Make War!
If I was to use an analogy to describe the Church in America, or at least my millennial counterparts, I would say we are like adolescent-adults thrust into the trenches of war, who not realizing the gravity of what is at stake, decide to take our childish games with us into the trenches. It’s as if we are content to play and joke around as long as we don’t have to take up arms and make war ourselves; while unaware to us the enemy is flanking us on every side. We are at war! The Church of Jesus Christ, built on the truth that He is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matthew 16:16) that church will always be at war, until Christ returns and he subdues all his enemies. Let this be a cry to my Millennial compatriots: make war!
We all know that wars are not fought and won by children playing games in trenches. Wars are won by warriors; warriors who recognize that a battle must be fought; warriors who are willing to take up their weapons of warfare, and lay down (or, put to death) their own comforts, desires, rights, freedoms, securities, for the sake of the ones they are fighting for. Wars are not won by sitting by idly while the enemy takes the high ground; wars are won by making great sacrifices for the sake of gaining territory, destroying strongholds, and purging evil and injustice wherever it lies. Remember well the battle of Normandy which cost the allied forces over 200,000 lives to secure a foothold in Western Europe which would allow the allied armies to gain ground and push back the Nazi forces, eventually leading the Allies to victory and ending the war. I’m convinced that great gains, or great advances do not come without great sacrifice, Napoleon Hill agreed when he said, “great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never selfish.” Are we willing to sacrifice comforts, securities, our own independence and personal rights for the sake of this fight? We must be willing. Winston Churchill once said, “This is no time for ease and comforts. It is time to dare, and endure” – if this carried with it a great weight in light of a physical world war, how much more weight should it carry when we look at it in light of the spiritual world war in which we find ourselves today where the stakes are much higher for we are not merely fighting a physical battle, we are waging war for the souls of men, women, and children all over the world. Let these words from the Apostle Paul echo through our lives, “you know the time, that the hour has come to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarrelling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” (Romans 13:11-14, ESV, Italics mine) this is a cry for war from the apostle Paul, he has just laid out systematically God’s plan of Salvation, the gospel, it’s no longer a matter of knowledge it’s a matter of application, are we going to wake up, are we going to make war? I believe this is a call to the Church in America - it’s time to wake up. This is a call to radical, biblical Christianity; a Christianity that lives and moves, and fights, in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ, in light of the fact that ungodly people as ourselves who did not seek for God, or even see fit to worship him, God has justified freely, by his grace, calling us back to life and into a right standing before him and then as our King He commissions us to live this life that is walking in step with his spirit, putting to death the deeds of the body(Romans 8:13), considering everything loss compared to the surpassing worth of know Christ Jesus(Phil. 3:8), being transformed in the renewing of our minds(Romans12:1-2), making disciples of every nation(Matt. 28:18) – this is a Christian life that joyfully sacrifices personal comforts, personal freedoms, personal desires, safety and security, for the sake of winning souls. This is a life that puts no confidence in the flesh, but instead, glories in Christ Jesus(Phil.3:3). This is a life that does not lust after the praises, or the approval of men; this life has only one driving pulse – to hear Him say “well done!” (Matt. 25:23). It has no cause, but that of the Kingdom’s conquest (Matt.6:10,33,28:18); it has no anthem but the cross (1 Cor. 1:32, 2:2, Gal. 6:14); No citizenship except in heaven (phil. 3:21); No other identity except in Christ (Col. 3:3-4); No greater comfort than to know that Jesus pleads for me (Romans 8:34, 1 John 2:1); no greater service than to lay one’s life down in love (John13:34-35,15:12-13, Romans 13:8-10,1 John 4:11); no greater longing than to sin no more (Romans 7:24); no greater hope than a homeland not built with hands, eternal in the heavens, who’s maker and builder is God (2 Cor. 5:1, Heb. 13:14); no greater aim than the praise and glory of God (Hab. 2:14, 1 Cor. 10:31, 2 Cor. 4:15); no greater pleasure than to know and serve The Lord (Neh. 8:10, Psalms 16:11, John 15:11, Acts 20:24, 1 Peter 1:8, 1 John 1:4).
