A Christian Soldier is...
The LIGHT in a dark world...
First you must be told that Christians during this earthly life must expect a battle, after all, there is a war going on! The welfare of your soul, and the souls of others is at stake, for now and for all eternity!
Second you must be told that in order to remain a Christian Soldier you must be willing to give up yourself entirely to God's will - what He wants. That does not mean that while you are on this earth as a Christian you will lose every thing you ever wanted. What it does mean is that as your relationship with our perfectly loving God grows, and He reveals more and more of the truth to you, you will most likely find that some of whatever ambitions, causes, crusades, ideals, convictions, opinions, desires, etc. that you have personally, for yourself or others, was not right, or may have to be sacrificed to believe and obey God.
But don't worry, how well you achieve these things is not what makes you a Christian. What makes you a Christian is your living faith in Christ Jesus that motivates you to make the necessary changes and sacrifices.
So why give up yourself entirely?
It is because one of the basic principles that God tells us is that we are not capable of seeing the whole truth about anything! But when we become a Christian, God the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us! Amazing! As Christians God considers us to be His temple and He lives in us! God works to convince us to believe everything He tells us in the Bible. This is because God made sure that the Bible is a description of what He wants us to know. He tells it is in fact the only description of Him and what He wants us to know that we can trust. Everything and everyone else is untrustworthy because either we who are unable to see the whole truth, and/or the Devil who doesn't want us to believe God, have compromised everything else. It is not that we won't find some truth from people or things other than the Bible, we sometimes will, in fact Satan and those used by him often put a lot of the truth of the Bible in what they say, but they don't include the whole truth so they make add their false teachings. God tells us that the natural mind, heart, and body of mankind is automatically against God, and on its own is unable to resist the Devil and his minions - the only reason non-Christians aren't total puppets of the Devil in every way is that God in His grace and mercy does not let the Devil have complete free reign in this world. And no one, including a Christian, is perfect, so anything mankind has done on their own will be flawed and cannot be trusted. And the Devil and his minions purposely distort everything. So we need to trust God and check everything to make sure it is agreement with the whole truth that God gives us! But because God always lets us have our free will, we at any time in our life as a Christian can still harden our hearts against God and therefore keep Him from convincing us of the truth, and we can choose to side with our natural inclination to not believe Him. And the Devil and his demons will work as hard as they can to use the thoughts and feelings of our bodies to convince us to harden our hearts and close our minds to God's efforts to tell us the truth, while throughout our lives God will be working to convince us to believe everything He says in His Word (the Bible). This is part of the spiritual war everyone is in. As a Christian soldier it is crucial that you work as hard as needed to not harden your heart against God and get to know what He says, just like it is necessary for a soldier to work hard to win a fight, and just like it is necessary for an athlete to work hard to win! In fact God uses those same to examples in the Bible to admonish us to work hard to win the spiritual battle. Remember that it is God who is actually making our work produce the needed results of believing Him and knowing what He says. So all we have to do is work to choose to believe Him enough to then work at doing what He says, work to learn what He says. Now remember, all of this work isn't what saves us. We are already saved by our faith in God, our choice to believe in Him. This work is what we want to do because of our faith in Him. Remember we are not saved by how well we perform, we are saved by our choice to believe in God. God tells us not to judge ourselves. We do the work the Bible describes because when we chose to believe in God He made us a new person who has put off the old unbelieving person and God now dwells in us. It is actually God living in us through the Holy Spirit that makes us want to do the work.
We fight our Spiritual war in our hearts and minds first. The battle is about what we choose to believe. When we believe the wrong thing, we do the wrong thing. Doing the wrong thing has destructive consequences for ourselves and others. The more we know and believe God instead of the thoughts and feelings of our bodies or the Devil and demons, the better we do in the War. So be ready to discard everything you think, or feel, or have, or do, that can interfere, or be used to interfere, with you hearing or believing what God is telling you. We also want to work to keep from getting into the habit of hardening our heart against believing the Bible. The flesh bodies that we live in, even though we are saved Christians, is still automatically sinful and will automatically resist believing God. While God made us into a new person in our souls with Him living in us, our souls still live in the same body of sinful flesh. So there is a risk that our sinful flesh will convince us to harden our hearts against God so much and so often that we get to the point that we no longer truly believe in God and you no longer hear God at all! God will not let you harden your heart to that point easily. He will work as hard as He can, as long as He can, to prevent you from hardening your heart to that point. But He does warn us about it in His Word the Bible. God never insists on going against our will. If we persist on insisting hard and long enough, we can get our way and suffer the consequences of refusing His way. And Satan is also working to defeat our faith in God. So we want to do the work to win the spiritual war. If this sounds scary that is good because God tells us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling. God will never leave us. He will never slack off of giving us everything we need to win the war. But He always leaves it up to our free will choice. Because we have sincerely chosen to believe in God, we want to choose to do the work to win the war because we do not want to be without our relationship with God and all He is and gives us, including making us good like Him, instead evil like our flesh, and Satan.
God straight out tells us the truth about ourselves. How inadequate and evil we are on our own with Him. He does not tell us the truth to demean us. He tells us the truth so that we can be set free of the futility of trying to do something we are not really capable of doing! God made us capable of some tremendous natural success. But we are not capable of seeing the whole truth and thus those natural "successes" are used by the enemy to convince us that we are okay and even winning when in reality we are not. God tell us the truth so we can be set free of the illusion that we, without believing Him, are okay or winning!
God knows the whole truth! He can and will win! He wants to help us! God tells us the truth so that we can face and admit the truth and turn to Him for that help!
So the battle goes on! Satan and his minions, both spiritual and physical, will continue to work to convince you that you should and must have "self" confidence. Satan and his minions work to convince you that you should and must have "self" worth. He and his minions work to convince you that if you believe that you, on your own, "can" do something, and/or that you "deserve" the reward of doing it, then you will be successful. This is a deception. It is part of the truth that sometimes applies to earthly things, but it is not the whole truth. God tells us the whole truth. We seem capable and can seemingly be successful, but in this spiritual war we are not capable or wining on our own!
Satan is a thoroughly evil creature! He wants us to be in his kingdom and he is not concerned about misery! Those that are in his kingdom when their earthly bodies die, will spend eternity with him, in misery! Not because God let him force or trick them, but because they chose to reject God's offer of salvation, and instead to go with the evil that the enemy endorses.
Remember! Satan hates God and is at war with Him! Satan does not care at all for mankind, he just wants to beat God. There is nothing good in Satan.
Satan takes advantage of God's choice to let man make up his own mind!
Instead of helping man overcome his weaknesses (as does God), Satan takes advantage of man's weaknesses in order to keep man from God!
Thus man, because of his choice not to accept God's offer, becomes the subjects of Satan's kingdom!
So we are born into this war!
At first we lose the war because we are not able to fight against Satan!
But we can become Christian Soldiers!
God can train and enable us to fight for ourselves, and for others!
There is nothing else so glorious because this battle is the ultimate real one, good against evil, the good fighting against evil for the sake of love, rescuing the needy, all to the glory of God! To learn about God's training and enabling click on train and enable.
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