Getting Spiritual Warfare Wrong
Part 1 of 5 - Spiritual Warfare for Wounded Healers
And Why So Many of Us Need to Start Over with Jesus
TL;DR: A lot of church talk about spiritual warfare has been shaped more by fear, spectacle, and control than by Jesus. If Jesus reveals what God is like, then Jesus also reveals what spiritual warfare looks like: truth, mercy, peace, courage, prayer, and cruciform love. Wounded healers need a better vision of warfare, one that tells the truth about evil without becoming obsessed with it.
"Your faith is your defiance against the idols of this world.
Your love is your rebellion against the powers of this evil age."
— NT Wright & Michael Bird
How Spiritual Warfare Became So Exhausting
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”
— C.S. Lewis
Spiritual warfare became exhausting as we gave more energy for fighting demons than loving neighbors.
If you grew up in church, there is a decent chance that the phrase spiritual warfare brings a mixed reaction.
For some, it sounds intense and important.
For others, it sounds strange, fear-filled, or deeply exhausting.
Maybe you were taught that spiritual warfare meant rebuking demons in the air, pleading the blood over every bad situation, and treating ordinary life like a constant supernatural emergency.
Maybe you saw people speak about the devil with more fascination than they ever seemed to have for Jesus.
Maybe you watched spiritual warfare become a kind of Christian theater. Loud. Dramatic. Certain. Full of invisible enemies and spiritual bravado.
And for a lot of us, it was not just strange. It was exhausting.
Because spiritual warfare usually showed up as extra.
Extra prayers.
Extra Bible reading.
Extra meetings.
Show up early and pray around the building.
Anoint the pews.
Anoint the doors.
Maybe anoint the wifi while we are at it.
No wonder so many people feel worn out. If the devil is always attacking, then apparently there is always one more spiritual task to add to the list.
It is exhausting living as a full-time demon hunter.
If every hard conversation, every bad mood, every conflict, every anxiety, every inconvenience is treated like a demonic assignment, you eventually have nothing left.
Nothing left for mercy.
Nothing left for patience.
Nothing left for your actual neighbor.
And that should make us pause.
Because Jesus did not say the world would know us by our ability to identify every attack, bind every spirit, or keep a running list of invisible threats.
He said they would know us by our love.
And what if some of that “extra” has actually distracted us from the one thing that matters most?
What if love is spiritual warfare?
What if we have spent so much energy on the weird stuff that we have nothing left for our neighbor, our spouse, our kids, our co-worker?
And please do not tell me to jump straight to loving my enemies when all my emotional strength got drained two weeks ago anointing the wifi.
And maybe, somewhere along the way, you started to wonder if any of it was actually helping people become more loving.
I think that is the right question.
Because if our version of spiritual warfare makes us more fearful, more suspicious, more combative, more obsessed with power, or more eager to label other people as the problem, then something has gone deeply wrong.
Not just practically.
Theologically.
We have not simply misapplied a few verses.
We have misunderstood the battle itself.
We are not demon-hunters.
We are wounded-healers.
When Spiritual Warfare Turns Weird
“Spiritual warfare is not about naming territorial spirits, claiming the ground, or binding demons. It is all about the gospel.”
— Tim Chester
If spiritual warfare makes us more afraid than loving, it is already being formed by the wrong spirit.
I do believe evil is real.
I believe there are powers at work in the world that deform us, divide us, accuse us, and pull us away from the life of God.
I believe the struggle is real.
But I also believe the church has often made spiritual warfare weird in ways that have more to do with anxiety, spectacle, and power than with Jesus.
We turned spiritual warfare into performance.
We made it sound like the most spiritually mature person in the room is the one who speaks the loudest, sees the most demons, or sounds the most certain about what Satan is doing behind the scenes.
We turned it into a kind of spiritual life hack.
Say the right phrase.
Use the right tone.
Name the enemy with enough confidence.
And maybe the bad thing will go away.
We turned it into an individual project.
As if every Christian is supposed to armor up alone and survive a private war against invisible enemies.
And we turned it into a power game.
Instead of learning how to stand in truth, peace, and love, we borrowed the world’s imagination of battle. Dominate. Control. Win. Defeat. Crush. Conquer.
At that point, even if we still use biblical language, we are no longer being formed by the Spirit of Jesus.
We are being formed by fear.
