Christian ministry without the supernatural is like a day without sunshine . . . or air . . . or ground to stand on. Only when Christ’s presence is experienced by pastor and people does ministry have any meaning.
Rut what exactly do we mean by “experiencing” the supernatural? What can pastors do to help people live in light of spiritual realities? And how about the dark side? How can we take the Enemy seriously, without fearful preoccupation?
To address such questions, LEADERSHIP gathered three pastors and a theologian:
-J. I. Packer, the theologian, is professor at Regent College in Vancouver, British Colombia, and senior editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He’s perhaps most well known for his book, Knowing God (InterVarsity).
-Jack Hayford is pastor of Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California. He has written several books, including Moments with Majesty (Multnomah) and Prayer: Invading the Impossible (Ballantine), and hymns, such as the widely sung “Majesty.”
-John Huffman is pastor of Newport Beach Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California. Previously he served at First Presbyterian in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is author of Joshua, a volume in Word’s Critical Commentary series.
-Charles Swindoll is pastor of First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California. He has authored many books, including Growing Strong in the Seasons of Life (Multnomah).
These men, we discovered, know a great deal about the ordinary and extraordinary dimensions of ministry.
Leadership: What do you mean when you use the term supernatural?
Chuck Swindoll: Supernatural is a word I use to describe something that happens beyond human ability. Sometimes when I preach, for example, people experience the Lord’s presence. I can’t produce that with mere human eloquence. That, to me, is the anointing of God.
In many ways, the supernatural is indefinable. That’s what makes it so magnificent. We can’t get our arms around it. It’s like getting your arms around Shamu the whale. It is so beyond us.
When talking about it, we can’t get away from the word awesome. We’ve cheapened that word to refer to everything from a good skateboarding routine to a high dive off a cliff. But I mean in the deepest sense-an experience that is awesome, a surprise, bringing spiritual delight.
Jack Hayford: Everything we do in ministry is related to the supernatural. Otherwise we pastors don’t have anything to work with. The supernatural is not something to be trivialized. We can’t manipulate it. Then again, it’s not so unpredictable and inaccessible that we can’t expect God to act supernaturally in our lives.
We may experience it as a special manifestation or as a daily reality.
Even though we expect supernatural things and look forward to them, they’re always a delightful surprise. To use an analogy, my kids just arrived from Wisconsin. My wife and I knew they were coming, but when they arrived, it was no dull or predictable greeting.
I don’t mean that we can predict a supernatural event as though it were an airline flight, but I do think worshipful people can expect God’s supernatural works with some regularity.
John Huffman: The people in my mainline Presbyterian congregation don’t use supernatural in this way, although they do know something about supernatural things.
In our society, many people are caught up in oriental mysticism and essentially define God as themselves. Whatever they happen to feel is, for them, God. I think it’s important to establish from the beginning that God is wholly other. He is not the same as us. We are creature-not Creator. God is above creation.
Instead of supernatural I prefer the phrase above nature.
And if God is above nature, he is above my feelings. His involvement in my life is supernatural. I live in a natural realm, empowered by the transcendent God, whether I happen to feel that transcendence or not.
That’s especially important to me when I face uncertainty, as I do now. My middle daughter, who just graduated from Princeton University, has Hodgkin’s disease. She’s been undergoing chemotherapy and will have to have a bone marrow transplant.
While I was officiating services during Holy Week-participating in Maundy Thursday communion and Good Friday services, and then preaching three times on Sunday-I was burdened for my daughter. I didn’t necessarily feel God’s supernatural presence. But I had to claim the objective truth that God was in and above all that was going on around me.
J. I. Packer: I don’t make much use of the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. I think that the word supernatural in most people’s minds is associated with things that are comparatively trivial: channeling, white and black witchcraft, pyramids, flying saucers. Supernatural is not a word that naturally suggests to such folks the living God.
Instead I like to talk about the distinction between the created and sustained order of the known and unknown world and the powers of redemption. I keep the word supernatural to refer to the work of the living God who permeates this world with a power that saves people and will ultimately redeem the whole cosmos. As a Calvinist, I do believe that God finishes what he starts!
