God is Warrior

So I'll admit it, I grew up scared of Mike Tyson. Now, anybody who grew up in the late 80s into the 90s, I believe every single man in the world at that point was scared of Mike Tyson. I mean, this was a dude who, as a heavyweight fighter, literally beat men who were huge and some of which were exquisite boxers. They were curled up on a canvas, basically calling for their mommies, needing a warm bottle of milk and a pacifier. This dude was frightening and everybody knew it. In fact, if you were a 20-something in the early 90s and you were talking with your friends, some dudes that are having a really weird conversation like, "Hey, if you were stuck in the middle of a dark alley with some bad characters, who would you want with you?" I can tell you this, at that time in the world the answer 100% of the time was Mike Tyson. Mike was a bad, bad man. Now, what's interesting is that everybody had a little bit of fear of him because he just wrecked people in a boxing ring. 
But I found it interesting that recently, he was doing an interview with some folks and I happened to see this interview. And on the interview, they were asking Mike Tyson what it felt like at one point to be the baddest man in the world. His response also scared me. Here's what he said. He said, "It may not be over yet. Anything's possible. I feel unstoppable now. The gods of war have reawakened me and ignited my ego, and want me to go to war again." Okay. The man is 53 years old, and if you'll just excuse me while I pass out when I hear those words. Because not only is he Mike Tyson and he's saying things about wanting to go to war now again, he's now conjuring up this idea of the gods of war. Now, if you don't know what the gods of war are, that's okay. What they are, they're these mythical gods that have been created by many cultures. 
You see them in the Greco-Roman culture in the ancient world, and you see them actually in a million different cultures. Think Odin, the father of Thor, he was one of those mythical figures. But you've got quite literally over 100 of those that you can actually list that were mythic gods of war who engaged in war. Now, why did they do that? Well, they did that because maybe they were driven by pride to show their prowess, or maybe they were trying to expand their kingdoms in the mythical ancient lore. Well, here's the bottom line, I'm not here to talk to you today about mythical gods of war, even though it's something that I was paying attention to because Mike Tyson referenced it. I'm actually here to talk to you about the one true God. But maybe it would surprise you as we work through this series, and we've talked about all of these things that God is, maybe it would surprise you the way that Moses described Him in a song. Listen to what our text says in Exodus chapter 15, beginning in verse number 2. 
"The Lord is my strength and my defense, He has become my salvation. He is my God and I will praise Him. My father's God, and I will exalt Him." Now, listen to this phrase, "The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is His name." Now, I don't know if that has a tendency to surprise you when you hear about the Lord being called a warrior. But it's something for us to pay attention to. And as always, what we need to do is make sure that we set up some context around it. So about 400 years before this event where Moses is writing the words of this song and talking about the Lord is a warrior, over 400 years before that, God had made a promise to a man named Abram or Abraham. This promise was a promise that He was going to bless the world, that He was going to make a nation for Himself. And that ultimately, the peoples of the world would be blessed through Abraham and specifically through Abraham's seed. 
Now, as you and I both know Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were very old, they didn't have children. So it was quite miraculous that they were able to conceive in their old age. But Abraham ended up giving birth to Isaac, and Isaac gave birth to Jacob, and Jacob gave birth to Joseph. And then as this lineage went on, Joseph who was sold into slavery by his brothers ... it was an awful thing, ended up by the faithfulness of God, and by Joseph's faithfulness to God, he ended up in a place where he was now in Egypt and he was basically second in command with Pharaoh. It was during a time of great famine. And as a result, his family who was the Israelites, this growing nation, this growing group of people were facing severe famine. And because Joseph was second in command in Egypt, and because he had stored away grain, he by the providence of God ... What they meant for evil, God meant for good. And by the providence of God, he was able to provide for his people, Israel. 
But there came a time in the life of Egypt where they forgot all about Joseph. They loved Joseph, but they forgot all about him. He had died, and now years had passed, and they forgot about him. And as the Israelites grew, these people of God, that God had promised Abraham would be. As this people grew, Egypt was a little bit ... They weren't happy with that, so they ended up putting Israel into slavery. And now the Jewish or the Hebrew slaves were too scared to fight against the mighty Egyptians, and they were under oppression for a very long time until God raised up a deliverer and his name was Moses. Moses spoke on behalf of the people. He spoke for God because God was speaking to him, and he told the pharaoh, "Let My people go." As a result, there were plagues and then God delivered His people through the Red Sea, and dealt with the Egyptians, and now was leading them to a place that He had promised Abraham. 
