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Calling believers to engage in spiritual warfare, interceding for Christian education, the church, and politics — before it’s too late to reclaim a biblical foundation for society.

This is my thirteenth in the series, highlighting key aspects from each chapter of my new book, While We Were Sleeping: A Wake-up Call For All Christians (2025). (Check out my YouTube channel, where I am posting a reflection on each chapter, to complement these posts.)

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My first twelve chapters explore issues impacting our society. This time, we explore how we can impact society!

Reflecting on the challenges covered so far in the book, three concerns stand out.

1. How many Christian schools have drifted from their founding vision, as they have sought to accommodate those who hold biblical values as well as those who do not?
2. How much of the church has been silent on issues they should have been addressing, giving their people the tools to take a stand on biblical values, no matter the personal cost?
3. How politics has become paralysed in seeking to accommodate the breadth of competing values from our multicultural society, while satisfying no one.

I have spent the past five years, since my retirement, thinking and praying about these things. There seems to be nothing I can do here on earth, apart from prayer and my obedience in writing While We Were Sleeping. A book alone can’t change anything, but God can.

The other day, I watched an absorbing video about a Dutch boy, Boyan Slat, entitled: “US Removed 45 Million Kilograms of Ocean Plastic — The Incredible Aftermath” (11 March 2026). This is the inspiring story of a schoolboy on holiday on the Mediterranean, who dreamt he could solve the impossible, cleaning the planet’s oceans of waste plastics.

Today, Boyan is well on the way to achieving his dream. I don’t know, but I am assuming he has been operating without God’s intervention, but see what courage, tenacity and vision can do.

Starting in the Covid-19 era, I first began to challenge the conventional wisdom and accepted beliefs surrounding governments’ actions, the pharmaceutical industry’s massive profits, and the destruction of the healthcare system.

We were all expected to go with the flow, believe in the honourable motives of those in charge of us, and be happy to be part of the crowd, the majority.

But what if conventional wisdom and accepted beliefs were wrong? The lightbulb went on for me when I observed that those who challenged the narrative were being sidelined, mocked, cancelled and deleted. How could this be the right thing for society to do? Surely advances in science are built upon asking questions, and on challenging assumptions?

So, I concluded, like Boyan Slat, that there could be one strategy that might begin to shift my three concerns listed above? They are all in different spheres — education, faith and politics, but notice the overlaps! That one strategy is spiritual warfare.

Spiritual Warfare

The fact that all three issues are paralysed in stalemate, tells me we need spiritual warfare to end the deadlock.

It is said that spiritual warfare is when we intercede on another’s behalf and plead their cause to our God in heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ. Intercession is a calling on all Christians. It has been described as exposing oneself for the protection of another or something. Meaning that we take up a position on the battlefield in the place of a wounded brother or sister in Christ, or a cause or situation we are called upon to intercede for. (Brittany Rust)

In spiritual warfare, we are no longer just praying for our own needs and wants, though they might be of critical value and urgent. Rather, we are venturing out onto the battlefield of the spiritual realm, as we voluntarily enlist in the service of the King of Kings in bringing about His Kingdom down here on earth.

Let’s bring the full force of spiritual warfare to bear on our three challenges — Christian schooling, the church’s silence on kingdom principles and politicians’ paralysis and blindness.

Many Christians believe that spiritual warfare is not their responsibility. Rather, they seek to close their eyes, and their minds, to these apparently intractable obstacles, and that has included me in the past.

But Jesus offered us a pattern for prayer:

Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10)

Do we simply parrot the words? Do we think: we are praying for Jesus’ second coming, and the end of the age? I guess we are, and that is right and good, but take a second look. This is a prayer for His Kingdom to come on earth, right here, right now. For me, this is now our mandate, not to wait for the by-and-by but to pray in the here-and-now.

For this to happen, the demonic forces holding our earthly realms captive to his will and purposes must be defeated. We must engage in spiritual warfare, if we are truly to pray the Lord’s prayer.

The Ingredients for the Spiritual Battle

1. Enlisting in God’s army.

Let me draw you a picture:

Where are you on this horizontal continuum? I hope none of you are on either the left or the right extreme. Are you in the centre, more or less? Or perhaps, do you veer to the left or veer to the right of centre? I suggest that to be ready to receive our spiritual battle orders, we need to be centred on this continuum.

Most of us find it hard to hold biblical truth in the one hand and compassion in the other. However, I believe that is where we need to be to receive the call-up into God’s army for service in spiritual warfare.

2. Face up to the impossible task.

We need to know that there is nothing we can do in the natural to shift the object of our warfare. We can’t establish a working party, launch a fundraiser, or appoint someone with expertise and experience to tackle the problem.

