(00:02) Stephanie Warner: Welcome on the trail listeners to Season 4, episode 43. Hello, Father.
(00:08) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter.
(00:10) Stephanie Warner: We are coming off a weekend celebrating two hundred and fifty years of the United States of America. Happy birthday, USA!
(00:21) Marcus Warner: Yep, I’m old enough to remember the two hundredth birthday and the two hundred fiftieth birthday. It’s making me feel old. But yeah.
(00:30) Stephanie Warner: You got your sweet spot there. You know, it’s good. I think it’s really good to have history in mind. That’s a really weird thing to say. There’s a really good thing to have like the scope of history in mind and the ups and downs and the seasons of you know, war and peace and the seasons of prosperity and not, and it gives perspective because sometimes you know, we either need to prepare for when bad is coming or we need to remember that bad is not all there is and…
(01:10) Marcus Warner: Well, and it’s true too. When I think about it, I just think about our own family history and the interconnection. I mean, on both sides of the family, we had people who came to this country in the sixteen hundreds, right? And my dad saw the hundred and fiftieth anniversary. And now I’m seeing the two hundred fiftieth. It’s pretty remarkable. It also gives you a sense of how short that is in the history of the world. But yeah.
(01:41) Stephanie Warner: I was just about to say that. And in the history of the world, we be babies. and I also just have to say, not only are we celebrating a country’s birthday, but also happy four years of podcasting. We have been on the trail for four years. Wild.
(02:00) Marcus Warner: Like an elected term. Okay. Yeah.
(02:02) Stephanie Warner: Our brains are in a place.
(02:08) Marcus Warner: Vote for us again. Four more years. Here we go.
(02:11) Stephanie Warner: Four more years on the trail! We’re so happy to be on the trail with you all. And in doing all that, we have a summer giveaway going on that you can check out the details for in the description and come see us over on @onthetrail_podcast on Instagram and what we’re up to over there. We’re just wanting to celebrate with you, not just to say huzzah in the podcast, but we are saying huzzah. And if you have been with us for any amount of time, would you pop a huzzah into the comments? We would love a sound off.
And even more, I would love to know, what makes you, why are you a listener? Why do you keep coming back? And if you’re not a listener, if you’re just coming into this for the first time, what brought you here? We would love to know. Thank you for being with us.
And what we are doing today is very exciting. We are starting a new book study working through Dad’s book, What Every Believer Should Know About Spiritual Warfare. And I’m just going to warn you right now as I say that. Internally, we referred to this book as WEBSKA: What Every Believer Should Know About. So if we ever say WEBSKA, that’s what we’re referring to – What Every Believer Should Know About Spiritual Warfare. The goal of this series is to equip you with a spiritual warfare first aid kit so you can function with more freedom on your deeper walk with God and to aid you in this.
We do also have a DIY book club kit for you that you can find for free in the description that has a discussion guide that you can use as you are in a group study through this book, or even if you just want to reflect on your own. But so that was a lot of announcements and a lot of celebrating and a lot of all the things. Anything you wanna say before we dive into chapter one, Father?
(04:18) Marcus Warner: No, let’s go. Let’s get into the reality of spiritual warfare.
(04:21) Stephanie Warner: Let’s go. The reality of spiritual warfare. Yes. I guess one more bonus announcement is we did have a little prequel series or prequel two episodes before this where we were talking about is spiritual warfare optional? And so if diving straight into the reality of spiritual warfare feels a lot, go check out those episodes. But yes, Father, in this chapter, you just kind of drop us straight into testimony after testimony after testimony of people and their stories from all walks of life, and all ranges of experience with spiritual warfare, and how they’ve dealt with it, and how it shows us the reality of spiritual warfare across the board. Tell us more.
(05:10) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so you know, again, my journey with this started very young. I was seven years old, and I remember I was home, there was a babysitter, my sister was with me, and all of a sudden I started screaming and they’re like, freak them out, right? It’s like why is seven year old Marcus screaming? And I saw sitting on the kitchen table, not kitchen table, the dining room table, staring at me, kind of this creature that was, you know, black and red eyes and it didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything, didn’t, you know, but it was really clear. It wasn’t like am I seeing what I’m seeing? No, it was vivid. And felt almost physical.
