We’ve got to fight!

We got to fight, fight ,fight ,fight, fight for this love. – Cheryl Cole

We’ve got to fight for love, peace, hope, relationship, healed communities a restored nation.

We’ve seen a lot of fighting on our streets the summer, looting and rioting, damage to property  and someone was killed.  I don’t know how you felt when you saw all of that going on, we watched from the safety of our living room watching the news, reading newspaper headlines, but what I couldn’t escape from was a stirring in my spirit to see change.  We put together a Facebook event inviting people to pray, we went to pray meetings, there was something powerful as the church got together to pray over the nation.  There were economic and social pressures that impacted on the riots but there was also a spiritual dimension.

In his letter to the Ephesian the apostle Paul writes;

“For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places”

As the summer has gone on I’ve been challenged by what I’ve heard and read, and reminded of the spiritual battles that we are facing, to look at the current age and hope for, pray for and work for better in my generation and the one to come.  This impacts my family, my church, my job and the  wider community.

Patrick Regan recently tweeted that “hope is the refusal to accept a situation as it is”

I saw someone running from a crime that he’d attempted to commit yesterday, I saw the look of fear and desperation in his eye’s as he turned round to see if he was being chased.  I refuse to accept that, that is all that young guy is going to know, I refuse to accept that the young people who I work with have the need to self harm, I refuse to accept that children are being trafficked into our nation, I refuse to accept that people are forced to live on the street, I refuse to accept that families are living in poverty. I hope for more and I will fight for that!

In his book Rousing the Warriors, Steve Uppal writes that we, the church has settled into maintaining and that if we are to see the change that we pray for and see the Kingdom of God advanced then we have to move from that position.  I recognise in many areas of my life, including significant relationships, that I have settled into maintaining rather than seeing those areas and relationships flourish.  In thinking this through a bit I’ve likened it to the recent London riots and the reports of the Police standing by watching the destruction of property, community and lives take place.  Of course there was more to it than that for the Police that week, what else could they do right?  But we cannot be a people that stand on the sidelines and watch while lives are destroyed, it’s an issue of eternity, it’s an issue of the Kingdom now but not yet. But to echo a phrase that has been in my heart, my spirit this summer, Now Is The Time!

I’ll end with this.  In his book the Conspiracy of the Insignificant, Patrick Regan ends with a quote from William Booth, I love it so I put it together with an image, if you click on it you can download a larger size. It’s on my desktop, I keep coming back to it time and time again, I’m going to get it printed and put in many places that I can to be a constant reminder.