You must personalize the murderous danger of spiritual warfare, because everything you value and love is at play in this war. Your sexual purity, your health, your mental sanity, your job and finances, your marriage, your children, your ministry, your testimony, and ultimately your eternal destiny and reward all hinge upon your effectiveness as a soldier warring on behalf of the God of Angel Armies (the Lord of Hosts). Nothing less than the destiny of the world is at stake, because you live in the last days and thus are called to fight in the Last Battle.

Do you know how to stand your ground against the cosmic forces of evil? Do you know how to fight against demons? Or how to equip yourself with the life-saving armor of God? “Stage 3: Spiritual Warfare” offers you a specific strategy for winning the invisible war that rages about you, starting with the fundamentals as laid out in this next series of posts.

Hopelessness is the granddaddy of all excuses, because in effect it excuses all other excuses! Think about it for a second. If you’re without hope, if everything is truly pointless, then why bother attempting anything, since you’re doomed from the get-go? Hopelessness is the one excuse above all others that the devil wants programmed into your brain and self-talk, because the man or woman who is hopeless is already defeated. Hopelessness is the dead opposite of faith, and without faith it is impossible to please God. Hopelessness is perhaps the greatest, most devilish lie of them all—because if you embrace it, you have fundamentally rejected the very truth that will set you free.

As you become familiar with your own internal code (read “excuses”), it’s time to get down to the brass tacks of deciphering your internal dialogue so you can rewrite your code, renew your mind, and change your life. Ladies, you seem to be naturally much more self-aware than men, but even so, most of us have received little training or modeling in the art of self-analysis—even though the Bible commands us to “examine yourselves” and “test yourselves” (2 Corinthians 13:5).

With codebreaking in mind (pun intended), here’s your Biblical Big Picture. In the war for purity, there’s a constant stream of coded messages, words whose decryption will help turn the tide of your personal battle. I refer to your self-talk, the messages you’ve been sending yourself inside your own brain. Many of you have been transmitting the exact same messages for 20, 40, and even 60 years, and yet you remain clueless to your own internal code. These coded messages are vital to your relapse process. Indeed, they are integral to everyone’s relapse process—because, as you’ll discover in these pages, everyone is selling themselves with the same old Lame-Ass Excuses. If we never excused and justified and defended our addictive behaviors, we’d never do them!

In other words, all addicts are con artists at heart, because the first person you must con is always yourself. This is precisely why Scripture commands us to take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5)—or in my warfare parlance, why you must decrypt your own self-talk so you can finally hear your own addictive excuses. Mental self-awareness always precedes the destruction of stinking thinking strongholds!

It’s no coincidence that the final puzzle pieces of my destiny fell into place as I was doing the hard work of both purifying and healing my heart. Indeed, a basic reason why many of you remain clueless as to your calling is that your hearts are still impure and immature. Only a healthy and wholesome heart can see with the eyes of faith. And without faith, you’ll never have the courage to take that leap into the unknown when the time comes. Without purity you can’t mature enough to faithfully pass the Wilderness tests, and therefore your destiny dies stillborn, a Promised Land in promise only. Indeed, failure to live out one’s destiny is an even greater sin than sexual immorality—precisely because destiny, unlike sin, encompasses the very reason you were put on this planet in the first place.