it doesn't all, doesn't everything bad go away. I mean, in one sense, yes, I've heard wonderful testimonies of people in these terrible prison houses, and God saved them, and there was a dramatic change in their life. But universally, if you talk to them, they will say, "Well, no, there are still a lot of issues, still a lot of areas of bondage, still a lot of battles to be fought." And when the Lord calls His people into His kingdom, He's not calling us into a cushy, quiet, trouble-free life where we've got a ticket to heaven in our back pockets, and while we do a sit back and the Lord just makes every trouble vanish. Obviously, we know it's not that way. So God has ordained that it is the way that it is, and He has called us not to a life of ease and comfort, but to be warriors. Maybe that's...I'll get a title out of the way here, called to be warriors. Last year, last, well, last year, last week, we talked about knowing your enemy, or know your enemy, and we have to. We have to be aware that what's really coming at us and how the devil works different ways. I believe the Lord can teach us these things, and we don't learn it all at once. But our life is going to be learning how to trust God, how to seek Him, how to lay hold of the things that He's given to us, all of which are ours, but not all of which we possess in a practical sense. And so that's why Paul, for example, told Timothy, "Fight the good fight of the faith." What did he follow that up with? Lay hold of eternal life. There's some laying hold of things that means I don't have it right now.

It's mine, my name is on the account. It's not like I've got to earn it. Jesus paid it all, thank goodness. But He has laid up something for me that I have to do something in order to obtain. And so that's where the Christian life is not just a cushy walk in the park, it's a warfare, Obviously, we see that Jesus Himself was called to walk when He walked in a human body. He faced temptation. He faced trouble. He faced opposition of all kinds. And we know that He was -- He is described as a tested stone. Now, we know that in God's -- what God is building, there's an illustration of what God is building. He's the cornerstone. Everything is built off of Him, related to Him. He's the one that sets how -- what God's purpose is. And we're attached to Him, but the cornerstone itself was not just a stone, but a tested stone. You know, one of the greatest comforts are the things that would should be a great comfort to all of us. It's the fact that He was tempted in all points just as we are. Now He demonstrates in His life how to overcome because He didn't do it in His own strength. He came in a place of dependence. He said, "I can by myself do nothing," but yet He did all these things. How did He do that? He knew where His help came from. He leaned upon the ability that God gave Him in every instance. And you know, He came to the end of His -- end of His journey the night before He was crucified. And He said, "The prince of this world is coming." Now, who's He talking about? That's Satan, right. The prince of this world is coming.

But what was his testimony? He has no hold on me. Now, was that for lack of trying? The devil went -- did everything He could to gain a hold upon Jesus, but He couldn't find any way to appeal to Him and say, "I've got a hold on you." You know, we talked last week about how the devil does get a hold upon people. He hangs chains from them. How does He do that? The reality is, if you and I have a hold in our life and we have an area of bondage that's just persistent, and there it is, and it keeps holding us down and holding us back, where did that come from? Is -- yeah, by giving in at some point -- and it could have been -- it could have just been ignorance. It could have been -- well, I know that's wrong, but there's a whole lot of ways that the devil will appeal to people. And if we yield to Him, He will come in and, you know, one illustration would be to dig in His talents. You think of Him like a dragon or something with claws, and I use the illustration about criminal gangs. If you gave a criminal gang member access to part of your house, do you think He would just later on say, "Oh, you need this room? Okay, bye-bye." No, there is a spirit in that kind of thing that He says, "That's mine." And that's where I believe God wants us to come to a deeper freedom. Anybody here need that? Yeah, I'm the first one. And that's what the Lord wants to give us, is a deeper sense of freedom, and there are areas where the devil has dug in, he has -- you know, we can stand at the door. I thought of this illustration. You can stand at the door and say, "Devil, this is God's house.

