Sometimes, when you need to get a nail into a piece of wood, you have to swing the hammer down a little harder than you have been. Up until that point, you have been holding the small metal object as close to its intended target as possible, tapping on the head slowly but surely until such procedures can no longer aid you in your goal. It is at this point that you must make a decision.
Choice A. Stop hammering. In the grand scheme of things, the nail is in far enough to serve its purpose. Say, for example, you are building a chair with this wood. The nail runs through the top into one of the back legs, and will soon be covered over with the chair backing. You've tested it, and you know that the chair will support your weight, so go ahead: stop hammering the nail in and move on.
Choice B. Pull back your fingers from the area, line up with the head, and pound away with all your might. You, in your hurry to get the cheapest wood available, managed to get really knotty lumber, and thus the nail will not be going in without many hard blows. You might break a sweat. One thing's for sure, right now you are wishing you'd used a power drill and a screw. On the bright side, once that nail is in there it's not coming out. Ever. This chair will be sturdy until it gets burned or purposely broken.
I think, in life, we often want to go with the first choice. Sure, it's hard to compare life and using a hammer without feeling somewhat foolish, but it does illustrate a good point: we are lazy, and if we can get the job done effortlessly who cares if it's at 100% efficiency?
I suppose with chairs, it doesn't matter all that much. In the end, the worst that can happen to you when your chair leg falls off is a broken chair and a sore rear end. But what about in war? Should we fire only enough bullets to disable the enemy? Should we use only enough stitches to slow the bleeding? Of course not. If you don't destroy the enemy, he will recover and retaliate, albeit with more resolve and a vendetta against you. And eventually you're going to bleed to death if you don't cut off the blood flow. So it stands to reason that, when involved in battle, we ought to be giving it our all, even if finishing the job means never giving up, never relenting with our hammer blows.
But, you say, I'm not in a battle. In fact, I try to stay as far from flying ammunition and air raids as possible. So who cares? Probably not a lot of people. But who should care? You, and I, and everyone else. Because whether you've realized it or not, we are all in battle.
Anyone who has ever seen a Disney movie or read a reasonably good book is familiar with the theme of Good vs. Evil. We (unless you are a sadist) root for the hero. We want him to slay the dragon, save the princess, beat his rival, etc. When he starts to doubt himself, we cheer him on; we rally behind him and applaud when his right-hand man convinces him to keep up the good fight. There are times when he drops to his knees and wants to throw away his sword, but when he rises it again in triumph with the monster's head his trophy, all we can do is smile and say "well done."
That's all fine and dandy, you say, but what does that have to do with me? What have Good and Evil to do with my life, and when will you tell me what sort of battle it is that I'm supposedly engaged in? Because, as far as I'm concerned, I haven't been doing any fighting at all.
And that, my friends, is precisely the problem. 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 says:
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.
Take a look around you. Perhaps you live alone. You are in a room with no other inhabitants, silent except for your keystrokes and mouse clicks. You're also, according to Paul, in a war zone. You may read that and coyly look around the room, wondering where all the flaming arrows and roaring soldier's voices are. But the war isn't
carnal, that is, it's not something to take place in flesh and blood. You cannot compose it from the elements or put on a special pair of glasses to make it suddenly appear. You cannot step through a door or wardrobe and suddenly be in the other,
supernatural dimension that surrounds you. Nevertheless, it is there. And, according to Paul, it's erecting strongholds in your life, preparing arguments for you to use against God's small, still voice of Truth, and sending thoughts into your head specifically designed to cause you to disobey one or more of God's rules.
If, like you said earlier, you haven't been fighting, then perhaps now is a good time to stop and consider what those devices of the enemy--Evil, that is--look like in your own life. Perhaps you are an alcoholic or smoker. Alcohol or cigarettes may be a stronghold in your life--a chink in your armor, a weak spot that you don't want to give up--and is therefore a place where the enemy knows to strike hardest. He may even convince you to try to quit, without giving you the strength to succeed, so that you'll become discouraged in the fight. Quitting is not impossible, and yet if you fail a few times you may give up the idea of ever truly getting rid of it. You stop swinging the hammer, or maybe you just aren't actually swinging hard enough to push the nail through the knot.
Maybe your problem isn't a stronghold. You consider yourself pretty much 'together.' You went off to college, got a degree--heck, you're a Doctor of Theology. If anyone has the answers, it's you, and logic says to you that God can't exist. You are a proponent of 'moral relativism,' the idea that we cannot judge others because their value system is not the same as ours. What one African village considers right and honorable, a European township may consider abominable, but that doesn't give the European township the right to interfere. Human sacrifice is their system of values, and so they must be right. Hitler believed in the Aryan race, and thus annihilated millions of Jews, homosexuals, and 'undesirables' from the territory he controlled. But hey, if that's what he felt was right, then who did we Americans think we were storming Normandy and fighting back the Nazi invasion with other Allied troops? That may sound absurd, but it's the "logic" that people just like you use everyday. I say to you "I think abortion is wrong, and should be stopped," to which you respond "That's because of your narrow-minded religious views. But those people think it's okay, and it's not affecting
you anyway, so what's the big deal?"