Leadership: When have you experienced the supernatural in ministry?
Huffman: One active member in the church told me this week that my Sunday sermon didn’t do much for her or, for that matter, for another person she had been speaking with.
But another person told me, “My daughter brought a friend to the service, and that friend prayed to receive Christ when you gave an invitation!”
To me that is God working in a way that is above the natural processes, in what appears to have been a so-so sermon. I did my homework, but to one person it was inadequate. To another, it was more than adequate; it was life changing.
Swindoll: I’ve seen a few enormous conflicts between Christians. In some cases, the atmosphere became so heated, I feared a fist fight might break out.
Naturally, during such times, I’ve asked church leaders to pray and to try to reconcile the battling members. But I can think of one case where human ingenuity solved nothing. Instead, the two men who were at odds simply reconciled. In a matter of minutes, they came together, set aside their grievances, walked over to each other, and embraced. They acted upon the truth they knew and had heard for well over a year from others in the church.
To me, that sudden transformation was nothing less than a supernatural work of God.
Hayford: I went into this past Easter Sunday having never felt weaker-not physically, just aware of the fragility of my humanity. I had done my homiletic homework. My spiritual life was in order. But I went into Sunday feeling about as spiritual as the back wall of a handball court.
When I awoke and prayed Sunday morning, I prayed until I felt a quickening at the physiological level. In other words, I decided I was going to praise God until I got a little happier than I felt. It was a Pauline “stir up the gift” time of praise.
I didn’t feel any stronger, but I sure felt more like it was Easter! Anyway, we had about 130 make decisions for Christ, which for us is a massive response-supernatural in my book.
I went home saying, “Lord, I don’t know what to say other than you’ve done an awesome, awesome thing.”
Leadership: Have there been times in your ministry when you needed God’s supernatural intervention and he chose not to do so?
Packer: One of our children has been unable to work for years because of fierce depressions. That is a situation in which my wife and I have longed to see a supernatural intervention, but, pray as we will, God has not acted that way.
Huffman: Chuck and I have a dear friend for whom we claimed God’s healing. All of the biblical criteria were met-confession of sin and faith, among others-and we saw this friend die at the relatively young age of 51. In fact, we shared in his funeral service.
That’s why, even with our own daughter, I hesitate to claim the kind of healing I want. I know the sovereign God is going to heal her in his way, in his time, and that healing may be death and eternal life, which I believe is the finest healing.
But I’m not about to stop praying specifically for the healing I want, in my way, in my time. But undergirding that is an attitude: “Not my will but thine be done.”
To me it takes a deeper understanding of faith to live at that level-trusting God, who doesn’t always function on my time table in exactly the way I want.
Leadership: What is the role of human effort in triggering God’s intervention? Does it require our effort, or is it entirely unpredictable?
Huffman: Human effort is involved, but we can’t guarantee how God will respond. Nor can we assume that if someone isn’t healed, it’s due to some human fault.
I’ve known people who have received genuine and miraculous healings. But I’ve known sick people who have been deserted by Christians who gathered and claimed healing. When the healing they prayed for didn’t occur, these patients became an embarrassment, and the people who had prayed for them moved on.
Hayford: We can neither deny the imminent possibility of the Lord’s miraculous invasion nor say we can guarantee it. We need to tolerate our apparent failures-and I emphasize apparent-and endure our successes humbly, acknowledging God rather than touting them as the evidence of our spiritual prowess.
We have remarkable things happen at the church with some degree of regularity, perhaps six or eight things a year. But we don’t make an issue of them, because the immature-those insecure in their faith-will look to the human element more than to God as the ultimate cause of the miraculous.
Packer: Even when human effort seems to fail, it doesn’t mean that nothing supernatural has taken place.
A pastor friend and his wife had a “miracle baby”-she wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant, yet she did. But when the little girl was born, she was so severely deformed that she lived only a week.
Courageously, my friend preached about her death the next Sunday morning, mentioning how people had told him that they had prayed that Joy Ann would be miraculously healed, and were sure she would be, and he must not be in any doubt about it.
A golden sentence in that sermon was his comment, “God healed Joy Ann by taking her to heaven.” That was God, not ignoring, but answering the prayers that had been made.
