Get Up and Fight | How to React to Spiritual Warfare and How Prayer Tools Can Help

Have you ever felt spiritually attacked? Pursuing a new goal or overcoming a past sin – and feeling like God’s truth is hard to believe right now? Come join in the conversation as we talk about spiritual warfare and prayer tools to help us reject the enemy’s lies and redeclare God’s truth over our lives. This episode ends with a pep talk to encourage us to live like we know we are children of God – citizens of heaven. May we not accept the world’s standards as best – but see our lives and the purpose of life on earth from God’s point of view. We all want to achieve our potential – may we be chasing the right things.

Listen to You Are You Christian podcast for women on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Or for my reading-lovers out there (I'm with you!), the transcript is below.

Hi friends! I hope you’re doing well this week and staying healthy. This episode is coming a week late as I was out sick last week but praise God am feeling 100% better.

Today I wanted to share about spiritual warfare, something I’ve been praying over a lot in the past week, and some practical tips on how we can declare we believe our position as children of God during those times where we feel spiritually attacked.

So that we’re on the same page, what is spiritual warfare? InterVarsity describes it as:

The leveraging of everything that God promises against everything that opposes God’s purposes. It’s when the enemy attempts to sever our connection with God, prey on our natural inclination to sin, and deceive us into believing untruths that might hinder our discipleship or cause us to lose our effectiveness for God’s kingdom.

We know the enemy is always looking to trip us up.

We know God allows us to be tested sometimes because he has a plan to use it for our good.

We know that as we go through the testing, our spiritual muscles get stronger.

And so I hope this episode is useful whether it’s relevant for you right now or is a ‘save for later’ type of episode.

1) How encouragement from our church family can help us fight the enemy’s lies.

One thing I’ve needed to shake off this week is intimidation.

As you may know, I’ve recently moved to Taipei and am working on my venture Pink and New, a platform that seeks to support churches in equipping Millennial and Gen Z women seek God for emotional health and healing. The more I work on this, the more I’m excited to keep going. It’s the area where, more than any other area, I feel God has used to grow me in my relationship with him. And the more conversations I have with pastors, leaders, women, the more I believe it’s needed.

This past week, I had the great privilege of being a guest on the My Single Story podcast which is part of Crossroads Media in Canada, the network behind 100 Huntley Street which is Canada’s longest running Christian talk show. When I was explaining the vision behind Pink and New, Meisha, the host shared a bit about her journey and thanked me for “taking up the mantle” in this area which kind of took me aback for a minute until I processed why I was taken aback. More on this in a second.

Still processing, the next day I went to a women’s bible study. One of the things I’ve been praying for is being mentored by women in a different stages of life from me. And the women I’ve met in Taipei are not only on fire for God, mothers, and super cool women, but many are also entrepreneurs. That day we discussed humility and leadership, as it relates to Philippians 2. I brought up that I was chewing on verse 7 which describes how Jesus made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant. We’ve probably all heard the term ‘servant leadership’ and know God calls us to be humble. But then how to reconcile this when we feel called to pursue something bigger than ourselves?

The women in my Bible study basically encouraged me to be bold about my God-given vision while humbly relying on God – because we have a responsibility to obey God and doubting God doesn’t please him.

Which helped me process the ‘taking up the mantle’ conversation. Often with our callings, it’s not something we feel we’ve chosen for ourselves – like we didn’t go to God and say ‘I want to be a leader’ in this area. It’s more we believe it’s where God is leading us, and it’s also an area that he’s given us the most passion for or training for. So I think I was taken aback because it sounded so grand when she said it like that but we are God’s servant and obeying God means obeying his leading. So 1) we all should be taking up whatever mantle God is calling us to do right, and 2) God does want us to rely on him and do things ever greater than Jesus did (as it says in John 14). So may we not be shy but do good deeds so others will glorify our Father in heaven (Matthew 5)!

This week, I’ve also been reading Genesis and was praying over Noah’s story. The Bible shows us that when God told him to do something, he did it. But perhaps he didn’t tell too many people, other than his family, that he was doing it, building the ark, because they wouldn’t get it. There had never been rain… is he sure he heard from God? Without official proof, we’re walking in faith, hoping God will show us that we heard right. We’re all in this boat, right?

So when we believe God has called us to something and we’re feeling intimidated, may we be wise about who we allow to speak into our lives and pray for discernment to know what pieces of advice to take and which to leave behind.

