Last night and earlier today I was under intense spiritual attack. It began after I’d experienced great victory with the Lord, and it was so sudden and unexpected that I was feeling weak, depressed, lonely, physically sick, exhausted, …, all at once and couldn’t quite remember how to deal with it (even though I counsel my good friends on spiritual warfare on a regular basis).
I reached out to a few people for prayer, I considered that I should be praying for strength, or taking authority over the lies of the enemy, and yet I continued to engage negative thoughts and wallow.
Then a friend spoke to me and mentioned something like, “it’s okay, we all feel down sometimes”. I can’t explain what happened in my spirit, but it was like Truth rose up inside me and my spirit shouted, “No! It’s not true! It’s a spiritual battle! I’ve been up against this before and won!”
Too often we give our flesh credit for what is happening in the spiritual realm. But Ephesians 6:12 says “Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.” When we feel anger, or sadness, or fear, or hopelessness or any other negative thought it is a spiritual thing. There are deceptive spirits speaking lies to us. It doesn’t matter how believable those negative thoughts may seem–they are all lies!
But 2 Corinthians 10 encourages us that if we have chosen Jesus Christ as our Lord, then we have spiritual weapons available to us through the Holy Spirit: “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.”
Our job is to “take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor 10:5). When we hear ourselves thinking a thought that is in any way negative or outside the nature of our Lord, we choose to cast it aside. We recognize that it’s false, claim the truth, and let the truth sink into our spirits setting us free (Phil 4:8).
This is exactly what I chose to do this evening, and I’ll testify that there is nothing better than the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23), and complete freedom in the Lord. If you’re a Christian, this is absolutely available to you all the time, no matter the circumstance; but you do have to choose to resist the temptation and lies of the devil!
