“You are worthy,

our Lord and God,

to receive glory

and honor and power,

for you created all things,

and by your will

they were created

and have their being.”

Revelation 4:11 NIV

Sometimes we feel overwhelmed, drowned, or crushed by unpleasant feelings due to the circumstances of our lives, our current situations, our past mistakes, experiences of trauma or grief, or other extreme situations. Sometimes we worry about things we can’t really control. Things can make us feel sad or angry. We feel irritated or frustrated. We feel anxious or nervous. We feel guilt or shame.

This condition of cycling through unpleasant emotions is something we are all doomed to experience in our lives due to the spiritual warfare in which we are all engaged in this world. Our souls, in Christian theology, are in constant warfare with three enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Our souls were not born of this world. We were each created by God in the eternal. God has known each and every one of us human beings since before we were in the wombs of our mothers, before we came to be in this world and even after we will have left it in the future.

Think of walking through a tree-filled cemetery or an old graveyard on pasture land. You see headstones with inscriptions or just oddly-angled stones with no inscriptions, maybe even a wooden cross or some other kind of grace marker. Imagine seeing a name, a birth date, and a death date, and maybe even a short collection of words that tell a story or a Bible verse or poem. All these words and numbers represent is a record of a life in this world. But we all came from the eternal before we were formed in the wombs of our earthly mothers and we all will return to the womb of the eternal long after our earthly remains turn to dust.

While we are in this world we must learn to not let it corrupt us and to not become conformed to the ways of this world but to get connected to the power of Jesus and to love Jesus and obey His commands. We are each called to sacrifice our selves and pick up and carry our own crosses, as Jesus did for us all, to stay connected to God, in Jesus, and to surrender to and serve Him.

Also while we are carrying out our individual callings to fulfill God’s Will and purposes we must live in this world in the flesh. We must each learn how to balance our sinful natures, the flesh, our earthly desires, with our callings to be holy, to love and serve God, not giving in the the enemies of the world and the flesh. We are to repent of our sins, to thank God for what we have and even for what we don’t have, and to ask Him for forgiveness even though we have already been forgiven through His love and mercy and grace. God loves people and the world so much that He sacrificed His only Son I n order to save us and to save the world.

We can’t fight these three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil, on our own. We need God. For in God we can already already claim the victory. He has never lost a battle. God wants us to learn to trust and to depend on Him to show us the next step in every circumstance, in every situation, in every moment of our lives. He calls us to not worry about anything but to pray about everything.