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5204--Tom Marshall--Spiritual Warfare_128k
00:00:00 Speaker: Reign King Jesus reign over all the nations of the world. That's a very political statement we're making. We've been listening to a political matter as much as anything tonight, as well as a religious matter. See, now we're singing the songs. I doubt, really, whether our experience as caught up with our confession yet. Nothing wrong with that as long as it ultimately does. I read a verse in the seventh chapter of the Book of Ezekiel a little while back. It said this they have blown the trumpet and made everything ready, but nobody is going to the battle. And I think, you know, that's largely true about large sections of the church. We haven't really realized there is a real war going on. You've been having a hard time, brother. You've been come to this camp with real struggles. You know what's on my heart to say to you? Not hard. Cookie. You know there's a war on. Really? Oh. And you know, you won't take this wrong. I wouldn't say this in other circumstances, but I believe I can to to this company. It's a real war. It's not a metaphorical war, not a make believe war. It's not just as though it was a war. It is actually a war. And I do not believe the Christian church has taken those categories seriously enough. Listen, brothers and sisters, in a war, there are no rules. There is no fairness. If the devil can do his work in a dirty, dirtiest way possible, he will do it. See? Don't ever expect fair treatment in a war. You either learn to fight or we get trampled under. Now, I don't want to frighten anybody. Sometimes when I speak like this, people say to me. Spiritual warfare. Count me out. You can have a go if you like. But that's not my fields. You don't have an option. We do not have an option. There is no neutral territory and there are no exempt civilians. A lot of advantages on our side will come to those in a moment. Here. I want you to turn your Bibles tonight to the book of Exodus, chapter seventeen. Exodus chapter seventeen and verse eight. This is just after the time when Moses smote the rock at Rephidim and brought forth water for the children of Israel. And verse seven, he named the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarrel of the sons of Israel, and because they tested the Lord, saying, is the Lord among us or not? Then Amalek came and fought against Israel at Rephidim So Moses said to Joshua, choose men for us and go out. Fight against Amalek. Tomorrow I will station myself on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand. And Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought against Amalek. And Moses, Aaron and Hur went up to the top of the hill. So it came about when Moses held his hand up, that Israel prevailed, and when he let his hand down, Amalek prevailed. But Moses hands were heavy. Then they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. And Aaron and Hur supported his hands, the one on the one side and the one on the other. Thus his hands were steady until the sun set. So Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. Then the Lord said to Moses, write this in a book as a memorial, and recite it to Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Or if you read in your margin, because a hand is against the throne of the Lord, I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. So Moses built an altar and named it. The Lord is my banner. And he said, the Lord has sworn the Lord will have war against Amalek from generation to generation. Amalek in scripture is a type of the devil. Amalek was the inveterate enemy of Israel. Generation after generation after generation. You find at the time of David that when David was out against the Philistines, it was the Amalekites who came and sacked Ziglag, and took all the wives and all the possessions away. You find at least twice in the time of the judges when Israel backslid, the Amalekites joined with the enemies of Israel to carry Israel away into captivity. It was an amalekite who stood on the wounded King Saul and killed him. Years later, generations later, under Esther, the man who plotted Plot A genocide against the Jewish people was a man called Haman. The Bible says he was an agagite. Agag was the king of the Amalekites. Haman was an amalekite. And there was this implacable enemy enmity against the people of God, generation after generation after generation. And we're facing that today. We have evidence of that right here tonight. Amalek. There's a hand against the throne of the Lord. Now, I believe in this chapter here it sets out the principles of spiritual warfare. And if there's anything that's on my heart for the people of God today is that we understand and get hold of the realities of war. And I believe in this chapter here, this little passage we read, there's some very, very important principles. And I want to go through them very quickly. First principle. Get on the attack. Get on the attack. The first thing that happened was that Amalek attacked Israel. There was an atrocity committed against the Israelites at that stage that was so terrible that it burnt its memory into the people of God for generations in Deuteronomy. Uh, forty years later, as Israel was being reorganized to go into Canaan, Moses said to them, remember what Amalek did when he came upon us, coming out of his, out of Egypt, how he fell on the weak and the stragglers. There was an atrocity committed against the people of God. That was the first thing that happened. The second thing that happened was that Moses said to Joshua, choose men for us and go out, and you fight Amalek. Now I believe what we've been hearing about tonight, as far as Islam is concerned, is an attack on the purposes of God and the throne of God. Now, what are we going to do? Most of the things I've heard tonight and I don't don't deprecate them at all, have been defensive. See, Let's stop this. Let's prevent this. Let's resist this. Do you understand? The best means of defense is always attack. Now the devil understands this. You see, his position is highly vulnerable. Jesus broke the back of Satan's power on the cross. And the devil's position is actually highly vulnerable. It is not