SPIRITUAL WARFARE series: Part 1 of 15 – The Armor of God, Conduct in the Campaign & Implementing the Victory of Christ in our Lives!
In today’s world, churches in error seem to be polarizing, to a large degree, between these two groups of fellowships: the one group hardly recognizes, or not at all, the existence of Satan, the kingdom of darkness, spiritual warfare and are involved in this world merely as social agencies, self-help institutions, and a platform from which to address entirely earthly, non-spiritual, political and social issues. Rick Warren is a prime example of this.
The other group seems fixated on nothing but spiritual warfare, the kingdom of darkness, and Satan; their battle strategies and objectives seem centered around “reclaiming this world/nation/city for God” which is something the LORD Jesus Christ never did, nor did any of His apostles.
The church received no such command to “reclaim” (A review of JOHN 17 where the LORD Jesus Christ prays to the Father is most revealing in this regard). They get into unbiblical practises which in themselves can lead a Christian astray from the Truth just as effectively as the Emerging Church Movement and its proponents (like Rick Warren as mentioned above); included among these would be such teachers as C. Peter Wagner and the late Derek Prince (strangely enough Wagner has been a spiritual mentor of R. Warren’s for a long time).
Those are the extreme positions (of course not all churches can be accounted for in these two groups), and as usual the Truth resides somewhere in-between; precisely that is, in an accurate appraisal of the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures.
An exhaustive treatment of this subject would be worthy of an entire book (and there are some, though not many that have been already published which prove useful; I have a list of such books at the end of this article)!