Sanctification and spiritual warfare 2

Spiritual battle both comes to a Christian and is something that is provoked by the Christian. When you are regenerated by the Word and the Spirit you become marked. The devil, the world, confront you. The Old Man within you (the flesh, of the phrase: the world, the flesh, and the devil) will lay low until he is provoked by you; but once you start to provoke the Old Man within you the devil and the world will also focus on you with new intensity.

Provoking this three-front war and struggling to increase your limits for being able to glorify God in these battles is spiritual warfare, and it is part of sanctification. The very thing church Christians deny. Effort in sanctification.

Before any church Christians now fall back to the position that I've already given you to fall back on, seeing effort as God-reliant effort and therefore 'ok', I want to remind my audience that this is not what they say when you are in their environments. They even deny God-reliant effort. To them Christian (from the Pilgrim's Progress) should have stayed home with his family. (Bunyan's work is, by the way, a severe rebuke to these church Christians. Any of them that affect to be a fan of that book either hasn't read it or hasn't understood it.)