Prepare for the Battle

One of the things that I have discovered (and some of you may just read this and go "duh!") is that the battles of this life are more than just physical, they are spiritual too.  I know, that's deep isn't it?  But we are told throughout scripture that we are battling spiritually.  (Ephesians 6:10-12).  When I look at things through those eyes, I see that there is so much more at stake.

I had a clear realization of just how this works on Friday.  I told you in my One Word 2012 post that I am participating in the Made to Crave Bible study (You can get the book here or you can do the 21 day challenge for free here) which not only focuses on God but on weight loss as well.  Friday was my weigh in day.  After losing almost 6 lbs the first 2 weeks my scale showed no weight loss on Friday.  I began to get frustrated and a little voice started to tell me that this really wasn't worth it.  (You can read about it on my SparkPeople blog here)  This was my first spiritual battle on this new journey I was on.

I had felt peace until the scale didn't show me anything different.  I was letting those numbers and that little niggling voice rob me of my peace.  So I turned to scripture.  After all, Ephesians 6:15-18 tells us to use scripture and faith to defend ourselves, not to mention that little reminder about being ready with the gospel of peace.  And I found this little nugget of truth:

Photo taken by Jose Carlos Norte licensed under the Creative Commons license

I felt like I had fallen, that I had failed at this new journey.  We have all had moments when we felt like we just didn't quite measure up and in those moments it is so easy to give ourselves over to the negative thoughts that plague us in those times.  That my friends is the spiritual battle.  We need to remember that even though we may have fallen, we have the strength to rise again (Philippians 4:13)!  We are never alone in our struggle.  God provides a way if we will just look to Him to lead.



Until next time,