God is increasing your capacity for spiritual warfare. What worked in the past will not be sufficient to engage the battles in your future. This increased capacity is a work of God, not a capacity you can produce.

When I was a cop, one of my fellow officers got in a shootout with an armed robbery suspect. It was a hot July night, almost 100 degrees. My friend saw a man dressed in a heavy wool coat and a watch cap driving through town casing stores. The unusual attire caught the officer’s attention so he followed the vehicle. Like many criminals, the suspect provided a minor equipment violation that allowed the officer to legally make a car stop. 

When the officer approached the vehicle, the suspect bailed out of the car with a semi-auto 30-06 rifle and began shooting. The officer returned fire with his revolver as he ran backward, attempting to find cover behind his patrol unit. One of the suspect’s rounds hit the doorframe of the police vehicle fragmenting and wounding my friend. At that point in the gunfight, the officer had fired the last round in his six-shot revolver.  That last round hit the suspect in the upper thigh, and the gunfight was over. 

I was a department training officer so I grabbed some time to debrief my friend on the shooting. I asked him what he would do differently. His immediate response was, “I would want more bullets.” Back in those days, cops carried six-shot revolvers, not autoloading pistols that officers carry today with magazines holding almost three times the number of rounds as a revolver. The higher capacity of modern handguns is a far superior fighting weapon compared to the limited capacity of the revolvers we carried back in the day.

Having enough capacity to stay in the fight is critical, not just on the streets, but in our spiritual lives. When we put on our spiritual armor, we are actually putting on the Person of Jesus Christ, not a skill we learned at a workshop on spiritual warfare. When God increases our ability to fight the good fight, He is increasing our capacity to know and reveal Him in the challenging situations of life. He is our capacity.

The next time hell opens fire on you and those you love, ask the Lord to increase your understanding of His power and presence in your struggle. That is your most trustworthy battle weapon and defines your capacity to do battle. What God reveals to you at that moment will never run dry, leaving you facing the enemy alone and outgunned.