Also, during that day when I was feeling initimadated and knew it wasn’t logical but it was hard to shake even for awhile after the bible study… I even prayed and waited and napped and ate well and waited for heaviness to lift but it was lingering… you know when it lifted? When I did a piece of work even though I didn’t feel like it. It was a small piece, an act of obedience, but just continuing to obey God shifted things.

When we know we’re on the right path, let’s do our best not to let lies derail us. Let’s keep pursuing God with our love, thoughts and our actions – and trust God will show up.

2) How we can use a prayer tool to reject the enemy’s lies.

One morning this week, I woke up feeling super hot, dehydrated, and confused. Because I’d had a really weird dream. I’ve prayed for spiritual dreams where God gives me wisdom and blesses me with the answers to a problem I’m working on in real life. But that very rarely happens (still praying for this though, God!). Usually I don’t remember my dreams at all. And then once in a while I’ll get a dream that shows me I need some spiritual cleansing.

Look we live in a fallen world. We are tempted to sin all the time. And we can often make agreements with the enemy even without realizing it. For example, maybe we watch a TV show or read celebrity gossip article and then all of sudden start believing the lie that all human relationships are doomed to fail or something like that. And then that lie attaches to another lie that we’ve believed in the past. And we might start to worry or doubt or spiral – maybe not even consciously but it starts coming out in our attitudes or ahem our dreams.

In my dream, there were some attitudes that I and others in my dream had that were clearly not God’s will, things I didn’t want to think about – like sins that should feel revolting but in my dream they didn’t feel unfamiliar. Gross, right? What to do? When I woke up, I had this urge to reject the lies. To declare that they were lies and then declare God’s will.

Part of what I want to do with Pink and New is showcase really useful, practical prayer tools from various Christian emotional health and inner healing ministries. For example, a few years ago, my church ran a course from Nothing Hidden Ministries that I found extremely useful. Highly recommending looking up their prayer tool called 1-2-3 Skiddoo, I use it a lot during situations like this. They describe the tool as follows:

“Identify what thoughts and feelings are coming against you and what it is trying to steal from you. You may be able to do this on your own or you may need help from someone whom you trust. Take the thoughts and feelings captive using these 3 simple steps.”

Step 1) Identifying the ungodly thought and nailing it to the cross. These thoughts could be anything from hopelessness, jealousy, self-protection. Or even things like “I’m never going to change” or “they’re never going to change.”

Step 2) Breaking all agreements that we’ve made with the things we identified in step 1, known or unknown, and repenting of joining with them – basically repenting of believing these lies.

Step 3: Asking God to send these things away and asking him what he wants to give us in their place. When I prayed this morning, I felt God remind me that I am forgiven, redeemed, and loved – so loved. Which then encouraged me to speak truth over my life – that I am accepted, holy, and pure because of the blood of Christ.

I love that step 3 involves waiting on God – because while this tool is useful, these words aren’t magical. Obviously we can say a different prayer. Because it’s not the words that heal us but God – these template prayers are just super useful when we don’t have the words ourselves.

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So a quick episode this week focused on reminding us that we *are* children of God. To believe this truth and act like it. We don’t have to act small or feel like we need to hide our light because we are worried others will judge us. God wants us to shine for him and be who he’s made us to be and wants us to live honestly in community sharing our work-in-progress lives. No matter what success we achieve, we’ll always be imperfect and need God and others, so let’s not be afraid to live and live for God. And when we notice that we are dealing with outright lies, let’s bring it to God and declare his truth over our lives.

If you ask me, living small is when we live for the world instead of God. When we take the world’s expectations and standards and timelines and accept them as truth – when they are not God’s will. Living the most glorious life possible is when we do it with God, in God, no matter how countercultural it feels. May we grow in boldness, may this upcoming week be bolder than the last, knowing that even when we face battles on this earth, God can use it to prepare us for our futures and for eternity. May we be careful to live for the right things – for we are citizens of heaven and our ultimately our goals and priorities should be there.

So cheering you on always and look forward to continuing to grow in the Lord together.

For daily encouragement, come follow The Yay Project at @the.yay.project on Instagram and Threads, or Yay Ministries on Facebook. As it says in Hebrews 3:13, one of my favourite verses,

But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

Enjoy the rest of your day and speak soon!