Welcome to Gateway Church's podcast. Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

So this is our fourth message, final message in the series, the four living creatures.

And I know that when we started, you had no clue where I was going.

And now you're just loving it. It's one of your favorite series of all times.

So we talked about the four faces, four creatures. Each creature has four faces.

It doesn't turn. It goes in the direction that the face is going following the spirit.

And the spirit is in the will. The will goes higher and higher.

And so what God is doing is taking us higher in these four what I'm calling foundations of the church and of our lives.

We talked about the lion. We'll talk about the lion this way. We'll talk about the man representing Jesus.

And we zeroed in on grace. We talked about the ox representing servanthood, the lowly ox, the serving ox, and we zeroed in on humility.

We talked last week about the eagle representing worship, and we zeroed in on abandonment.

So this week we're going to talk about the lion. The lion represents prayer, but we're going to zero in on war.

Because you've got the warring lion. I just want you understand that we are in a war.

And we don't want to be in a war, but we're in a war. It's a spiritual war.

And it's happening whether you show up or not. And if you don't show up in prayer, you're going to lose the war.

You're going to lose battles with the enemy because he's showing up. There's a verse in the Bible that when you show Christians this verse, many of them have never seen this verse.

But there was a shorter route to the promised land that God did not take his children by for one reason.

Let me read it to you. Exodus 13 verse 7, it came to pass when Pharaoh had let the people go.

It's Exodus 13, 17, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near.

For God said, less perhaps the people changed their minds when they see war and return to Egypt.

In other words, God has always known that his people had an aversion to war.

But we're in a war. Ephesians 6 says that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, principalities of ours.

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