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Gen. 30:11 Gad, “A troop comes! How fortunate!”

Here Leah expresses her delight after her maid has given Jacob another son.  The name Gad can be translated to mean either fortunate or a troop, which are both welcome responses after a season of wrestling.

In your walk with God, your ministry will experience some of the most blessed seasons of favor and fortune immediately after some of your most pressing wrestling moments.  The devil knows his time is short, and he will throw his forces of hell against you just before the break of day.

The lesson Jacob and Leah are celebrating here is that they are not alone but have the resources of an entire troop surrounding them in the battle.  The revelation of the power of numbers and the multitude that are with us propels our ministries into a position of favor, strength, and victory rather than being buffeted at the hands of the enemy.

There is strength, exponential strength, in numbers.  “A strand of three cords is not easily broken,” Ecclesiastes 4:12 summarizes the power of a company of people, a troop.  In my 25 years of doing battle, there are a few seasoned warriors who I know will lift my hands during the battle and come to my rescue like a cavalry.  These trusted brothers and sisters are your secret to lasting success in ministry.

Ecclesiastes elaborates, “Woe to him who is alone when he falls.  For he has no one to help him up.” (4:10) Israelite armies, Egyptian armies, Roman legions all recognized the power of a unified army in standing against the enemy.  God sent Gideon and his group of 300 as “one man” against the Midianites and won the battle.  This unity and comradery is a treasure of warfare that makes the struggle sweet to the warriors.

Says my brother, Randy, “Pleasure doing battle with you.”  We instantly remember and instinctively know the many times God had come through for us when we gripped hands in prayer against the enemy.  In your desire to plant a work of God, you will inevitably face battles and demonic powers that are beyond the ability of one person to defeat.

Developing a troop mentality is the key to overcoming regional principalities.  No one person is left on the wall alone, but we are connected to one another in the work, and at the sound of the trumpet, everyone runs to the battle.

Whoever is surrounded by such a troop is truly fortunate.  I consider myself exponentially blessed by the band of brothers God has surrounded me with for the battle.  Together, we are Gad and we are glad to fight alongside one another.

Gen. 30:8 Naphtali, “With great wrestling I have wrestled.”

There comes a season of prayer and survival where God will call us to fight with everything we have available.  Though we have surrendered and submitted as our first response, once we have submitted to God, the Bible tells us clearly, we are to “resist the devil.” (James 4:7)

This resisting Ephesians 6 describes as a wrestling match with principalities and powers.  Spiritual warfare is a lost art is so many church circles because we have resigned ourselves to passively accept our circumstances as God’s will when He is calling us to rise up against our oppressors.

Ephesians 6:10-20, “Be strong in the Lord…Put on the whole armor…Stand against the wiles of the devil…wrestle…gird your waste…put on the breastplate…shod your feet…take the shield of faith…praying always.”  These are fightin’ words.  God does not desire us to passively allow the devil to have his way on the earth our in our individual lives, but instead to actively combat and wrestle him down.

People unfamiliar with the warlike nature of God suffer constant abuse at the hands of the enemy because of their lack of knowledge.  Instead of being ignorant and unaware, the Bible tells us to undo the schemes of the enemy through our prayers and obedience.

Words of doom spoken over us, curses from past generations, demonic attacks on our family and finances, hellish powers coming against our ministries are all forces of the evil one God died to defeat.  Enforcing that victory is the privilege of the saints. “To execute on them the written judgement—this honor have all the saints.” (Psalm 149:9) “Behold, I have given you authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means shall hurt you.” (Luke 10:19) Realizing this truth and praying it into existence is the type of wrestling prayer that sets a believer free from demonic influences.

At some point in your walk with God, you must develop the tenacious, determined, violent faith that refuses to let the enemy have any ground in our life.  I am so distraught when ministries and families do not fight back against divorce, demonic books, material, and websites in the house, financial attacks and sickness.  Our God is a “Man of War,” (Ex.15:3) and He desires to train all His sons and daughters in the art of battle. (Psalm 18)

Prayerful wrestling consists of receiving God’s authority and enforcing His truth against our mutual enemies.  If you have never wrestled, you will. Study deeply these battle passages to prepare for the fight.

Gen. 30:6 Dan, “God has vindicated me.”

Envious of her sister’s children, Rachel enters the contest by giving her maid Bilhah to Jacob to conceive a seed.  God answers her prayers, and as a sign of her vindication, she names the son, Dan, meaning judge.

At some point in your ministry, you will come under the scrutiny and be judged based on the standards of others.  The difficulty of this position comes because we are very aware of the mixed motives of our own hearts.  We vacillate between believing everything we do is out of pure and undefiled hearts to condemning ourselves for our failure and misgivings.  The tendency of the world to look for some clear standard of measure by which to judge the effectiveness of our work runs against God’s ways of judging our hearts.

In 1 Samuel 16, the prophet is sent to the house of David to pick the next leader.  God bypasses all the sons of Jesse who are tall and handsome in appearance and chooses David, saying, “For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7) God chooses David, a ruddy, sensuous, worshiper of God who also has he own faults and then pronounces two New Testament epilogues about him: “a man after my own heart,” (Acts 13:22) who “served His own generation.” (Acts 13:36)

How can we reconcile the good that David and other leaders of the church have done with their human failures?  Fortunately, the job of judging ministries is not ours, but rather God’s.  When we are caught in a difficult situation whereby all our actions are brought into question, our only hope is to fall on the Lord’s mercy rather than vindicate ourselves.  God is the Just Judge of the universe who judge rightly.

I have seen in many instances fallen human take up this mantle of judgment against a man, women, or ministry.  Their initial motives always appear pure when they say they want to be good stewards of the ministry and help insure we are serving God as effectively as possible.  The challenge, however, is that their opinions and judgement are always limited by their biased perspectives.  No one person can see the 360-degree view that God has of an individual or a ministry.  No person can judge the heart of a man or woman as God can.

When you are faced with a challenge of justifying your ministry by providing measures, rubrics, strategic plans and targeted performance goals; it may help to realize that these human indicators cannot alter your position and the opinion God has of you in heaven.  Man looks at the outside; the Lord looks at the heart.  Let Him be your vindication.