What is Spiritual Warfare?

Our world is surrounded by opposites: black and white, yin and yang, good and bad. Without one, we aren’t able to fully grasp the other. For me, being a Christian means understanding and accepting that there is our heavenly God and on the opposite end of the spectrum, there is Satan. From the beginning of time, starting with Adam and Eve, Satan has tempted God’s creations. Till this day, the evil one continues to tempt us, enticing us with deceivingly empty gifts and false promises. In our personal lives, we witness Satan’s doing when we struggle with right and wrong. Evil also tries to ruin our relationship with God by hurting, breaking and sometimes even destroying us. He succeeds when we turn around and blame God for our mishaps and misfortunes.

What is spiritual warfare? In my humble opinion, it is a battle between good and bad. More importantly though, it is how faithful we remain in Him when things don’t seem to go our way. When blessed abundantly, Satan attempts to steal God’s glory by placing bumps and hurdles in our lives in an effort to instill doubt in our minds that ultimately turn us away from God. Recently, I have experienced spiritual warfare on a minor scale. Within the last month or so, I have been blessed by God in so many ways. After a year of being in an unhealthy relationship that deprived me of my self worth and security, I found a sense of freedom and peace that gave me the ability to live and breathe again (I will share this testimony in the future.) I graduated law school, took the bar exam and finally started to live the life that I studied so hard to attain. My dearest friends, one by one, started accepting Christ and opening up their hearts to God. In short, good things kept happening and I thanked God for each blessing. Then, the devil decided to do his tricks.

About a week ago, I got rear ended by a semi truck on the 91 freeway during peak traffic hour…[click “Read More” below to continue]

Read More

Freed from Mental Oppression

Have self defeating thoughts made you scared and timid about pursuing your dreams?  Has your negative self image held you back from starting or finishing something?  Our friend “X” shares how “mental oppression” crippled her in many areas of her life for years, and how through the love and healing power of Jesus she was set free.

I am an Asian American woman with a supportive and loving family.  I grew up healthy with no traumatic childhood experiences such as abuse, etc.  And yet, like many Asian American kids, I faced constant pressure to do well in this and achieve that.  If I did something that displeased my parents, I would get berated with angry, hurtful words.  Then, after college, I began a career in the tough, competitive world of broadcast journalism where many doors were slammed in my face and the feeling that I was not good enough began to seep in.  I believe that words have seed and when negative things are said about you or over you, they have the power to penetrate deep within your soul.  You start to believe those words, even though in your head you know they aren’t true.  But what you believe is stronger than what you know, so in addition to the harsh criticisms and rejection I experienced from the outside world, I did a whole lot of self-loathing on my own.  This would turn into a 10-year battle with mental oppression that I didn’t even know I had until I got delivered of it three years ago. 

My mind was filled with the most terrible self-defeating thoughts: you’re not pretty enough, smart enough, or talented enough.  Other people are better than you.  You can’t do it.  You’ll never make it.  It’s too hard.  Don’t even try.  Sometimes these thoughts sounded like vicious voices.  And at times, I could literally feel something pressing down on the top of my head!  

Read More

Satan Tried to Kill Me but was Defeated

Our friend, Marian, was involved in a car accident where her vehicle was completely destroyed.  It was truly a miracle she walked away with minor stitches, let alone survived.  She shares with us how God spared her life that day and how he used this tragic event to transform her.

“For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.” Psalm 91:11-12

This past Saturday morning, around 7:00am, I was on my way to a tournament driving westbound on I-90 in Chicago.  There was limited visibility on the highway because it was raining hard.  While driving on the passing lane, a semi truck suddenly makes an illegal lane change into my lane without seeing me.  I saw that there was too little space between the passing lane and the divider on the highway, so I hit the brakes to try to avoid getting sandwiched.  It was too late.  I lost control when the truck struck me on my passenger side, my car spins 90 degrees to the right and gets stuck underneath the semi.  The truck driver not knowing that I’m stuck, continues to drive at highway speed as I’m being drilled down, glass flying everywhere around me, and dragged sideways in my car for the longest 10 seconds of my life. I look out my driver side window and I see the divider inches away.  I’m frozen, scared, and anticipating how much it’s gonna hurt once I hit that divider.  I wasn’t sure if my head will still be attached to my body once it all ended.  All I could do was calmly wait.  The back end of my car smashes into the divider, releasing my car from beneath the truck.  I’m tossed around in my car as the truck rear wheels skid against my passenger side.  I finally come to a stop and I am undeniably alive.

Read More

A Beautiful Mosaic

I’ve shared before about how I run a non-profit called Freedom and Fashion.  A few weeks ago I was on the phone with one of our FnF team members for more than 4 hours.  In the last hour, we ended up praying.

As we were praying, she saw pictures of weeds that God was pulling out.  She discerned the weeds to be distractions, and these were the distractions that have been cropping up all around our team, but the Lord wanted them out!  It’s funny because that was exactly what a few friends from my small group discerned for me personally just the night before.  I was complaining to them about a situation with a partner of FnF, and I was getting angry and frustrated at the injustice.  My friends could see how my anger and frustration with that partner was keeping me from experiencing God’s peace, and that it was a form of spiritual warfare meant to keep me discouraged and distracted from what I was really called to be doing.  They warned me not to give in to the distractions because they were not from God.

So as my FnF team member and I kept praying that night, I also felt the Holy Spirit showing me things about her.  I said to her, “I feel the Lord is going to take all these shattered pieces of you and make it into a beautiful moasic.”

I didn’t know at the time, but that word hit her deeply.  Later on, still thinking about what the Lord had put on my heart for her, she asked me ”did you happen to go onto Facebook today?”

I replied that I was Facebook fasting, so no.

