Lesson 4

Eddie Smith Welcome to lesson 4 on Spiritual Warfare, making sense of spiritual warfare. I'll pick up where I left off the last time and I left off talking about the the warfare meeting we used to have here in Houston, not not we I didn't, but I did attend it. And what I saw there. And it was a group of spiritual warfare, people who were excited, but their excitement was greater than their revelation. And one night when I went, they said, We're here tonight to pull down the spirit of pride over our city. Well, there was something going on right then called Houston proud. And it's kind of like gay pride. Maybe they stole that from Houston proud back in the early 70s.    But we're here to pull down the spirit of pride over the city of Houston. So everybody on your feet, so they all stood up. Now, there's probably two or 300 people in here, there are doctors and lawyers, you know, all kinds of people; intelligent people and spiritual people and pastors and, and associate pastors and church staff members, and deacons, and elders and whatever. So it's a big mix of people. And the leader got up and said, Everybody stand they did. And they said, Everybody hold up your right hand. And they did. And they said, No, we're going to grab that spirit of pride by that slimy old tail, and we're going to pull him down out of this out of our city. I looked over at the guy across the hall, the aisle from me, and he had a pocket of L&M cigarettes in his pocket. He's being told to pull down a territorial spirit of pride over the city of Houston. And he doesn't even have authority over that much paper and weeds. Next to him is his wife and she was rotund, that means large, she didn't have authority over her fork. And next to them was their little boy, about six or eight years old, he had no idea what was going on. He's standing there with his hand in the air, grabbing the spirit of pride by the tail, they counted to three, and then they jerked the spirit of pride down out of the heavenlies.    And for the next hour, they celebrated the fact that pride and the spirit of pride over our city, a territorial ruling spirit, no doubt, had been defeated. To me, it seemed like quite a prideful thing they did. In fact, I began thinking, you know, if we conquer pride in our lives, and in our churches, we might have a chance against the spirit of pride about the city. At that time, I was responsible for our church newsletter. And I had created a logo and a slogan. And our logo was a heart. And it said, Calvary Community Church, the heart of Northwest Houston. And one day, I sat and looked at that, and God said, Oh, your church is the heart of North, there are churches all over Northwest Houston, but your church is the heart of northwest Houston. And I said, maybe not. And I took it off and never use that phrase again. It was pridefuland likely not true. That warrior meeting was quite interesting. As much as I appreciate passion. Spiritual Warfare is about purpose. It's not a matter of volume, it's a matter of power and authority.   What is the difference between anointing and authority? And no, they're not the same. What is the difference between anointing and authority? You might want to write this down. I'll say it slowly. So you can if you want, if you like, authority is the right to exercise the power of God. You see, we don't have power. I don't have any power. There's no spiritual power that Eddie can muster. It's spiritual power of the Holy Spirit living in me. So authority is the right to exercise God's power. Anointing is the power to exercise God's authority. I'll say it one more time slowly. I know because I hear preachers and I want to write down what they're saying, but I can't get it. Authority is the right to exercise the power of God.    Anointing is the power to exercise the authority of God. So I have no personal power, and there's no power in prayer now, Alice and I have had the US Prayer Center since 1993. So we do know a thing or two about prayer, although we're not specialists. But I can tell you that I have no personal power, and there's no power in prayer. Prayer access is the power of God. When done correctly.    Cassius Clay, remember him? I referred to him in one of the other lessons. Muhammad Ali. When Cassius Clay, the boxer, was sitting on an airline one day, the story is told that the flight attendant walked by and said, Sir, fasten your seat belt. And the flight attendant looked down and said, Sir, fasten your seat belt. And he looked back at her and said, Ma'am, Superman don't need no seat belt. And she looked back at him and said, Sir, Superman don't need the airplane. You see, we're not Superman, we do need seat belts, we do need the power of God. And weakness is the key. I get so upset and irritated by preachers and teachers telling people how to be strong. We weakness is the key, not our strength, it's our weakness. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. There are no trained specialist in spiritual warfare.   One day, I got an idea and I wanted to see what it was like to be like Jesus. You see, I asked my dad one time I said, Dad, what is your definition of the spirit filled life? He smiled and said, Son, that's simple. My definition of the spirit filled life is your spirit filled, you're more like Jesus than you are like yourself.    