We need warriors today – those who will stand against the tide of public opinion, who will live courageously and honestly in a hostile culture. People who will cling to God’s truth regardless of the consequences.

However, we sometimes place our human interpretation of love and mercy onto others who are in the fight for right. We bind them with expectations of political correctness when they are doing battle against the evils of this world. We judge them harshly for every misstep, and yet we do not join the fray.

When we search the scriptures, we find example after example of warriors that God used. They were not perfect, and God did not sugarcoat their flaws, but they stood in the gap for the people of God.

Joshua led the Israelites to destroy Jericho at God’s command.

David, a poet and a man after God’s heart, went into battle numerous times as he led the nation of Israel.

Moses followed God’s leadership when he directed the Israelites to spoil the Egyptians.

Even Jesus, Who was and is perfect, turned over the tables in the Temple when he accosted the religious leaders for their deceit and misappropriation of God’s law.

God is kind, and good, and merciful – always – but mercy lives in the context of judgment. Judgment is not an easy or a pretty message.

Like Eve in the garden, we are sometimes swayed by sweet rhetoric, but the serpent’s gentle words covered an agenda of death and destruction. Eve would have been better served to have applied a sharp hoe to his neck than to accept his invitation to dine.

We are at war with the ideology of evil. We must look past the smooth talk that surrounds us to the agenda being promoted,

and we must allow warriors to fight as we cover them in prayer, standing firm in God’s truth (which we will know only if we spend time in His Word), and willing to join the battle as God leads.

God did not call us to a life of ease; He called us to stand, to serve, to love, to disciple, to go.

II Timothy 2:1-3  Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful me, who shall be able to teach others also. Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.