Lesson: Commander in Chief

This Lesson was taught to Teen Class Sunday School on the importance of being alert and taking Church Attendance seriously!

1 Chronicles 12:31-33

And of the half tribe of Manasseh eighteen thousand, which were expressed by name, to come and make David king.

And of the children of Issachar, [which were men] that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads of them [were] two hundred; and all their brethren [were] at their commandment.

Of Zebulun, such as went forth to battle, expert in war, with all instruments of war, fifty thousand, which could keep rank: [they were] not of double heart.

Ephesians 6:10-17

Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

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].

Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;

And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;

Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.

And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:

2 Samuel 11:1

And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth [to battle], that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.

 

 

In the spring of 1942, five major world powers had strategically positioned themselves for what would bring to an end the 2^nd World War. Three countries, the United States, Soviet Union, and England, had Allied themselves together in an attempt to defeat a common enemy. The Axis, Germany and Japan, though worked separately, had one thing in common, the desire for world domination. Set before you is an exact historical record of where the military generals of that day had placed their troops to set the battle in array. Each country had drafted, trained and deployed soldiers whose mission was to destroy, defeat and thwart the efforts of the enemy! Six weeks of basic training was the foundation on which each soldier was built on. During that first six weeks of training each soldier was stripped of everything they had ever learned of thought to be the "way to do things". Then through precise training, drills, and discipline the broken man was rebuilt into a lean mean killing machine. Each man was taught to obey orders, respect authority, respect his fellow soldier. Love for God and country was instilled in each soldier. Every man was trained for battle. Each soldier was taught how to handle, hold, load and fire his weapon. Each soldier was trained in hand to hand combat techniques and if captured, each soldier was taught to endure pain through interrogation, even to the death, to protect his country. The training was hard, it was rough, it demanded their all. When a soldier finished his training, and shipped out to the battlefield, we were confident as a nation that our best was fighting for us. The crippled, lame, sick, flatfooted, and coward we left at home because we wanted to assure ourselves of the best chance to win the Fight.

This generation is about to witness the greatest battle of all time, unfortunately we do not have the luxury of sending someone to fight for us. This will not be a battle of guns, tanks and fighter jets but one that is set out to destroy your soul, take your life and drag you into the Pits of Hell forever. You don’t have a choice, this battle is already brewing in your homes, in your schools, and on the play grounds. This battle has already taken prisoners in your classroom, on your playground and in your living room. The battle you are about to fight in has claimed the lives of some your friends, some your family and other teens who never had a chance. They never saw the battle coming.

 

Had they known it was coming they would have been ready. They would have armed themselves against the enemy's attacks. They would not have been caught unaware, drinking and driving, messing around with drugs, fooling around in the back seat of a car, watching things that arouse them sexually or sensually. They would not have watched things or read books that confused them and caused them to gain curiosity in the occult and confusion concerning extraterrestrial beings. However, they would have given themselves to training, studying, reading, prayer, and fasting. They would have applied themselves to Basic Training in the Kingdom of God.

You sit there now and think to yourself, this will never happen to me, I'm saved! Are you? Has the enemy gained a foothold in your life through tolerance? When was the last time you argued and debated over the Word of God? When was the last time someone close to you began to swear like a sailor and use filthy language and say things that would guarantee a beating for you if you said them in front of your own parents? Did you stop them or walked away, or did you sit idly by and become party to this tirade? When was the last time you saw something on TV that you got up and turned it off because it was offensive to you? Has the enemy crept into your lives so much that you go to PG/PG13/or R rated movies that depict sexual relations and show nudity, murders, violence, rape, devilish creatures that tear bodies to shreds and show more blood than stored at a blood bank. Did you sit through the entire movie?

How about possessed individuals like Michael Myers, Jason Voorheves, Freddy Krueger, and Leatherface who are killed a thousand times, yet continue to live and kill again and again. Are you sitting in you home watching these things? David said in Psalm 101:3 I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; [it] shall not cleave to me. Is this our attitude? Or has the battle begun for your soul and now you find yourself being sucked in deeper and deeper? What do you listen to? Does it glorify sex, drugs, rebellion, anger, fighting, and the occult? What things do you give your time and money to: Worldly Music CDs, Hollywood by going to movies, immoral magazines such and Teen Beat, Rolling Stone, YM, GQ, and various Sci-Fi rags that glorify the occult and Satanism?

 

What things fascinate you? It is pretty girls, good looking guys, aliens, magic, the occult, violence, or sex? Are you fascinated by the word of God? Do you find yourself lost in reading and prayer? Do you lose track of time meditating on the things of God or do you lose time trying to escape reality?

It only takes one of these areas to give into and you are headed down a road of destruction. You do not have to dabble and play with things of the world to have a testimony. There are people going to hell sitting in your classrooms and living rooms that are messed up in those things! You don’t need to visit their demise to help them. They need someone who is standing up to sin to be an example. They need someone to show them the way out. I know it is hard living for God in a world that blasts you from every direction and appeals to every sense. But if those you love are going to be saved, you are the only one to reach them. If you have a lost parent, don't think someone at work or knocking on their door will win them to Christ if they see you messing up and not living for God on the weekend by what you watch, say, do, and places you go! Never! God as brought you to this time and this place for a reason, to do battle for lost souls. You may think to yourself, I'll never get too caught up in these things. I would assure you if Ted Bundy, who raped, murdered and cut off the head of a 9 year-old girl after molesting and raping her could return from the grave, he would tell you that he curses the day he ever saw his first pornographic magazine and movie. It was his own confession, before he was executed, that these things were what drove him to kill. How about the parents who buried their son who committed suicide after listening to a Heavy Metal CD 24hrs straight. I bet he would love to come back and relive that day. It would be spent burning and destroying every occultish fascination he had from posters, tapes, CDs and books. You see you'll run out of here this morning, the sun warming your face and leave here like you haven't a care in the world. Your mind is on "Real Life". Unknown to you though there is an enemy out there that is strategically planning your demise. Our covert agents have infiltrated the enemy camp, many have lost their lives, but one brought back a small portion of the enemy's plan to destroy you. It may surprise you to hear this; the enemy is not planning an onslaught, instead his technique is one you would not have noticed, one you would not have been aware of until it is too late. Thankfully one fearless commando risked his life and brought back this battle plan:

Our reliable sources indicate that this is a training tape of an older demon named Screwtape teaching his younger nephew Wormwood how to lead his assignment straight to Hell!

