Spiritual Warfare- When The Enemy Blends In

The enemy doesn’t always show up as something you can easily spot. Sometimes the real threat is an idea that blends in, gains trust, and slowly reshapes what you believe. We start with my experience in Afghanistan, where the battlefield had no clear front line and success was hard to measure because the fight was against an ideology, not just an army. That picture becomes a sobering lens for our Christian spiritual warfare today. 

Diving into Galatians 3 and Paul’s piercing question, “Who has put you under a spell?” and we unpack how deception often works through persuasion, not pressure. We talk about the traps on both sides: legalism that turns church habits and good works into a substitute for faith, and a counterfeit “freedom” that excuses compromise with spiritual-sounding phrases. Both can lead to a fake version of Christianity that looks close enough to pass at first glance, while quietly killing trust in Jesus. 

Then we check out Ephesians 6 and the reality of the unseen battle against spiritual forces. The solution is not paranoia, it’s clarity: testing our lives by Scripture, rebuilding prayer and fasting, and bringing hidden compromises into the light through repentance. If you’ve ever wondered how to know whether your faith is authentic, or how to stop drifting before the damage spreads, this is a hard but hopeful listen. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs discernment, and leave a review with the biggest takeaway you’re sitting with.

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Opening And Purpose

Keith Barnes 0:06

Here we examine the word of God and have deep conversations, leading a deeper relationship, change perspective, and a deeper intimacy with Christ. What's into you. Hey, good morning, good evening, good afternoon, whatever time it is that you are tuning into the podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in this week. Today is a wonderful day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it. I'm gonna hop right into it. This is something that's been heavy on my spirit, and I and I think it's critical for everybody in the body right now to kind of understand some things that are going on uh in the spirit. Um I think the most to give some context, uh I think the best place to to kind of tile this in is you know a little bit of story

Afghanistan And Fighting Ideology

Keith Barnes 0:54

time. Uh, you know, I served three tours in Afghanistan and you know when we pulled out um I was like, man, that was such a such a waste of life, and you know, so many people died and and and so many things took place, you know. But what made the war in Afghanistan um really different was that this was the first time um on a global scale that the enemy was not in a uniform. The enemy wasn't you know, the country of Afghanistan or Iran or you know uh Iraq. It was literally an ideology, right? It was um Islamic extremism um in the form of of terrorists, right? And so you had all these subfactions from Al Qaeda to Haqqani to the Taliban and so on and so forth. Some were bad, some were good, right? Like if you think about it, were we fighting the Taliban, then why do we give it back to the Taliban when we left, right? And so you have all these different groups, right? But it was based off of an idea, an ideology that turned into, you know, an extreme version of that ideology, um, which was a war against the infidels, right? Death to the infidels, infidels being everyone who is not um of the Muslim faith. And so being there, you know, some of the things that I witnessed, some of the things that I saw, um it was a war like no other, right? It wasn't a front line. You know, we're we're patrolling streets and and you know, IEDs were going off. Um here's a here's another interesting fact that you might not know um about Afghanistan, but you know, everybody had weapons. AK-47s, RPGs, you name it, you know, um, and believe it or not, in that culture, the the bigger the weapon, the fancier the weapon was the more, you know, high status you had in their social structure, if you will, right? And so when you're trying to identify a threat, you don't know who the bad guy is. Um, and as the the war evolved, and you know, I got there in what 2006, 2007. Um, but as the war was evolving, uh the tactics of the enemy involved as well, you know, and so you didn't see a lot of female suicide bombers early on in the conflict. You know, you started to see see female suicide bombers later on, you know. Um, you know, pressure cooker IEDs. I mean, you name it, they were unconventional, um, and there was no doctrine, there was no playbook, right? And so typically the military, we study other countries' doctrine. We we study other countries' weapon systems and enemy tactics, and and so we have this plan and we battle, we battle game and we war game, and we figure out if we're going to war with name a country, we already know what type of vehicles they have, what type of, you know, what if you see this many people in a group, it's probably this type of unit. When you're fighting an insurgency, there's no structure, it's just mass chaos. And now, granted, there was leadership for the different insurgent groups, right? But more or less, the the strategy had not been, you know, uh, it wasn't something in a book that you could you could say, hey, well, you know, if you see this many people here, this is what type of unit it was. And so it really challenged America, it really challenged the Allied nations that were coming to fight in Afghanistan because this is uncharted territory and we're fighting in an ununiformed uh group, and their ideals, they're not trying to win over the country, they're not trying to, you know, expand territory, they're legitimately just their main objective was to kill the infidel, right? And so, how do you fight something like that? How do you fight and then where's your measure of success? Is your measure of success, well, I we killed a hundred terrorists or you know, insurgents in in this city, and so now this city is safe. That's not how it worked. You know, you took one out, more would come. And and it was a very difficult uh occupation to be a part of. And and so when we did leave, you know, when we tried to hand it over to the Afghan army and so on and so forth, um, you know, it it just was bound to fail, right? It it it would have had to been one of those situations where we stayed there indefinitely, right? Kind of like how we've been in Korea for 50-something years. Um and or even longer than that. No, I'm gonna say about 50 years, right? So we would have had to stay there indefinitely. We would have it would have just been another forward operating base, kind of like what we have in Germany, right? Um, and it would have been chaos every single day. Now,