People act as if this world were the only one, or at least the most important one. But it’s the next life, the endless life that really matters. As Christians, we need to say loud and clear, as Jesus did, that the other world exists and that life here must be lived as preparation for it.
Christians and their children die, not out of life, but into life. And death, whether late or early, is a healing in the most profound sense. The supernatural bridges the two worlds.
Hayford: Also, when you encourage people to expect God to act supernaturally, you run the risk of sounding as though you can manipulate God into responding to human appeals or actions. You also run the risk of setting people up for disappointment, because God, in fact, isn’t manipulated by human action. Nonetheless, I believe we can expect God to act supernaturally and prepare for him to do so.
We’ve tried to school our people to be unafraid to ask for anything and to praise God whatever happens. Then, just as important, not to feel that we’re rationalizing when our requests aren’t granted, which takes another level of faith.
Faith has a number of levels. There’s the faith that prays, the faith that gives God credit for answers, the faith to live with the results you didn’t want, and the faith that finally decides you weren’t just rationalizing.
Packer: When healing isn’t granted, the supernatural may still be experienced in other ways. That, surely, is the message of Paul’s experience with his thorn in the flesh-he asked for its removal, and his prayer was answered with the assurance that though the thorn would remain, the Lord’s grace would enable him to go on living and ministering, in a strength not his own, as if the thorn wasn’t there.
My colleague in theology at Regent, Klaus Bockmuehl, died of cancer two years ago. We prayed many times for his healing, but it didn’t come.
What did come, however, was movement from a sort of despairing hopelessness, which was his first reaction to the diagnosis, into a marvelous spiritual poise.
He never lost it, even when his body was dreadfully eaten away and he couldn’t pray or even think for any length of time.
His last public action, a month before he died, was to give the address at our annual convocation. He spoke from a wheelchair and read the opening and concluding paragraphs-somebody else had to read the rest because he didn’t have the strength.
But the poise was there, and great peace and insight, too. His speech was a beautiful statement about learning to listen to God when strength runs out and being content to be weak and quiet so that God may show himself to be great.
I saw that as an answer to prayer, a supernatural manifestation of power that we would not have witnessed, and Klaus would not have known, had prayer not been made.
Leadership: When invoking God’s power, is there strength in numbers? If more people pray, will God more likely act?
Hayford: I don’t think there is any formula. But at the same time, I’ve seen God use concerted prayer to do wonderful things.
An Assembly of God pastor friend, Wesley Steelberg, had a terrible heart condition that forced him into early retirement. He couldn’t walk across a room without help.
He had been invited to attend a campus ministries gathering, since he had been instrumental in the spiritual life of the group’s leader, Bob Weiner. It was an opportunity for Bob to honor his spiritual father. So my friend went, but he had to be carried into the main hall when the service began.
At one point in the service, before 2,500 to 3,000 college kids, just as exuberant as they could be, Bob Weiner said, “You know, I feel we’re supposed to pray.” So they all prayed earnestly.
Pastor Steelberg said he could only describe what happened to him as a kind of electric shock that went through his body. He was completely and miraculously healed. He lived several more years in full health and died without unusual discomfort.
But the question is not How many prayed? The more important question is Would God have healed if they hadn’t prayed? I don’t think so. I believe the healing was a gift the Holy Spirit wanted to distribute just then. Yes-he distributes miraculous gifts as he wills, but we can receive them only if we ask.
Huffman: There’s a simple pastoral dimension here to consider as well: I think asking hundreds or even a few dozen to pray can become an invasion of a person’s privacy. Some people have the right to keep their prayer concerns within the confines of close friends and family. They have a right not to tell the whole world or the whole congregation about something intimate.
Swindoll: The power is God’s; it’s not in the number of those praying. If you’ve got just two or three who “agree together” on an issue, it can work miracles.
A friend of mine had a malignancy in his tongue. The X-ray showed it. The biopsy proved it. So he decided to go to the Mayo Clinic to see what could be done. Before he left, he called me and said, “I’m asking several of my closest friends to pray for me. Will you?”
