Rick Warren is waging war on Sunday.
Recognizing his enemy will be tricky since he'll be fighting “The Invisible
War.”
That must explain the shades.
Indeed, if you are a Believer like the Purpose-Driven pastor of Lake Forest's mega- Saddleback Church, you should be girding for war, too.
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As the Christian Post reports, Warren last Sunday launched a summer sermon series titled “The Invisible War” that is dedicated to defeating spiritual forces that “attempt to destroy God's
purposes for your life.”
Explaining the series to his flock watching at Saddleback, online or over the satellite the day before the Fourth of July (how revolutionary!), Warren contrasted current events with Bible
verses from Chapter 7 of Romans that illustrated Paul's
“internal struggle that goes on with all of us.”
It's not the struggle whether to get fries or onion rings with that, as Warren explained: “I read today that by the time our troops are completely withdrawn from Afghanistan, we will have been fighting there for 13 years-making it America's
longest war in history. But you are involved in an even longer war. It
is the war against you. It is an unseen war that we call spiritual
warfare. It's a war that happens from the moment you're born to
the moment you die. The Bible tells us that there are three
enemies that are warring against you, your family, and your soul. And
this battle has eternal implications.
“The Bible calls the three
enemies the world, the flesh, and the devil. The world is the corrupt
value system around you. The flesh is the sin nature within you. And
Satan and his minions are coming against you.”
Great band name, Pastor Rick: Satan and His Minions.
He'll go on and on (and on) about the war and how to win it in coming weeks. In the meantime, he urged his followers to “live according to your new life in the Holy Spirit. Then you
won't do what your sinful nature craves.”
Replace “Holy Spirit” with “weight-loss program,” and he sounds an awful lot like Jenny Craig.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.