ON THE VANGUARD

SPIRITUAL PROTECTION
“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”
Proverbs 22:6

Looking back at parts of my childhood, I can see God had a hand on me. I was raised in a home where love was abundant and God was given first priority. Our family would go to church every Sunday morning, night, and Wednesday night, as well as most every special event. And it wasn’t that we just went, but we were involved. Dad was an usher and mom was on the dance team. My siblings and I were involved in the different children’s and youth groups according to our age and in some fashion were using our talents for God. So then, with all this positive Christian-life flowing in and out of us like blood in our veins, why did I find myself wooed so easily by the enemy, and attracted to pornography? In a way I have known the answer for years. The enemy wanted to take me out of commission. But as I was reading over the weekend in a book authored by Perry Stone, I found more confirmation and basis for my hypothesis.
In his book, Purging Your House, Pruning Your Family Tree, Perry Stone writes:
"Throughout history, the adversary has set his focus on infants and children, especially during major prophetic seasons when God was raising up a deliverer for His people or for His nation. The pharaoh of Egypt assigned the Egyptians midwives, and later, all the Egyptian people, to cast every newborn Hebrew son into the Nile River…Centuries later, Herod heard that a king of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem. Out of fear, he commanded Roman soldiers to slay all infants under two years of age. Through God’s protection, both Moses and Jesus escaped from these decrees of death.”
These two examples prove my point. The devil longs to take us out at an early age. I was eleven when I was first introduced to porn. And it wasn’t like I went out searching for it; it found me. While taking a simple walk I found an adult magazine that had been tossed to the side. I picked it up and although I was disgusted, I was hooked. Years later, as an adult, I was still battling the same issues. And why not, as Stone also writes, “Adults who are struggling today were children only yesterday. Many who battle addictions and bondages first encountered the snares of the enemy as children.”So why should this matter? And why make this today’s devotional? The answer is because two things need to happen if we plan to stand on the vanguard. One, we must first come out of the addictions we are in. Not everyone is in pornography. Others are into drugs, addicted to alcohol, given to prostitution, what have you. But this is the time to come out; to cry out to God to forgive us for our sins and surrender ourselves to Him. Only He can break the chains of our bondage. But the second thing is this. We must stand up as parents and protect our children. We are given the task to train up a child in the way s/he should go, but are we? Are we standing in the gap for our children and defending them from the enemy’s onslaught? We parent the next generation, the next leaders, and the next deliverers. We are spiritually responsible for the legacy that God gives us. Are we standing?
The enemy’s main plan is to steal, kill, and destroy, and he will start young. He’ll work his way in there and twist and deceive and lure, so that when the time comes for the child to stand up, he is absent. Too many have been absent when it was their time. So then, let us stand up so that this does not continue. Let us seek God’s power to put aside the sin that entangles us, so that its web will no longer entangle those who follow us, and begin now to claim the next generation for God. Let us raise up the next generation to hear and obey God’s voice, and resist the devil.