We have to face the impossibility. Only then can we truly cry out with groanings that can’t be uttered (Romans 8:26). When we are in this place, there is no possibility for pride, only praise to our God.

3. Be of great courage.

In spiritual warfare, the ears of our hearts are fine-tuned to His voice. The probability is that God will respond to us with a demand that will cost us everything. See how God spoke of His dealings with his chosen people in the Old Testament.

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. (Joshua 1:9)

He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor; therefore His own arm brought salvation for Him; and His own righteousness, it sustained Him. (Isaiah 59:16)

So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one. (Ezekiel 22:30)

It was no surprise that God couldn’t find anyone to intercede in the Old Testament, as His people were so frequently preoccupied with their own circumstances; they had no bandwidth for intercession. So, as Isaiah reported, God intervened without His people. He doesn’t need us, but He does invite us to join Him in the battle.

I commend Christine Darg on the Jerusalem Channel for her description of spiritual warfare. God is still looking for intercessors, as there are still so few who have enlisted.

The Target of My Spiritual Warfare

I am inviting you to enlist in God’s army and join me in the spiritual battle for Christian education, the Christian church, and our nation’s politicians.

For sure, the prayers of one soldier can change history, but imagine the impact of an army! Let me paint three pictures of what these three intractable situations could look like, and let us examine the mechanics of how these transformations might come about in God’s hands.

1. Christian Education

Christian teachers, with the spiritual gift of teaching, supported by their principal and boards, delivering the mission of their schools without compromise. Namely, to provide a Christ-centred education, partnering with their families.

This does not exclude non-Christian families, but all families must wholeheartedly support Christ-centred education — that’s why it’s called a Christian school. All families will also deliver their part of the partnership in outworking biblical values and principles in the home. No families will be permitted to ‘opt out’, that’s why it’s called a Christian school.

2. Christian Church

While planning my book, I discovered Megan Basham’s 2024 book Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded The Truth for a Leftist Agenda. She reveals how well-funded forces from outside the Christian church have silenced, distracted, or redirected Christians away from their core values and beliefs. This is former lesbian Rosaria Butterfield’s endorsement of Megan’s book:

Shepherds for Sale offers an urgent wake-up call for all faithful Christians. With brave reporting and translucent writing, Megan Basham reveals that some of the most trusted ministry leaders have proven to be liars and charlatans, bought by the world’s filthy lucre and flattery. It’s not too late to repent and believe in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and drive out the wolves.

The Christian church was Jesus’ idea, founded in Jerusalem, after His ascension from the Mount of Olives, principally at the hands of His apostles Peter and John. The book of Acts describes that church. It wasn’t perfect, but it did turn the world upside-down.

In my vision, I see that the Christian church must focus on discipleship and the training of soldiers to be deployed in spiritual warfare. If this is the church’s core business, the winning of souls will take place quite naturally; we don’t need to elevate the professional evangelist and relegate the foot soldiers to furlough. The church must not focus on seeker services but rather on equipping the soldiers for the work of service (Ephesians 4:11–16).

3. Our Nation’s Politicians

In the words of the Honourable John Anderson AC, one-time leader of the National Party and Deputy Prime Minister:

Christians have a huge stake in democracy, because it is the product of the Christian worldview. It was Christians, who struggled for concepts of dignity, worth, fairness, justice, and how to accord each individual recognition as unique, dignified human beings, made in the image of God, but flawed by sin. It was Christians who came up with democracy, more so, in my view, than the legacy of the Greeks. They have championed the idea of the equality of all souls in the eyes of heaven.

It seems as though the majority of Christians today have forgotten this. They now think that the state has the responsibility for rolling out all the support for the marginalised and suffering.

John went on to say, his impassioned call for spiritual warfare, in support of Godly politicians:

I would say to Christians, ‘Wake up, get behind people who are seeking to serve and are not seeking to be served. You’ve got a responsibility, they need you, so they can be strengthened and emboldened to carry on the battle.’

He concluded his interview (in Chapter 6, “Politics”), talking about how politics should be downstream from culture. Most Christians have abandoned the political realm, so that those with anti-Judeo-Christian values and worldviews have taken over, with their radical, progressive agenda. They are now upstream of society, dictating the culture they want in their image.

Another way of describing this is to say that politicians should be the servants of the people, rather than the people being the servants of the politicians. They have never had it so easy, as Christians have abandoned their post.

Let’s pray that once again, politicians will be content to be downstream from the founding principles and values of Western civilisation, ensuring our safety and freedom, while rebuilding Godly pillars in our society.

Christians hold the key. They have a secure hope, and they can point to reality. They can demonstrate the need to love and to sacrifice and to put others first, and to invest in their children. Or they can sit on the fence and hope it all goes away, but one day we will all be called to account.

Will you join me in the battle?