3.30 Devotional - The Victorious Christ

0:00Today is Monday, March 30th. The title of our devotional is The Victorious Christ. A new campaign that we're beginning this week, I'm sure you can identify the title of it. It is called The Victorious Christ, living in his authority. In this campaign, we'll be exploring Christ's victory and his authority over evil spiritual beings and learning how to live in that authority that he gives us. First, first to recognize Christ's victory and to live in his authority, we have to be aware of the spiritual world in general. The world view portrayed in Scripture is one of both a physical, material world and a spiritual, metaphysical world. I like to think of it like the old transparencies if you've ever worked with those. You could have one transparency displayed and then you could like add another over the top of it that fills in a lot more detail from the first image, but when you're looking at it on the screen or on the wall, wherever you're projecting it to, it looks like it's

1:04just one image, but there's two transparencies on it. Spiritual world is kind of like that second transparency. It overlays the physical world and it fills in a lot more details of the world. The Bible portrays this cosmic battle in the spiritual realm that affects our physical existence on a number of fronts. We fossil poll calls this our primary battleground in Ephesians 6, 10, to 17. In some, there's a battle for the health of your soul, whether you realize it or not. When I was preparing for ministry, our culture was shifting from modernism and to post-modernism. The new atheist movement was popular and teachers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins were doing the thing. So I spent most of my time assuming that I would be arguing for Christianity amidst a cultural framework of naturalism, the belief that nothing exists outside of the natural world. They live in a very different cultural mood today than back then. Today the winds have shifted to a much more spiritual world view, encountering a staunch atheist is rare in my experience, having encountered far more folks who are spiritual,

2:06quote unquote, but don't ascribe to one religion or another. These folks tend to pick and choose aspects of all the major religions and blend them together into an incoherent glomerate of ideas that make up their worldview. Never mind that no serious adherent to the religions that they are borrowing from would agree with any of their conclusions. People are searching for spiritual experiences in our culture today. If they aren't searching for them in the one true God through Jesus by the Holy Spirit, they're finding these spiritual experiences, not in God, but in evil spirits. The intention of these evil spirits is to draw humans away from God. They are content to do so either by leading people to deny their existence at all or to give them the spiritual experiences that they're looking for and deceiving them therefore into believing that these experiences were experiences of the divine. This is why it's so important that the church sticks to the teaching of Scripture. Scripture grounds us in the truth that allows us to discern whether we are experiencing the Holy Spirit of God or an evil spirit.

3:08We also shouldn't get caught up chasing the cultural moods of the day. Okay, they are fickle and never changing. We should just continue to preach the truth of Scripture, of course, packaging it in a way that appeals to our current culture and in a winsome way. I'm not going to preach for three and a half hours of preachers have done in the past because people don't have that kind of attention span anymore in our current culture. In any case, with this topic as with all others, we must ground our exploration in the truth of Scripture and not get caught up in the cultural moods of the day. I don't know. When many Christians today think of spiritual warfare, it comes with a lot of fear. Much of the Spirit produced more by the movies we've seen than by the Scripture we've read. To our knowledge, we also just haven't experienced the spiritual world much, so that can produce a lot of fear of the unknown as well. However, when we examine the spiritual world through Scripture, we find a story not of fear, but of victory. Jesus waged war against evil spiritual forces, and he won.

4:09Not only that, he gave his followers the same authority to stand against darkness. Part of the problem may be that we're trying to fight this battle in our own strength. That's foolish, and quite frankly, that's scary trying to fight on your own. We have no power in ourselves in the spiritual realm, but in Christ, we have this power and authority at work within us. We have all power and authority because Jesus has all power and authority. So how do we live in that victory and in that authority? That's the question that we'll be answering and exploring throughout our time in this campaign. For reflection time today, I'd ask, what is your background when it comes to this topic of the spiritual world? Do you come from a church tradition that perhaps ignored it almost entirely and left you to live with little to no regard for the spiritual world in your day-to-day life? Or do you come from a background that perhaps over-emphasized the spiritual world and you had an unhealthy obsession with spiritual experiences, angels, and demons? Or were you somewhere in the middle? For today, I'd just invite you to reflect on what kind of assumptions you may be bringing

5:10into this campaign so that you can check them against the truth that we find in scripture.