The War of Influences By Jeremy Anderson

Brothers and sisters in Christ, like it or not, you find yourself in the heat of this battle, a battle of influences. There's a lot of voices. There's a lot of people out there and ideologies that are vying to build strongholds in your heart and in your mind. And we don't get to plead ignorance on this stuff. We don't get to stand before god someday and say, I didn't know. He's gonna say, I told you so, and I equipped you with divinely empowered weapons. So in this battle of the influences, brothers and sisters spot them. Know what they are for what they are. Destroy the ones that are not of the lord. [00:45:52] (45 seconds)  #BattleOfInfluences

Don't let them take root. And go out in whatever sphere of influence that god has entrusted to you. Don't be passive there, but see as opportunities. There there these are people that we engage with, whether right here in town, when you go eat lunch at the cafe today, when you go to work tomorrow, people, people whose souls right now may have been fortified with these strongholds, opportunities for the gospel to go forth. Paul wanted to see the church in Corinth become one where the gospel advanced beyond them. Let's be the same thing. Let's be a church where the gospel doesn't just come here and stop, but continues to go forth. Amen? [00:46:36] (45 seconds)  #GospelOnTheMove

Now this is incredible imagery. I I love the imagery that Paul uses here, and some of this is lost in us because we think take captives. And in the imagery that he uses as he speaks to it is is used when a battle has been fought. Right? So you you think the in the first century when the two opposing enemies line up on the opposite side of the battlefields and they all rush to the middle and they duke it out and they they finish that battle. At the end of it, the victors would lead away the defeated by spear point. They would take captives from that battle. And what Paul is saying is we're taking captives. [00:36:09] (34 seconds)  #TakeCaptives

And I think this is a remarkable thing, friends, because you look at the apostle Paul, and what he does is he is he is having smear campaigns ran against him by these individuals, and he's able to say to the church, listen. My battle is not against those people. My battle, the war is against their ideologies. The war and the battle is against their frameworks, their systems of thought. And so this frankly, Bill has been teaching a a class this year taking place before the service, and it's comparative worldviews. [00:29:14] (30 seconds)  #FightIdeasNotPeople

And we take those things captive in our heart and our mind. That means we've gone to war. The victory has been won, and now we need to lead those thoughts away by spear point, which means inherently we recognize that some of the thoughts that we have stand in opposition to the truth of God's word. But he doesn't just say take the negative thoughts captive. He says, we take all thoughts captive and submit them to the obedience to Christ. That that is the standard. [00:36:49] (28 seconds)  #SubmitEveryThought

And so Paul acknowledges, listen, we can stand and and we can debate ideas. We are equipped to destroy ideas because we have the truth, and the truth will stand up to scrutiny. And so we can hold on to this. We can live in this. And so, hey, I appeal to you as a Christian and a follower of Jesus Christ that the degree to which you know and understand this book is the degree by which you are prepared to destroy the worldly strongholds of thought in your life. [00:32:56] (33 seconds)  #TruthDestroysStrongholds

Our prayer isn't just so that we could kinda build up this this great thing in Corinth and have all this influence in Corinth. Our prayer is that as you grow in your faith, instead of being the receiving church, you would become the sending church. That Corinth would become the new base camp so that the gospel could go even further into lands beyond Corinth and the to people who haven't received the gospel. And Paul is saying we're not just trying to step in other people's toes. If someone else is doing ministry in a in a nearby area, I'm not trying to just steal the people from there. We're trying to reach new people. [00:42:45] (34 seconds)  #BeASendingChurch

So when we engage in this gospel ministry, it's not because we're trying to compete with one another. It's not because we're trying to say, oh, can we be the better church in Shehabbah? Can we be the best church in this area? That it's not a competition. If we're if we are one in the same if we're in Christ, as Paul says in verse seven, if anyone is confident that he's Christ, let him remind himself that just as he is Christ, so also are we. If we're on the same team, we're on the same team, we're fighting the same battles, we're going the same place, we're all we're all united in Christ, let's let's win for the kingdom of God, not just one particular local manifestation of the church. [00:41:06] (33 seconds)  #OneTeamInChrist