vulnerable to defense. It is only vulnerable to attack. The devil is known for years. The best way to to defend yourself is to get the the the potential attackers busy defending themselves. And he's done that for generations. The two things that have plagued the Church of God one is a terrible passivity, a terrible apathy amongst God's people. We have let the battle go by default without even trying, without even trying to oppose these things. The permissive society we face in the in the in New Zealand today is a succession of battles that have gone by default. We haven't even struggled over half the things to see. Even when we rouse ourselves up to fight, it's generally defensive when we are pushed into a corner and we've got no options and we're going to be overwhelmed and we'll dig in and we'll fight, see, listen, that mood has got to change. That attitude has got to change. Generally when you talk about spiritual warfare, people say, well, I know all about that. Our church has been having a real bad time. I don't doubt it. I know all about spiritual warfare. Devil's been really having a go at our family. I don't doubt it, but what I say is, why do we let him have all the initiative? Why do we let him choose what we're going to fight? Why do we let him plant his mosques here instead of us planting churches in Islam? See, why do we let the devil choose the time and the place where the battle is going to be? He has all the advantages. If it comes, he comes unstuck. He can retreat and live to fight another day. Brothers and sisters, that has to change. See, I don't know what it is, but somehow I feel that somewhere along the line we have so preached a gospel of yieldedness and surrender that we have produced a generation of weaklings in the church. I know a young woman come to me a while back. She's looking for a husband, very gifted, very strong. Last years. You know what she said to me? She told you. Quite frankly, I'm looking for a husband for years. She said, Tom, why is it that so many Christian men seem to be wimps? Present company acceptance. See? Of course. I think she's got something. You know what John said? John said, I write unto you, young men, because you are strong and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. The world is crying out for strong male figures. See a lot of the the ground that the feminists have taken again has gone by default. And God, I believe, wants to raise up in the church men who are strong. I believe largely this whole issue of spiritual warfare is a job for men. It still disappoints me that when you have a meeting for prayer or intercession or spiritual warfare, generally the women outnumber the men two or three to one, or spiritual warfare tonight. You can go along. See, I stay home with the kids, so. It's not really a laughing matter. It's not a laughing matter. You see the issue? The issue is a question of authority. Whose authority is going to rule our land. The devil's authority or God's authority? Who's the authority figure in the family? The husband is. And this whole issue is an authority issue. See? And in terms of spiritual warfare, it is the men who ought to be there. Moses said to Joshua, he didn't say, choose us out, some women, and go out and fight Amalek. He says, choose a men. See, one of the things that bless my heart, like nothing else has done in the last five or ten years, was on Sunday night when I made an altar call at at Hudson's conference for young men to come out, and they came, I don't know how many was one hundred and fifty, one hundred, one hundred fifty. Those beautiful young men. Oh, you know, I could have. I could have wept with joy to see them there. My daughter was a young woman. Less than half that came out. That's about the right proportions. They got after men. And he needs men for war because it's a real war. It's not a make believe war. It's a real war. And there are risks, and they're going to be casualties. See, now, let's accept that the categories of war. Sometimes we may need to be on the defensive. But I want to tell you something. A defense will never win a war. You can never win a war on defense. You might postpone defeat. You might prevent defeat. Ultimately, if you're going to win the war, you're going to search and destroy. You've got to go out and find the enemy and destroy him where he is. And the interesting thing these days, I read a lot in the Old Testament about the battles of God's people. I've ceased to apologize for them. I begin to understand why they're there. They're our battle manual. War on the heavenlies is exactly the same as war on the ground. I'll tell you an interesting thing. I do not find anywhere any instructions for for for fortifying a defensive position. The principle is always a taxi. Israel goes in and they invade the Promised Land. David runs out to meet Goliath. It is always attacked. Jesus goes out in the wilderness and Master Satan principle is always attacked. That is the fundamental thing that's got to get into our hearts. The days of defensiveness are gone. Days of attack is going to be uncomfortable. Going to be dangerous. We do not have I don't think at this moment the leadership for that. I think there's a we're a very, very interesting time in the church's history. You know, because it's the changeover of the leaderships, you know, hadn't. And Eric and I, we're the survivors. You know, I going to church these days don't find too many people with my color up here anymore. I'll tell you a very interesting thing. As the sixty year olds pass off the scene, by and large, the fifty year olds are not there to replace them, nor are they many forty year olds. The mantle of God is passing to young men and young women in their thirties, sometimes in their twenties, sometimes in the very early twenties. And I ask myself, God, what are you doing? God's deliberate in what he's doing. I believe he's dropping out twenty years of leadership, at least, because the time we're coming into is so radical that I'm positive my generation couldn't hack it. Or there'll be a few. There'll be a few. Caleb's, bless God. But by and large, my generation too set in their ways, who've been brought up in a defensive mentality. And there are new days. See God's after men