It's time to grab your bible

This is bigger than us.  All of it.  The heavens are raging around us and somehow we ended up here, in 2021.

God, in His wisdom sent His Son to conquer sin and the grave - and as if that wasn't enough, He gave us His power, His love and His sound mind.

It's up to us what we do with it.

It cost our God everything to love us - what does it cost us to love Him back?

Repenting our sins and accepting Jesus as our Lord and savior is the least we can do honor and love Him in return.  It's also the foundation of how we're able to go on the offensive spiritually.

The simple truth is that if God does nothing else for us besides giving us Christ - that's enough.  But He's done so much more, and He's not done.  

In fact, it looks like He's just getting started.

Many of us lived the life we were taught - church on Sundays, God in our hearts and us at the wheel for everything else.

God should have been the thread through it all.  We should have lived boldly.  We should have lived without hiding God within us.  We should have spoken up and often about what we saw around us and ultimately - we played a role in how we as a church and a nation got here.    

You can't put God in a box of your design, letting Him out when it's convenient.  You can't withhold God from every part of your inner world and live to your fullest.

Remove your inner partitions and allow Christ to invade every aspect of your life and who you are, which is one of the cornerstones of Spiritual Warfare.    

Our enemy is twofold - first, ourselves.  We make choices and cause our own consequences.

But the second enemy is old, biblical and successful.  The Bible says our enemy has a mind, heart and will - and we know those things make a person.  The Bible calls him the devil, Satan, the accuser and enemy of our soul.

The devil doesn't know your name, but he knows your character before God.

Those partitions you have?  Then enemy knows all about them, because he helped create them.  He fuels and affirms them.  The enemy loves that people profess to love God but won't be vulnerable to Him, which keeps God from doing His best work in and through us.

We don't glorify the devil by giving him more credit than he's do - but his tactics are perfected and he has an army working to steel, kill and destroy us 24/7.

You'll hear us often say that a life of warfare is a life of worship, because worship changes the atmosphere around us.  As the Holy Spirit inhabits the praise you offer God, His presence stirs within and around you - whether you're alone or in a crowded stadium.

The enemy can't easily operate in this environment...in fact the devil and entire demonic realm hates it because it makes them vulnerable and their power and ability to affect you is cutoff.  

Worship ushers in every aspect of God's presence - including peace - God's peace which surpasses all understanding.  We hate evil and wage war from a solid place of grace, humility, power and peace the world can never understand.  The fact that we can wage war from a place of inner peace defies logic, reason and most of all - conventional warfare.

Then comes prayer...less for ourselves, more for others, all of it for the glory of Jesus and Kingdom gain.  

In fact there will be seasons of spiritual warfare where all of your prayers are for others and for things that the Holy Spirit places in your mind or on your heart.  

Start with worship, receive His peace and unleash holy hell with prayer against strongholds, demonic oppression and sabotage the work of the enemy at every turn.  Or, get on your knees to pray heaven down for your neighbor who's battling anxiety and depression, or for your kids to be saved and lives turned around.  It's all fair game as long as it's Biblically sound, and your spirit is walking in step with the Holy Spirit. 

Our warfare isn't limited to what the world thinks or sees...and it's in fact more infinite and connected than most of you could imagine.  But we yield to Almighty God and operate with restraint.  

All the battles we fight belong to God - we just need to walk in the wisdom, grace and authority He calls us to because while He works in the heavenly realms, we're His first plan to operate here and pray heaven down.

There are a few foundational ideas to wrap your hands around when it comes to Spiritual warfare.

First, the Bible tells us that this world belongs to the devil, which means every living soul here is born behind enemy lines.  But the devil has legal rights against us if we don't forgive others and don't ask for forgiveness for the sin we've committed.

Accepting Jesus as your Lord & savior leads to repentance and salvation, and the Holy Spirit convicts us of the sin we've committed against God.  But thankfully this isn't a one and done process.  It's ongoing - as we fall short and commit sin, God loves us enough to forgive us - but we have to ask for it, and mean it.

The Bible tells us sin is in our hearts and we're all wicked, compelling most of us to repent daily - hourly, if needed.  Accepting Jesus doesn't change us overnight, because we try to hold onto ourselves - our habits, our thoughts, our drugs, our injuries, our grievances and ultimately - our story.

We need to give it all to God and allow the Holy Spirit to work on us, which includes what we call our spiritual grievances.  These are things that still burden us or things we're mad at God for.

Your story is unique.  There are things that happened to you - devastated you, wrecked you, destroyed you and were probably meant to kill you or throw you off God's path long enough to make you feel insignificant.  God sees it all and HATES the enemy all the more for it.

But you need to resolve your anger at God because the enemy is using it to keep you in a mental and emotional prison.  Write down a list of what happened to you, ask the Holy Spirit to show you how you were affected, how deeply you were wounded - and also how you were used to hurt, manipulate and destroy others.

You need to forgive everyone that grieved you, ask God to forgive you for how you've grieved others and go deeper and deeper down that process until you've purged everything that the devil is using against you.  

Start with un-forgiveness and continue uncovering the sin you try to hide from God because that affects your standing before His throne.  

God sees your character before Him - but so does the devil, and if you attempt spiritual warfare against the enemy without addressing these things - not only will he empty hell to attack you, he has the legal right to do it.  

Write down your grievances, atone with God, then use that same list and ask him for permission as your legal right to attack the enemy.  Pray on it.  Fast on it.  Continue writing that list until the Holy Spirit gives you permission to go on the offensive with the full force of heaven behind you - to the measure that you're called to do so.  

Fasting and kneeling in prayer are familiar habits of prayer intercessors.   We were born with no real power to defend ourselves, both physically and spiritually.  

We have no real power except that which Christ gave us in His name, and we are reliant on the infilling of the Holy Spirit to teach us, guide us and orchestrate our efforts almost similar to a one-two punch:  God gives us power in the name of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit tells us where and how to apply it.  

Fasting is our way of telling God we're hungrier for the Holy Spirit to operate in us than we are for human food.  It's part of conditioning our body to come into alignment with the scripture telling us to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength.  

As we fast, we don't parade it around people bragging how holy and righteous we are.  We don't do it for the credit or esteem, in fact most of the time nobody knows we're doing it.

Based on Jesus telling the disciples about fasting and our own personal experience, we've come to believe that fasting amplifies our ability to hear the still small voice of the Holy Spirit and God willing, allows us more authority as we pray against larger targets.  

Targeting deserves its own section.   We pray to receive a sense of God's anguish, and with it comes a burden to pray for things as the Holy Spirit guides us.  That's the best starting point for prayer...but it's often not the first.

Our story has left us with grievances that, once addressed with repentance, forgiveness, prayer and fasting - leads us with our own burdens and anguish to pray for.  

The marriage that ended abruptly.

The family member that died tragically.

The sexual abuse as a child.

The assault on our friends or family members.

The history of self destruction and sabotage that's left a wake of hurt, anxiety and hardship in your past.  

All of these things are examples of people's story that becomes part of their ongoing prayer walk because they have direct, intimate knowledge of them - and that experience equips them to take ownership of their story and pray heaven down to keep it from happening to others.   This is heart felt intercession at it's core...praying down heaven to help others avoid the same thing from occurring.

That is faith in action.  That's faith with works.   We still trust God, but we want to be trusted by God to be His emissaries and stewards  here on earth.  That's getting off the couch and doing something more than just trusting God.

If you're reading this right now, we believe you have a role to play.  If not for yourself, for others you love.  If not now, when?