A judo master has learned the art of exploiting the enemy’s strength rather than going for his weakness. He lets his opponent overplay his hand, using minimum effort until the opponent’s attacks have thrown him off balance or out of position. Spiritual battle is a lot like that. It waits, endures, and overcomes by refusing to match strategies.
It’s easy to get sucked into a spiritual battle, you may have noticed. The path between a contented, peaceful, praising heart and a heart obsessed with anxiety, shame, bitterness, or resentment is alarmingly short. A setback, a rejection, a conflict . . . then the high you felt yesterday gives way to the painful, intractable problem of today. And there seems to be no solution to it.
It’s important to know that in any spiritual battle, there’s a prevailing spirit, mood, attitude, or judgment causing your sense of oppression. Your most effective weapon is not to fight back. It’s to simply choose the opposite spirit. You want to live in the power of God’s Spirit all the time, of course, but there’s some aspect of God’s Spirit that will contradict and overcome the oppression. In an environment of pride, humility is a powerful weapon; in an environment of greed, it’s selflessness; in a conflict, it’s a refusal to be contentious. Whatever is coming against you, live powerfully in the attribute of God that overcomes it. Like a master judo artist, let the oppression exhaust itself and defeat it with the good, true, beautiful nature of God.
