The Battle

  I love epic war movies.  From movies like "Gladiator" and "Robin Hood" to "Braveheart", "The Patriot", and "Troy", they all strike a chord in me at some level.  The fighting and the cinematography is always interesting, but I like the stories to most, which I've discovered actually have very little variation.  Generally, our hero starts out on top of things, whether he's a lead general for the Roman war machine or a respected war veteran, he's got everything going for him.  At some point though, things take a sharp downhill turn, and this is usually at the hands of our primary antagonist.  Our hero then begins his new quest that carries throughout the rest of the movie, his quest to get revenge on the one who caused his troubles.  This quest culminates in our hero coming face to face with his enemy, battling him, and in the best cases, killing him, thereby exacting his revenge for the misery that was caused.
  If you think about it, Christian's live out their own versions of this story almost on a daily or weekly basis.  The trouble is that we don't fight against other people; we fight against our own sinful nature, the wretched thing that we're stuck struggling against until we die because while we are new creations in Christ(2 Cor. 5:17), we are still here on Earth, exposed to things that tempt us to act against God's will.  Not only do we struggle against our own nature, we fight against the very legions of Hell, who are bent on making our lives difficult and causing us to fall (Ephesians 6:12).  These aren't things you can see or feel most of the time, though they are real and have made manifestations through possession.  More often, they are the source of those little things that anger you so much; that bad customer who seems to complain about everything you try to do, the person driving forty miles per hour in the left lane of the highway, the creeping doubt of your salvation.  All these things are meant to trip us up so that we forget about God and fall away.
  But just like no warrior goes into battle unprotected, God provides us with all the armor we'll need for our struggle.  We're given a helmet,belt, breastplate, leg guards, a shield, and a sword, all provided from God himself (Ephesians 6:13-17).  All this armor comes from within ourselves, from the knowledge of who God is, what He's done, and what He says He will do for us.  It's meant to serve as protection from the schemes of the devil and his minions, shielding us from their strikes.  Moreover, we're not meant to fight completely alone.  We're supposed to be surrounded by our brothers and sisters in Christ, who are there to help us break from from sin and pray for us as we go through our battles (Hebrews 12:1 and Ephesians 6:18).
However, when the final battle comes and we're facing our primary antagonist, our Commodus if you will, they can't fight for us.  We have to rely on God to work through us and empower us to defeat the enemy.  If we try to do it alone, we will fail.  We might think we can beat it on our own, but the fact is that we really can't.  The only way to make the victory stick is to have God help us, and this is where a lot of people falter.  They charge into battle relying on their own strength, get knocked down, then look at God and ask what happened.  God is meant to go before us and behind us, surrounding us in His protection not so that we can claim the victory for ourselves, but so that we can say what God did for us.
  So Christians face battles on a regular basis.  We struggle against ourselves and against the world and the legions of Hell itself.  Oftentimes we can't see our enemy, but we know they're there because our walk is faltering or being challenged.  The only way to win these battles is to put on your armor and ask God to enable you to win this fight, to go out and face your worst enemy with no fear because you know God is with you, and He will not let you fall.  That is the battle Christians face.