Living in Thin Places: Standing Firm Against Evil

We never graduate from dependence and reliance upon God, and that strength helps us then stand, not fight, stand. Stand against the enemy's lies. I've got this. I just need more discipline. Paul says, you don't got this. You don't got anywhere near this. Your strength is not moral grit, but the participation in the life of Christ. [00:25:21] (30 seconds)  #StandInChrist

Evil will always make you look at your sin or the sin of another more than Christ. Always. Always. And yet, the scripture says that you can't outsend God's mercy. You might think it's that country or that party or that group or that besetting sin in me, but we don't wrestle against the flesh and blood but against the principalities. That's what we're standing against. [00:26:10] (35 seconds)  #NotFleshAndBlood

This is why it talks about the whole armor of God. You're supposed to be battle ready with your equipment to wrestle with evil, but be clear, everything about those verses is about reliance. Armor is given to a soldier. You are granted armor by your king or your centurion. You simply take it up and you can't even take it up without an armor bearer or a fellow soldier. [00:23:10] (30 seconds)  #TakeUpTheArmor

You don't have what it takes to make a spiritual breastplate or a helmet. You don't know how to make a spiritual shield. You may learn how to use them over time by God's grace as you enter into these thin places in your training, but you are not the blacksmith or the trainer. You don't have the capacities. We don't even know how to use them fully. [00:23:56] (29 seconds)  #ReceiveTheArmor

It's just so different than the way I was trained because first and foremost, it's not about your strength. It's not about your might. You are to be strong but in a very different kind of way. We need strength from outside of us because we're in a thin unseen place and we don't know what it looks like and we don't know how to do it. [00:22:29] (27 seconds)  #StrengthFromOutside

This could have been the church planting fund. They just thought about it a little bit more. They could have done something different with this. They could have funded all sorts of ministries, but they were utterly rejecting their former schemes of entering into the thin spaces because they saw the utter victory of Christ in the heavenly realms. [00:11:31] (22 seconds)  #ChooseChristsVictory

Paul assumes something that most modern Westerners, I've already talked about this, feel too sophisticated to believe. It feels kind of hokey, but what he is declaring is a personified, organized, and antagonistic evil that lives. Many of us are too confident in understanding the material world to believe these things. Again, too hokey, too unscientific, this doesn't hit our modern sensibilities very well. [00:12:36] (28 seconds)  #RecognizeSpiritualEnemy

How do we navigate the thin places around evil when evil is so deceptive that it can tell you something good that is intended for you to do evil? Every theologian holds that. The devil quotes scripture. I mean, it's pretty clear in this verse that we're called to a kind of strength, that the situation requires a type of courage and endurance. [00:19:37] (28 seconds)  #DiscernAndEndure