Faith Matters Podcast

#586 - Double Blessing; Day 1

Original BlessingThe Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler was famous for beginning counseling sessions with new clients by asking, “What is your earliest memory?” No matter how his patient replied, Adler responded, “And so life is.”Adler believed that our earliest memories leave a profound imprint on our souls. Imagine him sitting down with the first Adam and asking his trademark question. Adam’s early memories range from rib surgery to roaming the garden. Then, of course, there was the awkwardness of nakedness after succumbing to the serpent’s temptation. And, I’m sure, subsequent nightmares of being naked in public! But none of those moments represents Adam’s earliest memory:God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.”—Genesis 1:28, NLTBefore original sin, there was original blessing. And so life is! That first blessing sets the tone, sets the table. It establishes the emotional baseline and spiritual trend line of Adam’s life. But it’s not just Adam’s earliest memory. It also reveals God’s most ancient instinct. Blessing is God’s default setting—His first and foremost reflex. If you don’t believe that, you’ll doubt the goodness of God. And if you second-guess the goodness of God, you’ll forfeit His blessing. Because the truth is, God wants to bless you beyond your ability to ask or imagine. What is the blessing of God? It’s God—God with us, God for us, God in us. To reduce it to anything less dishonors God and devalues the blessing. God with us is joy unspeakable and the peace that surpasses understanding (Philippians 4:7). God for us is His favor, the X factor between the best we can do and the best God can do. And God in us is power, resurrection power. What happened in Genesis has more to do with your future than you might imagine. But like Adam, you’ve got to position yourself for that blessing. Because the blessing of God is more than a mystery to solve. It’s a decision to make, a habit to form, and a mindset to establish. My prayer is that this is the beginning of a new season of blessing in your life.

#581 - Faith Matters; Book of Signs - Ch 8 Radical Islam

Faith Matters with Brian and Andi HaleReviewing The Book of Signs by D. David Jeremiah; Ch 8 - Radical IslamAmericans do not seem to take the threat of Islam seriously. In fact, research tells us that US citizens are essentially oblivious to the potential danger of radical Muslims.God is at work in the Islamic world. Many Muslims are being confronted with the gospel in their dreams. Our prayers, our testimonies and our love for our Islamic neighbors may not turn the inevitable tide for the world, but they can turn the tide for individuals and allow them to escape the wrath to come.

#580 - Warfare; Day 5

in 2 Corinthians 10:4, Paul says our spiritual weapons can destroy Satan’s fortresses. Weapons such as prayer, reading the Word, obedience, meditation on Scripture, fasting, and service can blow up the devil’s strongholds. And that’s what we must do. These fortresses don’t need to be remodeled. God doesn’t tell us to capture them, change the locks, and use them for Him. Satan’s fortresses must be torn down. We also need to pull down those lofty partitions (v. 5). These include "speculations," those rebel thoughts that take us far away from the knowledge of God. Friend, you are not responsible for every thought that flashes into your mind. Satan can plant thoughts in our minds. But you are responsible for what you do with them once they are there. Our job is to recognize and dismiss evil thoughts. That’s the idea behind Paul’s statement about “taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). This is war language. When the enemy sends us one of his thoughts, we need to grab that thought and take it hostage. We can do this by telling ourselves, “This thought is not like God’s thoughts. It is against God and His revealed will. No matter how good this thought makes me feel, or no matter how anxious it makes me feel—no matter how much I may want to act on it or worry about it—it’s a thought out of hell, sent from the enemy. In Christ’s authority, I am going to make it my captive and dismiss it.” When we can do this successfully day in and day out, we are going to start winning some serious spiritual battles. Whoever controls the mind controls the war. When you take those roaming thoughts captive, Satan loses his control over you. And while not all anxiety people struggle with is purely a spiritual matter, for some it is based on imbalanced chemicals in the body or rooted in past traumas which produce triggers, this approach toward overcoming anxious thoughts can help to reduce it. It may not remove it entirely if a person struggles with physical-based symptoms, but it can provide a way to manage it. But in order to do so, you have to take each thought captive to Christ. No army can afford to have enemy troops running around loose behind its lines, wreaking havoc and sabotaging its weapons and defenses. You may be thinking, Tony, this sounds too easy. If you have been a spiritual POW for very long, you may think Satan’s strongholds are too hard to conquer. You may think the battle is hopeless, the problems too great. But this is one reason we have so many problems. We make the Christian life harder than God makes it. Yes, there are difficult problems. I don’t want to minimize that. But many of the problems we’re facing are not as difficult as we make them, because we approach them with a defeatist attitude. What is the difference between a person God delivers in twenty-four hours and one who takes twenty-four years? In most cases, I believe the difference is in the mind. When the thinking changes, the actions change. And then the fortresses come down. Let me give you an example of how this works. Joshua and the army of Israel came to the city of Jericho, which was surrounded by a high wall (Joshua 6). It looked impregnable. It was a fortress. God told Israel to march around the city for six days and then march around it seven times on the seventh day. Then the priests were to blow the trumpets, the people were to shout, and the wall would fall down. Imagine Joshua saying, “Excuse me, Lord, but this is a war. These people are the enemy. They are strong. Would You please give me my military instructions?”Joshua didn’t do that, of course. He obeyed God, and when the priests blew the trumpets and the people shouted, that wall crashed down instantly. The wall fell because the people tore it down God’s way. If they had used human methods, they would have been defeated.This is the question we always face: Are we going to use human or divine methods? It saves a lot of time and grief to use God’s method. Trust God for your battle plans, obey His Word, take your thoughts captive under His authority - and you will win victory after victory in spiritual warfare.