You can't come in here." But one if there's a back door that's still vulnerable and He still can come in and out and do stuff, God wants to shut all our back doors and help us to overcome. Now we mentioned and have often mentioned that we're not just dealing with doctrines and ideas and theory and all that kind of stuff, we're dealing with power. There is a real power and I'll guarantee you the power that Satan has to hold us in bondage is greater than our power to say, "Devil, get out of here." We don't have that kind of power. That's why the world is in the condition it is. Now a lot of it is deception, but there are plenty of people out there more than you might realize who deliberately reach into Satan's kingdom, knowing if Satan's kingdom, but they're looking for power, they're looking for help, they're looking for some earthly advantage. You know, I was in the printing business. I had customers who were dabbling in that area, they live right around here. This is not some way off someplace. are people who literally... know what's going on in their hearts and their lives. But they are literally reaching out for help from devils. Well, do you think there's no cost to that? Do you think you can play with a devil and get help from them in some area, whether it's information or whatever you want? You think you can do that and they're not going to dig in and hold? They're absolutely going to get a hold on somebody's life. There's a price to pay. Well, we need the Lord. We need Him. Thank God for what He has done for us, but we don't realize many times the seriousness in a practical sense of what we need and what we have as well in the Lord. So I was emphasizing the fact that there is a real power involved, it's spiritual power that holds people captive and I don't care how hard they try to be different and the

devil gets a certain kind of hold, it's there. And it takes a greater power to break that. Okay? You remember a scripture that we've often been referred to in the past and it's in Second Corinthians 10, I believe. Now Paul is talking about his ministry and talking about how he did things and he says in verse 3, "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does." Okay? So we're not here trying to use psychology and all the kinds of things that men try to use to fix people's problems. We're coming with different kinds of weapons. We recognize the need is different from what people think it is. People think, "Oh, I was born this way or I've just got this problem. I just need a psychiatrist. I need this. It's a medicine." I'll tell you. We need Jesus. All right? So then he goes on to talk about the weapons because if God has called us to be warriors, we better have something to fight with, okay? So Paul says, "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. In the contrary, they have divine power to do what? Demolish strongholds." Now a stronghold is what? It's a stronghold. It's something where this criminal gang member has got a place and not only is he going to hang on to it, he's going to invite his friends in there and they're going to take every advantage they can to have their way and not yours. You can be a believer in Jesus Christ and still have a stronghold.

Now I get that there are people who will pretend to be Christians or even think they're Christians, but they've never really surrendered their life to Jesus. It's still theirs. They're trying to reap the benefits of what Jesus did without handing over their lives. It doesn't work that way. But even when we surrender, even when we come and give Him what we know and we say, "Lord, I'm yours. I'm going to serve you from now on. Irrevocably. I'm yours." Lock, stock, and barrel. There are still going to be these areas of need over time that God is going to be touching and putting His finger on and helping us with. He longs to bring us to that place where the freedom, where He's such got practical control. He has such practical control in our lives and strength and influence that power can not only break these holes but flow through us to other people, unclog the pipes as it were. So anyway, Paul says there are the weapons that I'm fighting where they have divine power. Folks, we need divine power. We can use all the right words, but they've got to have some power there, okay? We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. Now, use the word pretension. That's related to the word pretend. Something isn't real, but you act as though it is. That's how the devil works, it's deception. He's going to tell you stuff that he can make you believe it, then you're going to live as if it's true like you're not a child of God, anybody ever fought that battle? If you were a child of God, the devil's going to fight every kind of thing and throw it out there, and boy, if he can get us to bite, then we're in a weak place.

