2 Corinthians 10:3-6 (NKJV) 3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. 4 For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, 5 casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, 6 and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.
We have been looking at some things concerning the time we are living in light of the Word of God. Peter tells us in 1 Peter 5:8 that we have an adversary and he calls him the devil. I do not fear the devil, but I oppose him by faith. The next verse in our chain of scriptural evidence is James 4:7. James tells us that we must resist the devil. If we do, he will flee from us. If we do not resist him, he will not flee. 1 Timothy 6:12 tells us that we resist him by fighting the good fight of faith. A good fight is one you can win. However, the only way we win is if we fight by faith.
That brings us to the scripture we are looking at now. God knew we would need to fight the adversary and gave us powerful weapons with which to win the battle. Many times, we look at verses like this and it seems as though these weapons could not overcome the things we face in life. We must remember that they are mighty THROUGH GOD! Our weapons will do the job if we apply them.
The mighty weapons in this scripture are designed to take down the one thing that defeats Christians more than anything else. They are designed to win the battle of the mind. We all know how difficult this battle is. Jesus told a father of a sick, demon possessed child in Mark 9 that anything was possible if he could believe. In response he cried out, “I do believe, please help my unbelief.” Jesus was not condemning the man. He was diagnosing what the adversary had done to keep him and his son bound.
Something has happened today among many good, Bible believing Christians. I am speaking here of my own experience and nothing else. It seems that if anyone dares to imply that one of us is in unbelief, we are accused of comparing our faith with their faith and we do not have any right to judge them. One synonym for judge is to evaluate. Sometimes we all need someone to help evaluate where we are in life and that includes in our walk of faith. Many things blind us to the truth about ourselves.
Proverbs 27:6 (NKJV) 6 Faithful are the wounds of a friend, But the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
If I say you may need to build up your faith in whatever area you are battling, that is not a judgement of condemnation but of evaluation. I am not saying you do not have faith. Just as Jesus pointed out to the father that his faith was being hindered, so I might be evaluating some things in your life or you in mine. It is not an attack. The man had the right response. He understood Jesus saw something in him that needed to change, and he asked for help changing it. If he had gotten offended and accused Jesus of judging him his son would have remained bound and so would he. Instead he accepted that Jesus loved him and said what he did to help him.
What was the man’s problem? If we read the story, we see that, although he came with confidence that Jesus could heal the boy, contradictory experience and voices had taken his confidence. I believe if we have had an encounter with God that results in being born again, it is extremely hard to take away our faith. What the devil will go after is our confidence in what God will do for us. He does this with arguments and thoughts that attack our confidence in the battleground of the mind. Sometimes these thoughts have their basis in some experience. Often, they come from the worldly or religious voices that bombard us with why the Word will not work in our circumstance.
Once they are in our mind, they take on a life of their own. They multiply, they keep running around in our heads until one thought becomes two and tow a whole litter of new baby thoughts that, unchecked, will overwhelm our ability to focus on what God says. At that point we are not faithless in the sense of our relationship with God. What we have become is unbelieving in whatever area we are fighting the adversary.
I am not a doctor or a scientist, but I can look at the numbers and do basic research on the effect and progress of Covid-19. Given the recovery rates, the degree of illness the majority of people who get the disease suffer, and the number of people who have been shown to be infected with no symptoms at all, I do not accept that corona virus warrants the degree of panic people have been feeling. It warrants caution. It warrants appropriate measures of protection. It does not warrant this level of economic disruption nor social isolation. (You might want to look at this link by Dr. Scott Atlas a former top health official at the Stanford Medical Center. https://www.wnd.com/2020/04/stanford-doctor-5-reasons-stop-panic-end-total-isolation/ )
Where is the panic coming from? We live in the age of the 24-hour news network. They need content and when there is a story as big as Corona, they need to get all they can out of it. Good news is not nearly as compelling as bad news. Good news is more compelling however, if the bad news is very bad. How many of us have watched more news during the “pandemic” than we did before?
The other source of words that exalt themselves against what the Bible says is the voice of politics. Politicians know that being on the perceived right side of a crisis can make their career while being on the wrong side will break it. To a politician, it is often not the facts but public opinion which determines what is right or wrong.
Finally, the voice of the medical world is filling our minds. These are people who have a specific set of knowledge and skills. It is their job to look at things through that lense. They provide valuable knowledge that we can use to help us evaluate, or judge, where we are. Theirs, however, is not the only point of view. How we respond to that knowledge can and must include what the Bible says and what we believe.
All of these voices have converged to bombard our minds with information. Some of it is good and important. Some of it we need in order to do what is necessary to overcome this challenge. To step outside the limitations of what the flesh can do, we must add to that information what the Word of God says and take those thoughts into captivity under the knowledge of God in the Bible.
We must also determine what information is real and what is not. We must determine what is “worst case scenario” information and whether that worst case is what is happening or if the reality of what we are seeing does not support the worst case conclusion. We must also evaluate what information is being thrust upon us to support an agenda and keep us bound. It may be a “news related” agenda, a financial agenda, a social agenda or a political agenda. Those thoughts are the ones we must treat with the last sentence in this verse. We must punish them with the Word of God.
What am I saying? We must not let those thoughts stay in our minds. We must take what the Bible says and cast them down. I will not live in fear. I especially will not live in fear that has been placed in my mind by the agenda words of someone else. I choose to believe what God says.
I want to challenge you to do something this week. For whatever amount of time you spend listening to the voices, some of them well meaning, that produce panic or fear, give equal time to reading the Word of God or listening to teaching that builds faith instead of fear. Even if the world voices are giving good and needful information, give equal time to the Word of God. You will see that your mind will clear, and you will begin to win the battle of faith.
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