How God Began Training Me for Spiritual Warfare

For 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.

- Eph 6:12

An excerpt from Chapter 17 of my autobiography, titled: Spiritual Warfare, Prophecy, Dreams, and Temptation in the Rainforest

“I am about to teach you about a part of life which you cannot see with your eyes.  It is an invisible battle, and you cannot win it with a positive mental attitude.” - God, (to me in 2009).

 

February 19-23, 2009 - Although we stayed at a nice resort, two of our days, were spent going deep into the rainforest, through miles of winding waterways in long dugout canoes, and hiking up steep and narrow trails behind our barefoot Indian guides.  By boat, we arrived on the shore of a primitive native Indian village where the villagers came out to greet us and sing for us.  It was extraordinary to see in real life, what I had only ever seen in a BBC documentary.  They lived in Bamboo stick homes, high off the ground, with thatch roofs and many of the women were still walking around topless, carrying small children under their arms like surfboards.  The little children were all naked and jumping around and swimming in the murkiest of waters, by a dugout canoe, near the shore.  I couldn’t help but notice their fearlessness, in a place where I knew there must have been alligators living.  The locals made some delicious fish and fruit for us, which we ate out of large leaves which they had folded so neatly into a sort of cone shaped cup.  The trip turned out to be truly an incredible experience for me, and not just because of the exotic landscape and experiences.

As can be read in detail in my autobiography, leading up to this desperately needed business trip, Keri became very angry and feeling that I was again going on a “vacation” while she stayed home with the children. She was once again filled with this poisonous hate and bitterness towards me.  I walked out of the house so discouraged and I went for the first time into our backyard woods to pray and seek God’s help in the matter.

After how wonderful our marriage had been in late 2008, I cried out to God in such pain and frustration about what in the world was going on with her.  I felt like I couldn’t win.  First, she was mad at me because I was doing free video work for the kingdom of God, and now I was trying hard to make a big sale to please her but because it was in some exotic place that she wasn’t getting to go to, she was mad as hell again.  As I was walking through the woods, humbled and needy, I heard the Spirit speak these words to my spirit, “I am about to teach you about a part of life which you cannot see with your eyes.  It is an invisible battle, and you cannot win it with a positive mental attitude.”  Instantly, I knew that God was speaking to me about spiritual warfare, the topic I had so often avoided in my Christianity.

It was around this same time when I started seeing 666 for the very first times.  After the divorce, starting in 2010, God would show me he number 666 over 150 times throughout the divorce from Keri, to warn me in advance of something bad coming. My parents, who were not even true believers in Christ, saw this happen over and over again, where I would come in and tell them that I saw 666 two or three times that morning, and usually within a few hours (always within 24 hours), there would come some new strike. They saw this happen over and over again, until they could no longer deny that God was indeed doing this. It was so precise that even my parents, who were not true believers in Christ, could no longer deny that God was indeed doing something supernatural to tell me the future, by communicating to me this way.

This was His amazing way to train me and teach me to associate every new move from Keri, or her attorney, with an attack of Satan. Had the Lord not done this, I would have simply attributed everything happening, to Keri’s bitter and unforgiving heart, and the natural reasons that people do things like this to each other. I would have seen Keri as my enemy, not Satan. 

Instead, the Lord wanted me to repeatedly associate all of this antagonistic activity from her, with the invisible spiritual war that I had still been so ignorant of.  Satan is the spirit who is now at work in people like Keri, those who are disobedient (Eph 2:2).  The disobedient have simply made themselves available like pawns on a chess board, and Satan then takes them captive to do his will (2 Tim 2:26)  They are indeed our enemy, but we cannot win a spiritual war by fighting against flesh and blood.  This is a different kind of warfare which requires totally different weapons.  This was a supremely important lesson the Lord taught me right at the start of my learning to walk with him.  He used Keri’s disobedience and stubborn unrepentant sin, allowing Satan to take her captive, in order to teach me long suffering in spiritual warfare.  God used Keri in a remarkably similar way He used Saul for David.  Saul’s disobedience against God led him to being taking captive by an evil spirit, from the Lord, which then was used to declare approximately 10 years of hard war against the future king David.

For 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. - Eph 6:12

These are the nations the Lord left to test all those Israelites who had not experienced any of the wars in Canaan (he did this only to teach warfare to the descendents who had not had previous battle experience. - Jud 3:1-

The Remarkable Three Part Prophetic Dream I Had Which Told the Future of My Spiritual War with Satan.

