We have all gone through trials. Sometimes we are in the center of them, but at other times we are just on the fringe. The crisis touches us, but it revolves around someone else. There is nothing we can do about it, no help we can give the central characters but to pray. This seems like a situation of total helplessness, but actually we have just been placed in a position where we can focus more intently on our true calling. Whether we are in the soup ourselves, or just splashed by the hot bubbles as we watch nearby -- or even simply in a place of peaceful prosperity -- we are commanded to pray.
All of us who are on the outskirts, we have a job to do. We are like the old-fashioned warrior who guarded the keep. He had to stand out there in the cold and the rain and keep watchful and vigilant, even when he could not understand what good it did. The battle, the sweat and the blood were elsewhere, he was not in the thick of things, what did it matter when it seemed he could do nothing to help? But his work was vital, and so is ours, and we are not allowed to lie down on the job and be miserable. We just have to keep "praying through."
Picture yourself as that knight at the lone garrison. You did not ask for this job, but the King came to you and requested that you serve Him. It is lonely, and the terrain is hostile and wild. You do not understand why you have to stand guard in this out-of-the-way place by yourself. But whether you know it or not, this is a key point of passage between the King's main armory and the battle being fought in the mountains. Your orders are to stand vigilant to make sure that the unseen messengers from Him can pass through unhindered to reach the battlefield. You do not even have the satisfaction of seeing those messengers as they pass through, for they are swift and soft of foot, and they will not come where your mortal eyes can catch a glimpse. But you must not relax your vigil, for if you do, while your back is turned, the enemy might sneak in and overpower those messengers. He will rob them of the vital supplies they bear: answers to prayer.
This may sound like a wild fantasy tale that you want no part of, but spiritual warfare is real, and we are all caught up in it whether we like it or not. And the battle is gained or lost through prayer. The kingdom has already been won on the Cross, but each one of us must go up and possess our land in the name of the King, and that is never done without bloodshed. The enemy has no use for people who are no threat to him. It is the people who are in danger of taking back one of his key strongholds -- those are the people whom he targets hot and thick with his arrows. The greater the saint, the hotter the devil builds the fire, not realizing that all he can really do is fan the flames of the refiner, and out will come a purified vessel unto the King's glory.
When your loved ones are in the flames, remind yourself that you are a warrior. The Word is your armory, and you have two main weapons that the enemy knows nothing of: Love and Joy. The way to wield them is to praise. Speak only praise of your King, glorifying Him aloud for His wisdom, which is higher than ours; His power, which is unconquerable; His love, which shields each one of His warriors so that not an arrow can touch them; His mercy, which knows perfectly when to let the arrow find a mark in the best interests of His child; and above all, His blood, which redeemed each of us from the hand of a crafty enemy and made our blood-sprinkled hearts holy ground on which the enemy dares not tread.
We know we need to pray, but we lose sight of how important it is that we spend much of our prayer time in praise. The eternal outcome of the battle has already been determined, but it still rages in the hearts of men on earth. Praising even in the midst of terribly dark circumstances is what keeps the enemy from reclaiming any territory.
Someone recently said to me that she "wished there was joy in the journey." The joy is there, but sometimes we have to fight for it. The enemy works upon our minds and emotions to try to convince us that reality is what is seen, felt, tasted... In short, that he defines what is real. It is sometimes hard to remember that we have the privilege of being defined by something higher, something unseen. Something more Real than the world around us.
It can be so much easier to be where the heavy fighting is, because there is no time to think, no time for emotion. You just do what you have to do until the job is done or you "die trying." It is the watchmen, who have nothing to do but be vigilant, who find that war drapes so heavily over their shoulders. Why does our King not come and put an end to it all?
What if you were the King, who had sent His Son to a greater suffering than any man can ever know, in order to save His people from the hands of a terrible enemy? Would you be interested in a people who expected only good at your hands? Or would you delight in proving that a small handful of your subjects were so fully yours that you could do anything with them, ask anything of them, and they would still follow hard after you, willing to pay any price for love of you? God does not lightly afflict His people (Lam. 3.33). He does not charge us a single penny that He does not pay for us out of His own resources. But the hotter the fire, the more fully He proves that we are His and can stand in the face of anything the enemy might hurl at Him through us. Thus, the greater His ultimate glory, and the greater the final loss to the enemy. And while He has given a portion to all who call upon His name, yet the more territory we take for ourselves in the name of the King here, in Time, the greater our inheritance in eternity.
If the Lord has required you to walk down a dark hallway, then listen closely: He is asking you if you will sing while you do it. Can you sing, even while your heart bleeds? Certainly not, if you are so weighed down that all you can see and feel is the sorrow of your situation. But He can lift you up to sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2.6), so that, with Paul, you are more in touch with the glory you are winning for Christ by partaking of His sufferings, than you are with the pain of the suffering itself (Rom. 8.16-18).
No one should pretend they are not hurting when they are. (Look at Job. His friends tried to get him to admit that his rantings at God were sin, but he was just being honest. He was in pure misery, and he was not settling for anything less than God Himself as an answer.) Yet, forcing yourself to open your mouth and utter words of praise when you are miserable, of promise when you are fearful, of joy in His character as a God who loves even when you cannot understand how this affliction could spring from love... That is what keeps the enemy from, to use my father's phrase, "having us for snacks." That is what reclaims for us the joy of the Lord, which is both our strength(Neh. 8.10) and our rightful possession as children of a covenant symbolized by laughter (Gen. 17.19).1
We give glory to the Lord by showing Him that nothing the enemy can throw at us or our loved ones can convince us that God is less than His Word reveals Him to be.
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1. Isaac means "he laughs."
