Warrior Fathers Confronting Spiritual Warfare

There is a dark hidden global war that is being waged on families everywhere and it’s claiming lives every day. And dads are the gatekeepers and guards responsible for keeping their family safe. My guest talks about what this war is and how you can be aware and prepared.

Jared Haley is a pastor, and public speaker who believes God created the design for strong faith and healthy families. Serving in professional ministry for over 20 years with his Master’s Degree in Transformational Leadership and Spiritual Formation, Jared is passionate about investing in people, and helping them understand how God wired and designed them to live strong.

To connect with Jared Haley visit:

Web/Podcast: https://www.strongbydesignpodcast.com/

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@strongbydesignpodcast4492

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Special thanks to Zencastr for sponsoring The Fatherhood Challenge. Use my special link https://zen.ai/CWHIjopqUnnp9xKhbWqscGp-61ATMClwZ1R8J5rm824WHQIJesasjKDm-vGxYtYJ to save 30% off your first month of any Zencastr paid plan.

Transcript: Warrior Fathers Confronting Spiritual Warfare

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There's a dark hidden global war that is being waged on families everywhere and it's

claiming lives every day.

And dads are the gatekeepers and the guards responsible for keeping their family safe.

My guest is going to talk about what this war is and how you can be aware and prepared

in just a moment so don't go anywhere.

Welcome to the Fatherhood Challenge, a movement to awaken and inspire fathers everywhere to

take great pride in their role and a challenge society to understand how important fathers

are to the stability and culture of their families environment.

Now here's your host, Jonathan Guerrero.

Greetings everyone.

Thank you so much for joining me.

My guest is Jared Haley.

Jared is a pastor and a public speaker serving in professional ministry for over 20 years

with his master's degree in transformational leadership and spiritual formation.

Jared is passionate about investing in people and helping them understand how God wired and

designed them to live strong.

Jared, thank you so much for being on the Fatherhood Challenge.

Well, man, thank you so much for having me.

I'm very excited to be here and to just get to talk about this really, really important

topic with you.

Jared, I got to ask, what is your favorite dad joke?

Oh, man, that's a good one.

My son's already starting to yell at me when I pull these out because they come so naturally

you know?

But a really good one.

This just went off the top of my head is can I let me just tell you quickly a pizza joke.

Have you heard the pizza joke?

No, I haven't.

Never mind.

It's too cheesy.

That one definitely deserves a rem shot.

Jared, what is your story behind why you got into ministry and working with families?

Well, my original call to ministry was when I was in middle school.

There was I was at a camp up in Woodland Park, Colorado called Quaker Ridge and I remember

I can't tell you who the speaker was.

But we're having a night of, you know, what you do at camp, we're having a worship service

and there's something going along with with the worship music and just the spirit was

moving that that night.

And there was a minister, a minister, a missionary who was speaking and I like I said I don't

know who he was or where he was from, but I remember specifically God speaking to me saying

asking me to take my shoes off.

You know, take your shoes off for the place you're standing as holy ground which all the time

in scripture.

But and I remember thinking that's weird.

Like why would God ask me to do that?

I'm looking around no one else is doing it, but I said, okay, God, I will do it because

you're asking me to.

And it was through like that little act of obedience that then God spoke and said, I have a call

on your life and you are going to be doing ministry as well.

I didn't know what that meant or what that looked like at that moment, but I learned very

quickly where I wanted to go to school and that God wanted me to do ministry my whole life.

As far as getting into families, man, this is something that is really as our own family

has developed.

My wife and I just celebrated 15 years of marriage and we have four graduations.

Yeah, thank you so much.

It's it's a it's a big feat apparently in these days.

We always feel like, you know, we have our ups and her downs and our struggles and you know,

we had our load times for sure, but God has it has been faithful to us through it all.

And we're just getting to a place now that as we are cultivating a relationship with

Jesus within our own family and we look around and we see the world that we're living in.

We see this, this gap.

We see this something missing in families and I don't have all of the answers and I don't

pretend to have all of the answers, but that's that's what's so important to us is we want

to help people live what we like to call a spirit filled life, which means that we actually

have a relationship with Jesus through the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit has been sent

to the earth to teach us to comfort us, to guide us, all of the things that we want in

our connection with God.

That's what the Holy Spirit does.

And we don't want that just as parents, but we want to include our children in that because

the whole idea is that we're raising our kids up, not just to do what we say, but to have

a relationship with Jesus themselves.

