Some thoughts on cultural warfare, spiritual warfare, and liturgical warfare:

1. If there's a culture war, who's the enemy? If my neighbor with a face and a name is my enemy, well, I remember a little something about what King Jesus said about the required Kingdom disposition, which the saints are to have toward such neighbor-enemies.

2. For the saints in Christ, "we do not wrestle against flesh and blood", and "the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly". The sooner we can get our minds back to the fact that demons and lies are the enemy and that our neighbors are captives, the better off we'll be.

3. Israel of old waged war upon giants in the land. That was a typological precursor to the church going to war in the heavens against demonic world-graspers in the darkness of this age and spiritual wickedness. Know your enemy; name him and his center of gravity.

4. The church's seduction by this culture and its embarrassment within this culture to name Satan and his minions and denounce them as the enemy is basically why the church has just joined in with the culture of demonizing human rivals in the absence of real demons.

5. Yes, it's true; the church in the contemporary West is plagued by niceness as it lives under the structures and values of the larger culture of corporate employment, consumerism, and so forth. And the church could generally use a good shot of the Stalwart vaccine.

6. Yet some of the most vociferous internal critics of this epidemic (with syringe clutched in hand) are a wee bit too eager and enthusiastic in their disagreeable polemical apologetics, and they specifically need to realize they need to take a Chill Pill for their fervor fever.

7. The warfare of the church is primarily liturgical; it's done in our public worship. We ascend by faith into heaven, calling on God to bring about his kingdom on earth. We worship in the heavens, and God acts in judgment in the earth.

8. If the church is going to attempt to bring kingdom politics into the earthly political realm but circumvents right worship of the body and right nurture of the individual as the starting point of transforming and heavenizing the world, it's a futile and worldly undertaking.

9. There is no greater, more central counter-cultural public display of the kingdom of heaven than the assembling of God's people to praise his Name, seek his Face, hear his Word, and feed at his Table in the Day of the Lord (i.e. the Lord's Day) every week.