Types And Shadows In Scripture

Keith Barnes 5:29

one thing about scripture, and I'm sure you were sitting there like, isn't this supposed to be about Jesus? One thing about scripture is that there's a type and shadow for everything in scripture, right? Now, most importantly, the type, when I when I talk about type and shadow, the type that we see identified in scripture is typically pointing to Jesus, right? And so we see Adam, we see Elijah, we see Elisha, we see Moses, we see Abraham, we see this story of God, you know, setting apart a people, and that people not choosing him, turning away from him. We see this need for a savior, we see this need for an answer and a solution to the world's sin problem, right? To the people's sin problem, Jew and Gentile alike, right? And so we find that in the Messiah uh Jesus Christ later on down the road, but you got to see like precursors, or as the kids would say today, Easter eggs are found all throughout the Old Testament of what was coming in the New Testament concerning the answer to the solution, right? And um uh the answer to the big problem, the sin nature problem, right? And so when Christ comes on the scene and he ends up being the ultimate sacrifice, he ends up being the one that takes on the burden that says, Hey, I I was able to fulfill the law, I was able to redeem what Adam couldn't do, I was able to do what everybody before me could not do. I was the lamb that was put on the altar, right? It goes even back to Abraham, right? I was the lamb that was put on the altar, and and God, that was the huge Easter egg, right? And so we get to this point now where we see that play it out, right? But there's another type of shadow that's been playing in the background of scripture this entire time, too, and that was warfare, right? And you see it from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