And he has this...Paul talks about... of God. That's what I need. I need truth, folks. I need that which is true. And we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Boy, if we can get free in our minds and what we think about and what we believe and what we act on, man, there's going to be more freedom that we've ever had. May God bring us to that place. Well, I thought about going back to a scripture that we use many times, but I see it in a little deeper way, I think. And I just pray that God will take this and make it real because we see something about the fall of Satan in Revelation 12. And we see how there was a battle, there was a war in heaven. And the devil did not prevail. Thank God he has no right to rule over us, by the way. He has only what we give him. And so the Lord, what the Lord wants to do is to take that permission that we have given the devil to take it away and remove him. Kick him out. Praise God. So anyway, then I heard after this war, then I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, verse 10, "Now have come the salvation and the power," Anybody here need that? "and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, his Christ, for the accuser of our brothers and sisters who accuses them before our God day and night has been hurled down." Then he talks about triumph. "They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death." Now as I thought about this, as the Lord seemed to quicken it, I came to a place where I felt like reading this first part, the blood of the Lamb. It's almost like that's a wonderful doctrine and years kind of blow right past that. But I think there's something a lot deeper there. You know, we sang the song and I listened to it again last night. Thank you Jesus for the blood applied. Yeah, the blood of Jesus is wonderful. What he did is incredible to shed his blood so that there's a, my sins can be washed away, cleansed, forgiven, thank God. But there's an application of that that needs to happen in my life. And if I'm going to get to the point where the second part is effective, I've got to have the first part right. You get me? And I think many times I've been in this place. Oh God, I did it again. Oh God, please forgive me and thank God he does. But still there's not, nothing happens beyond just, you know, this feeling we sometimes, we approach these kinds of things like, I'm sorry Lord, I did it again. Clean up, please clean up my mess. I promise I'll try harder. You think that's the description of the Christian life? Is that the best God has for us? Or is there a place where we can actually take this ground that the devil has taken hold of and is hanging on to? Is there a way we can get him to let go

and be able to look him in the eye and go to the effectiveness of the word of our testimony where he has to actually say, "Oh my God, I don't know this anymore. I got to go. I can't stand before this." That's where I want to get. And I believe God is bringing us there. And I believe with all my heart this, this blood business is not just simply a doctrine about what Jesus did. It is that. It's founded upon that. But there has to come a time when the effectiveness of what he did is applied to my life. Now you remember what John said in 1 John, "If we say," included himself, didn't he? So you know that even John, at this late stage of his life, there were still things God was working on. But he had gotten to a place where there was a great deal of freedom but still is always more, more ground to take. But here's John and he's saying, "If we say that we have no sin, Okay, see the devil can paint a picture of who you are and who you think you are in your mind. I'm a good person. Are you? By whose measure? You you go with Isaiah to the throne and just see how you see how you fare. Oh my God We need the Lord, don't we? But thank God he doesn't leave that there if we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us But if we sin if we confess our sin is how it goes on if we confess that there's a lot in that word confess Now I've used this in the past as that means we are agreeing with God, but that's that's a lot. There's a lot to that That's not some little little thing if I'm going to agree with him first of all I've got to put my finger on that said that is sin I'm not gonna say that's just my personality. That's just my weakness You know we have all kinds of excuses We learn to make for things that just recur in our lives and we know they're not exactly what Jesus wants, but oh well The blood was shared. I'm good But if God if we're going to come to a place of victory that blood needs to be applied to that I Need to be I need to be in such agreement with God that it is more than I'm sorry I did that it is a renunciation of that it is a Repentance for that it is a change of heart and change of attitude change of mind I need God's help to do that You know when Paul talks about the weapons in in chapter six of Ephesians

He's talking about he gives all the weapons and the armor and all of that, but then he comes to prayer We're gonna need to be going to God We're gonna have to be going to this the Lord know that we need help to do this Yeah So he's gonna be looking for people and listening for people who call upon him who seek him who say God I know that what I need I'm not where I need to be I know this a thing that is has a hold on me It has a hold on me because I yield it and I don't have the strength for it. I know I need to repent I need to let go of the saying I don't even have the power to do that to help me Lord Do you think God's gonna answer a prayer like that? That's just what he's looking for is for us to come to that place of renunciation of all that all that that sin Represents and just turning away from it and putting it under the blood And what what is the promise if we confess? He is faithful and Just there's a justice involved because that sin was already paid for He can be just he could still be maintain his justice and forgive us. That's because it was paid for through a representative He is faithful and just to do but there's two things that he does. I Think sometimes we stop at the first one He is faithful and just to forgive us But he also cleanses us I Need to be cleansed. I need that area of my life purified From all the defilement that's there and I think many times I could look back and I'm Lord Thank you for forgiving me and then we go right on and the devil still has access to that and God is wanting to take us down the path of our life and reveal to us You know the thing is many times we're it's not something where I say oh God I need you to show me what's wrong. We know If we're honest We know This has been the midnight cry broadcast if you would like a DVD or CD if today's message in its entirety Please request it by program number while it is not required a donation of ten dollars for DVDs and five dollars for CDs is

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