OUR POWERFUL WEAPON!

Ephesians 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

I want to talk one the subject of prayer…As we look at prayer, we need to know right now that it is the deciding factor in the spiritual battles we all face…

Now there is a spirit world…It co-exist with the material world…This spirit world is divided into two opposing forces…Those spirit angels that are obedient to God…that serve the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of life and light…There are, however, spirits, that have rebelled against God and are serving in the kingdom of Satan…a kingdom of death and darkness…

These spirits are opposed to one another…The major field of conflict is on this planet… You and I are in the center of this conflict…The purpose of that conflict is that of control…The control of lives…So you often find yourself in the middle of conflict as the spirit forces are at war over you…I find it in my own life that there is a war going on: As Paul said, “The spirit is lusting against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit…” and the two are contrary…

God seeks by His love to draw me unto Himself that I might live and fellowship with Him…The law of God’s kingdom is that of love…and thus of giving…which is the expression of love…the Lord tells us Himself, “that it is better to give than receive…” So God is constantly seeking to open my eyes & heart to the needs of those around me…reaching out in love to touch them and to help…to give a hand of strength and blessing to those that have fallen…or those who have been ruthlessly over-taken in this spiritual battle…

On the other hand, there are those forces of darkness that are dealing with me also…Trying to get me to give in to that natural characteristic of greed…and to live for myself and forget the needs of others…and to close up my heart and mind to the needs of those around me…and to go for, just what I can get for my self and live a very self-centered, selfish life…

There are those times when I want to just close up my mind & heart to the needs of those around me…And yet the Spirit of God is speaking to my heart and saying look, “you’ve been blessed, don’t hog it, share it…” He reminds me that there are people in need and He says, have compassion on them…So goes the battle, the spirit against the flesh & the flesh against the spirit…These contrary forces that are at work trying to bring me under their control…so our life is either ruled by greed or love and that is the whole issue of what shall rule my life…Will you be ruled by greed or by love…

Now, in this battle in which we are engaged, Prayer is the deciding factor to bring victory…Satan knows that, and that is why it is so hard to pray…I mean really pray…

Have you ever noticed, that when we say or think, “I am going to spend sometime in prayer…” The moment you get on your knees…either the dog wants out or the phone rings…There is something that seems almost diabolically connected to that portion of carpet, where I kneel down…and the telephone…The moment I bow down, bingo, the telephone…and I say I better answer that, it could be important…and immediately I am distracted and taken away from prayer…or somebody will pull into the yard…Distraction…

Satan will do anything to distract you from prayer…Because he knows it is deciding factor in the battle we are in…He concentrates all of his effort in disarming you from prayer….

See, it’s like this…If you were going down an alley and somebody jumped you…You would begin to scuffle with that person… And as you are struggling you see the flash of a knife…all of a sudden you realize the hold you have on their neck is not gong to keep him from cutting you…so you grab for the wrist because you realize that this knife could be the deciding factor in the battle and so all your effort and energy are concentrated, now in disarming them from that knife…grabbing the wrist and pushing it down and trying to wrench that knife out of their hand…because you know that that can spell the difference between victory and defeat…

Satan, realizing that is also true of prayer…controls his efforts against your prayer life…Keeping you from prayer…Also, another tactic of his… that the moment you get down and start to pray, all of a sudden, you remember all of those things you forgot to do…It is amazing how keen your memory can become the moment you start to pray…It happens to me so much, that I have learned to take a little note book with me just to jot things down…You know Satan will do anything to keep you from effectual prayer…

Oh how Satan fights prayer!! Because he knows that is the weapon that spells his defeat…

Now there are some very interesting facts that we need to know about this war…

1) The first one being…It is that the decisive battle has already been fought and won…Over two thousand years ago, the major contestants met, head on…they fought and One won a decisive victory…And Jesus Christ brought Satan into defeat…HOWEVER, even though, Jesus defeated the enemy thoroughly, he refuses to give up…So he seeks now to hold by force that which is no longer rightfully his…This battle that was fought, was fought at the cross…and there Christ defeated the enemy…

WHO IS THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD…?

