Warfare at the wall!
Share:
Have you ever hit a wall? I don’t mean a physical wall, I mean a wall of circumstances, opposition, maybe even failure. The good news is, you’re not alone, at some point in our lives we all hit a wall. I think the impact of ‘the wall’ is much harder if it comes after a time when you’ve been building momentum. Let me give you an example. In the book of Joshua we read the story of the Israelites marching towards the promised land and crossing over the river Jordan. In Chapters 1-5, the story is building momentum. Joshua himself is also gaining momentum in his ministry and leadership. He has succeeded Moses, God has promised to be with him and make him prosperous if he’s strong and courageous and meditates on the law of the Lord.
Joshua leads the people through miraculous events and the waters of the Jordan part, just as the Red Sea parted for Moses. He’s gaining more and more recognition and growing in his leadership. The people establish twelve memorial stones to mark what God has done as a sign to future generations and then, in Chapter 5, Joshua encounters the Lord in his holiness, just as Moses encountered Yahweh at the burning bush. Make no mistake about it, Joshua is on the up and up - he’s growing in wisdom and stature and at this point, if he used Social Media, everyone would want to follow him and be his friend!
But then we get to Chapter 6 and Joshua and the people are facing a wall. They’re facing the famous walls of Jericho - a fortified city that stood between them and the promised land. Life is so often like this, in between the promise and the destination there are obstacles, big ones, walls in fact. Sometimes you just hit a wall…
This is also our story. As a family, we recently hit the biggest wall of our lives. We weren’t expecting it, it came out of nowhere and at a time when we thought we were gathering momentum. Suddenly, our son came home from a school trip and he wasn’t himself, he was acting strange and seemed paranoid and delusional. A few days later, he had deteriorated even further and ultimately aged only 16 years old, he experienced a complete mental breakdown and was hospitalised for nearly six months in an intensive residential mental health facility. We were devastated. The monster of mental health ripped through our family like a tyrant without mercy and our son kept getting worse. We hit a wall that felt like it would never come down, but God is a God of the impossible and walls do come down.
So let's return to the story. Joshua is facing the walls of Jericho and God speaks to him and tells him ‘See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands.’ Joshua has the promise of God, but at this point the walls are still standing. God continues to explain to Joshua how the walls are going to come down and, at this point, if I were Joshua I think the conversation might have gone very differently:
God: “March around the city once, with all the armed men”
Me: “OK, armed men, soldiers, that makes sense, good start, what’s next?”
God: “Do this for six days….”
Me: “Sure, six days was it? Not just the once then?”
God: “Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams horns in front of the ark”
Me: “Priests with trumpets? You know we’ve got soldiers here right? Don’t you mean get some soldiers with swords, maybe cut down some trees and build a battering ram? What about fire, maybe we could hurl fire at them?
God: “On the seventh day, march around the city seven times with the priests blowing the trumpets”
Me: “Priests with trumpets!!? OK God, what else - should we stand on one leg, maybe we should hop around Jericho and clap our hands. Maybe we should prophetic dance and flag wave around Jericho and then the walls will come down, how about that??!!
God: “When you hear the priests sound a long blast on the trumpets, have all the people give a loud shout, then the wall of the city will collapse.”
Me: “OK God, I need to explain something to you here, trumpets don’t make walls fall down. It just doesn’t work like that, this is not how engineering works God!
Joshua, however, doesn’t even bat an eyelid, he just calls for the priests and says ‘get the ark, seven priests and some trumpets - this wall is coming down!’ What a wonderful example of faith. To the natural mind, God’s plan doesn’t make a lot of sense, but to the spiritual mind, we understand strongholds come down through faith and obedience.
Here’s the point I want to make. Walls will still come down but unlike Joshua and the Israelites, the walls we face are not physical walls. We have different walls to face, let's call them strongholds. If we fast forward to Corinth in the New Testament, Paul writes to them in 2 Corinthians 10: 3-5 and says:
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
Here we have God’s strategy for dealing with strongholds, this is how we break through ‘the wall’. I also want us to notice that the stronghold Paul is referring to here has to do with the realm of the mind. The strongholds we demolish are ‘arguments’, ‘pretensions’ and that which is against the ‘knowledge’ of God. The battlefield, for us, is the realm of the mind. Paul is very clear that we are fighting, there is a war but it’s not fought with weapons of the world - just like Joshua didn’t fight Jericho with soldiers.
Going back to the story of our son, we had to learn how to fight the giant of mental health with spiritual weapons. I remember we were visiting the hospital and my wife and I sat with him and told him, ‘son, just try listening to some worship’. We knew that he needed to ‘change the record’ in terms of the songs he was singing over himself. Now, nearly two years later, he’ll talk about that moment and the decision he made to start to worship God in the hospital. That was his turning point, that was when he took up the spiritual weapons of his warfare.
I want to tell you that the giant of mental health will fall, that wall will come crashing down if we apply God’s strategy in the battle for the mind. So how do we do that? We take every thought captive. That’s the first key, we have to take every thought captive - not just some thoughts, every thought. We have to stand back and ask ourselves, is this thought a friend or an enemy? Our thought life is so important because we’re transformed by the renewing of our minds - so the mind is the headquarters of transformation! (Romans 12:2). We have to check our thoughts against the truth of God’s word - if that thought is an enemy - take it captive!
The second key, once you’ve taken an enemy thought captive, is to make it obedient to Christ. We have a word that’s used for obedience to Christ - it’s called ‘discipleship’. Did you know you also have to make your mind a disciple of Christ - we have to discipline our minds. If a thought comes to you and says “you have no friends, you’re alone and people will always reject you” we have to make that obedient to the word of God which says ‘I have the spirit of adoption and I’m never alone because Jesus will never leave me’ (Romans 8:15 and Deuteronomy 31:6). When fear knocks at your door you take those frightening thoughts captive and disciple your mind with the word of God and declare over yourself ‘I have not been given a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and a sound mind’ (2 Timothy 1:7).
This is how, as a family, we faced the giant of Mental Health, this is how God instructs us to tear down walls and strongholds. Our son is well on the road to recovery and restoration and we’re learning how to fight the battle for the mind.
If you’re suffering from mental anguish and tormenting thoughts, go to the word of God. Take hold of those scriptures and just like the priests at Jericho released a trumpet blast and a shout, release and speak out the word of God over your mind, over your life and over your future. In the mighty name of Jesus, walls will come down.
