There are times when Christians remind me of "The Empire Strikes Back". We are all young Skywalker's dangling from a weather vane on the outskirts of cloud city, hand severed by Vader, whining in pain and just waiting for it to end. If you are like me, you find yourself rooting for Vader and the Dark Side because they have an awesome soundtrack and Skywalker curling up in a fetal position and sucking his thumb is something less than inspiring.
Fear was not foreign to the early church, and not even to the Apostles. In Acts 4, after healing a paralyzed boy in Jerusalem, Peter and John went before the Sanhedrin and were commanded not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus anymore. Satan wanted to intimidate them and cause them to shrink back from bearing witness to the resurrected Christ. Upon their release, they went to give a report of what happened to fellow believers in Jerusalem who gathered together. Not because they were fearless, but precisely because they feared the threat of persecution, these believers collectively cried out to God for boldnes (Acts 4:29) That prayer reached the heart of God because it's His mission to make the gospel known among all peoples, and "they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with great boldness" (Acts 4:31)
We have enjoyed the freedom to exercise our faith without any such threats of persecution and suffering in America and yet Satan has still developed a strategy and deployed his forces to derail our commitment to God's mission. Some of his tactics include convincing us that we "shouldn't force our faith on others", that everybody in the South has already heard the gospel, or that it's not our responsibility to evangelize and others will take care of it. We get so caught up in petty conflicts within the church that we fail to focus on the mission. We fear others won't like, respect or appreciate us. We don't want to look stupid, gullible or simple minded. We don't want to look judgmental or intolerant which is the kiss of death in our culture. Some of us are genuinely deceived into believing their are additional avenues of salvation. Some of us fear we won't articulate the truth the right way or best way. Whatever the reason, we lack courage even as the early Christians did, and like them, we must collectively cry out to God for boldness in testifying to the truth about our ascended Lord.
In Matthew 16:18, Jesus tells the Apostle Peter that He will build His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The picture Jesus paints is of the Church storming the gates of hell. His statement assumes that we are on the attack, taking ground from the enemy rather than just trying not to lose ground to the enemy.
Matthew, Mark and Luke all recount Jesus being egregiously accused of being possessed by "Beelzebub" and driving out demons by the power of Satan. They each record in some form, a brief parable that Jesus told in response to the charges levied against him.
In the parable, Satan is referred to as the strong man, rightly characterizing him as a supernaturally powerful being who is to be taken seriously.
The setting is Satan's house, which is the world we now inhabit, according to 2 Cor. 4:4. Satan's possessions are not electronics, power tools, vehicles or camping gear.
His possessions are people. Specifically, they are people who are in bondage to Satan, sin and death and who are blind to the glory of God and to the light of the gospel.
Jesus is the one who binds the strong man through his sinless life, substitutionary death and triumphant resurrection. Through his finished work on the cross, the payment for sin has been fully satisfied. Until then, Revelation 12:10 paints the picture of Satan constantly bringing accusations against humanity before God. Upon Christ's resurrection, the "accuser of the brethren" is said to have been "cast down."
Those who now belong to God are free from bondage to Satan and empowered to resist his influence and partner with God in the mission of repossessing lost sons and daughters. That is the church's part in the parable. We are those called and sent to plunder Satan's possessions and rob his house. We are to aggressively advance into his territory - our neighborhoods, cities, nations and the world - to make the gospel known to our families, friends, communities and people to whom we are sent, in order for them to hear and respond to the gracious offer of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.
Whenever a lost soul is awakened to faith in Christ, Satan loses his grip on another of his prized possessions and heaven rejoices in the reclaiming of what was lost to the serpent. Clinton Arnold, in his book 3 Crucial Questions about Spiritual Warfare, plainly and rightly states that "the church has a mandate to grow through conversion. A major portion of our time and energies should be devoted to serving effectively as Christ's ambassadors and communicating his message of reconciliation."
Evangelism, therefore, is not one program or activity the church creates among many others. Rather, everything the church does exists for this one purpose. It's not a piece of the pie. It's the whole pie.
This emphasis does not mean we only aim at conversions or settle for mere professions of faith from people. We cannot zero in on conversion and baptism while ignoring the other part of our mandate which is the "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" part of the great commission.
Again, this is war, and when Satan is robbed and plundered, he is not happy about it or indifferent to it. Just as you and I would furious at being tied up and robbed, so the strong man rages when he is shackled and looted. He violently wars against those who would presume to come into his territory and take what is his. So our struggle does not end when we are rescued by God. To Satan, we are traitors and now targets. He desires our destruction and is resolved to spend all his energy bringing us to ruin and frustrating our efforts to bring others into the freedom that God offers. He hates the good news that we have received and he is absolutely devoted to silencing, assailing or perverting that gospel in any way he can.
We make war on the enemy not only by boldly proclaiming the gospel to unbelievers, but by purifying our knowledge of Christ and our understanding of his commands so that distortions of the gospel do not derail us. This is where we must assume an aggressively offensive posture in spiritual warfare. Apathy and lethargy in our lives are not spiritually neutral. They are assaults from our enemy that have accomplished their goal and are evidence that he is attempting to reassert his authority in our lives.
We must recover the early church's sense of urgency for the sake of our own souls as well as for the sake of God's mission. Their boldness was not personality driven and did not come easy. Their boldness was supernaturally empowered by God in response to their desperate plea for what they did not have in themselves. They shared our propensity toward fear, intimidation, indifference and cowardice. But they recognized those things as remnants of their old life when they were Satan's possessions and they begged the sovereign Lord to overcome the fear they knew as slaves with boldness wanted to give them as sons.
