Rebuilding The Walls and Taking Ground

For the month of March, we have been examining our relationship with darkness, with evil, with Satan. What does he want? How does he work against us and how deeply has his influence infected our culture and our individual lives? Today, we are going to discuss how we, as believers, can and should take a stand against our enemy and not only rebuild the walls to keep him out but do what we were we were commanded to do and start taking ground for the Kingdom of Heaven.

So, where is the Church vulnerable? Where have we lost ground and given away our strength? For starters, we need to start with the Word of God. While the Bible speaks clearly about the fact that we do have a real, supernatural adversary, many in fact, who are working against us. The Bible tells us that we live in a world at war, but do we actually believe God and take Him at His word? Of course, the obvious, gut reaction is to say, “Of course, I do!” But, as we’ve said countless times on this channel, it is our consistent actions and behaviors that reveal what we truly believe. When you look at your day-to-day life, do your actions and choices show the lifestyle of a person who knows they are in the midst of a deadly battle, or do you live like you are safe? Are you sharpening your mind with the Word of God, the single offensive weapon we have amongst the armor of God or is your sword gathering dust on your bookshelf or the unopened app that you just never seem to have time for? When you come up against conflict in your relationships, do you find yourself getting into heated battles with other people or do you consistently recognize that your battle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual rulers in the unseen realm? Do you rely on your own intelligence, skills, giftings and abilities to get you through the challenges of the day, or do you recognize that without God, you don’t stand a chance? These are just a few examples of the ways that we might be saying that we know God’s word and believe it to be true, but when the pressure comes, we fall back to our own understanding.

Another one of the large areas of vulnerability within the Church is disunity. There are an estimated 40-45,000 Christian denominations active in the world today. When we hear that, I don’t think most of us are grieved the way that we should be about that. Now, some of those breaks were over weighty and important theological disagreements, some of them were over semantics, some were over politics and many over sinful pride on both sides. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are points that, as followers of Christ, we must not only separate from individuals or groups who had claimed to be followers of Christ, but we must also publicly denounce those people and warn others not to follow them. This is something that we do see modeled for us even in the first century Churh in scripture. However, rather than humbly bringing our differences to one another and searching scripture together, wrestling and wrestling until we come to an understanding, we find it so much easier to send people out or go off ourselves and start our own thing. Now, don’t get me wrong, that doesn't mean that you are obligated to continue working in ministry with someone that you don’t agree with on an important topic, BUT... unless you are willing to both walk through the steps of spiritual discipline outlined in Matthew chapter 18 and in the end go as far as to publicly declare them as an apostate, then you are not taking the weight of division as seriously as you ought to. Speaking specifically of the kingdom of darkness, in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” There are numerous warnings against disunity in the Bible and multiple commands and exhortations from Jesus and the apostolic writers to hold fast to the bonds of love. Disunity within the Church is one of the weakest points in our battle against the enemy.

Now, so far, we’ve talked about points of weakness in our defenses. But in Pan’s Grotto at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus made the bold declaration, “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it!” - Matthew 16:18. This statement is not defensive, but offensive. In this spiritual war that we were born into, we are not merely meant to hold the line but to take ground for the Kingdom of Heaven. The way we do that is through the advancement of the Gospel, taking the authority of Christ into every corner of the earth and letting everyone know, both human and people, that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. The battle for our souls has already been won by Christ’s life, atoning and propitiatory death on the cross, and triumphal resurrection which we will be celebrating this weekend. So, the enemy has been defeated, but then why is there still a war?

On January 1st, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln pronounced the executive order known as the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the southern states. While this order immediately granted the legal freedom to everyone held in slavery in the American south, Slavery still persisted for another 2 years because, simply put, there was no X, formerly known as Twitter, back then to let everyone know that they had been freed. It wasn’t until June 19, 1865 that slaves in Texas first learned that their chains had been figuratively broken by a word given from the President over two years prior, which is why the celebration of Juneteenth was established to recognize the culmination of a truth that had actually been put into effect long before its outcome was fully realized. That in-between time is where we are at now, but in the spiritual world. The enemy is defeated, but not everyone knows it yet. Man has been given the gift of reconciliation to God by God, but many people are still blindly trying to find their own way to heaven. There are still countless people who are trapped in bondage, slaves to sin, who do not know that he whom the Son sets free is free, indeed. By taking the gospel into the world and proclaiming the truth of Christ, we are like Major General Gordon Granger taking the emancipation proclamation into the furthest reaches of the land and enforcing the freedom that was declared by our Commander in Chief. The enemy doesn’t want to roll over and admit defeat and isn’t going to let their slaves just go free without any kind of fight, but we already have the receipts for the final victory, bought and paid for by the blood of Christ. This is why the enemy wants to keep us on defense, trapped behind the walls of our church buildings and just trying to keep the darkness out, because he knows that he is fighting on territory that is not his and he doesn’t want us to realize that, too.