Spiritual Warfare

22105 words long.

Published on 2024-08-02

What is Spiritual Warfare?

The problem with the topic of spiritual warfare is not that it is difficult to find useful, understandable guidance on the subject in the Bible. The problem is that there is so much! That is not the only problem. When you are under siege, logic and proportion vanish. Crises bring pain, impatience, shortcuts, and despair. They drain you of energy and wreck your plans. Paranoia or shame separate you from the friends you need to help you get through. Hearing an argument put forth and defended point by point will not do. Even if you agreed that the ideas are sound, the ability to put them into practice is not there.

Where does that leave Biblical principles? Are they robbed of their power? No! We must take our cue from Solomon. It is a matter of the right time.

• The right time to learn Biblical principles on how to prevail in a spiritual battle is before the crisis begins.
• The right person to apply the principles is often not you the sufferer but a fellow Christian walking on stable ground who comes up alongside you.
• The right words from the Bible for the moment may come to you mysteriously and they may not even make sense, but they don't have to make sense for them to begin the healing process. They just have to make sense to the Holy Spirit who is administering them.
• When the first three are not an option, faith in the love of the invisible God can sustain us when we have no support.

It is possible to learn new truths and put them into practice even while under fire. In Dreams I share how I was delivered from persistent nightmares through prayer and meditation on the Psalms and Isaiah, guided to the verses I needed by God's grace. Be grateful when such things happen to you. In my experience, such victories are rare. Take your swimming lessons before you board leaky boats.

The first lesson is NOT to answer the question, "What is Spiritual Warfare?" The first lesson is to define what is Spiritual Growth. Spiritual Growth is what the one who is warring against your soul hopes to stop. Once you know what that second thing is, the first will make more sense. The starting point is the Great Commandment:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them

disputing with one another, and seeing that

he answered them well, asked him,

“Which commandment is the most important of all?”

Jesus answered,

“The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God,

the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God

with all your heart and with all your soul

and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

There is no other commandment greater than these.”

And the scribe said to him,

“You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one,

and there is no other besides him. And to love him with

all the heart and with all the understanding

and with all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself,

is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him,

“You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.

- Mark 12:28-34

Perhaps those people did not dare to ask Jesus any more questions, but I do often. Yesterday I stepped back from the rough outline for this article and knew it was lacking something. I prayed for the wisdom to have something valuable to share with any who read these words. I wrote a few paragraphs more and then set it aside. This morning I had my answer. It was the law of love. That is what spiritual growth is.

It is to grow in our mind, in the apprehension and embracing of what is true and lovely and good and the overflow of that truth into our speech.

It is to grow in our heart, in treasuring the things that God treasures, submitting our emotions to faith in God's provision, and having passion for justice and mercy - with humility. It is receiving wise counsel and sharing it with others.

It is to grow in our strength, devoting our hands to good works, training them in good habits and focusing our time and energy on noble things, not dissipating it on foolish pursuits.

(I lump the soul in with the heart because I have a hard time dividing them. Hebrews 4:12 says the word of God is "Sharper than any double-edged sword" and "it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit". It knows how to do that, but I do not.)

Knowing what Spiritual Growth is, we can now define Spiritual Warfare:

For our soul's enemies, Spiritual Warfare includes everything that tries to make humans hate God and each other. These enemies attack every part of a person: heart, mind and strength. These enemies attack people at every phase of their life. They have separate tactics for each.

For our soul's allies, Spiritual Warfare includes everything that tries to make humans love God and each other. In the words of Paul, "Love always protects." That protection must shield the whole person: heart, mind and strength. That protection must persist across the whole of a person's life.

With the clarity of knowing what is at stake and what is the prize for those who win the victory, we can proceed to the details.

Get to Know Your Ally First

Dangerous ideas have long circulated that distract from assembling the best spiritual defense. I do not know if they are entirely wrong, but they put the focus in the wrong place. Before putting forth some good ideas about how to defend yourself against the enemy, let us push aside some bad ones. Paul said that knowledge puffs up. There is a sort of knowledge that seems indispensable when it comes to battling demons. It is not.

If you suspect that a friend or acquaintance is possessed by a demon or that they or you are oppressed by one, what do you need to know? Some people teach that you need to learn the demon's name in order to cast it out. To get it, you pray over the afflicted person charging the demon in Christ's name to speak and reveal its identity. Then with that knowledge, you can effectively pray for it to be cast out. When I was a new Christian, this idea seemed sensible. I was not yet well acquainted with the story of Job. The way that the story is framed, there is no evidence that during his trials Job knew of the existence of Satan. He certainly had no clue that it was Satan who was afflicting him. His sole focus was on God. That faith sustained him and enabled him to prevail. In like fashion, we do not need to know who or what is afflicting us. Is it a demon? A jealous colleague? A criminal living down the street? A communicable disease? Your own sin? God is stronger than all of them and I see nowhere in Scripture that a person is faulted for being ignorant about the nature of a demon. Yes, Jesus does ask one demon-possessed man, "What is your name?" (Luke 8:30) The answer to that question had meaning to Jesus, who as the Son of God knows all things and therefore the identities of all demons. If we ask such a question and are answered, of what use is it to us? We do not know where to send it, or what is its assigned place or assigned time for judgment. Jesus' normal practice was to not listen to the demons at all, but to shut them up! (Luke 4:33-37)

Spend your time getting to know Jesus by meditating on his Word. Abide in the Spirit. Pray to the Father. God has all the knowledge He needs to deal with your problem. The only deviation from this is when Jesus told his disciples that to cast out a certain demon, in addition to praying they needed also to fast. Is fasting a means of communicating with Satan? No! It is one of the means we are taught to communicate with God. So whatever the problem is, the answer is to spend more and deeper time in prayer, praise and worship of God.

Another idea is that there are territorial spirits. We must identify them and pray against them that the territory, whether a city, region, nation or empire, be freed from their grip and the Holy Spirit take charge. The Book of Daniel is cited for this. Daniel prayed and fasted for weeks before he received an answer to his petition. (Daniel 10:12-13) The angel told him that he was resisted by the "prince of the Persian kingdom", causing the delay. Many think that this prince was a fallen angel. It seems probable that every nation or at least great earthly empire has standing behind it such an angel, whether good or evil. While Paul in Ephesians tells us that we are battling against principalities in the heavenly realms, how does he advise us? We are to pray for kings and all who rule over us. Them we can see. Them we can pray for. Them we can resist if they command evil. As we move in faith in this world, our actions have an impact in the other world but we are not to become preoccupied with that.

Lest someone accuse me of dismissing an important idea in ignorance, I will say this. When I went to Romania in Summer 1991 on a short term mission trip, as soon as I crossed the border I felt something. The nation "felt" different from any place I had ever been. After leaving Hungary, I felt like the spiritual atmosphere over Romania was purer. I knew God was up to something in that place. Two years earlier, I had felt an urgent pull, drawing me irresistibly to study Eastern Europe. In my spirit I felt that something huge was happening in the world, but I didn't know what. It was Summer 1989. I attended a missions conference in July 1989 and heard a Romanian exile named Joseph Tson speak. He prophesied that Communism was about to fall. I was electrified. That Fall it happened exactly as he said. For months I had felt God applying massive spiritual force to the world. He was preparing to topple many nations, but I knew it not. I bet each nation had its own angel in charge. It didn't matter. They all lost their foothold, but not because church people learned a bunch of demon's names and said special prayers. No, Christians had been crying out to God for relief for decades and he answered. That is where you look, at the Father, not at the enemy. Despite the powerful feelings I had during those years and how well they lined up with the idea of territorial spirits, I have never found any use for that knowledge that could improve how I pray or act.

What use was it then? The visceral sense of such things caused me to marvel at God for showing me a glimpse of the great things He was doing. It gave me the insight to understand that God does judge nations and topple empires, just like he promised. It helped me trust ancient prophecies about God's plans. That certainty helped me persevere through years of Bible study and writing when so much didn't make sense. If the Lord can overthrow a beastly empire like Communist Russia in a season, is there anything He cannot do?

Dimensions to Spiritual Warfare

The starting point for victory in spiritual warfare is not knowledge, it is the humble admission of ignorance, emptiness, and powerlessness. The person who admits their need and turns to God for help has taken the first step in acquiring an educated mind, a stout heart and arms strong for the the task of opposing evil and building what is good. In the Spring of 1985, I was conversing with a believer about the Bible. He told me that he was impressed by my Bible knowledge. I said to him, "Yes, I have read the Bible, but I don't understand it." Weeks later I became a Christian. My admission of ignorance was one of the factors that enabled me to be saved.

Later that year, filled with anxiety about my studies, fear about my future and in a general state of depression, I cried out to God, "Jesus, I still don't know if you exist, but if you don't there is no hope for my life." I resolved to place all my hope in Jesus because I knew of no other place to turn. In response, God began to heal and strengthen my emotional core.

As for strength and direction in life, hours after my desperate prayer, the Lord gave me an idea for my bachelors thesis, then the perseverance to spend the next twenty months completing it. That thesis led directly to my first job out of college, which proved to be an excellent start for my career as a software engineer.

A sure mind, a steady heart and a guided and disciplined hand. Those are the three broad areas of life that God assisted me with during my first year as a Christian. I can understand those categories now and see how they surface all over the Bible and all over my life, but at the beginning I knew nothing of such things. The rest of this article will not tell you how to fight the battle. It will tell you how to see it.

Lots of wise Christians have put forth useful ideas about spiritual growth. They shape what they have learned into logical forms. Some of those forms are of their own invention and some are taken straight from the Bible. My preference is to propose categories and processes defined in the Bible. That helps me guard against adding something beyond what God has said or leaving out something vital. I trust the Bible to cover topics as completely as God intended; I do not trust myself to do the same.

What are these categories, these lists of love that the Lord has lavished upon us? Here are the ones that I have discovered. Many are not original with me - which is a good thing!

• The three parts of a person: Mind, Heart and Hand
• The three spheres of hostility: the Devil, the World and the Flesh
• The three forces of temptation: Fraud, Fear and Focus
• The three allies of faith: Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Father
• The three levels of growth: Material Growth, Individual Spiritual Growth, Collective Church Growth
• The Three Kinds of Heavenly Treasures: for Establishing, Nourishing, and Flourishing
• The Spiritual Disciplines
• The Five Voices to ignore : the fools, the sluggards, the quarrelsome, the malicious, the flatterers
• The Five Battlefields: the individual, the workplace, the family, the church, the state
• The Sevenfold Path to a Spiritual Harvest: Preparation, Plowing, Planting, Pouring, Plucking, Producing, Peace
• The Seven Phases of Spiritual Growth: Security, Ability, Stability, Amity, Opportunity, Community, Loyalty
• The Seven Spirits of God: Lordship, Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Might, Knowledge, Fear of the Lord
• The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
• The Law of Christ
• The Whole Armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-20)

Each of these ways of slicing the spiritual world gives you insight into another facet of the problem. Some are diagnostic of your current state while others plot out a course for you to follow to progress towards maturity and peace. This article will introduce them, some in groups and some alone. Many are explored in detail in other articles on this website. If the complexity appears daunting, reflect on Jesus' words:

And he said,

“The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed

on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day,

and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.

The earth produces by itself, first the blade,

then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.

But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle,

because the harvest has come.”

