Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 5: Be Strong in the Lord (Ps. 27 & Ephs. 6:10-20)
Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 5: Be Strong in the Lord
August 24, 2025
Psalm 27 & Ephesians 6:10-20
By: Pastor Mike Connor
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Some of y’all probably remember, oh, about two years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were threatening to fight one another in a televised cage match? The two billionaires -- Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook, now Meta; Musk the CEO of Twitter, now X -- had gotten into a heated virtual argument over Zuckerberg launching a new social media platform to compete directly with X. How did they think they should handle their disagreement? By locking themselves in a cage and beating one another into a pulp. To the Internet’s dismay, the fight never happened (I guess because Zuckerberg knows Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or something?). But their public threats were an example of how deeply engrained the reactive, retributive, ego-fueled cycle of enemy making is in our culture.
Two thousand years ago, when the Apostle Paul wrote that “our struggle is not against blood and flesh,” he was making use of a word, “struggle,” which literally meant “wrestle.” As in physical, man-to-man combat. It’s a word that goes all the way back to the Greek poet Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, eight hundred years before the life of Jesus.
For as long as we have been telling stories about ourselves in the West, we have been mired in binary thinking: Greeks and Trojans, Christians and heathens, Republicans and Democrats, Musk and Zuckerberg, us and them. Living in these black-and-white stories requires that we have enemies. We must deal with our enemies through a show of strength, dominating others through violence, deception, or social control.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Step into the ring. Winner takes all.
But Paul says our struggle -- meaning the wrestling that Christians do -- is not against flesh and blood. It’s not against other people. Remember Jesus’ words to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Put away your sword,” Jesus told him. “Those who use the sword will die by the sword” (Matt 26:52, NLT). Jesus breaks the cycle of enemy making. He doesn’t consent to that eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth stuff. We wrestle, according to Paul, against entities that are harder to put our finger on, that take a deeper level of awareness and spiritual maturity to detect:
“rulers,” “authorities,” “the cosmic powers of this present darkness,” and “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Depending on their historical contexts, theologies, and prayer practices, Christians after Paul have given these hostile spiritual powers a variety of names. We wrestle against things like demons, the false spirit, ideologies, systemic injustices.
Demons. That’s how the early desert mystics and monks conceived their true enemies. In their writings, they offer counsel on how to guard oneself against a spiritual threat that comes at you from the outside. There was, for example, a spirit of jealousy, a spirit of lust, a spirit of anger, so being tempted in these areas a sign of attack. An evil, spiritual force, working for Satan, was attempting to get in and take hold of the monk’s heart and mind.
The false spirit. That’s how St Ignatius described the enemy in the 16th century. Ignatius largely internalized and psychologized the ancient framework of spirits. He taught that we live each moment our lives under the influence of the “true spirit” -- God’s, ours -- or the “false spirit.” The true spirit can be known by what Ignatius called consolation: an inner sense of love, connection, and freedom. The “false spirit” can be detected by feelings of desolation, of diminished love, connection, and freedom.
Ideologies, systemic injustices. These are modern terms, and they stress our sensitivity to the ingrained evils of history and society. Ideologies are basically bad stories. They are unbendable worldviews that demand allegiance and that hold no space for genuine interaction with people of other perspectives. They’re always trying to get their way, serving some at the expense of others. Ideologies can be as big as capitalism, racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism or as small as the story I tell myself about who I definitely am and who others definitely are.
Systemic injustices are structural evils. They bind people in social, economic, and political circumstances that are overly privileged or overly constricted. They also work in tandem with ideologies. Ideologies inspire the creation of structures that give power to some -- the good ones and worthy ones -- and take it from others -- the bad ones and unworthy ones. Importantly, when we’re born and raised in an unjust structure, as we all are at some level, we grow up thinking it’s the “way things are.” We are raised inside an ideology, and it takes work just to name the story that we’ve inherited.
Demons, the false spirit, ideologies, systemic injustice. These are just some of the ways that Christians have named those spiritual forces of evil that Paul speaks of. They run the gamut from the demonic to the psychological to the political.
