Spiritual Warfare Without Hysteria

Today's Reading

Read Ephesians 6:10-20 in full. Read it slowly, and notice that Paul lists each piece of armor and then ends with the comprehensive instruction: "praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication."

Read 2 Corinthians 10:3-5: "For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ."

Read 1 Peter 5:6-9: "Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith..."

And read James 4:7-8: "Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you."

Reflection

Spiritual warfare is real, and most of it is fought in pajamas.

The Christian church has historically struggled to hold this in balance. On one extreme is the wing of the church that has so embraced deliverance ministry as a category that every spiritual struggle becomes a demonic encounter to be exorcised. On the other extreme is the wing of the church that has so secularized its understanding of the Christian life that spiritual warfare sounds embarrassing — a vestige of pre-modern thinking the modern Christian can quietly retire. Both extremes are wrong, and Paul's instructions in Ephesians 6 cut against both.

Paul is unambiguous that the Christian life is a war. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (6:12). The spiritual world is real, the powers are real, the conflict is real, and the believer is on a battlefield from his baptism to his grave. There is no mode of Christian living that is off this battlefield.

And yet — and this is what often gets missed — Paul's description of the weapons given for this war is striking for how ordinary they are.

The belt of truth. The Christian girds himself by knowing what is true — about God, about himself, about the world — and refusing to let that truth slip. This is the long, undramatic work of catechesis. Of reading Scripture until its categories become your categories. Of being formed by the creed, the confession, the steady teaching of the church. There is nothing magical about the belt of truth. It is the patient labor of becoming a person who knows what he believes and why.

The breastplate of righteousness. The Christian guards his heart by living in the practice of holiness — the daily putting off of sin, the daily putting on of Christ. This is the work of repentance and obedience, repeated for decades. There is nothing dramatic about it. It is the slow building of a life in which sin has been progressively starved.

The shoes of the gospel of peace. The Christian moves through the world ready to share the gospel he has received. He is not silent about Christ. He is, at all times, ready.

The shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. The Christian trusts the promises of God when temptation, accusation, and despair are aimed at him. The shield is the active exercise of faith in the moment of attack.

The helmet of salvation. The Christian rests his identity in what God has done for him in Christ — not in his performance, not in his feelings, not in his successes or failures.

The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. The only offensive weapon in the list is the Scripture, used as Christ used it against the devil in the wilderness — quoted, applied, lived from.

And then, almost as the air all of this is breathed in: praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. Prayer is not a seventh piece of armor; it is the atmosphere in which all the others are worn.

This is what spiritual warfare looks like in the New Testament. Not primarily dramatic exorcisms (though those exist and are sometimes given). Primarily the steady, daily, often invisible labor of truth, righteousness, gospel-readiness, faith, salvation-confidence, Scripture, and prayer. It looks, for most Christians, exactly like ordinary obedience. The dramatic moments are the exception. The disciplines are the rule.

This is why C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters is one of the indispensable books on this subject. Screwtape, the senior demon writing to the junior demon Wormwood, is consistently bored by attempts to score dramatic victories over Christians. What he wants is sleepy Christians. Christians whose disciplines have quietly atrophied. Christians who do not pray and do not notice. Christians whose Scripture-reading has slowed to nothing without their registering it. Christians whose Sunday attendance has become irregular without alarm. Christians who have softened on truth, drifted on righteousness, gone cold on the gospel — but who would still, if asked, identify themselves as Christians.

Screwtape's most chilling lines are about the gradual descent. The patient, he says, must not be frightened into spiritual alertness; he must be lulled into spiritual indifference. The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. The man does not notice he is descending. He only notices, eventually, that the disciplines that once formed him no longer do, and that the truth he once held no longer animates him.

This is the actual battlefield for most modern Christians. Not a dramatic confrontation with a demonic figure. The slow, gentle slope downward of the disciplines that constitute the armor.

This means the recovery of spiritual warfare in the modern church is mostly the recovery of the ordinary disciplines.

It is daily Scripture, read prayerfully, in some kind of plan, with attention.

It is daily prayer — not performances, not many-worded ones, but the honest pouring out of the soul before the Father, including the petitions for one's own faithfulness, the intercession for those in spiritual danger, and the prayers of confession that keep the breastplate clean.

It is the Lord's Day worship of the gathered church, where the Word is preached and the sacraments are administered and the saints sing together — none of which is optional, all of which is part of the armor.

It is the company of the saints in fellowship, where Bonhoeffer is right that a Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. Spiritual war is fought in the prayers of the saints for one another, often without dramatic effect, often without anyone knowing whose prayer turned which battle.

It is, when needed, the work of confession with another believer — James 5:16, the practice the early church took for granted and which the modern church has often lost.

It is, when called for, the more direct work of resisting the devil. James 4:7 is concrete: resist the devil, and he will flee from you. The promise is that resistance, in the strength of the Lord, actually works. The believer does not have to defeat the devil; the believer has to resist, and the devil flees. The defeat was won at the cross.

Now apply this to the subject of this whole plan.

If you have spent the last week realizing that you have been participating, casually or seriously, in occult-adjacent practices — astrology, manifestation, divination, energy work — the response is not panic. It is not the assumption that you are demonized and need a deliverance ritual. It is the ordinary path of repentance: confess the practices to the Lord (and, where appropriate, to a fellow Christian), renounce them, remove them physically and digitally from your life, fill the space with the disciplines of the armor, and walk on.

If a friend or family member is deep in these practices, the response is also not panic. It is the patient labor of prayer for them, the willingness to speak truth in love when an opportunity comes, the modeling of a peaceful Christian life that demonstrates what the alternative looks like, and the readiness, over years, to be the place they come to when the practices stop satisfying. This is spiritual warfare for someone else's soul. It is fought largely on your knees.

Bonhoeffer's line in Life Together is the right ending. The discipline of secret prayer is the central battlefield of the Christian life. Every other warfare proceeds from this one, and no other warfare succeeds without it. The dramatic confrontation, when it comes, will be won or lost by the prayer that preceded it. The slow drift, when it threatens, will be resisted by the disciplines that hold the soul.

The war is real. The weapons are ordinary. The Captain has already won.

Going Deeper

For each piece of the armor in Ephesians 6:14-17, write a single sentence answering: what does this look like, concretely, in my life this week? The belt of truth: what truth do I need to gird on? The breastplate of righteousness: what holiness do I need to put on? The shoes of the gospel of peace: who am I ready to share with? The shield of faith: what flaming dart is currently aimed at me, and what promise of God will I lift against it? The helmet of salvation: what is shaking my identity, and where is my identity actually rooted? The sword of the Spirit: what passage of Scripture do I need to memorize for this season? Then pray through the list.