of initiative. God said on Sunday night before I spoke and nobody knew what I was going to speak about, God said, it's time you started taking risks. Glory to God. Come out of your fortresses. God said, start taking risks. See, you've got to on attack because you don't know what's going to happen. You're unfamiliar ground out there. But that, I believe, is what the Spirit of God is saying. And I'm confident that God will raise up the leadership that's needed. A war always throws up its leaders. Once the war starts, you don't find your leaders trained in the playground, not in the in the exercise tent. And I think what we what's happening in the church is largely theoretical exercises, weapon drill. Nothing wrong with it. But that's not where the real fight is. The real fights out there, I see and you see, the characteristics that are valuable in war are not the characteristics that shine in peacetime. Characteristics that are valuable in war are things like aggressiveness and competitiveness and abrasiveness. And I got a strong sense that the leaders in the time to come are sitting around in our churches today, causing all sorts of problems. Oh, they are frustrating everybody in sight, all that pent up motivation and aggression and competitiveness and abrasiveness. They're all it needs to do happen is to point it in the right direction to. Peace loving men of unity and encouragement. Don't survive much in the trenches. God will raise them up. See? God will raise them up. Might be some of them here tonight. They may very well be some of you here tonight. And some of the very things in your nature that you've wept and prayed about and said. God changed me. So I'm not like that. Maybe the very things that God wants for the days to come. See, as long as you take it out on the devil. Not in your brothers and sisters. Plenty of people to fight out there without us fighting one another. Half the reason why we fight one another is because we know we've got to fight. But we don't know where the real fight is. Isn't that right? Get on the attack. Second principle. Get altitude. Get altitude. Moses said to Joshua, you go out and fight Amalek. I'm going up to the top of the hill. Now hear me in this. I'm very, very serious. We are facing real spiritual warfare on two fronts. Two fronts. One is on the ground and the other is in the heavenlies. Characteristically, we've tried at one or the other, and we've wondered why we have made very little impact. Now we're talking, you know, about this business of Islam. There's a battle in the heavenlies. There's a spirit, there's a principality there that needs to be dismantled. But there's also money and personnel and influence and effort that needs to go in on the ground, too. I want you to understand what the Bible means when it speaks about the principalities and powers in the New Testament. They are two dimensional. The temporal dimension of the principalities are the the structures and the institutions of culture and of society. So a religion is a principality. A corporation is a principality. A business is a principality, a school, a family. All the institutions of human life are principalities. They are created realities in their own right. They exist quite apart from the people who form them. I remember some time ago, uh, a Baptist minister from England was out here on the on the coast for some months. He'd gone through a period of kind of spiritual burnout, and he came out. God did some marvelous things in that dear brother's life. Lovely man of God. The last night before he went to go back home, he was living just down the road from us at the time. Uh, he was sitting in my study and he was talking about his early life, about his relationship with his father. His father had been a man who sold, who sacrificed everything for his career. He'd risen to be the head of the Metropolitan Transport Board in London, ended up with an MBE or OBE from the Queen for public service. But his family had suffered. This brother was still hurting at fifty years of age from the lack of fathering away back then, still kind of bitter over it. While he was speaking, he took off a gold watch he was wearing around his wrist and he said, Tom, you know, he said, that's all that's left of fifty years of my father's life. You know, when he said that, my heart sank. I thought, what is the London Transport Board? What is that thing that takes fifty years of a man's life, ruins his family and pensions him off with a gold watch. Now, it's not the people in London Transport Board, because the people there are different ones from the ones who are there twenty five years ago, another twenty five years hence, there will be a different bunch of people altogether. The London Transport Board goes on forever. Now what is it? It is a principality. It has its own culture, its own life. It sucks in people. It uses them, spits them out. The other end. See, now we live amongst these principalities and they share in the fullness of the fall. There's a fallenness in the structures. There's an evil in society that's quite different from the evil of evil men. See, the reason why our economy worldwide is causing such poverty is not because of the wickedness of greed of men only, but because there's something wrong with the system. See something wrong with the system? I'll tell you something. Your church is also a principality. Do you understand that? It is also a created reality in its own right. Do you understand? It is also fallen. It has a fallenness about it. And unless you understand that, you'll never be able to understand why it is that you very often see elderships or people in leadership in a church do something on behalf of a church that's totally unethical. Couldn't understand it for years. I've seen men do, on behalf of the church, things they'd never dreamed of doing in their private life, because they wonder what did it see? It's a principality. There's a reality there, and we're struggling against that. That is the temporal aspect of the structures now, behind those or over them, if you like. There is also the demonic, the demonic overlay that holds the structures in concrete so they won't change. Now we need to get this very clear because, you see, sometimes we think