FIGHT

As an advocate, I have some fight in me.  My natural inclination is to question and oppose that which is not in my best interest, nor in the best interest of my peers.  When I haven't felt like fighting, that is usually a pretty good indication that something is seriously wrong.  I understand that, like the Mighty Warrior David, I have battle blood on my hands.  No, not blood from actual murder; but there will be injury from battle and I have to be okay knowing that I have engaged in a battle for life.

Today I read a post on facebook that Pastor Rick Warren's son has died from suicide.  My fighting inclination immediately wanted to challenge my 624 facebook friends to take up the cause for mental health, lest there be one more suicide.  Still having leftover feelings of fight within me, I picked up a book and started reading.  The following is what I read.

With a fiery look in his eye and an intense tone in his voice, he said, "Before I became a Christian, I was a fighter.  I learned ninja, jujitsu, and a variety of other techniques for taking other people down."

I nodded.  I was making a mental note: Don't mess with Raden. 

He continued "One day I was sharing the gospel in an unreached village who had never heard of Jesus.  I was in one house sharing Christ with a family, and the witch doctor from the village came to the house."  Witch doctors and magic men are common in villages like these.  They hold sway over entire communities with their curses and incantations.

"The witch doctor called me out," Raden said.  "He wanted me to fight him."  Raden smiled as he confessed, "My first thought was to walk out there and take the witch doctor down.  But when I turned to go outside, the Lord told me that I no longer need to do the fighting.  God would do the fighting for me."

So Raden walked outside, pulled up a chair, and sat down in front of the witch doctor.  He told his challenger, "I don't do the fighting.  God does the fighting for me."

Raden recounted what happened next "As the witch doctor attempted to speak, he began to gasp for air.  He was choking and couldn't breathe.  People came running to see what was wrong, and within a few minutes the witch doctor had fallen over dead."

By now the entire village had crowded around the scene.  Raden said "I had never seen anything like this and I didn't know what to do.  But then I thought I guess this is a good time to preach the gospel."  Raden smiled and said "So that's what I did and many people in that village trusted in Christ for the first time that day."  

[from the book Radical, authored by David Platt] 

It brings me contentment to know that God has purposed me as an advocate, to advocate for others with all the tenacity that Christ advocates before the Father on my behalf.  I have both given and taken my share of hits and it is incredibly reassuring to know that victory has already been won the moment the trumpet sounds.  Yet I am reminded of the words of Jesus when he says "Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?  But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled saying that it must happen in this way?"  At the very moment when Christ was threatened (this is when my fight instinct would have surfaced), he won a greater victory because he chose obedience to the Father.  Like Jesus and like Raden, my deepest desire is to fight those internal spiritual battles & like David and Joshua my desire is to move forward with external battles only when I am in obedience of the Sovereign Lord Most High.