Not only that they were going to be a great nation, but He also promised Abraham so many hundreds of years before that, that they were going to have their own land, a land of promise. And now they were out of captivity, and they were through the Red Sea, and they were heading to the land of promise and that's when Moses wrote this song. After they had crossed over the Red Sea by the providence of God, he wrote this song to say, "The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is His name." Now, when God dealt with the Egyptians as a warrior, it wasn't because He hated the Egyptians, it was because He hated oppression. In fact, when He started communicating, when God was communicating by way of Moses to the people of Israel and setting them up as this new found country, listen to what He said in Deuteronomy chapter number 10. "For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords. The great God mighty and awesome who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes." 
Listen to this. "He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt." He was reminding them, the people of Israel, that this warrior who is God, the Lord, this warrior is a defender of the weak, and the vulnerable, and the oppressed, and the foreigner, and He expects His people to do the same. And He reminds them that they were in that position, so they should be good to people that are in that position. So when we look at this title, The Lord is a Warrior talking about an attribute of who God is, it's a fair title. And in fact, as I was reading and studying this text and studying for this message, there was a particular book called God is a Warrior by Tremper Longman and David Reid, that I took a little bit of a look into. And they divided up the nature of the warrior God into a number of different stages. 
I'm indebted to their work, though I'm not using all of their categories. But I do want to remind us of a few categories very quickly about how the Lord is a warrior and what He does. The first one is this, is that the Lord is a warrior who fights for Israel. We see that, actually in the text of Scripture. You see, God had made a promise to Abraham that, "You were going to have a people, and these people ultimately will have a land." And it was the land of Canaan. Now, there were people living in that land ... and that's something that we have to remember there. But the Canaanites that were living in that land were a wicked people. They were serving false gods, they were praying to false gods, they were sacrificing children to false gods. It was grotesque wickedness in Canaan. And through a number of overtures by God over the course of quite literally hundreds of years, they had been called to repentance but had never repented. So as a result, God used Israel to come in and take the land. 
And in their taking of the land prior to getting in there, even though Moses led them out of captivity, there was about a 40 year bypass where they had not entered the land because of some disobedience that occurred in the people of Israel. But ultimately, Moses' protege or his apprentice, Joshua, would lead them into the land of Canaan. And when Joshua got them together, Moses was gone. He led them across the Jordan River and was leading them into the land of promise. Right before they got to Jericho, notice what happened when he was face to face with a warrior. It's in Joshua 5 and it says this. "Now, when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, 'Are you for us, or for our enemies?', 'Neither.' He replied. "But as commander of the army of the Lord, I have now come.' Then Joshua fell face down to the ground and referenced and asked him, 'What message does my Lord have for His servant?' 
And the commander of the Lord's army replied, 'Take off your sandals for the place you were standing is holy.' And Joshua did so." I find it interesting that when he is face to face with someone who is named the commander of the army of the Lord, whomever that might be. Many think that this is what we would call a Christophany, a preincarnate appearance of Jesus at a time before He actually put on flesh. When he comes face to face with this commander of the army of the Lord and says, "Whose side are you on?" He says, "Neither. I'm on my side." The Lord is on His own side and He is a warrior. In this case, however, because of the promise that God had made, He was fighting for Israel against those who had rejected God, those who were oppressing others, those who were killing innocents, those who had not repented. He fights for Israel. But the Lord is not only a warrior who fights for Israel, the Lord is a warrior who fights against Israel, also in the Scripture. 
You see, what we find out is that as time marches forward after Israel becomes an actual people, and then they have judges, and then after that they asked for a king and God gives them a king. First, it's King Saul. And then it's King David. And then it's King Solomon, David's son. Right after that, everything goes south because the kingdom is divided, and now they are in a bad scenario because they start following after false gods. They start engaging in idolatrous practices. And now what God does is because His people are doing that, He stands against them and they go into captivity and exile for significant periods of time. First in Syria, and then ultimately in Babylon. So the prophets had been warning them whether that was the Prophet, Ezekiel, or Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or Amos, or others, they had been warning the people they needed to turn from these idols and turn themselves to the one true God. Because when they didn't, the warrior Gods stood against them. So we see the Lord is a warrior who fights for Israel, the Lord is a warrior who at times has fought against Israel. 
