2 Kings is a book full of wars and kings of Israel and Judah. So, I will talk about the former instead of the latter if you follow me.

Well tonight was an interesting night. Tonight was Wednesday Night Youth Group, aka Ignition. After an awesome time of worship (Doxology, My Glorious, Sing Out Hallelujah, Come Home Running and Forever My Love), Scott, my Youth Minister, came up. After an introduction, he had all of the youth who are involved in D(iscipleship) Groups (which includes myself) stand up front. He then talked about how we always talk about ministry, but never perform it. So he had us go talk to a person and pray with them for whatever is going on in their lives right now.

Let me comment on this before I continue my story. This, when I heard what he was doing, sounded like a good idea, but also left me alittle nervous and uneasy. That was my flesh speaking to me. You’re not someone who can do that. You are just Brian, a miserable weakling who is struggling with a number of things. You’re no apostle, you shouldn’t be doing that. But immediately my spirit fought back: You know what Brian, you can do this. You know how I know that? Because I’ve seen you do it before. You have prayed in front of people before, and you have talked to new people or people you didn’t know that well before. You can do this. You can do this because of the strength that Christ gives you. Man that was an exciting feeling.

So as we were all standing up there looking out at all of our peers and listening to Scott finish talking, I knew that I could do this. So when the moment came, I went out searching for a soul. I settled on a guy I had spoken to briefly earlier tonight. His name was Michael. He told me how he had some decisions he had to make in his life right now. So I prayed with him, that God would lead him down the right path, the path of His will. Then it struck me, but only in the back of my mind, that there was probably a war going on to determine which path he would follow. I asked him if there was anything else going on. He revealed taht he had not been getting hardly any sleep at all. I asked him if he had tried going to bed earlier, and he said that yeah, but he still couldn’t get to sleep. Wow, I thought, Man this guy is under some warfare right now. So I put my arm on him and prayed with him. After that, I felt prodded to talk to him a little bit about prayer, life, and the war we are in.

Man we are in a war. I can see it in myself, and sometimes, like tonight, in others. But one thing I struggle with is identifying this war constantly. By identifying it, I can battle it.

And the way the Bible says to battle it is through prayer.

We have been studying the book of James in D-Groups lately, and in the fifth chapter he talks about prayer. It’s a powerful weapon in our spiritual war. Prayer changes things. James uses the example of Elijah and how he prayed to God to make the rains stop, and it happened! And it wasn’t until three and a half years later when Elijah prayed for God to bring the rains back that it rained again. Prayer does change things. James says the “the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.”

So I guess my whole reason for writing this is to encourage all of you that we are in a war for our souls. And we need to identify this war as continually going on, something that must be reckoned with. So I encourage you with Joshua 1:9, my friend Josh Combs life verse. Go ahead and open your bibles right now and read it. May it bring grace and peace to your lives.

–bbbco