And so I was shocked that they couldn’t see it because of that. But I remember then as soon as my parents stepped across the threshold of the house, it disappeared. Boom, just left. And so my parents walked home from whatever they had gotten a babysitter for to a bit of a crisis in the house. And that night they calmed me down and told me it’s like, well, look, if this ever happens again, this is what you do. Just plead the blood of Jesus over you. And say in Jesus’ name I command you to leave, and then here’s a Bible verse to meditate on while you calm down.
And I’m kind of like, well, you can handle this. So you know, it’ll be fine, but just to make sure, I remember they scheduled an appointment with the doctor for me. So there’s something going on with Marcus, and the doctor said, Well, he’s having a night terror. And I said, what’s a night terror? He said it’s when you’re having a nightmare while you’re awake. And I remember thinking, well, that’s stupid. It’s like I’ve never been more awake. I know what a nightmare is, and that was not a nightmare. But I was like, whatever. I mean, so I literally was already like a seven year old thinking the doctor was an idiot, but I know, I was a very confident child.
But about a week later, this thing showed up in my bedroom. And I went, well, I plead the blood of Jesus over me and in Jesus’ name. And I did it as far as I got. As soon as I said, and in Jesus’ name, he left. It’s like, and so I’m like, this works. And that was my attitude to it. It’s like, this works. Well, okay, great. And that was it. My life wasn’t filled with stories like this. It was like it happened.
But years later, when I was in my early twenties, my father invited me to fly with him to Washington, DC, where he had been asked to speak on spiritual warfare. And it was there with the rest of the audience that I learned the rest of the story.
(08:12) Stephanie Warner: Isn’t that how that goes for the preacher’s kid?
(08:20) Marcus Warner: Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know how many things you’ve learned about your life from my preaching, but it turns out that the week before I saw that, my parents had met with a lady who had demonic issues and they helped her get rid of that demon and get free from it. And it was the first time they had ever done anything like this. And my father explained to the audience that basically it was the devil trying to threaten him and say, are you sure you want to do this kind of thing?
And he used it to make the point. If you think that shaking hands with the devil and saying, I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone makes you safe, you could not be more wrong. He said, he’s a liar, he’s always going to break that agreement. So yeah I didn’t take the deal and instead decided that I better teach my kids how to do how to engage in spiritual warfare. And so for me, I was seven and it was for me not a burden, it was a relief. It’s like, okay, I don’t have to worry about this.
And so my introduction to spiritual warfare started with a scary thing, but because of the way my parents handled it, because of the simplicity of the training, because of the experience of seeing it work and seeing this thing leave, for me, spiritual warfare was, well, this is relatively simple and I didn’t grow up being afraid of it. But that was my introduction to the reality.
And partly because of that, and then hearing stories my whole life when my dad would teach, the reality of it was just never really something in question for me because we had so many family stories of people who had clear demonic manifestations and then ended up in freedom and Christ was the victor. And I was like, yeah, that’s just the way life works, and I sometimes have to remind myself that not everybody starts there.
(10:26) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, same. I mean I am very blessed to come from such a rich heritage of you and grandpa and on both sides of my family. But I think that there’s a testament there to how it can be if you’re not afraid of it and you have the world view to understand. You know, we don’t go around life just finding demons under every rock. We’re not looking for [it], you know. Understanding spiritual warfare isn’t about, now I see spiritual warfare everywhere, even maybe some places where it’s, you know, not supposed to be.
Like, you know, you wrote a whole book on five engines that drive our emotions. Spiritual warfare is one of them, right? There’s a whole context to the world, but it’s just that if there is a spiritual warfare issue, you need a spiritual warfare solution. and if you don’t have the lens to even understand what you’re looking for or what you’re dealing with, then you’re going to be using other solutions and just get pretty frustrated and maybe let the devil keep more ground in your life than he needs to.