But maybe we should remember this, the Lord is a warrior who fights for His kingdom. You see, what I want us to do for just a moment is I want us to pull back a little bit and get some larger perspective because the Lord is a warrior who fights for His kingdom. I mean, why the warrior language from the outset anyway? Why are we talking in those terms? Who exactly is God fighting against at its core? When we're talking about at the really fundamental level of who God's fighting against, what is this all about? God fighting for His kingdom. Well, like most wars and how they start, they start with ego and they start with pride. It's like Mike Tyson saying, "The gods of war have awakened me and they have ignited my ego to go to war." Well, truthfully, that's how wars start generally, anyway. That's how personal wars start, they start with pride and ego. That's oftentimes how national wars start, they start with pride and ego. And the same thing is true in the war that God is fighting. Not from God's perspective, but from what He's fighting against. 
You see, when everything began, when we look at the context of Scripture and see everything from the beginning, it was good. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty and darkness the surface of the deep. And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. And then God made all of these things, the sun, the moon, the stars, the universe, people, and He said all of it was good. So for two chapters in Genesis, you're seeing the beautiful creation of God. And then in chapter 3, what you see is something enter in chapter 3 and you go, "What?" Listen to what it says in Genesis 3:1, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made, and he said to the woman, 'Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?'" 
So after hearing all about everything that is good, everything that's created and called good, now we've got this serpent in a garden convincing human beings that are created in God's image that God didn't say what He really said, or manipulating what God said to them. Who is that?  Where's that serpent from? Well, what we find out when we look through the rest of Scripture is we find out pretty clearly that this serpent is one who is emanated by the enemy of God that we would call the Satan. The Bible calls him the Satan. He actually uses the definitive article there, because the term means the adversary. So where did Satan come from? Where did all of this emanate from? Well, obviously, like everything else in all of creation, Satan, who was originally called Lucifer was a created being that was created good by a good God. A good creature created by a good God. So what happened? 
Well, we have a couple of clues in the New Testament that I'm not going to unpack for us today that I've done in the past, whether that's in 2 Peter 2 or Jude 6, that remind us that angels actually left their designated places of authority and rebelled. They were led by one in particular, Lucifer. Now, in the Old Testament, when we look at some of how this has played out, we see certainly his presence in the book of Job, and we see his presence in other places. Like if we looked in Ezekiel chapter 28, and saw this person called the king of Tyre. And while he was a real person, it also talked about this presence that animated this king, and that was the power or the influence of the evil one. We also see that in Isaiah, not with the king of Tyre, but the king of Babylon. And there's this emanating force behind the king of Babylon. 
And notice how God addresses this in Isaiah chapter 14, beginning in verse number 12. "How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn. You have been cast down to the earth. You who once laid low the nations, you said in your heart ..." Listen to how many times he says this phrase, "'I will ascend to the heavens, I will raise my throne above the stars of God, I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.' But you are brought down to the realm of the dead to the depths of the pit." This is God speaking very clearly to the emanating force behind the king of Babylon, and referring to the idea of his fall, and referring to the fact that it was pride and self-determination. Did you hear it? "I will. I will. I will." You see, you can't follow the I Am when you are full of I will. 
These things do not go together because it is pride, and ego, and self-determination that caused this rebellion. God is the only one in the cosmos who is worthy to be self-determining because He is life in Himself and He is the Creator and Sustainer of everything. But as a result of this rebellion, this kind of invisible rebellion, now you've got these competing kingdoms. That's why you have the language of war from very early on in the text of Scripture. In fact, when we see this serpent in Genesis 3, and we see Adam and Eve fall prey to that temptation, we see God's speaking to them. And notice what He says in verse number 15 of Genesis 3. God says, "I will put enmity between you and the woman ..." Talking to the serpent, "... and between your offspring and hers. He ..." In other words, the woman's offspring, "... will crush your head, serpent, and you will strike his heel." 
