Climbing the Mountain of God Stop Eight Warfare

Welcome to episode 159, In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Welcome to episode 159. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, we are about to enter our 8th stop on the Mountain of God, and I just want to encourage you, if you have not downloaded your map yet, go to nodoubtonlybelieve.com/mountain and you will find the map of the Mountain of God. You can print it out, you can save it to your phone or your desktop, wherever it is that you save material, and you will be able to look at that and you'll be able to go back and take a peek and kind of get an idea of this journey that we're going through together. Now I specifically put warfare at the top of the mountain, and again, I don't want anybody to start saying, well, this is exactly how you go through this mountain and this is from A to B, these are all the 9 steps, the only 9 steps that you need. That is not why I created this map. It is just to get an idea of where we're heading. Show you a place in the Bible where Jesus corrected his disciples because they got all this power and then they got mad. It's kind of like me driving in traffic. If I had used that power for evil, it might not end up like you want it to end up. So I— let's go to that scripture real quick in Luke. And let's start in Luke 9:51. Now it came to pass, when the time had come for him to be received up, that he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face. And as they went, they entered a village of the Samaritans to prepare for him. But they did not receive him, because his face was set for the journey to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, just as Elijah did? But he turned and rebuked them and said, you do not know what manner of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives but to save them. And they went to another village. With great power comes great responsibility. I think that might have been Spider-Man or something. Maybe that's a Marvel comic saying. Jesus' disciples had been given power and authority over unclean spirits. I want you to notice that Jesus didn't say that they did not have the power to call down fire from heaven. He rebuked them for not knowing what type of spirit they were of. And you know, Paul give us the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such there is no law. And remember, the disciples are walking with Jesus. Jesus had not been to the cross yet. Paul was still actually Saul of Tarsus, and so he was an enemy in the early church. He was the enemy of the church. So Paul had not pinned by the Holy Spirit yet the fruit of the Spirit. So the disciples are just learning as they go. And again, they had not been baptized in the Holy Spirit, but they had been given authority and power. If you remember where Jesus called his disciples to himself, power over demons and power to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead. Freely you receive, freely give. If you remember that power, and that's why I put this lesson or this stop on the mountain as stop 8, because you need to learn to walk in that power. And the only way to walk in that power is through the love of God, and that is found in 1 Corinthians 13. I call it the love chapter, and I want to specifically go to 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. Love is patient and is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not parade itself and is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek his own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity but rejoices in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. So in order to walk properly in the power of God, you have to walk in love. And love is all of these things in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. And God had me memorize those. And it's something I want to encourage you that if you, if you struggle with sometimes under— remembering or understanding what God's kind of love is This is a cool 3 or 4 verses in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, where it talks about what love is. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. I mean, it is just very eye-opening what love is and what love is not. And love does not call down fire from heaven, make crispy critters out of anybody that crosses your path. If somebody— and that's why road rage, I don't think, is of God. And when I'm driving down the road, I know, I know, but when I'm driving down the road and I'm gripping that steering wheel and I'm going, God, where do these people learn to drive? I don't think that's part of the love. 1 Corinthians 13:4, love is patient and is kind. I mean, right from jump, patient and kind. Is not what I think when I'm gripping that steering wheel and people are trying to turn 4 lanes across traffic. And oh, don't even get me started. You have the power of God, the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, living on the inside of you. And you then learn how to— and this is a learned process, this is a learned behavior— the just shall live by faith. That was the step before. All of this kind of mills together. But we are not warring against flesh and blood. We are warring against principalities and powers. We're warring against the punk and everybody that's under him. Any kind of demon, any kind of imp, any kind of principality, any kind of power, any kind of ruler of spiritual wickedness, all of that mess. That's who we're fighting, and that's who we use the power of God to bind up and cast out and use in a way that we can then— someone is being misled by the punk. With love, we bind all that mess up. We can disarm the