all we've got to do is to get a spirit filled prime minister and a spirit filled cabinet, and this whole nation will change back towards God. No it won't. The system, the political system, will swallow them up. You know why? Because there's a demonic overlay. Now it's the demonic overlay that has to be cast down and destroyed before the structures are open to change. That's why we face a battle on two fronts. It's not enough to get legislation passed to keep Islam out. That won't work. That won't work. It may be part of the problem. See? But until the demonic overlay over our New Zealand economic system is dismantled, the system won't be open to change. Let me give you a very small but simple illustration of what I'm talking about. Some time ago, in one of our Sunday night meetings that we have for spiritual warfare, the question was raised about a spirit medium that was being employed by Radio New Zealand on a talkback show. You may know about it. So that particular night, one of the things we focused on in our warfare was that very thing. So people prayed away and I'll tell you how little later on, and I forgot about it. After about two weeks later, I picked up the evening paper and there was on a double column heading there saying that, uh, the Radio New Zealand had decided not to renew this medium's contract. And the head of programmes went on to say, well, really, you know, there are only eleven people who wrote in complaining about it, but nevertheless we decided, well, we just wouldn't renew it. And I thought, well, why do they not renew it if only eleven people complain? The reason why they didn't renew it was because Christians were praying. And I'm sure many, many more Christians than us were praying. In other words, the issue in the heavenlies was settled. But unless those eleven people had written in as well, I still believe the thing wouldn't have been settled. So we have to approach the issues on both those levels. Sometimes it would be different people that do it. But we need both those things. If you just go out on the ground, the the structures will swallow up Christians. If you just do it in the heavenlies. You'll dismantle the principalities, but you'll not deal with the fallenness and the structures. So Joshua goes out on the ground. Moses goes up into the heavenlies. So the second thing is we have to get altitude. Third principle get authority, get authority. Moses went up with the rod of God in his hand. That was the rod with which he had brought the plagues on Egypt, the rod with which he'd opened the Red sea. Moses had authority. You see, brothers and sisters, what we're facing here is the whole thing is an issue of authority whose authority is going to rule. But what do we mean by authority? Now, for me, I have to bring things down to a very simple level to understand them, because I guess I'm a very simple person. Here is a foreman who's got a workman that won't do what he's told. See, that's the question of authority. What does the foreman have to decide. First of all, he has to decide. Am I on the right ground? Is it within my authority to tell that guy to do what I want him to do? Unless he's sure of that, he will never get it done. See, when he's sure of his authority, then it comes down purely to a matter of willpower. Whose will is going to conquer his will or the will of the form? The workman who won't do what he's told to. Here is little Johnny, who's racketing around all over the place. He and his mother says, Johnny, be quiet. And Johnny just goes racketing around again because he's heard all that before. It's the same issue. See? Two issues. Have I got the authority? And why that kid's mother? Am I entitled to tell him what to do and be quiet? Of course I am. Now, if he's if the ground is right, then it becomes purely a matter of willpower. See, Johnny? Now look at me, John. Now listen, Johnny. Johnny. Down! See? It's a matter of willpower. Then she finds out who's got the strongest will, whether she has or Johnny has. Let me tell you something, brothers and sisters. Authority is no good unless you know how to use it. The wrath of God is no good in Moses hands unless he uses it against Amalek, against the heavenly Amalek, and to use the rod of God to use the authority that God has given us is a matter of willpower. And I believe the missing dimension in so much of our praying lies right there. See, we pray thy will be done. Oh, God, on earth as it is in heaven. Like a prayer of resignation. A prayer of surrender. It is not. It is the most strenuous prayer the church ever ought to. Prayer ought to pray the prayer of declaration. We sing it in our songs. We, your church, enforce that victory in the world, do we? Do we even know how to do it? It's a matter of willpower. See whose will is going to rule in that situation? The will of God or the will of the devil? If it's the will of God that has to be expressed somehow, it has to be expressed by a human will. In other words, in our praying, we have to lend our human will to the will of God. You will never do it by human willpower, but listen, unless your willpower is used, the will of God can't move on that. See, when Jesus prayed, father, not my will, but thine be done, it was so strenuous that the Bible tells me he sweat, as it were, great drops of blood. And somehow there is a missing dimension in our praying that has to do with our human will. We are meant to know the will of God, to embody the will of God, and to declare the will of God, and to enforce the will of God, to lend our will and our spirit to the will of God for that to be enforced. We got into this kind of thing, saying, uh, in an odd sort of way. One of the brothers in the church had been over in Singapore for two or three years, teaching in Bible school over there. When he came back, we were speaking one night and he was telling me the way that Asians pray. Now they don't pray the way we the way we do. You know, somebody prays. And then when the silence gets too deafening, somebody else prays and so on. They pray all at once, all out loud. They just just pray the same thing. I was very interested whether that was transferable cross-culturally. See? So I said, let's try this on Sunday night. You know, let's do it in five