You realize that the very beginning we have what is called the protogospel, the gospel before the gospel that God is reminding through ... He's reminding Satan that, "Through Eve, one is going to come who is going to put on flesh and who is going to crush your head." You see, there's always been this invisible war because there's this evil competing kingdom that is set up to oppose the values of the true kingdom of God. And it has always been the plan of God, that Jesus would be the great warrior to ultimately crush the enemy. In fact, the prophets would testify about God's own warrior nature, and that this could ultimately be seen and exemplified in Jesus. Listen to what Isaiah said in chapter 42, "The Lord will march out like a champion. Like a warrior, He will stir up His zeal. With a shout, He will raise the battle cry and will triumph over His enemies." Listen to Zephaniah chapter 3, "On that day they will say to Jerusalem, 'Do not fear, Zion. Do not let your hands hang limp. The Lord your God is with you, the mighty warrior who saves. 
He will take delight. In you in His love, He will no longer rebuke you but will rejoice over you with singing.'" And the Psalmist actually got in on this as well, and they were talking prophetically about the one to come. Listen to Psalm chapter 2, "Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against His anointed ..." There's a prophecy about the one to come, the Messiah, "... saying, 'Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.' The one enthroned in heaven laughs, the Lord scoffs at them. He rebukes them in His anger and terrifies them in His wrath, saying, 'I have installed My king on Zion, My holy mountain.'" You see, the warrior nature of the great King, our great God would be exemplified in the person of Jesus. And though the nation's rage in vain, God is still going to do what God is going to do for the sake of His kingdom. 
But you see, when Jesus came and He declared the kingdom of God, and He came as a warrior to deal with the influence of the enemy, He was casting demons out of people and dealing with them along that line. And people believed but they felt deflated when He was crucified and He died. It felt like the King and the Kingdom had come to an end. But you see, the warrior nature of God was not done, because He was using death to conquer death. A very interesting thing, right? That this warrior had come to die so that He could kill death, and so that He could kill sin, and so that He could kill hell and judgment for those as a warrior that He had come to rescue. You see, that's why Paul in the New Testament actually uses some of this warrior language when he talks about what happened at the cross. Listen to what he says in Colossians chapter number 2, "And having disarmed the powers and authorities, Jesus made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross." Do you hear it? 
He disarmed the powers and authorities and triumphed over them. It's warrior language, it's the winning of war types of language. You see, Jesus warrior death and His resurrection rescues us from sin. It ultimately saves our souls when we put our faith in Him, and it begins the final defeat upon His return. Because He is just as surely as He came the first time died, rose again, ascended to the Father, He has promised He is going to return and He is going to return as a warrior to defeat the enemy and to bring in new creation. In fact, listen to how Revelation 19 describes it. "I saw heaven standing open in there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice, He judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on Him that no one knows but He Himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and His name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following Him riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen and clean. 
Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule them with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. And on His robe and on His thigh, He has this name written, 'King of kings and Lord of lords.'" You see, even at the culmination of what we see in the Scripture, the revelation that teaches us about what is yet to come in the return of Jesus to defeat sin, to defeat hell, to defeat the enemy, Satan himself, and to bring in new creation, we see Him postured as a warrior. "The Lord is a warrior. The Lord is His name." That's what Moses said, and that commentary holds up from beginning to end in the testimony of Scripture. So the Lord is a warrior. How do we respond to that? What do we do? You might say, "Well, we rejoice in that. We take great joy in that. We worship as a result of it." Absolutely true. But how practically do we respond to that? 
When we understand that the Lord is a warrior, what do we do as a result of it? Let me give you just a handful of things that I think would be good for us to remember. The first is this, fight the same war that the warrior fights. Fight the same war that the warrior fights. What do I mean when I say that? Well, we have a tendency to choose the wrong wars. You see, what we'll do is we will take up wars with people. And what we'll do is we'll demean them if they didn't agree with us, or we'll try and dehumanize them because we don't like them, or we'll demonize them. But that's not necessarily the right war of fight, because we've got to do what Jesus did. He was dealing with a very specific war, an invisible one. In fact, listen to how John records this in 1 John chapter 3 in terms of what Jesus came to do. He said, "The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sending from the beginning. 
