Call it spiritual warfare … or don’t. Call it the battle for your soul. Call it the fight to become who you’re meant to be. Either way, we know the battle, because we’ve felt it. It’s the ordinary temptation of “I’ll pray tomorrow,” “just one more time,” “it doesn’t matter.” And while we keep making little deals with comfort, we slowly become men stagnated by our mood and appetite and dulled by complacency.
It’s the quiet neglect of confession, the slow abandonment of prayer, and the numbing scroll that turns us into spectators of our own souls, until sin starts to feel normal and grace starts to feel optional. It’s a thousand tiny surrenders. And while we keep trading conviction for convenience, the enemy keeps running the same three plays — temptation, discouragement, division — until we realize we didn’t lose our souls in one dramatic fall … we gave them away in installments.
The enemy doesn’t need our worship. He just needs us comfortable, distracted and domesticated, patient enough to function but not brave enough to change, religious enough to blend in but not courageous enough to lead.
We all say we want holiness. We ask God for it. But if we’re handed “holiness” like a trophy we didn’t train for, what happens? We don’t know how to carry it. We can’t comprehend it, appreciate it or live it. Gifts we didn’t grow into can feel less like blessings and more like burdens. God doesn’t make saints by flipping a switch. He makes us holy by shaping us into the kind of men who show up. Holiness grows the way strength grows under steady, repeated load. We don’t get real self-esteem from having a six-pack, we get it from being the kind of man who goes to the gym every day. And here’s the point: that’s the spiritual life.
This life isn’t about collecting spiritual medals. It’s an epic battle for souls, and the point isn’t applause at the end. It’s who we become in the fight. Worldly “stuff” can’t love us back. It can’t stand next to us when temptation hits, when suffering arrives, when our family needs us steady. But Christ can. He is not a distant general. He is with us. He fights beside us and within us. And the truth every soldier knows: Men aren’t heroic for ribbons. They fight for the brother on the left and the brother on the right. In spiritual warfare, we don’t become holy alone.
But here’s the hard truth: We don’t get to opt out. We can enter the battle, or we can drift into it as bystanders, sitting on the sidelines critiquing the men who fight, wishing we had their courage, while refusing to see the nights they wrestled with temptation.
The confessions that broke their pride, the mountains they climbed while we quietly chose the easier road. In that sense, our spiritual life is self-assignment. We decide whether to pick up the armor of God or keep our hands in our pockets. Not because grace is optional, but because non-action is still an action. Drifting is still a direction. We will either be formed on purpose or formed by default, by appetite, environment, fatigue, the phone, the mood of the day.
So, the question is not whether a battle exists. The question is simple: Who is taking ground in our life right now, Christ, or whatever keeps pulling us away from Him?
God is offering us holiness, but it comes shaped like responsibility. It’s a daily decision to step onto the field and fight for our own souls, for our families, for our brothers. If we don’t choose the fight, the enemy is already prowling. Because the war is already in our house, already in our habits, already at our door. And the devil’s temptations won’t vanish because we got serious. If anything, we start noticing the fight more clearly. But by grace we also become stronger at withstanding it. The battles don’t end; we change. We become more disciplined, more resilient, freer. And as we grow closer to Christ, we’re often entrusted with harder fights, not because God is cruel but because in His providence He is forming us and supplying the grace to carry real responsibility. The weight doesn’t get lighter; our backs get stronger.
We were not baptized to be decent guys with religious opinions. We were baptized to be saints, soldiers of Christ who can stand in the breach. And God will not hand us “trust-fund holiness” that leaves us soft and untrained. He loves us too much for that. God is forging us like a blacksmith forges steel: heat, pressure, repetition, endurance. And the forge often looks like our real life: mortgage, family, aging parents, inbox, bills, temptations; the ordinary battlefield where we learn to become men who can carry grace.
This is where we get it wrong: We think we’ll win by willpower alone. We won’t. We win by training with grace. A rusty sword won’t cut when we need it; a soul that hasn’t been to confession in years is fighting with broken armor. But thanks be to God, we can always return to the fountains of grace and be made battle-ready again. Confession is not a shame booth; it’s a field hospital. The Eucharist is not a symbol; it’s wartime food. The Rosary is not for “some guys;” it’s a weapon that keeps our hands busy with prayer when our minds want to run. And brotherhood isn’t optional; isolation is where the enemy does his best work.
Christ the King already won the war. We are not fighting for victory: we’re fighting from His victory. When we renounce sin and put on the armor of God, we’re claiming what Jesus already won. That’s why the enemy trembles when a man kneels, when a family prays the Rosary, when we receive the Eucharist with reverence.
So, what do we do today, this week? Don’t make peace with things we should resist. When the temptation to numb out hits, we don’t negotiate. We move. We put the phone down, change the room and say out loud, “Jesus, I trust in You.”
When discouragement hits, we don’t spiral. We return. We schedule confession, we get back to Mass, and we pray the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. We refuse the lie that “nothing will change.”
And when division creeps in, we don’t isolate, we don’t go silent. We choose communion. We text one brother, name the battle plainly, and ask for prayer. We counter the enemy’s playbook like men who know we are at war.
Then we step back into His forge. We let Him shape us, strengthen us, heal us, feed us and call us. We let the war make us real. Because this life is not about what we accomplish. It’s about who we become. God is forming us into the men we were made to be great men, great saints, men of great holiness. Not “trust-fund holiness” but crafted holiness: forged through repetition, resilience, fidelity, hope and communion.
So, step onto the field. Strap on the armor. Take your place on the line. Because we fight for our souls, our families, our parishes and our brothers. The weight will not get lighter. But by God’s grace, our backs will get stronger.
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
Our Lady, Queen of Victory, pray for us.
Jesus Christ, King of Mercy, make us men who fight and do not flee.
Vivat Jesus.