who is the enemy?

My friend Aspen, the other day, was talking about her life.  She was sharing that she is married to an addict—and he keeps going back to using and keeps getting into trouble.  This has happened over and over again and she said she used to get so frustrated and angry and hung up on this relationship.  Every time he would screw up and relapse and end up in jail she would get off track.  And then she realized that her war wasn’t against him—it was against his demons, the evil that has a foothold in his life.  She needed to stop fighting him, and start going to war for him.  So she put her energy instead into praying for him and leaving him in God’s hands, simply hoping that through his relationship with God he can experience healing.  Her main battle is praying for him, hoping for him, and leaving him in God’s hands.  She realized it wasn’t her job to control his behavior, or to fight with him so much that he would finally give in and do the right thing.  She put the relationship in God’s hands.  This is a huge difference in our viewpoint.  Often we think other people are the enemy.

NT Wright: “It is, of course, a surprise to many people that there is a ‘struggle’ at all. Yes, they think, we find it difficult from time to time to practice our Christianity. We find it hard to forgive people, to pray regularly, to resist temptation, to learn more about the faith. But as far as they’re concerned that’s the end of it. They have never thought that their small struggles might be part of a larger campaign. They are like soldiers fighting in a fog: never seeing, and actually not knowing about, the others not far away in the same line of battle, let alone the other theatres where the war is continuing. In most major conflicts, of course, hardly any front-line soldiers know very much about the rest of the war. That’s the job of the generals. But at least they know that something is going on, and that their bit is part of that larger whole. That’s the perspective that every Christian needs to maintain as we hold our bit of the line against attack.”