One Of Those Days...

I hate to lose. I mean I REALLY HATE to lose. You might not know it from my mild mannered alter ego but it is very true. In fact, deep down, I'm so competitive that I don't much like the fellow I become when I lose. Over the years I have developed ways to cope with this dark little me. Most of them have involved locking competitive me away in a dark dungeon and not giving him an opportunity to come out and do his thing.

It is a poor solution, really, because I have allowed myself to shut away one of my most masculine traits merely because it is dangerous. If you subscribe to John Eldredge's view of masculinity, you know that that is a cardinal sin. But I digress. See, this post isn't about how I have managed this aspect of my life so much as it is about the spiritual warfare that Christians find themselves engaged in constantly and more particularly about the warfare in which I found myself yesterday.

One of the neat things about being a Christian is the foregone certainty that we are on a winning team. While this is true, it is also very true that our sanctification doesn't occur overnight. The reality is that we struggle against our flesh for the remainder of our days. Until we die we will contend against its desires. Our enemy does his part too to make sure that we trip often.

As a young Christian I had great success in the battle against the flesh initially. Quite a few of my more fleshly habits dropped to the wayside very easily. However, there came a time in my life (and from my observation the lives of all Christians) where the Lord allowed the enemy to start fighting back. This generally comes as a shock to new believers, and the real hard work of sanctification is begun.

Over the years you become more accustomed to the fight. Indeed, you can even get in the habit of winning these skirmishes with the enemy. Then God takes you to a new place where the demons that you are battling have entrenched themselves deep in the areas of your personality that are so close to your perception of who you are that it feels like the guns of heaven, the blasts of the enemy, and even your own weapons are turned upon you. The very things that we are fighting are the attitudes and mechanisms that we have used to protect ourselves from the wounds that we have received throughout our lives. These defenses were adopted as means of the flesh to survive the awful attack of an enemy who sought to destroy us even before we came to know Jesus the Savior. The difficulty of this part of the fight is that the habits are so deeply ingrained that we often do them without even realizing that we are doing them.

Such is the battle that I have been fighting. Recently, the Lord began to show me that the very root of all of the sinful manifestations that I have been resisting for all of my Christian life are bound up in one thing: FEAR. He has begun to show me through the Scriptures that if we truly know Him and truly understand the relationship that He wants to have with us then we need fear nothing. When we have acknowledged Him as Lord and are submitted to His will for our lives then we have nothing to fear in all of creation.

I pretty well have this down in my mind. I understand the theology behind it. I assent to the logic of it. I believe it is right. And yet I discovered yesterday that there is a big difference between knowledge and true belief. Knowing your enemy does not guarantee victory over him.

Yesterday I had to deal with a financial matter that had been looming for several months. I knew that I needed to work on it, but really wasn't that afraid of it. I wasn't afraid, that is, until I sat down to start working on it. It was then that the enemy hit me with everything that he had, and I found myself resorting to all of my old tricks. In short, I totally blew it, even though I knew what was going on, and even though I knew to fight, I found myself totally overwhelmed.

I hate losing. And by God's grace, in the next battle it will be the enemy licking his wounds, not me.