The same principle applies to war in the spiritual realm. The key to winning is to understand where and how the enemy is attacking and to respond accordingly.

Because Satan’s main weapon has always been lies (John 8:44), this involves figuring out what lies he is being most effective at telling in today’s culture and to clearly proclaim the truth that counteracts them. It is one thing to simply proclaim general truths– there are a lot of people in the world doing that. It is quite another to proclaim the exact truth that people need to hear today. It is easy to do the former—achieving the latter takes a bit more work.

For example, I recently debated a national atheist leader on the radio show. As fun as it was to have that conversation, I will not do that again any time soon. The reason is that the atheist came across as completely out of touch with the real world. He was defending positions that hardly anyone holds anymore and as good (or bad) as I may have been at refuting those positions, it didn’t matter much because there was scarcely a handful of people in the audience to convince. Defending against lies like “Jesus never existed” and even “There is no god” is fighting last century’s war.

On the other hand, our really effective radio shows have dealt with lies such as “All religions are basically the same—they all lead to god” and “It doesn’t matter what you believe spiritually, because the important thing is that your religion makes you feel good.” These are some of today’s battlefront issues.