I said, “Absolutely.”
So my wife, Cynthia, and I agreed together to ask God to remove this cancer from our friend. I suppose the other friends prayed the same kind of prayer. All of us, of course, wanted God’s will to be done.
My friend arrived at Mayo and went through their tests. But they couldn’t find evidence of the cancer. It had completely disappeared, and it never returned.
I can’t explain that. But I know that the miraculous is not dependent on large numbers.
Packer: In either case, there’s no reason to suppose that these healings would have happened without prayer, because the Lord has established a link between our praying and his acting.
He likes to give in answer to prayer because he then achieves two things in the same action: he gives us a good thing he wants us to have, and he strengthens our relationship with him because first we asked, and now we recognize this gift as his answer. Answering our specific requests is a specific gesture of love.
Furthermore, it’s the Lord who stirs people’s hearts to pray. So Bob wasn’t manipulating God when he decided to ask the group to pray for Jack’s friend. It was Bob responding to the Spirit’s evident desire to give a special gift of healing at that time.
Leadership: God is omnipresent, yet we talk about moments when he seems “especially present.” What does that mean?
Swindoll: Our director of music, Howie Stevenson, often refers to the prayer of a Presbyterian elder: “Lord, let something happen in our worship that is not in the bulletin.” I love that, because often it’s the unexpected in worship that reminds me that God is present.
That kind of spontaneity cannot be programmed. In the midst of sharing the background of a hymn, tears may come to Howie’s eyes. Other times, we’ll decide suddenly to sing an extra hymn. Occasionally I’ll decide, in the middle of worship, that we need some silence.
And it’s often in those moments when God seems most present. And we can’t repeat them mechanically in the following service.
Packer: I’ve experienced God’s presence most powerfully in worship situations, often during the singing, I suppose because when we sing to him, we are looking hard in his direction.
I have also experienced God’s presence vividly under the preaching and praying of Spirit-filled men of God. Singing, praying, and preaching are basic channels for corporate realization of his holy presence.
Hayford: I’ve had two remarkable experiences of God’s presence.
One time was when I was dean of students at LIFE Bible College. I had just finished praying with one of the students. We lifted our eyes, and we both saw a kind of silvery mist in the room. We watched it, and then it went away. We both recognized it as a visitation of God.
The other time was two years into my pastorate at Church on the Way. One Saturday night I was alone in the sanctuary, and I walked to the front to set the thermostat before I went home. I turned around, and I saw that same mist.
Swindoll: What did you do?
Hayford: Well, I almost feel embarrassed that I didn’t do something more colorful or godly, like fall down and cry, “Holy!” But actually I was so stunned, I just stood in questioning silence until the mist disappeared. Then I went home to dinner.
But I did have a clear impression during that moment that the Lord was speaking to me. You wouldn’t have heard it if you’d been in the room, but I felt the Lord saying, “I’ve given my glory to dwell in this place.”
The next morning, instead of our usual attendance of one hundred, we had 170. From that moment the church began to grow dramatically.
Swindoll: I’ve never had that particular experience. But I have sensed God’s presence almost with a chill. I don’t know how else to put it. It has happened maybe a half dozen times in my life.
Usually I’m frightened by it. I don’t shake, but I’m frightened. There is a wave of reassurance. God is here. He’s in this moment. There is a benediction of his presence that quiets me. It comes especially during times I’ve been unsure, or when I’ve been wondering about God’s will about a major decision. It brings a calming influence.
Huffman: I’ve experienced something similar. Early in life, I tended to have such moments in a natural setting-on the beach or in the mountains. More recently the experience is tied in with music.
Recently we had Haydn’s “Creation” performed at our church. It was during the war with Iraq, just when the oil wells had started burning in Kuwait and that terrible flow of oil was pouring into the Persian Gulf. In the middle of that music, I thought of the beauty of creation and how we defile it. I sensed the holiness of God and the power of Christ who will eventually redeem the whole creation.
Leadership: How do we distinguish between the presence of God and emotion evoked by human ingenuity? In worship, for example, how much spiritual awareness is the result of dimming the lights or softly playing the organ during prayer?
