One day during my junior year in high school I asked to hitch a ride home with two of my classmates. The car being driven belonged to the parents of the driver. It was a Nash Rambler. A Rambler was not a vehicle known to attract girls or solidify one’s reputation as a player. I hopped in the back seat. 

During the drive, my two friends became animated jesting back and forth like dumb almost-men do in an attempt to display a not-yet-visible manhood. They began to tailgate the car in front of us honking and swerving side-to-side behind the car that was traveling at the speed limit. The more my friends did this the more uncomfortable I became.  Suddenly, the car they were tailgating came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road.

Out of the car came two men. To us, they looked like men even though they weren’t much older than us. My guess was they were recently home from military service in Viet Nam. They had high and tight haircuts in the days of long hair. They were buffed physically and walked with an air of confidence that was fast draining from the faces of my two now not-so-confident-looking friends.

The men split up and approached our car and stuck their faces inside the two front windows. Before they spoke, they looked at each of us directly in the eye. In a calm voice, the man on the driver’s side said, “Do you want some of this?” Almost in a timed and rehearsed whimpering response both my friends said, “No sir.” The two men knew it was my jerk friends in the front seat doing all the foolishness. One of the men looked back at me and said, “You good with this.” I replied, “Yep.” At that, the two men turned around and walked back to their car, and drove off.

On the way to my home, both of my friends tried to shed their overabundance of accumulated adrenal fluid with trash talk just as rapidly as I imagined the puddle formed under each of them when confronted by real authority.

We can play the part of spiritual bravado and confidence, but until we are challenged our spiritual authority remains untested and not established. A wise man once told me that our spiritual authority is never established until it is challenged. 

Followers of Jesus can talk trash about the devil and his hellish activity, but they have never come face-to-face with hell or had to deal with demons head-on in Jesus’ name. When hell does appear, they look and sound like my two friends when challenged by darkness. They have been driving a vehicle of faith that exhibits a false confidence in self and an untested spiritual character. These tests never take place in isolation from spiritual reality. When taunted by the lies and deceptions of hell, we should resemble the two men who stopped and challenged my two friends, not the other way around.

We are about to face challenges to our faith in ways many of us have not yet had to face. We need to make sure our confidence is based solely on the Lord and not on our own strength or a false sense of spiritual bravado formed in untested isolation. When the test of our faith finally arrives, and it will, only confidence based on God and His word, will pass the test of those challenges.