Galatians And The Bewitching Question

Keith Barnes 7:20

And Paul actually talks about it in Galatians 3, and I'm just gonna start there, but we're gonna work our way eventually to uh I want to say Ephesians, but uh in Galatians 3, it says, You stupid Galatians, who has put you under a spell before your very eyes, Yeshua the Messiah was clearly portrayed as having been put to death as a criminal. I want to know from you just this one thing. Did you receive the Spirit by legalistic observance of law commands or by trusting in what you heard and being faithful to it? Are you that stupid? Having begun with the Spirit's power, do you think you can reach the goal under your own power? Have you suffered so much for nothing? If that's the way you think, your suffering certainly will have been for nothing. What about God who supplies you with the spiritual with the spirit and work miracles among you? Does he do it because of your lease legalistic observance of the law commands, or because you trust in what you heard and are faithful to it? It was the same with Abraham. He trusted in God and was faithful to him, and that was credited to his account as righteousness. Now you might be asking yourself, how is this tied to spiritual warfare? It was something very powerful in that very first statement, but I just kept I was I was led to continue reading past the point that I wanted to make. But, you know, he says, Who has put you on a spell? Right? And so in other translations, it might even say, Who bewitched you, right? And so when I when I dove into that word study of bewitching and spell and and tried to break out the Greek and the Hebrew and so on and so forth, because I just knew it had a little bit more ump to it, but it was this persuasion, right? This persuasion to bring to believe this alternative truth, right? Now we also know that Paul talks about spiritual warfare concerning the principalities that we're up against. And I'm gonna go over that in a little bit, but specifically here in Galatians, he's obviously identifying this thing that's happening in the church during this time where people are being captivated by some alternative option, some alternative option to faith, some alternative option to the trust that Abraham had that was accounted as credit to his uh to his righteousness, right? They were somehow, someway, someone came in with some smooth words, some smooth talking, and and they converted and and went back to the legalistic observance of the Old Testament. They went back and tried to say, well, maybe I can work this thing out. Maybe I can, you know, what I started in the spirit, right? Because it's a it's truly a faith-based thing. When we believe in Jesus as our Lord and Savior, and we say, hey, God, I'm ready to live my life out for you. Go ahead and start burning off the chaff, right? And and and for all of us believers out here, we understand what that feels like. That means letting go of the things that we once were doing, the things that that brought us joy and pleasure in this earth, all the things of the flesh, we're saying we're going to submit those things to you, and we understand this contract that we've signed with you, that all these things are on the docket now to die. They all have an execution date, and and and you know the date of the execution of the different things in our lives, but it's coming, and and we are putting our hope and our trust and our faith that all those things are going to die in our lives, and that we will be leading to a path of righteousness and being set apart because you know God has set us apart as a holy nation, right? As we've uh uh signed that contract to be ambassadors for the kingdom, we we've agreed to certain truths in our faith, right? And this became before any legalistic work, right? Now, immediately after that faith, we were like, okay, obviously, church service, you know, that has to stay. That's that's an observance that we should continue to observe. Um, you know, I should probably we started listing and identifying different things that we wanted to take part in, right, that we thought we could have a hand in and and and maybe work our way towards it, right? And so in this section, right, someone has put this church and the congregation under a spell to believe that the faith could be substituted for some type of work. And how does this all tie together? Remember

