39: Spiritual Warfare Basics (Part 1)

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On The Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 39. Today we are looking at some spiritual warfare basics. Hello, Father.

[00:00:27] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s kind of fun, isn’t it? We were recently at an event where people were calling you “Daughter”.

[00:00:33] Stephanie: That was a good event. Oh, man. Yes, I hadn’t realized quite how many catchphrases we had in our podcast until going to that event. My father, I call you by many names, but Father has stuck for this, and I like it.

[00:00:49] Marcus: Oh, yeah. It’s fun.

[00:00:51] Stephanie: I’m gonna steal back the icebreakers today. So here we go. Would you rather go on a walk or a bike ride?

[00:01:00] Marcus: Most of the time a walk. Thirty years ago, a bike ride.

[00:01:03] Stephanie: Okay, I’m 31 at this point, but I would say 20 years ago, a bike ride.

[00:01:09] Marcus: Yeah.

[00:01:10] Stephanie: we’re going to talk about spiritual warfare today, and we have a spiritual warfare conference coming up, March 31st and April 1st: What Every Family Should Know About Spiritual Warfare. As I understand it, this is a conference that will benefit people even if they’re not in a family situation, but it is specifically for families.

[00:01:33] Marcus: Yes, absolutely. I mean, this is good information people should know. And some of it will help you understand the family, as well as the family that you might have right now. We’re going to be talking about spiritual warfare praying. Judy Dunnigan, who is the author of The Loudest Roar, is going to have a session on spiritual warfare prayer for the family. That is going to be bonus content for everybody who signs up. They’re going to get that video.

We’ve got Junie Felix, who is a radio personality with Moody Radio in Chicago and she’s on the Deeper Walk speaker team. She’s been connected to our ministry for a while. She’s going to be an author in her own right. It would take a half the podcast to list her credentials.

[00:02:21] Stephanie: Yes, and for all of these people. Juni is going to be emceeing.

[00:02:25] Marcus: That will be great. And then, Dean Vander Mey, who is the executive director of Set Free Ministries. He is actually heading out to India today to do two weeks of ministry over there, where he’s been going for 20 years. A lot of really great fruit comes out of that. At his ministry, Set Free, they’ve dealt with a lot of teenage issues. And so he’s really going to be speaking into and sharing a lot of stories of how you deal with teenage rebellion and that sort of thing? I’m really glad he’s joining us.

Then Karl Payne, who was with us last year when Neil Anderson and Karl and I did a warfare introduction. He’s got a ton of experience. He’s going to be sharing specifically on this issue of generational iniquity. That’s a helpful topic just in its own right. And then specifically, how do you deal with it? What do we do?

[00:03:09] Stephanie: You have some sessions as well.

[00:03:11] Marcus: I’m going to start with just the basics that every family should know. There are a lot of us parents who run into situations, and because we don’t have a warfare worldview, we don’t know what we’re dealing with. So we’re talking about what does every parent need to know? Just the basics, how to cleanse the home, how to pray, hedge of protection. How do you have a conversation with your kids? How do you do it?

We’re going to cover a lot of things like that. And then we’re also going to be talking about how to guide our kids through this occult saturated society we find ourselves in. There’s going to be a lot of good material.

[00:03:45] Stephanie: Well, you can find more information about the conference at our website, deeperwalk.com. Right now it’s on the homepage. You can’t miss it.

I’ll also just say that if you have a small group or a church who wants to attend the conference, we also have pricing available for groups. So you can come check out the website for more details. And if you are listening to this after the event, you can still get the recordings.

So, on to spiritual warfare. Father, Jesus talks about the devil plainly in many places. I’m thinking about John 8:44, which comes to mind. What does it mean to be a child of the devil? What is he talking about?

[00:04:22] Marcus: Yes, there are a couple of times when Jesus refers to people. He says, “You are not children of my Father in heaven, you’re children of the devil.” I’m like, wow, that’s a pretty provocative statement.

[00:04:34] Stephanie: Let’s just go ahead and read it. I’ve pulled it up from the NASB: “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies.”

[00:04:50] Marcus: So let’s first of all identify the audience in a text like that. He’s not saying all of humanity, you’re all children of the devil. He’s talking specifically to the Pharisees and the religious leaders who are actively having conversations about killing him. So the idea here is that murder originated with the devil. That’s what Jesus is saying here.

Not only murder, but then deception. And one of the things I often tell people about warfare is that warfare requires propaganda. Warfare requires a deception campaign. I often think about World War II, where they actually got the Germans to believe that Patton had a fictional army that was ready to invade. They went to great lengths to deceive the people.

