What is the difference between practice and a game? Perhaps Father Orthoduck should change his terminology to ask what is the difference between drill and war? In both practice and drill you have at least some choice concerning when you stop for a while. Even if you yourself dare not stop, you have either a coach or a drill instructor who will stop the training before you suffer serious injury or die.
But, in either the game or in war, and most especially in war, you have opponents who will not stop until you are either stopped or killed. You have no choice as to when to stop. Particularly in war, you must see it through to the end. Particularly in war, the experience of being in a situation that is out of your personal control can lead to levels of stress that finally result in post traumatic stress.
And this explains the difference between simple fasting and prayer versus spiritual warfare. Far too many of us assume that because we fast and prayer or because we go to church in the face of our friends mocking us that we somehow are doing great things in spiritual warfare or are somehow feeling what the martyrs felt. And, it is somewhat correct to say those things because in one very limited and small sense you are experiencing opposition. But, that is a long way from what the saints spoke about when they spoke of spiritual warfare.
The internal spiritual warfare that is pictured by so many of the saints is somewhat different. That warfare is a war against ourselves, the type of war that is so well pictured in C.S. Lewis’ book, The Screwtape Letters. And, there is no doubt that fasting, the reading of Scripture, prayer, the reading of the lives of the saints, the readings of the great spiritual classics help us to be open to receiving the power of the Holy Spirit that we need in order to win the war against ourselves and to do what is right before the Lord.
That warfare, properly handled can teach us much about ourselves. It can teach us about our weaknesses. It can teach us about how sinful and poverty-stricken we are. It can teach us about how we are naked and poor and need God’s clothes. “For he has clothed me in garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness,” Isaiah 61:10. It is no surprise that one of the most often heard refrains from the saints who have purified themselves is, “Lord, have mercy,” even when they are leading lives that would have the majority of us convinced that they need little mercy. True fasting and prayer, true inner spiritual warfare lead us to a true knowledge of our condition, of the grace of God, and of the Holy Spirit who is so available to us. It is also no surprise that the saints who are recorded as being most successful in this type of warfare are also recorded as being immensely forgiving and loving. Having looked at themselves, they know that they have no choice but to forgive others. Having looked at God, they know that they have no response other than to love others.
Sadly, that warfare, improperly handled, can turn us into arrogant fools. Even more sadly, Father Orthoduck has met too many arrogant fools. Praying and fasting, reading the spiritual classics, and following a chosen spiritual “elder,” they now believe that they have wisdom, when they merely have knowledge, that they are capable of judging even their hierarchs and metropolitans, when they are incapable of judging themselves, that they are full of the Holy Spirit, when it is more likely to be gas. That is a person who has never made it out of practice into the real spiritual warfare and has merely bruised his “flesh” some rather than putting it to death so that Christ might be made manifest.
… if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.
Can you now see why Father Orthoduck might prefer C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to either John Wimber or to Peretti? Look again at the books of Lewis and Tolkien. In every one of them, as much, if not more, time is spent on the inner struggle and spiritual development of the characters as on the battles that are being won. At the end of the Lord of the Rings, Captains Merry and Pippin are no longer fools, but the brave defenders of their community. Samwise is now Wise Sam. And Frodo, dear damaged suffering Frodo has become a spiritual elder capable of judging even the fallen angels themselves with a wisdom that is more than human. At the end of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Pevensie children, and their friends, have indeed become true Kings and Queens, full of wisdom and capable of truly judging the realm with glory, wisdom, and power.
That type of insight is sadly lacking in Peretti, in novels that seem to be filled with muscular angels whose spiritual development does not appear to be as present as their muscles and whose wisdom seems only to extend to some very mundane battle tactics. And, as much as I have truly learned from John Wimber, Father Orthoduck must sadly acknowledge that he left us with far too many spiritually underdeveloped people going around looking for demons to cast out, inner hurts to heal, and areas to claim for Christ in prayer while doing either little practical evangelism or little practical involvement that would bring the presence of the Kingdom into that neighborhood.
Inevitably, spiritual warfare appears to be also linked with true suffering, and that suffering not self-inflicted suffering.
I, John, both your brother and companion in the tribulation and kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was on the island that is called Patmos for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, as of a trumpet, saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,” and, “What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia: to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.” … “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.”
===MORE TO COME===
Leave a Reply