Well, that was interesting, of course. But it didn't quite answer my question to my mind. And that night, I was in my office, and I got an idea. I remembered that with Microsoft Word, you can search and replace things. So I took the book of Luke, and I open it up in Microsoft Word and I clicked search for Jesus, replace with Eddie, my name. When I did in a moment, the entire Book of Luke was a story about Eddie. I began to read it. I read about four pages, and I couldn't read anymore. I was so disappointed at how unlike him I am.   Controlled Demolition. I talk about this in my book, Strategic Prayer. Controlled Demolition is where they put explosives in a high rise or in a football stadium and it all collapses on itself. That's what we're to be doing in spiritual warfare, tearing down the works of darkness. But when I read that story, about the Verzon family, they are the leaders and I think they're in New Jersey. They're the leaders in inclusion. When they interviewed the president, who was the son of the founder, they asked him a question.    They said, how when you're going to bring down a stadium, or SkyRise, skyscraper, how do you know how much explosive to use? And his answer surprised me. He said, Ma'am, it's not a matter of how much explosive to use. It's a matter of knowing where to place it. You see, in spiritual warfare, I may not have a lot of explosive. But if he tells me where to place it, I can bring down a skyscraper. I mean, where they see faith, I can move them out. It's the opposite of pickup sticks.    Now, I've never liked pickup sticks for some reason and I don't know why, but we had them. But I never played much. Pickup sticks was a big two bucks and when you dumped out these sticks about that long, like large toothpicks, they would fall, and they would be in a pile and now you have to remove sticks. The more you can remove, without bringing down the pile, the closer you are to winning well you get 200 points, I think when you when in spiritual warfare, we are also removing sticks one at a time, in such an order, that by moving a minimal number of sticks, the pile can be brought down. You see, we had a house in our neighborhood one day that burned to the ground. I mean, in 90 minutes, it was ashes. And this was like, almost a half a million dollar house. I would drive by it and I felt like God was trying to tell me something about spiritual warfare.    One day, I just sat there and asked him and I waited for him to tell me. He said anything about this. How long will it take to rebuild this house? I knew they would rebuild it, of course they did. But I got to thinking, first of all, they've got to get this mess cleaned up, that'll probably take a month or month and a half, could be longer. Then they've got to get a permit to put a house here from the government a permit, building permit, that could take three weeks a month. Then they've got to determine as a blueprint, what's the house gonna look like? That architect has to work that out and draw that blueprint.  Once they get the blueprint, they have to hire a construction company and they've got to sell them on this blueprint. Then that construction company has to determine what their materials are going to cost and what they're going to need,  those have to be shipped and delivered here. Then a new concrete floor has to be poured. Then the rooms have to be framed in and then they have and I said I don't get the point. He said, Eddie, it took 90 minutes to bring it down. It's going to take more than nine months to get it rebuilt.    That's the way it is with spiritual warfare. What we can bring down today, Satan does not have time left to rebuild. That's why spiritual warfare is so important. It's not just about reading the Heavenlies. We talked about that. I think in the last lesson about the ruling spirits over the city. It's not just and to some people, it's all about that we just need to rid the Heavenlies of those territorial spirits. Well, do you understand there's a policy involved. That policy is spoken about a person with a demon, but the same policy remains for a city. If you could bring down all those territorial spirits over your city, and they weren't replaced with something, they would come back from the desert places. They would be seven times worse than they were and the end of the city would be worse than the beginning of the city.   You see the solution is not bringing them down. It's about displacing them with the Kingdom of God. Jesus taught it this way, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. It's about God's Kingdom replacing man's kingdom. So it's not so much about getting rid of them as it is about getting his kingdom. Walmart is kind of an example. You know, all over Texas, Walmart has now stores in virtually every tiny town in Texas. I mentioned tiny Texas, there's nothing tiny in Texas. But there are some small cities with very few people in them. But there's a Walmart and that became a major problem 10, 20, 30 years ago, because these little towns had dry goods stores.   