God who gives victories
Psa
21:1
O LORD, the king rejoices in your strength.
How great is his joy in the victories you give!
Victories
are all about battles. The battle may be one football team against
another, one basketball team against another, one fencer against another,
but in every case there is a victor and a loser after a battle. Historically,
depending where we come from in the world, we can look back to days
gone by of great battles in wars. At the present time we look back
to the past hundred years and, seeing two wars that engulfed the globe,
hope we will never have such things again. Yet David still lived in
a time when there were those who sought to fight against him to bring
him down. In the face of this he turned to the Lord and the Lord gave
him victories, and it was in this he now rejoiced.
Many
Christians don't realize this dimension in their lives. The apostle
Paul spoke about this in Ephesians 6 when he started speaking about
our ‘armour'. He said, “our struggle is
not 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” (Eph 6:12).
Yes, this is the truth; we don't fight a physical battle but a spiritual
one. This battle is waged at two levels. First there is the obvious
external battle, then there is the internal one.
The
external battle is people who, under the enemy's prompting, come against
us. It may be with words, it may be with actions. Whichever it is,
it comes as hostility and it's probably because we are Christians.
Hopefully we did nothing to bring it on; we were just targeted by
the enemy. It happens. It's a battle where he seeks to wear us down
and bring us down. But there will also be an inward battle going on
whereby the enemy tries to make us give up, tries to get us to respond
badly, tries to get us to respond using the same ungodly and unrighteous
methods that he uses. If he can do that we are no longer representing
Jesus. The battle on the Cross was Satan trying to get Jesus to rail
out against humanity, to curse us – be he remained sinless, he had
the victory!
So
how does God give us victory? When temptations come, He shows us a
way out (1 Cor 10:13).
Sometimes he gives us the wisdom to know how to act in the face of
it, the knowledge of what to speak (Acts 7:10),
but sometimes that wisdom is just simply to flee the thing (Gen 39:12).
In any and every situation God's grace is there for us (2 Cor 9:8).
Grace, that thing that Paul wanted for his readers in every letter
he wrote, is simply the divine ability in us to overcome, to handle
the situation like Jesus, with the goodness of Jesus or the kindness
or gentleness or truth or love of Jesus. These are the things
we use to overcome because ours is not a physical battle but
a spiritual one.
There
was something else that Paul wrote in Eph 6 that is pertinent here:
“put
on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you
may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done
everything, to stand. Stand firm then”
(v.13,14). Do you see that? Three
times he says stand. You see the truth is that we have been given
a position to hold, ground to hold onto. Our role in this battle is
to hold on to what we've been given. What is that? Sonship! We are
children of God, temples of the Holy Spirit and therefore holy people.
Satan will try to get us to forget that and think and act just any
unbeliever. The battle is to hold onto that, and you know what? God
is working to give us the victory by His Spirit within and by sovereign
acts without! Let's rejoice in that!