So that is why we’re here. We are wanting to, yeah, unpack the spiritual warfare worldview and some of the basic principles so that if you do encounter it or you are encountering it, you know what to do. So this is good. Did you have another story you wanted to tell or I was going to ask about grandpa. You mentioned that was his first time dealing with something.
(11:56) Marcus Warner: Sure. What do you want to ask? I mean [there’s] a thousand stories. So what is the…
(12:00) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. Well, I think it’s interesting to know in terms of an onramp of how do you go from not really having a spiritual warfare worldview to all of a sudden being someone who people are coming to for help and that you’re understanding things enough and maybe just in brief, obviously he has a a large story…
(12:16) Marcus Warner: Right. Yeah. Well, whereas you and I kind of grew up with it because of the families we’re in, my parents did not. So neither my mother nor my father had a warfare worldview growing up. They both were introduced to Christianity in a relatively legalistic way. They didn’t have much of an understanding of grace, of identity in Christ, of a lot of the things that Deeper Walk teaches, the emphasis on them, is partly a byproduct, I think, of the journey that they went on of discovering freedom, discovering identity, discovering walking in the spirit, you know, all of these things.
And because they discovered them during my lifetime, I kind of got to watch them grow and watch as they learned grace and identity in Christ and saw how profound that was in their lives, to watch them learn. So, you know, my parents were missionaries in Sierra Leone, West Africa. And so most people assume that’s where they learned spiritual warfare. But that actually isn’t.
When I asked my dad one time, you know, did you see a lot of spiritual warfare when you were missionaries? And he went, well, yes and no. He said, At the time I just assumed it was all superstition, like, these poor superstitious people, they actually think that there’s something to, you know, witch doctors and shamanism and this stuff. And so I saw it, but that’s not where I learned what it was and how to deal with it. Because, and this is where you get to the power of worldview, right? And that is, the lenses through which I was looking at this did not allow for that interpretation.
And this is kind of what happens theologically, too. You get these different camps in Christianity, and the camp that you’re in gives you your worldview lenses. And what the worldview does is it tells you which interpretations of your experience are possible. And so a big part of my father’s teaching ministry was teaching on worldview because he wanted to help people understand that there are warfare explanations out here that actually fit the circumstances really well. And if you understand them and you apply warfare solutions to these things, there’s an awful lot of help that can be offered to people that they aren’t getting simply because people don’t recognize what’s going on, don’t call it what it is, and so they’re not applying the proper solutions.
(14:48) Stephanie Warner: So what finally cracked that code for him?
(14:51) Marcus Warner: So, what cracked the code for him was he became a missions professor and he started reading. And as he was reading these missionary books, he just kept running into stories of these missionaries having power encounters with witch doctors and having to deal with curses and taking them seriously. And he’s like, huh, not just superstition, right? There’s stuff happening here. So for him, it actually started with reading the books and reading about all these missionary stories.
And he decided one day I should probably teach my students about this, so when they go overseas, they have some understanding of what they’re going to be running into overseas. Because at that point, it was still kind of easy to think of, well, that happens over there, but not so much over here. But once he began to teach his mission students about spiritual warfare, word began to spread in the local community – hey, you know, Dr. Warner’s teaching spiritual warfare at the college.
And that led a local Christian counselor to send him and my mom a client to meet with. And that’s when it became real. It’s like, okay, all this stuff I’ve been reading about, here’s somebody sitting in front of me. They’ve got all the symptoms, right? They’ve got all the stuff. Let’s just do what we need. Yeah, they, with no training, right? No guidelines. They just kind of dived in and God was gracious and they end up seeing this woman get completely delivered and her compulsions went away immediately. And it was the beginning of the journey and it was the next week then that I saw the demon in the dining room and that’s kind of how that happened.
(16:39) Stephanie Warner: Mmhm. Oh man. I just smile. I had to smile because it makes total sense that Grandpa came by it academically and then put it into practice. It’s good. And I think that sometimes we can be hard on academia and reading and stuff. We have an emphasis on you have to actually put into practice, right? You know, you can’t just stay in head knowledge. But you and I both have advanced degrees. We’re not anti-academia. We love academia, we love learning and higher education. But sometimes when you get into this ministry context it’s like, well I got more of you know, [experience?] but no, there’s goodness there [in academia].
