Skip to main content

Kingdom Crossfire

It seems I’ve spent half my life caught in the crossfire between the principalities and powers of the air thinking I was fighting battles with flesh and blood. I gave my heart to Jesus at the tender age of nine. Naïve to what it meant for my earthly future, on the spiritual level a child can understand, I knew it was the right choice… the only choice for me.

I’ve had some amazing experiences in my life; God is responsible for these. Just this week, I’ve found He is at it again… bringing parts of my childhood and adolescent years around to meet up with my adult self and allowing me the great privilege of tracing His Hand from hell to high places… urging me toward completing the healing process in wounds almost three decades old.

As school starts back, may I remind you… parents and grandparents, classroom teachers and Sunday school teachers… coaches: The children in your care who have made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ are gigantic neon flashing targets for spiritual warfare. They probably won’t know what it is. They may not understand why they’re suddenly being treated differently by people who used to be their friends. How do I know? Because I was one of them, and just this week, a full twenty-six years later, as a full-blown mature adult, God cleared the blur and brought the full picture into view.

You can’t fight the enemy until you know who the enemy is. You can’t fight the enemy unless you have the right tools for the battle. You can’t get out of the crossfire until you know for sure which side you’re committed to. This is hard enough for adults. In today’s world, I cannot begin to imagine navigating as a child. They need our help to understand that things WILL change after making a profession of faith. They need help to understand that the Devil of the Bible is real in the world and wants to convince them that they’ve made the wrong choice.  We can't possibly expect them to identify what we often miss ourselves.  We must help them work through these attacks and guide them in developing the tools for the fight.  I believe this is the high calling of working with children and youth. I pray God grants us all the wisdom, discernment, and sensitivity necessary for the job.


                                                                      Guest blogger this week:  Karissa Petty

Comments

  1. Sue DuffieldAugust 9, 2017 at 3:14 PM

    Extraordinary post, Karissa. Sharing this. Keep them coming. "It’s better to be wise than strong; intelligence outranks muscle any day. Strategic planning is the key to warfare; to win, you need a lot of good counsel." - Proverbs 24:5-6

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownAugust 10, 2017 at 3:09 PM

    I love your insight on this subject Larissa. You covered it well!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God The Modern Father

   These are hard days.  It's tough for ministries.  It's tough for churches.  It's tough for parents.  It's tough for men, and it's tough for women.  It's tough to know who you can trust and who you can't.  It's tough to weed out fact from a preponderance of fiction.  In general, life is hard.    Did you know the Bible promises that life will be hard?  In a recent conversation with Ann about the overall decline of the church... why congregations take off and then systematically shrink and ultimately dissolve... I believe the Lord dropped a relevant truth into my heart.  It's not anything I haven't said before, but it is in a different context.    I'm seeing a trend in making converts without discipleship.  And, in the cases where discipling does take place, I fear there is some error in the teaching which could, in very large part, be responsible for the decline of the American church. ...
3 comments
Read more

Courteous Listening

The act of being courteous takes very little effort. I’m one of the worst to get involved in what is going on at that moment in my life, probably trying to figure it out, fix it, find a solution….you know, MOVE ON WITH IT.  All the while, I frequently miss what’s happening right in front of my face. When we stop and think about it, a lot of us probably come across as disinterested, impatient with, and/or bored by what others are saying.  In politeness we nod, maybe touch an arm as if to say, “I hear you.”  I know a lot of the time we’re sincere, but more often than not, we’re probably thinking about the next thing on our own agenda forgetting what we’ve heard only five minutes later. If I’m thinking about this, the light bulb may be going off in your head, too.  Maybe all of us can put forth a more concerted effort to be effective listeners and be as truly attentive as we try to make people believe we are.
Post a Comment
Read more

No Matter What

Several years ago a friend shared with me that his route to work every day took him through a toll booth....and he tried to always choose a certain booth. This is because the gentleman manning that booth was an elderly man who always had something "bright and sunny" to say to him. Every morning my friend would hear "Have a good day, no matter what!" Now, there were days my friend drove up to that toll booth with zillions of questions in his head of how he was gonna make it through a challenging day that was always before him when he arrived at his workplace. But he just kept those words in his head...and heart..."Have a good day, no matter what". Now, that's a choice, isn't it? "No matter what"???? I don't know about you, but I honestly don't find that coming naturally to me...it's a struggle to find sunshine on those cloudy, dreary mornings...'cause it just doesn't show up in my eyesight. But, that's w...
3 comments
Read more