Know Your Self: Spiritual Warfare for Artists
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWe are in an indepth series on spiritual warfare.
Last week I reference the book The Art of War.
In order to be a successful military strategist
you need to know your enemy,
and know yourself.
This week I want to talk about our identity in Christ.
Remember,
our foe is a defeated enemy who operates in lies and deception.
The battle we fight is filled with falsehood and delusion.
Once you know the truth,
and know who you really are,
a lot of things begin to shift.
Most of what we deal with in spiritual conflict is illusion.
James 4:7 gives us an interesting direction:
"Submit yourselves to God,
resist the devil and he must flee from you."
Jackie Pullinger once said that God
"wants us to have soft hearts and hard feet.
Our trouble is we want it the other way around."
Often we resist God and submit to the devil.
We think we know better and
that we are sinners who ascribe to a religion
and if we learn the right prayers or models
we are able to get power over satanic forces
to get stuff in our weak state.
The reality is very different.
You have power already,
and you just need to walk in who you are.
A shrug of your shoulder with authority
is enough to make the devil flee.
There is an episode in Acts 19:11-20
that gives a bit of insight into our situation.
Paul is in Ephesus,
and the Kingdom is breaking out all over.
And God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.” Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” And the man in whom the evil spirit was, leaped on them, mastered all of them, and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. And this became known to all residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks; and fear fell upon them all; and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled.
This short passage gives us a window into the spiritual world.
What the Jewish exorcists were doing was a form of witchcraft.
They were using a method to manipulate the spiritual world.
There are forms of this in Judaism to this day.
But they were fundamentally different than Jesus and Paul.
Why?
Jesus and Paul were new creatures.
They were not human beings using religion or magic.
They were spirit filled beings.
The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead,
and filled Paul and the Apostles
is available to you and me today
to do greater works than they did.
And the spiritual world recognizes this new reality,
even if human beings did not.
As Paul says in II Corinthians 5:16-17
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.
If you spend a lot of time consuming media,
you are going to start viewing everyone and everything
from a human point of view.
Paul gives us a bit of the same reality we saw in Acts.
From the point of view of the unseen world,
you are not a human being.
You are redeemed humanity.
You have died to sin and the curse of Adam and the Law.
And because of this,
you are now a new creation.
You are a new kind of creature.
Your place in heaven's economy is not below demons or angels.
Your place in heaven's economy is above all rule and authority
in spiritual places
because you have been positioned with Christ.
Why?
Not because you have to do mental gymnastics,
but because you are filled with the Holy Spirit.
You were born again by water and the Holy Spirit.
You are promised the Holy Spirit as a foretaste of the world to come.
You eat from the Table of the Lord,
and are feasting on the Body and Blood of Jesus
and you are receiving life with in you.
When the spiritual world sees you,
the spiritual world sees Jesus in you,
and sees all you are becoming.
There is no time in the spiritual world
so they see you in the fullness of what you will become
a fully redeemed
restored
eternal being.
This is who you really are.
You are not a person who agrees with a set of doctrines,
and is trying to live a moral life.
You are a member of the family of God,
God's DNA is in you,
and one day that fulness is going to be manisfested.
The spiritual world sees it already,
and they shudder.
One of the best passages C.S. Lewis ever wrote is
from the The Weight of Glory:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals with whom we joke , work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
Lewis, C. S.. Weight of Glory (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 45-46). (Function). Kindle Edition.
So what do we do with this?
First,
We need to honor and respect our brothers and sisters.
Jesus told us not to judge,
and that the measure we use on others
would be used on us.
I see so much venom and accusation
among Christians all the time.
Imagine an army where all the people in the trenches
shot at each other and not their enemy?
It is common in the church.
In Great Britain it tends to be accusations
about fine points of doctrine,
and "by what authority do you do these things?"
Many people from the house church movement
will only associate with people that their pastor
or denomination approve of.
Everyone else they treat with real contempt and distrust.
Here in the US I find two different trends.
The first is a soft witch hunt of people digging around
in the lives of others trying to accuse them of sin,
in order to "purify the church."
Let me tell you,
nobody can withstand that kind of scrutiny.
You do realize that King David would never be able
to do ministry in the current environment.
In the 1980's a number of TV ministries
blew up in scandal.
Ted Koppel on Nightline interviewed a few people
and he said that other scandals like this are hard to report on
because people cover up and hide information.
He said this one was easy,
because Christians lined up and were happy to tell all,
and snitch to the reporters
about everyone else.
Remember what I said last week,
the word "Satan" means "accuser."
If you are accusing someone of something
think about who you are aligning with.
Everything
in the spiritual world is
personal
and practical.
The other trend that I am seeing is
"so-and-so has a demon of this-or-that."
A person who has some spirit
is your brother or sister in Christ.
If you think they have a demon,
who told you that?
Who showed you that?
And if you had a demon yourself,
don't you think you would like to be free of it?
And how do you get free?
You get free from a demon by submitting yourself to God
and resisting the devil.
If you are walking in your true identity,
as a redeemed member of the Royal Family of Heaven,
then somebody else's demon shouldn't really be your problem.
And if they do have a demon,
well,
you walk in love and authority,
and they will either seek freedom from you,
or that demon will keep them away from you.
That demon knows that you will sort him out.
Really.
Jesus said pull the plank out of your own eye.
As I said,
most of what we deal with in spiritual warfare is illusion.
There is a fable that says when you train a baby elephant,
you tie it's leg to a post.
It learns it can only go as far as the rope.
Eventually,
all you have to do is drive a post into the ground,
and the elephant will stay there.
You no longer need the rope.
The enemy needs you to believe that you are powerless and weak,
and that the church is getting weaker and weaker until Jesus comes.
The enemy needs you looking at the darkness getting darker
so that you will be hide your light under a bushel.
The enemy needs you to look at the issues and immaturity in your brothers and sisters.
He knows if you are a afraid
you will hide.
You are a light being,
so the brightness of your life is hidden.
Satan wants you hiding in the corners afraid,
because then you are no trouble.
And if you can take out another Christian
Woohoo! You are doing Satan's dirty work for him.
This is the reality.
You are the light of the world.
You are the salt of the earth.
You are a city on a hill.
You are the image of God.
You are the Temple of the Holy Spirit.
You are seated with Jesus in heavenly places.
You are not what the world sees.
You are getting stronger every day in the spirit.
You are being transformed day by day
from one degree of glory to another.
You are going to judge angels
and you are going to rule over nations.
If you ask anything in His name and he will do it.
You have authority to tread upon serpents
and sit upon scorpions
and God has put into your mouth
authority and power
over sickness,
disease,
demons,
unclean spirits,
and anything that will not bow to the name of Jesus.
This is who you are.
And when you start to walk in it,
the world around you,
and the pressure against you
begins to give way,
because
if you resist the devil
he must flee.
Next week
we are going to talk about the weapons of our warfare
Prayer
Fasting
Giving
and Worship.
You can support Belonging House at https://belonginghouse.betterworld.org or buymeacoffee.com/christjohnotto.
We have a Mighty Network for artists and creative people who are committed to a lifestyle of discipleship: https://belonging-house.mn.co
You can get my Friday email at https://belonginghouse.substack.com
Member discussion