Rabbi Schneider - Continuing to Overcome
The power for breakthrough resides in each one of us. And the reason I say that, beloved one, to you is this. Jesus lives in you. And Jesus is the God of breakthrough. Think about it. He was put to death. His heart stopped beating. His blood stopped pumping. He was in the grave. And yet the Spirit of the Living God quickened Him, caused Him to come back to life, lifted Him out of that grave through the atmosphere, and He caused Him to ascend all the way to the right hand of the Father. Incredible breakthrough. He conquered the grave. He conquered death. He conquered every principality in every power, openly triumphing over all of them. And now He's seated at the right hand of the Father. That is ultimate spiritual breakthrough. And the spirit of the winner, the spirit of King Yeshua lives in you and I. What this tells us is that our life is going to be made up of a series of remarkable breakthroughs if in fact we have the heart for breakthrough in us, if we have a passion for breakthrough, if we're not going to be satisfied until we're free indeed.
You see, Jesus said, "If the Son sets you free you shall be free indeed. And if you continue in My word, then you're truly disciples of mine, and you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free". Don't you want to be free? Well, if you truly in your heart have an aching passion that you're not going to be satisfied until you're free, there's going to be something that's going to be driving you to press forward and to push on, to ascend in the Spirit so that you will continue to experience more breakthrough in your life. And the last day of your life will be your best, just like Jesus saved the good wine to last, His first miracle, because you'll continually, as you age, be experiencing breakthrough Yes, your outer man will decay. But the Bible says, though the outer man is decaying, the inner man, the true man, the real man is being renewed day by day.
You are created for breakthrough. Your destiny is breakthrough. You're going to get better as you age. You're going to become more free as you age. You're going to have more peace of mind as you age. You're going to have more love as you age. You're going to have a greater perception of reality as you age. Why? Because you're going to continue to get breakthrough in the realm of the spirit. You see, the Bible says we're being changed from glory to glory, from faith to faith, from grace to grace. And so breakthrough is a topic that's always appropriate. Those of us that are alive are changing, we're growing.
Now, David, who is our template for understanding breakthrough, and has been in this series, experienced great breakthrough in his life after he was anointed king of Israel and was attacked by the Philistines. Because the Philistines when they saw he was anointed and heard he was anointed, they resisted it, they wanted to stop it. And of course, as I've been teaching, this is a spiritual prototype for us to understand that as we're moving forward in the anointing, the enemy is going to resist us and try to stop us. This is just the way it is. I hope you'll go back and watch all the other episodes in the series because I talk a lot about this.
So David defeated the enemy when the enemy attacked him after the enemy saw that he was anointed. But I want you to notice something in the 22nd verse. "Now the Philistines came up once again". Get the picture here. David's anointed, the Philistines want to stop it. They want to snuff out the anointing. The power of darkness wants to snuff out the glory of God in your life. In this particular account in 2 Samuel 5, after the Philistines attacked David, David defeated them in Rephaim. But what happened? Sometime later after David defeated them, the Philistines came up once again.
Listen once again to verse 22. "Now the Philistines came up once again and spread themselves out in the valley of Rephaim". The point is that the enemy is not going to forever leave you alone, even with Jesus. When Yeshua was in the wilderness, He defeated the devil after 40 days. And the scripture concludes by saying, the devil left Him after the 40 days after Yeshua defeated him to look for a more opportune time. In other words, the devil couldn't defeat Jesus in the wilderness. And so eventually he gave up and left to come back. The Scripture says he was going to look for a more opportune time. In other words, the power of darkness we're going to look to come against Jesus again. They were going to try to find Jesus in a vulnerable moment. They were going to try to find Jesus at a place where they thought they could get leverage over Him.
The point is, beloved, we are going to be in a battle. I know some of you aren't going to want to hear this. We're going to be in a battle our entire lives. We're the victors. Greater is He that's in us than he that's in the world. We're the victors. The Scripture says we triumph over everything. That we're more than conquerors. But the battle is not going to go away. We're gonna have to fight as long as we're in this world. It was only when Paul was about to breathe his last that he said, "I fought the fight, I've run the race, and now there's laid up for me a crown of righteousness". The point that I'm trying to lay in your heart is we need to establish within ourselves a soldier's mentality. A lot of us are spending so much energy trying to flee the fight, trying to avoid the fight, trying to pretend the battle isn't there, that we're missing the whole point.
