 I wanna speak to us concerning the warfare world view. I ask you that you engage with me with your mind, with your heart and with your soul. I have made references to this before in their messages. One of the reasons I wanna share about this because it will put a in perspective, one of the reasons we do what we do in regards to supernatural deliverance and healing. I do wanna give credit to the person that highlighted or like made a name for this that I borrowed this from and this is a theologian and a pastor, Greg Boyd. He has a book called Guard at War. Anything that has to do with war, that's why when Kenneth was sharing that today I was like, ah, amen, my message. And so the warfare view, there's notes on the U-Version Bible app that you can follow, but let's dive in. The war for the blueprint view, so there's two main views that many Christians have. The first one is the blueprint view. The blueprint view is that everything is happening right now is the result of God's divine decree. And the devil, if he's involved in anything, it's because God has ordained him to do that. Thickness, death, tragedy, poverty are all part of God's blueprint plan. To explain suffering and pain, we use phrases like there's a purpose for everything. His ways are not our ways. God is teaching us something. I know you lost a child through, you know, when people lose their children. Miss Carriage, you know, maybe God is teaching you a lesson. There's a bigger reason for that. We just don't understand. You know, you lost somebody to cancer. There must be a reason for that. God is teaching us a lesson. God is in control. He is causing all of this to work out for his glory and for his goodness. So that is the blueprint view. There are scriptures that could signify this to be true. To explain suffering and pain, we use those phrases. That God is in control. Satan is an alish. He's just a little pet. I know he's biting everybody on the way, but God is holding him back and everything serves God's glory. There's another view that I believe that as a Christian, we have to adopt and as Hungry Jen, this is the framework that we operate from. And that is the warfare view. The warfare view says we are in a cosmic conflict between good and evil. Satan's will and God's will. Satan, demons and evil people have their own will and they are responsible for their will. And what happens on this earth is not consistent with God's character as revealed in Jesus. Meaning, if you wanna know who God is, you don't look at Job. You don't look at what happened with the tsunami or the famine. You look at what happened in Jesus. Every Jesus didn't promote starvation. He fed the multitudes. He didn't allow the storm to kill people. He stopped the storm because God is revealed in Jesus. We believe through the warfare view that God does not will evil. He is not evil. He is at war with evil. And the nature we see today is no longer natural. In the beginning, the food for animals was not other animals. Animals did not eat animals. Animals ate the grass. It was later on when the sin came into this world that the nature and the animal world became affected. That's why creation cries out in groaning for the revelation of the sons of God. Meaning what happens today with the wind, what happens today with the waves, the floods, the drought is not God's created natural order. The world is unnatural. How do I know that? Because I see in Jesus, he stops the waves. He doesn't surrender to them. Jesus, he resurrected the dead. He healed the sick and drove out demons. He came into crash in the clash with the kingdom of darkness. Early fathers, apostolic fathers, they held this view up to the fourth century. Actually, the view of early fathers for the first four centuries are very simple. All sickness is demons. All natural disasters are called by the devil. There was no like, oh, maybe I'm not sure. Some of it is natural. Everything was demonic. And they simply waged war until St. Augustine. St. Augustine came and he started to propose and God blessed his soul. He did such a good job for Christianity, but he also infused with this idea that God gets the glory through all the evil somehow, some way God still uses that for his benefit and there is some truth in that. But what it started to do, then the Constantine came, the emperor who made Christianity legal and who took the cross from Christians and gave him a sword, not spiritual sword, physical sword. And instead of waging spiritual warfare, the church started waging crusades. And we saw everything as God's blueprint and now we're in charge of this earth and now we start killing other people, killing other religions and all of this stuff and that's when everything went sideways. And hungry Jen, and for those of us who diminished, we must understand a few things. And for the remaining time, if you're taking notes, I want you to write this down. Number one, life is more like a Normandy beach than a Disney vacation. It is immoral to act like you were on a vacation when you are in fact in the war. When you are on a vacation mode, you ask the question, why do bad things happen to good people? Because when you go on a vacation, you expect everything to be good and God forbid something goes against you. You make a fuss about it, you threaten to leave a bad review on Google reviews or Expedia or Orbitz, you're like, this is a bad hotel, I paid for this, I deserve a good treatment. Nobody has that attitude in war. When you are in war, you don't expect, you're not surprised that bad things happen, you're surprised that good things happen. You're grateful you come alive. When you are in war, you're grateful for the smallest good thing that you see there. Why? Because in war, bad is normal. Good is not. So as a Christian, if you think of your life, especially those of us who live in America, who believe that, you know, a Christian life is supposed to be good and Jesus came