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Living Hope SDA Church

Christian Martin

Battle Ready From Temptation to Triumph

You know, when we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be.

But in the meantime, we must be battle ready.

The title of today's meditation on the word of God, let's pause and ask our commander in chief to draw near to us and speak to our hearts as we meditate on this word.

Father in heaven, yes Lord we do rejoice.

In fact being here within these walls of this space is truly literally a foretaste of heaven.

Yet Lord, we do realize that we do live in this world that is under the sway of the enemy.

We must not be forgetful, but very mindful of the reality that is right outside these walls and even within.

And we ask Lord that you would bring to our minds attention anything and everything that we need to understand in order to be battle ready in these days that we live in as we anticipate your soon return.

May the Holy Spirit guide us and we thank you in Jesus name, Amen.

You know wartime sounds have become far too common in regions in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe.

We don't understand, we don't, how it is to wake up every morning and be able to hear in a distance the shirking buzz of drones flying in the air, air raid Sirens going off at all times of the day and of the night.

There's hope of peace talks until the first shots are fired.

And recently, 1 leader was described as playing with fire.

When cease talks, cease fire talks were followed by 1 of the deadliest drone and missile attacks since this particular war began about 3 years ago.

Those words began to replay in our mind, in my mind, playing with fire.

You know if you say that someone is playing with fire, you mean that they're doing something dangerous, something that has potential to have painful consequences.

Something that could result in many problems.

I'm thankful to God that when I was a toddler, growing up in Central America, in the country of El Salvador, that I would hear gunshots fired from a distance.

We saw plenty of men carrying AK-47s up and down the streets of El Salvador, checkpoints all the time, going to church.

Oh, my dad has quite a few stories that would shock you.

It was civil war at that time, but today, today it's even worse.

Did you know that there were close to 60 armed conflicts raging in 2023, major armed conflicts?

Getting intense and more intense and frequent.

In 2024, just last year, at least 200, 000 people were killed in the context of war.

And over 120 million are currently displaced.

And today, roughly 2 billion people in the world live in conflict-afflicted countries.

That's a quarter of our Earth's population.

The truth is that The realities in which we live in are not only for the physical realm, the realm that we live in, but also the truth of the matter is that it's no different in the spiritual realm.

Because the spiritual realm also involves a war.

And it can be dangerous, resulting in great harm.

Precisely why it draws the attention of heavenly beings.

Because when you think about it, when there's war here on earth, it draws global attention for obvious reasons.

The economy shakes up and then you have all sorts of things happening and the global community is very interested when war happens.

But how much more in the spiritual realm?

Though in this case, it involves all billion of us in this conflict affected world.

You see, the spiritual warfare that we're in, it's a great struggle.

It's a battle between good and evil, light and darkness, Christ and Satan.

The Great Controversy has many different titles.

And as we call it whatever we want to call it, let's be clear in 1 thing.

No, there's no neutral ground in this warfare.

There was a man who had to make a decision about his life.

Whether to follow God or do his own thing.

Whether to allow God to sit on the throne of his life or to call the shots himself.

And in the dream he was standing in a large field.

And on 1 side of the field stood Jesus and a group of people who clearly belonged to him.

They looked peaceful, joyful, full of light.

And on the other side stood Satan and his crowd.

And right in the middle of the field was a fence, this long fence.

And the man climbed up and sat on the fence, thinking, I haven't made up my mind yet.

Time passed in the dream and evidently or eventually both groups disappeared from the field and the man looked around.

Then suddenly Satan came back alone And he walked up to the man and said, there you are, I've been looking for you.

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Battle Ready From Temptation to Triumph

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