Deception is a monumental part of warfare. The devil is this liar and deceiver who wants to kill. Well, here are these people and they want to kill the Son of God. Is that more like your Father in heaven or is that more like the devil?

They are lying to people. They are deceiving people away from following. God’s Son, the Messiah. And so he’s like, “Hey guys, you need to wake up and smell the coffee,” so to speak. And that is, you’re being children of the devil.

This is not the only passage where we find this stuff. Throughout scripture, we have this warning about falseness. In fact, the Apostle Paul, in Acts chapter 20, his last encounter with the elders of the church of Ephesus, they’re in Miletus on the shores of Turkey, and he says to them, his last warning is, “Beware. Wolves are coming.”

What does he mean by these wolves? He says at this point, “There are going to be false teachers, false prophets, false apostles, false brothers, and these false people are gonna come in like wolves and they are not gonna spare the flock.” So his main charge to leaders in the church, like me, was. “You’ve got to protect the flock from the stuff that’s gonna damage them, because that’s how the devil works.”

He told a parable about this too. There are weeds that get sown in there, and these weeds are not just ideas, these weeds are people who are planted by the enemy to bring division and disruption and to keep the harvest from growing and maturing properly. So, it’s a fairly large topic in the Bible, this idea of children of the devil.

[00:07:22] Stephanie: Jumping right out of that is, just a little bit later in John 10:10, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came so that they would have life and have it abundantly.” So we end with hope there, but so often people use this verse talking about Satan, and like we already mentioned with John 8, this is actually in a context where he’s talking about the Pharisees. So why do we so often use it to talk about Satan?

[00:07:50] Marcus: When it says that the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, his context there, you’re right, he’s talking about the Pharisees, and he’s contrasting their spiritual leadership versus his spiritual leadership.

He’s saying, “I’m the gate. The sheep pass in and out safely through me.” He said,  “You don’t even use the gate. You’re ignoring this. You’re the thieves who climb over the walls and you’re raiding the sheep. You are not doing what is good for them. You’re doing what’s good for you at the expense of the sheep”

That’s what he’s specifically saying about the Pharisees here. “You are devouring the sheep, you’re harming the sheep, and you’re doing only what is good for yourself and not what is really good for them.”

In contrast to this, he’s setting it up that he is the good shepherd, he is the gate, he is, the giver of life for the sheep, and he is actually, rather than using the sheep for his own gain, he is laying down his life for the sheep.

So there’s this huge contrast being set up here in John 10:10 between the thief, in this case the Pharisees who steal, kill, and destroy , and Jesus, who comes to lay down his own life for the good of the sheep. The connection here is that it was only a chapter and a half earlier that he called these same people. “You are children of your father the devil, and you’re doing what your father wants.”

This is yet another example of them doing what their father wanted. This is demonic behavior. This is not godly behavior. What happens is, we all recognize that in their capacity as thief in this situation, they are emulating a larger archetype, if you will, of the thief, the ultimate thief. And that this ultimate thief, the devil, is one whose task is primarily to steal, kill, and destroy.

[00:09:41] Stephanie: I was just going to say that those are some foundational things: steal, kill and destroy. I thought we could move into talking about what does it practically look like? What are the foundational things about spiritual warfare that everyone should know?

[00:09:54] Marcus: Yes, we’re talking about, first of all, that these things are quite literal: stealing. He wants to steal the good things that God gives us.In the bible, the term “blessing” means that God gives us something good.That’s a blessing. It’s a good gift from God. So Satan wants that turned into a curse by stealing the good blessing that God has for us. He is actively working to rob us of things that are our birthright, that belong to us.

He is also literally trying to kill people. One of the things that we see a lot of is demonic activity and suicide. A lot of people who become suicidal and actually go through with it, but from the ones who didn’t go through with it and survive, we find out a lot of them are having this barrage in their mind. It’s like, there’s a voice inside telling them that they need to do this.

And then even with a lot of these shooters who have killed a lot of people, if you press into the interviews with them, most of them have something in there where they talk about the voices in their head, telling them to do bad things to people, telling them to kill.

So it’s not just a metaphor. He wants to rob what you’ve got going on in your life and he wants to kill your dreams. That’s clearly a part of it, this can be quite literal. And in Jesus’ case, they were about to kill him.  This is what they’re coming to do: to steal the sheep from the true shepherd and to kill the shepherd.

