What Is Spiritual Warfare? — Bunyan on the Christian’s Real Fight
⏱ 14 min read
What if the thing you have been calling spiritual warfare is not the thing the old book is talking about? You have read the modern websites. You have heard the sermons that promise that a louder prayer or a sharper declaration or the right combination of scriptures said out loud at midnight will move the heavens off a thing. And underneath, quietly, you have suspected that this is not it — that the actual war the apostle is naming is older and slower than the dramatic version you keep being sold, and the part of you that resists the theatre is the part that has been listening, all along, to the soberer tradition the modern church has half-forgotten.
This essay is the slow walk back to that older tradition, through three passages from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress — the book Bunyan wrote from a Bedford jail cell across twelve quiet years, with the cadence of a man who knew the fight from the inside and was not impressed by his own bravery. The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety is the contextual companion for the kind of week this article describes — a slow daily page for the woman whose fight is not the loud one but the long one. For now, read slowly. The question what is spiritual warfare is the kind of question that only opens when you stop expecting fireworks for an answer.
Bunyan was a tinker by trade and a preacher without a licence in seventeenth-century England, which was a thing the state did not tolerate. He spent twelve years in Bedford jail for the crime of preaching the gospel without the king’s permission, and the bulk of Pilgrim’s Progress was written there, on prison paper, with a candle, while his blind daughter visited him at the window. The man knew the fight. He had been in it for a decade, in stone walls, with a wife outside and a child he could not feed. When he writes about spiritual warfare, he is not writing as a man theorising the topic. He is writing as a man whose daily life was the topic.
The viral version of spiritual warfare — the one in the YouTube thumbnails — would have lasted Bunyan about ten minutes in a Bedford winter. What he wrote instead is the older, quieter doctrine: the daily mortification of sin, the standing firm in scripture, the patience of vigilance against a flesh and a world and a devil that do not raise their voices but do not stop walking either. Three enemies, not one. Two of them inside you. And that quiet recognition is where the answer to what is spiritual warfare actually begins.
The first passage: the oil of grace, and what the devil cannot stop
“The Interpreter answered, ‘This is Christ, who continually, with the oil of His grace, helps the work already begun in the heart; by the means of which notwithstanding what the devil can do, the souls of His people prove gracious still.’”
— John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
Read it once. Then read it again — slowly, and notice what Bunyan is showing.
The scene in the Interpreter’s House, where this passage sits, is a small picture. A fire burning against a wall. A man on one side of the wall pouring water on the flame, trying to put it out. A man hidden on the other side of the wall, pouring oil onto the same flame from behind. The fire does not go out. It burns brighter, in fact, the longer the water is thrown at it. The Interpreter explains the picture to Christian: the fire is the work of grace in the heart of a believer. The water is the devil. The oil — pouring secretly from behind the wall — is Christ.
This is the first thing the older tradition wants you to see about spiritual warfare. You are not the one feeding the fire. Christ is. The work already begun in your heart is being secretly maintained by the One who began it, and the adversary’s water is real but is being out-poured, in the same scene, by an oil you cannot always see. Bunyan’s image will not preach as a forty-second clip. It works at the speed of a slow paragraph, read twice, and it does something the louder version does not — it lowers your shoulders.
Notice the words notwithstanding what the devil can do. Bunyan is not pretending the water is not real. He is not denying the adversary. He grants the adversary his full activity — what the devil can do — and locates the believer’s survival not in the believer’s counter-effort but in the souls of His people prove gracious still. The proof of the war is not the absence of attack. The proof is that, year after year, in cell after cell, in week after week of a faith that is being tested, the soul keeps proving gracious. The fire does not go out. Not because you saved it. Because the oil keeps coming from behind the wall.
For the modern Christian woman whose internal weather has been hostile for months — whose prayers feel thin, whose Bible reading feels mechanical, whose love for the Lord feels like a thing she has to manufacture every morning before the day starts — Bunyan’s image is the first quiet correction. You did not start the fire. You will not be the one to keep it alive either. Your job is to keep walking. The oil is His to pour. The fact that you are still, against every reason, on the road at all is the visible part of an invisible faithfulness happening on the other side of the wall.
