We have been blessed by a core leadership team and staff that has been together many years. As a result, we have been through many battles together. I don’t think anyone enjoys conflict, but they nevertheless thrive on it. They come alive with focus and resolve when there are attacks. Even so, we have some that I have watched recoil with every new attack. Their first tendency is to draw back and retreat, but when they fortify themselves in the Lord, they tend to be the ones who stand with great endurance. On the other hand, the ones whose first tendency is to bow up and fight sometimes tire the fastest. For this reason, I try not to judge the quality of warriors by their first response to conflict, but by how they fare over time.
Those who can quickly engage and stand their ground and those who take a little longer to have resolve, are important to gaining success in the battle. Just as the natural Special Forces are now the tip of the spear in military campaigns and can accomplish things that would often take forces many times their size, these would be wasted and not fare well in the day-to-day fighting in the trenches. Few wars will ever be won just by Special Forces, but used rightly, they can help prepare the way for a much more swift and total victory.
My point is that we need to discern what kind of battle we are in or are going to be in. At our home base, we are doing some things that are considered radical and threatening to many other Christians—such as laboring to see an authentic prophetic ministry raised up in the church. As we see in Scripture, this stirs up the wrath of those who serve other gods, or those with a Jezebel spirit, and we must have many who will fight with great endurance. We also have a Special Forces Missions group being raised up that we deploy mostly in special missions. These are adventure junkies who do not do well sitting anywhere for long periods of time, so we use this characteristic and see it as a part of their missionary gifts.
Every Christian is called to be a warrior, but not all warriors are the same. I do not consider myself to be smart enough to really know people with much depth until I have known them for a long time. I am constantly amazed and surprised at people. One thing I have learned over time is to not try and fit people where I want them to be, but to let the Holy Spirit place them in the body where it pleases Him. I can discern the kinds of battles we are likely to be in by the type of people the Lord sends to us. We do not try to fit people into Special Forces Missions (SFM), but we put out a call. Those who respond to this type of training and danger will come. Our goal is to then provide the training that will help them to understand their own gifts and callings, and some learn that the SFM is simply not for them.
As we mature in age and experience, our callings can also change. I used to thrive on the edge of danger much more than I do now. When I was a young pilot, I gravitated to aerobatics and would get bored to tears flying a long, straight, and level flight. I was more of the fighter-pilot type, not the long-range bomber type. When I owned an air charter company, I gravitated toward taking the freight runs that were going through challenging weather, rather than taking the passenger flights where smoothness was far more important. I knew the pilots who were more tense in the challenging situations would stay clear of them and were therefore better with passengers. We all have our gifts, callings, and places, so we do not need to force others into trying to be something they are not. Therefore, one key element after mobilizing people is to discern what they have been created by God to do and help prepare them for that, not forcing them into something they are not called to be or do.
One of my favorite and, I think, most inspiring accounts from church history is the history of the famous Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Rhodes, and Malta, or as they are more popularly called, “The Knights of Malta.” They were a small order of monks who are credited with inventing the hospital, which they founded in Jerusalem to care for the sick pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land during the Middle Ages. Because many pilgrims were being attacked on the way to Jerusalem, these monks later formed a military division to protect the pilgrims. As these military monks became recognized as knights, they started to become renowned for both their courage and skill as warriors. They also focused their resolve to not only protect the pilgrims, but protect Christian territory. They vowed to never retreat before the enemies of the cross and to die rather than surrender an acre of Christian territory to them. They also vowed to do all that they could to preserve Christian unity and to never take up arms against fellow Christians or the forces of a Christian nation.
Because of this resolve, this little order became one of most important and strategic forces in history, not only impacting their own times, but changing the future course of history to the degree that European monarchs credited them with saving Europe from an Islamic takeover. At the battles of Rhodes and Malta, there were just a few hundred of these remarkable knights, joined by several thousand militia, who took their stand against the most powerful Muslim armies numbering nearly one hundred times their own. After months of sieges, with some of the most fierce human assaults by numbers many times their own, and when the smoke had cleared, the banner of the knights still stood on the ramparts. The few but bloody knights who were left stood next to that banner.
Their courage and resolve even gained the respect and honor of their enemies. Today there are Muslim leaders who have such respect for this order that they give an audience to the modern knights. One reason may be because these more fearsome and courageous warriors never forgot their calling as healers. After each battle, the knights, even though exhausted and often wounded themselves, would not rest until all of the wounded on the battlefield had been taken care of, even those from among their enemies. To keep their humility, these knights, who were mostly the scions of the most powerful and wealthy families in Europe, and even their leader, the Grand Master of the Order, would spend time weekly in the hospitals serving the sick and wounded, even changing their bedpans. They did this believing that as they served even the least of these, they were serving Christ Himself.
This is something that must be recaptured and maintained. People are not our enemies—we do not war against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers in the spiritual realm. With all of the courage, resolve, strength, and devotion that we have as spiritual warriors, we must also grow in our skills as gentle healers, humbling ourselves to serve in this way even those who are used by the enemy to attack us. We must always keep in mind that our victory is salvation and the greatest victory of all is the salvation of our enemies. However, even if our enemies do not turn to the Lord and continue to hate us, we must love our enemies, and while resisting their error, we must be open to serve them in any way that we have the opportunity without compromising our message and convictions.