Weapons of War

“For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.” (2 Corinthians 10:4)

Discipline is really at it’s core an exercise in trained response. When you are working on Christian disciplines what we are doing is training our soul to respond correctly when confronted with our sinful nature. Our sinful nature is activated by our own selfish desires or by the actions of others around us that bring to the surface emotions like anger, frustration, jealousy, etc.

We are in a war.

Recognizing that is the first step in battling our sinful nature. We MUST see and acknowledging that there is a very real enemy who has two main goals in his war against humans:

(1) That as few as possible ever come to the saving knowledge of Christ, and
(2) For those that do accept Christ as Lord and Savior of their lives, that they never truly become children of God but live unfulfilled Christian lives.

The attacks on us from the enemy can be controlled or eliminated by a variety of weapons:

• Neglect: Some sinful habits just need to stop being fed so they die off.
• Violence: Some sinful habits must be confronted and intentionally and violently removed, like weeds in a garden that we grab hold of and pull out by the root, and then a vigilant eye kept for them trying to grow back and pulled out again and again until they stop growing back.
• Standing Still: There are some sinful habits that are not necessarily our own fight, but the Lords, meaning that the battle is the Lords and our part is to watch, pray and submit.

Knowing which weapon to use is a matter of prayer as each of us have different battlefields in our life, so there is no cookie cutter approach, but they all depend on us walking in the strength of Christ in our lives. BUT there is a common element to each of them: they work only through us drawing on God’s power and not walking in our own strength.

One of the subtle tactics of the enemy is the thought that we can handle this ourselves. He knows that if we go onto the battlefield of life operating in our own strength, we are already at a disadvantage. Why? Because satan knows that if we enter that same battlefield drawing on God’s strength the eternal outcome of that battle is already decided.

We fight not to have an earthly victory but we fight because we know our eternal destination is already decided, and so that any victory had here on earth is for one purpose only – to give glory to God and to lead others to Christ.