Spiritual Warfare
I've been preaching a sermon series called "Spriritual Warfare for people who don't see demons behind every tree." I took that title from a series of blog posts by Perry Noble - a pastor from my hometown in the US.
Anyway - this week we talked about how evil tries to distract us away from the call of God in our lives. And I talked about how it starts right from the beginning. I can't tell you how many people I know who have really gone through a hardship right after becoming a Christian or baptism.
In church I told the story of an old friend who right after his baptism was "tested" by an invitation to join a rugby club whose games just happened to be every Sunday morning at 10:00am. Since his first priority as a new Christian was to try to establish the habit of weekly worship, and since our worship service was at 10am on Sundays - this was hard. He told me that he'd lived in Washington, DC for 10 years and NEVER ONCE had a Sunday morning appointment until he tried to commit to Sunday worship.
I told this story yesterday in church and I was BLOWN AWAY by how many people shared the post-Baptism attack stories with me. I heard about relationship break-ups, lost jobs, illness, financial difficulties... the list could go on.
Our life with God really does have a spiritual warfare aspect to it. Whether you think in terms of the devil, demons and Satan, or whether the idea of personifying evil in this way makes you queezy - it's hard to deny the aggressive way in which evil attacks.
Anyway - this week we talked about how evil tries to distract us away from the call of God in our lives. And I talked about how it starts right from the beginning. I can't tell you how many people I know who have really gone through a hardship right after becoming a Christian or baptism.
In church I told the story of an old friend who right after his baptism was "tested" by an invitation to join a rugby club whose games just happened to be every Sunday morning at 10:00am. Since his first priority as a new Christian was to try to establish the habit of weekly worship, and since our worship service was at 10am on Sundays - this was hard. He told me that he'd lived in Washington, DC for 10 years and NEVER ONCE had a Sunday morning appointment until he tried to commit to Sunday worship.
I told this story yesterday in church and I was BLOWN AWAY by how many people shared the post-Baptism attack stories with me. I heard about relationship break-ups, lost jobs, illness, financial difficulties... the list could go on.
Our life with God really does have a spiritual warfare aspect to it. Whether you think in terms of the devil, demons and Satan, or whether the idea of personifying evil in this way makes you queezy - it's hard to deny the aggressive way in which evil attacks.
