 The Bible says something very interesting about spiritual warfare. According to God’s Word this unseen battle takes place in the context of relationships and the brain.
Ephesians 6:12 shows us that this spiritual battle is in the middle of everyday relationships with people, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Those relationships that you are struggling with, that brother who keeps picking on you, those students at your school who are making fun of your Christianity, that teacher who verbally criticizes your belief system in class, all have an invisible reality behind them. You see, our problem is not with “flesh and blood”. In other words, our problem is not with people. Our problem is with the devil who uses those relationships to discourage, distract and deceive us. Relationships are a battlefield for spiritual warfare…and so is your mind.
2 Corinthians 10:4 and 5 makes it clear that your brain is a battlefield, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.” These verses are filled with military terms. God tells us that we have powerful weapons to bust through Satanic strongholds in our brains. What is a stronghold? It is a wall of wrong thinking that keeps God out. It is the moat around our minds that refuses to allow the Word of God to penetrate. It is the iron gate of sin, built by Satan himself to keep your thoughts worldly. When you became a Christian your soul was saved. You were adopted as a child of God and your sins were nailed to the cross. You became a new creation in Christ. You have a new Father, a new home in heaven, and a new path to walk. But you need a new mind as well. Satan has lost your heart to Jesus and the last thing he wants is to lose your mind to Jesus. So he establishes strongholds (walls, moats, gates, etc) of wrong thinking to keep your brain thinking wrong thoughts about God, life, relationships, movies, music, sin and him. How do we break through these strongholds? We use our weapons! We use the catapult of God’s Word and the ramrod of God’s Spirit to break through the gates and shatter the walls and we capture our thoughts for God! Your brain is a battlefield!
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