Sermon Central
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Know Your Enemy Series
Contributed by James Turnes on May 19, 2012 (message contributor)
Summary: We battle not against flesh and blood. It is a spiritual battle that must be fought with spiritual weapons. If you want victory, you have to arm yourself.
Spiritual Weapons & Tactics
A lot of times the church fails to speak on the subject of spiritual warfare. Too often Christians, especially new converts or baby Christians, are left in the dark when it comes to this epic battle that is taking place in an unseen realm.
All too often Christians wonder and ask the question: “Why is this happening to me?”
Anybody ever ask the following questions:
• How come before I came to Christ my life was ok?
• How come now that I am trying to get my life together and serve God my world seems like it is falling apart?
• How come life seemed easier before I started to come to church?
Anybody ever ask these questions before? Well today I want to answer that question for you and over the next few weeks I want us to learn together how we can overcome what seems to be an all out war in our lives.
First thing we must recognize and understand is that we are in the middle of a war. A war that is not seen, but is heard. Whether we are saved or not we are in the middle of a spiritual warfare.
“12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” – NKJ
The fact of the matter is that when you accept Christ, you are just made more aware of this war. It is more evident in your life. All of a sudden it seems like your life is flipped upside down and things start happening in your life that didn’t take place before. It seems as though life just got harder and more complicated.
This is because there is a very real enemy whom you have made very angry. You have made him angry because the moment you accept Christ as Lord and Savior is the exact moment you decided to switch sides. You see there is a war that is going on between the Kingdom of God and anything that stands against Him, namely hell and all of its demons and the great enemy Satan or Lucifer.
This war began when the enemy Satan rebelled against God. In Revelation we are given some insight as to what happen:
“7 And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, 8 but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. 9 So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” – NKJ
The earth is now the domain of the dragon, or Satan and we are behind enemy lines. One thing we must understand is that the territory that we are currently living on is ruled by Satan.
2ND CORINTHIANS 4:4A
“4 Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe.” – NLT
Even though Satan may be the god of this world, he is not supreme. God in heaven is the only supreme god. Satan may be the god of this world, but he is very limited to what he can do. Like a dog in a yard. The dog can only as far as the leash will take him then he is retrained by the collar. Satan too is on a leash.
We see this in the account of Job. The enemy Satan had come before God and had to ask permission by God to attack Job in any way shape or form, and even then God had a restriction on him every time he came against him.
• JOB 1:12
“12 And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on his person.” – NKJ
• Even when the enemy wanted to harm Job physically, God still had him on a short leash.
“6 And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life.” – NKJ
You are probably wondering the why part of all this. Why would God allow these things to happen? We will get into that at another time in this series. What I want to help with this morning is to see who the enemy is for what he is.
Even though the war was won on Calvary over two thousand years ago, there are daily battle that take place and if we are to be victorious, live victorious, then we must know who the enemy is. In order to defeat an enemy, you have to know who they are and what they are about.