to give us life and more abundantly. Yeah, yet Jesus died. Yet his disciples were eaten by lions. So what kind of life did he came to give? He first and foremost came to give us spiritual life with God. We have to embrace a warfare militant Christianity because it is the only view that will make sense of the suffering and the trouble and the evil we see in this world. And I believe it is the only world view that will give us the tools of what to do when we see injustice in this world. Instead of blaming God or blaming ourselves, we take this and we turn into a war. Not against the Democrats, not against atheists, but against the spiritual forces that we were commanded to fight. Amen. I was privileged to reclaim my childhood by visiting Disney many years ago before I was married. And Disney is a magical place. That's before they, you know, started to do all that they do now. And so when I was there in Florida, it was beautiful. Everybody treats you right. Now, if somebody did not treat me right, I would make a fuss about it. Now, I was fortunate and also, I have never been to war, I've never been a soldier, but I have heard the stories I heard today from the men that I am surrounded with, great men of God. And when I hear their stories, or if you watch a World War II, what happened on Normandy Beach, you will find out that the scene in the Disney and the Normandy Beach is very different. And some of you see the stuff that is happening right behind me from the movie Saving Private Ryan, is that the scene is very different. And I want to tell you something. Christian life is more like Normandy Beach. In fact, not only Christian life, life on this earth than at Disneyland. Get rid of the Disneyland vacation mindset. It's not real. It doesn't exist. It will exist one day. It doesn't matter if you eat your protein, drink your proteins and eat your vitamins and exercise, and you do all the right decisions. Like, I'm not going to have sex before marriage. I'm going to do all the right stuff. You will still live in the world that there is battle. Paul says to Timothy, therefore you must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life that he may please him who enlisted him to be as a soldier. Matthew 1112, Jesus says, this is our savior from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent men take it by force. Jesus is not saying load your gun and go shoot everybody that you don't like. He's saying in the spirit realm, everything's changed. And he says, listen, wake up. I want you to update your software because you are not on the vacation. You are no matter how much you quote it, name it, claim it, blab it, grab it, do everything right. You are still in the war. I know in America we don't see rockets flying over our head, but right now in the spirit realm, we see rockets flying because people are taking their life. Drugs is taking their life. Cancer is taking their life because sickness, disease, and pestilence is taking their life. Why? Because we are in the war. Abuse is running rampant because evil is still fighting even in the United States. But my friend, I'm gonna tell you something in just a minute, we're on the winning side. Number two, I want you to write down the second thing is the church is a warship, not a cruise ship. Matthew 16 verse 18, the time where Jesus talked about the church, he says, but I say that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church. And you will think Jesus will say, and my church will be having a nonprofit status. He says, and the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. So the only reference Jesus makes about the church is actually about war. He's not talking about social work. He's not talking about the church, just building hospitals and helping the poor, though that's what the church will do. He says, the mark of my church is this, is there will be gates and my church will be pushing against it. Hell will not stand against my church. That's war, my friend. That's conflict, my friend. That's not pacifism. That is not the church defending its gates. That is the church attacking the gates of hell that is unleashing nightmare to this world. My friend, we are not a cruise ship. We are a warship. Our savior is the captain. Our savior is the king of kings, the lord of wars. Our savior defeated that hell in grave. Our savior is the lion of the tribe of Judah. Hungry Jen is not your grandma's church. It's a battleship. But your grandma is welcome. But your grandpa is welcome. But your kids are welcome because there is room for everybody. Amen. Now for those of you who are like, man, I just like peace. You cannot experience genuine peace if you're not in war. There will be no peace if you don't understand what the scripture says. My friend, that church, that's why if you come to church and things are rowdy and things are a little bit crazy here, why? You did not come to a cruise ship. You have come to a battleship. We battle. And there are those photos. What kind of a church? Some of you used to go to a cruise ship churches. I'm not gonna diss them because I like them, okay? I envy them, all right? I wish to be like them, but I don't have the luxury with people like Christina who come here. People like that cannot be set free in the cruise ship churches because cruise ship churches are afraid of demons. They're afraid of healing the sick. They just wanna say, pray for God to give you strength, my friend. We wanna come against sickness. We wanna come against demons. We wanna come against the evil. Not only outside, but inside of a person. Why? Because we are a battleship. We are not a cruise ship. Come on, somebody. Number three, are you keeping up with me? Number three is the war is won, but the battle still rages. So I'm gonna share something that, and it's a very difficult theological concept. I'm gonna break this down. It's a very simple terms. Hebrews chapter two verse eight, it