“Raise a banner on the bare mountaintop. Call loudly to them. Signal them with your hand to enter the nobles’ gates. I’ve commanded my holy ones. I’ve called my mighty men to carry out my anger. They find joy in my triumphs. Listen to the noise on the mountains. It is like the sound of a large army. It is the sound of kingdoms and nations gathering together. Yahweh Tsebaoth is assembling his army for battle. His army is coming from a distant land, from the ends of heaven. Yahweh is coming with the weapons of his fury to destroy the whole world. Cry loudly, for the day of Yahweh is near. It will come like destruction from Shadday.” (Isaiah 13:2-6 NOG)
The title Yahweh Tsebaoth (yah-WEH tse-ba-OATH) occurs more than 240 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. It means the Lord of Hosts leading a great army, the God who commands armies and fights for His people! Yahweh Tsebaoth is a title of great power. In Scripture, God’s “hosts/armies” include the armies of Israel; heavenly bodies/luminaries (Dt. 4:19; Isa 40:26); angelic beings (Josh 5:14); and the created order (Gen 2:1) – all these worship the LORD and do His bidding. Yahweh Tsebaoth affirms His universal rulership that encompasses every force or army: heavenly, cosmic, and earthly.
According to scriptures God is not our weapon of war, but we are His weapon of war. In the book of Jeremiah 50:25, it says that “The Lord hath opened his armory, and hath brought forth the weapons of his indignation.” Jeremiah 51:20 says, “Thou art my battle ax and weapons of war.” These Scriptures are not talking about a man speaking to God and saying that. It is God speaking to man and saying, “I am going to use you in the war and in the battle that is coming up in a way you've never thought possible before.” God seeks to anoint spiritual warriors to do His bidding. He seeks warfighters that will be used by God, like weapons of war for His glory!
If we could ever get that into our spirit, I believe that there is a sleeping giant, that if he ever wakes up to his full potential, he will do more damage to the kingdom of darkness than any other that has ever existed on the face of this earth. And that giant is us–the spiritual warfighters of the Kingdom of God. For the most part, we've been nothing but a sleeping giant over the past few years. We have laid back while the world around us has slipped closer and closer to the pits of darkness. Many of our people have had the attitude of us four and no more. But that kind of attitude is the reason many of our churches aren't growing and aren't doing anything to change this sin-sick world. We've had the concept over the years that since we are supposed to be holy that we need to separate ourselves from the world completely. God didn't call us to be monks hiding out. He called us to be a light in the midst of the darkness.
Many Christians today won't do anything at all because they're afraid it might upset Satan. What do we have in our modern churches? Warriors or wimps? The early pioneers wouldn't have even thought about flinching in the face of satan. God had given them a mission and they were going to carry it out no matter what. In the day that we're living in, the devil can organize his people to do a rock concert and have 300,000 people show up, but God cannot get His people organized enough to pack out a church. We are absolutely a sleeping giant. We have been lullabied to sleep by the pied piper called complacency. It's time to shake ourselves awake.
In Joel chapter one, God says, “The locust have come and eaten. And the caterpillar has eaten and the cankerworm has eaten and the palmerworm has eaten.” A locust eats the fruit on the tree. A cankerworm eats the root of a tree. We have had problems with the root and the fruit. The fruit is what’s on the outside. The root is what's on the inside. The Church has suffered blows not only on the outside, but we've also been suffering blows on the inside too. There's been cankerworms eating away at the very life of our churches.
When the cankerworm starts eating, God gives to us the steps to what happens next in Joel 1:5. God says, “awake, ye drunkards.” Or let me put it to you another way, “Awake, you sleeping giant, the new wine is cut off.” The new wine is the freshness of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. He said the oil languisheth. The oil becomes barren. There is no oil to be found. The oil is the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Not only that, but when you get to Joel 1:12 it says, “joy is withered away.” Joel 1:16 says, “the meat is cut off.” What is the meat? The Word of God. God is saying here, “My true Word is being cut off. Men are not preaching the meat of My Word.” The Church of our day has been fed a lot of meat all right, but it's some of the strangest meat you'll ever want to taste. The stuff that's come along over the past few decades is nothing more than rotten meat, and it's destroying the stability of our churches.
What is the Lord trying to say to us? He's saying that joy has died within your churches. He's saying that the fresh anointing that ought to be there is no longer flowing. He's saying that the new wine of the Holy Ghost is not there, and that you're only living on old wine, or past experiences. He's trying to shake us and say, “Awake, sleeping giant!” In Joel 1:17, it says, “the seed is rotten.” God is saying to the churches of our day, “The seed of My warriors has become rotten, and if you want to be used as a mighty weapon in My hands, you're going to have to clean up the seed. You're going to have to become pure again.”
I love, though, how God never leaves us hanging. Right in the middle of the Book of Joel, after everything God has just said about cleaning up our act, cleaning up the seed, becoming mighty warriors in the hands of God, He says, “I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” God is trying to say here, “In the middle of the mess, I'm still going to bless. In the middle of the trouble, I'm still God.” He was saying, “Hang on Church help is on the way. I'm going to raise up an army. I'm going to raise up warriors. I'm going to raise up people that know how to pray. I'm going to raise up a people that is not ashamed to worship Me and who is not ashamed of My Holy Ghost power in your lives.”
God is getting ready to shake that sleeping giant and wake him up to become one of the greatest warriors Satan has ever had to face. And when he does friend, you'd better watch out, because the power of God is going to explode like we've never seen before. And when it does, we're going to walk out of our churches as mighty warriors, and we're going to pull down the strongholds of satan. We're going to defeat the powers of darkness, and we're going to make a difference in this world again.
Whether you realize it or not, there is a seed of a warrior within every blood washed Christian. Every Christian has a seed of a warrior placed within them at the time of conversion. It is a seed of future possibilities, but yet it is still a seed. Now, if you were to plant a watermelon seed in the ground, you couldn't just walk away and never come back. No, you're going to have to do some things. You're going to have to water it. You're gonna have to apply fertilizer to the ground. You're probably gonna have to pull the weeds from time to time around it. Now let's apply that to what I've already mentioned from Joel chapter one to the seed of a warrior and see some things that need to be done to our seeds.
Just like that watermelon seed needed water; we need the oil of the anointing to be applied to our seed of a warrior. Just like that watermelon seed needed to be fertilized; we need the Holy Ghost to fertilize our seed. And just like that watermelon seed needed to have weeds pulled every now and then, we need to get the rotten meat away from our seed of a warrior. God placed a seed of a warrior into each one of us, but remember, it is now your seed. How you cultivate that seed and how you allow that seed to grow is up to you. If you want to become a mighty warrior for God, that's fine, but you must remember that seed is only going to grow one way–God's way.
Awake sleeping giant! Awake and grow strong and tall, seeds of warriors. It is time to march forward into battle. It is time to defeat the enemy. It is time to make a difference. It is time to become God's end time warriors!