01 January 2025
I'm sure some of you have heard this before: "If you are taking flak, you must be over the target." It has long been used in spiritual warfare, too. It is meant to warn you that Satan will defend his strongholds.
Of course, the biggest problem is a vast illusion about what "spiritual warfare" means. The popular mythology of the west in general, and America in particular, is the breeding ground for a whole raft of nonsense. It's the baggage we must deal with when we are striving to be effective at liberating our divine privileges from the Enemy. A recurring theme of this blog is to counter what we consider misleading concepts about the Covenant of Christ.
The hardest thing to remember is that mainstream American religion puts us in the same position as Nehemiah. We are in the presence of a vast horde of spiritual Samaritans who only imagine they are under the Covenant. Worse, a substantial majority of those who do belong to the Covenant have been compromised by marrying into the prevailing worldly culture around us. The biblical narrative doesn't mention the very messy situation of putting away the pagan wives who wouldn't convert, and then dealing with the children of those false unions. Moral compromise comes with a high price that only escalates the longer it rots.
We all come to this war burdened with the past. We are an army of cripples, and somehow the Enemy regards us as a threat.
We are in a time when the flak of demonic attacks will escalate. Their target is our fleshly nature; it's the only thing they can touch. Like you, I carry old wounds that sting when the Enemy returns fire. For example, I've been suffering nightmares, seeing myself doing things in my dreams that I would never, could never, do awake. I'm also facing a thousand little glitches every day from random directions. Even my best spiritual friends end up being used to hinder my mission.
Any or all of these things would appear to an outsider as just random, or at most, "bad luck". To outsiders, it would call for changing your behavior to avoid the hassles. That's not how it works when you choose to counter the Unseen Realm. The issue is very confusing. We won't lack for advice from a world that has no idea what is going on inside of us, and may not care. This is where the call to clarity of conviction is critical. The internal traffic in our souls must be filtered and structured to answer the work the of the Holy Spirit.
Where's the distinction between madness and demonic oppression? I'll grant you that the Enemy will gladly accept getting us lost inside ourselves, so the mandatory introspection must be purposeful in connecting with the Holy Spirit without getting twisted up in the emotions that often come with that. This is why we talk about disentangling feelings from faith. Everything in our world militates against recognizing that the heart is not a repository of emotions and sentiment. That mythology is intended to disable genuine faith. The heart is the seat of faith, your commitments, your "true will" and convictions. Getting past the feelings, establishing a sense of identity separate from the fleshly nature, is critical. It's also extremely hard for most people who carry wounds from the past.
This reminds us of Scripture's warning to "pray for our weaker members". It's not always a reference to weak in faith, but weak in the sense of disabilities from past wounds. Can we admit to being among the weaker in that sense? Pray for each other, and for me, too.
This document is public domain except for the poem in the comment; spread the message.