Digging Deeper LIVE with Andi and Brian Hale

It's LIVE WEEK 90 with Andi and Brian Hale on Digging Deeper Radio!

Can you believe it? Ninety weeks? YES, and we're not stopping until everyone is awake.

Tonight, it's Vaccine War Headlines vol 32 featuring part 4 of our 6 part series on Vaccine Dangers by Dr. Russell Blaylock, Trumans Matrix; Clown Show at the Capitol, The Ugly Truth of Manufactured Shortages, and Faith Matters; Book of Signs Ch 8 on Radical Islam. Whoa, that's a loaded lineup. JOIN US on https://www.diggingdeeper.us at 9pm Central or call in to be on the show!

9-11pm Central

It's LIVE WEEK 90 with Andi and Brian Hale on Digging Deeper Radio!

Can you believe it? Ninety weeks? YES, and we're not stopping until everyone is awake.

Tonight, it's Vaccine War Headlines vol 32 featuring part 4 of our 6 part series on Vaccine Dangers by Dr. Russell Blaylock, Trumans Matrix; Clown Show at the Capitol, The Ugly Truth of Manufactured Shortages, and Faith Matters; Book of Signs Ch 8 on Radical Islam. Whoa, that's a loaded lineup. JOIN US on https://www.diggingdeeper.us at 9pm Central or call in to be on the show!

9-11pm Central

in 2 Corinthians 10:4, Paul says our spiritual weapons can destroy Satan’s fortresses. Weapons such as prayer, reading the Word, obedience, meditation on Scripture, fasting, and service can blow up the devil’s strongholds. And that’s what we must do. These fortresses don’t need to be remodeled. God doesn’t tell us to capture them, change the locks, and use them for Him. Satan’s fortresses must be torn down.

We also need to pull down those lofty partitions (v. 5). These include "speculations," those rebel thoughts that take us far away from the knowledge of God.

Friend, you are not responsible for every thought that flashes into your mind. Satan can plant thoughts in our minds. But you are responsible for what you do with them once they are there. Our job is to recognize and dismiss evil thoughts. That’s the idea behind Paul’s statement about “taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). This is war language. When the enemy sends us one of his thoughts, we need to grab that thought and take it hostage.

We can do this by telling ourselves, “This thought is not like God’s thoughts. It is against God and His revealed will. No matter how good this thought makes me feel, or no matter how anxious it makes me feel—no matter how much I may want to act on it or worry about it—it’s a thought out of hell, sent from the enemy. In Christ’s authority, I am going to make it my captive and dismiss it.”

When we can do this successfully day in and day out, we are going to start winning some serious spiritual battles. Whoever controls the mind controls the war. When you take those roaming thoughts captive, Satan loses his control over you.

And while not all anxiety people struggle with is purely a spiritual matter, for some it is based on imbalanced chemicals in the body or rooted in past traumas which produce triggers, this approach toward overcoming anxious thoughts can help to reduce it. It may not remove it entirely if a person struggles with physical-based symptoms, but it can provide a way to manage it. But in order to do so, you have to take each thought captive to Christ.

No army can afford to have enemy troops running around loose behind its lines, wreaking havoc and sabotaging its weapons and defenses.

You may be thinking, Tony, this sounds too easy. If you have been a spiritual POW for very long, you may think Satan’s strongholds are too hard to conquer. You may think the battle is hopeless, the problems too great. But this is one reason we have so many problems. We make the Christian life harder than God makes it. Yes, there are difficult problems. I don’t want to minimize that. But many of the problems we’re facing are not as difficult as we make them, because we approach them with a defeatist attitude.

What is the difference between a person God delivers in twenty-four hours and one who takes twenty-four years? In most cases, I believe the difference is in the mind. When the thinking changes, the actions change. And then the fortresses come down.

Let me give you an example of how this works. Joshua and the army of Israel came to the city of Jericho, which was surrounded by a high wall (Joshua 6). It looked impregnable. It was a fortress. God told Israel to march around the city for six days and then march around it seven times on the seventh day. Then the priests were to blow the trumpets, the people were to shout, and the wall would fall down.

Imagine Joshua saying, “Excuse me, Lord, but this is a war. These people are the enemy. They are strong. Would You please give me my military instructions?”

Joshua didn’t do that, of course. He obeyed God, and when the priests blew the trumpets and the people shouted, that wall crashed down instantly. The wall fell because the people tore it down God’s way. If they had used human methods, they would have been defeated.

Satan knows not only where to get at us, but also how to get at us. That’s why we need to understand the method he uses to defeat and imprison us.

