The Land of Ozz

Have you ever experienced spiritual warfare first hand? I got an up close and personal view of spiritual warfare this weekend. I fought a battle with Satan on Saturday. There is no doubt in my mind that the things I experienced this weekend can clearly be defined as spiritual warfare.

The weekend started with my wife and I attending the Cleansing Stream retreat at the Seacoast Church West Ashley. There was well over 500 people in attendance from at least seven different churches in the local Charleston area.

Sherry and I had been through the Cleansing Stream seminar series a couple of years ago, but I was not able to attend the retreat at that time due to my travel schedule. Maybe the travel was Satan’s way of keeping me out of the retreat back then. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that Satan was all over me this weekend trying to keep me out of this retreat.

Let me give you a brief history of my work year to set the stage for this weekend. For most of this calendar year I have been the after hours on-call engineer for the government project that I support on my job. The duties of the on-call engineer require being able to respond to very complex technical circumstances in a short amount of time (minutes). The duties that the on-call engineer performs require troubleshooting, diagnosis, and repair of network security related problems for our government customer. Most of the problems are related to virtual private network (VPN) outages. We manage and monitor the third largest VPN network in the US government. The on-call engineer is sole person that serves as the last stop before a piece of equipment is replaced or the telecommunications company is contacted for possible circuit outages during non-business hours. I generally serve as this on-call engineer by choice because none of the other 10-12 guys who are qualified want it. Most of them travel extensively and do not want to take a chance of getting called in the middle of the night while they are home off the road. I believe that this duty, which does come with some compensation whether calls are received or not, has been a direct financial blessing to my family from God this year. The extra income from being the on-call engineer has boosted our house-hold budget to a point that has allowed us to be set free from a near super-natural debt situation in the past year.

For the details of my weekend, let me just say that I can not remember the last time I got a call on a Saturday morning as the on-call engineer. Weekends are almost always very quiet. I had no reason to think this weekend would be any different so I did not ask anyone to cover for me during this retreat. That was a BIG mistake. Satan knew I was on call and reached out and grabbed hold of my cell phone and dragged me out of that retreat no less than seven (7) times this weekend in 24 hours. Four of those times happened between 8am and noon on Saturday. It was so bad that the guy working the 24/7 help desk at work asked me, “What in the heck is going on this morning?” Not knowing where he is spiritually, I did not try to explain it over the phone. Besides, I wanted to solve the on-call issue at hand and get back into the retreat. The first call came very early Saturday morning just after we arrived at the retreat. The second and third calls came while I was waiting in line to receive prayer for anger and fear. I did not really think I needed to go up for prayer for fear or anger because I have been dealing pretty well with those issues myself… I thought. I will get back to that in a minute.

By the afternoon when I got call number six, I just started laughing as I stepped outside. I really got to the point where I found this to be funny that the enemy would try so hard to keep me out of this retreat. By the time the day was over I had received a total of seven calls on totally different issues within a twenty-four hour period. That is absolutely unheard of in my experience of being the on-call engineer for over 30 weeks this year. This was a really weird measurable attack by Satan and I stood strong in the name of Jesus Christ.

I am so glad that I stood strong against this attack from Satan and returned to the prayer line after answering my call. What I did not know was how much I needed prayer for fear and anger. I have had anger building up inside of me over the past couple of years in particular. I had just recited a prayer of repentance and forgiveness, but the Holy Spirit moved me to go forward to receive prayer for anger. I finally got to the front of the line and was waiting for the next ministry team member when I just became a pile. Tears started to stream down my cheeks. I realized at that moment how angry I had become over the lies, partial truths, and deception that had been fed to me about my son Caden’s doctors. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not coming down on all doctors or even a particular doctor. Praise God for doctors. The fact is, that you hardly ever get all the facts that are known from the doctors regarding decisions that need to be made on treatment choices. Your average person would have to go to medical school to understand even a small percentage of the facts anyway. I believe that Satan uses these facts to stir up fear and deception that can overshadow what God wants us to do concerning the health of our family members or ourselves. This can lead to our trust in God being overshadowed by a stronger trust in the doctors. That can be very dangerous.

Getting ahead in this war first requires us to realize that there is a war. God’s Word clearly tells us:

“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.” 2 Corinthians 10:3-4 (NIV)

If you have a hard time understanding or believing this scripture, then you are likely the victim of some pretty creative deception by Satan already. Satan does not want us to believe the Word of God.

The events of this weekend were an attack on me from Satan. The attack was intended to keep me from demolishing strongholds that he has been planting in my life for a while now. The fear and anger were just two examples of things that I was dealing with on Saturday morning. A battle was won this weekend in the, all powerful, name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Faith, Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.