(Below is a prayer prayed tonight, when God demanded my undivided attention, even at cost to myself and others.)
All right God. Here I am. I have come here immediately and alone. I have read from Ezekiel 37, about the valley of dry bones. I have watched the scene from Lord of the Rings, when Aragorn calls upon the army of the dead to fight for him, the king, the heir of Gondor. I have been thinking on and remembering a great deal today. Is the school dying, Lord? Is the body atrophying? Can these dry bones live? That is what you have asked. My answer is... You tell me.
You have been restoring me, changing and growing me, as long as I am willing and obedient; You never force yourself on me. I know I have not been willing, and I have not been obedient. I have been proud. I have lied. I have neglected important things. Worse, I have accepted a lie. Satan is a liar. He has talked me into so many things that are not true, and because I have made agreements with him, he has effectively crippled me and put me into a coma.
When you came, you promised abundant life; life to the full. But I forget the first part of that verse. There is also a thief who steals and kills and destroys. Somewhere along the way I lose sight of the fact that this is a battle. Satan wears away at me slowly. He makes me tired, or sick, or sad, or busy, or lonely, and I think that there is something wrong with me! I think that I should get more sleep, take more medicine, manage my time better, suck it up, grow up, get over it. We’re supposed to persevere under trial, right? God has a plan even when bad things are happening, even when I am being slowly eroded by the daily grind. Lies. These are all lies, meant to sound like the truth. The devil is not above using a grain of truth to accomplish his purposes. He is the accuser, and he will accuse us of a multitude of faults in order to keep us beaten down, defeated, just stumbling along and trying to survive.
But You didn’t come to increase our chances of survival; You came to bring revival. We are in the middle of a battle that we cannot even see! Or if we can see it, we refuse to fight! Of course Satan has come to steal and destroy our lives. The problems we consider trivial, or those that we try to solve under our own power, are spiritual problems. We are Christians! We don’t have “spiritual lives.” The Spirit is in us at all times; He is our life. He does not have to be maintained or managed; He ought to pervade every part of us. He ought to have changed us utterly when He first came into our lives. We ought to have been transformed. And maybe we were. But somewhere along the way Satan got to us.
We talk about eternal life, but I don’t think we realize that eternal life is not far away in the future; it is now. It is glorious and beautiful, and so are we! But though Satan has been bound, he is still at work to destroy all that is glorious and beautiful about us. He has redoubled his efforts, even, because he has become desperate. This is his final hour; he is making his last stand... and he is doing a hell of a job.
He has worn away at us little by little. Bad things have happened, we’ve asked why, and we have accepted his lies: We screwed up. It’s a trial we have to endure. God’s holding out on us. We’ll understand someday. No! There is truth and understanding now! Satan is attacking us! The forces of evil are waging war against us! And we are standing here, shell shocked, wondering why in the world we are being shot at! We’re in the middle of a war zone; we have been our whole lives. There are no nonparticipants. We’re either on the side of the devil or on the side of Christ. Wandering around somewhere in the middle is dangerous and deadly. Why on earth, in the middle of a battle, would a soldier abandon his wartime mentality and wander around without his armor or his gun? He might, if he’d been knocked on the head and forgotten who he was and why he was there.
That, I know, is what has happened to us. We have forgotten—or perhaps we were never taught—that we are at war. So we react like innocent civilians, mere children, when the battle comes to us. We cringe and whimper and cover our eyes and ears, asking you why such terrible things happen or worse... accepting them as normal. There is nothing normal about evil being in the world; sin is the most unnatural thing that ever existed. There is nothing normal about suffering of any sort. But we have accepted this; we have swallowed this bitter pill at Satan’s coaxing, and we think we’ve made it easier on ourselves. Perhaps we have. It is a sight easier to lay down our arms and become noncombatants, listless and lazy as we await our death and release from the unpleasantness of the world. But we cannot deny that the battle is going on, nor can we deny our part in it. To do nothing is to grant victory to Satan.
What if we considered every one of life’s difficulties an act of war? What if we treated sickness and hurt the way we would treat an attack by an enemy? What if we took up the weapons of our warfare—prayer and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God—and fought? What if we refused to be blinded by secularism and treated every problem like a spiritual problem—with a spiritual solution? Is the Lord’s arm too long? Do we think You can handle the really big problems, like redeeming us from sin, but that You are unconcerned with the everyday struggles of our lives? Why do we insist on trying to suck it up, be a man, tough it out? Yeah sure, the testing of our faith develops perseverance, but that is no excuse to abandon the battle against the forces of evil!
We will suffer. Oh, war is certainly a bloody and terrible thing, and casualties will occur every day. But isn’t it better to go down fighting, secure in our identity and purpose as being in You and of You, than to be struck down when fleeing, or worse... when lying around doing nothing? We need to wake up and pull ourselves together! We need to remember who we are and why we are here! And we need to fight!
God... I am Yours. Here I am to carry out your purposes. I want to be alert and oriented, not dazed and confused. I want to go back into training; to get back to my fighting weight. This is a battle. This is a war. Help me to fight with the weapons you have given me, instead of giving up or trying to go it alone. Remind me every moment of the vital importance of maintaining contact with my commanding officer. Help me, God, to carry out Your orders. Help me, God, to advance Your kingdom. Help me, God, to meet my Enemy in battle and take him on; You will give me strength to overcome. Give me wisdom, strength and courage, Lord Almighty, God of angel armies. And God... give me words. Teach me what to say in order to awaken others; to remind them of who they are and why they are here. Soften hearts that have been calloused by the devil’s steady erosion; prepare them to receive this truth. Teach us to love mightily and pray powerfully. Your kingdom come, Your will be done. All glory, honor, power is Yours.
Amen.
