And yet, many days what kept me going was you. Yes, you—the God’s man reading these words. The reason you have this book in your hands is because you have been called by your King for this hour. You are being asked to join the company of other mighty men to be the tip of the spear in the war against evil. Just the word fight resonated with your soul and spirit. You are cognizant of the smell of war in your own life, and you see it in your world. That willingness to fight is being affirmed by God’s Spirit. Your training as a disciple is ready to go the next level. Your strong, confident, and fully surrendered presence is going to be needed. Your quickening to the battle is at hand.

I know this feeling well. Writing Fight was unnerving and necessary for me. Reading Fight will be the same for you. The realities and truths you will confront in these pages will both unnerve you and compel a necessary faith response. More bluntly, from this time forward you will need to change the way you address the challenges of life to account for evil and its presence in and around you. In effect, you are being handed a pair of night vision goggles (another topic we’ll take on later), and you will see “movement” of evil that was previously hidden. You will feel the apprehension one experiences when he is considering war. Satan wants you to feel the fear.

God will replace that fear with Himself. These are how all rites of passage feel to a surrendered God’s man. God’s men are filled with spiritual tension because something is actually at stake. There is the tension you feel when your faith and the reality of your responsibility to it collide. Risk dealt with this. Then there is the tension of becoming the man you were created to be versus the man you thought you ought to be. Dream addressed this issue in your life. Then there is the rite of passage most men do not have the stomach to address: facing the reality and tension of dealing directly with evil. Fight will stretch you again and again to see, engage, face, call out, and demolish evil with confidence and skill through Christ. So men wearing spiritual skirts need not apply. Jesus didn’t own one, and as His representative possessing His authority, neither should you. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). Take heart, you have an excellent Mentor.

But let’s stow the macho talk for a second and get down to the sweat and blood of what’s to come.

Your Attitude and Your Stand

Your attitude about evil reflects your stand against evil. The great men of faith understood this, and as God’s man, so must you. To help you with this, we need to think about evil and our fight with it in uncomplicated terms that are consistent with Scripture and practical to apply. We need to think better before we can fight better. The “We’ve got Jesus, yes we do. We’ve got Jesus, how about you?” approach is as effective as it sounds. The Bible does not support it, though it might work at vacation Bible school. In fact, the more emotional you are in warfare, the sooner you die. So in the interest of living to fight another day, let’s replace emotional and unsuccessful strategies with intelligent and intentional ways of thinking about and fighting evil. For starters, let’s wipe the board clean of what we think we know about evil and resolve to stick to Scripture’s direction and plan for how we are going to prepare for the fight.