Spiritual warfare looks like forgiving your enemies, like repenting of your sin, like loving your spouse and your friends. It looks like preaching the gospel and taking the sacraments. It looks like loving your neighbours. It looks like the fruit of the spirit. It looks like prayer.

We contest not with flesh and blood but with powers and principalities (Ephesians 6). This means the grand principles of the fallen world, ruled by evil personalities, and the everyday demons we all encounter all the time.

Which might sound strange as maybe you don’t encounter many demons, but my pastoral experience would suggest otherwise. I’m not going to write a manual for casting out demons but it’s a not uncommon part of pastoral ministry.

Interestingly though, I’ve been in a church which was majorly into this; it saw a lot of demonic opposition and many cast out. I’ve been in churches which just deal with them when they come up. It might sound like the first is facing opposition because they’re really at the sharp edge and should be emulated, but I think that’s the wrong reading. Instead, in normal pastoral ministry they come up and you deal with them, but they love attention because it takes the attention away from Jesus. Ministries or churches focused on demons have usually got things out of kilter.

My point in this post is different. Most spiritual warfare is not casting out demons. Most spiritual warfare is ordinary things.

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