Facing the Battle

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Os Guinness, the Christian author of The Dust of Death, once went to England to give a lecture series at Essex University.  As he was being introduced to the audience, moments before he was about to speak, he noticed a young woman sitting in the front row.  What caught his attention was that the young woman had the most peculiar expression on her face – a look of fierce anguish.  Recalling a warning he had received that antichristian protesters might attempt to disrupt his lecture series, Guinness paused to pray that God would bless the meeting and restrain Satan so that God’s own message would go forth with power.

Then Guinness stepped to the lectern and proceeded to give his talk.  The lecture proceeded without interruption and was enthusiastically received.  After his talk, the young woman with the strange expression came up to him.  She was angry – and baffled.  “How did you do that?” she demanded.

“How did I do what?” asked Guinness.

“What sort of spell did you cast on me to keep me in my seat?” the woman said.  “You knew I had been sent here by the witches’ coven to protest your talk, didn’t you? And you put some kind of spell on me to keep me silent!”

“The only ‘spell’ I used,” Guinness gently replied, “was to pray in the name of Jesus Christ.”

A few weeks later, Os Guinness was back in America.  A Christian lady asked how his Essex lecture series had gone.  “The reason I ask,” she explained, “is that at the same time you were about to begin your lecture in England, I was suddenly overcome by an impression of you standing on a platform and a woman seated in the audience in front of you.  I had a sense that a battle was going on between you – a spiritual battle between the power of God and the power of Satan.  And I immediately went to my knees and prayed for you and the woman in the audience.”

The apostle Paul would have told Os Guinness and his praying friend the same thing he now tells us in Ephesians 6:  There is a battle raging – a battle between unseen forces in our own visible world.  It is spiritual warfare, and you and I are on the front lines of that battle.

Ephesians 6:10-13

Ray C. Steadman, Our Riches in Christ (Grand Rapids:  Discovery House, 1998), 337-338.

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