“The LORD your God is the one who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you” (Deuteronomy 20:4).
Since the iPhone was released in 2007, smartphones have handed billions of people limitless access to resources for good. Sadly, though, with the good has come endless connection to highly addictive and seductive gutter level wickedness and evil. The leading online pornography site, Pornhub, hit the web in 2007, a few months before the iPhone launched. In two short years, Pornhub was already receiving millions of hits each month. In 2022, just during the month of November alone, Pornhub became the fourth most popular destination on the world-wide web with 10.2 billion visits (https://www.preachingtoday.com/illustrations/2024/may/smartphones-turbocharge-dangers-of-porn.html).
The battles of life that seek to ruin our morality, degrade our humanity, and sabotage our effectiveness come at us through ungodly thoughts, direct confrontations, and demonic temptations. These spiritual battles—and, indeed, they are spiritual, as all of life is spiritual, since God created us spirit, soul, and body—are not won first of all in public before a watching world but rather in private before our waiting God. Yes, we must face our enemies to defeat them; however, many battles have been lost, because we lashed out aggressively to fight the enemy in our flesh rather than first placing the challenge before God to receive His counsel and enlist Him to go before us, fight for us, and defeat our enemy. It does us no good to pray, as Jesus directed us, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13), if we make God our last choice instead of our first stop, when spiritual warfare ensues.
As a matter of fact, we face many temptations that would never have come our way had we obeyed God’s word and kept spiritually alert and continually prayerful. Remember Jesus’ advice: “Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). When we neglect to take our battles to God first, we leave ourselves to fight with only our human intellect and resources. No matter how smart, strong, and capable we deem ourselves, we are no match for the arch-enemy of our souls, Satan, on our own. Thus, many lives have been decimated by addiction, wrecked by arrogance, crushed by pride, and impoverished by neglecting God.
The battles we face in life are won and lost in the secret place, the prayer closet, before God, before they are fought in the world. They require us to engage our will to do God’s will in the moment. When we place our will in solidarity with God’s will and go out to fight the battle before us, God goes before us. Our righteous action supported by God’s overwhelming power and sustained by God’s omniscient wisdom brings victory.
After God delivered Israel from the grip of Pharoah and slavery in Egypt, they found themselves up against the Red Sea ahead of them and the army of Egypt behind them. Their first battle after being freed from bondage boiled down to this: would they scamper fearfully trying to save themselves, or would they trust God to deliver them and bring victory? Moses said to the people, “Do not fear! Stand by and see the salvation of the LORD which He will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you will never see them again forever. The LORD will fight for you while you keep silent” (Exodus 14:13-14). This they did, and God peeled the waters back so that His people could walk through on dry ground and then folded the same waters over on Israel’s enemies, while all of Israel watched the banks of the Red Sea fill up with the dead bodies of their enemies.
In 2 Kings 19, when the Assyrian army besieged Jerusalem and threated Israel’s king with destruction should he refuse to surrender, King Hezekiah engaged the prophet of God and together they sought God’s counsel and help. The Assyrian general, Sennacherib, sent a letter to King Hezekiah demanding immediate surrender. What did the king do? He refused to panic and, instead, turned to God in prayer. We read that “Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it. Then he went up to the temple of the LORD and spread it out before the LORD. And Hezekiah prayed to the LORD: ‘LORD, the God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Give ear, LORD, and hear; open your eyes, LORD, and see; listen to the words Sennacherib has sent to ridicule the living God. … Now LORD our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone, LORD, are God’” (2 Kings 19:14-16, 19).
God heard His faithful servant’s prayer and answered. According to verse 35, “That night the angel of the LORD went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp.” The next morning, Hezekiah and all of Israel awoke to the battlefield littered with the bodies of their enemies.
The psalmist urges us, “Commit your way to the LORD, trust in Him, and He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment as the noonday” (Psalm 37:5-6). The spiritual battles we face on a daily basis may not stack up to formidable armies numbering thousands, but they are just as likely to leave or lives devastated and broken. Lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life are formidable enemies that bring attractive temptations swollen with horrible consequences. Lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, fornication, malice, gossip, and a thousand more sins flung from Satan’s flaming arrows desire to cripple us spiritually.
Moreover, in the face of every one of these temptations, our choice is to lash out in our strength or enlist our Lord’s help. Will we do our will or God’s will? We must submit to the Holy Spirit’s prodding to get alone with God and, in prayer, fight the battle in private with God before we go in public and war with the enemy. When our strategy for facing life’s battles begins here, we emerge with ever-increasing holy boldness, courage, and certainty, or, in the aftermath of failing to take our battle to God first, we come out with increasing spiritual weakness and uselessness in the Christian life and work of the Lord.
Mark it down in big, bold letters. The Bible emphatically tells us, “O LORD of hosts, how blessed is the man who trusts in You!” (Psalm 84:12). The psalmist enthusiastically implores us, “You who fear the LORD, trust in the LORD; He is their help and their shield” (Psalm 115:11). Oswald Chambers, in his devotional classic, My Utmost for His Highest, assures us, “Nothing has power over the person who has fought and won a battle before God. If I say, ‘I’ll wait till I get out into the world, then put God to the test,’ I’ll find that I can’t. I must settle the matter between myself and God first, in the secret places of my soul where no stranger intermeddles. Afterward, I can go forth with the certainty that the battle is won. But if I lose the battle in my will, calamity and disaster are sure to follow” (https://utmost.org/modern-classic/where-the-battles-lost-or-won/).
Remember, dear friends, for the follower of Jesus Christ, the spiritual battles we face are always our Lord’s before they are ours. When we forget this fact, we pay a huge price. When we act in unison with this truth, we gain enormous wealth in heavenly virtue and blessing from our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Go now, in the wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit, for your next battle is just around the corner.