Sermon Tone Analysis

Territorial Spirits

Colossians 2 and Daniel 7.

A war is going on for our nation today.

A war is being fought for our metropolitan areas, our great cities across this land.

There’s a war raging for our churches, for our families, and for each of us personally.

It’s a war in the spirit realm, and this is the challenge you face: The devil has sent messengers, strong principalities and powers, to stand against you and to keep you from being and doing all that God has called you to be and do.

So what will you do about it?

The central, foundational activity for spiritual warfare is prayer.

In one sense, prayer is a weapon of warfare, and in another sense, it is the medium through which all of the other weapons are utilized.

A chief New Testament passage on spiritual warfare is Ephesians 6, where we are told that:

We are told to put on the full armor of God, “praying always with all prayer and supplication in If prayer is the central activity for spiritual warfare, the central attitude for those of us in the battle is faith and obedience.

At one point when Jesus was on earth, His disciples tried to cast a demon out of an epileptic boy and could not.

After Jesus stepped in, cast out the demon, and healed the boy, the disciples asked Him why they couldn’t do it.

Jesus said, “Because of your unbelief . .

.” (Matt.

17:20).

The disciples lacked the faith to succeed in that episode of spiritual warfare.

Jesus tried to encourage them by telling them that as their faith increases they will have the power to move mountains and “nothing will be impossible for you” (Matt.

17:20).

What does faith do?

For one thing, through faith we establish our relationship to God.

We are saved by grace through faith (Eph.

2:8).

Then once we are in fellowship with God, we move on from there to deepen our relationship with the Father through faith.

That is why Ephesians 6 lists a part of the full armor of God as “the shield of faith” (Eph.

6:16).

Faith cannot be understood apart from obedience to God.

How do we know if we really have the kind of faith that draws us into a relationship with God? Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.

He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar and the truth is not in him (1 John 2:3-4).

Faith without works is dead.

The proper combination of faith and obedience can be summed up in one word: holiness.

Holiness means “being so full of God that there is no room for anything else.”

That means that we no longer love the world or the things of the world, such as the “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (see 1 John 2:16).

Instead of doing the things of the world, a holy person does the will of God.

All this is in First John 2, where it is summed up in the context of spiritual warfare:

You are strong and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one” (1 John 2:14).

If we pray with an attitude of faith and obedience, the specific weapons that God has given us for spiritual warfare will be effective in defeating the enemy.

What are some of these specific weapons?

Returning to Ephesians 6, we see that our engagement with the enemy is described in some detail, with the apostle Paul characteristically mixing metaphors.

He uses two simultaneous analogies to describe our engagement with the enemy: the wrestler and the warrior.

The Wrestler Paul says that: We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12).

Paul is speaking about very serious spiritual business.

When he says that we wrestle, he is not referring just to himself, Silas, and Timothy.

He is referring to all true members of the Body of Christ.

He does not suggest that we wrestle directly with the devil because, for one thing, the devil, as I have mentioned previously, cannot be in more than one place at one time.

The principalities, powers, rulers of darkness, and spiritual hosts of wickedness are descriptions of the demonic hordes that satan has delegated to steal, to kill, and to destroy, and those are the beings we are expected to engage.

In most cases, we will be called to wrestle against ground-level spirits, such as those frequently mentioned in the Gospels.

Some may also be called to deal with the middle-level spirits, which operate through witches, occult practitioners, New Age channelers, spiritist mediums, and others.

Paul dealt with one of these in Philippi—a spirit of divination, which had controlled a slave girl who was a fortune teller.

This was such a high-level spirit that the deliverance had political repercussions, and Paul and Silas found themselves in jail as a result (Acts 16:16-24).

Others, I would think relatively few, may be called to deal with the higher level territorial spirits such as the prince of Persia or the prince of Greece.

Obviously, the higher we go, the more caution we need.

The Warrior Once Paul establishes that our engagement with wicked spirits is like a wrestler, he switches analogies and describes our means of combat as that of a Roman warrior.

Military equipment, then as now, includes defensive as well as offensive instruments.

The full armor of God is our defense against our spiritual enemies.

Interestingly enough, the Roman armor was designed to protect the front of the warrior, not the back.

Apparently the assumption was that when the enemies were near, the soldiers were moving toward them, not running away.

But as any soldier knows, the final objective is not to protect yourself against the enemies, but to defeat them.

General Patton said the key to winning a war is not giving your life for your country, but seeing that the enemy gives his life for his country.

Paul mentions two offensive weapons in this passage, one used by the devil and one used by the Christian warrior.

The devil’s weapon is a bow and arrow (Eph.

6:16).

This is a weapon used at a distance.

It may well be satan’s desire that his forces do not engage well-armed Christians up close.