First of all, I want to apologize for my week-long absence. God has just been doing so much here, he's keeping my schedule really full!
This past week we studied spiritual warfare by looking at the book of Ephesians in-depth. Ephesus, during the time Paul wrote this letter to the church there, was one of the most intensely demonically-filled cities in the history of the world. To be an Ephesian during that time meant that you worshipped Artemis. Artemis was the goddess of fertility. If there are children reading this, the part in smaller print is not for them. The ways they worshipped her are unspeakable. There were temples with prostitutes on every corner, so one way you worshipped Artemis was by having large orgies and getting together to have many men rape the prostitutes. They also would kill their new-born babies in the hopes that Artemis would bless their harvest and their future children.
So, because when people became Christians, they stopped worshipping Artemis, if anything went wrong with with their neighbor's harvest, or if their sister's baby was born sick, or she had a miscarriage, the Christians would be blamed because they thought it was their fault for not worshipping Artemis. So Christians were often beat up and, in some cases, murdered by members of their own family.
So, if this letter was written to people who faced intense spiritual warfare everyday, how much more will it be able to help us in our daily lives?
We did talk a little bit about what people think of when they hear the words "spiritual warfare": what to do when someone is demonically possessed, how the Ephesians dealt with seeing demons, how to combat spiritual attacks when we encounter them... but we focused on the fact that this is such a small fraction of spiritual warfare. Probably less than 1%. The spiritual warfare we face everyday is a battle within ourselves between our own flesh and our spirit.
Galatians 5:16-17 says, "What I say is this: let the Spirit direct your lives, and you will not satisfy the desires of the human nature. For what our human nature wants is opposed to what the Spirit wants, and what the Spirit wants is opposed to what our human nature wants. These two are enemies, and this means that you cannot do what you want to do."
Ephesians 1:13 says, "And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago."
So we have had the Holy Spirit in us from the moment we believed. Since then, each decision we make has either been in line with God's desire for us, or it has not. When we make decisions about how to spend our time, we need to not just consider whether or not what we are doing is a sin, but we should look at if it is something that feeds our flesh or our Spirit. If we truly desire a greater relationship with God, we need to be purposeful about making decisions that feed our Spirit.
The more we feed the Spirit, by choosing to find time for a quiet time everyday, by keeping a strong prayer life, by surrounding ourselves by people who hold us accountable, the easier it is to continue feeding the Spirit. In the same way, the more we feed our flesh, by hitting the snooze button rather than getting up for our quiet times, by watching inappropriate movies, by spending time wrapped up in video games, the easier it is to continue feeding the flesh.
I had never looked at my decisions about how I spend my time in this kind of way before. It's definitely going to change some of the things that I value.
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