Identifying weakness

Winter Christian #4

1. You need to stop feeling guilty and defeated, and start serving God’s Kingdom.

2. You can serve every day without being a hero.

3. The war is starting, and we must prepare for anything.

What we’re discussing today…

4. We have weaknesses our Enemy will exploit.

The state of Christian warfare

Being a Christian whose faith is firmly founded on the Bible, you are already far ahead of any other warrior for truth. You will not be dragged into false doctrines, cults, or hysteria nearly as easily as others, who are blown around by the wind of the times…

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed about by the waves and carried around by every wind of teaching and by the clever cunning of men in their deceitful scheming.

—Ephesians 4:14

However, being saved by Christ’s redeeming blood does not mean you become automatically immune to the Enemy’s attacks, or that you have no weaknesses to the kind of spiritual warfare we are really engaged in.

Christians today are lazy, first and foremost. And I don’t mean that they aren’t working hard to support themselves and their families. I mean that they are spiritually and intellectually lazy, without the kind of military discipline we should strive for. They can’t be bothered to truly focus on a topic, grapple with the meaning of things, and draw important conclusions about life, reality, and the Kingdom of God. They are passive and vague in their beliefs, and not active soldiers waging war on Satan’s non-stop barrage of lies and half-truths. Therefore, they can quickly feel “overwhelmed” or “boxed in” by the sheer scope of confusion happening everywhere, instead of using their certainties to blast through the noise and get to the heart of the matter.

What is your problem?

All of us have weaknesses. And those of us who think we don’t are guilty of arrogance, which is one of the biggest weaknesses of all. Allow me to make a quick list of weak qualities I see every day in the Christian world:

• Guilt

• Fear

• Arrogance

• Comfort

• Dependence

We could think of more weaknesses, but let’s start with these. Guilt and fear is a good place to start re-training your spirit, if you want to get out of the hole Satan has dug for you, like a trap. You will be stuck in that useless, neutral, non-contributing state of mind if you refuse to confront their lies about Christians head-on. You are not condemned for your past mistakes; your sins are not currently being held against you; an endless river of grace is being poured out to enable you to overcome doubts; nobody can take away your salvation, your rewards, or your purpose, including yourself.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all Creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

—Romans 8:38-39

On the other extreme, arrogance is a very real danger. Those who display this weakness generally fall into two categories: the dogmatic traditionalists, and the radical self-proclaimed prophets. These shouldn’t need much explanation, but you may not realize just how many fall into these traps. In the age of the Internet, doubting Christians often find themselves relying on old dogma, “Church Fathers”, and tradition to ground themselves in something that feels more substantial than the Bible, and end up enslaved to the thinking of flawed humans thousands of years ago, rather than living in the present day and facing the war we’re in—which is much more important for serving the Kingdom right now, as we are called to do.

They’re hungry for weak Christians.

Self-proclaimed prophets are everywhere too, declaring all sorts of nonsense about spiritual events, miracles, visions, warnings, and authority that doesn’t come from God, but their own drunken infatuation with “influence”, in this age of “influencers”. You can see how the dogmatists feel justified because they condemn the lying prophets, and the lying prophets feel justified in condemning the dogmatists; but both are lost in the arguments of fools, not focused on the real mission.

“Not my problem”

Comfort and dependence are the other two big weaknesses I see. Those who don’t feel strongly about anything. They are lukewarm, and I fear that Jesus will spit them out when the time of tribulation ramps up:

So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

—Revelation 3:16

They find it easy to ignore the conflicts happening around them because it doesn’t affect them. But this is a self-centered, lazy, and WEAK position to take. Your job is not to wait until Christ returns passively, but to actively fight the Enemy and tear down the strongholds of Satan for the glory of God, to display the superiority of the Gospel above all falsehood. Did you not know that?

It is YOUR problem when everyone around you is deceived.

It is YOUR problem when your brothers and sisters are being devoured by wolves.

It is YOUR problem when God is mocked.

You are an agent of the Kingdom — a dedicated soldier, specially recruited for the purpose of waging cold war — not a bystander in the conflict.