Be Alert to Spiritual Warfare Part 2

03 Oct Be Alert to Spiritual Warfare Part 2

Blog Series

Moving from Checkers to Chess

Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective

As we began our discussion last week of Step 4: You Must Fight the Invisible, we learned that we must Be Alert to Spiritual Warfare, looking first of all at the necessity of accepting the reality of spiritual warfare. This week, in Part 2, we will see the necessity of choosing spiritual warfare over the American dream.

It is okay for a Christian to want to be happy

I talk a fair amount about happiness in my books and blogs. It is a fundamental motivation of life, and if we can understand God’s perspective on happiness, it can be a major principle for guidance in life.

 The desire to be happy is the highest desire of the human heart. It is as Blaise Pascal wrote:

“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employee, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”

However, Christians may feel vaguely guilty about wanting to be happy. We may think our highest desire ought to be something loftier, more self-sacrificing, more “spiritual.” Yet, C.S. Lewis once wrote, “It is a Christian duty…for everyone to be as happy as he can.” Pascal gave us further helpful guidance when he wrote:

“There was once in man a true happiness of which now remains to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God himself.”

These quotes help guide us to a necessary understanding of happiness. It is okay to want to be happy. God has created us to long for happiness. But he is the only one who can truly make us happy, so we have to look to Him for our happiness.

One of my own often repeated affirmations is:

“Everything God asks of us, he does so to give something good to us or keep some harm from us. Therefore, the shortest distance between us and the life we long for is total obedience to Christ.”

This sets up a dichotomy in the mind of Christians. We instinctively feel that God is not enough. It’s not that we don’t want God. We do. We want all that He gives us. The problem is that we also want things He doesn’t give us. So, we take all we want from God and then go looking for the things we want that are outside of what God gives us.

But this is a fool’s errand, because God himself is the only thing that can fulfill our fundamental longing for happiness. To look elsewhere is mindlessly to become like the donkey chasing the carrot on the stick tied to dangle in front of its head. We are ever walking, but never arriving. Always searching, but never finding.

This natural and instinctive desire to pursue happiness from the world around us is deeply ingrained in us by nature, and is also deeply ingrained in American culture. It is part of our very DNA as Americans, going all the way back to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of happiness.”

Pursuing the American Dream will not make us happy

This has led to the concept of the “American Dream,” which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “the ideal that the United States is a land of opportunity that allows the possibility of upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.”

There is nothing wrong with pursuing the American Dream. The problem is when the pursuit of the American Dream is a greater desire than the pursuit of the will of God. The problem is when the American Dream becomes the default perspective from which we live our life.

There are two problems with pursuing the American Dream as a higher goal than the will of God.

1. One is that we often cannot control circumstances enough to be successful, in which case we will be frustrated with God’s refusal to bless our will. It can lead to grinding unhappiness, disappointment, frustration, and even defeat.
2. Second is that even if we become successful in the pursuit of the American Dream, it will not give us the deep satisfaction we long for. We climb the ladder of success only to find it is leaning against the wrong wall.

As Oscar Wilde said, “There are only two tragedies in life; one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

For biblical and practical reasons, it is a lost cause to pursue the American Dream over the will of God.

Spiritual warfare must be factored into the living of our lives

But there is an even further connection we need to make when pursuing God first over the American Dream. Since God tells us that spiritual warfare is a fundamental reality for Christians then, if we want to pursue His will, we must do so in a way that takes into account both the reality of spiritual warfare and the biblical strategies for spiritual warfare.

Scripture teaches us that:

1. Spiritual warfare is an inevitable realty for all Christians: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12).
2. Spiritual warfare is a valid danger: “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert: Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).
3. We must choose God over the enemy: “Submit therefore to God. But resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7).

The devil and his servants will attempt to subvert our pursuit of the will of God. Satan is called the “deceiver” (Revelation 12:9) and the “destroyer” (Revelation 9:11). He deceives us to destroy us.

As we go through life, trying as best we can to live it according to God’s will, the enemy may bring people and circumstances into play in our lives to get us to abandon God’s will. He will also work in our hearts and minds to corrupt or misguide us.

If we do not understand this, we may try to deal with spiritual warfare issues as though they were merely occurrences brought about by natural forces. That perspective leads to certain defeat. And our goal in this series is to avoid defeat by developing an eternal perspective – seeing and embracing life from God’s perspective.

Conclusion

So, yes, use wisdom, hard work, motivation, education, training, etc. in your attempt to make a living and make a contribution to the world. But in the process of pursuing the American Dream, we must remember the reality of spiritual warfare in our lives, tempting us to pursue “the good life” above our pursuit of God, and remember that we must fight the invisible.

In order to Fight the Invisible, we must first: Be Alert to Spiritual Warfare:

• accepting the reality of it, as we saw last week, and then this week,
  
• choosing spiritual warfare over the American Dream – not being deceived into trying to live life as though only natural forces were involved, forgetting that happiness and fulfillment only come by pursuing God. 

But we must also understand the biblical strategies of spiritual warfare: Putting on Spiritual Armor, and Resisting the Enemy. Next week we’ll look at the fact that we must put on spiritual armor in order to Fight the Invisible. I’ll see you then.

Get a Moving from Checkers to Chess At-a-Glance-Overview: Click Here

As we have been studying these concepts for quite some time (including in some prior blog series), and I am excited to now be connecting all the “moving parts” from those posts and combining them into a “spiritual game plan” in this “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ 5 Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective” series.

For an overview of the game plan, so you can see at a glance where we begin and where we’re headed, I’ve created an overview/outline you can download for free: Click Here

For the full discussion of each of the steps, begin with the first post in this series, Moving from Checkers to Chess, and then continue with the following posts thereafter.

In case you’re new here, below are two resources I’ve created for additional help in your Christian discipleship journey:

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