Swindoll: It’s something I’m concerned about. I don’t fear our weaknesses; I fear the talent of pastors and church staff. With resources in drama, music, lighting, and sound, we can practically re-enact the resurrection! (Laughter)
But when the lights come on, all you have left is paper mach, and people ask, “What was that all about?”
Hayford: In Western culture, we are unfortunately disposed to labor that distinction more than I think God does. He made us with a capacity to experience his presence at many levels. In fact, there is a panoply of possibilities: our physical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual selves. And they each feed into one another. Finally, they can’t be separated.
For example, I like to lift my hands when I praise God. It’s a physical response, but it arises out of something emotional. And that emotion is connected to my intellectual perception that God is praiseworthy. Sometimes it’s the emotion that elicits the raised hands, and sometimes it’s the raised hands that stir the emotions.
In any event, the Bible often links the presence of God to things physical, emotional, and intellectual. I don’t think you can finally divorce them.
Huffman: For me, a place, a physical location, often communicates the presence of God. The older I get the more Gilgal places I go back to.
I was in Boston three years ago doing some sabbatical work. In Cambridge, about a mile from Harvard Square, my dad had a church for eighteen years, Cornerstone Church. It has since been torn down and replaced with an apartment building.
But while in Boston, every Tuesday and Thursday, I purposely would drive from Gordon-Conwell Seminary into Harvard, down Mass Avenue, and past that apartment building just to remember the lives that were changed by the services of that church.
That congregation no longer exists. In fact, I can still remember the night my dad came home practically weeping because some of the men he led to the Lord, deacons in his church, told him they were going to leave the church. They had moved out to Lexington, and they had started a little chapel in a home, which they eventually called Grace Chapel.
Now Grace Chapel is the dominant church in that area, and my dad’s church, where these men came to the Lord, no longer exists. God was obviously present in a powerful way then, but it wasn’t to be known for years hence.
When I visit such a place, I am tremendously lifted and renewed. When I go to a place where God has met me before, I often find he meets me again.
Packer: The Gilgal place only has value if, in fact, the Lord did meet us there before in a momentous way. Some have more Gilgals than others; some experience more dramatic Christian lives than others. We need to remember that it is God in sovereign grace who creates the experiences we remember and which become the means of his meeting us again.
Hayford: If there is any way to ensure a visitation, a presence, in the fullest sense, it arises out of worship, from a desire to seek the Lord and his exaltation. That can happen in jubilant praise or in awesome silence meditating upon the richness of God.
And I believe God is just looking for people who will say, “Lord, we love you, and we really want you to move among us today, and we are opening ourselves to that.”
Leadership: So how do you help your people experience the presence of God in worship?
Hayford: I seek to cultivate in people a desire to humble themselves before the Lord. And I believe that many physical and verbal expressions in worship help us do that.
For example, about once a month we have an opportunity to kneel in worship. Now that’s not a part of many traditions. Other traditions kneel several times in every service. But when we do it, something always seems to happen for people.
Actions like raising hands for verbalizing praise is another example. That involves a commitment to humble yourself. You’re saying, “I am expressing myself right up in front of not only God but everybody.”
Now if that becomes just a self-righteous performance that people go through because it’s part of the Sunday calisthenic, then it’s meaningless. But if it is understood that we’re presenting ourselves to the Lord, that by such actions we’re confronting our disposition to hold ourselves back from God, then it becomes a genuine humbling.
And when the humbling takes place, people experience the presence of God powerfully.
Packer: The Lord has promised that he will be found by those who seek him with all their heart. I don’t think, in my circles, that we say that half enough.
No doubt we are sometimes set in dry places, for reasons we may or, like Job, may not be able to discern. But if we seek him regularly, surely we shall find him regularly. If at the start of a prayer time I do not feel his presence, I should tell him so-“Here am I, Lord, seeking you, waiting for you. Shine your light upon me, touch me, come to me. I need you”-and both Scripture and experience tell me that he responds to such prayer.
Surely we ought to say to ourselves and to our people, “The ordinary Christian experience is knowing the presence of God.”
As Paul said, “The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” That sentence is in the present tense. Paul is not talking about a particular momentary experience but about a regular condition of the Christian believer.