enemy, and we do that. Remember, Revelation 12:11 is my favorite scripture. We overcome him, which is the punk, by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony, and we did not love our lives to the death. So we can overcome evil with the blood. Jesus already died and shed all his blood for you and I. That does not have to happen again. It's already happened. Your testimony is your testimony, and you just got to make up your mind to do whatever it takes to help someone get into heaven. And I just want to encourage you that this walking in your God-given power is an incredible honor, but it's incredible responsibility. And look, and I'm not trying to tell you that I've got this all figured out. I would argue that I'm learning every day a different way to walk or a different way to love his people and his kids. And it's difficult. This is not an easy route. Jesus said in Matthew 7, remember, wide is the way and narrow is the gate that leads to life, and few who find it. That's why I put this step, or stop, way up on top of the mountain, because I believe you need to be a disciple, you need to have already walked in His Word, you need to be abiding in the vine and in His Word, and you need to be using your faith and taking steps of faith. All of this stuff is going on before we start this, quote, spiritual warfare. And it— and sometimes, and we've talked about this multiple times, it looks kind of goofy if you've ever seen how some people in the body of Christ, quote, use spiritual warfare as a way to do crazy stuff. And I don't see it's very biblical, the things that they're doing. You know, they'll go and do a Jericho march, and I see the Jericho march one time in scripture. I don't see it multiple times, and I don't see a way that we need to go do this you know, march around the city 7 times and take trumpets and all of that, you know, from the— a casual observer, unless some walls fall down, you're going to come off as looking a little bit screwy. And I would encourage you to go back and listen to the Armor of God series, and where it talks about putting on the whole armor, and it talks about the different parts of the armor of God. And before you even start battling, you've got to humble yourself. And what I have found in the word of God is that when you think you've got something and figured out. It's almost directly opposite. If you think that what you're going to do is go and do this one thing, and you start reading the word and you start looking at how God did things, it's, it's different. God's ways are not our ways, and you've got to die before you can live, and you've got to give before you can receive. And you— the person that wants to be the greatest must be the least. And see, things like that just does not make sense to the normal carnal mind. You can't, you can't rationalize your way into that. You've got to do this by faith, and you have to make up your mind that we're not fighting against what we can see. We're fighting against the principalities and the powers and the rulers of the dark age and the world system and Satan and our body All of these things we need to battle against, and we need to do it in our own world before we take it out. I think that part of this may also— you might could use Jesus' analogy in Luke 6:40: A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher. And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye and do not perceive the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me remove the speck that's in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the plank that is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother's eye. And I think a lot of people in all of this spiritual warfare, I mean, they're wanting to go out and kick the crap out of things spiritually, and I'm putting up air quotes, but they got these big old planks in their eye and they're walking around whopping people upside the head with these planks coming out of their eye trying to get this little speck out of their brother's or sister's eyes. And I've talked about the body of Christ, that we're all different parts of the same body. And if we are— if I'm a little toe, I'm not going to look anything at all like an eye or a nose or an elbow and I'm not gonna have the same function. I'm probably not gonna have the same terminology. I'm not gonna communicate the same way. And it's gonna be very difficult when I start trying to communicate. I believe it just spins all the way back to personal responsibility and work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. And this warfare thing, you need to be ready. You have got a power inside of you, but you need to learn, you need to get yourself right before you start bringing all of this power and all this warfare into the world. Well, that went on a pretty different tangent than I was thinking about and had in my notes, but let's pray. God, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you, Jesus, for coming and living a life that I could not live and dying a death that I could not die, and you rose again the third day. And Lord, I thank you that you are able to defeat death and defeat Satan and redeem the whole world. Lord, all sin has been dealt with and paid for. It is paid in full. Lord, sin is no longer the issue. I pray the person that's listening to this episode, Lord, will dive into your word and look at the power that's on the inside of them right now. Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world. Lord, we thank you, we love you, and we ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you on the next episode.

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