Firefighters: the Connection Between an Apostolic/Prophetic Warfare Team and Intercessors.

I heard an excellent illustration recently, of the relationship between warriors and intercessors that a friend Bruce Turnbull shared with me. He was a firefighter in the navy and they had a drill where a room was filled with JP5 fuel and set on flames. The firefighters worked in two different teams consisting of 4 men each. They stood in two rows as close together as possible. They were staggered kind of like a honeycomb or bricks in a wall. The hose and applicator are held only by the front man in each team.

The job of the #1 hose team was, as soon as they opened the door to sweep back and forth from one side to the other, pushing the flames back from off of the fuel. A person from #2 team stood right behind the #1 team front person and had an applicator that sprayed a mist of water, that basically created a "wall" of water to keep them cool and protected. If the front person wasn't diligent and didn't go all the way to one of the sides, the fire would get through the space and set the fuel behind them on flames again and engulf them both.

If the person from team #2 didn't keep the front person protected with spray, then the insurmountable heat from the fire would be too much for him to stand. Because of the great heat he would lose control of his mind and cause him to be unable to do his job correctly. The reason there are 4 men in a team is because they require more than one man on a hose because the power of the hose is too much for one man to handle. If the front man tires then the second man takes over and #1 goes to the back.

In this illustration, the front team are the front line soldiers and the team in the back are the intercessors and together they form a combined warfare team. The clearest scriptural example of this is in the Old Testament, where Moses, Aaron and Hur are the intercessors on the mountain and Joshua and his men are the front line soldiers down in the valley. Together they formed a combined warfare team and both were vitally important. We discover from this passage that when Moses lowered His arms the warriors would begin to lose and when he raised his arms they began to win. So the key to the victory was in the intercession, but on the other hand, if there are no soldiers down in the valley, there is no battle.

How does this apply to the church today? The intercession part of this equation is already happening in many churches. How many churches do you know, that don’t already have an intercession group? On the other hand, how many churches do you know that has a front line soldier's warfare team? Many have equated intercession to be like a destroyer bombing the shore before the marines go in and hit the beach. In most churches then, we have the shore being bombed over and over, but no one is going in to take the beach. The church, therefore, is in a desperate need for front line soldiers to be raised up

As in the example of Moses and Joshua, the teams can be both men or both women or a mixture. We see that both men and women are involved in the intercession teams that are already in place, however in many cases there is a much greater number of women. Perhaps, the “front-line soldiers” team is the ministry for many of the men who presently haven’t found a place to plug into in the church.

Bruce also shared with me a revelation that God had given him, that men were created to be warriors and when they don’t have a foe outside to fight, then they begin to fight their own families and their aggressiveness is focused inward. This seems to be confirmed in the scriptures, for instance Numbers 1:2&3 - "Take a census of all the congregation … every male, head by head from twenty years old and upward, whoever {is able to} go out to war in Israel, you and Aaron shall number them by their armies”. This indicates that all men who were 20 years old and over, were expected to be soldiers and were numbered by their armies

Doesn't there need to be “call to arms,” to mobilize men into front line spiritual warfare? Think about it: wouldn’t this be the logical progression as the next step after the Promise Keepers movement. This movement helped men to get things straightened away at home, to be the kind of fathers and husbands that God had called them to be. Now that things at home are in better shape, shouldn’t the focus be for them to rise up as warriors and to battle the enemies of their family and church and community.

May I suggest the formation of front-line warfare teams in each church, with the purpose of seeking the Lord as to His strategy for their church and region.