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work." That's a significant statement. The reason that Jesus appeared was to destroy the devil's work, because there is a kingdom that is waging war against the true kingdom of God. In fact, I want you to listen to how Paul teaches us that we are supposed to respond to that in Ephesians 6. Here is what it says, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." So, my friends, this isn't about waging war necessarily with people, although sometimes people are instruments of evil. This is about actually fighting the same war that the warrior fights. That He has actually come to destroy the works of the enemy and that we wage war against those things that the enemy brings. Now, certainly those things come in different formats. Oppression, for instance. The enemy is interested in the oppression of people, both in real world ways and also in spiritual oppression. But as the people of God, we should stand against that. 
The enemy, he wants to see the vulnerable taken advantage of because he hates people. That's the idea. The values of the kingdom that opposes the kingdom of God, the values of the kingdom of the enemy, they hate and not love. They oppress instead of break free. This is the value. So we as the people of God should stand against vulnerable people being taken advantage of. As it even said in the Scripture itself, whether they're poor, or whether they're foreigners, or whether they're widowed. Or in our context, whether they have special needs, or whether they're elderly, or whether their unborn, we should be people who are standing for the most vulnerable among us. We should also stand against sin and its bondage. Because the enemy is looking to keep people in the bondage of sin, whether that's through pornography, or whether that's through addiction, or whether that's through abuse, he wants to keep them in that bondage. And we want to pray, and we want to serve, and we want to love to be able to free people from that. 
So we need to remember how we respond to the Lord being a warrior, is that we want to fight the same war that the warrior fights. But the second truth is this, we want to love the same Kingdom the warrior does. We want to love the same Kingdom the warrior does. I find it interesting that as we played it out in the Scripture, sometimes God was fighting for Israel, and sometimes the warrior was actually standing against them. You know what that reminds me? It reminds me that for God, this isn't about a geopolitical nation. This isn't ultimately about just one place. It's not about God just being for Americans, it's not about God just being for Canadians. It's not about that. And in fact, I think that in our polarized political climate that we live in, the Church of Jesus Christ ... listen to this. The Church of Jesus Christ needs to learn better how to be a Christian than an American, or how to be a Christian than a Canadian, or ... Fill in the nation.
I'm not suggesting we don't love the place where we live, whether it's America, or Canada, or whatever. Of course, we do. We're grateful to God for the nation that we're in. We're thankful for the freedoms that we have. And we should be, but not at the expense of loving it over everything else because the kingdom that the warrior loves, and the kingdom that the warrior is bringing is not about a geopolitical entity. In other words, our identity as believers is not tied up in a flag, it's tied up in a cross and an empty tomb. You see, this is the kingdom of God. But it should be that Jesus Himself is our rallying cry, and should we love our country? Absolutely. But we should love it in the way that Jesus does, in the way that Jesus intends. Sacrificially sharing and showing the love of Jesus, communicating the gospel and demonstrating the beauty of how the gospel has changed our very lives. Why? Because His Kingdom is not about geography, His Kingdom is not about ethnicity, because all of those are actually included in the people of God.
In fact, when you read this in the book of Revelation, here's what you see the commentary about the people of God in Revelation 5 and in other places, as well. It says, "And they sing a new song saying, 'You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals because You were slain. And with Your blood, you purchased for God persons from every tribe, every language, every people, every nation. You made them to be a Kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.'" So if we want to respond to the idea of the Lord being a warrior, then we want to remember that we want to fight the same war that the warrior fights, and we want to love the same kingdom that the warrior loves. But let me remind you of a third truth, I think, or third takeaway for us. We need to use the same weapons that the warrior used. What exactly am I referring to when I say, "Use the same weapons that the warrior used?" 
Well, when we see Jesus described upon His return, He's described as one who's riding a white horse. He's coming as a warrior to finish the consummation of the destruction of evil, the destruction of the unholy kingdom, and to usher in new creation. But I want you to notice in verse 11, what it says about this warrior. Here's what it says. "I saw heavens standing open, and there before me was a white horse whose rider is called ..." Notice it, "... faithful and true. And With justice, He judges and wages war." You see, the weapons that we can use as people who are standing on the side of the warrior who doesn't take sides but is on His own side. In other words, it's about us being on His side, not about Him being on ours so to speak. But when we are on His side, He claims us as His own. And we should be a people that use the same weapons that we see the great warrior King bringing to play. Faithful, true, just. 