“God has not given us a spirit of fear,
but of power and of love and of a sound mind”
— 2 Timothy 1:7
That verse gets quoted a lot in charismatic spaces, but I think it cuts against some of our worst spiritual warfare instincts. If fear is driving our worship & prayer, then something is off.
The Real Danger
“If the devil cannot make us bad, he will make us busy.”
―Corrie ten Boom
The deepest problem is not that spiritual warfare got embarrassing.
The deepest problem is that it got misdirected.
Evil loves misdirection.
If the enemy can keep us chasing shadows, we will miss the real fractures opening up in our lives and communities.
We will rebuke demons but ignore greed.
We will talk about principalities and powers but overlook gossip, domination, racism, contempt, and tribalism.
We will imagine ourselves as warriors for God while quietly participating in the dehumanizing habits of empire.
We will make enemies out of flesh and blood.
This is why Isaiah 59 has started to feel so important to me. In that chapter, the crisis is not that people failed to perform enough religious intensity.
The crisis is that the very things meant to hold a community together, truth, justice, and righteousness, have been driven out, and nobody is standing up for the people being crushed.
That is what leads to the image of God putting on armor.
Not religious weirdness.
Not spectacle.
Not a hunger for domination.
The problem is not just that people are hurting each other.
The problem is that the community has started attacking the very things that make healing possible: truth, justice, righteousness, and peace.
And that is one of the clearest signs that we have already lost the plot.
Paul says our struggle is not against flesh and blood.
That means your neighbor is not the enemy.
Your political opponent is not the enemy.
The difficult person in your church is not the enemy.
The person who wounded you is not the enemy in the deepest sense.
This does not mean people cannot do real harm. They can.
It means that underneath human sin and conflict there are deeper powers at work that distort desire, feed accusation, reward domination, and teach us to stop seeing one another as human beings loved by God.
Walter Wink puts it this way:
“In the biblical view the Powers are at one and the same time visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, spiritual and institutional.”
— Walter Wink
That matters because it keeps us from reducing the battle to either private temptation or spooky supernaturalism. The powers work through souls and systems, hearts and habits, institutions and imaginations.
“Spiritual warfare is simply telling the truth.”
— Richard Beck
I think that is one of the clearest definitions I have read on the subject.
The struggle is not just out there in the shadows. It is also here, in the lies we normalize, the distortions we protect, and the ways we excuse what deforms love.
How We Forgot Jesus
"Through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth... Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that".
— Martin Luther King Jr.
If Jesus is the clearest revelation of God, then Jesus must also be the clearest revelation of how God fights.
Here is where I think we need to be brutally honest.
A lot of Christian talk about spiritual warfare has not really been shaped by Jesus.
It has been shaped by our love of drama.
Our addiction to certainty.
Our fear of vulnerability.
Our fascination with power.
But if Jesus is what God looks like in the world, then Jesus must also be our clearest picture of spiritual warfare.
God has always been exactly like Jesus.
If God is exactly like Jesus, then spiritual warfare cannot finally be about domination, panic, coercion, or religious swagger. Spiritual warfare has to look like Jesus.
And Jesus does not fight evil the way we expect.
Jesus does not become violent.
He does not dehumanize his enemies.
He does not build his ministry on panic.
Jesus does not turn suffering people into props for spiritual authority.
Jesus tells the truth.
He touches the unclean.
He forgives sinners.
He confronts hypocrisy.
He resists the tempter.
He sets people free.
He weeps over cities.
He loves his enemies.
Jesus carries a cross.
That does not look timid to me anymore.
It looks like the deepest form of war.
The domination system “sustains itself by violence
and by the myth that violence is redemptive.”
— Walter Wink
Jesus spends his whole life exposing that lie.
He does not simply preach against evil.
He reveals a different kind of power altogether.
This is why I cannot trust any version of spiritual warfare that makes us less recognizable as followers of Jesus.
The Battle Inside Us
“The soul possesses freedom; and though the devil can make suggestions, he doesn’t have the power to compel you against your will.”
— St. Cyril of Jerusalem
The older Christian tradition often understood spiritual warfare less as spectacle and more as the hard work of refusing the passions that deform love.
One thing eastern Christian writers can help us recover is the sense that unseen warfare is not mainly about spiritual theatrics. It is about learning not to surrender your soul to fear, pride, resentment, self-love, and accusation.
In Unseen Warfare, the tradition puts it starkly:
“if this is the most difficult of all battles,
because in warring against ourselves it is within ourselves
that we encounter opposition,
victory is the most wonderful of all.”