minute slots. Pick a topic. Everybody prays on that topic. So we started to do that. And to this day I don't know quite how. But before we knew what had happened, we were right in the middle of this, this whole issue of spiritual warfare. And I started to learn things that I ought to have seen years ago. See, I started to learn. The categories of war in the heavenlies are exactly the same, exactly the same as the categories of war on the ground. Now it had twenty four hour prayer chains before and great value and great blessing. But I realized you could never take a target on the ground like that. If you got that farmhouse you're going to take. And once every half hour somebody rushes out and has a go in at twenty four hours, you've got twenty four dead bodies around the place. If you listen, if you're going to take it sooner or later, you've got to make a dirty rush altogether and and just hope that you must have more firepower on the ground than the enemy has. That's true. Well, I'll tell you something. And spiritual warfare, exactly the same thing applies. Exactly the same thing applies. See, I, I was speaking at a Warren base in Hawaii a while back, and there will be perhaps, uh, I suppose, three hundred people there that night. And we were talking about this, and we did two bursts, two five minute bursts of praying on specific topics. Part of my little mind did some afterwards, and I realized, you know, three hundred people praying for ten minutes. Uh, that's, uh, thirty times. Uh, what's that? About fifty hours praying. About fifty hours praying, but concentrated into ten minutes. And I don't think the devil's armor is enough to stand against thirty hours of praying funneled into ten minutes. Sooner or later, something has got to give. Sooner or later, something has got to break. And I believe that we've got we've got to learn the importance of us praying together, as we did tonight, with about ten times as much energy and about ten times as many people can get hold of them, and praying about specific areas that God gives us, because I believe we bring that kind of pressure on it. Sooner or later, somebody's going to get a breakthrough. When somebody gets a break, gets a breakthrough, the whole of the Devils defense is over. Our land is liable to just fold up you. Learn to use the authority of God's given us. There's some very interesting things that come out of the Second World War. I remember reading a magazine article one time where they had discovered that in the landings on the beaches of Normandy, uh, there were some divisions where in the first four days, less than forty percent of the troops ever fired a weapon. The other sixty percent were cut their heads down and keep me out of trouble. I do not blame them, but I wonder. I wonder whether we could muster four percent of the Church of God that knows what the weapons are, that knows how to use them, and has got a heart to use them. say. But when we do, when we do, some amazing things are going to happen. Since we started to understand the categories of spiritual warfare in these dimensions, I've seen the most remarkable things happen in our little patch. We've had some deliverances that have been so easy that part of my mind said, hang on, hasn't happened yet. You know, where's all the manifestation and stuff? Until I realized that the reason why we have such trouble individually is because they're reinforced by the principalities over the years. Jesus said, first things first, says first bind the strong man, and then you can spoil his goods. And when you can get a handle on the power over your area and bind and inhibit that power, you're going to find an amazing release on the ground. When Jesus sent the seventy disciples out, they came back almost blown away with what had happened. They said, Lord, it's amazing. Even the devils are subject to us in your name. Jesus had a very interesting thing. He said, I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning. What they'd been experiencing there was only the fallout of what he'd done in the place of intercession. He got hold of the devil and dragged him down. He dismantled the power of Satan and things came loose all around the place. And, beloved, if we will begin to understand the categories of war, we will learn as never before the awesome, awesome, awesome power that there is in the cross of Jesus and the blood of Calvary in the name of the Lord, scares the living daylights out of the devil because he knows that's where his power is broken. If you look back at the Second World War, we know now the war was over by late nineteen forty three, early nineteen forty four, after some of those major battles and no other way the war could have gone and the way it went. But listen, the second front still had to be opened. The island still had to be taken one by one by one. Otherwise, the Japanese and the Germans and the Italians will still be there to this day. We say, Lord, you won the victory on the cross. He did. The war is won. The ultimate issue has been settled. But the devil believes he can postpone his exit indefinitely. And he will do it if we let him. He still has to be ejected from all the ground that God has given us. City by city by city, town by town by town. Street by street, house by house, person by person if need be. Not a big thing to take us. Country. Now you take a country, you take it city by city. Now Israel, did you know how you take a city? You take a suburb by suburb. You know how you take a suburb. You take a street by street. You know how you take a street. You take a house by house. See, we have the power. We have the weapons. I believe, brothers and sisters, we can have a revival. The only thing that holds us up is lack of will and lack of perseverance. Got to get authority. Got to know how to use it. Fourth principle. Get assistance. Get help. Up there on the mountaintop. It seems that Moses suffered some kind of a of a spiritual breakdown. He just couldn't stand the strain. The the battle was won because there were two other men with Moses. And listen, they were very unremarkable men. Wars are won by unremarkable men. There was nothing very brilliant about Aaron. He did silly things. I don't know how he ever managed to get high