Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

How to Win the Big Ones

by Dave Wilkinson

Romans 12:12, Ephesians 6:18

April 30, 2000

In September, 1863, the Union Army of the Cumberland crossed the border from southern Tennessee into northern Georgia. They believed they were pursuing a Confederate Army that was in full retreat.

They were wrong. On September 20, General Bragg’s Confederate Army struck the Federals a shattering blow at Chickamauga Creek. The Federal’s retreated back through the mountain passes into the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The victorious Confederates occupied the high ground above and around the city and waited until the Federals surrendered from lack of food. The Confederates were where they could not be attacked and the Federals were where they could not retreat.

Abraham Lincoln reacted with vigor. Troops were taken from the Army of the Potomac and sent by railroad to Tennessee. The Army of the Tennessee under General Sherman was ordered to help. General Ulysses Grant was placed in command of the whole force.

Grant wasted no time. He took the ground needed to open a supply road into Chattanooga. But Grant wasn’t interested in just saving the army. He wanted to reopen the door into Georgia that had been so abruptly closed.

But how was he to do it? The Confederates were where he wanted to go and they were solidly entrenched along a steep rise called Missionary Ridge.

The Army of the Potomac troops were sent against Lookout Mountain and captured it. But nothing was changed by the victory. The main Confederate line was unbroken. Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee was sent against the northern end of Missionary Ridge but gained not a thing for their blood. Finally Grant ordered the Cumberland’s to take the pressure off Sherman by pretending to attack the center of the Confederate position. It was only supposed to be a "pretend attack" to keep Confederate soldiers pinned to the center.

But that wasn’t what happened. The Cumberland’s 89 regiments had had enough of that Confederate line. They took the positions at the base of Missionary Ridge

and then, completely against orders, kept going right up that steep ridge in the face of the cannon and the rifles of some of the best soldiers in the Confederacy -- soldiers who had many times demonstrated that they knew what to do with a rifle when they got a Yankee in their sights. It was suicide. General Grant chewed on his cigar and muttered that "someone was going to sweat for it if the charge ended in disaster." And disaster was inevitable.

In his book That Hallowed Ground, historian Bruce Catton writes: "If justice existed on earth and under the heavens, Braxton Bragg would have been right. His position was impregnable. Missionary Ridge rose five hundred feet above the plain, sparse trees and underbrush littering its steep, rocky slope. It ran for five miles and the Confederates had all of it. At its base, fronting the plain, they had a stout line of trenches, and on the crest they had another line studded with cannon. Halfway up, at all the proper places, there were other trenches and rifle pits manned by tough Confederate veterans. Bragg was right, by any standard anyone could use. His main position could not be taken by assault." The Federals were charging into a death trap.

But then the incredible happened. That impregnable Confederate line cracked wide open and the Yankees went streaming over the top of the ridge, swamping the Confederate guns, capturing 8,000 men and routing the Confederate survivors back across the border into Georgia. From that moment on it was just a matter of time for the Confederacy. Sherman would set out from Chattanooga for the capture of Atlanta and the devastating march to the sea. The Confederates were forced on the defensive into a fight they could not win. Their line had fallen apart. Soldiers who had never fled the enemy in scores of desperate fights inexplicably gave up an impregnable position and ran away.

Why did I tell you this story? Well, it’s a Civil War story and I’m fascinated by that liberating period of our history. But the greater reason is because I believe it has something to teach us about prayer as an important way to express our love. In Romans 12 Paul talks about the practical actions of love. In verse 12, he says that one practical outgrowth of our love for each other, as well as our love for God, is that we are "devoted to prayer."

At the beginning of the year we spent five weeks looking at Paul’s teaching on spiritual warfare and the armor of God. Immediately after talking about spiritual warfare and the armor of God. Paul speaks of the attitude of the Christian: "With all prayer and petition, pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints."

The common theme of these verses, Romans 12:12 and Ephesians 6:18, is prayer. In Ephesians 6:18 Paul says the faithful Christian is prayerful with all prayers and petitions.

He says that we are to be prayerful at all times. This does not mean every waking moment -- the word chronos -- but in every season -- the word kairos. We are to pray in every incident and in every phase of our lives -- in every time of crisis and in every hour of need. We are always to remember that we are not alone and that our God stands beside us to help us.

