The Secret To Winning Your Battles

“I got this”, my mind tricked me into thinking.

A year and a half of battling for goodness amidst such wickedness.

A year of pressing forward with some mom that confessed she cannot keep her children….was begging for us to take them.

We meet the children, fall in love, follow step-by-step every path we believe God might have us on.

Only learning…

The mom is getting beaten. The children aren’t safe, and the police have proof of nothing.

So, the children stay…hearing and seeing abuse…while the world can do nothing. Their Christmas presents sit waiting for two children that may never come…

It was a year of questions, heartbreak, spinning from the realization that those who you expected to love you unequivocally, have failed you.

Those you thought were safe, really turned out to be the same people who turned your world upside down.

To say there has been a battle brewing, would be an understatement.

And sometimes there are not strong winds of warning, but a strange calmness, a mixture of pressure and wind combining to make this brief stillness un-alerting us to storm lurking, just around the corner.

As a little girl in Elementary School, I was walking home one day. Unaware, the teachers let us out to tread the eight blocks to where we lived.

A storm came, the winds blew so strong we had to hold onto the trees in front of a little house in the middle of the block. I was maybe six, and was with some other kids who also could barely stand.

Just then, an older lady came out of her wooden shelter, saying, “Why are you all out here. The winds are stronger than you are. If you let go of this tree, you’ll be blown away.” 

I remember the way she looked at me, the smallest. Like a loving grandma. She opened the door, gave us something to drink, and let us sit under her roof contently, until the storm passed.

Yet, many of us today, don’t have sweet grandma’s to shelter us. The generation of prayer warriors, have passed far too quickly.

Saints have been carried away to the promise land leaving a generation of baby boomers clinging to money and security, instead of faith in the God who never leaves or forsakes us.

Worse yet, we feel our own fragility.

Many of us have let go of the trunk, where the roots grow deep, and have been blown by the storm; turning, twisting, enduring damage those around us can see.

My friend e-mails, telling me this week about Gideon.  The battle seemed so fierce, yet God dwindles the army impractically to only three-hundred.

She tells me, “I think that’s what God is doing. He wants us to know it was Him when the battle is won.”

And yet, we often cling to and think we can win the battle with our own resources. We grab our own strength, pride ourselves on perseverance, use head-strong determination to make the best of our situations.

Yet, God calls us to contriteness. He says He will be near to those who humble themselves, pray, and seek His face in weakness.

I tell my friend, just two days earlier our pastor spoke on that exact same message. The jars upon the torches, the trumpets surrounding the army with Gideon and only three-hundred men.

In church service, I had scribbled to my oldest daughter, about how the broken jar is us, the torch is the fire is the Holy Spirit, and the trumpet equals victory.

And how this story is a mathematical equation we can apply to our own lives…

Broken Vessels + Holy Spirit = Victory

Finally, after seeing this visual image of the broken jar, with fire burning through it….something shattered in me.

I fall helpless on the Father’s feet, see the great cloud of witnesses, letting go of the circumstances spinning my life in circles.

He had been showing me for weeks, “When I am weak, He is strong”, and how…

When we let ourselves be broken, the fire of His Spirit can work through us. And that’s where the victory is found.

I fall on my fluffy white carpet and weep, lift up this battle, the children, this case I have been caught in for almost two years, and give it all to Him.

I let my life be shattered at his feet, cry out in worship, lift my hands all alone, then ask His Spirit to again fill me.

And I don’t know what you are facing. I don’t know if you feel like your spinning out of control by the winds of your circumstances. I don’t know if you have faced divorce, hardships, abuse, crucial decisions….

Or you feel dead and life-less because the storm has whipped you, twisted you, and left you seemingly abandoned, and forgotten in some gutter.

But, one thing I can promise you is…His Spirit will come if you ask Him, and stop fighting, stop striving, stop working for the victory that is His in the first place.

And I can hear them, can’t you? The trumpets of The One declaring His entry, winds howling, breeze sweeping, trying to distract us from the Victory.

Troubles trying to turn our eyes from seeing, Him riding in on His white horse, declaring, “Rejoice, my children. The battle is won.”

He’s whispering, to humble hearts choosing to listen…

“This light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” 2 Corinthians 4:18

Today friends…

• Let’s insist the storms stop thrashing us.
• Let’s stop trying to draw armies near us.
• Let’s stop thinking our own strength will get us through our afflictions.
• Let’s let go of our determination to “get through the day”.
• Let’s stop trying to be tougher, bolder, more forceful in our attempts to maintain our pride or reputations…

Instead…

• Let’s get low and walk in humility.
• Let’s come to Him with our nothingness, because that is the place of in-filling.
• Let’s allow the vessels of our lives to be broken, laying abandoned and contrite before Him.
• Let’s live continually giving Him our weakness, so He can be our strength.

It’s not too late. He hasn’t forsaken you. The saints may have gone on, but can’t you close your eyes and almost hear them cheering? The finish line is near, friends….

We’ve almost made it home.

Let’s give up all our striving and trust, “The Battle Is The Lord’s”.