How do you Fight?

“You come at me with sword, spear, and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord…” (I Samuel 17:45) Those are the words a young boy, David, addressed to a giant named Goliath. How do you fight? Oh to be sure we have to fight for we live on a battlefield. Competing ideas, conflicting values and persistent evil make our world a battlefield. But how we fight matters immensely. It is so easy to adopt the methods of a world which has long operated on the basis of brute force, intimidation and brutality. It is so easy to fight by gathering a bigger team or coalition than the other guys. David took a different approach. His approach would look very foolish to us if we did not know the outcome of the battle. He was outmatched in almost every way. He was surrounded by what would seem to be more capable warriors who had decided that they could do nothing about Goliath. He was mocked and ridiculed by his enemy. But this is what he had – he believed in something with all of his heart. He was facing someone who was half-hearted. He was surrounded by his own people who were half-hearted. No one can fight well with half a heart. David believed in God with his whole heart. What carries the day is loving God with all of our hearts. This does something more important than changing our circumstances, it changes us! We live differently, we see differently and we fight differently. Victor Hanson writes, “War is never glorified in Scripture, but neither is it shied away from …” We still face giants of every variety and the approach taken by David will work for us. A heart full of belief in a sovereign warrior God who leads us into battle not for our glory but His glory, is still a winning strategy. To fight this way, we must make it our top priority to know this God. “His ways are not our ways,” so we must commit ourselves to knowing Him so that we follow Him and not the ways of our world. We can all readily see the destruction being wrought by the way the world fights. Be different to the glory of God. This is how you raise the bar on your discipleship.