This post Originally posted on In Focus:
Like all aspects of life in God, there is a journey to becoming a Spiritual Warrior in a New Testament world. We grow up into life as Warriors and Champions, much as we mature from being babes in Christ to mature sons and daughters of the King.
No one would dream of scooping up a guy off the street, driving him madly to the airport and throwing him on a plane with Navy Seal Team 6 to be dropped in the middle of a war zone. He could even be outfitted in all the gear, have the cool arm patch and state-of-the-art weaponry, but he’s not a Navy Seal. He’s a guy that looks like one and is now armed with some serious firepower that he has no clue how to use. This is not a good scenario.
God understands how to develop warriors. He knows it takes time and delightfully plans for it. When we can recognize His higher ways, then we can begin to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in our training in the #1 key to a true Kingdom warrior’s life: majesty. It’s what the Way of the Warrior is—Special Forces training in God’s majesty—the power, life, and glory of it that overcomes evil with good.
The best example of that process is in the story of Israel’s transition from Egypt, through the wilderness and eventually into the Promised Land. In Egypt, Israel was a witness to majesty without really having to participate much in it. There were a few instructions to follow, but for the most part, Moses and Aaron were the ones on the frontline.
The first level of Warrior training is being a witness to majesty; encountering just how big God wants to be for you in whatever it is that you’re facing. He may overwhelm you with His peace or part the impossible circumstances before you without much more than our cry for help. The shift from problem-based perspective to a majestic lens has begun.
The next level of training in majesty is what Israel encountered in the wilderness. It was supposed to be a time of learning how to partner with God’s passion and provision for them. Obstacles would arise and their job was to believe, to be still in peace and rest, becoming confident that God would come through for them as they had seen Him do many times before.
This is the time in our warrior training where begin to look for God’s majesty to be present in every problem. The situation may not resolve immediately, but warriors grow in quiet confidence of Who God will be for them in this place.
Joshua and Caleb joined Moses in embracing that process during Israel’s original journey through the wilderness, out of Egypt and on the way to the Promised Land. How do we know that? Because, when it came time for the next stage of development, they saw it the way God did.
Everyone else? Not so much.
After our experiences in seeing through the lens of God’s provision and possibilities more than problems…after we’ve practiced times of stillness, waiting actively on Him with joy…and in New Testament terms, experiencing that “greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world”—then God rolls out the breakthrough opportunities that get us into the really high places of relationship with Him that can overwhelm whatever opposition we encounter. This is where we can weary the enemy with our rest, discourage him with our joy and overcome him with patience that can not only break into new territory, but has the ability to establish it.
We can expect a lot of opposition at this level, because a people who can live like that in God are highly dangerous to the darkness. How we respond to that pressure will reveal the life we’ve cultivated in our training. What will we see?
Promised Land or Giants?
Inheritance or Walled-Cities?
Obstacles or Opportunities for God to be amazing?
Caleb and Joshua had lived through the same experiences as everyone else on that trip—but they chose a different experience with God in it—so they had a majesty-based response to all that they saw.
God had trained all of Israel to share this same majestic perspective because He knew what was ahead. He miraculously came through for them over and over—and gave them lots of opportunity to practice seeing through the lens of majesty.
Caleb and Joshua had made that choice, so they saw an enemy ripe for defeat and a Promised Land that was everything God had said it would be. The rest of the spies saw only the details that God had wisely chosen not to share at the beginning so that a majestic perspective would have time to develop. But because the people had continued in their problem-focused perspective, they quickly defaulted to fear and unbelief—delaying the inheritance of a nation for 40 years.
We now live in a New Covenant time, based on even better promises (Hebrews 8:6)—but warriors are still in the business of inheriting those promises as God fully intended. Warriors don’t spend much time in contemplating all that the enemy is up to, except to gather “intel” that tells us what God is up to instead.
The life of a warrior focuses on majesty (not the six o’clock news) for encouragement and strengthening. We understand that it’s our job to fill up the atmosphere with joy, peace and goodness until it shifts, and whoever is within our sphere of influence is able to come up higher too.
That is The Way of the Warrior—our path through life with a very big God, where everything is a training ground for majesty. A powerful, peace-filled army of believers that believe, and a fighting force of goodness that the world dearly needs to see and that Jesus so richly deserves.
“Spiritual warfare is not just about pulling down the strongholds of the enemy. It’s about discovering the sovereignty, the supremacy and the majesty of Jesus.” –Graham Cooke, The Way of the Warrior
–Allison Bown