For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Eph 6:12 (ESV)
War We Fight – Part 2
Go to PART 1
In the last 3 chapters of Ephesians, the narrative moves from identity to action. When your identity is healthy, it changes the way you live. Rather than living FOR acceptance, you live FROM acceptance. In this place, success and failure don’t carry as much weight as authenticity, vulnerability and honesty does. As you move through your life understanding that you are loved, your actions are a response to that love, not a reaction to rejection or failure or hurt or pain.
Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:1-4,
“I plead with you to walk holy, in a way that is suitable to your high rank, given to you in your divine calling. With tender humility and quiet patience, always demonstrate gentleness and generous love toward one another, especially toward those who may try your patience. Be faithful to guard the sweet harmony of the Holy Spirit among you in the bonds of peace, so that you will be one body and one spirit, as you were all called into the same glorious hope of divine destiny.”
We are valued, we are one (sons and daughters, brothers and sisters), we are holy. This is our identity in Christ. It changes the way we treat ourselves and others and defines the choices we make.
Of course, it's easy to say and a struggle to live. Within all of us there is a grand tension between eternity and sin nature. It’s a daily choice, sometimes a moment by moment choice, to remember our true identity in Christ and our connection to others. Often it’s in making mistakes that we learn how to walk this road best. And that's OK – that's what a life of repentance looks like. Not perfection, but learning and growing in grace and love. When you know whose you are, you know who to turn to when you get it wrong, and your options seem tough.
One of the problems in our world is that most people have no idea of their true identity. Their state of origin is a mystery. A heartache, an unanswerable question. So they cling to other things to draw their identity from and give them a place in the world. It can be anything from career, a relationship, achievement, sports, art, titles, governments, countries, race, religion… these things turn into identity sources (rather than expressions) for many.
When your identity is in something that can be taken away from you (rather than something that is shared with others), you will fight to the death for its protection and advancement. Conquest becomes our purpose, and that outworks itself in millions of ways: lying and cheating at work to get ahead, being unfaithful to your partner, betraying your children, stealing, bullying the smart kid in class to make you look strong, manipulating situations and people to get what you want, racial and religious vilification, neighbour and territory wars… and it goes all the way across to abuse, murder, racial violence, war, genocide, gendercide… horrific crimes committed against humanity so that others can conquer and own space in the world.
Frederick Buechner said,
“The war of conquest, which is a war to heat the blood of even the most timorous, because one way or another we all fight to conquer, and what we fight to conquer is the world. Not literally the world… but, for the most part, our goal is a more realistic one: just a place in the world, a place in the sun, our place… We feel that we must conquer a territory in time and space that will be ours.
If that is the goal of this war of conquest that we all must wage, there are also the adversaries with whom we have to wage it; and they are adversaries of flesh and blood. They are human beings like ourselves, each of whom is fighting the same war toward the same end and under a banner emblazoned with the same word that our banners bear, and that word is of course Myself, or Myself and my Family, or Myself and my Country, Myself and my Race, which are all really MYSELF writ large.
But there is another war that we fight, of course, all of us, and this one is not a war against flesh and blood. ‘For we are not contending against flesh and blood,’ the letter reads. Then against what? What worse is there to contend against in this world than other men?”
Go to Part 3 – Against the Darkness
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