Fighting on Both Sides

In a recent prayer, I acknowledged that I can't win my spiritual battles without God's help. Shortly thereafter, He reminded me that He can't win those battles without my help. We can't win the war for our souls without His help, but at the same time, He can't win those fights for us. We both need to fight, or we will certainly lose.

Let's start, as I did, with an acknowledgement that we can't win without God's help. This fight is too hard for almost any mortal, and the only reason I included the word "almost" was because Jesus Christ managed, yet, arguably, He might have needed God's help, too. There are instances in the scriptures where angels ministered to Christ. If He ever needed celestial assistance, we certainly do. 

We fight an enemy that we could never hope to defeat with our mortal limitations. We get tired; he doesn't. We sleep; he doesn't. We have only one human lifetime of experience to consciously recall and draw upon; he doesn't. We are fighting an enemy who doesn't have physical limitations. It might help if we had some allies who don't have physical limitations either. If we are going to win this fight, we will need God, or at least a few angels, to fight alongside us.

But just as we need God's help, He also needs ours. He can't win these battles for us. That would likely defeat the purpose of why we face these battles in the first place. We need to fight the adversary as part of our mortal experience. We need to face opposition and temptation and learn how to overcome them. We need to learn to control ourselves. That's not something God can do for us. God can help us learn those lessons, but we need to put in some effort as well. God will help us fight our battles, but He needs us to keep fighting as well.

If we are going to win this fight, it'll be through fighting on both sides of the veil. If we keep fighting on our side of the veil, and God keeps fighting for us on His, then it's possible for us to win, but if we try to face this fight without His help, or if we give up the fight, hoping He'll carry us, we'll lose. Our spiritual lives depend on us winning this fight, but it'll take fighting on both sides of the veil to make that happen.