How To Fight Back

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ…” 2 Cor. 10:3-5, NASB

I was severely convicted as I listened to a Fight, Laugh, Feast podcast when the hosts asked their guest how he would encourage people who are concerned about all the crazy to get involved and fight back. His response, if I may paraphrase, was along this line: “Pray. You look at other countries where the Spirit of God is moving with power and the church is advancing mightily, and you will find countries where the believers take prayer seriously. If we aren’t going to pray, we might as well give it up.”

Ouch.

So Scripturally speaking, how do we fight back? You scroll through your Facebook feed and see the 2020 news cycle, and at the end of it all you feel like you just took a bath in a dumpster while watching a mugging take place just far enough away that you couldn’t do anything. It’s like the nation is burning down and you’re stuck staring helplessly at the orange glow in the sky.

I know the feeling.

So grab a bucket, my friend, and let’s run towards the flames.

1. Prayer

“If I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people, and My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 2 Chron. 7:13-14, NASB

We are used to hearing this verse, but let’s look at it again. Look at the emphasis. It does not start with a checklist of things to do, ways to get involved, plans for political activism or even personal morality. It starts with God. It starts with His people humbling themselves. What does that mean? The answer to that question deserves books, not a blog post, but I’d like to posit a simple threefold definition of what it means to humble ourselves before The Holy One:

1. Acknowledgement of God’s all-surpassing perfection

2. Acknowledgement of our own desperate depravity

3. Acknowledgement of our helplessness without Him

What does Scripture repeatedly portray as the picture of personal and national repentance?

“Then the people of Nineveh believed in God; and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. When the word reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe from him, covered himself with sackcloth and sat on the ashes. He issued a proclamation and it said, “In Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let man, beast, herd, or flock taste a thing. Do not let them eat or drink water. But both man and beast must be covered with sackcloth; and let men call on God earnestly that each may turn from his wicked way and from the violence which is in his hands. Who knows, God may turn and relent and withdraw His burning anger so that we will not perish.”” Jonah 3:5-9, NASB

This is square one. You want to fight back against Marxism? Here’s where it starts. You tired of seeing mob violence in the streets? Tired of living in Nineveh, of strolling through Sodom? So am I. So we need to be Jonahs (with a better attitude), and preach repentance before the coming wrath of a Holy God, and we need to be penitent Ninevites, crying out to God for our own sins and the sins of our people.

We need to follow Nehemiah’s example:

“They said to me, “The remnant there in the province who survived the captivity are in great distress and reproach, and the wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates are burned with fire.” When I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for days; and I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven.” Neh. 1:3-4, NASB

Go get your Bible and read the rest of Nehemiah chapter 1.

Seriously, like before you keep reading.

I’ll wait.

So as I was saying- you didn’t go read it, did you?

I thought so. Come back when you’ve read it.

Nehemiah’s prayer should be the prayer of every American today. Nehemiah is one of the most politically involved figures in Scripture, and before he gets into any of his activism he starts with prayer, mourning, repentance, fasting. He takes God seriously and casts himself fully on His mercy. He doesn’t try to accomplish anything until he has first sought the face of God.

So must we. When was the last time we as individuals, families, churches, governments, have proclaimed a fast- actually stepped away from the buffet of American comfort for a minute, literally went hungry, literally turned off Netflix, literally prostrated ourselves on the floor, literally did physical actions to emphasize our desperation, our need, our brokenness, our sorrow?

Not in some attempt to impress God, but rather in recognition of our need for God.

Not because denying our appetite makes us righteous, but because if we love righteousness then the sight of what is happening in our land should make us lose our appetite.

What are we really hungry for?

We also must recognize that America is undergoing judgment. Judgment for our sins. Judgment that we deserve. And that judgment is not coming from Marxists. It’s not coming from the devil. It’s not coming from “peaceful protesters.” Sure, they are all participating in the judgment. But they are just tools. They may be the sword, but they are not the Hand that wields it.

We are undergoing judgment at the Hand of a Holy God. We need to recognize that the way to stop the fire falling from heaven is not to design more efficient fire trucks.

“He makes the nations great, then destroys them; He enlarges the nations, then leads them away. He deprives of intelligence the chiefs of the earth’s people and makes them wander in a pathless waste. They grope in darkness with no light, and He makes them stagger like a drunken man.” Job 12:23-25, NASB

We must tremble before the Judge of all the earth.

Before we go and do, we must stay and wait. We must hear our orders from our General, and then carry them out. We don’t march to the beat of our own drum. Prayer and action are not opposites. They are root and tree, they are yeast and loaf, they are soul and body. If we truly labor in prayer (and by prayer I mean all-encompassing worship, seeking God’s Face in Scripture, fasting, prayer, singing, etc.), God will hear and will answer and will guide.

If we do not turn to our God for our marching orders, we will march onto the wrong battlefield; there, there is no Ark of the Covenant; sin is in the camp; there is no pillar of cloud before us; our swords are dull, our armor fragile, our faith misplaced, our defeat inevitable.

True prayer leads to faithful action as we yield to the guidance of The Holy Spirit. If we sweat and cry in our prayer closet, we will bleed on the battlefield, and our arms will be strong for the fight with a strength that is not our own.

