Have you ever been in battle? I mean a real military battle!
For me, one who was born in the USA in the late 1950s, I was never in the military. I was too young for Vietnam. Neither of my parents served in the military—they were too young for WWII. Neither of my grandfathers served in the military—they were both too young for WWI, and too old for WWII. My wife’s father served in the Korean conflict days, but didn’t see battle.
On my side of the family, I have to go all the way back to my great-great-grandfathers, born in the mid-1800s, who both served and fought in the American Civil War (interestingly enough, one was in the Confederate army while the other was in the Union army—and they are now buried near one another in the same cemetery!).
The great exception for my wife and me is our son, who was an Army officer and served in Iraq during the “surge” of 2007. Those were intense times for us as a family, knowing that he was stationed in a battle zone—a place where real bullets were flying every day, real bombs were exploding in the streets, and lives were being wiped out and included in a war report that we call “body counts.”
We are studying how to BUILD HIS CHURCH this year. We are currently working on what we call the “Kingdom Wall” to His Church. This Sunday, we are going to address a much more intense part of this wall—one that we, honestly, as an American / western / democratic society, don’t understand, maybe because we just don’t think it applies to us—and that is the part of the Wall to has to be built to face spiritual warfare, the dark spiritual battles in this world.
As you prepare for this coming Sunday morning, I ask you to read ahead and contemplate these stories:
This is the story of the fledgling young Church early on in Jerusalem, right on the heels of the Pentecost and the explosive growth in numbers of new converts and disciples.
- Look at the unique battles they quickly had to face
- Look at how they faced these battles:
Are we building this kind of a church here?
See you Sunday morning at 10 a.m. Let’s study God’s Word together as we prepare for the battles that we face.