- Mark 4:26-29

The Word of God is infinitely complex, designed by the Creator of the Universe, yet we do not need to understand all that complexity for it to sprout within us and produce a harvest. It is like your doctor prescribing a pill. Do you know its chemical formula? How it was manufactured? How it interacts with the different systems of your body? How it targets your ailment? How your body eliminates it when it is no longer needed? No, you just need to trust your doctor, your pharmacist and the factory that made the pill. You need to trust them, pour a glass of water, and swallow. Yet if you work for the pharmaceutical company designing an improvement to the drug, you need to know these things. If you are the doctor, you need to know the side effects and the characteristics that indicate whether that drug or another will be better for a given patient. And if you are a mature Christian, you need to learn these things if you are to mentor younger people.

When we are infants in the faith, the Lord cares for us like babes. We are short on knowledge and lean on our faith and the assistance of others. Months after I became a Christian, another believer pointed me to a sound Bible study; her advice spared me from joining a pseudo-Christian cult. Then when my new Bible study leader visited churches, I tagged along and ended up at a good one. As we grow older, the Lord steps back. We are expected to grow in maturity and proactively pursue knowledge, just like parents step back when their children become adults. In the sections that follow, I show a few of the things that I have learned related to spiritual warfare. The most important is that this warfare is permitted by God to help us grow. The crises in my life taught me how to distinguish between the voice of God and the voice of the enemy. Without "a time for war", you will never be prepared to enter into the "time for peace".

Temptation, Treasure and Lots of Threes

Spiritual conflict often begins with a temptation. One goal that God has for our spiritual growth is to break the power of temptations that once ruled over us and ruined us so that we may be free from sin and full of good fruit. How do you regard temptation? I grudgingly admit that it is a teacher. When we are drawn to a harmful thing it tempts us because we desire it. When we are chased away from a good thing, we comply because we desire pleasure and holding fast to that good has been made painful by persecution or some other form of hardship. When we fail such a test, our values are clarified. We discover what is important to us and what we merely give lip service to. Temptation is a harsh teacher.

Reflecting on the stories of temptation in the Bible was the first exercise that enabled me to discover the Harvest Pattern of Jesus. Succumbing to temptation is the opposite of gathering a harvest. You learn useful things from negative lessons, but they are incomplete.

A second exercise was meditating on the Parable of the Soils (Matthew 13:21-23). That parable describes three ways in which people fail, each a different kind of temptation. I wrestled for years to understand that parable. Consider how important Jesus regarded it:

And he said to them,

'Do you not understand this parable?

How then will you understand all the parables?'

- Mark 4:13, ESV

The NIV amplifies the importance by saying "understand any parable". I put my understanding alongside Jesus' declaration and they didn't line up. The meaning that I could see did not justify the extreme - even paramount - importance attached to it. That told me that I was missing something big.

The third exercise was reflecting on the spiritual struggles in which I was victorious. These include victories over the fear of death, aimlessness, nightmares, depression, and anxiety. Each time we overcome a temptation, weakness, or character flaw of any kind we reap a new harvest of righteousness. By introspection and prayer, I discovered a pattern to my victories that had escaped me and that pattern matched one found in the Bible. This was a new proof to me of the truth of the Bible's ideas.

The central stories of temptation are the three times that Satan speaks openly: to Eve (in Genesis 3), to the Father (concerning Job in Job 1-2), and to Jesus (when he was tempted in the desert in Matthew 4). (A fourth story is the testing of Peter. We do not hear Satan's words directly, merely that he wanted to "sift [him] like wheat" (Luke 22:31).) These three stories are compared and contrasted in "Three Appointments with Satan" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew. An early result of studying them was discovering the first three threes, which govern:

• our personality
• the enemy's tactics
• the vectors of hostility

Personality. Models for describing human personality abound. The one Jesus employed was simple; it has just three parts:

• the mind (including speech and intellect)
• the heart (including emotions and desires)
• the hand (including habits, plans, goals and actions in the physical realm)

These are the three areas we need to grow, consequently these are the areas that Satan attacks. Satan attacked Eve in all three, and Job, and Jesus. Let's start by looking at Eve:

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman.

“For God knows that when you eat from it

your eyes will be opened, and you

will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree

was good for food and

pleasing to the eye,

and also desirable for gaining wisdom,

she took some and ate it.

She also gave some to her husband,

who was with her, and he ate it.

- Genesis 3:4-6, NIV

Satan tempted Eve with three lies, each directed at a different part of her person. She then accepted each of the three lies and all three parts of her person (and her husband's) were harmed.

1. “You will not certainly die" is a lie about the effect on her physical body, saying it won't harm her strength. Eve's response is to accept that it was "good for food", meaning it will strengthen her body.
2. "Your eyes will be opened" is a lie about the effect on her heart. Her spiritual eyes were darkened and unholy desires entered her heart. Eve's response was to admire the fruit as "pleasing to the eye". Our heart's desires are a fertile battleground for Satan.
3. "You will be like God, knowing good and evil" is a lie about what true wisdom is and how we are to pursue it. Eve then trusted Satan's evaluation that the fruit was "desirable for gaining wisdom". This final assault was against her mind, to believe a lie.

With Job, Satan did not speak to Job directly, because Job was wise about God's words. Instead of leading with lies (the realm of the mind), Satan softened him up with attacks on his strength (in chapter 1 by killing his beloved children, his servants and stealing his wealth) and his heart (in chapter 2 by afflicting him with disease, nightmares and rejection by wife, friends and family). Only then did he invade the dreams of one of his friends to introduce religious lies to attack Job's character and faith. Thus the order of attack was: Job's strength (his hand), his heart and then his mind. This is the same order that showed up in the story of Eve.

Unlike Eve, Job was victorious. God withdrew his hedge of protection from Job temporarily to allow Satan's attacks, then restored it piece by piece. The protection was restored in three phases, one for each facet of Job's being.

1. During the speeches in which Job argued with his friends, God poured wisdom into the man's mind. We know this, because at the end of the book, God endorses the things that Job said.
2. When Elihu enters the scene, he offers Job emotional support, sides with Job against the words of his three friends, and gives wise counsel and promises that God loves him.
3. When God arrives in the Whirlwind, He speaks about how he provides physical assistance to the animals, like food, freedom and assistance with bearing young. Then he restores Job's health, fortune and relationships.

Thus the victory was won in reverse order: the mind, the heart, and the body. This order is critical. It matches the order given in the Parable of the Soils. Temptation and destruction are a harvest in reverse.

Jesus faced the same categories of temptation in the same order, but did not respond in kind.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness

to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days

and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came

and said to him,

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones

to become loaves of bread.”

But he answered,

“It is written,

“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,

but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him

on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him,

“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down,

for it is written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’

and

“‘On their hands they will bear you up,

lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus said to him,

“Again it is written,

‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain

and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

And he said to him,

“All these I will give you,

if you will fall down and worship me.”

Then Jesus said to him,

“Be gone, Satan! For it is written,

“‘You shall worship the Lord your God

and him only shall you serve.’”

Then the devil left him, and behold,

angels came and were ministering to him.

- Matthew 4:1-11

Tactics: The Three Forces of Temptation. The devil's attack was standard:

• Against the body: hunger to tempt Jesus to pursue bread for strength
• Against the heart: accusation to get Jesus to doubt God is his Father and can protect him
• Against the mind: bribe to get Jesus to reject the central truth that only the Lord God is to be worshiped

This brings out Satan's tactics, the three forces that he applies to destroy us:

• Fraud: Satan lies to us
• Fear: Satan bullies us with persecution or hardship
• Focus: Satan distracts us with shiny things that make us leave the path and focus our strength on everything but what we should be doing

Jesus' response was not standard. On every point he responded with an appeal to the Word. On every point he followed the path of growth.

• Instead of feeding his bodily appetite, Jesus feeds his mind on "every word that comes from the mouth of God"
• Instead of succumbing to fear, Jesus derives his confidence and maintains a steady heart by trusting in the Word
• Instead of being distracted by a bribe from his course, he sets his hand on worshiping God and living by God's timetable

Note that by his temptations, Satan tries to get us to prioritize our bodily needs first, then our feelings, and only last worry about the truth. Jesus' responds first with truth, then steadies his heart with that truth, then obeys that truth by committing his actions - his hands - to working for and worshiping God. Make your appetites serve the truth instead of bending the truth to satisfy your appetites.

The Three Spheres of Hostility. Our enemies may be divided into three camps:

• The devil (and all malicious spiritual entities)
• The world (all individuals and groups of people hostile to God)
• The flesh (our sinful nature, the enemy within)

We already dealt with Satan's role in temptation, here is the world's:

For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh,

the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—

comes not from the Father but from the world.

- 1 John 2:16

Much of the Bible is devoted to the world system and its evils. Space does not permit us to repeat it. We mention it here because we must recognize our enemies if we are to at last understand Jesus' Parable of the Soils.

The Three Bad Soils (and one good one!).

After I published Job Rises, I sat down and tried to simplify what I had discovered into a plan for life. I observed that the structure of Job, the unfolding of Jesus' temptation and the Parable of the Sower showed different angles of the same underlying truth. That was the genesis of the Harvest Pattern. Since Job is a type of the suffering servant, his suffering was like Christ's suffering. Thus that much longer book amplified the brief tale of Jesus' temptation until even this deaf person could hear it. The parable warns of failure but in doing so gives us the keys to success. Job is filled with negative theology and so is the parable. By studying what can go wrong, we can find the help to ensure that it goes right.

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat

beside the sea. And great crowds gathered about him,

so that he got into a boat and sat down. And the

whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them

many things in parables, saying:

“A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed,

some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came

and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground,

where they did not have much soil, and immediately

they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil,

but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since

they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds

fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and

choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and

produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty,

some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.”

- Matthew 13:1-9

When the Lord took away hearing in my left ear in January 2005, then gave it back, he was telling me that I was spiritually deaf. In this parable Jesus is challenging us. Do we have ears to hear or not? Verses later in the chapter tell us that the disciples came to Jesus afterwards to ask him to explain what the parable meant. That is hearing. The true hearer goes back to Jesus again and again pleading, "Please explain!"

Jesus spoke to the crowds who left after hearing wise stories and probably thinking they understood the meaning. The disciples were humble and diligent. They asked for more. I was once lazy, like those crowds - but I thought myself like a disciple. You see, I passively read the report of what Jesus told his disciples and thought that qualified me as one who kept after Jesus for more insight. No! There is no substitute for individually approaching Jesus in prayer, or in asking questions of pastors, or in reading books searching for a clearer understanding. No one else can do all the work for you.

It is over a decade since I began to question Jesus about this very parable. Every few years I revisit it and each time derive new insight. Consider the agents at war against the sower who seeks a harvest and their tactics. Jesus told us who they are later in the chapter:

• the bird is the devil and his tactic is to trick you out of believing the gospel by attacking the mind
• the rocky soil is the world which uses suffering (like natural disasters, disease and famine) and oppression (like peer pressure and persecution) to scare you out of believing, attacking the heart
• the thorny soil is your sinful nature which distracts you with desires for pleasure and comfort, to engage your hands with useless activities

The three hostile agents are paired with their three tempting techniques and each attack one of the three dimensions of a person. This parable is elegant and compact. It also drives home another point: time. Planting occurs at the beginning of the growing season. Rapid growth amid rocky soil occurs through the rainy season (which is April to June where I live) and is not interrupted until the midsummer heat beats down. Lastly, the problems with thorns do not become apparent until later in the season, as the harvest draws near. These three temptations do not describe static events. Instead of thinking of the three soils as three types of people, as I was taught, it looks like they are three distinct failure modes in a single harvest process.

After the parable tells us about three failures, it goes on to speak of three successes of different degree. What it does not tell us is how to resist the things that cause failure and obtain an abundant yield.