(Made a Video of a Demon doing a Training Video, Played a heavy metal CD in the background while I dictated this letter had a Glow in the Dark Skull Mask and Twilight settings on the Video Tape Recorder with Very Low lights. This is the first chapter from the Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis.)

My dear Wormwood,

I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future.

That's the sort of thing be cares about.

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result! Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real."

Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (oh, that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defense by argument, I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control, and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line, for when I said, "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning," the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind," he

was already halfway to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape, and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safe guard against the aberrations of mere logic." He is now safe in Our Father's house.

You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life." But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of modern investigation." Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE

 

You see? Satan does not need to attack you head on, just slip in and trip you up a few times and then preoccupy your mind with "real life" and keep you from repenting or slowly get you so far off track that you become blind to conviction. A battle is raging in the spiritual realm, and the prize is your soul. The difference between this battle and all other battles in history is two fold: 1.) In this battle the Prize can fight back and 2.) In this battle we have a champion who has already defeated the enemy more than once and in more ways than one, and He has left his training manual for us to follow. And we have a secret weapon! Inside our hearts is a war room that our General has designed to accommodate him alone. From inside this chamber he directs us in battle and leads us to victory. He puts power, knowledge, strength, spirit and the Word in that secret war room.

The problem is, so many times, before he get in and establishes a beach head and sets up a base camp and His Head Quarters we have already given in to the enemy and he has filled it with junk. Many times when the Commander in Chief shows up what was designed to be His War Room looks more like pig pin. We have used it as a storage room where we keep grudges, hatred, lust, scars from drug and alcohol use and abuse. His War Room is turned into a POW camp where we are held captive to sin and habit.

The Commander still wants to rescue us and establish His foothold for us to wage battle against the enemy that has captured us. But before he can we must be willing to participate in His escape plan. If we are not willing then the enemy will continue to torture us with sin until he finally kills us! Then the battle is over and you are his forever! But if you are willing to climb out of the pit where you are held captive when he breaks through the enemy forces then our Commander will setup His War Room in your heart and lead you to some major victories over the enemy.

His escape plan is simple and easy to follow. One of the greatest soldiers of all time lead 3000 people in a prisoner of war rescue mission in one day. These 3000 did not even know they had been captured and worst of they had killed the Commander himself, we know now that the Commander's death was a decoy.

The Commander used the cover of death to infiltrate the enemy camps and bring back the keys to all the cells that holds the prisoners captive. It was a scary 3 days, but when the Commander emerged victorious from His covert operation, He walked right up to His best trained soldier and told him to go and loose everyone he could. This soldier did just that! He marched right into the enemy's camp and unlocked the cages of 3000 people and gave the order to move out. This confused and shocked the prisoners. So they asked how is it that we can escape. The Soldier explained how the Commander has used death to slip behind enemy lines and take the keys to their cages. This excited the prisoners into asking if they can join this Army to help free others from the bondage they had been in. This is when the soldier showed them the escape plan. He said first you have to turn from your sins and face the Commander and ask for him to forgive you. Then you must follow his example and be baptized. Baptism will wash away all the sin in your heart. This cleans out the War Room so the Commander can move in. That’s the best part, cause when the Commander moves in He saves you from the enemy. From that point on you are ready to wage war. Some training is necessary, but most of it is on the job training. Just follow his orders and he will lead you through victory after victory. And finally, when the war is just about over and he is ready to drop the BIG ONE. The Commander is going to give the command to all of His troops to pull out. This is the important one, if you miss this order you will be doomed for sure. We do not know when this command will be given, and only those who have their hearts setup as War Rooms and not pig pins will get the order and will be saved from his ultimate weapon.

You are here today for one of two reasons. If you do not have your heart setup as a War Room for the Commander then this is your chance to escape from the enemy and meet with the Commander. Today may be your last opportunity, when the enemy finds out I have slipped in to help you out and unlock your cage he will definitely send his troops and double his guards. He may even execute you! Remember he wants you dead, he only keeps you alive to torture you. If your heart today is not a War Room then here is your chance to break out of the POW camp. The rest of you I will break up into two categories

 

This Sunday School class is you classroom, your training ground, you briefing room. It is in this room that you learn about how others have defeated the enemy and how you must go about your fight against the evil forces that attack you every day. This is not a game, we have lost too many soldiers, good soldiers, because they did not stand the watch. The training manual tells us how the good man of the house would not have let the enemy slip in a steal his stuff and kill his family had he know when he was coming. He would have stood guard and watched for him. Good soldiers have fallen in the heat of battle because they we not watching out for the enemy. They were not paying attention in training class, refused to read the training manual and had let down the lines of communication with the Commander. They missed the instructions and lost the battle. This is not a game, it is for real. What you do, how you act and how you react to the things said in this training room will have eternal consequences. In this room you are taught everything you need to do battle. If you miss it, you will lose the battle and miss the call of the Commander to pull out. If your actions cause someone else to miss out on training and instruction, the Commander will hold you personally responsible for that fallen soldier.

Thank you for allowing me to brief you this morning, your instructor will issue you further instructions.

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