Self Defense for the Soul

Jeri has an interesting post on self defense today, talking about how important it is to understand our weapons:

When I teach martial arts to women, I always tell them that self defense begins with the chin. Put your chin down. Most people, when frightened, lift their chins. It's an unconscious indication of preparing to run away. Even when an opponent is being defiant and "talking trash," that chin gives him or her away...

So in a sense, even a chin is a weapon. It can betray you in a fight, or it can warn your opponent that you are mentally prepared for real combat. If you have a sword in your hands, but your chin is lifted and your voice is high and taut, a skilled opponent knows that you are not master of your sword. He can defeat your sword with his sword. Or, worse, he can make your own sword defeat you.

A good weapon, held in the hands of a person who does not know how to use it, can be as deadly to that person as anything the enemy brings to the circle of combat.

That last line really caught my interest, especially because of where she went next. Jeri pointed out that as followers of Christ, many of us have no clue about our spiritual armor, self-defense for the soul. And we lift our chins and betray our hand by the weapons we choose - we underestimate the power of prayer and trust, and we rely on poor substitutes instead: numbers, popularity, politics, and...

Morality - Now we come to the most deceptive false weapon of all. It just looks so much like the real thing...

Morality is the weapon of glass, for we do not possess moral goodness ourselves, and so in the battle, if we use this weapon to hammer the other side, we find ourselves holding shards. The only thing we can bring to mankind is salvation in Christ. We are the salt of the earth, not because we boycott or rail or shun, but because we are forgiven, we believe, we confess our sins, we find restoration in Christ.

But the material that makes a bad sword is material for an excellent mirror...

Good stuff. She has nailed it! Click here to read the whole thing...