You see the world originally belonged to God by right of divine creation…God created the earth and made man and when He did so…He gave the earth to man, that he might enjoy it…God told man to be fruitful and multiply…and told him he could have dominion over the earth…the fish of the sea…the foul of the air…over every living thing…God’s purpose for man was that he could enjoy all that He had created…

So God gave the earth to man…But Satan through lying and deceit, and guile, came into the garden and deceived man into turning the world over to him…So that the world came under Satan’s dominion and authority…He became the prince of this world…and this became his kingdom…so as you look at the world today, you do not see the world that God, originally gave to man…

When Christ speaks of this world, He means the world of sin… He means the world for which, as He mysteriously declared in John 17, “I pray not for the world…” The prince of this world is Satan…

The world in which the devil is prince or king is the world of unrepentant sinners... They are stubbornly set on doing their own will, contrary to the will of God…

Since the dawn of history, the devil has misled human beings in what may be called an ocean of lies…

In our century he has deceived millions on the meaning of human freedom…Certainly we have a free will… but what the devil does, through his deceit is to blind man and divorce human freedom, from dependence on God…

Thus he is the master of deceptions and the prince of this sinful world…

When we think of the world that God intended, we must realize that He did not intend that men live in greed & lust & fight each other…& destroy each other in wars…
God intended that man would live in love…But the world rebelled against God and is in rebellion against Him even as we speak…

WHAT JESUS DID!
Colossians 2: 14-15…Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross…and having spoiled principalities an powers, He made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it…

God sent His Son, Jesus Christ to redeem the world back to Himself…Jesus said, “I have come to seek and to save that which was lost…” He also said in Luke 4:18, “The spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor, He hath sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised…”(Remember the blind part.)

And So…the purpose of the coming of Jesus Christ was to bring the world back into the control & under the authority of God’s Kingdom…That was what Jesus was always talking to His disciples about, “The Kingdom of God”…and the Glory of the Kingdom of God, when God once again, rules over the earth…

So this is why Jesus came…to provide a way of escape for the ones who really want out of the sinful side of this world…to provide a light for man to see, and through this light men who have been blinded by Satan, will have the choice to make, that will lead them into The Kingdom of God…

But…What we need to clearly realize is that Satan knows that better than we do…When we study the Word of God in dept, we will see many times in the life of Christ in which Satan was trying to keep Christ from going to the cross…

The conflict between Jesus & Satan, on earth, began early, when Jesus was only about two years old…Satan tried to do Him in by inspiring the heart of Herod to order the death of all of the babies…So the decree to kill all of the babies two years and older went out from Herod…and unless the angels of the Lord had warned Joseph to take the baby and His mother to Egypt…Jesus would have been destroyed by Satan…before He had a chance to redeem the world…

Later on when Jesus was baptized by John, He went into the wilderness and Satan came to tempt Him…Satan took Him high up on a mountain top and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them…and Satan said, “If you will just bow down and worship me, I will give you all of these…” He was offering a compromise…it was a lie…it was a part of his deceitful plan of which that is his natural characteristic…

For you see if Jesus had bowed down to him, He would have been in subjection to him…and the world would have been his…forever…it was a clever plan…

So see this…What Satan was doing was a compromise…he was saying, “You don’t have to take God’s way…You don’t have to walk that path…I’ll give you just what you are looking for, immediately… You don’t have to suffer the cross…You don’t have to take that painful way…You can have immediate fulfillment now…Just bow down and worship me…Follow me and my way…turn away from God’s way & follow me…”

AND HE SAYS THE SAME THING TO PEOPLE TODAY!
“Look, you don’t have to take up that cross…why don’t you just follow me and I will give you immediate fulfillment…” Sound familiar?

But Jesus won that round in the wilderness…Later He went to Nazareth to preach…He stood in the synagogue …read the prophecy of the Messiah and He said, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your eyes…” and Satan inspired the hearts of the people to kill Him…They took Him out to the edge of the city of Nazareth, to a cliff and they were going to throw Him over the cliff…but He slipped out of their sight…Later on, when He was on the boat on the Sea of Galilee…Satan stirred up a storm, trying to sink the ship, and the disciples woke Him and said, “Lord we are going to drown…” and Jesus stood up and He rebuked the storm waves…and it was still…

But then Satan filled the heart of Judas who went to the High Priest and said, “Hey you want to know where He is? Give me thirty pieces of silver and I will lead you to Him…”

Judas lead the soldiers from the High Priest into the Garden of Gethsemane, where they arrested Jesus and took Him back…where He was condemned in a mock trial and taken to Pilot…and Satan stirred the hearts of the people with animosity against the man of Love…and they cried, crucify Him, crucify Him, and the voices prevailed…and Pilot turned Him over to be crucified…and as Jesus died on the cross…the kingdom of darkness seemed to triumph, because the darkness even covered the land…it seemed like the forces of hell were rejoicing in this great victory…it seemed like they could hold forever, on to the death which they had gained…

But, but…early on the morning of the first day of the week…They found the stone rolled away…because Jesus had risen from the dead… and in so doing had triumphed over Satan…

