Ed Stetzer asks JP Pokluda how a church leader tells a cultural problem from a spiritual one, and how the answer changes the way that leader prays. Pokluda says that the enemy goes after faith, and that authenticity is the best protection for a pastor and a congregation.

How can a pastor take spiritual warfare seriously without obsessing over it?

Stetzer raises C.S. Lewis’s two errors of ignoring the devil and obsessing over him. Pokluda adds a third: believing the enemy exists and letting that belief change nothing about how one lives. Stetzer asks whether a leader should call consumerism and performance idolatry and call for repentance, address them missiologically, or rebuke them as demonic. Pokluda says no one can know exactly where one ends and the other begins. He says the enemy runs many strategies and that the main one is distraction from God, with comparison and discontent as its ordinary means.

What protects a pastor and a congregation from spiritual attack?

Pokluda’s answer is straightforward: faith. He points to the shield of faith and to Jesus's prayer that Peter's faith would not fail, and he says that studying the subject left him less afraid and more faithful. The weight falls on what a pastor teaches, Pokluda argues. Leaders who train a congregation to look and sound like Christians while living differently in private, he says, are building toward disaster.

From the conversation

“As with all wars and all battles, there's lots of strategies, there's tributary fights, but the main current of what they're trying to do is distract us from the most high God, the creator of the heavens and the earth.” JP Pokluda

“They're really looking for that inauthenticity. They're looking for double lives. They're looking for the pretenders. They have a heyday with that.” JP Pokluda

“Be holy because he's holy, but not in an effort to appear holy, but to genuinely live a holy life.” JP Pokluda

About JP Pokluda

Jonathan “JP” Pokluda is Lead Pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, and the author of Your Story Has a Villain, Welcome to Adulting, and Outdated. He previously led The Porch in Dallas.

Presenting sponsor: Gloo, a technology company for the faith and flourishing ecosystem.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.