We love spiritual stuff, or at least the idea of being spiritual ourselves. Movies and TV Shows about the spiritual realm and the supernatural are always in season. At the gym recently, I heard one guy explain to another guy, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.”
At our church, we’re doing a #30dayprayerchallenge where we contact a person each day and ask how we can intercede for them and then pray for them throughout the day. And, at times, it’s been a little uncomfortable to broach the subject of prayer with my person-of-the-day.
Why is that we are quick to be consumers of spiritual things, but when it comes to identifying ourselves with a specific spiritual belief, we shy away? Why is it so difficult to step out and declare our spiritual allegiance with Christ?
Maybe it’s fear of rejection or the fear we’ll be seen as ‘crazy Christian’ or something. Maybe we don’t really feel in touch with the spiritual aspects of our faith. Maybe Christianity to us is a moral code instead of a spiritual journey.
Above all these things, I think we forget that there is a battle being fought right now, in every moment, for the spiritual lordship of our hearts. And the battle has way less to do with what others think about us, or how successful we are at our marriages or our jobs. It’s an unseen battle. It’s the spiritual battle.
Ephesians 6:12. For our struggle isn’t against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
I believe the enemy loves it when we dabble in the spiritual but don’t really take it seriously. The enemy wants to keep the spiritual mysterious and mystical so that we’re intrigued with it, but not truly engaged with it. The enemy loves it when we treat the spiritual as an immaterial and subsequently innocuous part of our lives.
We’ve gotten so ‘smart and scientific’ that we’ve ruled out the ‘spiritual’ as reality. But if you claim Jesus, you claim the spiritual. They cannot be divided, and the impact the spiritual realm has on our lives should be normal. When we move it out of our sphere of normal, we’re bound to fight the battle with the wrong weapons.
Over the next few weeks, I want to look at the spiritual…the Holy Spirit, the spiritual walk, the spirit realm…. My hope for myself, and maybe you, is that we can normalize the spiritual, not to rob it of its power, but to at least normalize our understanding of its impact on our daily lives.