In 2 Corinthians 10:3–5, Paul reveals the devil’s primary battle strategy:

Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

What Paul wants us to know first is that we can’t use secular or fleshly weapons to fight spiritual battles. The reason so many Christians are losing the battle is that they are trying to beat the devil using the world’s weapons. They’re looking to the secular world to help them with their spiritual need. If your problem, your struggle, your need is induced and orchestrated by your spiritual enemy, your flesh can’t win the fight. Unless you choose a spiritual response, all the time, effort, and resources you spend trying to fix the problem will ultimately be a waste of time, a Band-Aid on the situation.

Paul says our methods are not of the flesh because our enemy is not of the flesh. Some of us have been wrestling with things day in and day out for years. Those are battles, no matter what other names we may give to them. And if God speaks to it, it is a spiritual battle. And if your battle is spiritual, it needs a spiritual cure. You don’t fight cancer with skin lotion. You don’t fight a brain tumor by taking aspirin and lying down. Those kinds of problems demand another kind of help. So do spiritual problems.

The text we cited above tells us that Satan targets his attacks on our minds because Paul talks about “speculations,” “the knowledge of God,” and “taking every thought captive” (2 Cor. 10:5). Where do speculations come from? The mind. Where is knowledge rooted? In the mind. Where do thoughts come from? The mind. It is all in the mind. So, the Christian who wants to trade his or her spiritual POW status for freedom must learn to think differently.

When Satan attacks a Christian’s mind, he starts building what Paul calls “fortresses” (“strongholds,” niv and kjv). The devil builds a place from which he can operate, and he means for that fortress to be permanent. He plans to take up residence there.

Satan makes himself at home, in other words, and he gets a grip on the mind until people begin thinking there is no way to overcome this problem, no way to save this marriage, no way to unify this church, no way to make a difference in our world. Whenever you hear a Christian saying,“No way. It can’t be done. I’ve tried everything, and it just doesn’t work."

A fortress or stronghold is a mindset that holds you hostage. It makes you believe that you are hopelessly locked in a situation, that you are powerless to change. That’s when you hear people saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” The only reason you say, “I can’t,” when God says, “You can,” is that Satan has made himself at home in your head.

If your problem originates in the heavenly places, then you need a solution that originates in the heavenly places as well. Most of us are vaguely aware of angels because they’re not part of our physical world. But we need to understand that the angels of God and the demons of hell are the warriors in the cosmic battle between God and Satan.

When you hear believers say they are being attacked by the devil, they probably mean they are being harassed by his foot soldiers. Satan is a limited being, just like any other created being. He is not everywhere present, all-knowing, or all-powerful. Satan is not God, but he has a whole host of evil angels called demons he can use for spiritual attacks. Anything that hell can bring against you results from satanic activity in the same realm in which God operates, called heavenly places.

You and I are no match for the power and deceptiveness of Satan and his army. We need the power of God to neutralize and eventually overcome Satan’s attacks against us. We can be thankful that God has established His throne in heavenly places, pitting His kingdom against the kingdom of darkness. The kingdom of darkness has its own king, Satan, and he wants to be in charge of the universe. Yet when it comes to the universe, there’s no question that God’s kingdom and His King, Jesus Christ, are firmly in charge. And Jesus’ eternal victory is already assured. Still, God has allowed us to choose in our individual lives who will rule over us.

Revelation 12 depicts a day when the invisible warfare in the heavenly places will break out in a very visible form. Verse 7 shows us who the enemy is in this conflict:

“And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels waging war with the dragon. And the dragon and his angels waged war.”
The archangel Michael and the holy angels are fighting Satan and the angels who rebelled with him. The battle is angelic, but they are fighting over the earth. Thus, the war in heaven directly affects what is happening on earth.

We are in the midst of an angelic con­flict, a satanic rebellion, in which Satan is seeking to bring this whole world under his rule. That means when you were born into the kingdom of God, you were born into a war.

You were born a warrior.

You are surrounded by a spiritual enemy, but the battle is not for land or anything physical. This cosmic battle is for glory.

The issue is: Who is going to get the glory in this universe? Who is going to be worshiped? Who will have notoriety? Who will get to call the shots?

Satan has essentially said to God, “You cannot have all the glory in creation. I want some of the glory for myself.”

God’s response? “My glory I will not give to another” (Isa. 48:11).

Of course, that answer didn’t sit well with Satan, so he set about to steal what was not rightfully his—glory. The battle is for glory. Understanding that is half the fight. That’s why Paul told us, “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31; see also Col. 3:23).

Glory—it’s what the battle is all about.