Three Allies for the Harvester. That question, unasked by the disciples, was the decisive one for me. When I went to the Lord asking how to produce a good harvest, he told me not what to do but who to call, who to lean on for help in each phase of the harvest.

• Jesus is the Word, so he is both sower and seed. He commands the intellect and spoken communication so can protect the mind. He can refute the lies and trickery of the devil and prevent the seed from being snatched by the bird.
• The Holy Spirit is the comforter of the sorrowful, the counselor of the lost. The Spirit soothes emotions and reorients desires. He dwells in the human heart and is the pure water that protects the plants from the heat of the sun.
• The Father is the one who disciplines and guides our hands, pruning the thorny weeds from our lives, teaching us new habits of action. The Father helps us make good plans and is the master of time, the one who is and was and is to come.

I was pleased to see how the Trinity is intimately involved with the process of producing a harvest. This deepened my understanding of the "economic Trinity", how the three equal persons serve different roles in how they act in our world. It also shone a light on how our sanctification proceeds. First our mind must be transformed, then our heart and its desires realigned, before finally we are able to reform our behavior. "Just do it" just doesn't work.

This realization also made it clear that Spiritual Warfare is the impetus that drives the the whole of a faithful person closer to God so that they may be fruitful. When your mind is under assault, you turn to the Word. When your emotions are tattered of your desires frustrated, you turn to the Holy Spirit. And when bad habits threaten to undo you, the Father is there to direct you back to the right path.

How? Each part of us has different ways to communicate with God.

The Spiritual Disciplines

Spiritual Disciplines is fancy way of saying "Ways to talk to God". Almost all of them are mentioned in Job, as I noted in Job Rises and repeat in Job and the Ways to Talk to God. People have written whole books, each on a single one of those means of communication. In regards to Spiritual Warfare, talking to God regularly is one of the best things you can do to protect yourself and be prepared and guided in how to protect others.

The article cited above treats each means of communication separately, but they can't really be separated any more than one God can be split in three. These means can sometimes be associated each with a different member of the Trinity, then strung together in a chain that accomplishes a complete work. One example is repentance.

• Reading the Bible is associated with the Divine Word, which is Jesus. A believer who is reading the Bible often finds words that tell them they have done wrong. As Paul said, "Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith." (Galatians 3:24, KJV)
• The Holy Spirit cuts us to the heart. With deep emotion, we regret their actions, even weep over our sin. Moved by the Spirit, we confess our sin and pray to God for forgiveness.
• With the direction of the Word and the conviction of the Holy Spirit, we may seek a means to do penance and with our hands make some restitution for what we have done. Additionally, we may resolve to change our behavior and form new and better habits. This work of the hands satisfies the Father.

In the example above, a series of actions drawn from different spiritual disciplines connected to one another to engage all three members of the Trinity. However, sometimes the same type of action is expressed differently by the three dimensions of a human, each oriented towards a different person of the Trinity. Prayer can be like that.

• You pray to God to make a petition, plead the promises, or ask for wisdom. You are specially guided by the Bible in how and what you pray. It is the Son whom you address and the prayer engages your mind.
• Next, you pray in the Spirit. "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." (Romans 8:26) Such pray occurs in the deep places of your heart.
• Finally, you pray to the Father, either the exact words of the Lord's prayer or another prayer in the same spirit. Instead of seeking your will, you seek to know the Father's will. This prayer ends in the obedient actions of your hands.

Through prayer, your will and God's will begin to converge.

In the strategy game of Go, there is a concept called "light and heavy". If you defend a territory too heavily, your opponent can expand fast into the territory where you have no presence. If you spread yourself too thin to capture extra territory, your lightly defended territories will fall to your enemy's attack. It is the same way with your spiritual life. Is your faith unbalanced, directed more at one member of the Trinity than the others? This wold turn up in which categories of spiritual disciplines you favor and which you neglect.

Does this concept of having a diversified faith vis-a-vis the Trinity appear strange? A simpler way to look at is like so:

• Are you an intellectual Christian? Is the main focus of your faith reading the Bible, commentaries and books of philosophy, hearing sermons and talking about the ideas of the faith? If so, your faith dwells mostly in your mind, in the realm of the Son.
• Are you an emotional Christian? Do religious passions, ecstatic experiences, and deep sympathy for others define your faith? When you read your favorite Bible stories for the hundredth time, do they still make you weep or rejoice? Are you keenly aware of your own sin, often guided by dreams and visions, or one who frequently speaks in tongues? Do you make yourself available to sit with the suffering or a distraught friend to offer emotional support? If so, your faith dwells mostly in your heart, in the realm of the Holy Spirit.
• Are you a deliberate, active Christian, volunteering at church everywhere that you can? Do you swiftly take action to make amends when you offend? Do you frequently fast or give generously to the church or friends in need? If so, your faith dwells mostly in your hands, in the realm of the Father.

Many of the actions of our faith do not fall entirely under the purview of one member of the Trinity, but a strong enough connection may be inferred to be useful for diagnosing how balanced your is your faith. What follows is my attempt to make such an assignment. Feel free to disagree; the point is not to slice the godhead in pieces but to search your heart and see if you need to make adjustments.

I know which part of my faith life is strongest: the mind. I read and study the Word, seek patterns in it and scour church history and works of theology for answers. Then I structure and write about what I found.

I know which part of my faith life is weakest: the hand. The Father is in charge of time and planning. I am terrible at planning. He is also in charge of pruning us to help us find focus. I am unfocused in many areas of life.

So where are you strongest and weakest? Here are some Spiritual Disciplines (or subcategories of them), broken by the member of the Trinity with the closest affinity to that means of communication. This list is illustrative, not exhaustive.

• The Mind: Jesus, God the Son
  • Prayers of the Mind:
    • Petition
    • Pleading the promises
    • Asking for Wisdom
  • Bible focused activities like:
    • Reading the Bible
    • Memorizing the Bible
    • Reading commentaries, theology books
    • Listening to sermons, attending conferences
    • Learning what God values
    • Recalling a guiding verse in time of need
  • Journaling
  • Pursuing a Godly conversation with a friend
  • Receiving a word of knowledge
  • Listening to a living prophet
  • Receiving an informational message from an angel
  • Hearing audible words from God
• The Heart: God the Holy Spirit
  • Prayers of the Heart
    • Praying in the Spirit. "In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans." (Romans 8:26)
    • Supernatural burdens: When the Spirit tells you to pray for someone in deep need and you didn't even know they were in trouble.
  • Practicing the presence of God.
  • Receiving words of counsel from the Spirit
  • Offering words of counsel to others, prayerfully
  • Receiving words of comfort and strength from an angel
  • Meditating on the Psalms
  • Singing praise to God
  • Having dreams and visions
  • Treasuring the things of God in your heart (like the Virgin Mary did in Luke 2)
  • Inexplicable and inexpressible things
• The Hand: God the Father
  • Marveling at God's works in nature
  • Suffering in faith
    • Normal human suffering
    • Persecution for the Name
  • Observing the Sabbath
  • Praying the Lord's Prayer
  • Fasting
  • Offering sacrifices:
    • as penance for your sin
    • as charity, for others
  • Entering full time Christian service in the role of pastor, missionary or something else
  • Receiving miracles of healing
  • Being assisted materially and physically by an angel
  • Seeing God via a Theophany
  • Casting lots (which is a weird one)

Explaining all these associations would make this article unnecessarily long, but a few are worth noting. The assignment of verbal, intellectual practices to the Son should make sense. Concerning the second category of the Spirit, a Pentecostal could probably add a lot of additional interactions. Indeed, I have a hard time defining some of my own experiences in the Spirit. That leaves the Father, whose domain of the hand is the realm of physical actions, plans and time management. His ways are the most mysterious. To many new Christians, fasting makes no sense, even though it is a common practice in many religions. By depriving the body of food, you are taking a physical action. You are saying that the sustenance you most need is not of your body but of your spirit.

Fasting is a voluntary form of suffering. You pursue it because Jesus and others have told you that it is a meaningful activity that God honors. It is the involuntary suffering that torments and perplexes us. Yes, it is obviously related to the physical realm of body and hand, but it seems far from spiritual. Much suffering seems meaningless. Most of us are not equipped like Job to get to the bottom of it. Suffering IS a means whereby God communicates to us. That was one of the most important things that I learned while doing research for Job Rises. God has used it to speak to me many times, but sometimes it takes years for me to figure out what that message is. However, suffering fails in its mission if you lack faith. The person who suffers yet retains their faith in God receives a blessing, just as Job did. My experience with Janet Sullivan, as expressed in Hannah's Song, underscores this. From Janet I learned that the benefit for suffering in faith does not always accrue to us. The blessing is received by the people around us who are moved by our example. When I witnessed Janet's faith in the midst of a terminal illness, it changed me. The message carried by her suffering came from God through her to me (and to others who knew her). I was filled with tears of compassion and then a powerful joy that delivered me from a decade of depression.

This truth about suffering is of consolation only to those who love God and their neighbor in fulfillment of the commandment. Only such a person can understand Paul's words:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,

but in humility count others more significant

than yourselves. Let each of you look not only

to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

- Philippians 2:3-4

To love others so much that you are willing to suffer for them is only possible if the Holy Spirit dwells in your heart. Reflecting on this as well as on a significant challenge I faced early in my Christian life, I concluded that one of these means of communicating with God deserves special attention: sacrifice.

Sacrifice

When I became a Protestant, I formed an impression that sacrifice was downplayed. The Jews had an elaborate sacrificial system, the Catholics (whose beliefs I once held) a penitential system, but we had Jesus offering the only sacrifice for sin that would ever be needed. This minimization of sacrifice is not based on Baptist dogmatics but on my gut reaction to what I was taking in at church, in small group fellowship, or in my reading. We might talk of commitment or of perseverance, of "the sacrifice of praise" or tithing, but not sacrifice in a direct and vivid way.

This is not to say that all talk of sacrifice was absent. It attaches itself to many facets of my Baptist faith. We sacrifice our time. We forgo activities in which the world indulges. We sacrifice much of our freedom in search of a greater freedom. Like many, I refuse to work on the Sabbath, which can create friction with employers. We are asked to sacrifice our pride. By professing belief in ideas that the world rejects, this may cause us to sacrifice our reputation.

This strange ambivalence incited a conflict in me. Someone shared with me an idea that became a first step toward harmony. They explained what Jesus meant by these words, delivered to people who complained that Jesus consorted with tax collectors and sinners:

Go and learn what this means:

‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’

For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

- Matthew 9:13

As a person prone to taking things literally, this had been my core verse on the place of sacrifice in the Protestant faith. I took it to mean that God didn't want sacrifice any more. Alas, those words mean the opposite! No, more than the opposite. They call us to lives of even greater sacrifice than we could imagine. Jesus was telling us to sacrifice "sacrifice". My friends' insight into what Jesus meant was this:

Jesus is telling us to love mercy, not the things we must sacrifice to show it. We must be happier about blessing our friend than we are mournful over what we had to give up in the process. Otherwise, we are like the host of one of Solomon's proverbs:

Do not eat the food of a begrudging host,

do not crave his delicacies;

for he is the kind of person

who is always thinking about the cost.

“Eat and drink,” he says to you,

but his heart is not with you.

You will vomit up the little you have eaten

and will have wasted your compliments.

- Proverbs 23:6-8, NIV

In those days, I was reading The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In that book he harangued against "cheap grace". He believed that God's grace was both free and costly. Recall the man in Jesus' parable who found the treasure in the field (in Matthew 13:44), then sold all he had to buy that field? That is a steep cost. I am proud to say that I recognized how great the cost of following Jesus was. I accepted Bonhoeffer's words, attempted to put them into practice and failed. The sacrifices he said that Jesus called upon us to offer were more than I could bear.

