I was told many things about what happened after a person became a Christian. I was told that after I chose Christ as my Savior my life would change. I found this to be true; life does change. I was also told that life would be easier. Now, if this meant that Jesus would become the answer to all of my problems and I could claim many different promises in His name, this is absolutely right. But if this meant (as many people assume) that my problems would go away and it would be smooth sailing the rest of my life, it couldn’t be more wrong.
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In my experience, the inevitable difficulties of being a Christian causes a lot of discouragement and often makes me doubt my walk with Christ. I had long held to this misconception that if I was a good Christian I wouldn’t have any issues in my spiritual life (or even life in general). So, any time I found myself struggling to be consistent in my walk with God, I thought something was wrong with me. Yet, I found that the attacks in my life seemed to happen when I was trying to get closer to Christ. I saw that my struggles grew the more my desire to know God grew. It seemed the harder I tried to live right, or the greater the mountaintop experience I had with God, the more likely I could expect something in life to throw me down again.
As I would learn later, this whole Christian/ disciple journey is a battle. As Paul said to Timothy: “Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3). No one looks forward to hardship. Many do not expect it to be a part of being a disciple either. Jesus didn’t hide this aspect of discipleship from us though. He was clear about the cost of following Him: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). True discipleship is filled with days of self-denial and cross-carrying.
This is not a punishment for following Jesus, it is the reality of choosing Christ over this world. Troubled times are part of our Christian experience because there is a great, cosmic, spiritual war occurring all around us. Every day a battle is fought over us: God, and all of heaven, are fighting for our salvation, while our Adversary and his forces are fighting to pull us away from God. We are a part of this war whether we want to be or not and, ultimately, we all will choose a side—either on purpose or by default.
On becoming a disciple, we join the forces of God, by following Him, and are purposely taking a stand against His opposition. This is why we see trouble. This is why there is fighting. By choosing to lovingly obey God, we become a target for Satan’s schemes (Ephesians 6:11).
This is an important key to understanding our trials and sufferings. As in any war, it is important to know where the battlefront is. If we are fighting in the wrong places we will never see victory. Paul advises, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12, emphasis mine). Our fight is not with the physical but with the spiritual—not with people but with powers.
In other words, we are not to fight against each other. If we are distracted from the true source of our struggles and fight each other, we are fighting the wrong battles, wasting our strength, and we will never have spiritual victories. Instead, we are only helping the enemy! Even if a person is used to hurt us or cause us to stumble, we cannot forget that the battleground is spiritual. Our fight is not with that person, but with the spiritual forces of evil. Therefore, as soldiers of Christ, we must focus all of our attention and our energy to fight against our true enemy: that old serpent, the Devil!
Yes, the battle and the struggle is real—we are at war. The more we take our stand for God, the more we can expect conflicts in life to try to knock us down. Satan will not give up. In fact, he is coming at us “in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!” (Revelation 12:12).
The Devil may come at us with everything he has, but that does not mean we will be overcome. God didn’t intend to call us to His side to be defeated. He sends us out into this war protected by His whole armor (Ephesians 6:13–18). As His soldiers, we are only protected if we use His armor (I’ll talk about this armor in later blogs). However, armor is useless without the right battle plan. In my next blog, I will talk about God’s battle plan.