Are you going through a trial that just won't end? A season where home, marriage, work, and church all seem to be shaking at once? This message, preached at Tokyo Christ Church on January 18, 2026, starts from a short passage in Exodus 17 to give you two survival verbs: fight, and climb. Two words that carried a brother through three difficult years, and that can carry yours too.
Introduction: Two Words for a Whole Year
The preacher, who returned to Tokyo after nearly twenty years in Nagoya, does not hide his emotion as he takes the pulpit again in the church where he was born spiritually. He has come to talk about something very concrete: his family, his marriage, his faith have been shaken like never before between 2022 and 2025. Many brothers and sisters, after hearing his testimony at a retreat this past September, asked him the same worried question: "Are you really okay? Isn't it too much for you?" He wants to give his answer today to the whole congregation. His answer is simple, and it is also the unspoken title of his sermon: I'm okay. Not because the storms have calmed down, but because God has given him a way to get through them that truly protects.
He found this way in four lines of Exodus 17. Just two verbs: fight, and climb. These two words became the theme word of his year 2025. And if you too are in a season where you no longer know how to grab hold of your difficulties, these two verbs can become yours as well.
The Text: Exodus 17:8-11
"Then Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim. So Moses said to Joshua, 'Choose for us men, and go out and fight with Amalek. Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand.' So Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed." (Exodus 17:8-11, ESV)
You probably know the story. Israel fights, Moses lifts his hands, God gives the victory. But if you take the time to imagine just how overwhelming this battle really was, the text starts to speak differently. That is what the preacher invites us to do.
Outline of the Sermon
1. Fight: Three Reasons to Tremble Before the Battle
Israel, at Rephidim, goes into battle under humanly disastrous conditions. Three factors make this battle terrifying.
A terrifying enemy. The very name Amalek means "the one who plunders, the one who raids." This nomadic people from the southern Sinai lived off raiding. Their cruelty was known to everyone. These are not farmers coming to fight: these are professional soldiers, for whom plundering and killing was a way of life. Picture the fear of a people of slaves facing warriors like these.
No weapons worthy of the name. Israel comes out of Egypt as a people of slaves. A slave does not own weapons. According to some commentators, the only weapons available were those picked up along the shores of the Red Sea, after the drowning of the Egyptian army: foreign blades, likely khopesh, those curved swords no Hebrew had ever held. Imagine being handed, the night before your first battle, a tool you've never seen and being told, "figure it out."
The very first battle. This may be the heaviest weight of all. No one in the camp has ever fought before. The young men Joshua must choose have no veteran to turn to for advice. They spent 430 years making bricks, not waging war. "Dad, how do we fight?" "I don't know, son. All I've ever done is make bricks." That night, before the battle, you can imagine the mothers' tears, the fathers' silent questions, the anguish of the young men sent out first.
And yet the text says it clearly: they truly fought. This is not a case where God paralyzed the enemy on his own, as he sometimes did. The Hebrew word, like modern translations, plainly says war, battle, combat. There were wounded. There were deaths. When Moses lowered his hands, "Amalek prevailed." That means Israelites were really falling.
2. What This Battle Tells Us About Spiritual Warfare
This discovery greatly encouraged the preacher. It says two very important things about the way God leads us through our own battles.
First, the final victory belongs to God, absolutely. We will be brought all the way to heaven, we will be shaped into the image of Christ, that is the promise. But in the meantime, God does not keep us from everything. There are setbacks. There are wounds. There are sometimes heavy sacrifices. The Christian battle is not a protective bubble where nothing can touch us. It is a real fight, where we can truly lose ground in this or that battle, without losing the war.
Second, God prepares his people for battles they have never fought before. After 30 years of Christian life, you can be tempted to believe you've already seen it all. That's false. There are battles you will only be able to fight after ten, twenty, or thirty years of walking with Christ, because they touch foundations you had never had to revisit before. Those battles may be the deepest of your life.
3. The Personal Battle: Three Years Between Shadow and Light
The preacher then tells what these last three years meant for him. It is not easy to hear, and he does not try to make it pretty. Among other things, he shares two entries from a spiritual journal he began keeping, inspired by Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem in 52 days (Nehemiah 6). His question: what are my broken-down walls, and how do I rebuild them, stone by stone?