I no longer feel that way. My change in perspective required decades of struggle and the learning of more than one lesson. Before I share a few of the stories of experiences that changed me, it is important to clear up what sacrifice is.

Definition and Process

Sacrifice is a way to say to God or your neighbor, "I love you. You matter to me. You are more important to me than the things I am giving up." That may seem obvious to you, but it wasn't to me. Sacrifice is a form of communication. The old proverb that comes to mind is "Actions speak louder than words."

Life and the Holy Spirit's whispering periodically set before you an opportunity to offer a sacrifice or not. What makes "the cost" that Bonhoeffer wrote about high or low? What motivates a person to pay that cost? My failures sprang from placing too great a focus on one side of the equation. Sheer will mixed with gratitude for Christ's sacrifice on the cross could only carry me so far. One by one, I identified a series of truths that liberated me from this situation of despair and failure in following Christ. Once you understand and accept these truths, a marvelous change will come over you. It begins with the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

1. The starting points are the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) and the Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:36-40).
2. Like the lyrics from a Foreigner song, "I want to know what love is." I needed someone to show me. (John 13:34-35)
3. By seeing the Church model love and reading how Paul defines it (1 Corinthians 13), I learned what love is.
4. By trying and failing, I discovered that the Cost to love my neighbor and my God and so fulfill the Golden Rule is high. (Matthew 10:39, 16:25)
5. At the same time, I lamented that I am materially, emotionally and spiritually poor; I do not have the resources to meet my neighbor's needs. (Revelation 3:17-18)
6. I learned that by faith, if I ask, seek, and knock, God will supply me with the resources I need. (Matthew 7:7-10)
7. Jesus tells us to pursue heavenly treasures... (Matthew 6:19-21)
8. ... but I did not know what those treasures are; they are hidden. (Job 28, Proverbs 25:2, Colossians 2:3)
9. By searching for wisdom as instructed by Proverbs, I discovered what those true treasures are. (Proverbs 2)
10. By offering sacrifices, I replaced my old, materialistic values with a desire for heavenly treasures. (Romans 12:2)
11. With a new heart that values what God values, the sacrificial cost of loving God and neighbor did not seem so high. (Hebrews 12:1-4)
12. With this altered emotional appraisal of the cost, the difficulty of serving God and neighbor was diminished and I made progress toward spiritual maturity. (James 1:2-5)

The critical discovery was that when your value system changes, so does the cost of discipleship. When you realize that the things you once treasured and which were hard to give up have little value, then the sacrifice of valuables metamorphoses into a trade of trash for treasure. The journey to get to that point, however, is paved with sacrifices made before that transformation is complete. While you are making the early ones, they are painful. Here is a sampling from my life. Lest I sound like I am bragging, I know people who have sacrificed far more than I in order to follow the Lord. What I sacrificed is not remarkable; what the Lord did for me is. The blessings we receive in response far exceed what we offer. God is gracious. The list I give is meant to show that to transform a whole life, you need a burnt offering. In the ancient Jewish sacrificial system, the burnt offering consumes everything, unlike some of the offerings which left part of the food to be shared with priest or family. That means that sacrifices must be made in every area of your life, otherwise that part of you will remain unchanged. I do not know if I have yet made sacrifices in every area of my life, but I am getting there.

Love

Love touches everything. No progress in the Christian faith is possible without some knowledge of love and commitment to act in love. In the Spring of 1985, I learned three lessons about love. First, a woman named Jenifer who witnessed to me about the love of Jesus gave me an illuminated poster that she had drawn. The words on the poster were taken from 1 Corinthians 13, Paul's chapter on love. This taught my mind God's definition of love. Second, the woman's church demonstrated Christian love by how they treated each other. A popular hymn from that era said, "They will know we are Christians by our love." I could not put my finger on what was different about them but the kindness and consideration they showed each other made an impact on my heart. With mind and heart enlightened about love, one thing remained: my hands. One way the hands put into practice the truths of God is though sacrifice.

I was midway through a decade of depression. My habit was to sing "songs in the night" (Job 35:10, Psalm 77:6). Singing from a song book called "Sour Notes" was how I kept from sobbing myself to sleep from loneliness. My moral compass was starting to crack. I was ready to do anything and break any commandment just to find somebody to be with. Despite this willingness, women took no interest in me. When I hit my low point in January 1985, I cried out to God and gave Him two weeks to show himself. After the deadline passed and God did not show, I weighed my options for how to turn my life around and find happiness and decided there were three. One was to find God. That wasn't working - and I had tried ooooh so hard, uttering a single prayer, hadn't I - so I considered my next option, finding a different kind of work to do than study physics that would make me happy. I was so drained from studying that any thought of work was repugnant. That left the third option: finding a girlfriend. I decided that my best chance at happiness was to sign up for square dance lessons, meet a gorgeous young woman from another university, fall madly in love and live happily every after.

When people search for a source of meaning in life, religion, work and relationships are three of the most popular. I was drifting through a life of despair, unable to formulate plans and stick to them. The fact that I had a moment of clarity where I weighed options, made a choice and pursued it was unusual. That choice said something about me. I had finally settled upon what I thought would save me from depression and meaninglessness, and it was not God. That meant that finding a woman was the idol that I served. Mercifully, God had a plan to handle that. I took square dance lessons and in February 1985 met a woman from another university - and she was a Christian. She shared her faith with me and at the end of April I gave my life to Christ.

It was through Jenifer that I first saw the power of God. Tragically, I saw it in reverse. As she got closer to me, Jesus began to withdraw his power from her life. One symptom was that she began to mistrust her church friends. It got to the point that she suggested that we move in together. With an insight far wiser than any I had ever had, I knew what was going on. I was a bad influence on her faith, a faith that had once sustained her and was now in danger of being extinguished. I knew that the best thing for her soul was for me to leave her. I was five years into a terrible depression and she was the only source of joy and hope in my life. She was everything to me. She showed me what love was and now I showed it to her, the day I broke up with her. That was the first sacrifice I ever offered to God.

By offering that relationship to God, I was partially delivered from the idolatrous power of romantic love. Fighting idols is the epitome of spiritual warfare. Did God reward me by quickly finding me a wife? No, marriage would have to wait another nine years. What God did do was teach me the kind of selfless love that a good and strong marriage requires. Love does not spring from romance, a healthy romance springs from love. God gave me hope to endure the years of struggle and growth that remained ahead of me. Only after my character had been strengthened would I make a fit husband for anyone.

By sacrificing a chance for love before I was mature enough to handle it, the Lord showed me what love is. Knowing that opens up the possibility of obeying the commandments and keeping the Golden Rule, but from where does the power to consistently love come? How do we obtain those material and emotional resources so that we have them to offer others? Those questions cannot even be asked so long as you believe that deep down inside, there is nothing in you that anyone would ever want to love. Finding a source of inner worth is the challenge of forming a Christian identity.

Identity

"Who are you?" When my Christian counselor asked me this question, it made me angry and afraid. Why such a strange response? If the answer was that I was a hypocrite hiding deep sin, even criminal behavior, my response would have been to feel shame or guilt and become evasive. If I suffered amnesia or dementia, I would have felt sorrow over losing myself. It was none of those things. I didn't even know what an answer to that question would be like. How do you define your identity?

There are people who are comfortable with who they are. They see little need to change. Then there are people who are trying to reinvent themselves to get past a failure. Some people try to define their identity by their own efforts while others allow themselves to be reshaped by the pressures of the strong-willed people around them. None of these approaches is the correct one. We must cooperate with God in our metamorphosis. He knows what the best version of me is and how to get there. Only the Lord knows what it is to be a perfect human. Only Jesus can be our guide and surgeon.

Which is more foundational, being or doing? When you meet people, what do they talk about first?

• If doing is more important to them, they talk about work and accomplishments.
• If being is more important to them, they talk about family and status.
• If they have no pride in either, they talk about the weather or who won last night's game.

I was raised to pursue excellence and accomplish great things. My father patented the face-pumped laser, my mother programmed nuclear submarines, and my uncle designed the rendezvous radar for the first lunar landing in 1969. In my family we defined our identity by our work and its results - and I had none. That left me with nothing to talk about. My life was barren.

The pervasive feeling of barren purposelessness nearly got me expelled from college for poor academic performance. I came to faith four-and-a-half years into my studies at MIT. A few months later, the Lord directed me to read Habakkuk. In chapter three I found my mantra, the prophet's psalm of barrenness.

Though the fig tree may not blossom,

Nor fruit be on the vines;

Though the labor of the olive may fail,

And the fields yield no food;

Though the flock may be cut off from the fold,

And there be no herd in the stalls—

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord,

I will joy in the God of my salvation.

The Lord God is my strength;

He will make my feet like deer’s feet,

And He will make me walk on my high hills.

To the Chief Musician. With my stringed instruments.

- Habakkuk 3:17-19, NKJV

I programmed my computer to print Habakkuk 3:17-19 out every time I logged in. For eighteen months I meditated on those words every day. I learned to imitate the prophet and praise God from a barren heart. In August 1985, I prayed, "God, I still don't know if you exist, but if you don't, there is no hope for my life." I chose to place all my hope in Jesus.

That was the first part of my next sacrifice, the sacrifice of praise. It is no small thing to praise God when you see no evidence of His benefits in your life. To sustain that praise daily for the better part of two years was an impossibility. Only by God's grace had I the faith to do that. I prayed for a blessing, and when I finally got my diploma in 1987 I received it, but which blessing is of greater worth, the diploma or the faith that got me there? I had my blessing all along but I did not know the value of the thing that I had.

So is the cure for a barren heart to fill it with accomplishments? Consider the conundrum facing God. He promises fruitful harvests to those who love and obey Him. He must keep His promises. However, He also opposes the proud. When a person builds their sense of self worth upon their own accomplishments, the pride of doing becomes an idol. Our identity must not be built upon what we do. Must God's blessing bring a curse?

That prayer of hope in August and the beginning of my meditation upon Habakkuk in Autumn 1985 was the start of a harvest season. The end was the day I graduated from MIT in June 1987. In between came a miracle. Like many miracles, it started small. I was alone and knew I needed help, so I decided to search for a Bible study. A Christian named Chavonne had once shown me a small kindness, so I sought her advice. Independently, another group also invited me to a Bible study, but I didn't know them. My friend recommended the United Christian Fellowship, affiliated with Intervarsity (IVCF), so I joined theirs. Had I not, I would have joined a pseudo-Christian cult instead.

At my first Bible study meeting (likely in October 1985) the leader, Paul Anderson, asked us all to memorize a passage from Galatians:

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live,

but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body,

I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and

gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God,

for if righteousness could be gained through the law,

Christ died for nothing!

- Galatians 2:20-21

The words made no sense to me, but I dutifully memorized them. I even wrote a song based on them, with words long forgotten. This is the power of God's Word. Even though you do not understand the words, they begin to change you. How do they change you? They make you into the kind of person who can understand them and follow them and be blessed by them.

What are those words about? They are about identity. They are about your old identity dying and a new one taking its place, an identity built upon the crucified Christ. A few weeks after I memorized those words, a change overtook me. I would be walking down the street, thinking about my plans for this or that. All of a sudden, a thought would intrude that rejected that plan and suggested another, better plan. Back and forth I would wrestle with what course of action to take. This strange sensation recurred several times during that month. Eventually I stopped wrestling.