This prayer is to be done, Paul writes "in the Spirit". Some people take the phrase "in the Spirit" to describe the emotions we should have when we pray. They think that it is necessary to be emotionally jazzed before prayer can be effective and so they concentrate on creating in themselves sufficient "faith feelings" before they start to pray.

Now certainly emotion has a place in prayer. But emotion is not essential or necessary to the effectiveness of prayer, because it is not prayer that does it. God does it. Knowing whom we are praying to is what it means to pray "in the Spirit". It means to pray according to the promises, which the Spirit has given and is based on the

character of God, which the Spirit makes known. It is the confidence that the power of prayer is not up to us but to the Holy Spirit, who, as Paul wrote back in Romans 8, "intercedes for us with groans too deep for words".

During the English Civil War a Puritan named Thomas Kent, one of Cromwell’s Ironsides, prayed this way before a battle: "Thou knowest, O Lord, that I must of needs be busy this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me." To pray in the Spirit is to pray with this confidence -- that we are not forgotten no matter how we may feel or no matter how things may appear.

The second thing Paul writes about the faithful Christian in Ephesians 6:18 is that we are aware. We are aware first of all of the presence of God. This is why we pray. When we pray, we recognize the existence of an invisible kingdom and the fact that someone is listening. His kingdom is not far off in space somewhere but surrounds us on every side. We are always in touch with it even though we may not realize it. We pray because we trust the promise that God means good to us.

We are also aware of the fact of danger -- that we are engaged in a spiritual battle against the forces of darkness -- what Paul calls the "spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places."

Ben Patterson writes in Deepening Your Conversation With God: "He was a seasoned veteran of the Christian ministry, my first boss in the church, a respected mentor, and a dear friend. I had asked him what he had to say to younger pastors like me as he approached his retirement. It was one of those what-would-you-do-if-you-had-it-to-do-over-again questions. His answer came quickly: "Don’t take it personally."

"Don’t take what personally?" was my next question.

He told me not to take it personally when thing get tough in the church, when I am attacked or tired or depressed. Things like that go with the territory. We’re in a spiritual battle. When a soldier is shot at, he isn’t shocked. His feelings aren’t hurt. He doesn’t peer over his foxhole at his adversary and shout, "Was it something I said?" He expects it, he plans on it.

"That’s spiritual realism. The question is not whether we’re in a battle, but what kind. The battle is spiritual. So we don’t take it personally, we don’t get hurt feelings when things get hard. We are spiritual realists."

In the face of this danger, Paul writes that we are to be "alert". We are to be on our guard.

This command goes back to the teaching of Jesus Himself. He emphasized the need for watchfulness. He told us over and over again, "Be watchful." "Watch and pray", Jesus told His disciples. It was failure to obey this order that led the disciples to their almost disastrous disloyalty. Peter wrote later "Be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." Peter knew what he was talking about. He was almost devoured by denying his Lord. And he gave the warning Paul gives in Ephesians, "Be alert".

But it is not enough to simply be alert. We need to be alert, Paul writes, "with perseverance". It is not enough to be alert on a part time basis or only when we’re not tired. We need to be prepared for the long haul -- prepared to withstand attack after attack and detect trick after trick. Paul writes to the Galatians, "Do not become weary in doing well". There’s a danger of doing that -- of not being prepared for the conflict to be not only sharp but prolonged and requiring our best efforts year after year.

Ben Patterson observes: "The command to pray is one of the few truly central and radical things God has called us to do in this spiritual warfare. It is central because it stands at the hub, the heart of our struggle. It’s not all we are to be about, for there are many other wonderful and critical things to do in this spiritual warfare, such as preach the gospel, cast out demons, feed the hungry, care for the poor. But these great things are to prayer what the spokes of a wheel are to the hub. When the hub weakens, the rest of the wheel collapses. It is a divinely ordered sequence. When Jesus called the twelve, He called them so that they might do three things. The first was simply to "be with Him." With that in place, and from that place, He sent them out to do the rest: "to preach and to have authority to drive out demons" (Mark 3:14-15). All the work of the kingdom of God begins with simply being with Jesus. If it doesn’t start there, it doesn’t start at all."

This brings us to the last characteristic Paul gives of the faithful Christian. We are connected. We are aware of those about us and their needs. Paul writes that we are to be "on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints." We are not alone. We are not to pray only for ourselves. We are joined together as a body of Christ and it is as a body that we live.