The Western church is getting waylaid. The world that is in bondage to the enemy is wanting to silence the gospel and many of us are lamenting that the cultural landscape is unfriendly to us. But understand that we are only just beginning to glimpse the opposition that was normative for the early church. They displayed the same symptoms from which we suffer, but they understood then what we so many of us fail to grasp now: that in this war, it's kill or be killed. It's not enough to take cover and go into hiding. We must take up arms and go on the attack. We are traitors and targets in enemy territory and the sustained formation of the gospel in our lives ultimately depends on the forward progress of the gospel through their lives. But the boldness you and I require for the task is the boldness that you and I lack in ourselves.
And so we either settle for own version of the Empire Strikes Back where we assume young Skywalker's embarrassing posture or we join with the fearful, intimidated and conflicted believers in Acts 4 and beg the living God for the boldness he delights to give so that the good news will go forth and bear fruit.
But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house. (Mark 3:27)
Jesus statement here offers significant insight into the reality of spiritual warfare, the nature of Christ's work, and the mission that he has entrusted to his church.
In the parable, Satan is referred to as the strong man, rightly characterizing him as a supernaturally powerful being who is to be taken seriously.
The setting is Satan's house, which is the world we now inhabit, according to 2 Cor. 4:4. Satan's possessions are not electronics, power tools, vehicles or camping gear.
His possessions are people. Specifically, they are people who are in bondage to Satan, sin and death and who are blind to the glory of God and to the light of the gospel.
Jesus is the one who binds the strong man through his sinless life, substitutionary death and triumphant resurrection. Through his finished work on the cross, the payment for sin has been fully satisfied. Until then, Revelation 12:10 paints the picture of Satan constantly bringing accusations against humanity before God. Upon Christ's resurrection, the "accuser of the brethren" is said to have been "cast down."
Satan, therefore, lost his ability to justly accuse people because of the forgiveness God extends to each of us through the shed blood of Christ. The strong man has been overpowered and no longer has the freedom to exert his strength over those former possessions of his who, through repentance and faith, have been reclaimed by God the Father through the work of His Son. That's why Jesus says in Luke 10:18, when he sent out the 70 disciples on s short-term mission trip, that he "saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven."
Those who now belong to God are free from bondage to Satan and empowered to resist his influence and partner with God in the mission of repossessing lost sons and daughters. That is the church's part in the parable. We are those called and sent to plunder Satan's possessions and rob his house. We are to aggressively advance into his territory - our neighborhoods, cities, nations and the world - to make the gospel known to our families, friends, communities and people to whom we are sent, in order for them to hear and respond to the gracious offer of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.
Whenever a lost soul is awakened to faith in Christ, Satan loses his grip on another of his prized possessions and heaven rejoices in the reclaiming of what was lost to the serpent. Clinton Arnold, in his book 3 Crucial Questions about Spiritual Warfare, plainly and rightly states that "the church has a mandate to grow through conversion. A major portion of our time and energies should be devoted to serving effectively as Christ's ambassadors and communicating his message of reconciliation."
Evangelism, therefore, is not one program or activity the church creates among many others. Rather, everything the church does exists for this one purpose. It's not a piece of the pie. It's the whole pie.
This emphasis does not mean we only aim at conversions or settle for mere professions of faith from people. We cannot zero in on conversion and baptism while ignoring the other part of our mandate which is the "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" part of the great commission.
Again, this is war, and when Satan is robbed and plundered, he is not happy about it or indifferent to it. Just as you and I would furious at being tied up and robbed, so the strong man rages when he is shackled and looted. He violently wars against those who would presume to come into his territory and take what is his. So our struggle does not end when we are rescued by God. To Satan, we are traitors and now targets. He desires our destruction and is resolved to spend all his energy bringing us to ruin and frustrating our efforts to bring others into the freedom that God offers. He hates the good news that we have received and he is absolutely devoted to silencing, assailing or perverting that gospel in any way he can.
We make war on the enemy not only by boldly proclaiming the gospel to unbelievers, but by purifying our knowledge of Christ and our understanding of his commands so that distortions of the gospel do not derail us. This is where we must assume an aggressively offensive posture in spiritual warfare. Apathy and lethargy in our lives are not spiritually neutral. They are assaults from our enemy that have accomplished their goal and are evidence that he is attempting to reassert his authority in our lives.
We must recover the early church's sense of urgency for the sake of our own souls as well as for the sake of God's mission. Their boldness was not personality driven and did not come easy. Their boldness was supernaturally empowered by God in response to their desperate plea for what they did not have in themselves. They shared our propensity toward fear, intimidation, indifference and cowardice. But they recognized those things as remnants of their old life when they were Satan's possessions and they begged the sovereign Lord to overcome the fear they knew as slaves with boldness wanted to give them as sons.
The Western church is getting waylaid. The world that is in bondage to the enemy is wanting to silence the gospel and many of us are lamenting that the cultural landscape is unfriendly to us. But understand that we are only just beginning to glimpse the opposition that was normative for the early church. They displayed the same symptoms from which we suffer, but they understood then what we so many of us fail to grasp now: that in this war, it's kill or be killed. It's not enough to take cover and go into hiding. We must take up arms and go on the attack. We are traitors and targets in enemy territory and the sustained formation of the gospel in our lives ultimately depends on the forward progress of the gospel through their lives. But the boldness you and I require for the task is the boldness that you and I lack in ourselves.
And so we either settle for own version of the Empire Strikes Back where we assume young Skywalker's embarrassing posture or we join with the fearful, intimidated and conflicted believers in Acts 4 and beg the living God for the boldness he delights to give so that the good news will go forth and bear fruit.
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