If the under-current of your week has been the anxiety that the war is being lost because you are not strong enough, how to pray when you’re under spiritual attack sits very close to this paragraph, and prayer for anxiety and overthinking (calm your mind with scripture) is the practical companion for the body the modern war keeps tightening. The fight is not yours to win by force. The fight is yours to stand inside while the oil is poured.
The somatic that goes with the warfare
Pause here, because Bunyan’s tradition was not a head-only one, and the body has been carrying the war the whole time the mind has been thinking about it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put both feet flat on the floor. Notice the shoulders — they are likely up by an inch. The reading of spiritual warfare tightens the body before the soul has even formed an opinion. Let one slow inhale come in. On the exhale, let the shoulders drop by the inch they have been holding. Then let one more breath go all the way out — slower than the inhale. Notice where the fight is sitting in the body. The jaw. The chest. The small clench in the belly. You do not have to do anything about it. You only have to notice that the war has been in your body, not just in your prayer life, and the body is going to need the slow daily exhale, repeated, before the mind will believe what it is being told about the oil.
Stay with the longer exhale for thirty seconds. Then continue reading. The somatic is part of the warfare, not separate from it. The body that has been bracing all year is the body the Lord is also pouring His oil into. You will need to give it permission to lower itself. That permission is part of the fight.
The second passage: the heart that was never made pure
“The Interpreter answered, ‘This parlor is the heart of a man that was never made pure by the sweet grace of the Gospel.’”
— John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
This is the harder passage of the three, and it is essential to the question what is spiritual warfare.
The scene, again at the Interpreter’s House, is a parlour thick with dust. A man tries to sweep it; the dust rises in a choking cloud and the room becomes unbearable. The Interpreter then has a maid sprinkle the floor with water before another sweep, and now the dust settles, the floor can be cleaned, the parlour becomes habitable. The dust, the Interpreter explains, is original corruption — the disordered loves of the natural heart. The man with the broom is the law — the moral effort that, by itself, only stirs up the dust without removing it. The maid with the water is the gospel — the grace that settles the dust by a different power than effort.
This is where Bunyan locates the real fight. The first enemy named in the older spiritual warfare tradition is not the devil. It is the dust in your own parlour. Your disordered loves. The pride that surfaces at three in the morning. The envy that catches you off guard at the school gate. The small daily resentments. The fantasies you do not say out loud. The flesh — to use the apostle’s word — that has been with you since you were born and will be with you until the day you die. Bunyan would not let you skip past this enemy to the more cinematic one. The dust is the first front of the war, and most of the daily fighting happens here.
The older tradition called this the mortification of sin — the slow daily putting-to-death of the disordered loves of the heart by the grace of the gospel, not by the broom of self-effort. John Owen wrote a whole book about it in 1656. Bunyan is dramatising the same doctrine in a parlour with a maid and a broom. The doctrine is sober. It is daily. It does not produce a viral video. It produces, slowly, a heart that becomes habitable to the Spirit because the dust has been settled by the water of the gospel rather than swept into a choking cloud by the law.
When you ask what is spiritual warfare, the first answer Bunyan gives you is: it is the daily settling of the dust in your own parlour, by the water of the gospel, in the small repeated practice of confession and grace and slow turning, until the room becomes a place the King can sit down in. The cinematic version skips this front because it is unphotogenic. The actual war is fought here, mostly, and the woman who has been faithfully sitting at the page with her Bible and her tears for years has been on the front line the whole time — even though no thumbnail has ever celebrated her for it.
This is the part of the practice the 100 Days of Faith Over Fear: The Slow Practice That Actually Holds walks for the modern woman who is tired of the loud version and is ready for the patient one, and christian journal prompts for anxiety — 30 prompts to quiet your mind is where you might begin the page-work if the dust has been thick lately.
A short word on the modern noise
The reason most modern teaching on what is spiritual warfare leaves you tireder than when you arrived is that it has narrowed the war to a single enemy — the devil — and located the whole fight in a single act: a louder prayer, a sharper declaration, a midnight intercession. Bunyan, with the older tradition, named three enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil. The flesh is the dust in the parlour. The world is the seed-plot of false soils where your desires get planted. The devil is real and active but is the third front, not the only one, and by Bunyan’s reckoning the third is usually feeding on the first two. Mortify the flesh; the devil has less to grip. Reorder your loves; the world has less of you to ensnare. The cinematic version skips the slow work and goes straight to the third front, and the soul ends up exhausted because it is being told to fight a battle the older saints would say has its actual ground in the small daily mortification it is not being taught to do.
