Daily Devotional for Monday March 22, 2004

Spiritual Warfare - Part I - The Enemy is Attacking

(Ephesians 6:12)

So many of the emails I receive every day are from good Christian people who are looking for God to help them through a difficult crisis in their life and wondering why they are going through the difficulties they are. Unfortunately, there is not always an explanation or good reason "why." One reason I challenge and encourage you to follow the Lord each day is because we cause many of the problems in our lives by not following God's plan and ignoring the warnings that He has clearly laid out in His Word.

However, following Christ each day, living a Godly life does NOT mean you are immune from the trials and tribulations of life. You have to understand that there is a very real enemy named satan, who is actively trying to disrupt the work of God. In addition, Jesus told us what satan's goal is concerning YOU in John 10:10, to KILL STEAL, AND DESTROY.

The Bible clearly tells us that our battle isn't against flesh and blood, but that it is a SPIRITUAL BATTLE! Over the next 3 days, I am going to try to help you fight these spiritual battles. The most important thing you have to understand, no matter how intense the attacks may be on you right now, is that YOU HAVE ALREADY WON if you know Jesus as your personal Savior!

The most important battle is the one for your soul. Knowing Jesus insures you have won that battle and that knowledge alone should give you the confidence to fight whatever challenges this life may present knowing that in the end, YOU HAVE ALREADY WON!!!!!

The lesson for today is that if you have put your faith and trust in Christ, no matter what battles you may be fighting today, YOU HAVE ALREADY WON!!!!!

The reason for this 3-part series on Spiritual Warfare is because of the attacks Liveprayer has been under ever since we started 54+ months ago. God showed me when He gave me the vision for this Internet ministry that it was going to be a major battle since the Internet had largely been satan's playground and to a large extent still is. For all of the positive content the Internet provides, it is still far outweighed by the ungodly content that is available.

You would be amazed at the numbers of lives destroyed over the last 10 years by the Internet. Men and women in total bondage to Internet porn, addicted to Internet gambling, marriages and families destroyed by online romances that became real, people lured by the greed of online trading and losing everything they had. Every kind of evil and destructive thing in the world has found a place of prominence on the Internet. I had no illusions that this would be easy trying to use the Internet to share the hope and love of Christ with the lost and hurting in this world 24/7/365.

This past Saturday morning at around 2 a.m., the Liveprayer website was attacked by a group in Egypt that had our website down for about 12 hours. Rarely does a day go by we are not attacked multiple times. These attacks try to overload the bandwidth so people can't access the site or they try to find holes in the Microsoft operating system to shut it down. The mail servers were attacked as well but not affected, however if you did send me an email and it was returned simply resend it. LPeMail is on a totally separate system so it was fine, though some people had trouble accessing the website at times on Saturday. All of our data on the website is 100% secure, and our E-Commerce system that handles credit card donations is on a separate, secured server where all of that information is scrambled and impossible to access.

God has blessed Liveprayer with one of the most gifted and creative technical minds on the Internet, a man that could easily be earning mid 6 figures working for a major computer corporation. He sees first hand what God is doing in peoples lives every day thru Liveprayer and has DONATED his time and talents for these past 4 years to oversee all of the technical aspects of Liveprayer. We have the most sophisticated anti-virus software, firewalls, and other technology that has kept Liveprayer up and operational for all but app. 40 hours since we started over 40,000 hours ago. Even the federal government, AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft, with millions of dollars of technology and thousands of techs go down from time to time. GOD HAS KEPT HIS HAND ON LIVEPRAYER!

***This was nothing but one of those "distractions" I just spoke of in Friday's Devotional!

I tell you this to let you know something I learned early on in my ministry and it applies to your life. If you are not doing anything that is a threat to satan, he won't bother you. If you live for a while and aren't being attacked, you probably aren't doing anything that satan sees as a threat. Rejoice in the attacks because it is confirmation you are being effective!!! Over 1,900,000 people worldwide get the Daily Devotional each day, over 20,000 people visit the website each day, just under 60,000 people that we know of have accepted Christ since we started, we have over 1,200,000 praise reports archived. I EXPECT THE ATTACKS AND IF YOU ARE SERVING GOD, YOU NEED TO EXPECT THEM TOO!

I love you and care about you so much. I am praying for you daily. Never forget that "greater is He that is in me, than he that is in the world." God is still on the throne, still in control. Liveprayer.com is going to keep ministering to over 2 million people worldwide daily, we are going to keep sharing the hope and love of Christ with the hurting and lost, we are not going to stop until we have such a presence on the Internet that every adult site, every gambling site, every site that is destroying marriages and families has to shut down because no one wants to go there anymore. Impossible? Nothing is impossible with God! You need to have the same attitude. Don't let anything, especially the attacks of satan stop you from doing what God has called you to do with your life. The only way satan can win is if we let him!