Before I started planting a church, I fancied myself a cool-under-fire, Joe Montana-like fellow, dodging one blitz after another while keeping my hair fluffy and bouncy. Before. In reality, I wasn't in the battle. I was just in training camp, where the bullets were still rubber and the blitzing linebackers weren't allowed to tackle me to the ground.
A couple of months into this, I realized I was in a fight. Unaccustomed to the daily grind of war, I found myself buzzing like a one-beer drinker with no tolerance, oscillating between extreme optimism and anxiety, often in the same day. Contending with passive people, the massive theological confusion in American Christendom, an overwhelming amount of work, and even cowardly, neutered "brothers" in the battle is enormously exhausting. I needed more constant recharging than I ever imagined.
So, for the first time in my life I really opened the book of Psalms. I had heard rumors that it dealt with stuff like this. And I also found a more experiened fighter to guide me through the Psalms, Patrick Henry Reardon and his wonderful book, Christ in the Psalms. With the help of King David's inspired poetry and Reardon's honest commentary, I found myself seeing Jesus the fighter like I had never seen him before and praying things I would have never prayed before, things like: "Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God! For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked" (Psalm 3:7)
About this third Psalm, Reardon writes:
To pray the psalms correctly, then, it is very important that we properly identify the enemies. Some modern Christians, not understanding this, have even gone so far afield as to exclude certain of the psalms from their prayer, attempting to justify the exclusion by an appeal to Christian charity and the spirit of forgiveness.
This is unmitigated nonsense. The enemies here are the real enemies, the adversaries of the soul, those hostile forces spoken of in the very first verse of the Book of Psalms - "the counsel of the ungodly." "For we do not wrestle," after all, "against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12). To relinquish any one of the psalms on the excuse that its sentiments are too violent for a Christian is a clear sign that a person has also given up the very battle that a Christian is summoned from his bed to fight. The psalms are prayers for those engaged in an ongoing spiritual conflict. No one else need bother even opening the book.
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