On Monday night, February 22/23, 2009, the night before we left to go back to the US, I had a very remarkable dream.  I rarely have dreams that are anything more than nonsense from my own imagination, but I sensed immediately that this dream was from God.  Unlike any dream I’ve ever had, this dream happened in three separate, connected, yet unfinished scenes one right after another.  This dream was entirely prophetic, and just this year after the Lord showed me the final meaning of the whole dream, I had the different scenes drawn up, by an artist, to better illustrate this remarkable mercy from the Lord, to have shown me the future, as an encouragement in my long suffering for Him.

Then, on the last night of the trip, all forty of us met for dinner right on the historic Panama Canal, where the huge cargo ships pass right by the outside seating at the restaurant.  During dinner, there were three older ladies sitting directly across from Larry and I (see photo above at dinner table, taken perhaps an hour or so before the prophecy was spoken to me, sitting on the left across from the three ladies). I could tell that these women were much further ahead in their relationship with God than I was.  I was not yet enjoying God’s personal guidance and daily presence as I do today.  One of these ladies was an attorney from Panama City Beach, FL, and after asking my permission to share, she said in a very matter of fact tone, “Michael, God is going to use you to touch millions of people’s lives for His kingdom, but there’s something important he needs you to learn and understand first.”  

The two ladies she was sitting with showed their immediate agreement with her words.  Naturally, I was excited about what she said, but I remained reserved, feeling even a bit skeptical, because I did not know who this lady was, or if she was legitimately hearing from God.  Perhaps she was just saying this because she was impressed with my talk or because she wanted to be known as a “prophet” who speaks for God.  There are many people who get carried away in their own ego and emotions, telling others, “God told me to tell you…. this or that,” when it’s really just their own corrupt imaginations speaking.  I cannot remember an exact time or example, but I have no doubt that even I have done this before.

But then, she went on to say, “Michael, your whole life you have been thinking about the outcome.  You don’t do anything without first thinking about the results.  God would have you learn to become obedience based in your thinking and leave the outcomes to him.” At hearing this, I broke down right there at the dinner table and started to weep in front of them all, because now I knew for a fact that God was confirming a very specific word to me through this godly woman.  Unknown to her, this subject had first come to my attention back in January of 2008, when I started noticing that God appeared to be speaking to me and confirming His words to me through a daily devotional I was subscribed to. 

On Monday January 14th, 2008, I received in my inbox a remarkably timely devotional entitled “Move On” and the verse that day was Exodus 14:15 which reads ..."Why are you crying out to Me? Tell the Israelites to move on." Incredibly, this was the same verse that our pastor had preached on the day before in church, and this when I was just sitting around waiting for the end to come with Revelations and not knowing what I should do.  I knew God was telling me to move forward with downsizing the business and to stop sitting around sulking, waiting for a miracle that wouldn’t come. 

The very next day’s devotional was entitled, “Obedience-Based Decisions Versus Skill and Ability”.  At that time, my skills and ability in sales and my always being focused on the outcome, were still getting in the way of me simply learning to trust and obey God, no matter what He said.  Since the time that devotional came in, my friend Larry Smith and I had both talked about this subject several times, and it had just come up again as a hot topic for me, just before I came on this trip.  Now, here I was sitting in front of a godly woman whom I barely knew, and she was confirming this exact same message.  I knew this was no coincidence.

While still eating dinner, in my peripheral vision, I had seen another man a few seats away, turned backwards from his dinner table, patiently waiting to speak with me.  Having not heard what this first woman said to me, this man shocked me by saying nearly the exact same thing.  Despite all the turmoil waiting for me back at home in the marriage, I was so encouraged because I knew God was speaking to me loud and clear.  When I look back on this, I can see that this message on obedience-based thinking begins to set in motion the promise which was given to me back in 2002, when that lady/angel said, “God will be magnified and glorified through your obedience.”

I can look back from here and see why Satan was fighting so hard through the antagonism of Keri to try to stop me from taking this trip.  So far, I had had the most remarkable prophetic dream I’d ever had, which was warning me of great spiritual warfare that was coming against me.  Then I had a most encouraging prophetic word spoken to me about God using me in the future to impact millions for the kingdom of God, plus an incredible confirmation of a word from God, regarding obedience, which I was to focus on.