In Elia Kazan’s The Arrangement, we hear this passage from the main character: "I realized, I did not have and never had any friends. My relationships were either professional or functional. I had a boss and an editor or two or three, several servants, a wife, many former mistresses, a literary agent, several secretaries, several professional collaborators, and 300 people to whom I sent cards every Christmas. I knew some people in my office who either feared me or flattered me, but whom I did not meet outside of our functional relationships. I had sponsors, and clients, PR men, account executives, and district managers.

"I knew an even greater host of service people, the men who fixed the hi-fi, the TV, the icebox, disposal, electric stove, air conditioner, pool circulator, the three cars. There were those people who sold me books and records, the tailor who cut my suits, and the haberdasher who made my shirts.

"But you couldn’t call those friendships. I hadn’t talked or related to any of these people, except for some use or function. I hadn’t touched any of them humanly. They were things to me."

We are not to be things to each other. We are brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. We are to touch each other humanly. We are to know each other’s needs and intercede for each other in prayer. We cannot put on the armor of God for another person, but we can pray for that other person. We can call in reinforcements when we find him engaged in a struggle greater than he can handle or for which he has not allowed himself to be equipped. We are to be aware of other people’s need and pray for them. Paul says in Romans 12, that devotion to prayer is an expression of our love.

Paul assures us of the power of our prayers for others and other’s prayers for us. And he tells us to pray for "all the saints." The individual Christian is not to think only of his own spiritual growth, but to be concerned about the whole church of Jesus Christ. The Christian lives in the awareness that there are other saints -- that we are not in the battle to stand or fall on our own. Near us is an unseen commander and around us are countless comrades -- some who need our help and others who are able to lend their help, but all in the battle together, giving and growing together.

So, what went wrong for the Confederate Army at Missionary Ridge? Why did those brave veterans retreat from a position that would certainly have been impregnable if only they had stayed in the line?

Bruce Catton explores this question in That Hallowed Ground: "Maybe the real trouble was that the battle was too theatrical," he writes. "People could see too much; most particularly, the Confederates could see too much. They were up in the balconies, the Federals were down in the orchestra pits, and when the battle began, every move down on the plain was clearly visible to the Southerners on the heights. Perhaps just watching it did something to them."

But the problem was not just that the Southerner could see too much of the enemy. The greater problem was that he could see too little of his own army. Catton writes of the assault up the ridge: "Looking down from the crest, the Confederates kept on firing, but the foreknowledge of defeat was beginning to grip them. The crest was uneven, and no defender could see more than a small part of his own line; but each defender could see all of the charging Federal army, and it suddenly looked irresistible. The defensive fire slackened here and there; men began to back from the firing line, irresolute. Bragg’s line -- the center of his whole army, the hard core of his entire defensive position -- suddenly and inexplicably went to pieces. By ones and two and then by companies and battalions. Gray-clad soldiers who had proven their valor in a great many desperate fights, turned and took to their heels. Something about that incredible scaling of the mountainside had been just too much for them."

The Confederate army snatched defeat from the jaws of victory that decisive day because each soldier suddenly believed that he was on the ridge alone -- facing the onslaught of the entire Federal Army by himself. He didn’t see his comrades about him. He didn’t see his commander. He just saw himself and the advancing enemy and suddenly he felt very small and powerless. He thought he had to fight the battle alone.

Our position as the people of Jesus Christ is impregnable. We cannot be forced from it by any assault or any devious trick as long as we prayerfully put on the armor that God provides and stand fast. The only way we can lose, is if we stop trusting our Lord and our brothers and sisters beside us and start thinking that we are doing it all alone.

Lee Iacocca once asked legendary football coach Vince Lombardi what it took to make a winning team. Lombardi said, "There are a lot of coaches with good ball clubs who know the fundamentals and have plenty of discipline but who still don’t win the game. Then you come to the third ingredient: If you’re going to play together as a team, you’ve got to care for one another. You’ve got to love each other. Each player has to be thinking about the next guy and saying to himself: If I don’t block that man, Paul is going to get his legs broken. I have to do my job well in order that he can do his. The difference between mediocrity and greatness is the feeling these guys have for each other."

We are engaged in a great battle. That is why we need the armor God provides. But we are not alone. Our Lord Jesus Christ is with us! And we have brothers and sisters in Christ here and all around the world who faithfully walk beside us. So let us be devoted to prayer for each other and for ourselves.