The Warrior Needs a Cause
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| I miss Dulce, such a sweet little girl. |
Everyone faces battles all of the time. Some days they are not as evident but they are always present. At times they are staring us in the face but for many, they are beneath the surface, quietly destroying the life that we are hoping to build. We often see them from a surface level and miss out on the real picture of what is happening. We see the less qualified person that is challenging for the promotion that we feel we should have. We see the bottle or the pornographic image that continues to call after us. We see the illness that is threatening our lives. We feel the heartbreak of betrayal. We see these things and we go to battle against them. It is our nature. We are designed to fight and to overcome. We pour all of our energy into defeating these enemies. The problem is that we have identified symptoms and not and enemy. When we fight on this level, we can damage ourselves, our reputations and our relationships. We often become angry, legalistic and isolated.
When we misidentify the enemy we have turned our focus to secondary issues, manifestations of a problem and not the root. While all of these things are harmful, even deadly, they are only symptoms of a deeper issue. When we turn our attention to fighting against them, we give them a place of priority and prominence in our thinking. The problem is that as we elevate them, they become bigger. Eventually they will occupy our thoughts fully and we will be captive to them. When we battle against these things, we empower the enemy to keep us in bondage to them and even more so, to the root issue that produced them. What we spend our time thinking about will determine our actions.
The more I think and pray about these things in my own life, the more clear the battle becomes to me. In 2 Cor 10, we read that our battle is not against flesh and blood. Our weapons are not natural weapons. What I have come to realize is that all of our battles come down to 2 things. 1) We are fighting to believe that God is who He says He is, that He loves us as much as He says He does and that He has brought us into His family and given us His authority. 2) We are fighting to find a way to be in right relationship with the people around us. People are not our problem but finding a way to live in mutual love and respect is.
When we rightly identify our problems as being rooted in our broken relationships with God and man, then we can begin to fight the battle on a different, a supernatural level. If I see my problem as overeating, which it often has been, then I focus on not eating the wrong things or eating the wrong quantities of food. The problem with that is that it turns my focus to food. As I focus on not eating, I desire food. I have created a law for myself and like Paul said:
Rom 7:5-11 ESV 5 For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6 But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. 7 What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." 8 But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. 9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. 10 The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. 11 For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.
The law is not bad but when we try and live under it, we see everything that would be against the law as the battle that we are to fight. The problem is that when we see things that way, the law, revealing sin to us actually produces a desire to sin. It also turns our focus to the thing that we are against and attracts us to it. We cannot defeat these things in this way because they were never meant to be the object of our battle. Our focus on them strengthens their hold on us. We are called to focus on Jesus, to meditate on His word and to pray without ceasing. We are to live in continual contact with God.
So what is the battle and how do we fight it? First we start with the new identity that Jesus gave us at the cross. He made us sons and heirs. In this identity, we are already overcomers with Jesus because we died to sin and were raised to new life. Sin no longer has a hold on us. We are called to be transformed by renewing our minds in Rom 12:1+2. We are called to think about things differently. While we used to look at things through a law perspective, we are now to look at things from the cross. Jesus has already defeated all of the powers of the enemy for us, for all time. We tend to look at the negatives and fight to be free of them. We point them out in others so they can be free too. This produces bondage to them in all of us. We look on the face of Jesus and chains of bondage break off of our lives.
Our first battle today is to push past the lies to receive God's love, to let Him pour a new identity into us. We do need to repent and ask God to help us not walk in ways that displease Him but we must not make the focus of our lives overcoming them. He has already done that. We need to continually remind ourselves that we are God's beloved, that He desires to hold us close and that He wants to be in fellowship with us. When we know that He really loves and desires us, we can go to Him with everything. We can live close to Him and know the goodness of His heart toward us. The number one goal of the enemy is to keep us from winning the battle for our identity in Jesus. When we win that battle and receive the truth of our adoption as sons into His love, the other battles become less because we will walk away from everything that hinders the flow of His love in our lives.
Our second battle is to love people. It is easy to be annoyed by people, to be competitive with them or just be indifferent towards them. We often live like most of the people around us do not matter. The devil has told us lies and filled us with insecurities that he uses to keep us separated from the people. We are called to battle for our neighbors, for their hearts. We are called to show them the love of Jesus and build relationships with them so that they can see what His love looks like. The devil tells us lies about them, fills our mind with judgments and causes us to mistrust their motives. Jesus told us to love them. That does not mean to have good feelings about them. It means to lay our lives down in service so they can have His best for themselves. We have to battle to live in love towards them.
I think that these two battles were exactly what was on the heart of Jesus when he was asked what laws really mattered. He said that there are 2 commandments to pursue and that all of the law was fulfilled keeping them. 1) Love the Lord God with all of you. 2) Love your neighbor as yourself. We have to push past a lot of things to love God fully because there are so many distractions coming against us. Once we deal with loving God, we have to work on loving our neighbor. Since we are supposed to love them as ourselves, we need to learn to love ourselves. Most of us feel unlovable at times and in ways. We have to let God speak His truth into our hearts concerning who we are then, as we receive that love, we begin to look for ways to live it out in our relationships with our families, neighbors and communities . We give away the love that we have received. These are the battles that we need to fight every day. As we begin to fight these 2 battles, God reveals Himself and His strength in us and to us so that those other things, the things that we thought were the battles begin to lose their hold on our lives. When we win the battle of receiving love, we are free.
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