It’s time to rise. It’s time to take the gospel seriously. It’s time to take God seriously. It’s time to pursue holiness ‘without which no one will see God’ (Heb. 12:14) – it’s time to take sin seriously. It’s time to start taking our enemy seriously, too often we think we can play games with our sin, not realizing that our enemy is vicious, and hates us to the core of our being! He is seeking to rob from us, and from our friends, and from our family’s infinite joy by keeping us from seeing the light of the gospel that we might be saved from the wrath of God, thus having to endure it ourselves for eternity in Hell. That is what he wants; in the words of J.C Ryle, “you may be careless about your soul, but the devil is not” he cares for it, he wants to see your soul destroyed in hell, and it’s not because he loves justice, it’s because he hates you. We think we are fighting against a playful weak enemy who we are free to dance around and be merry with until it’s time for us to “grow up” and we pay little attention to the warning to flee, and guarding ourselves with great diligence – we think, “what is the issue with just a little bit of sin” forgetting that the little acorn will grow into a giant oak tree that will blind us from seeing the light of the gospel, and will eventually bear fruit leading to death; we must remember the words of Paul to Timothy, “But as for you, O man of God, flee these[sinful] things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of the eternal life…” (1 Timothy 6:11-12, ESV) Fight the good fight! While we sleep here in America, the devil does not, he is hard at work; he is fighting a battle against a sleeping foe, and he must love it. How many souls are lost each day because we are content to maintain our momentary comforts at the cost of eternal torment for others. We must fight!
We must fight first for ourselves to keep seeing the beauty of Jesus, to keep seeing him as supremely valuable (Psalms 34:8, Phil. 3:8, 2 Cor. 4:4); We must fight to kill sin in our own lives (Romans 6:12-14, 8:13, Col. 3:5). We must fight for others to keep seeing Jesus as supremely valuable. We must fight for others that they, by the grace of God, would kill sin in their lives. We must fight for those who are blind that they would have the eyes of their hearts enlightened that they would behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and that they would be saved from the wrath to come. We must fight for those trapped by sin, trapped by sexual immorality, alcoholism, drug addiction; we must fight for those so trapped by depression and anxiety who are believing the lies that they only way for things to get better is for them to take their own life. We must fight for those who are going to a godless, joyless eternity. We must fight for those who are complacent in their faith, that they would have a renewed vigor to follow Christ and fight this battle. We must fight for those who are stagnant in their faith, who are in a season of spiritual slumber or backsliding and need to be woke from their sleep and restored to the joy of their salvation. This is not an easy task that we have before us, but we must remember that we are not unequipped for the fight, just as our King Jesus commissioned us so he also equipped us, and so it is up to us to take up the weapons of our warfare, we must take up “the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.” (1 Thes. 5:8), we must take up the sword of the spirit (Eph. 6:17), we must take up the “prayer of a righteous person” that has “great power as it is working” (James 5:16). We must stop having an appearance of godliness that denies the power. We must stop living a good moralistic Christian life that is removed from the resurrected life of Christ. Rather we are to be filled with the spirit, realizing that the same spirit who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies, and remains in us training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, godly lives, in the present age, waiting for the appearing of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:12-13). We must not sit by idly while our brothers and sisters around the world bear the blunt. We must never use our comforts and freedoms to cover up our passivity, rather, we must use our freedoms with urgency to gain ground on our enemy while we still have the freedoms we do. The war doesn’t stop just because you are asleep, the battle wages on with the stakes as high as ever – let us never think that the battle is far away, the battle is in our homes, the stakes are high because the souls at stake are the souls in our homes, it’s our brothers, our sisters, our cousins, our aunts and uncles, our parents, our children, our friends, this battle is on the home front, and for them we must fight!
Will we stand idly by while the enemy destroys the people closest to us? Will we stay idle? Will we hit the alarm-clock snooze and passively pass the torch onto the next generation, after having made no ground on the enemy during our lifetime? May we lose sleep spent in prayer for their souls. May we labor and toil with all Christ’s energy that by any means necessary we might save some (1 Cor. 9:19,22). May we never stop, may we fight to the end; may we be spent that our families, our friends, our acquaintances might come to know the love of the savior; and may we be spent that The Lamb who was slain may receive the full reward for which he died!
"It is out duty and our privilege to exhaust out lives for Jesus. We are not to be living specimens of men in fine preservation, but living sacrifices." - Charles Spurgeon
Written by, Houston Abbott. Founder & President of Simple Minded Theology