Church Indoctrination And Hidden Extremes

Keith Barnes 11:27

when I was talking about an insurgency and what made it difficult for you know the world's greatest superpower, America, right, to come in there and destroy this idea and ideology. What made it difficult was because it was no tactics to it. And so obviously, this church in Galatia has been put under a spell. Someone has convinced them to believe another thing. That is a is a perfect type and shadow for what we just all, if you're alive today, experienced in the type of this new warfare, in the type of no longer, you know, country against country, but countries against an idea, the world against an idea, and realizing that you can't conquer it because it has no uniform, right? The perfect type is being played out now in the modern day church, right? And I've I personally believe that God always gives us an example of something tangible, of something that we can reach out and touch and say, oh, that's how it applies in the spirit. Wow, this is the same way this could be applied to my spiritual walk with the Lord, right? And so now we're sitting in churches, we're sitting in small groups, we're we're operating a lot of times just in our day-to-day lives, right? Being indoctrinated by the insurgent group. Trust and believe, no devout Muslim out there wakes up one day and says, yes, suicide is the option, right? Because that's the extremist of that version, right? Just like, you know, uh, and and correct me if I'm wrong here, but you know, the the KKK back in the day that believed in Jesus and God, but yet still were doing the things they were doing. Or, you know, uh slave owners back in the day who went to church every day but was still doing all no one comes in their their religion, right, and then automatically hop to the extreme side. There's an indoctrination that has to happen, and most often it is slow. Most often there is a grooming that takes place. And right now, my my stern warning to the body is be careful of who is grooming you. If it is not the Holy Spirit that's grooming you, but it is the solely the pastor, solely your your the parishioners around you, solely the community around you that is grooming you into a life lived out with Christ, examine the fruit. Because surely the Galatians, having come to a trust in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, did not think that they would end up back in legalism. Just like surely when you gave your life to Christ, just like surely when you decided that Jesus is the way and he's the only way, and that those who knock, he will open. If we allow him in our hearts, he's gonna be there. Surely we didn't start off assuming that we too will go back to a legalistic observance. Or worse, we too would start to compromise and just end up being super lukewarm, compromising to the point of becoming our own version of a suicide bomber, right? Like you gotta think the warfare and the schemes of the enemy are only increasing with the time. Evil increases with the generations, right? And the and the schemes understand in the Old Testament when it says that the that the that the enemy is like a lion roaring around uh on the prowl waiting to pounce, right? We're not talking about lions and bear tigers and bears anymore, y'all, right? We're talking about this new idea. We're not afraid of lions anymore. So that that picture, that analogy doesn't even make sense to us. But I tell you what, you see a pile of trash on the road and don't realize it's a bomb, and you drive by it and it blows up. Now you look at every piece of trash a little differently. You see large crowds, you know, half these soldiers that come home with serious PTSD from crowds and and heavy traffic flows and stuff like that, because they've seen something that it shook them, right? In the Old Testament, when they used that phrase and that idea of a lion hiding in the grass, getting ready to pounce, that clicked because they understood that if you heard the sound, it was too late. Right now, we don't have anything, most of us don't have anything to relate to in order to understand how the enemy is actually working. And sometimes it's gonna be super offensive to realize that it might be the church that you're in, it might be the person that you're listening to, it might be the person that's mentoring you or life coaching you or whatever the case may be that is leading you down a path, down a path to actually indoctrine you to end up being an extremist in the faith for the wrong way. The enemy is trying to win us over at every leap and bound in every way possible, and and why not put on a uniform, right? Why not just have on a regular attire? The enemy doesn't want to easily be identified out there as bad because we could avoid it, right? If we knew where every bomb was, we wouldn't have died by IEDs. If we knew where every insurgent lived because they wore uniforms and when they were walking down the street, we could easily identify, oh yeah, that's a bad guy, then the war wouldn't have taken 20 years, right? But the thing is, when they're in disguise and when they're dressed up and when they sound like you and when they talk like you, but it's the ideology shift, right? And sometimes that takes years. Sometimes that takes a very long time to like fully convert somebody over to this extremist path where they're writing manifestos and trying to blow up stuff, right? But it happens likewise in the spirit, it happens likewise in the body. And it and it can simply start off with just simple, you know, I'm I'm at church, I'm doing my thing, and you know, I need to tithe, I need to give, and uh, I need to do all these things. Now you start getting these checks and balances, right? And then eventually at some point, somehow, you're bewitched. Someone has cast a spell, right? And by that means a persuasive thing that's made you consider whether the truth that you know to be truth, right? And I want to say John says, if it's not the thing that I said, don't believe it, right? But it's a truth that you know should be truth has now been uh converted and and perverted with a lie, that also makes sense. Because what's wrong with going to church and tithing and and doing good and being a good Samaritan and praying for people, what's wrong with that? The the error lies when those things, those works becomes the reason of our faith. When those works become greater than our faith, we have just committed a suicide bombing on our salvation and not even understand it. And then what's sad is that it spreads, right? And so now we have enemies within the camp spreading this false ideology, right, that in Christ, in our faith, it's works. And then on the opposite angle, right? Because remember, we talked about this. There's multiple insurgent organizations out there. You have those that just hate Americans, you have those that are truly about the faith aspect and they hate infidels. Likewise, in the body, you have those that are truly not just legalistic, but super faith, right? Super freedom. Super, well, once you said the prayer and you're free, you just live your life. Jesus got you, he got the rest. God knows your heart. Continue living the way you want to live until you get emboldened with that freedom, and now you're just out there doing whatever you got to do, not realizing, right? Not realizing that you have a counterfeit faith. And see, I think that's the scariest reality that we have to realize when it comes to the enemy, right? Is that the counterfeit, the fake stuff that's out there, the fake faith, the fake Jesus, the antichrist that's out there is starting to look so close that you can't see it with the naked eye. And that's by design. Paul Paul speaks to it, right? I mean, we go right into Ephesians 6, and it says, uh, let me see, verse 12. No, I'll start in verse uh 11.

