I spent twenty-five years wearing a badge. Patrol, Special Victims, Homicide. I have walked into rooms I will never be able to fully describe to you, and I have looked into the eyes of people who had done things that should not be possible. For a long time, I thought I understood evil. I thought evil was a person in handcuffs. It took me years to learn I had been looking at the wrong enemy the whole time.

The man in the cuffs was real. The harm was real. But behind every one of those rooms was something I couldn't enter into evidence. Scripture is blunt about it:

"We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age" (Ephesians 6:12).

I read that verse for years before I felt its weight. The real enemy was never the person in front of me. The person was the casualty. The enemy was the one who had been working on that person in the dark, long before I ever showed up.

I'm telling you this because I think the church makes the same mistake I made for two decades. We point at people. We decide the enemy is the person in the other pew, the family member who hurt us, or the brother who said the wrong thing in the meeting. We put the cuffs on each other and feel like we've done something. And the whole time, the one who actually started the fire is standing in the corner, delighted, because as long as we're fighting each other, we're not fighting him.

I won't pretend I have this fully figured out. I'm still learning to catch myself when I want to make a person the enemy rather than the spirit at work in the situation. But I know this much now that I didn't know with a badge on: you cannot win a war if you keep arresting the wrong suspect.

This week, I want to ask you the same question I've had to ask myself. Who have you decided is your enemy? What would change if you treated that person as someone the real enemy is trying to use, rather than as the enemy himself?

The fight is real. I've seen it up close longer than most. But we have been aiming at each other when we were called to stand back-to-back.

Pastor Keith