priests in some of the. The ideas he had about throwing earrings into a fire and a golden calf walks out. I mean, I ask you, who was Moses brother in law? Ever hear of him? Twice. They were very unremarkable men, but they were there on the spot when they were needed. Let me tell you something. Wars are won by unremarkable men. I can remember when I was a teenager and we were at high school, having to go to Anzac parades and seeing these old veterans from the First World War hobbling along. I think those guys won a war. Those old blokes won a war. And I'm sure people think the same today. You know, they see all those grey hairs and bowed heads and glasses. And I think those guys won Alamein and all that kind of stuff. Wars are won by unremarkable, ordinary men. See, they're not won by flashy heroes except on television. They're won by ordinary people like you and I, who are determined to fight whether we are afraid or not. See and listen. I don't care how afraid you are. You can still fight in an actual war. You don't have the option. You have a limited local objective and you go and do it. You go and you dance to take it whether you think you can or not, whether you're scared out of your wits or not. See? And that takes first priority. What would have happened on D-Day if the general in charge of one of the armies had sent a message to headquarters saying, well, look, you've picked the wrong weekend. Actually, we've got a sports thing on this weekend. Just go on. We'll catch up with you later on. See, war takes priority, doesn't it? Otherwise, we're just playing around. Otherwise, we might just forget it and go home. Either it is in dead earnest and its first priority, or forget the whole thing. I know it's dead earnest. I know it's dead earnest. And there's a there's a need for us. We need one another. We need to get together. We need to understand the specific categories of war. When we started out, we didn't really know what we were fighting against And again, I guess that is often our problem. We want to see God's will done, but it's like somebody standing up in the foxhole and blasting off their weapons into the air and hoping you hit something. See, it might be you never know about it. And I guess in the beginning it was like that for us. And we started to say to God, God, what are we actually fighting against? The Lord showed us right in the very beginning, two specific areas of power that we're up against. One was a spirit of poverty and the other was a religious spirit. Now, if you saw the coast, you wouldn't think it was all that poverty stricken. Although many of the characteristics of poverty are there apathy, powerlessness, hopelessness, and so on. Anyway, we we we started to pray against the spirit of poverty. It was very interesting. The first thing that happened was that for two or three weeks, our church offerings almost dried up. Totally. It was. It was appalling. We'd have been bankrupt in three months. It stayed like that. It was almost. That thing said, I'm going to fix you guys. I'll just turn the tap off so there's no more money. See, we realize we struck oil. See? We realized we'd struck a sensitive spot. See, then we knew what to pray against. And we knew how to pray into that. And we knew that it was not just a matter of praying. It was a matter of doing something about this whole money thing. I can remember one night, I think it was Peter there who had the word of the Lord for us. He said, well, you know, we're praying against the spirit of poverty. I believe God wants us to put our money where our mouth is. So we put a bag there. It was a very small meeting, actually, that night. Perhaps people, perhaps people suspected what was going to happen. Peter put a bag on the communion table and said, well, God is speaking to you about it. Let's give this thing out of business. Over twelve hundred dollars given by little company of people that night. So people started to put their money where their mouth is. Two things no good praying against poverty. If you're not going to give the thing out of existence. As far as the religious spirit is concerned, we became aware in a in elders retreat one time as to how gradually, over a period, we were in danger of settling down into a kind of a rigid mold where you knew more or less what was going to happen in a meeting. You don't do it deliberately, but the, the, the drive of a, of a religious spirit is to settle things in forms. Even Pentecostal forms, even charismatic forms to settle them in forms. And we had to repent of that. We had to repent of that before the people and say, Lord, we're going to hold the meetings over you. Just move. Whatever you do, whatever you want to do. And we found God starting to move again. See? Now understand, I'm only expressing those as illustrations that were. What we need to find are the specific targets that God has for you as a fellowship. You as a church. The church is in. The localities are in. Get assistance. Get help. Fifth principle. Get victory, get victory. Verse thirteen says Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. I find constantly my theology under review. Such theology as I have one of my theological precepts that is now under severe attack, is this one the basic, unexamined assumption that you can't ever destroy a demon? All you can do is shift it on off your patch onto somebody else. I no longer believe that doesn't seem to fit the scriptures. The Bible says the weapons of our warfare are mighty through God to the destruction of fortresses. For this cause, the Son of God was manifest that he might destroy the works of the devil. See? What use is it if we go to town down a cavity and move all the demons off of cavity and they end up down in Christchurch. What do they do? They get praying. Shut them all back up here. See? Now, why can't we? Why can't we cancel them out? See? Does the blood of Jesus really have that authority? Have that? I'm sure it has. I'm sure it has. And I think we need to rethink the whole of our attitude towards these things. Now, I'm not saying I know the key. I know very little. I know hardly anything about it. All I know is there's a war on out there and we're dragged into it. And that's where you find out what the answers