Counterfeit Faith And Armor Of God

Keith Barnes 19:46

Use all the armor and weaponry that God provides so that you will be able to stand against the deceptive tactics of the adversary. For we are not struggling against human beings, but against the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers governing this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm. You can't see it with the naked eye. And so now we have to really truly check ourselves and say, man, is it is is my faith authentic? How do I how do I know if I'm living a counterfeit faith? How do I know if I've been indoctrinated into the enemy's camp and I'm not really an ambassador for Christ, but I'm an an ambassador for the Antichrist. I'm out here converting people to my cause. I'm out here converting people to the enemy's cause under the guise of the light, under the guise of righteousness, under the guise of holiness. I'm saying just be good because God is good and no longer pursuing righteousness and holiness. I'm no longer, you know, trying to have the chaff burned off me anymore because it's alright to have a little bit. We're all imperfect. How do I know? How can I test the authenticity, uh, authenticity of my genuine faith? It's not gonna be the way we look in the outwardly flesh. We won't be able to examine it by just how good the service was or how good the speech was. The only way to examine it is with the word. The only way to examine it is in our with truly in prayer and in fasting and saying, God, am I where I need to be in your eyes? Examine my heart. I want to say that's a proverb, examine my heart daily to see that everything that I'm doing is within your will, right? Like, truly, we have to start checking the authenticity of not only ourselves, but those that we are bringing around. Because believe this or not, you know, we you you might be getting indoctrinated and not realize it. You might be getting trafficked and not realize it. You might be working for the enemy, thinking that you're working for good. Because it it always sparks my interest and and it breaks my heart and it scares me, truly. It scares me, truly, and it should scare you as well. But when when When Jesus sent out the disciples, right? And they were out and they come back and they're all amped up and they're like, Man, we was casting out demons, you know, and and doing all these things, and he said, Be better that you uh it's better that you know that your name is in the book of life. Like, Jesus was not impressed with the works that they were doing. And and Jesus sent them out to go do the things. So, like, that was completely, as my wife would like to say, counter, or she always says I say this a lot, but that was very counter-cultural, like, right? Like if your boss tells you to go do something and you do it well, you come back and he says, Hey, high five, good job, you did it well, right? But instead, they come back and they've they've brought multitudes to the faith, they've healed people and raised the dead or whatever else they were doing. And Jesus is like, cool story, bro. Uh just be more concerned that your name is in the book of life. That scared me because it made me realize like God can raise dry bones. He can he can make the the dead bones praise them if he wanted to, he can make rocks praise them if he wanted to. So it's not necessarily about the work. It's not necessarily about what it is that we do on a daily that that classifies us as authentic believers, as authentic in the faith, as authentic followers of Christ, as authentically saved, is not the work. So just just think about that for a moment, right? And so that that verse scares me because then I have to really look at my life. And I look at all the bad, all the good, all the in-between, and I get to this point where it's just like, well, God, how do I know? Give me some, give me a sign, let me know like I'm good to go. Like and that I'm not out here actually, you know, working for the enemy, you know. And and in truth, the one thing that that resonates greatly in me about my walk, right, and and the love of my wife life, having my wife here and and just thinking about our family dynamics and some of the things that we go through. Like, she's always talking about God, like, because that's the overflow, right? Um, and our arguments, right? Like the things that we conflict about, like, you know, is typically about holiness. It's typically about, hey, Keith, you're doing too much of X, Y, or Z, or you know, I realized the other day that I I'm I'm being a little too too hard on, you know, trying to convert. I need to let God do. Like, it's always God, right? And that's not a bad thing either. But the thoughts of my mind, God being uppermost in my mind, God being a holy and righteous and just judge, my life is lived out in the perspective and the lens in which I view things are always through God's lens. And then in maturity, as I continue to grow up and as I continue to mature in my faith, I'm sitting here like, I really need to create some new disciplines of spending time with you, not out of force, but just because it's a relationship thing that I'm trying to develop, you know?

