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September 25 - December 8, 2020
First, spiritual warfare is a metaphor for standing on the Lord’s side in the epic struggle between the Lord and his enemies.
Second, spiritual warfare is a moral struggle. It is a conflict over who you are, what you believe, and how you live.
but repentance and humility before God will cause him to flee
Scripture treats spiritual warfare as a normal, everyday part of the Christian life, and so we should as well.
Scripture never puts Satan and his activities front and center. God puts people and our relationship to him and each other front and center.
By nature and nurture, you and those you counsel have lie-darkened and lie-calloused hearts.
These lies are always untruths about God, ourselves, and others.
Putting on the belt of truth means depending every day on Christ. He is the way, the truth, and the life.
Christ’s battle strategy is to do what is right and good, and to say what is true and helpful.
We join Jesus’s mission. We entreat our counselees to join Jesus’s mission. We remind them that any glass of cold water is an act of righteousness, any word that is constructive, not destructive, any word that is true, not false, any word that builds bridges instead of creates distance.
The Lord himself is a shield to those who take refuge in him when faced with enemies. In numerous psalms, our enemies are characterized as liars and murderers.
Notice, the Lord is the shield. Faith per se has no protective power. But faith looks with confidence to the one who protects and strengthens.
Your counselees need the encouragement of their salvation.
Who is fathering you? Whose words are catching your ear? Whose desires are you following? Who do you say I am?
light. How do you fight spiritual warfare? You rely, you stand, you walk into the dark world. It was prophesied that Christ would do it. He did it. We see how Paul did it. And he calls us to imitate him, just as he imitates Christ
As counselors, it’s tempting for us to trust our theories of motivation and causality, and our knowledge of how people tend to react to certain struggles.
Pray for your friends and family. The people you are most connected to need the Lord to directly impart his strength for them to be able to walk in faith and love. What part of the armor of Christ do each of them need the most today? Pray that the Spirit would clothe them with Christ. Pray that their eyes would be open to their need for Christ. Pray for those you counsel. Pray that they would be drawn to a living dependence on Christ. That the strength and love of Christ would flow into their lives and flow toward others. Pray for their faith—that they would have ears to hear and eyes to see
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Most of the issues that bring people into counseling can be sorted into three general categories: anger, fear, and escapism.
Helping someone understand and move forward means encouraging a living dependence on our living Savior, which is the #1 most important goal in any of our counseling.
One of the most elemental aspects of biblical counseling is the truth that people are always making a choice.
side. One choice is the anti-repentance and the other is the truth of God’s Word applied to their particular struggle. One side would be the voice of the world, the flesh, and the devil that says, “You need to do this for reasons x, y, and z.”
The other side of the card would give words to what repentance and crying out to God would look like in the midst of the struggle that they are in. How will they turn to God in the midst of accusing others? What voice will they listen to when they hear the voice of the accuser? How will they choose when tempted to find salvation in someone or something that is not Christ?
As you think through these questions together, you can help those you counsel come up with biblical, powerful, and concrete ways to turn toward Christ and rely on him in the midst of their everyday struggles. Because of Christ, they can choose Christ. Because of the Spirit, they can keep in step with the Spirit. Turning to ...
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I name the evils I am facing: 28:3–5.
a deliverance event, however dramatic in the moment, proved to be no predictor of any good thing in a person’s life over the long term.
prayer. He sought to find out what else was going on in the lives of people. He found dark secrets and relational problems—and the miseries of life that both tempt to sin and result from sin. He found secret adulteries. He found financial corruption.
He dealt with bizarre evil the way the Bible tells us to deal with evil of any sort: clear scriptural truth; bold, faith-expressing prayers that plead the mercies and power of Christ; heartfelt worship; meaningful fellowship.
True spiritual warfare normalizes the abnormal, helps people live in Christ’s reality, not the haunted universe of animism. He was waging true spiritual warfare against the powers that enslave people in the confusion of sin and fear.
Labels and speculations also distract us from caring well for a troubled young woman, and learning what was going on inside her, and offering her real help.
The greatest gift is faith in Jesus—the One who defeated death for us and who will guide us safely home at just the right time. He is the one who provides the armor so that we can stand against the Evil One. And we do desperately need Christ’s armor for this battle. It is a battle for faith, hope, and love in the middle of one of the hardest circumstances.
Work, and pay what is owed. Notice that the idea of a mode shift between what Jesus does and what we are to do is not really an argument from silence. Scripture gives us no command not to control nature by a word of power in order to get tax money.
But because the rest of Scripture teaches and exemplifies a different mode, such a prohibition would be absurd and redundant.
Today—and throughout the Bible—similar issues of faith are ever present. But now we normally express faith by walking through the deep waters rather than walking on the water. The mode of expressing faith has shifted to the classic mode.
We also must feed hungry people, and our mode follows Jesus’s example up to a point: we, too, pray. But the Bible teaches a fundamental discontinuity of mode between what Jesus did next and what we do. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, “give us this day our daily bread,” we ask God to provide.
In any case, ours is a derivative authority, not our own. Or authority is a signpost pointing to the one with all authority in heaven and on earth.
We, too, must call people and hear the call to ministry. We do not use the command-control mode, but look to Scripture’s guidelines in such passages as 1 Timothy 3. Scripture gives objective criteria: character, willingness, experience, reputation, and gifts. We test people, watching their lives over time; we pray to our Lord for wisdom.
We forgive others as recipients of Jesus’s mode of forgiving: “Forgive each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you”
If a person asks for our forgiveness and is a hypocrite, we still forgive subjectively, holding no grudge against him or her. But the hypocrite will remain unforgiven objectively, because God reads the heart. Jesus does authoritative, objective forgiving; we do personal, subjective forgiving.
Healings—both before and after they occurred—were repeatedly linked to Jesus’s call to place faith in him as healer. On several occasions Jesus also explicitly used healing power to establish his authority to forgive sins.
The normal mode of healing in both the Old and New Testaments is to pray, placing primary reliance on God, and then to employ medical means. Prayerful faith in God the healer lays the foundation.
But Scripture specifically tells us to approach sickness a different way. James 5:14–16 teaches the church what methodology to use. “Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up.