#579 - Warfare; Day 4

Satan knows not only where to get at us, but also how to get at us. That’s why we need to understand the method he uses to defeat and imprison us.In 2 Corinthians 10:3–5, Paul reveals the devil’s primary battle strategy:Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.What Paul wants us to know first is that we can’t use secular or fleshly weapons to fight spiritual battles. The reason so many Christians are losing the battle is that they are trying to beat the devil using the world’s weapons. They’re looking to the secular world to help them with their spiritual need. If your problem, your struggle, your need is induced and orchestrated by your spiritual enemy, your flesh can’t win the fight. Unless you choose a spiritual response, all the time, effort, and resources you spend trying to fix the problem will ultimately be a waste of time, a Band-Aid on the situation. Paul says our methods are not of the flesh because our enemy is not of the flesh. Some of us have been wrestling with things day in and day out for years. Those are battles, no matter what other names we may give to them. And if God speaks to it, it is a spiritual battle. And if your battle is spiritual, it needs a spiritual cure. You don’t fight cancer with skin lotion. You don’t fight a brain tumor by taking aspirin and lying down. Those kinds of problems demand another kind of help. So do spiritual problems.The text we cited above tells us that Satan targets his attacks on our minds because Paul talks about “speculations,” “the knowledge of God,” and “taking every thought captive” (2 Cor. 10:5). Where do speculations come from? The mind. Where is knowledge rooted? In the mind. Where do thoughts come from? The mind. It is all in the mind. So, the Christian who wants to trade his or her spiritual POW status for freedom must learn to think differently. When Satan attacks a Christian’s mind, he starts building what Paul calls “fortresses” (“strongholds,” niv and kjv). The devil builds a place from which he can operate, and he means for that fortress to be permanent. He plans to take up residence there.Satan makes himself at home, in other words, and he gets a grip on the mind until people begin thinking there is no way to overcome this problem, no way to save this marriage, no way to unify this church, no way to make a difference in our world. Whenever you hear a Christian saying,“No way. It can’t be done. I’ve tried everything, and it just doesn’t work."A fortress or stronghold is a mindset that holds you hostage. It makes you believe that you are hopelessly locked in a situation, that you are powerless to change. That’s when you hear people saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” The only reason you say, “I can’t,” when God says, “You can,” is that Satan has made himself at home in your head.

