Finally Understanding What We Had Always Missed Before

Do you have verses in the Bible you read that you don't seem to understand? And then something changes and you understand what it means when you read it the next time?

That's what happened to me recently. In the midst of God doing what He's been doing in my life, clarity and understanding of something in Scripture came.

"For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that set itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." (2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

For most of  my life, I've read these verses and liked what they have to say. They've been highlighted in every Bible I own. But, the truth was I didn't really know what they meant. What they said sounded good, but very little of what they said was true in my life.

A couple days ago I read these verses again and read them differently than before. Something made sense about them that had never made sense before. Instead of reading them and wishing they were true of my life, I read them and realized they were true of my life.

In the last month and a bit, God has been showing me what He meant when He had Paul write these words. The battle we're involved in isn't something we see on this world. It's something that requires the weapons we fight with to have divine power. Without this divine power strongholds in our lives can't be broken. God in us is the reason why we have the ability to fight these battles.

As I read these verses again, it dawned on me that I'd been having a hard time understanding what they meant and seeing them as true in my life, because I was confused about whose power was supposed to be at work. I had always read these verses as something I had to do. It was about me working to have this in my life.

But, I couldn't have been more confused about it. It's not about me. It's about God in me and through me. That's the difference I saw today when I read these verses again.