Swindoll: God loves things done decently and in order. And I’ve found the best settings, the best songs, the best arrangements are the simple ones.
Normally we finish our Communion services in absolute silence: no organ, the lights dimmed. We do this to break away from visual interruptions; we don’t want people focusing on non-essentials, like what someone is wearing or that a light is out or if the organist misses a note. Instead we want their complete attention on God.
Then we’ll close with the familiar “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” That simple procedure opens people to the presence of God as much as anything we do.
For many people church is the one place they can be quiet. It’s one place the television is not present. There is no radio going. So we’ll have a discipline of silence-three, four, as much as five minutes. Absolute silence in worship can cleanse the soul and put us in touch with God.
Huffman: We can also teach people to prepare themselves for worship. I don’t do it as often as I should. Every two or three years, I’ll do a sermon on preparing for worship: about how much sleep you get the night before, where your focus is, what you are looking for, how you relate to those who are there, how you approach a hymn.
Leadership: There is another side to the supernatural that we’ve yet to discuss. What does the phrase spiritual warfare mean to you?
Swindoll: I think of Ephesians 6 where we are told to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. It is an engagement of the enemy. What makes it so insidious is that we cannot see him. We cannot touch him.
Hayford: Spiritual warfare is the kingdom of God engaging the powers of darkness. And I tend to think of it in personal, specific terms. It has to do with me, in this moment, in this circumstance, having to win a battle over some personal struggle, temptation, or difficulty.
There is, of course, the broader context, the age-long struggle. But most of the time I think of it in personal terms.
I try to remember that here, in my town, in my work, in my circumstances, Satan is trying to probe and find an entryway into my setting. I want to recognize the custom-made attacks made against me and the church.
Of course, I mustn’t give the devil more credit than he deserves. Dr. Vincent Bird, my mentor, used to say, “Lots of people have the spirit of suspicion and call it the gift of discernment.” Nor does a wise leader announce it every time he suspects demonic attack.
Still, I don’t want to hide from its reality, and I want to be bold to identify it and then take a stand against it.
Leadership: Can we lose this battle?
Hayford: Calvary accomplished the victory, but there is the ongoing struggle to apply its triumph to an ever-widening circle. And the church has been endowed with the authority to wage that warfare.
Swindoll: And we don’t have to enter the battle frightened or intimidated. We have the victor as our captain. We approach the battle as conquerors.
It’s the same thing as with the children of Israel. They were given the land. They didn’t need to worry about having it as their own. It was theirs to claim. But when they stood in unbelief, they lost what God had won for them. In terms of our battle with Satan, the victory is ours. We just have to act in faith to claim it.
Huffman: I think we can lose it. He has won it, but we can lose it. I see more and more colleagues my age who are losing their privilege to minister because of obvious sin. We all struggle with sin internally, but they’re doing things that cut their Achilles’ heel.
When we think we have it made, that our reputation is secure, that’s when I believe we’re most vulnerable. There’s a security in reading Romans 8-nothing can separate us from Christ’s love. But there is also a kind of melancholy that sweeps over me when I read the biographies of persons who did not finish the race.
Leadership: Describe a time in your ministry when you felt you were in the midst of spiritual warfare.
Hayford: When the Spirit of God began blessing our church, when we were beginning to grow so rapidly, a couple of long-time members became increasingly unhappy. They began talking with others and soon the staff felt clearly that they were sowing a “spirit of division.”
Since I felt the Spirit’s influence so strongly, I felt moved to ask another pastoral staff member to pray pointedly with me. We declared “the dominion of Jesus Christ” over the division.
We prayed that the evil spirit would be removed without the removal of these people. But if they refused to allow themselves to be divorced from that spirit, then we asked God to take them out with it.
And recalling Jesus’ commanding of the spirits not to tear the child, I added, “And, Lord, don’t let the church body be torn.”
Within six weeks those people left the church. There was no stir whatsoever. It was as though they’d never been there, although they had been a part of the church from the beginning. Nobody asked, “Where have they gone?”
There was no question in our minds that the Lord delivered our church from that attack.