It would be a long time before I learned what was going on. I had a new counselor inside of me, guiding me. With a new identity came a new spirit, the Holy Spirit. That was the whispering voice. At the end of the month I would hear a shout.

A recurring dream took over my sleep. The imagery and outcome might make it seem a nightmare, but I call it one of the greatest blessings of my life. In the dreams, I was sitting in bed, running an electric razor over my face. Suddenly, the razor shorted and electricity coursed through my body. I was being electrocuted! In the instant of my death in the dream, what final thought passed through my head? Was I sad about the people I would never see again? Disappointed over not having accomplished anything with my life? Angry at God because I was leaving behind an unfinished life?

No! My final thought before I woke from my dream was that I was going to be with Jesus. I was at complete peace.

This struggle of trusting myself to other believers for added strength, of memorizing unintelligible words, listening to the Spirit, and joyfully accepting death if it meant I would be with Jesus was a spiritual battle. That battle was against the idol of success and accomplishment. I had come to believe that even if I did nothing more with my life, I was accepted. Jesus would take me just as I am.

Graduating from college did not bring me peace. Accomplishments did not bring me acceptance. Acceptance by God and peace with God are what led me forth to victory. That is how God solved the paradox. We can reap a harvest and be humble, knowing that our accomplishments are a gift, not the coin we use to buy peace from God.

Eternal security is transformative. That would have been enough for me. For thirty-six years I was sure I knew the the full meaning behind that dream. For thirty-six years I was sure I had already received the full benefit of that dream. During those thirty-six years, I fought with my dad, stopped talking to him for three years, fought with him some more, and prayed for his salvation. Toward the end, when he reached his eighties, he began to soften, but still I had no assurance about his salvation. He had been so hostile towards religion, God and the church. Some of the things he did and said gave me scraps of hope that he was turning towards God. Then he became ill and was admitted to the hospital. He was ninety-five years old. I drove to Schenectady from Boston to see him. He asked me to fetch an item from his apartment. I went and got it and changed its batteries. When I handed the item to him he was so happy. I shot a video of him on my phone as he sat on the side of his bed, shaving with his electric razor. A few days later he died in his sleep. That video of him using an electric razor in his bed was the last picture I took of him while he was alive. For thirty-six years the image of using an electric razor while in bed had symbolized only one thing to me, going to be with Jesus to enjoy peace forever. That is how I know my father is in heaven.

I sacrificed my ambition and my need to accomplish great things to find my self worth. I hold a physics degree from MIT and come from an accomplished family. That sacrifice was not easy and it was a spiritual battle. The reward was decades later knowing my father is safe in heaven. That is the thing about faith. We do not always know what the rewards for our sacrifices will be at the time that we make them. We do know that they will remake who we are and give us a new identity.

Emotional Stability

To love your neighbor, what do you need? You need wisdom to know how to help. You need emotional strength and stability, so that you can bear your own burdens AND theirs, for as Paul said, "Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2, NIV) Lastly, you often need material resources like money, medicine, or food. Collectively, those three require that your mind, heart and hands be full. Part of the spiritual battle against your soul is to convince you that your mind, heart and hands are empty. The enemy blinds you to the riches you have in Christ.

By late 1988, despite progress in my faith, I still suffered from depression, anxiety and general emotional instability. Earlier I referred to Janet Sullivan with reference to the article Hannah's Song. Despite an appeal from the pulpit at church, I refused to visit Janet, who suffered from a terminal illness and lived in in a nursing facility a block from my apartment. I was depressed and convinced that visiting a sick person would make me more depressed. I lacked the emotional strength to help. I was empty.

I am convinced that the Lord orchestrated the whole situation. Only when I learned that she lived a block from my apartment along the forty-five minute route I walked to church did my heart soften. Of everyone in my church, I was literally her only neighbor. Now when I said that I was adverse to visiting the sick, it was not for a trifling cause. A few years before I helped throw an Easter party for children in the burn unit at the Shriner's Hospital for Children. Seeing all those deformed children was traumatic. It was more than I cold handle. Effects of that experience were keeping me from visiting the sick.

To visit Janet, I had to sacrifice my emotional comfort. I had to risk being traumatized all over again. What did I find? Was it as bad as I feared? I found a woman in more physical pain than I had ever seen before. Nor have I seen anyone in such pain since. After I left her room following my visit, I wept harder for Janet than I had ever wept for another person. I feared a heartbreaking visit and I was not wrong to fear it. What I was wrong about was the after effect. When I visited the children at Shriner's, I was not a Christian. When I visited Janet, I was. The visit did not destroy me, it healed me. The Holy Spirit entered my heart in a new way and after the tears stopped, joy flooded my soul. The joy remained for a week. During that time, part of the meaning of Philippians was opened to me. Because of that time, I was delivered from a decade of depression. In the rarest event of my life, my sacrifice was instantly accepted and I was instantly blessed. It was like the fire coming down on Mount Carmel to consume Elijah's sacrifice.

Emotional safety is not something a Christian is called upon to sacrifice once. For me, Janet was just the beginning. A few weeks after I visited Janet, a man named Craig visited my church. He was a homeless Vietnam vet, a recovering alcoholic and drug user, and a habitual gambler with a temper. Fresh out of experiencing the miraculous power of God to heal, I invited Craig to live with me. For six months I befriended Craig. I prayed with him, brought him to church meetings, and got my friends to gather round him for support. The emotional toll on me was immense. A mature, healthy, well-rounded person with experience in social work would have been taxed to their limits by such a man. I had none of those things. At one prayer meeting, he began speaking in a different, frightening voice. Either he was possessed by a demon or was suffering multiple personality disorder. I was drowning.

To get away, I visited my family in New York. Then I rode a Greyhound bus back to Boston. I knew I had to make a decision. To survive emotionally, I needed to tell Craig to leave. To help my friend for whom Christ died, I needed to let Craig stay. The spectre of the guilt I would feel if I turned him away was unbearable. Emotional turmoil threatened to rip me apart. The sacrifice of my comfort and emotional safety was far greater than what I had made when I visited Janet, and in the middle of this crisis with Craig, Janet had died.

What would God do? Did He have any regard for the pain I was in? Did he have any advice on what decision I should make? Was my sacrifice in vain?

God did not abandon me. In fact, the Lord did something while I was riding that bus back to Boston. The bus was crowded and noisy. Then it was like someone slowly turned down the volume knob on a stereo. My fellow riders were all still chattering, but now they sounded far away. Then I heard a voice:

I knew what to do. I put aside my emotions and made a clear headed decision. I asked Craig to leave my apartment, but I helped him find a new place and continued to visit and befriend him. I found a way to preserve my mental health by setting sane boundaries without giving up on a friend.

That is the only time in my life that God has spoken to me audibly. He uttered five little words. They helped me get through that crisis but also have helped me navigate others. That day I began to learn that our emotions are good at telling us that a decision is urgently needed, but bad at telling us what decision to make.

I know that what I heard was God's voice because the wisdom was far beyond me. He didn't tell me what to do, He taught me how to be. Those words went deep.

An actual soldier, possibly demon-possessed. If anything in my life qualifies as "spiritual warfare", that would be it. Sacrificing my time, emotional health, and a spot in my apartment was not a trivial affair. If anything from my life can convince a person that offering sacrifices to God is still important and can yield an unexpected boon, my time with Craig would be it. I did not by my sacrifice earn an audience with God. It was all grace. It was probably the Holy Spirit that gave me the compassion to help in the first place. That means that the inclination and ability to make the sacrifice was itself a gift. What is certain is that if you find yourself making a great sacrifice for God, whatever the source of motivation, you can expect a response from God. The nature of the response may be a surprise, but it will be good, for the Father gives good gifts to His children. (Matthew 7:11)

Money

When I was a teen, I was also a thief. I stole a comic book from one friend and a few sci-fi books from another. I even shoplifted comics from a newsstand, then got caught by my father. He marched me up to the clerk and said, "Should we call the police?" I am grateful to my father for teaching me that lesson. After that day, I never stole again. However, that was not the worst part. All that time I believed I was not materialistic. I didn't want nice clothes or a fancy car or a new motorcycle. All I wanted to do was read, which is intellectual, not materialistic, right? How much emotional energy does it take to power the self-deception of a thief that believes he is not a selfish, shallow materialist? Then after I was reformed, how low did I have to set my sights to believe that not stealing is worthy of merit? The opposite of stealing isn't not stealing, it is giving. Proverbs 30:15a says, "The leech has two daughters: Give and Give." Even after I stopped being a thief, I remained a leech. Becoming a Christian changed that, but progress was slow.

A few years after college, I had a good job and had saved a little money. I got an invitation to view a time share resort in New Hampshire with the lure of a free weekend and no obligation. I had zero interest in buying real estate, so I went up there with a friend to enjoy a free vacation. The salesperson was good. He didn't try to sell me real estate, he tried to sell me a lifestyle of luxurious travel. I fell for it and signed a contract. That night or the next I had a nightmare. I was trapped inside an electrified cage. Inside the cage was a fire breathing demon from hell. (It looked like a dragon from a video game I played too much of.) This was the biggest case of buyer's remorse in history. Thanks to a state law that gives buyers a three-day right of rescission, I canceled the contract.

God sent me that dream as a warning, to save me from becoming financially ensnared in the ways of the world. As Jesus said, "the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful." (Mark 4:19) My pride at being a faithful Christian free from greed with no desire to become wealthy had blinded me to just how deceitful riches can be. What did I do next?

Due to a merger and layoff, I was now at a new company. I received a payout from my retirement account with the previous firm. With my recent folly still fresh, I prayed to the Lord and asked what I should do with the money. I named the exact and full amount of the check I had received in my prayer: $8,000. Then I waited. A few days later I attended a prayer meeting. A person at the meeting said that a place where they volunteered, Daybreak Crisis Pregnancy Center, had an urgent need. She said that they needed $8,000.

I had my answer to prayer. That is when the spiritual battle began. Remember the rich young ruler?

And as he was setting out on his journey,

a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him,

“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

And Jesus said to him,

“Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.

You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder,

Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness,

Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’”

And he said to him,

“Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.”

And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him,

“You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have

and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;

and come, follow me.”

Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful,

for he had great possessions.

- Mark 10:17-22

The Lord had answered my prayer. He had told me what I lacked. He was not asking me to sell all that I owned, just hand over one check to a worthy charity. That amount was a little over half of what I owned. Months before I was ready to foolishly spend a similar amount on a timeshare. I was not blind. The selfish disposition of my heart was laid bare. You know that I was trying to find a way out of it, but I knew the scriptures. As Solomon said:

Be not rash with your mouth,

nor let your heart be hasty to utter

a word before God, for God is in heaven

and you are on earth.

Therefore let your words be few.

- Ecclesiastes 5:2

I went to my pastor, told him what was going on, and asked him to pray for help in making the right decision. Then I gave the money to the pregnancy center anonymously, because I also felt convicted that my pride would try to salvage some personal benefit out of it.

In the Bible, people who made sacrifices often went to God with an urgent request. It might be to have a child, as with Hannah, or to gain wisdom, as with Solomon. Some preachers of the health and wealth gospel tell you that if you give to God it is like sowing seed; you will reap an even greater material reward. I at least had the sense not to pray for money. Given the battle inside my heart, I knew exactly what to pray for. I asked, "Lord, please give me a generous heart."

In the thirty plus years since that prayer, did God shower me with money so that I could be generous to others? No. I have twice been to the brink of bankruptcy. My family has had our utilities shut off, been without phone service, had to get assistance from our church just to buy groceries, delayed home repairs and medical procedures, pulled our kids from private school, and more. The last few years have been prosperous, not so most of the years before that. Through it all, the Lord has made me generous. When we had no money, we volunteered our time at the church. When we had a little, we gave what we could and more.