(17:27) Marcus Warner: It’s easy to camp out on the deficiencies in academia, but what it’s good at it’s good at. Unfortunately there’s just holes, right? So…
(17:31) Stephanie Warner: And we want to support. So I did want to kind of end, I guess, on a question, potentially controversial take. In this chapter you make the statement that you know we’re not vaccinated against the effects of the devil because you know, with an injection of the Holy Spirit or whatever. And I know I’ve encountered a lot of people, who are like, well, I’m a Christian, so the devil can’t touch me, you know, I’m totally safe. And I just want you to unpack this idea of what we as Christians, as we’re dealing with spiritual warfare, what does this look like? What does this mean? Can the devil touch us? You know, what is…
(18:21) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so there’s one verse in the Bible which makes it sound like if you’re a Christian, the devil cannot touch you. And it literally uses the word for touch. And so when you read that, it sounds like, well, the devil can’t. It’s 1 John 5:18. So people are like, it says, you know, anyone born of God is, you know, a child of God kind of thing, and the devil, evil one cannot touch him.
So It’s not all there is to the verse. We’ve unpacked it in other episodes. But it sounds to all the world like well, when we say you can’t touch me, that’s like anything – there’s nothing that you have to do with my life. But that interpretation is just in contradiction with all the rest of scripture, which tells us to put on our armor, tells us to be alert, tells us to resist, tells us that I don’t want you to have koinonia with these things. Don’t give this, you know, the devil a foothold in your life. It’s like there are so many clear teachings on this. And in Acts we see the church bringing out their occult things and burning them and destroying them. And these are Christians doing this. And so you’re like, okay, this verse may need a little closer inspection.
And that’s the way with most passages of scripture. You know, I mean Jesus said, if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. But I don’t see a lot of one-eyed Christians walking around because people have looked a little more closely at what’s really going on in that verse. And I think it’s the same way here. It’s also dangerous to take your whole theology largely from one or two verses. And I think that what we see is that spiritual warfare is a massive theme in the Bible, right?
It starts in the Garden of Eden. It runs throughout the battle with the idols and the gods of the nations. We see Jesus confronting it head on in his earthly ministry. We see the apostle Paul dealing with it. We see Paul describing conversion as a transition from the, you know, the realm of darkness to the kingdom of God’s own dear son. So it’s just kind of this unavoidable background that’s in everything in the Christian life.
And even verses that say things like, you know, what does Christ and Belial have to do with each other? Like what do Christ and the devil have to do with each other? You know, some people appeal to that and like, well, Christ and the devil can’t be in the same place. But that’s not even the point of the text. The point is they shouldn’t, not that they can’t. It’s the same thing with James talking about, you know, the tongue. He goes, can, you know, one spring produce both, you know, fresh water, salty water kind of thing? And his point is that can’t happen. So why is it happening you know, with your tongue? And the answer is it shouldn’t be happening like there, not that it can’t.
There’s also, you get into vocabulary, and that is that we in the West kind of invented the category of possession, oppression, and you know, temptation, and other things like this, but those aren’t biblically-derived categories. There’s kind of Western observational categories. And so again, a lot of people in my dad’s generation said, let’s just talk about demonization, because that’s a more biblical word. And it allows for us to talk about scale and range of activity in a person’s life. And that’s fine too.
(22:00) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. How demonized is this person?
(22:03) Marcus Warner: Yeah, and honestly, know, that’s fine too. Though I’ll be honest, I’m not sure that just because the Greek word is demonidzo or demonizomai doesn’t mean demonize is the correct translation either. But it’s moving in the right direction in terms of a translation. So I just look at all of this and say it still has to be defined what our relationship to demons is. And I think I’ve got a chapter on that in the book. But it’s like…
(22:30) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, there’s a section in chapter two on Christians and demons.
