Our Gospel lesson on Sunday will be taken from the 17th chapter of St. John's Gospel. There, we have Jesus' prayer in which he petitions the Father to protect us from "the evil one." (John 17:15).

The prayer is striking in that Jesus has just acknowledged that the world will hate His disciples. We will encounter untold trials and tribulations at the hands of those who mean us harm. And yet, Jesus' prayer isn't to deliver the church from suffering, but from Satan.

This speaks, doesn’t it, to the true nature of the battle in front of us? The true enemy we face isn't the secular elite or wayward Christians, it's against "spiritual wickedness in high places." (Eph 6:12). DE Hoste succeeded Hudson Taylor as the leader of the China Inland Mission. He said this of prospective missionaries:

“I won’t send someone on mission until I’m convinced they've learned to wrestle with the evil one, because if they haven't wrestled with the evil one, they will wrestle with their brothers and sisters.”

We are sent to complete a mission that Jesus started. The life to which we're called isn’t stationary: it’s kinetic, it’s active. The metaphor Scripture uses is a marshal one, it’s warfare language. We are called to do battle.

If we don’t understand that the enemy we're are called to fight is Satan, we will, inevitably, spend our lives fighting people. We know we’re sent to a battlefield. We know we’ve been given armor. And if we don’t hear Jesus’ prayer to protect us from the evil one, we will think our enemy is our brothers and sisters, and we will fight them. Or we will think our enemy is non-believers, and we will fight them.

And a pugnacious attitude is only indicative of the real problem: if we're spending our lives combating people, we aren’t fighting the evil one. How do we live in light of this spiritual battle? How do we live with the Kingdom protection and authority that's ours in Christ? That's what we'll be talking about Sunday. I hope you can join us!