The Battle Line Has Been Drawn

The Battle Line Has Been Drawn

For the past 8 weeks, we have talked about building our lives and our church for Christ. We’ve talked about preparing ourselves for His service, about committing ourselves to becoming His willing servants.

Why? We talked about it last week, because we serve a God who can meet our every need, because we serve a God who sacrificed it all for us on the cross. And with that sacrifice, He gives us the victory. Why wouldn’t we want to share that message with the world?

Our vision for the next 5 years is clear.

5000 salvation decisions

5000 additional people in our SS programs

Double our attendance

500 of you on short term missions projects

500 new churches planted

500 missionaries sent to the field

5000 of you as lay ministers serving in our community

And when we talk about those kinds of goals, that type of God sized vision, you can rest assured that there will be opposition. We have already starting seeing results. We’ve already started seeing God moving like never before in this place.

I received an e-mail this week from a man our church. I want to share it with you:

…You must realize that you are "drawing a line in the sand". You are challenging Satan to battle. You are calling a people to follow Jesus with all of their heart. You are leading a church to touch the world in a way that even your dad never dreamed of. And Jonathan, all of the forces of evil, and influences of the evil one, will be unleashed to try to destroy what God has ordained before the foundations of the world for you to do...

Do not let "doing" take the place of "being". Do not let all of the duties of this mammoth responsibility keep you from the only thing that matters...time with your Father, intimacy with Jesus, and soaking in the Holy Spirit. Do not let good things take the place of the best thing. You will have to daily carve out time to spend in the holy place. And please be aware that satan will try to get you to be so busy "pastoring" that you don’t have time to feed your spirit. When you changed the "wall" to say "Not I but Christ", you challenged satan to war.

I read that e-mail and I must admit, I was stunned. I stopped and read it again and again. Why? Because those words are more true than any of us can imagine.

We have drawn a line in the sand and we are daring Satan to cross it. We are daring Satan to attack us. He has seen what is happening here in our church. He has heard the sermons that we’ve been talking about over these past weeks. He has seen what is happening in your lives. He has seen what is happening in my life. And my friends, HE WANTS TO STOP IT! And he’s willing to go to battle to make that happen.

Today, I want to talk about that battle. I want to talk about those attacks that are most certainly coming. They are on their way. He will come after this church. He will come after you. And he will come after me. And we can’t afford to let him win!

Ex. 10:1 Now the LORD said to Moses, “Go in to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his servants, that I may show these signs of Mine before him, 2 and that you may tell in the hearing of your son and your son’s son the mighty things I have done in Egypt, and My signs which I have done among them, that you may know that I am the LORD.”

Moses was called by God to confront Pharaoh on behalf of the children of Israel. He had been raised in a most unlikely scenario. He had fled Egypt after he killed one of the Egyptian guards. He had been in the wilderness for years where God found him. And now, in this chapter and in the previous chapters, God had brought him to his defining moment.

I read this passage last Saturday night. And even though I read it amidst the hustle and bustle of kids jumping on the bed and kids chasing the dog around my room, these words jumped off the page of that Bible.

I had read the e-mail that I shared with you earlier. And here these words were now being read and I saw what God had planned for us as a church, for us as Christians was exactly what He had planned for Moses in this passage.

God wanted Moses to confront Pharaoh. And, he wants us to confront Satan. To confront Satan and show him the power of almighty God. To show Satan whom we serve. And, so that we, and our children, will see that He is Lord.