Now let's talk about this global war that we talked about in the intro.

What is spiritual warfare and how are families becoming ground zero?

Also what personal evidence do you have you seen of this?

There's an attack on the conservative family, right?

Or maybe not even conservative.

I'd say the traditional family, right?

Where we see this everywhere, even in its funny like in Disney, if you go and watch Disney

shows, you'll see that a lot of times it's a single parent where either mom or dad is

gone.

It's very unique anymore to see a mom and a dad and kids on a show.

And so it's something that that's the podcast that I represent and I'm part of is called

Strong by Design.

And Strong by Design is we've been created in God's image to have a strong mind, body, and

spirit.

The reality is is that because of sin and consequence, we become weak in all of those areas

of our lives.

And when we turn away from God's original design, which is, you know, we would define that

as sin.

When we turn away from God's design, we have to reap the consequences of that.

And so the only way to get back to living the right way is to get rid of that life, to

surrender our life to Jesus and to come back to that original design.

And when we look at how the structure of the family that was set up in scripture, we

see that God actually designed it to work a certain way.

And so obviously that's what the enemy wants to tear down and rip apart is this idea of

God's design.

Like that's what he's all about regardless.

The enemy has two goals.

The first goal is to keep you from knowing Jesus.

And if you know Jesus, his next goal is to keep you from being faithful to being part of

kingdom building, of building God's kingdom here on earth.

And so if you can rip a family apart, man, how much trauma does that cause for the rest

of your life?

That's pretty scary.

It's very scary.

And you see the statistics all over the place of, you know, if dad's not involved or if

mom's not involved or and there are obviously circumstances that you can avoid, right?

If someone passes unfortunately or if one of the parents are abusive, you need to get

out of those things.

However, it all boils down to this idea of destroying what we know as the traditional

family.

And I believe that God is calling us as believers to come back to those truths, to come

back to that design of what it means to be a family that follows after God.

How are fathers being caught or in some cases they are prime targets for the spiritual war?

Against popular belief in this day, men and women are different.

I don't know if you're aware of that or not, Jonathan, but God actually designed men

and women differently.

And the problem is is in our culture, it's been set up for us to think that that means

that one is better than the other.

And that's not at all.

Like one is not better than the other.

We're just different because God wired it that way.

God designed it that way.

And so the reason that dads in particular are being targeted is because God designed the

man to be the head of the household.

Now that doesn't mean that the man is designed to be authoritative and domineering and all

of those things that are unhealthy, but it does mean that God has designed for the husband

to be the head of the house just as Christ is the head of the church.

That's what Paul would say or did say in Scripture.

And so if the enemy through spiritual warfare, if he can rip apart a man, if he can degrade

him or if he can tempt him into sexual sin or if he can convince him that he's no good and

he should lose anything that he can do to deter the man from being to stepping in and

fulfilling that role in the home, he's going to do it.

And you alluded to spiritual warfare and spiritual warfare is basically everything that's going

on in the spiritual realm that we can't see, right?

We're almost in like a sub-reality of the true reality and we don't even know it.

And it's because there's so much that is going on outside of the physical world that we

don't, we can't see it unless God gives us a vision to see it.

And so recognizing that it's there and recognizing that the enemy is at work diligently trying

to destroy you and destroy your family calls us to action as men and really as women

as well, married couples and families to combat that in a way that is going to be effective.

One of the things I've observed and maybe it's just my own and maybe you see it differently,

but it seems like when I do a comparison between the two, between the attacks on women and

attacks on men in the home, women seem to be attacked very differently than men do.

So a majority of the women when Satan really decides he's going to attack, I would say a

majority of women are influenced and pulled away by new age influences and new age belief

systems.

And men are pulled away and attacked by a pornography.

But the result is the same and Satan is very efficient.

He doesn't have to necessarily go to individuals.

All he has to do is knock off the dad.

He can hit the dad hard enough. He has done with one job.

He has potentially damaged many generations.

Just hit the father.

Damage him so bad that becomes an absent parent, uninvolved, emotionally disconnected, whatever.

And he is messed up women and he's messed up men.

Yes.

It's funny because the two play on each other, right?

So men want respect and they want to be desired.

And women want to be beautiful and they want to be loved.

And so if the men aren't receiving that, that respect or that desire, then they start

to look for it somewhere else.

