Derek Prince - Where Is The Spiritual Battlefield?
And then having deprived Satan of his weapons against us, and the one great, sovereign, supreme weapon is guilt, Jesus has equipped us with the weapons with which to defeat Satan. That’s the second part of it. Second Corinthians, chapter 10, verses 3,4 and 5. Ruth and I make this confession and I think we will do it together. We have a number of Scriptures, I think probably 50, that we proclaim as part of our spiritual warfare. And this happens to be one.
So you talk close to the microphone. For though we walk in the flesh, we war not after the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. Casting down imaginations, and every high thing which exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. What a victory that is, isn’t it? Thank you so much! You see, we have weapons that are not carnal.
So what are they? They are not carnal, what are they? Spiritual. In other words, we don’t use bombs, or tanks, or rifles, because we are not fighting persons with bodies. They are useless, but we have been given in place of those physical, material weapons spiritual weapons, that we can use. And this is what we can use them for: pulling down strongholds. Whose strongholds? Satan’s, that’s right. If you notice the next verse, there are various alternative translations. You can have arguments, reasonings, speculations. And then it speaks about the mind and the thought.
So we’ve discovered the battlefield. Very important to know what the battlefield is. It is the mind. How many of you realize that? Most of your problems as a Christian are in the area of the mind. Don’t let that discourage you. That’s where the war is. But we have been given the weapons of victory. And we can pull down Satan’s strongholds or road blocks or fortresses. You see, Satan builds up fortresses in the minds of men and women to prevent them being able to receive the truth of the Gospel. And one of our functions is by the spiritual weapons God has given us.
Prayer, preaching, praise and so on to break down those strongholds and open the way for the Word of God to enter and to save people and to change them. We dealt, for instance, with two anti-Christian forces, Judaism and Islam in our last talk. Each of them has a specific stronghold that you have to break down. The stronghold in the Jewish mind is: "If I believe in Jesus, I’ll no longer be Jewish". You may not be aware of that but that is the strongest barrier that they have against receiving the truth about Jesus. The Moslem stronghold is: "God does not need a Son. There is not a Son of God". And if you are going to reach either Jews or Moslems effectively, you are going to have to use these spiritual weapons to break down those strongholds before you can really make an impact on them.
So we have the weapons for victory. Notice the ultimate aim is to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. It is a staggering assignment. First of all, we have to release people’s minds from the false captivity of Satan and then we have to bring their minds into captivity to obedience to Jesus. That’s wonderful, isn’t it? But we have been given the weapons to do it. Now my talk tonight is not on those weapons. I have given many talks on that theme in the past.