are. See, that's where you find out what works and what doesn't work. And, uh, I'm encouraged with what I see rising up amongst the people of God. What you're up against. And I just want to finish with this is. I've said it before, but it's so important to undergird it. What we're up against is a heavily entrenched will that is set against the will of God. I was speaking to a at a Ywam base in England, uh, a while back, speaking about spiritual warfare. And uh, so we said, let's try it out. Let's, uh, let's pick a couple of targets and let's have a go. And so the first one they picked was revival. That was a good one. They really got wound up and they sailed into revival topic. And and I really seemed to clear the heavens of all darkness and stuff. And while they were praying like that, I spoke to the leaders on the base and I said, tell me, what are some of the real problems you're struggling with, uh, in this particular base here? They said finance. I said, you know, the base is going through a hard time financially. Lots of those kids out there don't know where their money's coming for, for their fees and so on. So when the stops said, well, the next thing we're going to pray about is finance. You know, Mammon has got a hold on the work of God in this place. He doesn't want to let it go. And we're going to pray against mammon. So away they went and they walked straight into a brick wall. It was amazing. In less than two minutes, they'd run out of words to say they'd gone flat. They lost all their excitement. You know, the whole thing ground to a halt. I believe God did it deliberately to show them that it's not just make believe, you know, it's not just stirring ourselves up to have an exciting time. There is a will. There is an implacable, resistant will. Some of these prayer meetings that we've had on Sunday nights are the hardest times I have ever experienced. They've been dry, laborious struggle against something you can't get hold of. But you know it's there and you're hammering away. I don't care a bit as long as somewhere there is a result and the results don't happen often in the meeting as it happens somewhere else. I'm content with that. I don't even mind if we struggle away fruitlessly in Kapiti if we release the pressure somewhere else. I can remember some years ago. Eric here. He may have forgotten to tell me about a visit you had from a missionary from Africa or somewhere, and you were telling him about the spiritual warfare that had been going on in the church you were in. And if I report it right as I think I do, this guy said to Eric, we don't have anything like that where we come from. We just go out and preach the gospel and get one hundred people saved, or twenty of them healed or whatever. It's easy to see why is it happening so easily out there. I believe it's happening because power is being dragged away from there to defend vulnerable spots in the devil's defenses elsewhere. Do you understand? The devil has still got the same number of demons he had when Jesus was around or less. He's certainly got no more. When Jesus was here on earth, as far as we can determine, that total world population was two hundred and fifty million or thereabouts. Today it is four thousand million. He has to hold down those four thousand million with the same number of demons as he had to handle two hundred and fifty million. So his defenses are bound to be stretched. And I believe we need to probe out and push out and have a go and penetrate everywhere we can. Because if we do, we'll start to find and God will lead us to the soft underbelly of the devil in particular localities. And we'll see the kind of breakthrough we long for. Many times I think, uh, we we we we are failing because we're acting like armchair strategists. You know, we have a meeting to settle the war. Uh, you know, I admire the spirit. Young fella in in our church rang up, uh, one night because you're out of this thing. They'd been along one night to a to a spiritist meeting in Paekakariki, and and so some of them went along there and prayed in the back of the meeting, and the whole thing was absolutely flat. It was a fiasco. And he rang me up and said, Tom, he said, let's have a meeting and wipe out all the cults. Now, I'm sure the cults need to be wiped out, but we'll never do it in a mass thing like that. See, in the real war, you don't have charge of the whole battle. In the real war, you've got a limited local objective. That's your target. That's your section of the line. That's where you function and you do the job there, or it won't be done. And, beloved, I believe what God has been speaking to us through Murray and through some of the other things that have come through. God wants us to get a real realistic, hard grip on this whole issue of spiritual warfare. Don't promise you it'll be easy. You won't have one meeting and just walk to victory in twenty minutes flat. It could be some of the hardest, most difficult times of your life, but that's reality. That's where it's at sea and the land is precious enough to spend that kind of effort to recover it? Because I believe that somewhere, if we persist long enough and earnestly enough and urgently enough, in enough places, somewhere somebody is going to get a real breakthrough. And then the likelihood is the whole thing will fold up and we'll have the kind of ingathering. The Bible speaks about, and my hearts for that, my hearts for that. And I believe that God wants to anoint some of you brothers here in this hall tonight. I know it with all my heart. There's some of you tonight. You know God's speaking. I remember a man coming to me after a meeting one time, and he said. He said, that's it. He said, I always knew there was something we could do. He said, I've been sitting in church for years feeling frustrated. But in my heart of hearts, I always knew there was something we could do. And in some of your hearts tonight, there's been that leap, some of your hearts. Tonight there's been that leap. We may all get excited about it, but there's some particularly, you know, because the anointing of God has touched you. That's the realm that God wants you to move in. May not all be men, may not all be men. Some of the most marvelous spiritual