Espionage, Compromise, And Slow Drifts

Keith Barnes 25:12

And so I'll give you one more analogy and then I'll bounce out, but it makes me think about you know, foreign intelligence. Um, excuse me, foreign intelligence agents, and when you're traveling and you're an American person. And, you know, especially if you work in the government or you you deal any type of thing with something that could be advantageous to the enemy, right? Um, and this is in the tangible, but they they always start off with the simple questions, you know, hey, what do you what do you do? You know, where do you work? Um, oh, you you do what? Oh, that's pretty cool, man. You know, tell me about it, right? It's never like a blatant, I'm gonna roll up in the in a kidnap van, scoop you up, and interrogate you to tell, give me all your secrets. Typically, whenever espionage happens, right? Whenever espionage happens, it's it's not necessarily done by force. It's either done by like blackmail or you know, uh coercion, or they put you in some type of compromising position, you got honey potted, you know, whatever the thing might be, but it's typically it takes a little bit of time to get you there, to get you into this place of compromise to where now you kind of gotta give up the secrets because you don't want your your you don't want whatever that thing is to be found out. It doesn't happen overnight. It's not overt. Typically, it is very covert. The same thing in the spirit, the same thing when we're thinking about the principalities and and the things that that Satan is doing, um, that the enemy is doing to entice our flesh. Um typically when we when we're talking about you know being uh exploited by the enemy in our faith, the conversations happen the same way. It's another type of shadow. It starts off small with the you know, surely, you know, I can I can you know drink. Drinking is is totally legal in the word, you know, and then next thing you know, you can't put it down. Well, I mean, you don't want nobody to know you're an alcoholic, right? And so, I mean, you just keep doing the alcoholic things, but just don't tell nobody, and I got you, right? Because God knows your heart. He knows that I mean it's a chemical addiction at this point. It's no longer about just simply I enjoy drinking, now I have to drink, you know, smoking, um, whatever the thing might be. And I'm using a tangible thing, right? But the same thing with prayer life, right? And and and I'm I'm guilty as um, this isn't, you know, casting stones. I this is an awareness, a public service announcement, right? But like prayer, right? How often do we truly sit down and pray? Like some of these things have to be fought and and carved out because guilt aside of how often you do or don't pray, guilt aside, casting that thing off and saying, I'm gonna fight for this because I've not been doing it right for so many years, this is the relationship, these are the things that we need to be striving for in our faith, right? Identifying our areas of compromise, our areas that have been exploited by the enemy, that that can be used as blackmail against us in the courtroom of heaven, in the kingdom of heaven, and saying, hey, you know what? It holds no power because I'm gonna lay it public, I'm gonna lay it bare before the Lord, I'm gonna put it out in the courtroom myself because I know I deserve death. But you know, last I checked, Jesus was my lawyer and I'm gonna be alright. But sometimes the the guilt and the shame of the things that we have been compromised with, the things that the enemy has exploited in us, whether it be our own flesh or whether it was an encouraged or inspired word from some other agent in the church or agent in the faith, agent in who we've uh been watching as influencers or whatever, has has put that seed in and we allowed it to grow and then it became compromised, whatever that mess is, now is the time to say, hey, you can't blackmail me with nothing, Satan, and put it on the altar. Because when we live our life in compromise, right, when we live our life trying to hide that lie, trying to hide that thing that we know is wrong, but but you know, is it might make us look bad, it might make us uh uh not seem like we're in the faith. When we put that thing on the altar and we let it go, that's the whole purpose of repentance. That's the whole purpose of having a God that when the veil was torn when Jesus died, right? And before he rose again, when that veil was torn, he was saying that, hey, the Holy of Holies is open. The Holy of Holies is now available for for you to walk into and commune with me. Understanding that I'm not looking at you, but I'm looking at the Jesus in you. I'm looking at the Holy Spirit that is in every flesh that was poured out, right? So the Holy Hope of the Holy of Holies is open and available to us all to lay those things bare.

