The Real Enemy

 Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised:

Thanksgiving with my parents and some Thai friends
(Miang is next to my mom in the back row)

I recently had a wonderful time with seven American friends who came to spend two weeks with me in Thailand, followed by a five-week visit from my parents.  Prior to these visits, I had been feeling discouraged and exhausted but, after the extended time with such strong believers, I am encouraged and ready for the battle.  It was such a blessing to be with so many loved ones for so long!

Prayer Necessities:

1.  Please lift up my Thai partner Miang and me as we are trying to establish relationships in some new areas.  Pray that our Gospel presentations to those we meet would be very clear and directed by the Spirit and that the Father would lead us to divine appointments where we encounter women who truly want to hear the Good News.

Helping to baptize Ja was a wonderful experience!

2.  Continue to pray for Ja and Best as they grow in their new faith.  They are both great encouragements to me as I see the changes in them constantly, and Ja, in particular, is sharing her faith with the students at the after-school tutoring center she and her mom lead.  We are hoping to start a new Bible study group at her house after the new year, with the plan to invite any of her interested students to come and learn more about following Jesus.  Please pray with us that this group would develop into a strong and healthy body of new believers.

3.  Please pray for a Christmas party hosted by a local ministry to women in the red-light areas.  Miang and I will be involved in inviting many of these ladies to come and join us for a night of good food, gifts, and a Gospel presentation.  Pray that many of them will be interested in learning more about Christ and will ultimately choose to follow Him.

Inquiring Minds Wanna Know:

Life has its distractions.  If you're anything like me, you feel surrounded by them all the time.

Busyness is my constant companion.  My work and the relationships I strive to maintain take me in varying directions throughout the week, and I feel as if I'm running around like a chicken with its head cut off most of the time.  I'm sure the vast majority of you can relate.  Even when I'm not working, there are still so many things that clamor for my attention:  Internet, music, TV, sports, texting, and any number of other things.  Those things keep my mind occupied and take my focus away from where it needs to be.

As if the daily distractions weren't enough, the leaders of my mission agency (and yours, if you're Southern Baptist), the International Mission Board, made a big announcement a few months ago that 600-800 of our veteran mission personnel needed to leave the organization by the end of this year in order to achieve greater financial stability.  The beginning phase of this process was a voluntary retirement incentive offered to all personnel aged 50 and up who have at least five years of service.   Wow, 50 and 5? Let me tell you, those numbers are staggeringly low.

Since the initial announcement, many of my friends, people I love dearly, have chosen to resign, and it breaks my heart to see them go.  And beyond my own selfish desires to keep my friends here with me, the missionaries around the world who have taken this incentive and are returning to the US represent hundreds of years of cross-cultural service.  I am grieving because I will miss so many of them so deeply, and I am grieving because it seems to me that sending people home from the mission field runs counter to Christ's command to pray that more workers will be sent into these harvest fields.  Don't get me wrong; I know God is sovereign, and He is not surprised by this.  His plans will not be thwarted, not even when we are not doing as we should.  But I cannot seem to keep this subject off my mind lately.

In addition, our world is absolutely rife with fear.  Nearly every day, it seems we're hearing of another terrorist attack, another world disaster, another plane crash.  Police are shooting citizens, and citizens are shooting police.  There is a refugee crisis, and no one knows what to do with people who might be terrorists or might be on the run from terrorists.  I can't open up my Facebook page without seeing friends on both sides of these arguments throwing darts at one another on social media, and it all boils down to fear.  We are absolutely terrified, and our government and its laws seem completely powerless to protect us.

As I've been thinking about all of these things lately, it occurred to me just how effective our enemy really is at misdirection.  While we've been thinking about the next thing on our to-do lists or mourning the retirement of friends or arguing with one another about whether refugees should or should not enter our country, we have forgotten both who our enemy is and who our leader is.

There is a line from the movie, "The Hunger Games, that has been on my mind quite a bit lately.  I realize that is a secular film, but I think there's some truth to this particular quote:  "Remember who the real enemy is."  That's the context of this passage, where Paul urges the Corinthian church to forgive one of its members:

"...so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes."  (2 Cor. 2:11)

We spend far too much time arguing with one another on social media or caught up in our own busy lives, and we have forgotten that we are in a very real war between good and evil that is played out in our lives every day.  We have a very real enemy in the spiritual realm, one who is powerful and resourceful and who is bent on our destruction and one whose schemes we should not underestimate or refuse to acknowledge.  He is good at what he does, and we would be wise to be aware of that.

But the other thing we often forget when our enemy misdirects our attention is that we have a leader, a general, a King, Who is even more powerful and has even better battle tactics than our enemy.  We are guaranteed to win, but wars always result in casualties.  We are given spiritual weapons with which to fight, divinely powerful ones with which we can demolish "strongholds,... arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God" (2 Cor. 10:4-5) and spiritual armor to wear (Eph. 6:10-18).

And, in the midst of this battle that is raging around us, we must NOT fall victim to our enemy's scheme of distraction.  We have been given a point of focus.  His name is Jesus,

"Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."  (Heb. 12:2)

The war will be won.  Let's stay on target.

With seven wonderful American friends and our housekeeper at our rented beach house in Phuket, Thailand