“It may look like I’m surrounded, but I’m surrounded by You”. These words from the song, This Is How I Fight My Battles, have been ringing in my head the past few days. We sang this song at my church, and while we were singing, I looked ahead of me, and I broke down at what I witnessed. I couldn’t help but notice a young man, perhaps in his early to mid 20’s, worshipping God and singing his heart out. The part that shook me was that this young guy had cerebral palsy, from what I could see. He couldn’t move his hands. He was confined to a wheelchair. He couldn’t stand for the songs. He couldn’t do the normal things that I could do. Even though this young man was dealing with this severely crippling medical situation, I could see him singing the words over and over, “This is how I fight my battles; this is how I fight my battles”. Even as I am thinking of this as I am writing, I am close to tears because it just does something to my heart seeing a young man who is claiming the victory God has won for him over anything that is going on in his life.
I was reading in Judges 1 where it talks about the Israelites going to fight the Canaanites. The Israelites were on a hot streak of victories, until they got to the hill country. They were defeated by an army that had the latest military technology, chariots of iron. When I first read this, I was confused; was this army with the chariots of iron too much for God? There is no way that could be. So I dug into some commentaries on this scripture. I found something super interesting. It wasn’t that God was not strong enough to fulfill His promise to His people. It was rather that Judah didn’t have full faith in God. They had faith in God, but when it came down to it, they had more faith that they would be defeated by modern military technology.
How often do we, even now, associate with this mentality that God is powerful, but not strong enough to defeat the innermost struggles of my everyday life? Ive heard it said that even though one may accept Christ as all powerful, for some reason, we feel like we need to be kept in slavery of our sins, whether it be one or two small ones. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY FALSE. God is so powerful and loving that He desires to dig down deep into the messiest messes of our lives, and be present to raise us out of them. Whether that be sin, or feelings of loneliness or anxiety and fear, He desires us to live life abundantly. I really believe that through it all, God is saying that He is here with us so that we can be changed and lifted up from the feelings and sin that try to entangle us and keep us from living the life Jesus has called us to.
I do want to challenge us to this point. Stop putting God in a box. He didn’t die for 80% of sin. He died for EVERY SIN and everything that the enemy brings to try to get us off what God has miraculously done in our lives and hearts.The only way to not let this happen is to keep our eyes on Jesus, and to dine with Him every day. We should fix our eyes on Jesus higher than we fix our eyes on the things that keep us away from fully trusting in Him and what He has done. This is how we fight our battles.
Much Love,
Ryan W.