The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety is built on this older diagnosis. Not a deliverance manual. A daily companion for the woman whose fight is mostly happening in the parlour, on a Tuesday morning, with the kettle on, in the slow settling of the dust by the gospel — the actual war the apostle named, before the modern church loudened it.
The third passage: the saving grace that shows itself
“Well, if you will, we will fall to it now; and, since you left it with me to state the question, let it be this: How doth the saving grace of God show itself when it is in the heart of man?”
— John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
This is the conversation between Christian and Faithful, walking along the road, asking each other the question the whole book is built around. Read it twice.
Notice that Bunyan, having shown you the oil behind the wall and the dust in the parlour, now lets his pilgrims sit with the practical question — how does saving grace show itself in the heart. The question is not theoretical for Bunyan. He has been asked it by men in the Bedford congregation week after week. He has watched grace show itself slowly in some, and watched the absence of grace pretend itself convincingly in others. The conversation between Christian and Faithful is the older tradition’s third move on the question of spiritual warfare — what does the actual fruit of the fight look like, if the fight is being won.
Bunyan’s answer, walked across several pages, is sober. The grace shows itself, he says, in a conviction of sin — the dust in the parlour is felt, not denied. In a fleeing to Christ — the maid with the water is sought, not the broom of self-effort. In a different walk — the road actually goes somewhere different now. In a tender conscience — small sins matter, and large ones grieve rather than glamour. In a love for the brethren — the war does not isolate the soul, it incorporates it. None of these is dramatic. All of them are slow. They are the visible signs that the invisible oil has been doing its work for a long time.
For the modern Christian woman who has been wondering whether her quiet, undramatic walk is enough — whether the absence of cinematic spiritual experience means the fight is being lost — Bunyan’s third passage is the gentlest possible correction. The fight is being won, he would say, in exactly the fruits you are too humble to notice in yourself. The slow turning from the resentment. The daily showing-up at the page. The tender conscience that catches itself at the small unkindness in the kitchen. The love for the brethren — the friend you called even when you did not feel like it. The fight is showing itself. You have just been told to look for fireworks, when the older tradition would point at the slow steady fruit on the branch and say, that is what victory in the war looks like, week after week, for a lifetime.
The quiet shape of the answer
So — what is spiritual warfare, in the older, soberer tradition Bunyan is dramatising?
It is the daily standing inside a fight whose oil is being poured from behind the wall by a Saviour who is not waiting for your strength. It is the slow settling of the dust in the parlour of your own heart by the water of the gospel — the long mortification of the flesh, repeated weekly, year after year. It is the patient noticing of the saving grace showing itself in the unphotogenic fruit of a quietly transformed life — the tender conscience, the different walk, the love for the brethren — that is the actual evidence the war is being won. It is not the louder prayer or the sharper declaration or the midnight intercession against a single dramatic enemy. It is the long obedience, in the same direction, on three fronts at once, with an oil you mostly cannot see, in a body that is learning slowly to exhale.
This is the spiritual warfare the older saints walked. It is the spiritual warfare Bunyan walked in his Bedford cell, with his blind daughter at the window, and his wife outside, and twelve years of stone walls turning into the slow steady oil-pouring of a man whose soul was proving gracious still. You are in the same fight. The same oil is being poured for you. The same dust is settling, slowly, in the parlour of your own heart. The same fruit is showing itself, week by week, in a life you are too tired to admire from the inside.
(The sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers cluster sit at What Is the Armor of God? — Owen on Ephesians 6 and How to Fight Spiritual Warfare — Murray on Standing Firm, if the slow read wants to keep going.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor for the soul that is learning, slowly, to stand inside the older fight without being recruited into the louder one.
The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety carries Bunyan’s slow vocabulary — the oil behind the wall, the dust in the parlour, the saving grace that shows itself in unphotogenic fruit — into a daily companion built for the woman whose spiritual warfare is the long quiet one, and who is ready to stop being recruited into the noisy version.
