In this series of articles, I want to challenge you to live much bigger. I want to challenge you to enlarge your heart into a kingdom heart.
This world is dreadfully broken and full of darkness. Paul writes to the Ephesians, “For ours is not a conflict with mere flesh and blood, but with the despotisms, the empires, the forces that control and govern this dark world–the spiritual hosts of evil arrayed against us in the heavenly warfare.”
So, a fundamental principle of our calling is to struggle with “the forces that control and govern this dark world”. We should regularly renew our resolve to go to war with the things that make up this dark world.
Focusing on the petty
Sadly, we appear to completely misconstrue the enormity of the task. So much of our focus appears to be on the petty, even the ridiculous. Christians as a group appear to focus on stamping out the childish pursuits of our fellow Christians. We should rather focus on the enormous darkness that surrounds us.
Why are we interested in whether someone drinks, smokes, dances, gambles or attends one event or another?
These are matters that every Servant of God wrestles with deep in their own mind. These things are simply not any one’s business other than our own.
Our True Focus
Therefore, as a body and as individuals with a kingdom heart, we should focus on edifying and strengthening the power and beauty in our lives of our relationship with the One True God. We shouldn’t be beating down our neighbours in the personal struggle we all have with the mistakes we make.
What do we understand by the idea that we are struggling with the forces that control and govern this dark world?
Paul urges us to stand firm against all that oppose God (the stratagems of the Devil) by putting on the whole armour of God, and on the surface this appears to be a personal struggle, but then he dramatically expands the conflict by telling us that this is not about mere flesh and blood.
What are we really about?
This is, therefore, about supreme rulers, the privileged, rulers of the darkness of this world as well as spiritual depravity in places where there should be spiritual purity – the high places.
This should, without doubt bring us out of our concerns with the petty smokin’, drinkin’, dancin’ and gamblin’ “sins” of our peers and instead focus our minds on going to war with the evils of a broken world.
Therefore, I decided to write about this warfare in this series of articles.
I wrote this series of articles originally as a book (never intended for serious publication). The articles in order are as follows: