Confront and Conquer: The Warrior’s Focus

Kim Crabill: Hello everyone, and welcome back to Strengthen Your Walk. I’m Kim Crabill.

Watch Confront and Conquer with Kim Crabill

Casey Gomes: And I’m Casey Gomes.

Kim: Thank you for joining us for this series, “Confront and Conquer.” Providing biblical principles to reveal, revive, and restore the warrior inside you. In our last session, we talked about discerning the path that God wants us to take with our briefcase burdens.

Let’s talk about some things that he may want us to confront along that path, Casey. We talked about the principles of Jeremiah 6:16. Remind us really quickly what were those four principles?

Casey: I’m happy to. They are pause, ponder, pray, and proceed.

Kim: Absolutely. The four “P’s.” If you can remember that, it will help you memorize these things that we’re talking about. But we must remember that when we pray so many times we think that praying is just one part. I just talk. But in reality, praying has two parts that we have to remember. We talk to God, but then we quieten ourselves to hear from Him. From our previous days, we’ve learned how to know His voice. That this is possible.

No matter where you are, no matter what you think about yourself God loves you and He wants to talk to you. So, as we were talking last week in our principles, when we get to the word pray we need to pause there again and listen to what God has to say to us. What I’ve learned when we get to the principle of praying is that we talk and then we listen. I found that most of the time God has a lot to say to us.

In this study, let’s use Hebrews 12:1 as our catalyst of how God may want to talk to us. Would you read that for us?

Casey: I would. It’s one of my favorite passages in the Bible. “Throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

Kim: That tells us right there that there are things for us to do as we’re listening for God, as we’re walking this path with Him, as we’re seeing our briefcase burdens turn into whatever it is that God has for us. The blessing, the rest, the things that we’ve talked about.

For memory sake here, I have put this into four “R’s” for us to talk about. Let’s talk about that to start with. Let’s start with the first three. Remember what we talked about in the study?

Casey: I do. It’s renew, rid, and reconcile. These first three are very important to start with.

Kim: Okay, let’s dive into that. What does renew mean?

Casey: Renew means what’s hindering you? What’s in the way? It’s not a sin. It’s not necessarily bad. It’s not too much TV or too much of something. But it’s whatever you’re doing that is keeping you from what God would want you to do. Those are the shackles He’s asking us to remove when He’s talking about that race in Hebrews.

Kim: Absolutely! You know something that I just thought about? I feel like we need to talk about ridding even false thinking in our mind. For example, a lot of men when they first hear this are thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to do that. That’s a sign of weakness.” That’s not what we need to rid ourselves of because … meekness is not weakness.

Casey: Yes, I agree. And I think what we’ve learned over the years is — as we talked about this earlier — that’s not God talking to us. A lot of times that negative voice is something that we have in our brain, or it’s something that our father or an uncle or a coach said to us that’s repeating in our head. So, we want to rid ourselves of that. We need to stop thinking those things and thinking about those negative thoughts because those are the anchors that are weighing us down. We need to make sure that those aren’t things that are going to allow us to govern our behavior. We want to get rid of those negative thoughts.

Kim: Absolutely. Because a lot of times when we’re thinking about being in line with God we think about doing, doing, doing. But we also have to rid.

Reconcile. That’s a biggy. And we can go into Matthew 5:24. But what does reconcile have to do with dealing with our burdens in our briefcase?

Casey: It’s this idea that they are there no matter what. Keeping them hidden isn’t doing us any favors. We need to reconcile them. We need to — as we said before — not just open them up but once they’re out bang the bottom of that briefcase. Get them out so that we can reconcile them, so we can realize that they are there and they’re not gonna go anywhere if we just leave them in there. We’ve got to take them out and reconcile them, deal with them, and bring them forth.

Kim: And sometimes reconciliation means going to someone that maybe we have hurt or someone that has hurt us and really being able to sit and talk with them. That’s how my ministry began. Reconciliation with my past and with a lot of hurt and abuse that was in my past. Many times that’s what we must do — to think about that and to feel like there’s great courage that comes with doing that.

So, renewed relationship with Christ. Rid things of your life that are not necessary thinking or habits or whatever. And then, to be able to reconcile with those around you, maybe that you just need to go to. Matthew 5:24 is a good principle on that. But the Bible tells us then once you do these — rid, renew, and reconcile — there’s a fourth “R.” Casey, what is that?

Casey: This is my favorite. It’s the one that I typically do the most of. And that’s run, which is moving forward. And this comes out in the Scripture from Hebrews. God wants us to run. So many times I hear people say, “God will provide and they pray. I’ll wait and God will provide.”

I find myself thinking the same thing. He already did provide. Now, let’s go do it. Let’s go forth. So, we do want to pause. But then, God wants us to eventually take action and to run and to go forth. To move forward in a way that He wants us to for our goals and our dreams.

Kim: Absolutely. So, if you take the two Scriptures from last time and this time, you can begin to draw out a picture of being able to know what to do when you don’t know what to do because we want to do what God wants us to do. Not just what we want to do. So, go into the Scriptures this week, sometime tonight, and really begin to write out these Scriptures.

God is not about what you have done in your past, but how He wants to use it in your future. Nothing in your briefcase has negated what God has for you (Romans 11:29). The plan, the gifts, the talents to which you were born are just as real today as they were then. So, warrior, you can continue to use all your energy wishing things hadn’t been the way they were, but that’s not going to change a thing. Here’s what a warrior like you can do: refocus. It’s time to quit fighting your past and it’s time to begin fighting for your future.

Take time to think about what you can do. Get in the fight that matters. Confront what needs to be renewed, deal with what needs to be gone, and think about calling up that person who God has put on your heart to maybe have a reconciliation with. Remember, friend, we can’t conquer what we don’t confront. But as we confront, Romans 8:37 assures us that God has already made us more than conquerors through Him. We can hold onto that promise as warriors.

Thank you for joining us. We pray that this “Confront and Conquer” series will strengthen your walk.

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