But notice, and this is critical: the enemy is not a person. It is a power that possesses the person. These cosmic powers that often go undetected in the ordinary, they grab hold of people and drain their vitality, assault their dignity, and conscript them into harmful causes. The only way for us to enter a wrestling match against these powers without adding to the damage is by putting on God’s armor: belt of truth, breastplate of righteousness, sandals for swiftly spreading peace; shield of faith, helmet of salvation, sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
And notice we do in our spiritual armor. Paul doesn’t tell us to be aggressive, to assert our own way. Rather, he calls us to “stand firm,” to endure until the end.
So, here’s the question for each of us: How can I get to a place where, little by little, I can disentangle my essence from each temptation and falsehood, from the smallness of the story or the constraints and expectations of the system?
To sketch an answer, let’s start with some words from the prophet Isaiah: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength” (30:15, NKJV). Isaiah points toward what would later be called contemplative awareness, or contemplative vision. Our strength and salvation don’t come from reactivity or compulsive action, but from returning to our center, our quiet confidence in God.
So, our Psalm: “The Lord is my light and my salvation -- whom shall, I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life -- of whom shall I be afraid?”
So, Paul: “Be strong in the Lord.”
“In returning and rest you shall be saved.”
Contemplative awareness is cultivated through contemplative prayer. When we are inwardly still and observant, when we patiently learn to rest in God by releasing ourselves from our mind’s tyrannical activity, something liberating takes place: We learn that there is a deep center of our being that cannot be identified with any single thought or anxiety or story or emotional state or historical circumstance. There is something, there is someone -- me! -- who experiences all these things and yet is not reducible to any of them, or to all of them put together. I can start to observe my defensiveness, my assumptions, the spinning of stories to justify my anxiety or anger or withdrawal.
I wasn’t aware of them before, or if I was, I took them to be absolutely essential to my identity. But prayerful observation has now driven a wedge, no matter how small, and a moment, no matter how brief, between, say, the anger we feel and the self-justifying story we will start to spin about our anger; between, say, the person we loathe and our self-satisfied comfort in loathing them.
All God needs is a sliver of awareness. When something stirs us up and sets in motion that enemy-making cycle, we are able to pause and endure the assault with God’s help. God’s tools -- faith, righteousness, peace, and the rest -- help us choose who and how we want to be.
In this series on enemies, we’ve been on a journey. We began with the honest confession that our world and our inner fantasies are chock full of enemies. Us and them. Righteous and wicked. Liberal, conservative.
And as we’ve followed Jesus into this world, we’ve come to realize that our way of seeing is not God’s way of seeing. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV). As Elle reminded us last week, “the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, NIV). There is a reason Paul says in Romans that we must “be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind” (12:2, NIV).
If we can learn to observe ourselves slipping into the enemy-making-mode for any reason, we can stand firm against it and ground ourselves in God.
Always, we can give or withhold our consent to the story presented to us by the world or fabricated by our minds.
Always, God will help us if we ask him to.
Remember that point about the true enemy not being a person but a power of possession? We can say that because the contemplative awareness that shows us when and where we are at risk of being conscripted by sin is the same awareness that allows us to see other people as human beings, created good and in God’s image, who have become possessed by a vice, a false spirit, an ideology, a nexus of societal privileges and blind spots. Humans withering under the weight of falsehood. Humans who’ve given ground to a lie until they can’t tell themselves apart from it.
And so: Jesus calls us to pray for our enemies, to hold them before the mercy, the justice, the light of God. To beg that they be liberated from enslavement to powers that deceive and harm, that they would be freed into God’s story of joyful belonging, sacrificial struggle, forgiveness, and hope. And in order to pray prayers like that, we need to have those wedges of awareness, those footholds for the Spirit to move in our own souls. Because if we aren’t clear that our true enemy is our need to have flesh-and-blood enemies, we will always misunderstand the place of the struggle. We’ll reach for the cage match rather than prayer and telling the truth.
I’ll end with the closing words of our Psalm. And I’ll read them in three different translations to drive the point home.
“Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord” (27:14, NLT).
“Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord” (NRSV).
“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord” (KJV).
In the name of God, the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit: Amen.
