Trained for War

On 11th June this year I wrote the following post. I did not share it at the time, probably because I felt it was incomplete. But again today I was reminded of Ps 144:1 – it’s a theme that keeps recurring. I’ll be honest, I don’t know what to do with it. I know God is calling us the Church to be battle-ready, and I believe He is calling me to take part in that… I just don’t know exactly how. So I’m praying for His guidance, and meanwhile sharing this here in the hope that it will be inspire faith in others and maybe connect those who are seeing the same… xx

When I awoke this morning, I had two clear sentences resounding in my spirit: “The Battle for the Dark Pier” and “every Christian is in the battle, they just don’t all realise it or know how to fight”. When I heard the second sentence it reminded me of many words and pictures that God has given me about rousing and equipping His warriors. It’s something I know God is calling many of us to do. But the battle for the dark pier? What is that? So I went straight to God to ask Him what it meant & what to do with it.

Firstly I felt to look up the symbolism of piers in a dream dictionary, and learned that a pier can represent a positive outlook about uncertainty in the future, or an expectation of something bad that’s going to happen, before the problem is actually faced. When you think about the way a pier is a manmade construction that juts out into & over unknown seas, this makes sense.
And I felt God say that there is a real battle over our outlook and expectation; the way we approach uncertainty… either with hope or with fear. This is the battle of faith. We think we do battle for health, finances, vision, unity etc – we pray for blessing in those areas, and if we are sufficiently trained we do battle with the enemy in those areas – and I’m sure there is truth in all of that. The enemy does come to steal, kill, and destroy, and we can easily assume that the battles are all in that realm. But the battlefield is not merely over what we can see – our physical well-being or provisions – but it goes much deeper. It’s actually in our minds. The ultimate battle that it all boils down to is this: where is our faith? The realm of faith is much deeper. Because the pier represents our approach to uncertainty. If we have faith we approach uncertainty with hope; if not, we approach it with fear – all of which is unseen and incredibly hard to gauge.
Right now we are all in a season of overwhelming uncertainty. And I am seeing many Christians either responding with fear or being distracted to fighting worldly battles. Not in a judgemental way – I feel the pull to fear all the time too – but it does concern me that so few Christians seem to know how to resist that pull & how to overcome. We have to get trained!

As God has been reminding me recently from Ps 144:1 – “Blessed be the Lord, my Rock and my great strength, Who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle”.
There are many other scriptures that also mention being trained for war (Judg 3:1-2; 2 Sam 22:33-36; 1 Chr 5:18; Ps 18:32-35; Songs 3:6-8) Most Christians are aware on some level that we are in God’s army – equipped with armour as in Eph 6, and that we have an enemy. But as God clearly said in the second sentence that He woke me up with, most of us have no idea how to do battle. Our hands need to be trained for war. We can’t just go to battle with no experience, just armed with a sword, and think that we will magically figure out how to use it!

For those who want to be serious warriors we need to engage over the dark pier – the unseen realm of faith that juts out over the unknown water of the Spirit-realm. We need to engage in exercises of disciplining our minds to conquer the internal & unseen temptations and attacks to our faith. We need to be brutally honest and acknowledge everywhere our faith is challenged and found to be insufficient. We need to be quick to confess unseen sin: pride, fear, doubt, worry, greed, selfishness. Self is the idol at the centre of all our unredeemed lives, that clings on as long as we live. Every day we need to be tender-hearted, seeking conviction and correction, repenting and receiving forgiveness – and then, from a place of security in Christ’s redeeming blood, we advance against the enemy, knowing he has nothing in us because it’s all dead in Christ.