To Him Who Overcomes....

I often think in analogies, and right now this one occurred to me -- we in America (and the West), especially under current leadership, seem to be reluctant to face the reality that our enemies are not measured and moderate in their goals, nor in their brutal intensity of achieving them. But pretending or wishing this were true doesn't change the reality. And how hard you actually fight is pretty much determined by how hard your enemy is fighting.

And what occurred to me is that the same is true when it comes to our 'spiritual warfare' (see, e.g., Eph. 6:10-20; 1 Pet. 5:8-9). We may wish that authentically living the Christian life was really just kind of a casual self-improvement plan -- but it's not. It's a fight (1 Tim. 6:11-12) -- and how hard we have to fight is not really up to us -- in a key sense, it depends on how hard our Enemy is fighting to defeat and destroy us.