If the woman doesn't feel beautiful and adored, she starts to look for it somewhere else.

And it's like these two things that Satan sees that if he can mess with either one of them,

it really messes both of them up.

And it's just crazy how they play off of each other.

I see it all the time as well.

What are some of the sneaky and seemingly innocent ways that children are opening the doors

to the dark, spiritual or demonic forces and realms in their homes?

What are some examples that you've seen of this?

Man, they're all over the place.

I think technology is huge and allowing, I can't believe it always surprises me when I see

like a five or six year old walking around with a phone.

Like do you know how much corruption they can fall into just by having a device that's connected

to the internet?

Like it baffles my mind.

But that's a whole other, I mean, we could have a whole conversation on technology and

digital media and how to handle that as as a family unit.

But what we've been doing, it's really crazy that you bring this up because God's actually

been doing a huge thing just in our own family.

It's almost like a purging of our home.

I've been really big in harping on, we want our home to be a sanctuary, we want our home

to be a place that's holy and set apart, which means that it's a place that's safe from

the culture.

It means it's a place that is safe from the influences of anything outside of God's truth

and holiness.

And what that means is we have to be diligent in asking God what can stay and what can go.

We haven't told our kids what toys they can keep or what they need to get rid of.

But as we've engaged them in that conversation, our 12 year old son just through praying and

listening to God on his own came to his own conclusion that Pokemon wasn't something

that God wanted him to keep.

And so I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't get rid of Pokemon in your home, but I am

saying that the enemy will use anything he can to attach himself to your children.

And so if there are things that are going to be influencing them outside of following

Jesus, especially as their brains are developing and their thoughts are developing and their

behaviors are developing and their belief systems are morality are developing.

We want to be as parents and as fathers, diligent and paying attention to those things in the

way that they're influencing our kids.

So it's just in the recent, this last Halloween was the first Halloween that we didn't celebrate

as a family.

We've always dressed up.

We've always gone out and done the trick or treating thing.

And we've always spun it as we want to be a light in the darkness, which we do.

We want to be a light in the darkness.

We don't want to just abandon the world and go inside our homes and for the sake of protecting

ourselves.

That's not what we're trying to do.

What we're trying to do is say, God, how do I be a light in the darkness without allowing

the darkness to influence my home?

How can my home be set apart?

And so we didn't do Halloween this year, but instead we made cookies and we delivered them

to our neighbors.

And so we showed up to their house and they expected to give our kids candy.

And instead we were giving them something and saying, hey, we just want you to know that

we care about you and we wanted to bless you and return.

Thank you for loving our neighborhood.

You know, so it's finding these other ways that God can use you in these dark times and

order to bring light into that darkness.

And these things are difficult because there's nowhere in scripture that says, should your

child read Harry Potter?

You know, there's nothing in scripture that says, should your kids watch cartoons with

unicorns in them?

You know, and so we really have to be intentional to go to God and say and have a good enough

relationship with Jesus that we can actually ask him these questions and learn how to hear

his voice, learn how to hear the spirit speak to us so that we can take these things that

aren't so black and white and he can shed light on those things for us.

Yeah, I can think of one example.

There's one of the most popular video games that's been out there is Minecraft.

It seems like all the kids are into Minecraft.

And Minecraft seems very, very, very innocent.

I mean, it's a world and you can plant trees and you have these animals everywhere that

you can care for.

You have chickens and everything.

It's very much like in a lot of ways like our real world, you can build a cabin and just

kind of walk around and live and exist on this world.

Not for the fact that there's all these other characters that are in the game and these

are characters that God did not create such as zombies.

Right.

And there's another character that's in there and the characters call Enderman.

Right.

And what does Enderman sound like?

It sounds a lot like Slenderman.

And Slenderman, if you're not familiar with that, hopefully not too familiar with that,

Slenderman is a demonic character.

It is a being from demonic influence.

So Slenderman is a very evil demonic thing.

And so if you do the research and this is for you dads, like do the research on what your

kids are doing.

Don't just sit around and just be passive about it.

Get proactive.

What are they doing?

What are they involved with?

Do the research?

Because if you do the research on Enderman on that character, you will find that you

will find it is influenced by Slenderman.

And are these really the values that you want your kids doing?

So that conversation, I had that conversation with my own kids.

Yeah.

And they figured it is.

