This morning, God is providing for us a key to breakthrough in our battles.

Psalm 22:3 teaches us that God inhabits or is enthroned on the praise of His people.  Whatever we are going through, when we lift up our voices in prayer and in praise to God, we bring God’s Presence into that situation.  When we praise God, we are simultaneously casting off fear and worry and anxiety and doubt about that situation.  God’s peace and joy and strength come rushing in to replace them.

Worship is our warship!  It is a vessel through which we endure the battles of life and get through them victoriously!  It is a safe refuge that we can run into in the heat of battle!  Worship is our warship!

Elisha called for a harpist to hear the voice of God, Jehoshaphat sent the worshippers first into battle and the Lord defeated their enemy, Jericho’s walls fell at the sound of a great shout of God’s people, Gideon won the war with trumpet blast and great shout to the Lord, and I could go on and on.

When the enemy comes on strong, when the troubles of the world overwhelm us, and we lift up our voices in praise, we are raising up a battle cry.  The Lord raises up a banner (Psalm 60).  The Lord becomes our banner and the battle becomes His!  There isn’t a single battle yet that He has lost. 

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  Where the Presence of God is, there is victory!

That doesn’t mean that we won’t ever experience difficult times and that there won’t be times when we feel like failures.  That doesn’t mean that there won’t be times when it looks like a complete loss from worldly standards.  Just consider the cross and the borrowed grave of Jesus, right? 

It does mean that if we remain ever-faithful to God and keep seeking after Him, it will all end in a great victory!  The greater the theft of the enemy, the greater the restoration when God steps in!  Just consider all that Job had loss and how at the end of a very long and painful season, God restored TWICE what had been stolen by the devil!

Let’s turn now to such an account where God’s people were opposed, suffered, but experienced a great victory in the end of it all because they responded in PRAISE!

Acts 16:16-39

16 Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling.

This single verse contains far, far more information than what we realize when first reading through it in our various translations.  Understanding what is contained within it, however, sets the context for everything that happens next.

In the original Greek, this young girl possessed a spirit. the Greek word echo.  She was not possessed by a spirit, she possessed a spirit.  The spirit did not have her, she had the spirit.  We are provided no back story to this young girl to understand how this may have taken place.

However, this isn’t a possession like the others that we read about throughout the New Testament where a spirit takes control of a person and causes sickness or disease or physically harms them or whatever other form of torment they receive against the person’s will.  The Greek word used in these cases is daimonizomai which means that they were under the power of a spirit.  The Greek word used for her possession was echo.

This young girl somehow controls the spirit and uses it to tell the future.  There is a mutually beneficial agreement of some sort.  It’s sort of like some parasites that have a mutually beneficial relationship with their hosts, but this one was spiritual.

In the Greek, we also are given the spirit’s name; Python.  Most English translations just say that it was an evil spirit or a spirit of divination or a spirit that could predict the future.  However, Young’s Literal, the Darby, and the Jubilee translations of the Bible speak what the original Greek language actually says.  It is a spirit named Pyt