That feels much closer to the New Testament than a lot of what passes for warfare teaching now.
The point is not that evil is merely internal. It is not. The powers are real, and they exceed us. But one reason distorted warfare teaching does so much damage is that it flatters the ego. It lets us imagine ourselves as heroic warriors while leaving pride, contempt, and self-protection mostly untouched.
That is not discernment. That is delusion.
Once peace is restored in the soul, we are to respond to our foe in compassionate and peaceful ways.
That is such a needed corrective.
Even when the battle is real, the goal is not frenzy.
The goal is shalom.
The goal is self-giving love.
The goal is Christlikeness.
Wounded Healers Need a Better Way
“The devil fears hearts on fire with love of God.”
— St. Catherine of Siena
Wounded healers do not need louder spiritual warfare.
We need truer, gentler, more Jesus-shaped spiritual warfare.
This series is for wounded healers because wounded healers know what bad theology can do.
We know what it is like to be tired of religious noise.
We know what it is like to sit with grief, trauma, mental exhaustion, or disappointment and have someone offer a spiritual explanation that sounds certain but does not feel like love.
We know what it is like to be harmed by people who talked a lot about authority but very little about gentleness.
We know what it is like to long for a faith that is deeper than hype.
“Nobody escapes being wounded.”
— Henri Nouwen
When wounded people are given a theology of warfare built on anxiety or control, the result is not freedom. It is usually more fear, more shame, and more exhaustion.
That is why I do not want a version of spiritual warfare that is built on spiritual theatrics.
I want one that looks like Jesus.
I want one that tells the truth about evil without becoming obsessed with it.
I want one that names the powers without turning people into enemies.
I want one that is strong enough to confront injustice, lies, and dehumanization, but tender enough to remember that wounded people need healing, not punishment.
I want one that helps the church become a place where love is not sentimental, but resistant.
Because I am starting to believe that one of the clearest signs of spiritual warfare is this:
Will we let the powers deform us, or will we let Jesus make us whole?
Starting Over with Jesus
"Jesus is our ultimate example when it comes to warding off spiritual attacks. Observe how Jesus handled direct attacks... “It is written.”"
— CS Lewis
If we are going to recover spiritual warfare,
we have to begin again with Jesus, not with fear.
So this is where I want to begin.
Not with techniques.
Not with formulas.
Not with fear.
With Jesus.
In the essays ahead, I want to explore a different vision of spiritual warfare.
I want to talk about how Jesus wore the armor first.
How the armor of God is rooted in Isaiah’s vision of God’s own justice and salvation.
How the armor was meant for the Body of Christ, not anxious individuals trying to survive alone.
How the powers work through lies, empire, accusation, and division.
And how wounded healers fight not by becoming harsher, but by becoming more honest, more rooted, more peaceable, and more deeply formed in love.
Because spiritual warfare is real. But it is not what many of us were taught.
And if we are going to learn how to stand, we are going to have to unlearn a lot first.
We are going to have to stop making it weird.
We are going to have to stop making it about power.
We are going to have to stop mistaking fear for faith.
We are going to have to fix our gaze upon Jesus, beholding the Human One who fought evil without surrendering to it.
Richard Beck gives us a phrase that feels like a fitting place to end:
Spiritual warfare is “the tactical interruption of the world with love.”
— Richard Beck
That is where we begin.
With the one who tells the truth, makes peace, refuses domination, and keeps loving all the way to the end.
Let’s Talk
When you hear the phrase spiritual warfare, what emotions or memories rise up first for you?
Where have you seen the church mistake fear, control, or spectacle for spiritual maturity?
What would change if we treated truth, peace, and love as the real shape of resistance?
Next in Series
The thesis of this series is simple: spiritual warfare is not spooky performance or private technique. It is the church wearing the life of Jesus together against the powers that deform truth, fracture community, and dehumanize God’s beloved world.
Tomorrow’s essay is: Jesus Wore the Armor First.
Before the armor becomes ours, it is his. We will turn to Isaiah, Ephesians, and the life of Christ to ask what the armor of God actually looks like when God himself puts it on.
"The real enemy is not... any other pagans, then or now. It is death itself, the chaos-monster that is determined to obliterate God's good creation".
— NT Wright
"What if love is spiritual warfare?" Yes!! But our egos want the swords, capes and shields.
Amen!