Battling Spiritually and Clashing with the Unseen part 2

Ephesians 6:10-18 Be Invincible In Battle

At times we struggle over prayer and our connection with God. Many things can begin to emerge with threatening frequency as we easily start to feel like prayer failures.  Multiple fiascoes, stuff that feels like we’re not connecting in our prayer, letdowns and total bomb outs of our life experience jab at us, eating at our mind.

All of a sudden, we start feeling like a disaster, a major flop, and a botch in our communication skills with God.

How do we become invincible in the spiritual battle against this unseen enemy who agitates us, interfering everywhere?

How can we develop unshakable reliance? How can our prayers be irrepressible with wild expectations, where we eagerly sense that we’re actually heard by God?  Where we have a real consciousness of being right in front of His face with our heart wrenching demands?

The Lord through these tugging stresses is assigning opportunities in us, by stirring our longings as He providentially inserts burdens in us?

A load, which He instigates for us, a weight that He tempers to cage us in with, that we might give it all to Him.  He is the only one who can lift it off of us.  He appeals to us to ask, seek, and knock about all, on the doors of heaven?

I see nowhere in the Bible where God says He’s disappointed with our pray. The thing that saddens and grieves the Spirit of God is our lack of faith, our absence of asking and our nonattendance in His presence.

By lack of faith, I’m not referring to quantity or size of our faith, but the deficiency in the object of our faith.  What I’m suggesting by lack of faith is that we entertain a deficit in the body of our faith and that obsesses us with defects in our vision.

In other words, our lack is, we’re looking at the wrong person, and we’re focusing on the wrong voice and we’re not apprehending the work of Christ for us and in us.

Faith comes by hearing.  So then, what is the thing we’re to be hearing, receiving and gathering in with intense perception?  Who is the master optometrist that drops the corrective lens of vision into place for the stimulation of our understanding, to place in us an outburst of trust and positive confidence?

In God’s Word we read it is the Spirit of God that prompts an uncovering of our eyes and ears of faith, to the voice of God. The only way to gain unshakable resolute faith is to get our minds and hearts in front of the Spirit’s voice in the Word of God.

We do this by reading it, studying it, meditating on it and getting around others who value God’s truth and are unswerving in consuming a maximum of biblical truths into their hearts and lives.

We’re under a constant attack not to listen to God. There is a noxious voice that pummels our mind with accusation and doubts.  This conflict is like an aggravating spasm.  We think it’s our own insecurities and the pessimism of our inadequacies.

But actually we’re under attack by an unseen force that dupes us to think it’s our own thoughts.  Our tale spin suddenly becomes our undoing as our faith shrivels from focusing on the words of this invisible enemy of humanity.

We think it’s our failure, our insignificance for God or we balk over our bad attitudes, our flawed behavior or repetitive, and defective habit patterns. But the accuser of humanity is terrorizing us and that plunges us deeper into disharmony and tension.

We can’t let this put us down from our acceptance in Christ. He values our individual personality and invites our approach to our heavenly Father and loving God.  We’re to come boldly to God’s throne of grace and love.  To be bold means to come in a shameless confidence.  Boldness is assertive assurances where we’re convinced that God hears every thing we express to Him.  It’s an amazing challenge to realize we’re to be excessively forward with God.  He’s elated and tickled with us.  He wants to impact every aspect of our life and circumstances right down to the minute detail of each item in our environment and situations.  Nothing in our life and circumstances is insignificant to Him.

These alien voices may attempt to impute an impression that sounds like this, now wait a second here, you can’t just relax with God while you’re a big messy sinner.

If that happens we have to grasp that we’re under an assault, we’re being put down.  God doesn’t convict by condemning, not ever.  He never gives up on us, for He is leaning down, always reaching out to lift us up to Him.

Who we going to listen too?  The Spirit says in:

Hebrews 10:17 and their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.

Now we already appreciate God as an all-knowing person.  How in the world would he not remember?  What’s it mean that He won’t remember our sins?  I think it’s because He’s selected to place us in His grace provision and to concentrate His eyes to see just Jesus in us.

We have to rest in is His forgiveness. Turn a deaf ear to the voice of accusation and criticism.

He craves that we enter into the celebration of his extravagant giving of this priceless gift of Jesus.

Ephesians says we are accepted in the beloved, the Spirit broods over us.  He desires for us to see how every conceivable spiritual benefit is ours as we walk toward and straight live according to our destiny of Heaven.  We should be overwhelmed with what he’s done for us and in us.  In God’s outstanding kindness He has made us totally comfortable in His infinite love.  This is the same love, he has for Christ.

Because of Christ sacrifice, in the awesome reality of Him taking our place of judgment. It’s through our Lord Christ that we’re now a free people, free of penalties and punishments.

The stuff we’ve stirred up by all our stupidity is gone.

I’m not implying that we don’t often continue to make contributions in a course of futility.

My point is that Jesus didn’t do a shoddy job for our need but accomplished a complete freedom for us.  We’re not just a little free, but totally liberated. Abundantly free!

I’m not eluding dismissiveness to the failings and frustration we feel around us as the battles we feel are very real.  We have to measure the battle and we should desire to pray, to pray always, but more often, if not constantly we have to be driven to pray.  So we’re forced to dependence by this warfare scenario.

God considered everything, covered ever issue we could possibly need, we are in the center of His plans and His pleasure is the delight of making us perfect in Christ.

When He says He doesn’t remember our sins He means He’s chosen to see us in Christ.  Sin is not relevant or applicable to us any more.

When I forgive someone for a wrong I have felt from another, I’m, in true forgiveness, making a choice to view the wrong done to me as irrelevant.  I have selected to see the hurt as unconnected because I don’t attach it to our relationship any more.  The wrong is made in my mind to be extraneous and peripheral.  I choose instead to see Christ in you; I don’t focus on sin on you. I see by faith what Christ has done, and I see, in prayer, what God is going to do in and through others.

So what do we do when we feel crummy, we admit it to God.  When we are slinking with an inferior, shoddy self-perception we disclose it to the Lord.

God is reliable, consistent, straightforward and upfront about everything. He already knows our condition.  We need to be straightforward and upfront with Him.  Its is called walking in the light.  There is no future in feeling trashy.  Admit where we’ve messed up, reveal it and release it to God.

When I had young babies in diapers I wanted them to be swaddled in fresh diapers, clean clothes and didn’t want the disfiguring of anything that would cause a rash or irritation on them.

I checked them when they we’re sad, and I appreciated it when they came to me with a mess or even cried out.  I wanted them to relate their needs to me, to make the annoyance known.  There is no future in concealing a problem.

Our God is a perfect Father.  Our Lord is a loving shepherd.  The Spirit of God who lives in us is a comforter and infinite encourager.

We can come boldly and we can share every feeling of our heart and our sins and inadequacies.  These things are no longer to be viewed as connected to us.  The tragedies of sin are not our identity.  They need to be placed is this vacuum of irrelevance where we don’t stew over it.  We approach God in prayer with all the beauty and perfection of our new person that we are in Christ.  So we are free to speak our mind with God.