• How can you win souls, witness to a soul if you are still battling with your own spiritual conversion from your old nature to the new nature of Christ Jesus?
• How do you talk about your conversion process as a new creature being transformed in your soul if you have not surrendered your all to God and His Will?
• Are you delivered? Or are you being delivered and healed?
• Are you sanctified, declared holy, and consecrated for God’s sole purpose in the earth?
• We as born-again believers being converted to be transformed into a new creature in Christ to become a son of God need to know and understand that it is not the devil, but it is the access, power, and opportunity that we give to Satan and his demons through our flesh, its lust, desires, habits, practices, and behaviors.
• So, the devil does not make you do anything you choose him and allow him to carry out his plans through you.

The Spiritual connection between Spiritual warfare and Strongholds
Both stemming from the issues of the heart and the works of the flesh, its lust, and desires to control.

• The issues of the heart of man Jesus spoke about in St Matthew 15:18-20 when referring to what really defiles a man is in his heart out of his mouth and not the fact that he does not wash his hands.
• What is in the heart plays a crucial part in this spiritual connection between the spiritual warfare and strongholds. Why? Because the heart is really what influences our thoughts and choices that we make.
• We are born with strongholds in our stony hearts of flesh designed to shape our mindset, emotions, and behaviors to choose.
• So, to fix this our spiritual connection is to get a heart transplant replaced by the Great Physician Himself, our Creator. Ezekiel 36:26-27 speaks of a new, regenerated heart to replace the hard, stony heart we were born with.
• As a new creature in Christ, you MUST receive a heart replacement.
• The works of the flesh is sins fruit which are only evil in Galatians 5:19-21. It only produces evil works and evil fruit.
• A spiritual connection is not about indoctrinating one another or others to be believe like you, act like you, or talk like you to form a click or a bond but it is the connection of the soul and spirit in you and in others to come to Jesus.
• A spiritual connection in Salvation is not a connection made through the flesh and its feelings that will filter into your soul and spirit to reveal your spirituality.
• A spiritual connection is a sense of connection through a relationship to God through His Son Jesus.
• A spiritual connection goes beyond a shared interest or physical attraction. It is a spiritual connection that bypasses all flesh and its Will, its 5-sense knowledge in good and evil to include witchcraft, voodoo, magic, etc.
• In a spiritual connection your flesh profits nothing! It feels lonely, denied, deprived, and left out in its operation and functioning to commit sin.
• Flesh is a narcissist!
• A spiritual connection that breeds traditions and religion is an occult that includes a belief in supernatural, mystical, or magical beliefs, practices, or phenomena that are felt through the flesh, its behaviors, desires, and mannerism.
• Strongholds are issues of the heart that works in and through the flesh.
• What is the spiritual connection between the issues of the heart and the strongholds? What do they have in common?
• Strongholds are like hidden fortresses lodged within our heart and mind. They are constructed and structured through our repeated patterns of negative and evil thoughts, behaviors, and distorted beliefs.
• In Jeremiah 17:9-10 and Genesis 6:5 where God told us that the wickedness of man’s heart was deceitful and desperately wicked, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
• When we are not delivered strongholds hold us captive to prevent us from fully experiencing the freedom of a new life, its abundant life, and lifestyle in Salvation through Christ Jesus.
• Strongholds are your personal and individual barrier(s) that will hinder or prevent your relationship with God by producing sinful thoughts and negative patterns that will oppose the knowledge of good and truth of God. (This is the knowledge that is given through the Word of God to cause you and I to spiritually grow in God through Jesus Christ).
• The Word of God gives us the biblical approach in wisdom, knowledge, and understanding to spiritual warfare and its strongholds.
• Satan uses “footholds” in spiritual warfare to establish strongholds.
• Footholds are points of operations that allows Satan to exert power over us.
• Footholds impact our thinking, thoughts, imagination, emotions, and behavior.
• Satan and his demons use your past with everything that is negative, ugly, and that made you ashamed to establish these footholds over you.
• Deliverance and healing from these footholds come only from the Spirit of the Lord God, His Word, and His Truth accepted.
• Strongholds repress born-again believers until it subdues them by consistent force through their flesh to stay submitting to it and its desires.
• Spiritual warfare stems from the control of the flesh over the soul and spirit which produces a stronghold.
• Spiritual warfare is an offensive tactic of Satan against God and the soul of man.
• As you encounter your spiritual growth into your spirituality it becomes a source of spiritual conflict that will arise between God and Satan.
• Spiritual conflicts refer to the tension, strains, and conflicts of surrendering your Will as you are being transformed to the spirit being that you are to relation to your spirituality in Christ Jesus. These conflicts occur immediately when we confess, repent, and proclaim Jesus as being Lord over our lives.
• Spiritual warfare is the battle that takes place in the spirit realm between the forces of good and evil.
2 Corinthians 10:3-6
• So, strongholds such as hurt, arguing, debating, lofty opinions, and feelings that oppose the knowledge of God hinder spiritual growth and keeps many trapped in their own pattern of thinking with a behavior that is contrary to the Will and purpose of God for them.
Ephesians 6:12-13
• When we openly and honestly accept and obey the Spirit of the Word of God by addressing the issues of our heart, allow the Word to dismantle the strongholds, and seek the Spirit of God for His guidance we actively engage in spiritual warfare by breaking free from our chains of bondage that keep holding us back from the fullness of God’s love and purposed plan in our lives on earth for His glory and honor.
• Flesh is the weaker element in human nature. It is the unregenerated state of man, the seat of sin in the flesh.
Romans 6:19-20 19 I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. 20 For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness.
Romans 7:5 For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.
• Types of spiritual warfare: the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Ephesians 2:1-3
• Jesus triumphed through obedience, demonstrations, and portraits of the Spirit of God over the powers of the world (natural and spiritual) by healing sicknesses, diseases, casting out demons, opposing society’s elite, demonstrating His power over Satan and his demonic forces by and through the soul saving love of God for all mankind.
• Jesus’ completed work left us the empowerment to spiritually fight against our flesh and its Will to lust and desire the evils that will lead us back to sin and death by condemning sin in the flesh.
Romans 8:3
• Warfare with the world is not physical but spiritual. How do we fight it? We fight the good fight of faith! We fight in spiritual belief not with physical means.
• According to the prayer that Jesus prayed to the Father in St John 17:14-17 14 I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 15 I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 17 Sanctify them through they truth: thy word is truth.
• Warfare of the flesh that is in our bodies and minds.
Romans 7:18-20
• Warfare with the devil is already won and demonstrated when we obey the Word of God in Spirit and in Truth.
1 Peter 5:8
• Satan and his demons are evil spirit beings that must have a surrendered body to be legal in the earth. He is rebellious, prideful, subtle, deceptive, and will always oppose God, God’s Will, and His people. He will employ any means necessary through anyone to have his way and conflict misery on humanity and separate us from God and His Order.
• Satan works in those that are disobedient to the Word of God.
• We must continue to grow spiritually to continue to be freed from the power of the enemy of your soul.
• Progress only in the things of God that are spiritual.
• Walk by the Spirit and His Order with a press, Philippians 3:14.
• Then, go and teach, preach, and minister the Gospel as commissioned in St Matthew 28:18-20.
• We already know the end of the strongholds and the spiritual battle from the death of Jesus on the Cross and the succession of His Words completed and completed in us.

Amen

Sunday, March 3, 2024, Apostle Tracey Robinson