warriors I know are little old ladies. The little Anglican lady not so far from here. Amazing lady. She's nearly eighty years of age. At nighttime, God wakes her up in the middle of the night. She always sleeps with a Bible under her pillow. And God wakes her up in the middle of the night, and she opens her Bible until the anointing tells us where to stop, and she runs her finger in the dark, up and down the columns until God says, that's it. You mix it with a pencil, sticks the Bible back under a pillow till the morning. In the morning she records all these prophecies. She's got a card index for them. And it is the divine strategy for her church. She shares all that stuff with the vicar. She guides the church. Little old lady. I'll tell you something. The devil scared of little old ladies. It is. I remember being in a in a camp one time down in Christchurch. That was led by two little old ladies who were both in their seventies. One of them had taught a methodist Bible class for twenty five years, and towards the end of the camp, she came to me and said, Tom, I want you to pray for me, that God gives me the gift of tongues. I believe God is calling me to a new ministry. Isn't that marvellous? Seventy years of age, God is calling me to new ministry. A ministry of intercession. And so we prayed together. And God gave the gift of tongues. And that little old lady had to lay hold on God. You know, I felt the. I'd never heard anything like it in my life. I felt the hair stick up on the back of my neck, and I realized that day that God is not really scared of preachers. At least the devil is not really too scared of preachers. He knows roughly how to handle them either. When there's an altar call, he glues everybody to their seat so nobody moves and the guy gets all discouraged, or he shoves everybody out and he thinks he's Billy, Graham and Elizabeth all rolled in one. What the devil doesn't know how to handle is a little old lady who knows how to pray? See? Yeah. He can't scare her. He can't tempt her. She's too old for that. And she's she's. She's more stubborn than Balaam's ass. In the nineteen fifties, in the island of Hebrides, in Scotland. There was a revival. You know, the old classical revival. I remember reading about it twenty years ago, where the Spirit of God just fell on the whole community. The key to that revival, you're right. Were two little old ladies up in a cottage. Crofter's cottage up in the hills. One of them was blind, and God spoke to them. And God said, he's going to send revival. He even gave him the name of the man he was going to use, a man called Duncan Campbell. And so they wrote to Duncan Campbell said, God has told us he will visit his people. You come up here to be the messenger of God's mercy. And Duncan Campbell, who is the Faith missioner, looked at his diary and he saw his booked up every weekend for eighteen months. So he wrote back and said, well, I'm very sorry, I can't possibly come within the next eighteen months. The story goes, the letter arrived at Little Cottage up in the hills, and the sister who who was sighted said to the blind Sister Elizabeth, here's a letter from Duncan Campbell. The little blind lady said, Hallelujah. Then she read it. She said, oh, I'm sorry, dear. Duncan Campbell says he can't come. Praise the Lord. You don't understand, dear. Duncan says he can't come. She says that's what he thinks. Do you know what actually happened? Duncan Campbell was was at a conference in the north of England. He was on the platform. He was being introduced and God spoke to him. God said, get off that platform. Get up to the Hebrides as soon as he can. He tugged the chairman's couch, set him off. He said he can't get to speak to him. He gets on the on the boat, and when he arrives at the Hebrides, the people are already coming across the moors to the church to hear him sing. So don't discount the little old ladies. See. But it's not just for them. It's for men. It's for women. So people who've got a heart for the battle, who are fed up with static positions and and and losing ground and things going by default. And there's something rising up the people of God today. It says enough is enough. Enough is enough. See? And we're set to recover the land that God has set before us. And we've God is calling us. God is calling us as a people here to that kind of thing. Amen. I'd like us to, uh, to have another five minutes and to pray, particularly against the spirit which divides the body of Christ, because I believe this is a demonic, a tactic to keep us isolated and and small and powerless. See, what we've been speaking about was the the effect of combined operations, if you like. I think now I believe it's particularly relevant to this locality. We're in here now. We've been looking back into the Maori history of of this Coastland area. Uh, it's very significant. It has been the jumping off place, uh, for invasion of the South Island. Interestingly enough, the jumping off place for the American troops from here to, uh, to the islands, uh, it's been associated with violence, uh, all its life and a history of of division and intertribal warfare. And there's a real parochialism in the body of Christ, uh, in this particular area. But he's much more widespread, perhaps, than that. But I would like us to pray against that tonight. The spirit that Divides and separates the body of Christ because it's not flesh and blood. We struggle against principalities. Let's pray about that. Um, in this business of of of of of shouting, one of our elders was a Dutch commando officer in, uh, in Indonesia. And we were talking about this, this, uh, thing. One time he said a very interesting thing. He said if I was taking a platoon of men across open ground under fire, I'd make them shout. He said they didn't shout. They would never make it. You know, there's there's something there's something about, uh, getting our will and our voice and our confession, whatever is needed to release that. And, you know, Israel had a battle cry. You know what it was? It was. The Lord has given our enemies into our hands. That's what God wants us to get hold of. Tonight. The Lord has given our enemies into our hands. He shout, for the Lord has given our enemies into our hands.