It's like we're trying to create some kind of false illusion or reality thinking that we can escape the fight. But the truth is, beloved, you can never escape the fight. Because wherever you go, there you are. And wherever you are, the powers of darkness are there looking for some way to attack. We have to get a soldier's mentality. We have to develop the mentality of the Marines. We have to always be prepared. We have to recognize the enemy is not going to go away. And the only way to live in victory is to recognize the presence of the enemy all around us, continually exercising our spiritual impulse in the Lord to remain on top of him. I want us to understand that even as David was in a fight here and he defeated the enemy, but then the enemy came back, so too you and I may defeat the enemy on this front. But just because we defeated the enemy on this front doesn't mean that the enemy is going to leave us alone forever or that he's not going to try to come back another way.
One of the primary ways the enemy attacks is through fear. Because remember the enemy he's the prince of the power of the air. Now, the air is not Now, the air is not physical, it's something spiritual. And thoughts, as I taught last week, are spiritual things. So when you think about fear, fear is made up of thought. And thoughts come from the air, from the spiritual powers of the air. And so we recognize that the thoughts that we have in our mind they're oftentimes not just the result of a chemical process. The thoughts in our mind are spiritual. They're either thoughts of light or thoughts of darkness. And so we oftentimes are under attack from the enemy through fear. We need to recognize sometimes that the fear that we're having is not logical, but it's an attack from the enemy.
So I'm trying to make the point that when we defeat the enemy in one area like David did, it doesn't mean that the enemy will not try to come around a different way and attack us in another area. And if you think about this in relationship to fears that you've had, perhaps you can better understand what I'm trying to illustrate here. For example, in my life I used to be afraid of the devil. Before I knew Jesus, I was very, very afraid of the devil. I remember, unfortunately, as a young boy, not knowing God, I went to see the movie "The Exorcist". It's terrible even to say it. It was such a terrible movie. I was just turning 16 years old. After seeing the movie, "The Exorcist," even though no one ever told me about the devil, I was not taught in Judaism, I was not taught in the temple I was Bar Mitzvah'd in about the reality of the devil. I never thought about the devil objectively. But after I saw that movie, somehow deep inside I knew that a movie like that could never have been made of, it couldn't be thought of unless there was a malevolent power like the devil.
In other words, I knew that that movie, in order for it to exist, there had to be a devil. And after seeing that movie I was so afraid. I literally came home, went into my bedroom terrified and I waited for my parents to fall asleep so I could crawl into their bedroom and sleep in their bedroom next to their bed on the floor because I was so afraid. And that fear lasted for months. Well, now I'm not afraid of the devil because I have the word of God, I have scripture, I have the assurance of Jesus. But does that mean that the devil won't try to come at me with other fears? No. He tries to come at me with other fears. Fear for my health or fear for the health of my loved ones, or fear of getting in a car accident or fear of my loved ones getting in a car accident.
So what do I have to do now? I have to once again fight and close the door to the powers of darkness against those fears in order to get breakthrough once again over those fears. And Baruch Hashem, by the grace of God I am. And so I'm trying to help you to understand, my friend, that the sooner we realize we're in a fight, and that the fight cannot be avoided, the more equipped we are, the more we're ready for battle, and the more effective we're going to be in defeating the powers of darkness and keeping ourselves in the battle. Which brings me to point out to you here verse number 21. "When David defeated the Philistines," the Bible says here, "they abandoned their idols there. So David and his men carried them away".
And what this means is that the Philistines, they brought their idols onto the battlefield, thinking that their idols would help them to fight. And they were so terrified, the Philistines, when Israel was overcoming them and defeating them, they fleed the battlefield, leaving their idols on the battlefield, and then the men of Israel carried them away and burned them. Well, the concept I want to point out here is this. That when breakthrough happens idols are destroyed. When breakthrough happens idols are destroyed.