The big deal is that your moral relativism is selective. It's none of my business when I try to apply my moral lens to abortion, homosexuality and stem cell research, but the moment we talk about genocide and third world countries, I'm a sadistic freak if I try to support ethnic cleansing. How does that work? If you truly think about it, it doesn't. Thus the 'logic' that you use to tell me, the Christian, that I'm wrong is actually a faulty argument that you would never have used if you'd approached it from every angle. But you didn't, because the enemy set it up in your mind and you went with it because it didn't require you to do anything different in order to accept it. You could leave the nail sticking out of the wood because your argument "proved" that the chair would be 'good enough' as-is.
Believe it or not, however, those first two are nothing compared to the final device of the enemy; thoughts. Close your eyes and think of something. A tropical island, wind blowing softly through the palm trees. You smell the sea as the waves roll along the beach, and the sensation of flight takes over as you rock back and forth on a nice hammock. Sight, sound, smell--all of these can actually be experienced just by using one's imagination. If you can dream it, you can do it. And, very often, if you can do it you will do it.
Thoughts are the flaming arrows of the enemy. You have millions every day, some are good, some are negligible, and some sneak in from the enemy. The forces of evil can shoot as many as they want towards you, and not really care whether they hit or miss the target. The point is, once an arrow hits you, you have only moments to extract it before the fire catches under your armor where it pierced you. If you fail to do so, you will be a smoking skeleton before long as the fire trapped beneath your armor ravages your body with tongues of flame. And that's just one arrow.
A popular brand of Satan's archers is lust. A simple glance at a magazine, television, book, school, sidewalk, office building--heck, even a church--will immediately reveal the presence of sexuality in our lives. To revert back to the analogy, from the time you open your eyes in the morning to the time you close them at night (and even after that), you are under permanent heavy assault by just one type of attack (and there are many others). You see a picture in a magazine of an attractive celebrity. The arrow hits you in the side. If that is the end of it, then you have pulled the arrow from your side and survived the blow. However, what if that isn't the end? You glance back, maybe stare at the picture. Now there are a few more arrows, and they are all still on fire. Perhaps you are on the train home. When you get home, you get on the internet and begin to search for pictures of this person. You notice one of the sites boasts nude shots. You raise your brow, close the door to your room, and start to look through the material. Thankfully you came in quietly, so your spouse doesn't know you are home; they're asleep upstairs. Thirty minutes later, you've gone way too far down that line.
Let's review that, shall we? It started as a thought. Rather than brushing the thought aside or rebuking it, you allowed the thought to linger. You dwelled on the thought, and eventually were persuaded to act upon it. It is at this point that you have already lusted, and Jesus tells us that any one who lusts after another commits adultery with them in their heart. Even before anything physical has taken place, you have managed to lust and commit adultery. By the time you slide into bed to fall asleep beside your faithful partner, you've been consumed by sinful flame and taken down by the enemy. Tomorrow morning you may feel a bit regretful, but then you see another magazine ad, or a commercial on the television, and days, weeks pass. A single thought has enslaved you to a lifestyle of sin.
And that's just with a picture in a magazine.
You may think this is all a bit exaggerated, but it isn't. In fact, it happens everyday. It's become so commonplace in our society that we've started to call it the norm: every teenager should have had sex before graduating highschool, and since that's what they're gonna do anyway, let's just distribute condoms, cuz that will fix the problem; college life is all about sex, drugs, and alcohol, so let's talk to our children about the potential outcomes. Let's try to scare them with STDs and videos of DWI crashes, because it's much easier than telling my child they're still under my authority and that authority includes a strict abstinence policy; people masturbate all the time, so let's make lewd jokes about it in our comics, our cartoons, our late-night television, and if we can get away with the innuendo then let's put it in children's material too; we can make money if we sensationalize secret affairs and scandals, so let's put them everywhere we can.
You get the point--with that single arrow Satan has been torching people to the ground for years. And it's not just lust that's so powerful. Every action we take spawns from a thought in our minds. You look at the pack of gum before you slip it into your pocket without paying. You look for the cop before you speed through the red light. You think about yawning, and you're bound to yawn. Hopefully, you think before you say something. And every time one of those thoughts is an attack from the enemy, you need to be prepared to grab it, rip it out, and discard it before it can cause further damage to you.
A song I've listened to quite a bit over the last several weeks bears the lines: "So many ups and downs/my heart's a battleground." Despite the fantasy nature of the game for which that song was written, I can't help but notice the truth it carries. Every day and night our hearts are battlegrounds, places where the enemy can shoot arrows into which we can either respond to immediately or else lose the fight. But don't forget the second part of that verse: "...the weapons of our warfare are...mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments...bringing every thought into captivity...when your obedience is fulfilled."
We are armed for this battle; we have the hammer in our hands. The question is, are you ready to start swinging? And if you've been swinging, are you ready to keep swinging with all your might? I won't lie to you- this fight will always be hard. It's one thing to say "I'll keep fighting for a week or two." It's quite another to rise from the ashes of fallen comrades, grip your sword tightly in hand, and say "I know that this fight will last until the day I die. But I'm ready to take this battleground."
As for me, well...this
is a forge and I
am a smith. You can guess which path I choose.