That should describe the people of God, that we should have a faithfulness to Jesus above all things, that our commitment to Jesus is above all things. "Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you as well." The Bible says. This should be our heartbeat and truth so that we can deal with in justices when they occur, that we are people of truth. In other words, we don't lie. We don't misrepresent people when they're not around. We don't misrepresent people who are our ideological enemies. We present their ... Listen, we present their positions fairly, and then we deal with those ... And clearly, there are going to be some we disagree with. But we don't dehumanize, we don't demonize, we deal with those as people of truth. We don't engage in deception. We don't engage in manipulation. You see, when lying, or misrepresentation, or deception, or manipulation are involved ... Listen to this, we are now inculcating the values of the kingdom that stands against the kingdom of God. And we don't want to do that. 
You see, what Jesus does is by His truth, is He sets us free. By His truth, He sanctifies us or sets us apart for a holy work. He does that by His truth. And when people don't embrace that, they embrace the values of the rebellious kingdom. And here's what I know. The Lord is a warrior and it does not end well for those that choose the rebellious kingdom, because God in His justice will deal with that. And rightly, He should. But you know I am grateful? I'm grateful that one of the weapons that we have is just His presence among us. That His Holy Spirit dwells inside of us so that we now can put into action, the faithfulness that we have to Him, the truth that we have through His Word by His Spirit. And that we can be people who love justice, and who stand against oppression, and lying, and manipulation and all of those things. His presence is actually our weapon. 
I want you to think about that as this song is sung over you, and then I'm going to be back in just a moment to close our time together. This memorial day, we should rightly honor those who have given their lives in service to our country so that we can have some of the freedoms that we enjoy. But we should also remember here on this day, Sunday, the Lord's day, a day that we celebrate on this day because of the death and ultimately the resurrection of Jesus, that there is only one warrior who can save us eternally. It was at the cost of His own blood, that the Lord Jesus laid down His life so that sinful people could find forgiveness, and hope, and life in His name. I don't know if you've ever come to a place in your life where you've ever surrendered yourself to the Lord Jesus, where you've turned from your sin and you've put your faith and trust in Jesus. 
But boy, my hope is this day, my prayer for you this day is that you step out of the kingdom of darkness and step into the Kingdom of light. The true Kingdom, the one that the warrior who is the great warrior who wins the battle, who ultimately has died to save your soul, to redeem your life, to free you from the bondage of sin, and the shackles that have weighed you down whatever they may be. It's a warrior who loves you. A warrior who laid down His life, not out of obligation, but out of love. So if you've never invited Jesus to come into your life, I can't think of a better place than where you are right now, and a better time than right now to receive Jesus. If you want to talk to somebody about that, we would love to be able to do that for you. You can either contact us, thechapel.com/knowingjesus or you can even call us if you like. The number is on the screen there for you 716-631-2636. 
We have people that would love to talk to you about what it means to receive Jesus, to have your sins forgiven, your life made new, to be freed from the oppression of all that the enemy has desired for your life, and to come into freedom in knowing Jesus. Father, I pray that for every single one of us, for those that need to trust You, that they would have the courage to step out. To connect by way of computer, to pick up a phone and to call. And that You would give them the strength, Lord, to understand that the greatest decision they'll ever make for all of eternity would be the choice to put their faith in the one who died on the cross for their sin, who rose from the dead, and who is the only one who can save. The way, the truth, and the life, Jesus Christ. 
Father, I pray as well for all of us, that we would be reminded that because You, God, have revealed Yourself as a warrior, that we know that the rescue of our loves from the dominion of darkness has only occurred because we have a rescuer. Because we have a warrior who has fought for us. Thank You, Lord Jesus, for the grace and the kindness that You have shown to us, warring for our lives, dying in our place, rising from the dead as a great conqueror and the one who is going to make all things new. I pray that we would be a people who would fight the same war that the warrior fights, and who would love the same Kingdom that the warrior loves, and who would use the same weapons that You, Lord Jesus, use so that we would be known as people who demonstrate the truth, and the love, and the grace of Jesus Christ to a world that desperately needs Him. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.