I mean, I feel and and that again, that's why I mean, we have these conversations and we

want to bring our, I mean, for us as our family, we want to bring our kids into that conversation

so that they understand that we're not just randomly taking things away from them, but

we're helping them understand why.

You know, we're helping them understand what's influencing us is important, right?

A glass can only spill what it contains.

So what am I putting inside my glass that's going to then be poured out of me?

I can, I don't want to be putting in evil stuff.

You know, I'm going to be putting in more, more good stuff.

And so you almost have to go through a morning process sometimes with some of these things

because until it's revealed to you that it's not okay, you almost fall in love with

these things, you know, but then when, when God asks you to give them up, there's just, there's

a period of morning and there's a period of loss saying, okay, that thing is gone, but the

turnaround is, look at what is so much better in my life with Jesus and what he has to offer.

My experience is that when God takes something away from you or takes it out of your life,

he always replaces it with something better.

He never just leaves a hole.

The other reality of why we're careful about, you know, the games that we play, the things

that we get involved with and such is that these things are potential gateways.

These are opening doors into the demonic spiritual realm and it is allowing opening doors, allowing

them access.

It's like signing a consent form that gives them permission to waltz into your world and

waltz into your into your life into all kinds of things.

It is not hard to find stories of people who have been caught in that and, you know, they've

had everything from they've seen apparitions.

They, you know, the whole scene of ghosts, things being messed with in their home, all this really

freaky stuff that's the things of your nightmares.

It all started innocently whether it was games or whether it was somebody else that they

were praying to that wasn't God or movies that they were watching music that they were

listening to it all started innocently and that's how Satan gets you.

These are the things that God is trying to protect you from.

Yeah.

And it's across the board, right?

I mean, it's things that you play with as far as your toys and things.

It's things that you're reading.

It's music that you're listening to.

I mean, there's so many different avenues that we need to be paying attention to and really

praying through is this glorifying God or is it not?

And that's kind of that's kind of the basis, you know, is this bringing glory to God?

Is this helping build his kingdom or is it not?

And that's that's kind of a tool that we use to measure a lot of times.

Is this worth it or is it not?

The other thing is, you know, when it comes to to what you occupy your mind with the Holy

Spirit is unimaginably huge.

And so why wouldn't you want to wake up every morning and invite him in every single day

to fill up your mind?

He will occupy every crevice.

He will give you the discernment when you're doing something that isn't good for you.

And if you learn to listen to him, he will walk you through those changes.

Yeah.

And it's something too that I like to tell people, my relationship with Jesus and the Holy

Spirit, it's not just him teaching me things that he doesn't want me to do anymore.

Like the real relationship with the Holy Spirit is him speaking into your life and bringing

you on an adventure of things he's actually asking you to do.

And that's when it gets a little bit more fun and a little bit more exciting because all

of a sudden he's telling you to speak to somebody or say something to somebody or pray for

somebody or whatever it might be.

And you're thinking, is that me?

Are you really asking me to do this?

That sounds crazy.

And you hear stories all the time of people being faithful to this weird thing.

I just saw a video yesterday about a pastor who someone showed up at his house in the Holy

Spirit told him to give him a blank check and then how God used that to like transform

his ministry.

I mean, it's just weird stuff like that.

My good story for me personally was before we had kids, my wife and I were working and

doing a young adult service.

And it was when I can't remember the year, but there's a big tsunami that hit somewhere

in Asia.

And my wife felt led to stand up and say, hey, we should collect money and send it over

to them for relief.

And so I'm like, yeah, it's a great idea.

And so we could do all this collection.

Well, we only had like $60 left in our bank account.

And we had about another week before we were going to get paid.

And Kristiana felt the spirit, speak to her and say, you need to give all of your money

to this fund.

And I remember afterwards she told me and I was, I was, I was like, what, you got to be kidding

me.

Like, we have no money.

You literally gave away all of our money.

We have no money to live on for the rest of the rest of the, like, what are we supposed

to do for the rest of this week?

We ended up, the other part of the story is that we were closing on our house the

next day as well.

And so then you have all of the added stresses of man, how much money do we actually have

to bring to closing and all of these different things?

Well we ended up going to the closing of our home and the people come in and they sit

down and we're getting ready to start signing papers and they say, hey, before we start,

we just need to disclose something to you and we're like, oh, great.

Now what?