This idea of destruction: what is counterfeit about Satan’s work is that he promises life, but he offers destruction. One of the pictures that has helped me to think about this is in 1 John 2:15, where it says, “Do not love the world or the things of the world.”

It sometimes helps me to think of the world as the devil’s mistress, sort of like the devil’s girlfriend. The world is like this attractive, seductive, “Hey, I’ve got what you want. Don’t you want to hang out with me a little bit?” John is warning us not to fall for it. Don’t fall for that tempting thing being thrown out there by the world saying,  “I’ve got what you really want. I’ve got the good thing here,” because it’s like flirting with the devil’s girlfriend.

It’s like flirting with the mob boss’s mistress. It’s not going to be worth it. It’s kind of the idea that whatever good might be there, this is going to end up really, really bad. So there is this kind of warning that goes on when he says, “The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy.”

No matter what good thing they put out there, the good thing that is being put out there is not for your good. It is bait. He is hunting you. Bait only works when it’s attractive and that’s a lot of how this works. The enemy is out hunting us like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.

And so he puts bait out there. And a lot of times the bait is to try to seduce us with things that look attractive, that promise to give us good things. But in the end, they don’t give what is good. They end up in bondage and they end up in destruction. So to steal, to kill and to destroy, I kind of wrap that up that way.

[00:13:15] Stephanie: Yes, and so often he does that through lying.

[00:13:19] Marcus: Yes. That’s the essence of bait and hunting, isn’t it? You’re lying to the rabbit when you stick the carrot in the trap, you’re lying to the rabbit and you’re saying, “Hey, this is good. Yeah, you want this? This’ll be good for you.”

It’s the same thing he did in the garden. “You see, it’s good. It’s obvious. Let’s eat this.”

That hunting element always starts with deception. I often tell people the deception always has a kernel of truth to it. I sometimes look at it as an illusionist trick, where the magician or the illusionist will say, “Look, I just made the Statue of Liberty disappear.”

You’re like, well, how did they do that? And the answer is that they show you certain things that are true, but they hide from you other things that are true. And so the illusions only work because they get you to focus only on a few true things and not on other true things. And the result is you believe a lie.

So let’s take, for example, somebody who hates themselves. “I hate myself. I’m worthless. I’m no good. I don’t know why anybody would ever care about me.” Let’s just say that that’s a fairly common attack from the enemy. Those people can almost always point to evidence that what they believe is true, and that is there are people who have told them that, there are people who have rejected them. There are people who’ve treated them like that. They know that they have messed up. They know that they have done bad things. They have some evidence there.

And so what the devil does to deceive us is to get us to only focus on those pieces of truth or those pieces of evidence that support the lie and to get us to overlook and ignore other pieces of truth that would refute the lie. This is common to all propaganda. Propaganda starts by saying some things that are true about somebody, but then it turns that thing into a straw man that you can attack and you can beat up.

There’s a few little things that are true about it, but by the time you get to the straw man that you’re attacking, there’s almost nothing true about that straw man. That happens in warfare all the time, and it is what Satan tries to do to us. He gets us to focus on a problem, view true things, but build a straw man out of it. In our case, it’s our view of ourselves as a straw man.

We start beating ourselves up and we start hammering on ourselves. Whenever you find yourself doing that, you have fallen into the devil’s snare because it is never God’s will for us to beat ourselves up. It’s never God’s will for us to hate people. It’s never God’s will for us to do these things.

So if we fall into that, we can recognize, “Okay, I have fallen into the devil’s snare.There may be some true things that I’m believing, but at some point that true thing turned into a deception. It turned into a straw man. And I am now pounding on that straw man and something needs to change here.” Usually, I’ve got to undo that deceptive web.

[00:16:01] Stephanie: So what are a few things that you wish that everybody would know?

[00:16:07] Marcus: Some things I wish everybody knew about this? Well, the first thing is that not every thought that comes into your head is yours. That’s one of the first things I wish everybody knew, because there’s a lot of us who spend our lives down on ourselves, feeling like we’ve disappointed God, feeling like he can’t possibly love us as much as people say he does, believing these things. They don’t understand that those thoughts aren’t originating with them. They’re coming from the enemy. If we don’t understand that these thoughts come from the enemy, then we end up beating ourselves up instead of beating up the enemy.

