There is a defensive crouch that a lot of Christian men have mistaken for faithfulness. Hunker down. Hold on. Protect what little is left. Wait for the end and try not to lose too much ground before it comes. And they think that is what a faithful man looks like in a dark age, a man playing defense, slowly losing. It is not. Jesus described his church going the other direction entirely, and the picture is the opposite of a crouch.
"I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it" (Matthew 16:18).
Notice what he says will not overpower his church. The gates. The gates of Hades. And here is the thing men read right past, gates are not a weapon. Gates do not attack anybody. Gates are defensive, they are what a city hides behind when something is coming for it. So when Jesus says the gates of hell will not prevail against his church, he has flipped the whole picture you were carrying. Hell is not on offense in that sentence. Hell is behind its gates. The church is the one advancing on them.
Who is storming whom
Read it again with that straight, because it changes what kind of man you think you are supposed to be.
You have been picturing yourself as the city under siege, hell battering at your walls, you barely holding on. Jesus paints it the other way. Hell is the one holed up behind its gates, and his church is the army marching on them, and the promise is that the gates will not hold. Not that your walls will barely survive. That their gates will fail. You are not the defender hoping to last. You are on the assault, and the assault is guaranteed to break through.
That is a completely different man than the one crouched behind his own walls losing ground. The man who believes he is under siege plays not to lose. The man who knows he is on offense behind a King whose promise is that the enemy's gates cannot hold plays to advance. He takes ground. He goes toward the dark places instead of away from them, into the addiction in his own family line, into the lie his kids are being fed, into the sin in his own heart, on offense, because the outcome is not in doubt. The gates will not prevail.
Stop defending, start advancing
So the question for you is not whether you can hold on. Holding on was never the assignment. The question is where you have been crouched, playing defense, in a war Jesus told you is an assault with a guaranteed outcome.
Where are you hunkered down? What has you in a defensive crouch, treating a retreat as if it were faithfulness, protecting the little that is left instead of taking back ground? The generational thing you have accepted because fighting it felt hopeless. The area of your own life you gave up on and quarantined. The place in your home you stopped leading because it seemed like too much. Those are gates, and Jesus said the gates will not prevail, which means the thing you gave up as unwinnable was never unwinnable, you just believed you were on defense in a fight where he put you on offense.
Get out of the crouch. You follow a King who is building something the gates of hell cannot hold back, and he did not enlist you to defend a shrinking position. He put you on the assault, and he already told you how it ends. The gates will not prevail. So stop defending, and start advancing, because the outcome was settled before you ever picked up the fight.
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