Giving does not make you generous. Generosity makes you give. Trying to give showed me who I was and who I wanted to become. That sacrifice was not proof that I was a good person, it was a prayer to become one.

Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord,

and he will repay him for his deed.

- Proverbs 19:17

Here is the thing about God. He gives us more than we ask for or can imagine. More than thirty years after I made that gift, God gave me something unexpected in return. My gift of money was intended to help free women whom I would never meet from an oppressive burden, enduring a pregnancy without financial or family support. In December 2020, I prayed to God asking, "Lord, what is your plan for liberating women from oppression?" Over the next week, the Lord answered my prayer by opening up my eyes to mysteries hidden in His Word. Then during the years since, he has shown me more. Much of what I learned is in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew and Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. It includes the The Motherhood Pattern and my ideas on women serving in church leadership, summarized in Against Complementarianism.

The lesson here is that we can never be sure what the long range effects of the things we do will be. What the Lord freely gave me in return far surpassed my expectations. He changed me. He gave me a concern for helping women that I never had before. God changed my money which will perish into generosity, a treasure which will never spoil or fade.

Time

One of the rare statements that is found in all four gospels (with only small differences in wording) is this:

For whoever would save his life will lose it,

but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

- Matthew 16:25

Life is many things, but it is measured by time. The one who loses his life is the one who devotes time in service to the Lord. They may even make choices that cut their life short. The sacrifice of time is tied up in all the other sacrifices. Rather than dig for a powerful, insightful example from my life, I will offer a prosaic one. Only one of the Ten Commandments makes reference to time: the fourth commandment to honor the sabbath. The other sacrifices may be offered in an instant, or span a few days, months or years. Observing the sabbath is a life long sacrifice. One day in seven, week after week, year after year, devoted to attending church, prayer or simply time with family. The Lord calls upon us to regard his sabbath with delight. This is the backbone sacrifice. Its regularity forms the structure of a life obedient to God.

What heavenly treasure does God shape from the time we offer him? Eternity, the sabbath rest of God.

Power

Depending upon our talents and ambitions, power takes many forms. For me, I believed that my dreams held messages from God that I was to use to advise other people. I have had dreams from God. They are mostly warnings. Some are words of comfort. They are usually only for me and my family. When I was younger, I thought otherwise. I craved the power to influence other people - for their own good, of course. The trouble this caused I describe in Dreams. I had to repent of this lust for power and misuse of the gifts God had given me. I had to sacrifice something that I considered part of my identity, something that made me feel powerful and important.

When you sacrifice power, you receive meekness. Most people have no use for meekness. Many have it unwillingly but would like to be rid of it. Jesus said that the meek will inherit the earth. I believe it now.

Purpose

How do you find a noble purpose for which you are suited and gifted by God? Ecclesiastes has a lot to say about what is futile and vain, a chasing after the wind. Peace, like Solomon Never Knew devotes eight chapters to the things that Solomon calls futile:

• Workaholism
• Intellectualism
• Altruism (Noble causes)
• Religious formalism
• Vainglory-ism (Fame)
• Absolutism (power)
• Revolutionary extremism
• Materialism (wealth)
• Hedonism
• Adventurism (mad thrill-seeking)
• Nihilism
• Self-determinism

People around me have often told me what I was trying is futile. When do you listen to people who tell you what you can and can't do? When do you ignore them?

• My first semester physics professor at MIT told me I would never make a good physicist.
• The mission agency and my pastor told me I was not cut out for missionary service.
• Then while enrolled in seminary, I came to the tearful realization that I was not called to be a pastor.
• Concerning writing, many people - including a best friend and a pastor - told me I would never succeed at writing.

Sometimes we have to sacrifice one dream and trust in God to give us another.

Sometimes we have to pursue a dream with no guarantee and follow it far with little to show for it.

I have done both. On this subject, I do not know how it will turn out. The real sacrifice is not the dream, it is the anger. I have to forgive the people who do not believe in me. They may be right. I may have a strong will to succeed and I may run a Hollywood strive-and-succeed montage through my mind on a continuous loop, but that does not mean God will smile upon my plans. I have to sacrifice the "I'll show them!" speech. The Lord is the only audience that matters.

Moses thought that his purpose was to lead the Hebrew people into the Promised Land. He messed up and that purpose was handed to Joshua. David wanted to build the temple, but he messed up. That purpose was handed to Solomon. Those men did not give up. They were faithful to complete what they were permitted to do. Sacrificing our expectations of the things we thought we would get to do is one of the most painful sacrifices a person can make. What will the outcome be when we do this? What will the Lord make of it? I am still trying to figure that one out.

What I have figured out is that God takes the futile, temporary, small and insignificant things we do and shapes them into eternal wonders. We must live our lives doing things we are convinced are pointless with the faith that they are not. A few months before I became a Christian, a classmate named Chavonne, hearing that I would soon graduate, said, "I'll miss you." She said it with kindness and sincerity. About ten months later, when I was a new Christian and needed a recommendation for a good Bible study, to whom did I turn? I went to Chavonne. I went because of that one kind thing she said to me. When I mentioned this to her years later, she had completely forgotten that conversation. It was a meaningless, friendly gesture, the kind we toss off all the time. No big deal. Except I was the kind of person who seldom heard such words of kindness and it meant something to me. Because of that, I trusted her recommendation. Because of that, I did not end up in the damaging cult that invited me to their Bible study at the same time. Because of that, after one month in my new Bible study I was delivered from the fear of death. Because of that, I followed my new Bible Study leader, Paul Anderson, to visit churches and we ended up at Ruggles Baptist Church, where I still worship thirty-eight years later. At that church I was baptized, married, and had my children baptized.

"I'll miss you." Three little words changed my whole life. God takes the purposeless things that we do and changes them into something beautiful. Believe that and live each day hoping that something you do that day will have eternal significance.

The Heavenly Treasures

Remember the old Led Zeppelin song? The words "She is buying a stairway to heaven" are as antithetical to the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone through grace alone as you can get. You can't buy your way into heaven, but you can buy spiritual treasures. You don't believe me? Then what did Isaiah mean by this?

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;

and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

- Isaiah 55:1

When I gave money to charity, what was my prayer? "Lord, please give me a generous heart." When we give from the heart and not begrudgingly, that is generosity. That is how money and possessions, which are material, are transformed into something that is spiritual. Like the philosopher's stone, the Holy Spirit takes our material sacrifices and transmutes them into spiritual gold.

Following my first visit to Ruggles Baptist Church in March 1986, I was filled with joy for a month. The joy was not as intense as when I visited Janet Sullivan and it diminished but did not end my depression, but it sprang from a related cause: being grafted into the vine of the church. When I visited Janet, it was because my pastor asked for people to visit her. When I went to comfort a dying woman, I did not go alone. I went as part of the church. That is the message of Philippians. After speaking about how Christ emptied himself to serve others, Paul speaks of himself:

Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be

blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish

in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom

you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the

word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud

that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. Even if I am

to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial

offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all.

Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me.

- Philippians 2:14-18

Paul shows us the path to joy. That path leads through suffering voluntarily accepted and intent on showing sacrificial love to people in need. It is both individual and corporate. The Holy Spirit then transmutes selfless suffering into joy, an impossible miracle that I could neither comprehend nor believe until after the Lord led me through it.

Let us step back from stories to look at the Heavenly Treasures as a whole. In The Endless Hunt I catalogued twelve. Today I will add a thirteenth. I doubt that I have found them all, but most of the ones I found fit into four categories (one of them forced). These categories are for being, establishing, nourishing and flourishing.

• The treasures that define the beginning and end of our being are:
  • life, for we are made in the image of God
  • the Fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of all good things
  • the Glory of God, for to reflect it is the sole end of man
• The treasures that establish us are relationships. To thrive we must be planted into a matrix of relationships so we can be fruitful together. They include:
  • family
  • work & rest
  • authority & purpose (like the church or the secular government)
• The treasures that nourish us make us grow strong character and guide us through life. These treasures include:
  • love
  • courage & protection
  • wisdom, justice & truth
• The treasures that make us flourish are:
  • happiness & generosity
  • freedom
  • peace
  • joy

My late addition is peace; it is more than rest. I just wrote two books about peace. It grows on you.

To make this list took twenty years of searching. That means that I spent a few months searching, gave up for a decade, then spent another decade looking intently. I am not an idiot. Making lists of words that sound good is easy. Finding the things that matter most to God is not:

He said to them,

“You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others,

but God knows your hearts. What people value highly

is detestable in God’s sight."

- Luke 16:15, NIV

Last I checked, I am people. I must assume that if I value anything highly, it is suspect. Words only made my list of treasures if I could find a place in the Bible where Jesus or a prophet or apostle attributed ultimate value to the thing. After that, I had to understand what was detestable and destined to pass away about that thing as humanly understood and what was the eternal and godly way to understand it. That is why happiness is paired with generosity. Selfish happiness is the happiness of having everything that you want and being satisfied. Godly happiness is the happiness of giving to others and delighting in the happiness that produces. Godly happiness shares.

The guiding light for me as I searched came from Paul's words about love:

The chain of thought that led me to my conclusion astonishes me because I am not clever enough to have come up with it. I began by trying to understand law.

• Laws are created to uphold a moral code.
• The moral code was created to protect things.
• The things they protect are the things of ultimate value.

If you look at my list of treasures, what do you see?

• First & Second Commandments: One God and no idols (authority, purpose, wisdom, truth, glory)
• Third Commandment: No vain oaths (truth)
• Fourth Commandment: Work six days (work) but not on the seventh day (rest, freedom).
• Fifth Commandment: Honor father and mother (family)
• Sixth Commandment: No murder (life, courage, protection)
• Seventh Commandment: No adultery (family)
• Eighth Commandment: No stealing (happiness, generosity, joy)
• Ninth Commandment: No lying (fear, wisdom, truth, justice)
• Tenth Commandment: No coveting (happiness, peace)
• All Ten Commandments: justice and love for God and neighbor

One way or another, the Ten Commandments were given to protect these heavenly treasures. What is the role of these treasures in spiritual warfare? Our adversaries seek to trick us into believing that what is valuable is not and substitute trash for treasure at the center of our heart's affections. The proper place of these treasures is as objects of worship. True worship is the valuing of the things valued by God. The life we worship is not our own, it is the life of Christ that was sacrificed for us. The peace we cherish is peace with God. The rest we relish is the sabbath rest of God. The government whose authority we promote is the kingdom of God.

The seven representative sacrifices gathered in this article correlate strongly with these heavenly treasures.

• love matches love
• identity matches life
• emotional stability matches family, happiness, freedom, joy and peace
• money matches happiness and generosity
• time matches work and rest
• power matches the authority of government, work and family
• purpose matches work and the glory of God

God has given us His law to protect these heavenly treasures. We must learn with our mind what they are and are not by meditating on the Word. We must cherish in our heart and worship the one who provides these treasures and in whom are hidden all these treasures, the Lord Jesus Christ. When the battle for our mind and heart is won, we must carry it forward with our hands. By sacrifice we declare with our hands and habits what we value. Sacrifice is how we draw our sword and plunge it into the heart of the enemy.

Psalm 27 is a song about spiritual battle. According to my analysis in the chapter "Psalms of Growth: Psalms 1–28" from Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace, this 27th Psalm matches the 27th time in Solomon's list: a time for war. In this war, David knows what His God is:

The Lord is my light and my salvation;

whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the stronghold of my life;

of whom shall I be afraid?

