Blog

by Charlie Wolcott

God has opened up many doors for those involved with Worldview Warriors in ways many of us could not imagine. Our blog post readership is greater than it has ever been before. Our founder and leader, Jason DeZurik, has this amazing opportunity to host the morning show of a Christian radio station in his area which will greatly increase exposure to this ministry. Several of our other bloggers are finding themselves with open doors that were not in their vision when we started 2014. And God has been opening doors for me too.

I am still going through the Cadre, an intense Biblical Worldview Seminar through the Creation Truth Foundation. I have Part 3 coming up in February and Part 4 to wrap it up in November. I have also been invited to be a speaker at the Colorado Christian Writers Conference in May this year, where I will be speaking about Spiritual Warfare and “Writing From a Biblical Worldview”. And this does not include other local speaking opportunities or further progression with my spiritual warfare trilogy. What I love about all these opportunities is that none of them are meant for the mere purpose of building me up, but for the purpose of being used for expanding God’s Kingdom.

But I need to make something clear. Whenever God is on the move, he puts us into position to advance his Kingdom. And when God’s Kingdom advances, Satan’s Kingdom shrinks, and while he is a defeated foe, he will not go down without a fight. To open up 2015 with my posts for Worldview Warriors, I am going to address the basics of Spiritual Warfare. I will write about what is going on, what our equipment is, and some of the tactics we may see being used against us. This post is just an introduction to what it is and what is going on.

The battles we fight as Christians are unlike any other battle that has been fought on this planet. We don’t fight with swords and arrows, or guns and bombs. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Our weapons bear a different nature. But while we don’t fight with swords or guns, that does not mean we cannot use the concepts and tactics that involve such weapons to give us a picture of how the spiritual battle works. It is very difficult to imagine spiritual warfare, let alone how to practice and train for it. For how can you practice how to prepare to use spiritual tactics with spiritual weapons to fight against a spiritual foe? Many times we gloss over what spiritual warfare is. We love to read about the Armor of God (I’ll emphasize this later in the month) but we often don’t get the picture of what this means or why. If we, as Christians, are not called to fight, why were we issued armor and weapons?

The reality is this: we are in a spiritual battle whether we want to be in it or not. There are no sidelines to this battle. There is no “neutral” ground where we can retreat and just watch. You are either on God’s side of this war or you are against him. We all started out against him because of our sinful nature. Sin, in a nutshell, is rebellion against God. It is wanting to do things your own way and striving to be the ruler of your own life. This is one of three fronts we face as Christians. The other two fronts come from Satan and his legion of minions and from the worldly system. We must not take Satan lightly. Even though he is defeated, he is not destroyed yet and he is really good at getting us to fall in our own sin. Many times, Satan really does not have to do much to get us going. So we must be on our guard at all times. And the worldly system is something Jesus said he overcame. James also warns us that if we are going to be friends with the world (meaning the system) that will make us enemies of God.

So what is at stake here? Why is it important that we fight? It’s easy to talk about, but many of us don’t take this battle seriously. And little by little, because the Christian church as a whole is not fighting, at least here in America, we are losing ground and fast. The American Revolution in the 1770-80s was a worldwide affecting moment. But often forgotten in the historical context is what led up to the Revolution: The Great Awakening. Preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield fought for the spiritual standing of the American colonies and through their preaching, through their making a stand against the spiritual decay of their time, America woke up. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers cited 27 BIBLICAL violations made by the British government. Taxation without representation was #11 of that list. It was not the only reason, nor primary reason. And they decided to not be Britain’s doormats any longer. They rose up and they fought. But it started with a spiritual battle 40 years earlier.

The Christian Church in America has effectively gone dormant, with a few here and there that are still fighting the good fight. We here at Worldview Warriors are striving to fight the good fight. It’s not about bettering ourselves, though day to day we still need God to continue working in us to make us more like Christ, but about doing the will of God. And one of the tenants of God’s will is to go out and make disciples of all nations. Many of us have confused that with “make converts of all nations”. What does it mean to make a disciple? One of our guest bloggers wrote about that earlier. And to do this, we have to be ready for battle. Because the spiritual forces of darkness do not want to see a single soul under their thumb lost. Satan wants to take as many people with him to hell as he can, and he is succeeding in getting us to take this battle he is waging against God lightly.

Sun Tzu says in his book The Art of War, “To win 100 battles is not the height of skill. To subdue your enemy without fighting is.” He also says this: “Know your enemy and know yourself and in 100 battles you will never be in peril.” Friends, we need to understand that the principles Sun Tzu is talking about are being used against us and being used well. We will not be able to fight in this war if we don’t understand what is at stake, what our weapons are, what tactics our enemy is using, or even the very basics about spiritual warfare. Over the next 3-4 months, I’m going give you a basic run down of what we are dealing with and how to engage in this battle. But before we get into the tactics of spiritual warfare, we need to understand who are enemy is and who we are. Next week, I’ll talk about that in more detail and in two weeks, I’ll address the standard issued equipment we have for this battle. I’m going to keep it simple and not get into in-depth theological treatises but we need to be ready to fight and not just to stay on defense. Welcome to Spiritual Warfare Boot Camp.