“You come to me with a sword, with a spear, and with a javelin. But I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.”
1 Samuel 17:45
To show you what it means to engage in spiritual warfare, let me share with you the precious journey taken by Anna, who was part of our ministry team for my Grace Revolution Tour. While she was in Dallas, Texas, she went through a horrifying ordeal.
She recounted experiencing a numbness in her legs that quickly progressed to her diaphragm. Unable to move, she was rushed to the emergency room where she underwent a five-hour emergency surgery for spinal cord compression caused by multiple lesions and tumorous growths along her entire spinal cord. Without warning, she found herself bedridden with stage-four cancer that had metastasized from the thoracic area to her neck and bones. Given a life expectancy of three years, this is how she described her battle:
All that I, a frightened sheep, could do was to just stay really close to the Great Shepherd. During my entire thirty-three days of hospitalization, Jesus became my impenetrable “safe house,” protecting me from further assaults by the devil. I requested for visitors to be kept to a minimum, choosing to spend the time with the One whose very presence and words were now my very life and healing. Just hearing the way the doctors and nurses talked about my cancer caused the life and peace in me to leak—I felt that I had touched death.
But I remained in my “safe house,” Jesus. I fed on God’s Word during my waking hours, often drifting off to sleep with Pastor Prince’s sermons playing on my iPad. Every time I took my cancer medication, and after undergoing each round of radiotherapy, I would also partake of the holy Communion. I believe that was the reason I didn’t experience any of the side effects, except for temporary hair loss, throughout my fifteen cycles of radiotherapy treatment. I just continued daily in the Word and in partaking of the holy Communion.
The cancer was real, but Anna knew the true battle was a spiritual one. Of course, she was fearful. But she is a child of God and was not going to take the enemy’s attacks lying down or allow him to intimidate her. She fought back, armed with the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17), knowing that her God was backing her up all the way.
Anna reminds me of how David refused to cow in fear before the giant Goliath as the other soldiers of Israel did. Rather, he got angry and demanded to know “who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (1 Sam. 17:26). David was conscious only of how big his God was. The enemy may come against you with a sword, spear, and javelin, but when you come to him in the name of the Lord of hosts, that Goliath is no match for your God!
This devotional is taken from the book The Healing Power of the Holy Communion—A 90-Day Devotional. Joseph Prince