“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.” Eph. 6:12

This verse has the potential to set us free from so much unnecessary human conflict in this life, yet it seems to be one of the hardest realities to receive and act on for Christians. It certainly has been for me.

It is so easy to be attacked by who I see as a purely human “flesh and blood” agent and automatically react with my own hostility in return. In the biblical injunction to turn the other cheek and love our enemies is the truth that those enemies, particularly ones who have no knowledge of God, are not even acting on their own. Rather they are often, perhaps even always, being manipulated to at least some extent by dark spiritual forces of which they are completely unaware. Yet it seems like 99% of the time I do not seek to defend myself from those forces. I seek to defend myself from the people they are manipulating.

This is an area of spiritual growth that is a vital one for me, and I suspect I am not alone. If I can separate the person with whom I am in conflict from the demonic influences upon them, influences of which they are probably not even conscious, then I can love them despite whatever they may be doing or trying to do to me. Meanwhile I can learn to engage in the successful spiritual warfare to which I am called as a Christ-follower. This would be a tremendously freeing way for me to live in this world. I could then see past whatever human provocation to which I am reacting to see the bigger spiritual picture and then act on it in a truly biblical way. This would be a ‘win-win” for me personally and possibly a game-changer in my effectiveness as a witness to the unconditional love of Christ.

This, I suspect, can only happen if I consciously make an effort to remember verses like Ephesians 6:12 and then add to that remembrance all the Bible teaches about how to fight the enemy of every human soul. To do this I must become far more intentional about meditating on those verses and asking the Spirit to both make them personally real to me, and then to equip me with the supernatural weaponry He provides.

Beyond that I must learn to effectively wield this weaponry, particularly the “sword of the Spirit which is the word of God.” As Pastor Chris taught us this past Sunday, all the armor of Ephesians 6:16-18 is defensive in nature with the exception of that sword. It is through the words of Scripture, empowered and made real to us by the Holy Spirit, that we can fight the real enemies in our lives while loving those who are tragically unaware of what (or more accurately, who) are driving them to be in conflict with us.

Chris’s message was a timely one for me. I’m tired of being tempted to hate people instead of hating the evil that is both manipulating and destroying them. I want to love those people and fight to push back the darkness that is keeping them from coming to know the ultimate Lover of their souls.