says the following. You have put all things in subjection to his feet. Somebody say all things. So that means everything is already under the feet of Jesus. And then it says this, for in that he put all in subjection under him. He left nothing that is not put under him, meaning nothing that is not under Jesus. And you're like, amen, I name it. I claim it. I confess it and I possess it. And then there's this part. But, and the author of Hebrews puts a but there, but we do not yet see all things put under him. So it's this thing that theologians called already, but not yet. Now, let me illustrate it from the Normandy Beach example. The D day was the day that the battle, the war of World War II turned tide. When the forces, the German forces, the Nazi forces were broken, but the war did not get finished on D day. It took at least one more year before the D day turned to a V day. And what happened 2000 years ago was the D day. It was the defeat of the devil. Jesus broke his back. The war turned the tide. From that point on, Jesus says the kingdom of God suffers violence and the violent man, meaning there is a face that rose up in God's people. We're no longer victims. We are victors. We're no longer just running away. We're going forward into all the world and making disciples of all nations. We're to tell everybody in this room, there is a V day coming when Jesus will ride into this earth on a white horse, where there will be no more suffering and pain. The curse will be no more. He will wipe the tears of everybody's eyes. There will be no more sickness. There will be no more disease. God will finally accomplish justice on this earth. My friend V day is coming. But we are in between the D day and the V day. So what would happen with these soldiers who would fight after the D day? There was a sense of a spring in their step. We're beating. We're winning. We're beating the enemy. That's exactly where we at right now. We're pumped. We're excited. We're spreading the message of Jesus Christ everywhere. Why? Because Jesus beat the devil. But we don't see that yet because the V day is still coming. Amen. Number four, what does this mean? I am in the ward. There's a ward taking place. The church, Jesus declares about the church for the way applying warfare view and Jesus defeated the devil, but yet he's not fully gone. What does this mean for me? Very practical. It means I'm a soldier. I am not a survivor. I'm not a slave. I'm a son, yes. But in the spirit realm, I'm a soldier. That's why ministry can learn more from military than seminary. Military represents ministry more than anything else in the world. Why? Because Paul uses the analogy of a soldier for a minister. Not an analogy of anybody else. Why? Because there has to be a militant. I am not talking about angry aggression against people. That is not what the Bible carries. But this militant mindset, few things I wanna highlight. One of them that we are soldiers and we are not slaves. We have to pray prayers of revolt, not prayers of resignation. Because I'm a soldier, I have two ways I can pray. If I believe that behind everything is God's reason and God's will, God gave me cancer to teach me a lesson. I'm not sure what the lesson is. He's not sharing the lesson. It's been 20 years. I'm still waiting for the lesson, but I'm pretty sure there's a lesson. If you believe in that, then you're not going to pray against cancer. You're going to pray a prayer of resignation. Lord, I'm sorry, please help me to beat it and guide the hands of the doctors to remove cancer because I know it's your gift for my life. That's gonna be the prayer of resignation. Now as a soldier, that is not the prayer we pray. Even if you use the phrase of the Paul's thorn, you have to understand Paul's thorn, Paul pray three times against the thorn. Because the default position of every soldier is not to surrender, it's to subdue. It's not to accept, it's to attack. Even your body goes into an attack mode when the bacteria hits it. Your body goes into an attack mode when some kind of a sickness attacks it. I want to challenge you today. If you have a sickness, if you're battling maybe with an addiction, listen, rise a soldier inside of you. Wake up a soldier inside of you. Go into a prayer of revolt and rebellion. I'm not talking about rebellion against God. God is not your problem, your problem is the enemy. Your problem is the addiction, your problem is greed, your problem is lust, your problem is poverty, your problem is sickness and disease, your problem is envy, your problem is drugs, your problem is alcohol, your problem is pornography, your problem is that, my friend, and begin to pray a prayer of revolt. I come against that in Jesus' name. I break the grip of that pornography over my life. I break the grip of that rebellion, or I break the grip of that pride over my life in Jesus' name. And if you pray for healing, you pray for healing and you pray for healing and then God comes to you and says, you know what, this thing is not gonna go. I'm not gonna explain to you why I'll get to you later. Then what you do is God pretty much is telling you, waste your ammo on the other target. Paul didn't get the thing from God. Hey, the thorn is gonna stay in your flesh. Things just roll over and die. Now God says, I'm gonna infuse you with ammo for another target. I'm gonna still use you. See like for example, if I take the issue of my eyes, I pray for a long time that God will heal my eyes in the sense that one will look like the other. There came a point where I really felt in my heart that God's like, Vlad, waste, spend your ammo on the other target. Meaning this thing is not gonna get solved. Not because I don't want to, there's stuff we're not gonna get into right now. It does not mean that this is the default position for every person. It just means when I have revolted and revolted and revolted and nothing happened and God clearly