Swindoll: There have been times I have felt a severe oppression. Interestingly, it will often be felt as well by my wife, whose discernment is often keener than mine; she will observe discouragement or oppression or pressure.
Sometimes it will come because I’m dealing with this very topic, say, preaching from Ephesians 6. To be known is one of the least favorite desires of our enemy. And when you expose him and give examples and warn people, then strange events often occur-an onslaught of critical letters, an inability to communicate, staff unrest. Such events usually converge like sand in an hour glass into one concentrated period.
As a result, my wife and I go to prayer. If I am able to address an individual who is causing trouble, I will do that privately. But more often than not, I simply have to seek God’s direction to get through that tough period.
That type of oppression has occurred maybe a dozen times in my thirty years in ministry.
Leadership: How do you communicate the reality of spiritual warfare to your congregations?
Huffman: My former church was versed in spiritual warfare; they understood the language, almost to the point that they were inoculated to the reality of it.
Then I came to Southern California to a more mainline tradition. Now when I use the biblical language of spiritual warfare, it jars people. At one point, a chairperson of one of our committees took me aside and said, “Now, you don’t really believe in a personal Satan, do you?”
I certainly do. But obviously the challenge is to communicate to my post-enlightenment congregation a reality they tend to consider only medieval or first century superstition. C. S. Lewis, of course, did one of the better jobs in Screwtape Letters. But the challenge continues.
Straightforward expositional preaching has seemed to work the best, especially as I’ve worked through Ephesians. And the congregation has come along.
Swindoll: We tend to fall into extremes. Either they don’t believe there is a personal devil, or they fear the devil and his demons are in everything. I’ve heard people talk about a “demon of nail biting” or a “demon of backaches.” That’s ridiculous.
We’ve got to communicate a balanced understanding, solidly based on Scripture, not just experience.
Huffman: I also find myself ministering to an increasing number who buy into supernaturalism, but only the New Age, occultish, unbiblical variety. So my task with them is to clarify the difference between that and the supernatural that comes from Christ.
Hayford: I’ve found it fruitful to discuss the issue in our Sunday night service. Two or three weeks before I do, I announce I will speak on the topic, and I’ll mention the questions that I’ve heard people asking, such as Is demon activity really taking place today? What’s happening in the occult-mind control or demonic activity?
I’ll do that once every eight or nine months, and the place is packed.
Packer: However we go about it, I think we’ve got to be fairly blunt in asserting the reality and constant, unwearied activity of the devil. We have to rub people’s noses in Ephesians 6 and tell them, “Look! This is the war we walk into when you come to faith. It’s Satan’s war with the Creator, and now that we’re on the Lord’s side, Satan will be after us as never before. Watch out! He will try to pull you down any way he can.”
Then we need to describe to people (and remind ourselves) what forms temptation takes: either inducements to unbelief-discouragement, giving up, actually denying God’s truth-or allurements to moral transgression. It’s all in Ephesians 6.
Leadership: How should we respond to spiritual attacks?
Packer: Know your weakness. Know your enemy. Know your Lord. Those three things summarize it, I think.
Most of us don’t know our weaknesses. We don’t know where we’re vulnerable. And that’s where we get tripped up.
We’ve also got to be realistic about the tactics of Satan. Paul says we are not to be ignorant of his devices. One translation renders it: “I’m up to his tricks.”
And we must know how to draw on the resources God has given us, which means learning to put on the armor described in Ephesians 6. For instance:
The belt of truth is God’s revealed truth, learned from Scripture and taken honestly into our hearts.
The breastplate of righteousness is consistent obedience and a conscience kept void of offense.
The shield of faith is the habit of looking to the Lord when we are under attack. Peter could walk on water while his eyes were on the Lord rather than on the waves.
The helmet of salvation is assurance drawn from God’s promise to keep us to the end.
And prayer is our support system. We are wise to lean on our spouses, colleagues, and Christian friends, asking them to pray for us and help us through. That’s fellowship, and we are told, all of us, to live in fellowship. No Christian is meant to be a Lone Ranger, a self-sufficient hero, in the spiritual battle. We can’t do it, and we shouldn’t try.
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