An old friend wrote me an email last week saying that something I'd said when I spoke in her church years ago remains lodged in her brain and has continued to goad her to get out of her comfort zone ever since. This is what I said: "I want to live the kind of life so that when my eyes snap open in the morning, the demons say, 'Oh no, he's awake again.'"

Actually, I got the quote from Andrew Shearman. He adds, "That's not braggadocio; I want to be a threat to hell." When I first heard this, it exploded in my spirit.

At that point in my life, I was the product of a church that had elevated the trait of niceness above boldness and faith, yet my spirit man knew that we were all born for something other than a Neville Chamberlain-like posture of appeasement.

Let me take a chance and challenge you just a bit as I do from time to time on this blog: If you've not lately felt the ice-cold terror of an attack from a personal evil that wants to suck the life out of you and destroy everything you count as precious, then you may be one of the numb masses of western Christians that have been rendered inconsequential in the titanic battle for hearts and souls now raging across the world.

I'm not saying that to bash you, but to encourage you to wake up to the reality of a personal evil that hates you and has a strategy to keep you on the sidelines.

Let me encourage you to take an honest look at your life. You have enemies assigned to you, and do you intimidate them? If your honest answer is "No," let me suggest you begin equipping yourself by doing something like what Eric Hanson did:

"Come, we must go back and pray for Sebastiana," Joy urged us. So Chris Telfer and I went the morning of our long journey home. The four of us went back to her house and began to pray for her again. We prayed for about 10 minutes when she began to shake violently, scream, and spit. It was as if something inside of her could not handle our prayers, something inside of her was fighting very hard... (Read the rest of the story on Eric's blog.)