(22:35) Marcus Warner: Okay, so we’ll talk about it a little bit more, but this idea that we don’t have to worry about them, you know, has turned into ignore the devil and he’ll leave you alone, which is almost a contradiction of the scripture which says resist the devil and make him flee…
(22:57) Stephanie Warner: Yes, I’m sorry to inform you all, but the devil is not a bumblebee.
(23:02) Marcus Warner: Yeah, not a bumblebee. Like I was always told, that’s how I was told to handle bees. Just ignore them and they’ll leave you alone. And I’m like, I feel like people treat demons like they’re bumblebees. Just ignore them and they’ll leave you alone. It’s just not how it works. So I’m convinced, for example, if my parents hadn’t taught me how to deal with what my experience was as a seven year old, that I would have just kept getting harassed my whole life. That’s how people get into really dark places is that things like that show up. Nobody’s ever taught them what to do about it. They take on more and more ground in their life.
Like one of my friends and I met with a young man years ago and he was battling with depression, but he said it’s not just depression. And he told us a story of how as an early teenager, he literally moved to the attic of his house, put in black light out, blackout curtains, wanted to be in the darkest place he could be in. And he said he distinctly had the experience of something darker than the darkness moving in there with him. And from that point on, he just could not win this battle with depression.
And he was a Christian. He was married at the time. He had young kids now and he was just desperate. So we were able to pray with him, and that’s where this story came out. While we were in that prayer session, he said, well, I’ve never told anybody this before, but… and that was the story. And so he walked through [the prayer] and he said, I’ve tried actually praying through the steps to freedom, and I’ve tried praying some of these other prayers and they haven’t been working.
And what we found in that particular situation was I said, this is not about who is stronger, you or the demon. And so I think this time, when you say in the name of Jesus, you need to leave, I think it’s also say, and I’m done dealing with you on this, take it up with Jesus. So you go to the cross, you go to Jesus, and you take it up with him, and you can only stay here if he lets you. And basically we had to take the battle from being, do I have enough faith to do this? Am I a good enough Christian to do this? Am I strong? It’s like, that’s not the point.
(25:25) Marcus Warner: The point is, is Jesus’ work on the cross truly enough, is what Jesus has done sufficient to handle this. And then once he dealt with it that way, it’s like he just started sobbing. I remember, you know, very vividly and just over and over for like three, four minutes it was like it’s gone. Like it’s gone.
And you know, that’s the kind of thing. It’s like we could have given him brain science management tools, you know, for years and he was never going to get rid of that because it was a spiritual warfare problem and it required a spiritual warfare solution. So that’s one of the reasons why we teach the stuff we do. It’s not to make everything about demons, but it’s to say, man, there’s Christians like that in the world who don’t need to be living like that. And if we can get them the training and the teaching and the tools that they need, there’s so much more freedom that most people could be experiencing.
(26:27) Stephanie Warner: Amen. Oh, I’m so glad that we are embarking on this journey of hope and freedom with this series. Thank you for writing this book. And thank you to everybody who is joining us on the trail. We are so pleased to offer this podcast free around the world. Thank you to everybody who has been with us, whether this is your first episode or you’ve been here all four years. Thank you for your prayers and your encouragement and your testimonies, and thank you for every donor who keeps us here. You guys are really great and we are privileged to be walking this trail with you. So, Father, any final thoughts for chapter one?
(27:06) Marcus Warner: Yeah, final thought. Two things come to mind. One is like if you want a slower ramp up on spiritual warfare things, you might check out Judy Dunagan’s book, The Loudest Roar, on living from our victory. And it was the idea of living from our victory that led me to think about her book. And that is when it comes to spiritual warfare, I think it’s important for us to realize that we fight from a position of victory because we are following a commander who has already won.
And so partly what we’re looking at is how do I walk in the victory that has already been given to me? In the same way that we ask, how do I walk in the identity that has already been given to me? How do I walk in the freedom that has already been given to me? How do I walk in the Spirit who has already been given to me? So this is part of it, but to understand that we’ve been given a victory and we’ve been given freedom. What we want to do is get the tools and the training and the understanding of how do I actually walk in this? And that’s what the book’s all about.
(28:14) Stephanie Warner: Awesome. See you back next week.