I'm thinking about one right now that I've been in many times because you could buy almost anything in there. They had hardware, they had clothing, they had snacks, they had everything in there and building supplies. But Walmart started building on the outside of town. As Walmart was established in the town, the mom and pop stores began to fail and die. So that hardware store went out of business, you could buy all that at Walmart, the clothing store went out of business, you could buy that at Walmart. Those little businesses that had been there for years, the toy store, been there for years, they closed down because Walmart was there. When the Kingdom of God comes into your city, the kingdom of darkness is going to shut down. It's a matter of Kingdom displacement.    How do we win this battle? Well, we must keep our focus. Here's my personal unofficial formula and I say that important importantly, because I don't want you believing anything I tell you, you believe what He tells you, and you'll be safe. But my unofficial formula is this 75% of our attention needs to be on God, what he's doing 15% of our attention needs to be on the needs of others. 8% of our attention needs to be on our own needs. 2% of our attention needs to be on the enemy. Now, there may come something that requires God to direct us to show more attention to the enemy, and to defeat him in that process, but unless that happens, we should not be focused on him. I have people call me sometimes because they're having spiritual problems in their home. To hear them talk, I tell them, you know, I've heard the word demon and Satan and, and so much more on this phone call that I've heard in the past two weeks of my life.    Alice and I don't sit around talking about demons or about Satan or about darkness or about those kinds of things. We, if we talk about anything along that line, it's about the Father, and the spirit and the Son, but not about the enemy. And then if there's something that comes up that requires us to address the enemy, we're certainly ready to step into that role. But some people just live with the enemy on their their mind.    Understand that a war is a series of battles. And though defeated, he's still entrenched in some cases, and there's gonna mopping up exercise, there will be battles that we will have to win and lose. But the war is over, the war was was accomplished, was won at Calvary. You see, when Satan saw Jesus die, he assumed that he had won. But he had not assumed a resurrection. And so that's where the war was won. So these battles that were there, just battles of mopping up exercises, which follows virtually every war. Wrestling is not the point. You know, Ephesians six is where we learn that term about we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers. And a lot of people just kind of get that in their mind, because they're familiar with whatever that type of wrestling is. Where they get into a cage, and they fight, no holds barred and all that.    Then collegiate wrestling, and then professional wrestling, which is all fake. They get it in their mind that it's about wrestling. It's about wrestling with demons. It's not that at all. No, that's not the point. The point is not for us to wrestle and find out we win. The point is, there must be a point and the point is to score. So wrestling is not like wrestle play that wrestling in that sense, in Ephesians Six sense is not wrestling, like wrestling wrestlers do, it's more like football. Because when you get to the goal line, and you are about to penetrate the goal line, you're gonna have to wrestle your way across that goal line, you're not wrestling to see who's the strongest, you're wrestling to see who scores and that's what wrestling and spiritual warfare is about. It's about scoring.    I know people that have been involved in spiritual warfare for 10, 15, 20 years. I couldn't give you one example of a score of something that happened because they wrestled also in terms of ourselves. If you go back and read that passage, in Ephesians, chapter six, that is about the only place where the spiritual warfare is simply described. You will find something that few people ever see apparently, at least I don't hear much about it. What is the point of all that? Well, it's defeat darkness. No, it's not really, when it's defeat the enemy. No, it's really not about that. It's about taking the city no.    You see, what is the victory? We need to understand what the victory, the victory is not that we can destroy demons. Because I'm not convinced they can be destroyed. I've never read any place that they could die or, or be destroyed, they will be bound, of course, at one point, but not now. So what's the point? The point is that, Ephesians six, that you may be able to stand, and having done all stand. You see, the enemy wants to defeat us. And he defeats us by coming into us working on our circumstances, working on our bodies, our bodies working on our minds, and he wants to defeat us, he wants to get us out of the battle. He wants to stop us from worshiping the Father. He wants us to declare his works, and focus on all the bad things he's doing to us. What defeats him is when it doesn't work. And we don't sit around talking about all he's done to us, we stand and having done, all we stand.    