Repentance And The Holy Of Holies

Keith Barnes 30:25

We the the days of individual sacrifices to the one that might get the prayer to be heard, because I don't know about you, I know I've been there before too. Like, well, maybe this person's prayer will get answered. And so maybe I will tell them what I'm going through and they can pray for it and they can take it to the Holy Holy. Stop feeling unworthy. You are. We all are, we all fall short of the glory. But when the veil was torn, the Holy of Holies became available to even us peon sinners that can go in front of God, lay our hearts bare, and say, God, the enemy has caused me to compromise. The enemy being my flesh. Because truly, that's all it really is. I don't care if it was your pastor, your deacon, your small group leader, your best friend, or the YouTube person that you watch for daily sermons. Whatever they said was enticing to the flesh, and then you agreed with your flesh. So they can't even be the scapegoat, right? So when you go before the Lord and say, Lord, I agree with my flesh. I agreed that what the enemy suggested was a compromise, I could comp I could get away with it. You know, Chambers, I wish I had this quote, but Oswald Chambers was um Tanisha was telling me uh of this passage that just really hit me about sin and our sin nature. He was just like, you know, when you think of like the murderest of murderers, right? It's like, you know, those that commit sin at the in the high level, they're they're just bold. They ain't they're not cowards to commit sin. You and I, you know, we're kind of cowardly in our sin nature because we think of the consequences and that's why we don't do it, right? But in our flesh, the the little small compromises that don't really hold a huge consequence, we're like, mm, I could ride with that. I could be a murderer in my heart, but not for real, for real. I could be a a liar in in my heart because they don't know that I'm lying, right? Like, I'm not gonna like go lie in front of a courtroom because that that could get me sent to jail. Like I can I can speed, I can break the law, I can do all these things and edge the law all the time because the consequences aren't that great, and people might not find out about it. But we're being cowards in our flesh, you know, whereas some of the real ones, some of the real unworthy ones are out there just doing it, right? And we look at them like, ooh, how y'all are just horrible. How can you be out there doing all these sins knowing we got a pile of them in our backpack that we're not talking about? And so I say all that to say, yes, the spiritual warfare that we are fighting against is is is not like the days of old. It's evolved with the times, just like everything else. Just like Solomon said, you know, there's nothing new under the sun. This isn't really new. Sin just evolves as we get wicked, sin gets wicked, our flesh gets more enticed, so on and so forth. But the reality of it is, one, we need to be checking the authenticity of our faith. We need to be going to the Holy of Holies and laying those compromises down. Anything that the enemy can use to blackmail you in the courtroom of heaven, expose it. Don't let them have hole over it, right? Once that is exposed, now you can start in God's a program, now you can start building these new habits and accepting the things in life that you know you made mistakes on, but not being in condemnation about. And just moving forward and growing and growing in the Lord, and so that way you can you can truly testify that you are an ambassador to the kingdom of heaven and not a spy from the enemy of hell.

Final Warning And Hope

Keith Barnes 34:14

Because the scary reality is that on that day of judgment, on that day when when every knee bows, the real will be separated from the fake. The wheat will be separated from the tear. Like these things are a fact and will happen. And guess what? You have every availability to you, as long as you are breathing, if you're watching this video right now, you have the ability to go into the holy of holies and say, God, forgive me. God, lay I'm laying it down. I and everybody knows what they're being blackmailed for. Like, if you ever think about it going back to the tangible, right? When when a spy sends the person they're trying to get the secret from, they send them the evidence of what they're blackmailing and say, Hey, if you don't do this, I'm gonna send this out to the world. Oh, here's the secrets in the spirit. Here's my faith, here's my trust, here's my here's my belief on Christ to do a thing. I I'll give that to you and then I'll go and just work it out with my flesh. And I I'm gonna just I'm gonna just give it to something else. And then before you know it, you're dead. Before you know it, you're the suicide bomber. And you're not only impacting yourself, but you're hurting and you're killing other believers in the faith. You're hurting, you're maiming, you're you're causing church hurt. When that IED goes off at a mall and everybody's just shopping, you gotta think those survivors of that, they they don't want to go shopping again. The survivors of a of a spiritual IED, people don't want to go back to church. People don't want to hear anything about the faith because they've been hurt, they've been let down, and the enemy loves that too, because that's the that's the definition of terrorism, right? To cause fear. Now we have a fear of God that's not in the right way, not in the authentic authentic way, but in a in a perverted way. Now we have a fear that says, nah, I don't like him. He causes pain, he causes suffering, and not for my benefit. He's no no different than the devil himself. And you start to blur those lines, and now you have believers with PTSD with God, and that is so inaccurate. And and and our hope is that we are not the cause of that, we're not the cause of causing people to stumble. And so I pray that this message has blessed you, and that it has opened your eyes and brought back to the reality that, hey, we are in a time and in a space where just like we have evolved, just like technology has advanced, the schemes of the enemy has advanced as well, and we are fighting an unseen battle, the enemy is not wearing a uniform, it's chaos. And the whole purpose is to kill our faith. It's to kill our trust in the one we should be having trust in. It's to substitute something fake, something that is insatiable, right? Something that's not gonna ever bring us true joy. And like I said, I want to say a couple of weeks ago, the enemy would love to give you peace on this earth because he knows that he's gonna give you unrest for eternity, right? And so just realize that the holy of holies is open, man. It is not too late, you know. Um, I love y'all, and I hope y'all have a great, wonderful day and the rest of your week. Until next time. Be blessed.