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I'm redeverness. Harold Ristow is Professor of Theology at Concordia Lutheran Seminary.

He was a chaplain in the Canadian Armed Forces and is the author of At Peace with War,

My First Exorcism, and When You Fast, his new book is Spiritual Warfare for the Care of Souls, our topic today.

Welcome, Professor Ristow.

Thanks, Mark.

Happy to be here.

The term right in the title, the term warfare may turn off a lot of Christians, but you insist that warfare of a spiritual kind happens, whether we like it or not, because, quote, as you write, every faithful Christian is assaulted by the unceasing attacks of the world and the devil in his or her day to day life.

Is this a fact many believers find hard to accept? Is that what you've seen in

your experience? Yeah, I mean, I think that most Christians, there's sort of a movement,

it's been going on for the last a couple of decades to not believe in the devil and to just

sort of see these this caricature

as this you know cartoonish-like figure that can't be taken seriously um and so at best you have

christians who feel uh that they struggle with their own sin or or they't have, they're not the version of themselves,

they wish they were. And that's kind of the spiritual war that, you know, they, they feel that

they're fighting with. But what we're talking about is good old-fashioned Christianity

that involves the fallen angels,

including Satan, and that he's active and alive in all of our lives, not just trying to cause us to sin,

but trying to make us miserable in different sorts of ways,

interfere with our vocation, obviously jeopardize our relationship with God.

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