You don't win by keeping an opponent from scoring, you win by scoring. It's an offensive exercise, not a defensive exercise. There are two things that we have to focus on. Even if we're a quarterback, we've got to focus on two things. Number one, the play that we've called, number two, getting the ball across the goal line. Jesus said greater things than these shall you do when I go to be with the Father. That's interesting, because He did a lot of great things. But greater things than He did, we would do when He went to be with Father, He has gone to be with the Father.    The reason we can do greater things, is because He's given us His Spirit. Now I hear it preached a lot and I don't believe it. It said often the greater things that we do is because there are more of us than there was of Him. He was one person, we are many, and we have His power. And so we're doing greater things than He did. I don't believe that at all and I'll tell you why. It has to do with the Greek word use there as greater. The greater thing there is not more than it's bigger than greater thing, bigger things shall you do. That I've done? Well, what did He do? He raised the dead, He walked on the water, He healed the sick, He healed wide eyes, and so forth. So it's not that we'll do more of that, it's a greater thing. It's the difference between this. If I had a can of green peas, english peas, and I put it out on a tray or plate and then I took another can of english peas and when I poured it out, it was just one big english pea.   That's greater than those. What he's saying is we will do more important things than he did through the Holy Spirit, which will do it through us as His instruments. More will be accomplished because not because there's more of us, but because the things we will accomplish are bigger than not more than he did. We confront the gates of Hell, Jesus never did that. Sometimes people say Jesus never confronted territorial spirits well, not directly.    But we know that it is because we know that when you remember the demons came out of the the Gadarene Demoniac. He cashed them into the pigs and the pigs ran into the sea and committed suicide. When they were cashed into the pigs that was deviled ham. I was 2 old jokes. But the truth is that change, the gravity that affected the atmosphere, that affected the territory. You remember he went from here to there because she could not do much because of their unbelief? There were territorial issues that he confronted and his being there and his doing what he did, did affect that territory.   Our generation is the generation that will confront the gates of Hell. It's prophesied of us that the church would be formed, and that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church. What does that mean? Well, the elders sit at the gates. In the Old Testament, the elders would sit at the city gates, they would make decisions. They were like judges, they would judge conflicts in the city. The elders sat at the gates, Satan's elders, would be higher than everyday ground level demons.   We need to stay at the gates. You've heard, perhaps references to the seven mountains that are spoken of. I've never dealt much with that. But it could be that they are the seven gates of your city, seven gates of our nation. They are religion, government and law, arts and sports, education, business, science and technology, media, family and welfare. We need to pray for the gates to open so the King of Glory can come in. Psalm 24/7 through 10, who is the King of Glory? Jesus Christ. Where's the King of glory in us?    We must take the Gospel into our spheres of influence. I hear people all the time praying, oh, Lord, come down. Lord, come down in our city, come down on our city. He doesn't want to come down. He wants to come out. He lives in us. He is here. He doesn't have to come down from any place. He wants to come out of His people. We must take the gospel. We must pray for the gospel to be released, revealed and received. We need to release the gospel when we preach. We need to pray that the veil will be removed from the eyes of those who hear it and we must pray for it to be received.    When you do evangelism without prayer, it's like showing a blind man a highway sign. First, we must pray that their eyes will be open, so they can see what God is saying. Pray for God to forgive sin and grant repentance. That's Second Timothy 2 through 22, verse 25, praying for the Kingdom of God to come. The Kingdom of God is here. Pray for it to be revealed to us. You know, I went into a town in Nigeria, where 90% of the people in that town had been born again. It was the most amazing thing. You could walk through there at night as you walk down the streets. There's no fear because nobody's going to hurt you. You may have heard about the place in Guatemala where that happened. God is moving and we must stay at the gates. It was a woman that got us into this problem Eve, remember? It'll be a woman that gets us out of this problem, the Bride of Christ. Thank you for listening.