Spiritual warfare is:
- An ongoing war
- Waged by Satan and his demons
- To gain influence or control of the minds and hearts of people (especially Christians)
- the goal is to impede us from living the fullest expressions our God-given callings and glorifying God with our lives.
The battlefield is the minds and hearts of people.
Because Satan cannot force Christians to do his will, he relies on convincing them by trickery, deception, lies.
He tempts the believer to do evil and then blames the believer for people a weak Christian when they actually do evil or lies to the believer that God really doesn’t care about protecting them. The goal is to drive a wedge between the believer and God.
I (Kenneth) personally think the temptation with discussing spiritual warfare is to focus on the physical manifestation of the supernatural when much of it is more “mundane” but potent such as putting ungodly thoughts in the minds of people, tempting them to do things, blaming them, and deceiving them.
As I’ve been thinking about the nature of spiritual warfare, I think (and my thoughts need to be tested further) that the whole journey of life from birth to death is a spiritual war-zone. You could get shot at any time by the enemy. Many times, the enemy plans just little innocuous and seeds that seem harmless but they grow to cause great harm. A lot of times you don’t know when he plans the seeds. But even though life is a spiritual war zone, we cannot blame everything on the devil directly. We have the flesh and the world all of which are corrupted because of the devil’s actions in the garden. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between what is due to the devil directly and what is not and what extent the devil’s influence runs. Obviously, that difficulty is not something God has. But we don’t have to be so good dissecting situations and determining exactly what extent the devil is involved. We know that anything that is not of God is a sin. Whether it comes from our flesh, the devil, or the world may not always matter as much because we need to take any such thought or influence captive and make it obedient to Christ.
“The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians”. A.W. Tozer
I agree with Tozer. While the world is a battleground, we are the target. They are shooting at us. We are the target because someone wants to hurt our father by hurting us, who are the apples of his eye. We aren’t the target because of our own inherent worth but because of the worth that we have because God loves us and has adopted us
Reference
A.W. Tozer This World: Playground or Battleground.Â