- Psalm 27:1

His God is light, salvation and a stronghold. Imagine you are cut off from your army, running in the dark, pursued by enemies. Suddenly, you see a light, the beacons lighting the fortress walls. Now you know which way to run. As you near safety, the enemy overtakes you. A flight of arrows and a cavalry charge bring salvation! They give you cover and you sprint for the now open gates. Just in time you cross the threshold and the city gate slams shut. You have entered the stronghold and are safe.

The light is the wisdom of God that lights our path. The salvation is the inner confidence that conquers our fears. And the stronghold? It is the the open arms of God, our refuge, the tangible, material aid that helps us when we are in need. So when David reaches that stronghold, the tent of God, what does he do?

And now my head shall be lifted up

above my enemies all around me,

and I will offer in his tent

sacrifices with shouts of joy;

I will sing and make melody to the Lord.

- Psalm 27:6

David offers sacrifices with shouts of joy. There was a time when I knew nothing of the joy of sacrifice. To sacrifice is to give something up. The logical response to loss is mourning, not rejoicing. Only eyes of faith see the light, the glitter of gold in Heaven's coffers, the treasures that never rust, spoil or fade.

The Five Voices to ignore

In Proverbs 26 and 27, we learn of five voices that we are to ignore. These voices may be of Satan, of the people around us, or arise from our own heart. Four of these voices are addressed in the section on Proverbs 26 in the article Proverbs 20 to 29, namely the fools, the sluggards, the quarrelsome, and the malicious. The flatterers are covered in the section on Proverbs 27.

According to the Growth Pattern, Proverbs 4-31 match the twenty-eight times of Solomon in sequence. That means that Proverbs 26 matches "a time to be silent" and Proverbs 27, "a time to speak". When we are silent, we are supposed to listen to what other people are saying. The irony of Proverbs 26 is that it uses negative philosophy. It gives examples of the four types of people you should not listen to! You should not listen to them or else you will become like them.

In Proverbs 27, we are warned about flatterers. They stand apart from the other four. The first four are easier to spot. Their words often hurt or discourage us. Flatterers, on the other hand, win our favor because their words make you think they are on your side. They offer false encouragement and try to seduce us into being loyal to them.

All five act in the verbal dimension of spiritual warfare but also attack the heart. Fools offer counsel that leads you toward failure. Sluggards rob you of energy and motivation. The quarrelsome exhaust you and drag you into conflict which can become dangerous. The malicious form coalitions against you and rob you of your influence. All of this is spiritual warfare. All these voices interfere with hearing the counsel of the Holy Spirit. Our link to God is through clear lines of communication and these five get in the way.

Whenever someone speaks into your life, try to determine if they fall into one of these categories. Each type of person must be faced in a different way.

The Five Battlefields

In His kindness, God shared with us His battle plan for opposing Satan and his allies. If we are wise, we will study it and pray how to recognize and repel the attacks of the enemy. That battle plan is found in Proverbs 30. To summarize the linked article, the main battlefields on which the spiritual war is fought are:

• the individual (Proverbs 30:5-6)
• the workplace (Proverbs 30:10)
• the family (Proverbs 30:17)
• the church (Proverbs 30:20)
• the state (Proverbs 30:32-33)

Reflect on this list and pray that the Father's will be done in all of them.

The Sevenfold Path to a Spiritual Harvest

In the version of the explanation for the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4:13-20, Jesus names six causes for a person to not grow spiritually:

• Satan
• tribulation (literally constriction)
• persecution on account of the word (literally chasing)
• cares of the world
• the deceitfulness of riches
• the desires for other things

The first is symbolized by the bird, the second and third by the sun beating on rocky soil, and the last three by thorns. The progression of the number of causes from one to two to three might not be significant, as the version in Matthew gives the count as one-two-two and in Luke 8, one-one-three, with the three being "cares and riches and pleasures of life". If the increasing count is meaningful, then it may symbolize a commander sending out more troops with each attack. Certainly it speaks of a deepening conflict. Satan is a lofty spiritual being, remote. Hardship and persecution are material but external to us. Finally, the cares and riches and pleasures are related to material things but experienced within a person. If a person/s faith survives to produce a harvest, it comes from the deepest part of the spirit.

In the article on the Harvest Pattern, the focus is not on the spiritual war that causes failure but on the sphere of your person where growth is needed if you are to succeed:

• The gospel seed must survive to enter and transform your mind
• The water of life must protect the young plant from the sun and transform your heart
• The pruning of discipline must produce new habits of action in your hands

Also, in the Growth Pattern the focus is on your allies, not your enemies:

• The ally to combat Satan is Jesus, the seed
• The ally to combat the world's persecution is the Holy Spirit, the Comforter
• The ally to combat life's thorny distractions is the Father who disciplines us

Every spiritual battle that you win produces a harvest. When you are in the midst of the battle, set your eyes upon the harvest so that you do not lose heart. Think about the spoils of victory.

The parable does not talk about three important steps of the Harvest Pattern. They show up in the temptation stories (of Eve, Job and Jesus). The parable forces us to ask:

• What kind of soil is my heart?
• Can I improve the condition of that soil?

You see, Jesus tells us what happens to the different types of soil but in the parable he doesn't tell us how that soil was made. For the first two critical steps, the best guide is Job. The full pattern is:

1. Preparation
2. Plowing
3. Planting
4. Pouring
5. Plucking
6. Producing
7. Peace

The preparation phase is learning the Law and basic morality and submitting to God as your Lord. It involves offering sacrifices to God. The prologue in Job 1 describes a man who lived that way. It says that Job feared God and regularly offered sacrifices to God on behalf of his children. This preparation is possible in people who are not saved. They do not have a personal, saving relationship with God and may be trying to please God in their own strength.

A person may be saved with little obvious preparation or religious background; God is gracious. However, in harvest seasons after a person is saved, preparation is essential. Meditating on the Psalms is a good way to prepare for a new season of growth. Depending upon God's goal for a given season of growth, other Bible books will be useful, especially Paul's first seven letters, as explained in Paul's Discipleship Program

The Plowing Phase is suffering. For some seasons the suffering is involuntary, like Job's trials. For other seasons, it is voluntary, like Moses and Jesus fasting for forty days. God speaks to us through our suffering, if we are willing to listen. Plowing does three things:

• It softens the soil, so that it is not like the beaten path that will not receive the seed.
• It exposes the rocks, enabling them to be removed from the field.
• It turns the soil so that weeds dry out and die, making the field proof against thorns.

Suffering in faith is the most important preparation for a harvest. The faith won't be there without the earlier preparation phase. No faith and the sufferer will surrender to despair and bitterness. Plowing in Israel occurs following a light rain. The light rain softens the soil so the plowing is easier. That rain symbolizes God's grace, which permits a measure of relief in the midst of that suffering.

Note that there are three places in the Harvest Pattern where the greatest suffering occurs:

• During the Plowing Phase, by the hand of God, for our good
• During the Pouring Phase, by the hand of Satan (as ruler of the world), for our harm
• During the Producing Phase, by the hand of Satan, to sift the wheat and separate it from the chaff

This third bout of suffering was revealed by Jesus to Peter, who said that Satan had asked to sift him like wheat. It may be that such sifting is only for leaders; I am uncertain.

The other two are the cause of much distress. We can accept that Satan inflicts suffering to harm us and make us fail, but not God to ready us for planting. In Job, the plowing phase is found in the two dialogues with Satan in chapters 1 and 2. A cursory reading would make you believe that the governing motive in chapters 1 and 2 is Satan's wrath while the agent in Elihu's speech (chapters 32-37) is God, since Elihu offers comfort to Job and Satan is nowhere to be seen. That is the paradox. Satan intends Job harm and that is his motive for attacking Job and his family. At the same time, God has put a hedge around Job so that Satan is prevented from going too far. The end result is that the trials inflicted upon Job in those first two chapters are God's loving, preparatory communication to Job. They precisely serve God's purposes and advance Job's spiritual development.

In Elihu's speech, we see a man trying to help Job. Where is the infliction of more suffering? Where is Satan? Elihu talks about the weather. If you read his statements related to meteorology, you will see evidence of a titanic struggle between a warm front and a cold front that are colliding. The oppressive, hot, dry desert air represents Satan, who brings no soothing rain to cause growth and protect the plants from the sun. The air mass with the cool, moist air represents God. He sends forth lightning, terrifies with thunder and issues a mighty downpour but it revives the parched land and delivers it from the sun's cruel heat. The collision of those two air masses creates the whirlwind from which the voice of God issues.

Due to that paradox, we find that times of evil and suffering which we are convinced are from the enemy may be explicitly serving the interests of God, while other times of suffering that occur in a religious context may be from Satan. How do you tell them apart? How do you survive this terrible conundrum? Get to know this pattern. It is woven into the structures of Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Matthew and Revelation. By reflecting on the order of events in your life and matching them to the pattern, you can discern what kind of challenge may arise next and where to turn for help.

The Seven Phases of Spiritual Growth

If you are under spiritual attack, how do you know? You can't see demons or any other spiritual forces. The Exorcist and Omen and such movies are not a good model. One approach is to assess your material and spiritual progress along the seven dimensions of the Growth Pattern. If you are falling behind schedule or see a regression in an area where you once were strong, that could be an indicator.

Solomon gave us twenty-eight times which can be divided into seven phases. Each phase operates on three tiers:

• material
• individual spiritual
• corporate spiritual

The first tier is life "under the sun". Each phase lasts about seven years and is straightforward to understand. Though religions have laws and customs that govern these times of life, these categories and this schedule can be deduced from observing human behavior without reference to any particular religion. There is no supernatural component to them on this tier.

1. Security: Food, shelter and parental love
2. Ability: Being taught basic life skills, how to use your mind and hands
3. Stability: Mastering verbal and physical self control over emotions
4. Amity: Forming friendships, cooperating in work and romance
5. Opportunity: Acquiring and managing money and property, deciding where to live and choosing an occupation
6. Community: Rise to a position of responsibility in the community, handle conflict
7. Loyalty: Choose which side to fight for in times of conflict

When Satan struck Job, his power may have been spiritual, but most of the effects of the attack were material. Cattle stolen. Children and servants killed. Body afflicted with disease. The deceiving spirit that spoke to Eliphaz in a dream was the exception. Consequently, attacks on the material aspects of your life can be symptoms of a spiritual attack.

The second tier relates to a person's individual relationship to Christ.

The third tier relates to a person's integration into the Body of Christ, the church.

These two tiers are interwoven. The Gospel of Matthew has twenty-eight chapters and is structured according to the Growth Pattern. Jesus speaks in parables that are often aimed at individuals, thus Matthew tends to speak more about our individual relationship with God. Luke is explicitly addressed to an individual, Theophilus, though he may be a literary fiction used to personalize the gospel. With the Apostle Paul, his first seven letters are addressed to churches. His advice is generally to whole churches and much of it is about how to create and maintain a healthy church. Individuals are advised how to grow and flourish in the context of a church community and how to share their talents with the church.

Here are a few examples of how the times from Ecclesiastes 3 map to the life of a Christian:

• a time to be born: being born again
• a time to die: dying to self and getting a new identity in Christ
• a time to plant: being baptized and joining a church
• a time to uproot: breaking off some relationships with unbelievers

The first four times listed above constitute progress towards experiencing the assurance of "eternal security" as taught in Romans.

When I matched the times of Ecclesiastes 3 to my spiritual life, I found that I progressed through the first dozen or so times rapidly; each step took a year or less and I hit them in the order given. Then my life entered a period of chaos. I got married, had kids, left my church for another due to a crisis, then seven years later returned to the first. The lack of stability caused me to pass through some of the times out of order. After the decade plus of chaos ended, my progress resumed in the normal order, but slower. Instead of one year per "time", it took seven to pass each milestone.

