Stand Your Ground

In the United States, a stand-your-ground law is a law that authorizes an individual to protect and defend their own life and limb against threat or perceived threat. This law states that an individual has no duty to retreat from any place the individual has a lawful right to be and may use any level of force, including lethal, if the individual reasonably believes they face an imminent and immediate threat of serious bodily harm or death; this is as opposed to duty to retreat laws.

Forty-five U.S. states have adopted the castle doctrine, stating that an individual has no duty to retreat when the individual’s home is attacked. Twenty-two states have removed the duty to retreat requirement from other locations as well. “Stand Your Ground”, “Line in the Sand”, or “No Duty to Retreat” laws thus state that an individual has no duty or other requirement to abandon a place in which the individual has a right to be, or to give up ground to an assailant.

–Wikipedia (solid source, I know…)

 

Lately my prayer life has been one of a great battle.  The more time I spend with the truth of Jesus, the more clear that the lies of the enemy become.  Where Jesus has declared victory, we too often run in retreat.  We bend to depression, being overwhelmed, and feeling defeated.  We feel hopeless, defenseless, and powerless.  We look altogether like the rest of the world in our beliefs, our speech, and our defense of morality in America.

Jim Elliot, martyred missionary, quoted, ““Forgive me for being so ordinary while claiming to know so extraordinary a God.”

Perhaps that is the sin we must first confess…simply being ordinary because we have forgotten the extraordinary God that we serve.  As Christians, we must learn to hold the line of Godliness in the power of the God we serve.

He created you to heal the sick, cast out the demons, call forth rain to dry lands, and release the prisoners from their chains.  He has called you to stand your ground.

And we miss it.  We let our marriages fail, our kids fall away, our sick die, our offenses grow, and our faith seems no different than a powerless moral code with negotiable lines in the sand.

No more. It’s time to submit our hearts and lives to His Word.  It’s time to become a people group that is submitted to prayer.  Not the garden variety of “before dinner” prayers, but a fierce prayer life that makes demons tremble when we walk by.  A prayer life that creates an anointing in our life where people are healed by getting too close to our discarded tissue.  A prayer life that demands righteousness and kicks sin to the curb. We must connect to the power that is seen in the book of Acts.

So, the enemy took a few hits in our lives.  They hurt, they really hurt.  He may have even won a few battles here and there.  Weep, struggle, ache, but for God’s sake…get up.  Stand your ground.

STAND YOUR GROUND.