Spiritual Warfare Re-Visited

What is the essence of spiritual warfare?

My college years were the late 80’s.  It was, what seemed like, the height of an awakened awareness of spiritual warfare.  Frank Peretti had written his novel, “This Present Darkness,” and I began looking for demons behind every bush, person, institution, or creepy looking building.  Ironically, SNL’s sketch “The Church Lady” was also blaming her every sin on the devil.  It also played in 1986, the same year Peretti’s book was published.  Spiritual warfare became an “us-and-them” warfare.  The Church was the spiritual good (us), the world and everything in the world was the “them”.  The goal was separation so that we would not be defiled by the world.  

But the essence of spiritual warfare is not out there but in here.  It is in the heart.  It is a fight to believe, trustingly and obediently, the gospel - the reality that the Christian is so free from his sin and guilt and declared righteous before God that nothing can separate him from the love of God in Christ - nothing.  

Every believer in Christ experiences the battle.  On some days and at some moments we despair our sin and think our particular circumstance is too great a wound to be covered by Christ’s forgiveness.  On other days and at other times, we feel pretty good about our Christian performance and feel we deserve God’s grace.  Spiritual warfare is the fight to believe that God’s grace in Christ is sufficient for the worst of sinners and the best of sinners.    

The “I believe; help my unbelief” of Mark 9:24 becomes the motto of the Christian involved in this spiritual warfare.  

Lord, help me to believe that you are enough.  Do not allow me to despair my condition and run to despair.  And do not allow me to puff up with a pride that trusts in my religious performance to gain your affection and atonement.  I am loved just as much today as yesterday and every day afterward because of Christ’s substitution for me.