After applying this analysis to my own life, it was clear that it accurately reflected the state of my spiritual life. It revealed the times when I was under the heaviest spiritual attack. If only I had known what "time" I was struggling with at the time I was living through it! It would have clarified the nature of the attack and the proper spiritual goal for that period of my life. It would have enabled me to counter the attack more effectively and make plans to foster growth in that area. I plan to work out a detailed diagnostic tool based on these ideas in a future book on discipleship planned for 2025. For a few ideas along these lines, see Paul's Discipleship Program. For details of how the twenty-eight times have unfolded in my life, sometimes regularly and sometimes not, see The Righteous Fall Seven Times.

One important result falls out of the structure of our spiritual growth. I have heard other Christians lament the friendships they lost as a result of becoming a Christian. I hold the same feelings. Do we have to cut so many ties to people we knew before? Isn't there another way? Yes and no. The choice is not between dropping our non-Christian friends or not. The choice is between recognizing whether you are in a time of engaging or disengaging with the world. Some times are heavy on disengagement. Others are times when re-engagement is advised.

• a time to plant: engage with the church
• a time to uproot: disengage from the world
• a time to embrace: re-engage
• a time to refrain from embracing: disengage
• a time to tear: disengage (often from people in the church due to doctrinal differences or hypocrisy)
• a time to mend: re-engage (often with church people)
• a time to love: re-engage
• a time to hate: disengage
• a time for war: disengage
• a time for peace: engage (mostly with the church)

The problem new believers face is when to reverse course and establish new ties or reestablish old ties with unbelievers. It is a matter for reflection and wisdom. The shifting of relationships and alliances is one of the most tangible consequences of the spiritual battle in which we are engaged.

The Seven Spirits of God

Revelation tells us (in Revelation 1:4,3:1,4:5,5:6) that there are Seven Spirits of God which are listed in Isaiah 11:2. These Seven Spirits are woven into many of the patterns of Scripture. Each Spirit goes with:

• one of the seven steps of the Harvest Pattern
• one of the seven phases of the Growth Pattern
• one of the seven Bible books that constitute the Seven Pillars of Wisdom
• one of the seven times when God drew His mighty sword (as mentioned in The Fifth Trumpet and the Industrial Revolution)

In Matthew 12:45, Jesus speaks of a person possessed by seven evil spirits. In Luke 8:2, we learn about Mary Magdalene, from whom Jesus drove out seven demons. These mentions of groups of seven evil spirits give us a window into a vital aspect of spiritual warfare. The Revelation references to the Seven Spirits of God going into the world and their association with God's sword tell us that God has countered the evil spirits with spirits of His own. When you are assailed, ponder which aspect of spiritual strength you are lacking so that you may seek assistance, focus your prayers and Bible study, and consider what changes you need to make in your life. From Isaiah, the spirits are:

• Lordship
• Wisdom
• Understanding
• Counsel
• Might
• Knowledge
• The Fear of the Lord

The cited articles talk about these spirits and how they can assist you. For a change, consider how these spirits can guide you in how to assist a friend or stranger in need.

• Share stories about how following the Lord got you out of trouble and into a healthier place, like a good church or a better set of friends.
• Since wisdom is gained through suffering, walk alongside a suffering person so that loneliness, despair and bitterness do not derail the work that God is trying to accomplish in them until it is complete and their season of suffering has ended.
• Understanding is connected to worship. Help a new believer understand that worship is a means to so focus your attention on God's excellencies that they shine into your soul and transform you to be like Him. Share stories about times of worship when you received guidance that helped you with a problem.
• Counsel friends with ideas that you have learned from the Bible or from other believers. Be vulnerable and share your struggles.
• On my playlist is a song that says, "The Joy of the Lord is my strength". When a friend is in despair, let your joy be that strength for them. Help them over the line with a difficult task by your might so that they may reap a harvest and endure until that joy manifests in them.
• The Scriptures and the collective memory of the church are a rich source of knowledge. Carry it into your conversations so that that knowledge is spread.
• To those living in fear of man or of their circumstances (like their health or job), the Fear of the Lord holds no appeal. Proverbs 2 tells how long a journey it is to get to the place where the Fear of the Lord is desirable. Be be gentle. Consider this instance where Jesus quoted Isaiah:

“Behold, my servant whom I have chosen,

my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased.

I will put my Spirit upon him,

and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.

He will not quarrel or cry aloud,

nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets;

a bruised reed he will not break,

and a smoldering wick he will not quench,

until he brings justice to victory;

and in his name the Gentiles will hope.”

- Matthew 12:18-21

When your friend cannot fear the Lord because they are bruised and their spark is smoldering, you must be the one to Fear the Lord in their sight. When they see that this holy fear makes you strong and not weak and makes you shine and not wink out, then they will finally know the Fear of the Lord.

By reflecting on the Harvest Pattern, you can discern which step your friend is at in their current phase of growth. Pray for guidance in that area from the guiding spirit that goes with that phase.

By reflecting on your friend's age and level of maturity as it corresponds to the Growth Pattern, you may discover that a different one of the spirits must be engaged. To further complicate things, our maturity is on two levels, material and spiritual. Our physical age is a good guide for dealing with material needs, but our spiritual age is trickier. All people proceed at very different speeds. The best diagnostic is to consult Paul's first seven letters, as in Paul's Discipleship Program. One of the letters should deal with the spiritual crisis faced by your friend.

When you think of the Seven Spirits of God, think of the Holy Spirit. There are only three persons in the Trinity, not nine. Due to the accepted ideas of divine simplicity and the economic Trinity which I find exceedingly complex, it is hard to say how this sevenfold division relates to the essence and activities of God. All we need to know is that they wield God's sword to fight against evil and deliver His people from danger, and after those spirits train us, we can wield the same sword and fight alongside them:

In all circumstances take up the shield of faith,

with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts

of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation,

and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God...

- Ephesians 6:16-17

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Let's say that you have figured out which phase of the Harvest Pattern you are currently in. Also assume that you know which phases of the Growth Pattern you are in, one in the material tier and two in the spiritual tiers (individual and collective). You can then use those markers to search the Scriptures for passages relevant to your current condition. The seven books of the Bible that constitute the Seven Pillars of Wisdom are structured according to those patterns. In addition, the first seven letters of Paul each match one phase of the Growth Pattern, as explored in Paul's Discipleship Program.

This is not to say that other parts of the Bible are not relevant. A partial guide would be to lookup the relevant passages in Matthew or one of Paul's letters, then use the cross-referencing features of a study Bible or online Bible to find prophets quoted or alluded to by Jesus or Paul.

God's wisdom is more orderly than you can imagine. This order is not evident to new believers but it can be discovered and exploited to guide you with clarity through life's battles as they arrive.

The Law of Christ

Matthew and the Law of Christ shows how each pair of chapters in Matthew explores one of the fourteen imperative statements that make up the Ten Commandments. Thus Matthew is a commentary on the Law. It reinterprets that law in the context of the Christian faith. Matthew also conforms to the Growth Pattern. Importantly, it not only conforms to the Harvest Pattern, it defines it. Taken together, we see that the law is not a set of rules to restrict us, it is a guide to help us grow and reap an abundant harvest. That means that the Law of Christ has something to say about spiritual warfare.

There is one important thing about the Law of Christ to know, and it is found in Galatians 5:23. After listing the fruits of the Spirit, Paul says, "against such things there is no law." Do not let religious rules and customs keep you from helping people, even today's lepers and outcasts. When you fight against Satan, everyone is a hostage. You do not know whom you can succeed at rescuing, so nobody is unworthy of your prayers.

Jesus compared his wisdom to Solomon's:

The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment

with this generation and condemn it, for she came

from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon,

and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.

- Matthew 12:42

It took years of study before I could see the depth of wisdom in Solomon's words. I saw small bits of wisdom at the verse level, but the organization of his sayings baffled me. Where the plan and pattern of an argument cannot be seen, neither can its brilliance and profundity. If that is true of Solomon's words, how much more the words of Jesus? The meaning of individual parables, the arrangement of the whole of Matthew's gospel by the patterns I have found and likely others that I have overlooked, the prophetic content, and other mysteries are all hidden there. And that is just one Gospel! You must devote serious time to reading the gospels. Your spiritual life depends upon it.

It is easy to get lost in the weeds (or flowerbeds, as there are no weeds in the Bible!). When facing a spiritual battle, you need to know who Jesus Christ is and what he does. The work of the atonement is complicated and people argue over the process. One ancient theory that is true but incomplete is called Christus Victor, or Christ the Victor. It means that one dimension of the work that Jesus did is to fight against the forces of evil and defeat them so as to rescue people from Satan's grasp. That victory has already been won. Believing that the victory has already been won is hard, given the warfare afflicting our world. If you win the battle of trusting in Christ's victory, all subsequent battles will be easier to win. Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins and he rose from the dead to prove his victory. That is the gospel that will save you and carry you to victory.

The Whole Armor of God

One of the most beloved and encouraging passages in the Bible describes putting on the armour of God so that you can be protected from harm and hold your ground in the contest against Satan and his forces.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand

against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle

against flesh and blood, but against the rulers,

against the authorities, against the cosmic powers

over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil

in the heavenly places.

Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may

be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all,

to stand firm. Stand therefore,

having fastened on the belt of truth,

and having put on the breastplate of righteousness,

and, as shoes for your feet, having put on

the readiness given by the gospel of peace.

In all circumstances take up the shield of faith,

with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts

of the evil one;

and take the helmet of salvation,

and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,

praying at all times in the Spirit,

with all prayer and supplication.

To that end, keep alert with all perseverance,

making supplication for all the saints, and also for me,

that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly

to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am

an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly,

as I ought to speak.

- Ephesians 6:10-20

Whole books have been written on this passage. Already in this article we have talked of the truth of the Word, of the salvation won by Christus Victor, of prayer and other means to talk to God, of the sword wielded by the Holy Spirit, and of the gospel message. To be complete, this article would need to address every piece of armor and its use, but it is already three times as long as I planned for. There is one blatant truth staring us in the face in this passage which I have never heard anyone comment on. The Apostle Paul asked his friends to pray for him. He prayed for boldness and the words to speak. When you hold the Bible in your hands, you have the proof that Paul's prayer was answered. God did give him the words. Paul did preach them boldly, even to the point of death. This passage is the prayer of a soldier who won the victory. The truths he taught spread throughout the world and throughout time, reaching even as far as you and me. There is no stronger armor. Put it on.

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Links to the other articles in this section:

Spiritual Growth Introduction to the articles about spiritual growth.

What are Life's Twelve Most Important Questions? If you can answer these questions, you know the way better than the Mandelorian.

What are the Heavenly Treasures? It is one thing to list these treasures, quite another to acquire them!

The Harvest Pattern of Jesus A tactical pattern for overcoming an individual obstacle and reaping a single spiritual harvest.

The Growth Pattern of Solomon A strategic pattern to help you plan your whole life.

The Motherhood Pattern A strategic pattern for women.

The Law Pattern of Moses The law does more than restrict; it also guides.

The Journey Pattern It is a long journey back to Eden.

Emotional Prophecies of the Psalms

Job and the Ways to Talk to God

Job Description for a Savior Job knew what he needed in a savior. Do you?

Dreams Dreams can guide you, paralyze you, or lead you astray. In my case, it was all three.

Spiritual Warfare Somebody IS out to get you.