2. Personal Holiness

“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” Matt. 7:5, NASB

We are in a spiritual war. All the things we see happening around us- they are all fruits of a spiritual root. It is far too easy for us to be distracted by what we can see, and to miss the cosmic conflict raging around us. But this is a mistake. As Christians, we are soldiers of Jesus Christ, and if we aren’t careful we’re going to find ourselves AWOL in some cultural skirmish miles from the battlefront where the real war is raging. Scripture tells us what it takes to be a faithful soldier of Christ- things like putting on the full armor of God, cleansing ourselves from sin, laboring in prayer. We are not ready to go confront a sinful world if we are not confronting our own sinful hearts.

If we were in a purely physical conflict, your browser history wouldn’t matter. Your spending habits or time priorities or anger problem wouldn’t affect your ability to go say what you need to say and do what you need to do.

But we are not in a purely physical conflict. We are in a primarily spiritual conflict. The battle lines are drawn. Suit up, Christian, and take your stand. Get on your knees. Get in the Word. Grow to be like Christ. Kill, kill, kill sin. You are not called to be a member of the moral majority. You are called to be a soldier of Jesus Christ. And this is how He tells us to fight.

The fight to preserve “traditional values” was a fight doomed from the beginning, because there is only One Victor, and those who do not gather with Him will scatter. Those who place their hope in the Constitution, the Republican party, the goddess of reason- all these are idols made with human hands, and they can offer no deliverance.

Take care, Christian, to be fighting the right foe, marching in the right ranks, following the right banner. That starts with sharpening your sword, putting on your armor, and strengthening your arms in the grace and knowledge of God.

3. Love Your Neighbor

“Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers’ hands?” And he said, “The one who showed mercy toward him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do the same.”” Luke 10:36-37, NASB

In a world of Zoom meetings and Twitter feeds it is quite easy to get caught up in all the big and exciting news out there. But Scripture has an inescapable focus on the idea of loving our neighbor. God has put people- actual people, not pixel-people- in our lives, on our streets, in our families and churches and communities. It is all too easy to get into some Facebook tangle where we are trying to straighten out somebody’s wacky opinion on some major national issue. But the Biblical emphasis is much closer to home.

You want to fight Marxism? Love your neighbor. Seek God’s guidance, and pray that He will bring people into your life to disciple and to serve and to love.

This means loving your wife. This means discipling your kids. It means making dinner for that lady at church that just had a baby. It means getting to know the person next door so that you can figure out how to love them and lead them to Jesus. It means running for local office, or showing up at your city council meeting just to say “thus saith The Lord.”

You want to do something about all the crazy?

Go kiss your wife until she can’t stop smiling. Go look at the stars with your kids and read Psalm 19. Give that guy at the gas station a Gospel tract. Go to church and sing and laugh and pray and weep. Ask your co-worker what Jesus thinks about the Black Lives Matter rally he just attended (and be ready to give a Biblical answer to your own question). Pick a city council member and see if they’d be willing to do lunch. Make a welcome basket for the new family in the neighborhood- and follow it up with an invitation to a dinner that smells like the love of Christ. Go hold a sign at your local abortion mill. And if God gives you the opportunity to publicly take a stand for His Truth against the zeitgeists of our day- whether it’s at a family dinner or in a business meeting or on national TV- take your stand.

Love your neighbor. Do the dirty work of the Gospel.

Why are these things effective ways to fight back?

Because this is a spiritual war, and this is how Jesus said to fight it.

We need to ask ourselves what kingdom we are fighting for.

4. “Get Involved”

“And when he wanted to go across to Achaia, the brethren encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him; and when he had arrived, he greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.” Acts 18:27-28, NASB

Step 1 in repentance, revival, reformation, is to recognize that we cannot bring repentance, revival, or reformation; that’s what we discussed in point 1 of this post. We need to walk out onto our parapet and survey the flaming trash heap of 2020 and say “behold, is this not the great nuclear wasteland that I have made by my wisdom and the strength of my own hands?”

Why yes, indeed it is!

We are beholding the very best of humanity apart from Christ. And we must take care lest, in response to Divine punishment for relying on the strength of our own hands, we attempt to somehow overcome His punishment by the strength of our own hands. That would be severely counterproductive. God is not mocked; He will make the enemies of Jesus Christ a footstool for His feet. The goal here is not to outsmart the judgment of God. That ain’t gonna happen. We’ve sown. We are reaping. God is just.

Praise be to God, He is also merciful. Let’s just remember that we should be seeking His mercy- not a brimstone-resistant roof upgrade.

Remember the passage we started out with. We are in a spiritual war. Our enemy is satan- not Joe Biden, not Margaret Sanger, not a mob of rioters. These folks are lost, enslaved to sin, under the sway of the devil. Just like we were until Jesus called us out of the darkness into His marvelous light.

We are simply participating in the latest manifestation of the war between the Seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. And it is a war that has already been won, which means that as we press the victory out into the edges of the battlefield we can do so fearlessly and with joy.

That fearless combativeness does- must!- eventually work its way out into the edges. This means that Christians should be involved on Facebook, on YouTube, in national politics; we should be writing our representatives and refuting leftism and resisting tyrannical ordinances; we should be armed and ready to defend the innocent against tyrannical governments or tyrannical mobs. We should blog and Tweet and podcast and take every means at our disposal to fight. But we must keep these things in their proper Biblical place. That’s why they are fourth in my list.

And when we do these things, we must not do them as ambassadors for traditional morality. Traditional morality did not rise from the grave. The goddess of reason is not returning to judge the quick and the dead. The great Republican elephant is not seated at the right hand of God.

There is only one Light, and He has vanquished the darkness.

We must go forth in His Name, for His glory.

Our message is simple.

“Thus saith The Lord. Kiss the Son.”

#Abortion #FightBack #MoralMajority