He had triumphed over death…He had triumphed over hell…and rose in victory to set at the right hand of God the Father until all His enemies, He made His footstool…

So Satan was defeated at the cross…The cross, rather than spelling victory for evil, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, spelled total defeat for Satan…and it is by the cross and His death on the cross, that He redeemed the lost world back to God…and lost men now have a way back to God…

However Satan refused to acknowledge defeat and sought to hold on to that which is no longer rightfully his…

Illustration: You remember the story in the Old Testament, when Saul, the first king of Israel…disobeyed God and the prophet of God came to him and said…”Saul, because you have rejected God from ruling over you, God has rejected you from ruling over the people and the kingdom is taken from you and given to another…”

Samuel was told to go down to the house of Jesse and there to anoint one of the son’s of Jesse to be king, which he did in anointing David to be king of Israel…As far as God was concerned…David was King but Saul was still sitting on the throne…Not only that…Saul is doing his best, by force, to hang on to that which has really been taken away…
No longer rightfully his…David is rightfully King…The rightful heir to the throne…but Saul is sitting on the throne and trying to keep that which is no longer his…

The same is true with Satan…He was deposed at the cross…the world is no longer rightfully his…But he is seeking by force to hang on to that which is not legally or rightfully his…

Therefore, when we pray…what we are doing is taking from Satan, territory that doesn’t really belong to him anyway…
We are laying claim to the Victory of the Cross of Christ in that situation or in that life or in that area, where Satan is still holding on…and when we come against Satan, through the Victory of the Cross…the glorious thing is that he must yield…He cannot hold on…He’s got to let it go…However, he is very relentless and very stubborn…He only yields what he must yield…Our prayers must be defiant and persistent…

Listen close to this…One of the mistakes we often make in prayer, is, in those situations, where Satan has obviously been in control in a person’s life…We begin to see some amount of success, they come and say, “All right, I didn’t realize the mess that I had gotten into…I going to take charge now…Things are going to be different now…we got it made…” and us as the one’s who have been praying…get comfortable, and we quit praying…

Then, when Satan has been driven off his territory…he counter attacks and tries to regain that territory from which he has been driven…Therefore, our prayers must be persisted in even after we seem to have won the battle and start to see victory and resolve…

The mistake we often make is quit praying and then Satan sees our guard is down…he counter attacks to take the territory back that he has lost…he wants back what he has been driven from…

So what is gained through prayer, we must hold through prayer against the power of darkness… He only yields what he must…Our prayers must be specific…He loves generalized prayer…”Oh God, ‘save the world’…” That doesn’t bother him at all…to generalized, because he knows no one is really going out to help win the world for Christ…most of us don’t ever speak to our neighbors much less, share Christ with them…
So what we must do is bring, life-by-life, individual-by-individual, territory-by-territory, to God, through persistent prayer…

Illustration: Several years ago, a brilliant attorney in the state of Missouri, was elected to “The House of Representatives…” He became the congressmen for his district…He was in Washington in which he was promoting several bills that he had introduced…He was an atheist…He wanted nothing to do with God…But back in Missouri, his wife, who loved the Lord, was meeting with some friends for prayer…and when she mentioned her concern for her husband, three of those ladies said, “Look, let us covenant together to pray for your husband…and every morning at 10 o-clock, we will pray that your husband, to be freed from the power of Satan and that the light of Jesus Christ love, will shine into his heart…that he might receive Christ as his Savior…”

So these ladies made a pact to meet, made the covenant together, that at 10 o-clock each morning, they each, would lift him up in prayer and to pray to break the hold that Satan had on his life…

It was such a hectic time in congress, that he hardly had time to call home…but when the recess came, he returned home, and to his wife’s amazement, on Sunday morning, he said, “Lets get up and go to church together…” She was delighted, thrilled as she got dressed to go to church with her husband for the first time…She was even more amazed when at the alter call, he went forward and gave his life to Jesus Christ…

As they began to share their new life and the love they had found together in Christ…She told him how her and three ladies friends had been praying for him everyday at 10—clock, for his salvation…He said to her, “When did you make that decision?”