If you're going to get freedom in your life, if you're going to get breakthrough in your life, along with that breakthrough is going to be the destroying of things in your heart that are idols. In other words, the reason that we oftentimes have fear is because there's an idol in our heart in which we're not putting God first. Think, for example, of our health-something that causes fear for many. If you think about it, the Lord says, "Fear nothing, fear no one but me". If we fear nothing but God, if our only concern was to please God, would we still be afraid about our health? No, we wouldn't. We would be so concerned with loving God, with pleasing Him, and not being afraid of anything because He commanded us not to be afraid that we wouldn't be fearing our health.
You see, many of the things that we end up fearing, we fear because we've made those things an idol. We fear losing our money. Why? Because we're not trusting God and we've made money an Idol. We fear the death of our loved ones. Why? Because we've made them an idol. We've put them before God. I know what I'm saying is harsh and I know that there's some balance to all this. But the truth is, is that anything that we place in our life over God becomes an idol. And because we can't control the loss of those things that we've attached ourselves to, we fear losing them, which creates fear. But the reason we fear losing them so much is because they're an idol. So in order for fear to be destroyed, in order for there to be breakthrough, the idols in our life need to be destroyed. Whenever there is breakthrough that happens, idols are destroyed.
So I want to ask you a question right now. What in your life is causing you fear? And if you really get quiet enough and still enough, is the thing that you're afraid of... has it somehow become an idol? Has it somehow become more important to you than God? Maybe someone today is afraid of losing their job? And you're anxious about it all the time. But why? Is it because your job has become god in your heart? You're not trusting God first? You're not first of all just concerned with pleasing Him and letting your life take you whatever direction He takes you? But for some reason, you're hanging out of that job and you're hanging on to it so tightly that you're fearing losing it, rather than trusting God and being like Abraham that left everything he knew to follow the Lord to a place that he didn't even know where that was going to be. He didn't know where God was going to lead him.
Do you see what I'm saying? Idols are destroyed when we are entering into a deeper realm in the spirit, when we enter in, beloved, to breakthrough. And I also notice here as I'm looking at the text, that when the Philistines came up to come against David the second time, David used a second strategy. In other words, God gave David a strategy to defeat the enemy the first time the enemy came. But when the enemy came the second time, God didn't tell David to use the same strategy. He gave him a new strategy.
So look at verse 23. "When David inquired of the LORD, He said", David's inquiring of the Lord, "So shall I go up against the Philistines? How shall I defeat the Philistines? How shall I defeat the enemy"? And the Lord spoke back to him. "When David inquired of the Lord, He said, God said, 'You shall not go directly up...'" Which he did last time. Last time David went up directly. Instead, the Lord said, "circle around behind them and come at them in front of the balsam trees". This is important because different attacks of the enemy require different strategies.
I remember a friend of mine he was having these tormenting thoughts, these defiled, perverted thoughts. And he kept on coming against these thoughts. He kept on attacking these thoughts. When the thought would come to him, when this defiled thought, this perverse thought came into his mind, my friend kept on trying to take authority over the thought. And it made him afraid that he was having these thoughts so he tried to take authority over the thought and renounced the thought. And he came to me, said, "I keep on having these thoughts, these terrible defiled thoughts". I said to him, "Listen, next time the thoughts come, don't respond to them, just ignore them. Just don't worry about them. Just ignore them". And you know what? That strategy set him free. When he just began to not pay attention to the thoughts, when he was not afraid of the thoughts, when He just ignored the thoughts and didn't respond to them, you know what? They went away.
You see, sometimes we have to come directly against the powers of darkness, directly against certain fears, quoting the Word of God, stamping them under our feet with the word. Sometimes thoughts come to our mind, you know what, we just ignore them. We're aware that they're there, we don't give them the time of day. We don't allow them to cause us to respond. We just ignore them, and they lose their hold, and they have no power. You see, each different attack requires a different response. And that's what we see here. David inquired of the Lord. He depended on God. And as he depended on God, as he truly pulled the reservoirs of heaven into his soul through cleaving to the Holy Spirit of the Lord, God downloaded a unique strategy to give David victory in every attack.