#578 - Warfare; Day 3

If your problem originates in the heavenly places, then you need a solution that originates in the heavenly places as well. Most of us are vaguely aware of angels because they’re not part of our physical world. But we need to understand that the angels of God and the demons of hell are the warriors in the cosmic battle between God and Satan. When you hear believers say they are being attacked by the devil, they probably mean they are being harassed by his foot soldiers. Satan is a limited being, just like any other created being. He is not everywhere present, all-knowing, or all-powerful. Satan is not God, but he has a whole host of evil angels called demons he can use for spiritual attacks. Anything that hell can bring against you results from satanic activity in the same realm in which God operates, called heavenly places.You and I are no match for the power and deceptiveness of Satan and his army. We need the power of God to neutralize and eventually overcome Satan’s attacks against us. We can be thankful that God has established His throne in heavenly places, pitting His kingdom against the kingdom of darkness. The kingdom of darkness has its own king, Satan, and he wants to be in charge of the universe. Yet when it comes to the universe, there’s no question that God’s kingdom and His King, Jesus Christ, are firmly in charge. And Jesus’ eternal victory is already assured. Still, God has allowed us to choose in our individual lives who will rule over us.Revelation 12 depicts a day when the invisible warfare in the heavenly places will break out in a very visible form. Verse 7 shows us who the enemy is in this conflict: “And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels waging war with the dragon. And the dragon and his angels waged war.” The archangel Michael and the holy angels are fighting Satan and the angels who rebelled with him. The battle is angelic, but they are fighting over the earth. Thus, the war in heaven directly affects what is happening on earth. We are in the midst of an angelic con­flict, a satanic rebellion, in which Satan is seeking to bring this whole world under his rule. That means when you were born into the kingdom of God, you were born into a war. You were born a warrior. You are surrounded by a spiritual enemy, but the battle is not for land or anything physical. This cosmic battle is for glory.The issue is: Who is going to get the glory in this universe? Who is going to be worshiped? Who will have notoriety? Who will get to call the shots?Satan has essentially said to God, “You cannot have all the glory in creation. I want some of the glory for myself.” God’s response? “My glory I will not give to another” (Isa. 48:11). Of course, that answer didn’t sit well with Satan, so he set about to steal what was not rightfully his—glory. The battle is for glory. Understanding that is half the fight. That’s why Paul told us, “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31; see also Col. 3:23). Glory—it’s what the battle is all about.

#577 - Warfare; Day 2

The essence of the war we’re talking about is spiritual. Because this warfare is first and foremost spiritual and not physical, the degree to which you and I will be successful is the degree to which we are prepared to understand and fight this battle on a spiritual level. While waged in the invisible, spiritual realm, spiritual warfare is manifested in the visible, physical realm. In other words, spiritual warfare is a battle between invisible, angelic forces that affect you and me. You and I can’t see the cause of the war, but we see the effects—the kinds of problems I mentioned above—all the time, day in and day out.It’s hard enough to fight an enemy you can see. It’s much harder to fight someone you can’t see. Everything you do in the visible, physical realm is caused, provoked, or at least influenced by something in the invisible, spiritual realm. Your five senses are not the limit of reality, and until we address the spiritual root of a problem, we will never fix the physical effects of that problem.Not only are your physical senses limited, but they often provide little help in spiritual warfare. This means that if you are going to wage a successful spiritual battle, you need a “sixth sense”—a keen awareness of the spiritual realm. In order to understand spiritual warfare, we have to address it through the lens of the spirit, with the help of the Holy Spirit.The Location of the BattleWhere in the universe is this great battle called spiritual warfare being fought? Paul tells us it is “in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12), which means the spiritual realm. In the Bible, the word heaven describes three levels of existence (see 2 Cor. 12:2). The first heaven is the atmosphere that surrounds the earth, the environment in which we live. The second heaven is what we commonly refer to as outer space, the stellar heavens where the stars and planets exist. This is also a realm in which angels operate, be­cause in the Bible angels are often called stars (Job 38:7). When you see the stars at night, they should remind you of spiritual beings called angels and the reality of the warfare we are engaged in. The third heaven is the throne room of God, the place we normally think of when we hear the word heaven. It is about this heaven that the Bible has the most to say. In fact, the third heaven is an incredibly busy place because it is the control center of the universe.In the book of Ephesians alone, we find numerous references to heavenly places in addition to that in 6:12. Understanding these passages helps us know how to tap into the heavenly places and thus wage victorious spiritual warfare. Ephesians 1:3 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.” This verse tells us that God resides in the heavenly places, and so do all of our spiritual blessings. This is important because if you are engaged in a spiritual battle and need help to win, the help you need is with God the Father, who is in the heavenly places. But if you don’t know how to access heavenly places, you won’t know how to access the heavenly help you need to win the battle in earthly places.