Imagine with me a battle against the fiercest enemy. Imagine you’ve already lost this battle once before. You’ve already seen the devastation; you know what it looks like to lose it all. You look to your leader for guidance. You look to the one in charge for the battle plan, for the strategy, the ruthless plan of attack that will surely defeat this foe.
Then imagine they ask you to go to your knees, to sing, to wait.
Sometimes this is what God asks of us. Sometimes in the midst of what we know to be a battle we could lose, against an enemy we sense has the upper hand, God asks us to stop. To wait. To worship.
In 2 Chronicles, we see Jehoshaphat go with this strategy. We see that a battle is incoming, one they’re sure to lose. The army is set up for failure, and when Jehoshaphat seeks the Lord for a plan, the plan is clear: worship me:
These men—poised for a fight—take pause, go against the training they know will give them a fighting chance, and remember who it is that should do the fighting. They are called to remember who it is that will win the battle:
And when they finally do go out to fight, the battle is literally already won. The opposing army slaughtered each other, and the people of God did not have to fight.
A few weeks ago, at a women’s retreat I felt the Lord speaking to me in a similar way. I felt resistance in my spirit to raising my hands in worship. I didn’t feel much of anything toward worship in that moment. I asked God to speak to me, to uncover what was going on. I felt the Lord reminding me of a line from a song I had heard on the radio earlier that week:
There is an enemy out there prowling around scheming to defeat us, and he certainly has the power to do so. But we have even greater power at our disposal, if we want it. By letting that resistance rule my time in worship, I was letting the enemy win a battle I wasn’t even aware was happening.
So when I raised my hands in worship that evening, I imagined that my raised hands were pushing away the enemies schemes: that above me were the negative thoughts, the lies, the circumstances that the enemy wanted to use to derail me and his purposes for me. As I raised my hands I was holding those lies at bay, I was holding a battle line with my worship.
And as I spoke the words of truth in those songs to the God I knew could defeat our enemy, I was letting my testimony defeat him:
My words were taking up the space in my mind that the enemy was attempting to fill with lies. The words I sing in worship are literally defeating the enemies attempt at taking over my thoughts:
Where the enemy whispers “you are not worthy,” we sing “He is worthy.”
Where the enemy whispers “you are defeated,” we sing “The victory is already won.”
Where the enemy whispers “you are shaken,” we sing “Christ is my firm foundation.”
Where the enemy whispers “you will fail,” we sing “He won’t fail” over and over again.
When we feel the enemy proclaiming things over our lives, let’s use our worship to fight. Let’s remember that “…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” (Ephesians 6:12).
And even if we don’t feel the battle, we don’t feel anything negative invading our souls, we can still praise because unseen things are happening. We don’t see what our praise does to the enemy every time we surrender to God. We don’t see the defeat in the enemies schemes, but it’s happening; if he is actively prowling for our souls, we can be actively holding him off with our praise.
So when you enter into worship this Sunday in church, in your living room this week or in the car on the way to work let’s remember that our worship plays a part in defeating the enemy and declares to everyone everywhere who we know is in charge of this world.
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