Sword of the Spirit
Ephesians 1:3 tells us that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. We have everything we need. Our spiritual arsenal is huge—or could be. A soldier can have a gun, but it's useless if he doesn't know how to use it. If it's jammed, it's useless. The same holds true for our spiritual weapons. We have to keep the weapons battle-ready, and sometimes we don't. They are available to us, but we have to learn how to use them, and we have to maintain them.
The first weapon in our spiritual arsenal is the Sword of the Spirit.
Inventory Time
It's time to switch gears. I have been posting about common spiritual attacks we face every day. Enough about what the devil is doing. Let's consider what we can do to fight his attacks.
Hurts So Bad
The world is a place of suffering, and suffering is hard. Jesus told us to pick up our cross and follow Him. I would like to follow Him, but I'd rather not have to carry that cross. Romans 5:3-5 tells us to rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.
That is God's perspective of suffering. It's good. It can bear fruit. But it's a hard teaching.
All In a Day's Work
I have many friends who are retired police officers. There is something different about them. They are low responders. When something goes wrong, they stay calm. That's not me. I sometimes feel like a chicken with its head cut off, or the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I don't have what it takes to be in law enforcement. It's not in my nature.
As I thought about my low-responding police friends, I wondered if one's career or vocation might, by its nature, create a spiritual weakness that Satan can exploit. I reached out to people in different vocations and asked them if they faced unique spiritual challenges because of that vocation. The consensus was yes.
Pig Out
My dad was an all-or-nothing kind of guy. If he was interested in something, he never took it slowly. When he began running, he did marathons. When he heard about intermittent fasting, he started by fasting for three days at a time. He never tested the water first. Just jumped in completely.
I am a bit like him, especially with spiritual things.