said, hey, let's put this to rest. That does not mean that now every area of my life has to be an area of resignation. We have to revolt, not resign. Amen? When hell breaks loose, take revenge against the enemy. Don't get resentful against your commander. I used to look at Samson in a negative light and every time bad stuff happened to Samson, Samson went on the revenge spree. He went into this like Rambo style, just killing anything that moved. And I was like, man, he's not a man of God. He should have just controlled his emotions. And then I reread his stories a few days ago and I've noticed one thing, Samson never took vengeance on the people who caused him that suffering. For example, he marries a girl and then his best friend takes his wife and marries her. You would think the revengeful thing would be to kill your best friend. He didn't kill his best friend, he killed Philly scenes. He always took vengeance on the enemy that was behind the apparent enemy he saw. They took his eyes and Samson's prayer is God, please help me why so I can take vengeance. See, when you don't have a worldview of warfare, you will take vengeance on your spouse, on your children, on your government and on the people instead of the real enemy that's behind that. God wants us to develop an attitude of revenge. If we don't keep a healthy revenge attitude, we will develop resentment against him. Listen to me again. If we don't have a healthy revenge, meaning somebody dies out of cancer, God, why did you take it? God didn't. You either will have resentment against God or you will turn your revenge against the spirit of cancer. And you say, cancer, I'm gonna wage war against you. With the name of Jesus, Moin Jesus is against cancer as you are against cancer. You're like, why is God not doing everything? God is also wanting to partner with us and turn our anger against cancer. Addiction, turn your anger against addiction. Maybe your spouse is battling with pornography. And you're like, man, and you attack your spouse, you're not attacking the real enemy because you're not still looking through the worldview of warfare. You have to attack the real enemy and the enemy is not your spouse. Your spouse is being beaten to help your spouse to beat the real enemy. Set the fillet in fields on fire. Not your spouse on fire. Maybe your child is battling with something right now. Instead of pulling a gun and shooting them, the wounded soldier, you go and you wage war against the real enemy. That is the benefit of having a worldview of warfare. The spiritual battle doesn't only have physical symptoms, it also has mental strongholds. It's easier to see the battle out there in the sickness, in the demons, in the famine, in the starvation, in the racism, in the murdering of the babies, in murdering of people. It's easy to see the battle there. And sometimes God uses us and accomplishes his kingdom to help us win the battle there. But the battle then gets inside when then there is those demonic thoughts in our head, those parasites. That's why Paul tells us not only to do wage warfare in the spirit realm, he tells us to wage warfare in our mental realm, your thoughts. And while you can get the demons out and subdue them and then you're realizing you got them roaming free in their own head space through negative thoughts and you gotta bring them down. I just wanna encourage you today. If you adopt a warfare mentality, you will experience more vacation feeling that you will know what to do with. If you strive for vacation life on this earth, warfare will smack you so bad and it will bring you back to reality. So let's start with the default position. We're victors. We are in the Normandy Beach. Our Captain Jesus Christ is not somebody from heaven looking down on earth and says, I know how you feel. He's in the hell hole with us. He's the man who went through with us, walked on dessert, got beaten, rejected, whipped and he got the keys of hell and hades and now he's leading and he says, listen, I'm God but I know what you're going through. We're gonna win together. I'm not just on the outside guiding you. I am living on the inside through the Holy Spirit. I know what you went through. I know the suffering and the pain that you're going through and I got you back. Not only I can forgive you of your sin, help you overcome your sin, but listen, I will help you to overcome whatever you are going through. And if there are losses or casualties that we experience, he walks with us beside. He doesn't dump us and we don't get bitter. You know, if you lost your comrade in war, you don't shoot your commander. You get angry at your enemy. If you lost somebody in this war, I wanna encourage you, God is not your blame. He's the one you need the most and the enemy wants to confuse you and say, blame him the most so you can withdraw from him and then the devil toys with you like a cat with a mouse. This madness has to stop. You have to remove the scales of your eyes and understand that God is not your enemy. He's a good God, he wills only good and when we screwed up, he sent his son, Jesus Christ, dying across. And when he saw that the sacrifice of Jesus is good, but we still need help, he sends his spirit. Jesus poured his life out for us. The spirit got poured out. Can you imagine how God loves you? Not only he loves you, he says, I love you. He lets Jesus be poured out. When you pour something out, it empties itself out for you. His spirit gets poured out for you. Listen, God got you. God loves you. I know probably should have said it in a more of a nicer tone, but he loves you. He really, really, really does. Thank you so much for being a part of this community. If you're interested in learning more about Hungry Gen, our internship, our conferences, deliverance and so many other things, go to HungryGen.com for more information. And as always, remember, better is not good enough, the best is yet to come.