Prepare for War

i emailed this to pj after yesterday morning at prayer... and well i guess i can share it with everyone else to.... so here you go:

as we were praying
this morning i was asking God to prepare us all for what's to come in
Burnaby and i was reminded how it says Prepare the warriors in Joel... so i
went there and began to read... i was struck by something just before that
verse...

"Now what have you against me, O Tyre and Sidon and all you regions of
Philistia? Are you repaying me for something I have done? If you are
paying me back, I will swiftly and speedily return on your own heads what
you have done. For you took my silver and my gold and carried off my finest
treasures to your temples. You sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to
the Greeks, that you mihgt send them far away from their homeland.
See, I am going to rouse them out of the places to which you sold them,
and I will return on your own heads what you have done. I will sell your
sons and daughters to the people of Judah and they will sell them to the
Sabeans, a nation far away." The LORD has spoken.

Then of course it goes onto "proclaim this among the nations; prepare for
war! rouse the warriors!.. etc.." and so i'm not sure if i'm taking this
out of context which is likely, and i could be not understanding some stuff
which is again, likely... but i felt God say something to me about this:

I know we have an enemy - we may not have entire nations against us, but we
have an enemy that wants to kill, steal, and destroy- a lot like this is
talking about. This enemy has taken treasures from us, and taken worth
away to things that we once counted priceless, he has led us astray as a
people to believe in lies. I feel the call of God is to draw together as an
army against our enemy - to draw from the diverse places that we have been
scattered among - those places we have been sold to - whether that be an all
consuming job, a broken family, a past full of abuse, pornography,
addiction... We are to draw together from those places and use what we
already have as weapons against the enemy... "beat your plowshares into
swords, your pruning hooks into spears".

I believe that we are called to Burnaby as these people... people who have
an enemy, people who have been stolen from, people who's hearts have been
scattered... but also people who have been called by God to draw together
and prepare for war! I also believe that we are called not only to be these
people but to find these scattered hearts - the ones who are in the middle
of the enemy's field.... lost in an unknown land - but one that has become
so familiar - and we are to draw them back into the heart of Jesus - our
hope - they are to become part of His army.