My favorite example of this comes from Neil Anderson years ago. I heard him use this example: if I have a house with a backyard and a fence around the yard, and my neighbor has a really mean, vicious dog. And so I’m always careful to keep the gate closed because I don’t want the dog to come bite me. He said, “But suppose one day you’re careless and you leave the door open (just like we might open up a door for the devil, or his demons to, attack us). So in comes this dog and sure enough, he ate us. He bites us. Bites on us. He’s chewing on our leg. We’re in great pain.”

He goes, “Would it make any sense then to respond by hitting yourself in the head repeatedly? Like, ‘I’m such an idiot. What a moron. I can’t believe I left that gate open! I’m such an idiot’.”

[00:17:30] Stephanie: Get rid of the dog.

[00:17:31] Marcus: Right. Beat on the dog, if you will. Get this thing out of here. Make this, you know, make the attack stop. Get it out there and shut the fence. That’s a pretty good picture of a lot of what happens in this battle for the mind and spiritual warfare.

Satan gets us to beat ourselves up instead of actually attacking the real adversary. So we actually talk about it, “Attack the actual adversary,” is one of the points that we often teach when it comes to spiritual warfare in the family. Because a lot of us, we attack our kids, or our spouse, or a sister or a brother, an aunt or uncle, whatever. And realizing that while there may be truth that casts them into the role of enemy, our true enemy is the devil and we need to look for how to attack him in this.

It applies not only to the way we beat ourselves up, but oftentimes the way we look at other people.

[00:18:22] Stephanie: That is a good word.

We’re flying through this episode. We’re coming to the top. We’re definitely going to continue the discussion next week because I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface. Do you want to give final thoughts for the episode or can I ask one more question?

[00:18:40] Marcus: I’ll answer your question for my final thoughts.

[00:18:42] Stephanie: You’re talking about taking our thoughts captive, what are some other kinds of attacks that people have to deal with?

[00:18:46] Marcus: The devil can attack us physically. The Bible is filled with people who had physical problems that were resolved by Jesus casting out a demon from someone not being able to speak, someone not being able to hear, somebody being hunched over, even a fever and other things.

He can attack us physically, and so it’s important for us, I think, when we come under physical attack, one of the things we do, just like we would look for a physical root cause, we sometimes have to look for a spiritual root cause as well and say, “Did a door get opened? Is there something here that needs to be renounced and gotten rid of?”

My mind goes specifically to the stories of people who have taken short term mission trips, been exposed to something occult, brought it back home with them, and some new physical ailment began when they got back. They don’t put together that there’s a spiritual root to this that needs to get dealt with. So there could be physical attacks.

There are mental attacks, and sometimes it’s like, “Did a door get opened that allowed this mental attack to begin? Am I justifying something I shouldn’t be doing?” So you pray and you say, “God, show me, is there a spiritual root to this thing that I’m going through?” Whether it’s a mental torment, whether it’s a physical attack, whether there’s been some relational breakdown – I’m not saying that it explains all of it or that it’s the only thing that causes these things, but I think it is a component that is often missed.

So, asking God to show us what that spiritual root is and then we deal with it. We confess whatever opened the door. We cancel the permission of opening the door, renounce what we did, and we command the wicked spirits to leave and commit that part of our life to Christ.

[00:20:31] Stephanie: The three C’s plus the committing to Christ.

[00:20:34] Marcus: Yep.

[00:20:34] Stephanie: That’s Karl Payne, and I keep wanting to say acrostic. It’s not an acrostic.

[00:20:41] Marcus: It’s some kind of memory device. We call it the three C’s plus one.

[00:20:44] Stephanie: Can you just explain those C’s one more time really clearly?

[00:20:48] Marcus: Yes, The idea is I Confess. Whatever gave permission to the adversary to be tormenting me in some way: it might be something I did, but it might also be something generational. It might be when we go into a hotel room, “ I confess that sin may have occurred in this hotel room.” but I’m confessing whatever the open door was.

And if I don’t know what that is, I use an “if” prayer: “If this door got opened by my ancestors, by something that happened on this property, by something I unknowingly did, then I confess that.”

Then you go to the next one, “I Cancel it. I renounce doing that. I repent of that. I forgive that person. I want to tear up that agreement. I want to cancel the permission that was given there.”

And then thirdly you say, “I now Command, in the name of Jesus, as a child of God, you’ve got no more permission to be here. I command you to leave.”

Those are the three C’s: confess, cancel, command. What gave permission, cancel the permission, and then use your authority to command the enemy to leave. And then I say, “God, I now commit this over to you. Grant me your peace, grant me your protection. And, forward in that confidence.

[00:22:04] Stephanie: Excellent. Thank you, Father.

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