She said, “because on my Facebook status I put ‘God take these broken pieces of me and make me whole.’”

Isn’t the Lord great?

Solei Deo Gloria!

Bonnie

God Told Me Someone Was Pregnant

During a recent GBS bible study on Joshua chapter 5, I learned how God used praise and worship to break down the mighty walls of Jericho and give the promised land to the Israelites.  For so long the Israelites wandered in the desert because they just didn’t quite understand who God was.  For if they knew they wouldn’t have been disobedient to his commandments.  They whined and complained the land was impossible to conquer because they were staring at the distractions around them and not the great and powerful God who stood before them.

A while back, I was singing my heart out during praise and worship because our church was making preparation to enter into 42 days of prayer for revival.  As I immersed myself into the goodness of God, dancing and shouting out to him, the Holy Spirit put a nameless, pregnant, and single girl from our church on my heart to pray for.  I had this feeling she was there with me at church, keeping this secret to herself and unsure whether she was going to be able to keep the baby.  But I also sensed that God wanted her to know he would take care of her and the baby should she choose to keep it.  I really felt God’s love and genuine concern for her well being and how he wanted to make things better for her.  I got the impression she was confused and that she was experiencing tremendous grief, and how God did not want the burden of this situation to devastate her.  The words I got from God for her were “it’s not as bad as you think” because he was going to take care of both her and the baby should she trust him.

I told my friends Bonnie and Dan how I wanted prayer to find her and share all these things the Holy Spirit was revealing to me.  But Dan was wise enough to redirect my focus on praying for her well being and trusting God to use others to minister and care for her.  Perhaps my only role was simply to pray.  I need to be obedient and not cross boundaries by taking matters into my own hands.   I surrendered the situation to God and gave up on finding her.

A couple weeks later my boyfriend told me about a single girl who recently went public with her pregnancy.  I immediately was convicted by the spirit this was the girl God told me to pray for.  After praying and seeking the advice of friends I felt it was necessary to share this story with her.  She needed to know God’s side of the story, which is his undying love for her.  How God loves her so much he put her on a stranger’s heart to be prayed for.  She needed to know that as God was revealing the worries and guilt on her heart for me to pray for, he was also showing me the things on his heart: his perfect love that was free of guilt or shame.

So I emailed her and within a few hours she responded and shared how she was in awe of God’s amazing grace and love.  She said she felt guilt and shame, and it seemed like those things were preventing her from experiencing the intimacy of God’s love.  However, that barrier has been removed and she finally has a peace about this situation so that she can move pass the grief she’s been experiencing.

Her story is so important to me because of how important she is to God.  Her feelings of guilt and shame prevented her from truly knowing what was in God’s heart so those feelings pushed her away from him.  God knew that happened and he never left her nor did he stop loving her.  He chased her down and sent a messenger so that she would come back to him.  

Her story is also important for my church because we were once known as a “church without walls” (CWOW) but we’re all sinners so things happen and like this girl, we felt separated from God’s love.  A wall went up between us and God and each other.   As God was actively breaking down the walls that prevented this girl from receiving his love, I sensed he was also breaking down the walls of our church so that we would enter into all the good things he had planned and purposed for us (Jeremaiah 29:11).  God fights for us because he longs to love us (Isaiah 30:18).    As the power of praise and worship broke down the walls of Jericho, I ask you to join our church in prayer, praise and worship that will be held at the end of this month to help break down the walls of our church.

Please join in the revival effort for Newsong LA.  Please pray for us: http://42daysofprayer.wordpress.com/

Spiritual Warfare

The following is from my friend Paul whom I (Mylinh) started to pray for last week.  He didn’t tell me what to specifically pray for but I started praying and the following is what I asked God on his behalf: 

I asked God to lift the spirit of discouragement, sadness, and depression from him and give him a spirit of hope.  I prayed against any and all things preventing Paul from seeing the hope of God and entering the fullness of all God has for Paul.

A week later the following happened…

Paul’s story:

It’s difficult to know how to best approach this topic but tonight, it jumped out at me like a cursed spirit from an old tome. There are several unsettling things about this that has slipped into my mind. The one I will mention here is that there are casualties in spiritual warfare. Whether you believe in spiritual warfare or not, tonight I realized that I’ve been under attack - for an entire year.

I know I have been trying to figure out what it all meant. Lots of people have asked, “How are you doing?,” and all I could respond with was, “I don’t know, honestly.” I will admit that for the past year, I did not believe that the New Testament was valid scripture in part because I had reduced it down to a handful of ancient letters and a few books. I believed that the New Testament was inferior to the Old Testament, and that it was not a source of authority. Dear, you wouldn’t believe how many lies about God I have festering in my mind.

There have been so many things in the past few months that have led to this revelation, and each one strategically placed. For starters, I found it very, very amusing today that I even decided to study Job, because the concept of spiritual warfare was the last thing on my mind last October. I am still awestruck at how clueless I had been, blowing over the first three chapters of Job. But the Book of Job is a perfect snapshot of spiritual warfare, down to the smallest details. And though the character of Job explicitly knew he was under attack (Job 14:19; Job 16:12; Job 19) I could not identify with him.

This alters how I understand the Book of Job. Previously, I concluded that God doesn’t need to give a reason for our suffering. Not a terrible thing, but man that God seemed like a douche-bag. It is not so much that one is suffering unjustly, but rather one is under continuous spiritual assault. Under this framework, chapters 38-42 have a different tone. Instead of a “if only you were God, then you could end your suffering,” it is a “because you are not God, you will be vulnerable to spiritual warfare.”

What am I going to end on tonight? A praise and a request. I have been experiencing a mild depression the past 6 weeks, which I believe is beginning to lift. I now ask for intercessory prayer, because spiritual warfare is not an easy business and I need to muster everything I can to push back.