And they said, in the middle of your loan process, we actually changed the type of loan

that we were giving you.

And we are required to disclose it within three days or get penalized and we're like, okay,

so how much more money do we owe you?

And they're like, no, no, no, no.

We're penalized and because we're penalized, we now owe you an extra $8,000 the government

is like, oh my goodness.

We literally, God just said, hey, thank you for being faithful.

Here's money, which ended up money that we got, we went, we didn't know the things that

you need when you buy a new home.

And so, we had to buy curtains and all of these different things that that money didn't

last as long as we thought it would.

But it's like God asked us to do crazy things that you would never do on your own and then

you faithfully do it and it's like, this is what it's about.

This is what, this is why having a relationship with God is so full of fun and joy and adventure.

God is very, very, very busy and if you are connected with Him and following Him and

listening to Him and obeying Him, you will be too.

And it will be an adventure and believe me, you will have fun.

It is, it is a lot of fun.

It is a lot of fun.

So I want to get into the next topic, which is how spiritual warfare is impacting marriages

and what can dads do to protect their marriages from attack?

Absolutely.

I did want to touch too, just with technology and kids and you talked about pornography

being an issue.

That's another reason to be aware of what your kids are doing online.

The average kid gets exposed to pornography now.

I think it's like age seven, which is just stupid young.

And so the same is true with dads, right?

Dads can be easily tempted.

So be smart with what you're doing with technology.

Make sure to be smart with the boundaries that you're putting in place with co-workers and

other people and other friends.

Make sure you're being smart with where you're spending your time.

I always encourage it, courage dads to be diligent and praying for your family, be diligent

and praying for your, for your wife.

My wife and I love to go into our kids rooms after they fall asleep and just take time praying

over them.

And I praying again, that's something else that we don't always know what to pray, but

guess what?

You can ask the Holy Spirit, Lord, give me words to pray.

What does my son need prayer for?

How can I, like, I don't know the ins and outs of what's going on inside his mind and heart

and spirit?

And so God, tell me the things that I need to pray for him.

And the spirit is so good at just feeding me information and feeding my wife information.

And so I think that I am where I am today, specifically because my grandparents were so

diligent in praying for me.

And so there's a lot of power that comes from praying consistently for your family.

So I think it's an easy thing for us to do as dads and vital to the success, spiritual success

and all success of our families.

Jared, how can dads get a hold of you to get help or to ask questions or learn more about

what you're doing?

Also you have a podcast, how can dads find it?

Sure.

So the podcast that I'm a part of is called Strong By Design.

You can go to Strong By Design podcast.com is the website.

We have a YouTube channel where we put everything up or anywhere podcasts are found.

You can find it just search Strong By Design podcast that will pop right up on Google for

you.

We, it's an interesting podcast because we have different hosts.

I cover all of the faith and family topics, but then we believe that you know, you're

made mind body spirit.

So we have stuff on leadership that we have another host that is covering that stuff.

We have a host that's helping with nutrition and holistic health.

And we have another coach that's helping with physical fitness.

So it's kind of a wide variety of things on that podcast, but being strong and all of

those areas are important.

So go check that out.

My social media stuff, you can just look up Jared's Aria.

It's J-R-E-D-S-A-R-I-A.

I'm on Instagram.

I think I'm tick tock.

I'm Jared's Aria 84.

And Facebook as well.

You can you can search me up on Facebook.

But any of those areas, if you just, you know, send me a DM, I'm happy to connect with anybody

that wants to connect.

Just to make it easy to if you go to the fatherhoodchallenge.com, that's the fatherhoodchallenge.com.

If you go to this episode, look right below the episode description.

I'll have all those links posted there so you can connect with Jared and find him easily

that way.

Jared, as we close, what is your challenge to dad's listening now?

Please don't coast.

Be intentional with your time.

Be intentional with what God is asking you to do and lead your home.

Leading your home doesn't mean that you have to do everything.

That just means that you are shepherding and guiding and leading your family in the direction

that it needs to go in order to follow what God has for you.

So please be intentional.

Jared, it's been an honor having this conversation with you and you've taught us a lot.

Thank you so much for being on the Fatherhood Challenge.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fatherhood Challenge.

If you would like to contact us, listen to other episodes, find any resource mentioned

in this program or find out more information about the Fatherhood Challenge.

Please visit thefatherhoodchallenge.com.

That's thefatherhoodchallenge.com.

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