The spiritual warfare success rate is dismal. I wish I could say it is amazing. I cannot. I can say that we have great examples of amazing breakthroughs. I can also say we talk about them because they are exceptions, not the norm.
Unless we see ourselves as roving bands of marauders fighting the pirates but never establishing the kingdom culture, we have to reconsider how our tactical manual fits into the greater encyclopedia of kingdom culture and purpose.
I would champion the spiritual warfare principles taught by our best leaders. The fathers and inheritors of the territorial warfare vision and assignments have given us treasure, and the present leaders draw out both old and new from that kingdom treasure. However, we have to admit, if we are intellectually honest, that the tactical manual they have given us and the greater scope of the kingdom and its culture has suffered from a disconnect.
On the other hand, in Brazil and the US, we have seen warfare breakthroughs at the national level against antichrist, Jezebel, Leviathan, and systematic spiritual conditions. On the other hand, these saved us from certain peril more than they established a kingdom or kingdom culture. They were “do or die” moments of mercy more than foundational shifts toward kingdom and kingdom culture. They elevated the warfare more than they settled something.
1. We have lost kingdom culture, and we do not even know we have lost it.
So, we do not have the encyclopedia before us as a point of reference to locate our tactical manual of territorial spiritual warfare. We are warring without the proper context.
If the illustration is more Biblical, we do warfare as site preparation for a construction project without the blueprint or artist’s conception of what will be built on that site.
Ask this question of most kingdom leaders, even those with the authentic pedigree of “apostle, prophet, and teacher:” What would this region look like fully restored to its redemptive purposes?” That deer in the headlights look comes from uncertainty, lack of convincing, or – too often – from complete ignorance. If the reason for that is then expressed in the attitude, “I don’t need to know that, just do my job,” we know for certain we are marauders, not warriors of the kingdom.
Unless we are part of a kingdom initiative to establish kingdom culture, we do not even represent the King very well when we use His Name to drive out usurpers with little capacity to build what the King wants on that site. As territorial warfare progresses, the level of submission for warriors to the blueprints leaders becomes increasingly more essential. The idea that “we are warriors and you are not” cannot reach a conclusion that the army is not led by warring generals or that those that war but do not build.”
2. If we produce warriors who do not build, we have produced marauders, not warriors.
I once had dinner at the home of a man who served in some intense jungle warfare and trained soldiers in hand to hand combat. He showed me his illegal weaponry and admitted that he takes it out into the deep woods. He said to me in an odd whisper, “Sometimes I just have to kill something.” A very short dining experience followed. I could only hope his wife, who was cooking, wasn’t trained in the use of poisons.
We do not train bloodthirsty marauders who just need to kill something. We prepare kingdom citizens to both build and war, and the passion for warfare comes from a vision of what the King wants to be constructed and protected in the region.
Let me return to the first points of warfare and its definition: “positively pressing for the purpose of God and running into and overcoming His enemies.”
3. To say we are “successful” and measure that success with anything less than “what the King wants to be built here” is to err.
I know we have political agendas that wish to characterize my nation in terms of attacking when the true nature of our nation’s military interventions are about freedom or protecting our own people in other lands. While we can interpret some of that activity or discover wayward warriors using the nation’s heart for freedom for monetary purposes, we cannot properly say that we are pirates. (That should bring the water to a boil if certain people ever read it.)
The truth is that God approves and supports, assigns, and authorizes authentic warfare, both naturally and spiritually, and the US stands on the right side in the wars she enters. Of course, all our kingdom warfare is done on an assignment basis, so we do what God approves and supports, assigns, and authorizes. That is authentic warfare.
If we develop warriors who just want to be combative all the time, fighting anything and everything they perceive challenges them, we produce a disruption of more than an expansion of kingdom purpose.
America was slow to get involved in WW2 for various reasons. In the context of that moment in history, Hilter looked like a hero to racists, so the Democrat Party loved the idea of killing off “inferior races and handicap or less than perfect people.” The thinking that founded Planned Parenthood was “scientific” justification for Hitler’s death machine. When he invaded other countries and brought the world to the brink of a new order of antichrist evil, we still hesitated. Until Pearl Harbor…
The point I’m making in this comparison here is that America was approved and assigned to defeat Nazism, Fascism, and the dehumanization of “inferior races.” We saved the world from it when the world without us would have been lost without our warfare.
I find our hesitation troubling when looking back now. I think we hesitated more because we just didn’t want to go to war than the influence of Democrat racists who justified Hitler because they applauded the idea of keeping the DNA of “inferior races” out of the human race.
For the kingdom warrior, any hesitation to respond should end the moment the King sends him, but the hesitation to war should remain constant. Until the King makes His decision and appointment of the group of which the warrior is part to an assignment, the warrior remains “at the ready” but without a need to attack or destroy. There is no legitimate lone wolf demon sniper in the kingdom of God. They all operate within a shared kingdom assignment. The warrior does not go “rogue.”
I would question the notion that any kingdom citizen has the identity of “warrior” when “warrior” is the shared identity of the entire citizenry.
