Quote from a book I’ve just finished reading called Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge:
She’d not known that to fight with the weapon of prayer that which destroys happiness
is to have it round upon yourself.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
To pray for the diseased, the wicked, the insane,
was to be bound with their chains and tortured with their fears,
it was to stagger beneath a load as heavy as that of Atlas,
and yet somehow find the strength not to be bowed down to the earth by it
but to lift it up and up,
to straighten one’s self with it,
until again there came that sense of support.
But it never seemed to come until
it seemed that the last moment of endurance had been reached.
The language is a little old fashioned, after all the book was written in 1944 and it recounts a fictional story of two sisters in the late 1800’s. But the lines quoted here are so profound.
If you’ve ever prayed that intensity in spiritual warfare for someone. Then you understand it.
If your prayers are just worries preceded by “Dear God” and ended with “Amen”, then I’m sure this quote sounds like jibberish.
It is really work to pray the prayers of spiritual weaponry. To take a stand for someone to destroy that which destroys happiness, true happiness. To feel their chains.
The spiritual sweat is rewarded with greater faith, a fresh vision of the eternal, unseen realities.
These prayers are the marks of the spiritually mature.
Thirty plus years walking the faith road, and I’m only just a toddler in these prayers.
I believe, Lord, but help my unbelief!
lifefullyinhabited 