Hello friends, welcome to In Bolden. I'm Chris Shatter, an ordinary Christian living with and learning about an extraordinary God. We've made it today's 16 on 30 Days of Giving Glory to God. Our scripture today is from Psalm 106-47.
Save us, Lord, our God, and gather us from the nations that we may give thanks to our holy name and glory in your praise. And here's a prayer for today. Holy God, the heavens are your battleground. You fight against the cosmic forces over darkness.
Your power and majesty are at work all around me through the unseen world of the Spirit. And through my earthly worship, I take up your sword each day to withstand any evil in your son's name. Amen. One of my favorite lines by Jesus in the Bible is, Get Behind Me, Satan, as he rebukes Peter for having the wrong mindset about Jesus' work.
His exact words are repeated in Matthew 16 and Mark 8. Jesus also uses similar words in speaking directly to Satan in Matthew 4-10 with, Begone Satan. I jokingly use these phrases when donuts suddenly appear in front of me. Recently, however, I heard teaching about spiritual warfare, and I realized I had the completely wrong approach to it.
Psalm 28-7 says, The Lord is my strength and my shield, my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song, I praise him. You see, we so often talk about rebuking Satan or fighting our goliaths, when in reality, we shouldn't be speaking to the devil at all. It's dangerous work that I would venture to say most of us are not prepared to withstand.
Even the archangel Michael used God as his shield rather than his own words. Instead, we should be relying on the incredible power of the Trinity to fight our spiritual battles. Along the same line I once told a friend, we shouldn't be asking what would Jesus do, but rather what would Jesus want me to do. You see, we are not fully man and fully God.
We are just man. And we need to acknowledge that alone, we only have the power given to us through the Spirit. God, through his great love for us, will take care of the rest. Isn't that beautiful and amazing?
So, what do we do? Well, we enact the famous lines from Ephesians 6, and we put on that armor of God. We stand firm in God's truth. We fit our feet with Jesus' gospel of peace.
We arm ourselves with the shield of faith and the sword of God's Word. In other words, we allow God to fight his glorious fight with the devil, while we do the seemingly mundane acts of worship, studying our Bibles, praying for intercession, baptizing in his name, and spreading his word of peace and salvation. Friends, we need to start saying, Get Behind My Lord and Savior Jesus Satan. He is the blinding shield, the Kryptonite against evil.
He is the most powerful weapon we could ever imagine to ward off the arrows' law of debtus. Each time we open our Bibles and go to church, show love to a stranger, speak the gospel truth into a friend, we place that shield firmly in place for God to enter into our battles. Have a great day. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Enbolden Podcast.
Be sure to follow along so you don't miss any episode, and check out my blog at Enbolden.net.