She thought back an recalled that it was on a Tuesday that we gathered for prayer…it was Tuesday the 10 of March…

He looked at his notes, and on the 10th of March, he had scribbled down, that all of a sudden, he had suddenly come to a tremendous consciousness, an awareness…that he needed Christ in his life…

The power of prayer…Pulling down the stronghold of the enemy…You see, the Bible says, that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal in the spiritual battle…but they are mighty through God and through them, we can pull down the strongholds of the enemy…and one of the most powerful weapon we have is prayer, where we can bring the victory of Christ…concerning our love ones, and we can free them from Satan’s hold…

Now, the question that arises is, “Can we pray with assurance, for our unsaved loved ones or troubles ones…” because we know that God will not save any body against their will…and that is true…

God will not save you against your will…If you are unsaved and don’t want to be saved, don’t worry, God want force you into salvation…He’ll never do it against your will…Jesus said, “Behold I stand at the door and knock,” you don’t have to worry about Him busting it down if you don’t go to the door…He said, “If any man hear my voice and open the door,” and that is necessary, you’ve got to open the door…He’s not going to force you to open it…He’s not going to force entry into you life…

So if God want force a person against their will…how then can I pray with assurance...that God will save them…?

It’s, understanding the nature of the battle…It’s understanding, the truth of their condition…You see, these people are really not free to make a Godly choice because Satan is holding them in his power…in his grip, against his will…He has blinded them… Paul told us that through us, “They might recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will…” (2nd Timothy 2:26…)

He also tells us in 2nd Corinthians 4:4, "whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine into them…" So it is, they can’t receive, because they cannot see…where Satan has blinded their eyes and is holding them in his power…

Therefore, our prayers must be directed against Satan’s power…So we must bring them before the Lord and in the victory of Jesus Christ upon the Cross…We must command that Satan release that hold that he has on their lives…Jesus died to redeem them…Jesus won the victory…He has purchased them all ready… and Satan’s power has no real right to them and we demand that he release them from that hold that he has…

The beautiful thing is that he has to do it…he can’t hold out…We must demand that he release them from that blindness that has so perverted their thinking toward the gospel…that has given them a weak view of the Jesus Christ…That has blinded them to the truth and the realization of their own need…

Illustration: I had a fellow the other day, and it was just as true in my own life as well, tell me, “You know, it's amazing…when I was an out in the world, drinking and doing drugs, I didn’t realize what a mess I was making of my life…I thought I was really a cool man…I though I was really living, you know…I thought things were really going great…”

He went on to tell me that he was completely blinded to how he was destroying himself and his marriage & everything else…He said he was completely blinded…He just didn’t see it…

How true, It could be that you are totally blind to you situation today…The god of this world has blinded your eyes that you cannot see the truth…So by prayer, we can come against that blinding work of Satan that has kept you or whoever, from seeing the truth and God can open your eyes and your hearts that you could realize the mess that your lives have gotten into…and the need you have of God…

Many people do not even believe in God…why? Because Satan has blinded their eyes…

I firmly believe, that through our prayers we can connect with God and He will… “say to them that are of a fearful heart, be strong, fear not, behold your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompense (reward) ; He will come and save you…Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped…"(Isaiah 35: 4-5).

Now once a person has been truly freed from the hold that Satan has upon them, and really sees the truth…Any rational, reasonable, logical person, would then receive Jesus as their Lord…only a fool would reject Him at this point…So if your friends or family aren’t fools, you can have great hope…the Lord says, come now let us reason together…

Now as we close…the question arises…is it right to pray more than once for the same thing…if I have enough faith, can’t I just pray once and let it go…Now again, seeing what prayer is really about and what it can accomplish…That it helps to break up the strongholds of the enemy…we need to know that every prayer becomes a fresh flow of power…it becomes a fresh blow against the enemy…every prayer is helping to break the resistance that he has created within the ones he has blinded…so repeated prayers are very valuable and necessary as we storm the fortress of darkness…and through our prayers, God will deliver people from the kingdom of darkness so they can come into the glorious love of Christ Jesus…

Now, we know we have the power but it is not only our power, but the power of the One who bought it with His life blood…God wants to use your prayers to set the prisoners free from that work of Satan…that has bound them and blinded them…you have the power to free them in order that they might make a free choice and find the Glorious light of hope and the Love of Jesus Christ…

The reason they are going on in darkness is, “no one is taking the time or the effort to get into the battle and fight it through…”

But we can see God’s victory work through their lives if we would just set some time aside, and pray specifically for those you know that are blind…

We come from a position of strength of power of victory because the battle has already been fought and won…All we have to do is lay claim to that victory, life after life…situation after situation…issue after issue…

It’s time we begin to set our world free around us…

It’s time to quit singing, “Hold the Fort,” and start singing, “Victory in Jesus,” and mean it…because God is with us…

We need to get out of the trenches and start slugging … we need to take away the territory that Satan is trying to keep by force and use the Power of prayer through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and hold our prayer banner high in His name….

That’s my story and I am sticking to it in Jesus name…

Robert N. Graves, Sr. Fisherman for Christ