This is submitted by Teresa Seputis [ts@godspeak.net]

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                 Covert Spiritual Warfare

The Lord showed me something important about spiritual warfare yesterday. 
He did it through a series of experiences that I am guessing you will 
relate to. He wanted me to pass this on to you, to make you aware of
one of the devil's schemes against you.

The devil likes to use business to drag us down, and he was using that
strategy on me for the month of January. I had so much "must-do" (and 
not enjoyable) work this month that it sort of sucked the life out of me. 
I am sure you know the feeling--the urgent "to-dos" sort of overshadow 
everything and make you tired. It gets to the point where even simple 
tasks seem "hard"--things that should take 15 minutes can end up taking 
an hour because unexpected little things "go wrong." You spend less time 
sleeping or resting, and you work on the stuff looming in front of you 
until you are too tired to do any more. When you finally stop for the 
day, you are too exhausted to do much of anything else.

That type of fatigue erodes at your daily walk with the Lord. You are 
not negligent in your walk with Him, but you are too exhausted to really 
enter in when you pray, worship or read His word. Your spirit doesn't
end up being "fed." You don't realize it, you just keep putting one foot 
in front of the other and trudging forward in a bit of a daze, just 
trying to "get through it" in hopes that things will return to normal 
when you finally finish whatever huge task that lays before you.

Sunday morning had been grueling with "must-do" chores. I started working 
on them at 4:00 AM. When it was time to leave for church, I almost did 
not go because I still had so much work to do. But a part of me longed 
for God's touch and refreshment, so I decided to go.

God met me there. His presence was strong and tangible during corporate 
worship time, drawing me closer to Him than I'd felt in a long time. I 
noticed that the closer I got to God, the more invigorated and alive I 
felt. That had happened to me before; it seemed that every time I was 
worn out or felt messed up, I would come back to life again when I got 
into His presence. God spoke to me as I pondered this. He said, "Of 
course it works that way. I am the source of life--you can't get near 
to Me and not come alive, because I am life."

When service ended, His life seemed to ooze out of me. I felt revived 
and wonderful when I left church.

I had several errands I had to run on the way home from church. They
should have taken an hour, but they ended up taking three. Everything 
conceivable went wrong and each thing was frustrating. Here is an 
examples: I stopped to pick up a quick lunch at a sandwich shop, and 
their cash register broke. They'd already made my sandwich, so I was 
stuck waiting over 25 minutes before they could ring me up. I had about 
5 of those things happen to me on the way home from church. Any one 
would have been frustrating on it's own merit, but put together, they 
sucked the life and joy I'd experienced at church right back out of me.

That night, God debriefed with me about my day. He told me that I'd 
just experienced one of the most dangerous types of spiritual warfare. 
It is dangerous because it is covert and secretive; we don't realize
we are in a battle, so we don't try to fight back. If the devil opposes 
you openly with huge problem, you know you are in a battle and you 
can go to war: prayer, exercising the spiritual authority that God 
gave you, etc. But the devil has another strategy that he likes to 
use because it is so sneaky that he can usually get away with it for a 
long time before we raise up in our God-given authority to rebuke his 
attack. 

That strategy is twofold. One part is to work in the little things to 
drag us down and get us so fatigued that it drains the life from us. 
That makes it harder for us to live in that place of being spirit-led;
most of the time we simply drudge through our tasks instead of looking
for His leading and direction. We get focused on what we need to do
instead of on what God is doing, and we become less of a threat for the
enemy.

The devil's other covert strategy is to hit us every time we have a
spiritual high, to drag us back down. He usually uses a bunch of little 
things instead of one big obvious overwhelming thing. His goal is to 
steal our joy and drain the life back out of us. Each time that God 
reaches down and revives us, the devil will try to subtly drag us 
back down to that place of trudging through our day.

If you recognize these strategies working against you in your life, I
have a strategy from God for you. Make it a conscious point to invite
God into your day. Ask Him to lead and guide you through the pile of
tasks that lay before you. Invite Him to speak to you frequently through
out the day. Ask Him to make you aware of any tactics the enemy might 
be using on you to draw life out of you. In short, apply Psalm 37:5 to
your life-- commit your way to the Lord, and He WILL direct your path.