One night in 2024, in the middle of the night, he runs out of his house shouting in the street that he wants to throw himself off a ledge. One night at the end of the year, he trembles on the couch repeating "I'm scared, I'm scared," while his wife rests her hand on his back and reads him the Word. In that moment, he knows (in a sharp, existential way) that he is in a real spiritual battle. The enemy looks for the cracks. Wherever the foundations are fractured, he gets in.
This testimony is not here to shock you. It is here to tell you: if your foundations seem to be cracking in certain places, you are not alone, and you have not fallen outside of the faith. You are probably living through a battle that God has been waiting a long time to bring you.
4. Climb: The Gesture That Decides the Victory
Here is the second half of the text, and it carries a hundred times more weight than the first: Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. As long as Moses holds his hands up, Israel prevails. As soon as he lowers them, Amalek gains the upper hand. In the end, a stone has to be set under Moses so he can sit, and Aaron and Hur hold up his arms on either side.
Understand the message clearly: it is not the strength of the fighters that decides the outcome. It is the posture of the one who climbs to intercede and surrender to God. Very few people are physically able to stay up on the hill. But everyone can do this: climb, in thought, in prayer, in a corner of their day, and hand the outcome over to the Lord.
This posture, the preacher says, is a hundred times more important than the battle itself. It is a faith and a prayer that refuses to let its condition be dictated by the current score. The final victory belongs to God. When you understand that, the battle itself takes on a different flavor: it is no less real, but it is no longer crushing.
5. How to "Climb" Concretely
For him, climbing also very literally means walking up a small slope behind his house, along a river, while praying. Twenty to thirty minutes walking the dog. When time is short, it will be a five-step walk in the nearby park. The place doesn't matter, what matters is that it be sustainable. Something you can really do every week, every day if possible. A practice where you hand your battle over to the Lord, again and again.
Alongside this, he has built other very concrete supports: a carefully prepared, budgeted family devotional, going as far as printing out an "instruction manual for myself" to help his wife understand when he is truly exhausted, because he does not naturally sense his own fatigue until he is on the verge of collapse. And the patient reading of a book that shook him deeply: Spiritual Depression by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Read, reread, annotated, copied out, because there are seasons when we must learn to read seriously what God has placed at our disposal.
Key Takeaways
- Your battle is real. Spiritual warfare is not a metaphor. There are wounds, there are setbacks, there are sometimes three-year seasons. God is not deceiving you when he leads you through it.
- Fight, yes. But climb, a hundred times more. The real lever of victory is not your strength at the bottom of the hill. It is your ability to climb, in prayer and trust, and hand the outcome over to the Lord.
- The final victory belongs to God. That does not mean you won't lose any battles. It means the war is already won in Christ, and you are called to live it out from that outcome.
- After thirty years of faith, new battles remain. Some foundations are only revealed after twenty or thirty years of walking. That is not a regression. It is a new depth of God's work in you.
- Make your discipline sustainable. It is not the grand spiritual promise that holds you together. It is the small daily appointment you can actually keep, year after year.
Personal Application
- What is, today, in your life, the battle where you are about to lower your hands?
- What would your "hill" look like, the place, the moment, the posture where you climb to hand this battle over to God?
- Who in your circle could be your Aaron or your Hur, someone to hold up your arms when you can no longer do it alone?
- Is there a reading, a book, a teaching that God has placed in your path that you keep putting off digging into seriously?
- Are you ready to make your spiritual discipline something small and sustainable rather than grand and occasional?
Verses Cited
- Exodus 17:8-11 · Israel fights Amalek, Moses lifts up his hands.
- Nehemiah 6 · Rebuilding the walls in 52 days.
- Hebrews 12:1-2 · "Let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus."
FAQ
What does "fight and climb" mean in the Christian life?
"Fight" refers to concrete engagement in the real battles of your life: marriage, family, work, relationships, habitual sin. "Climb" refers to withdrawing, like Moses on the hill, to pray, intercede, and hand the outcome over to God. Both are necessary, but climbing is the decisive lever: that is where victory comes down from.
Can you still face major spiritual battles after 30 years of faith?
Yes, and often these are the deepest ones. Some foundations of your life are only revealed as cracked after years of walking. God sometimes waits twenty or thirty years before putting his finger on them, because that is the only moment when you are ready to rebuild them. This is not a regression, it is a deeper work.
How do you hold on over the long haul when the battle lasts for years?
By making your spiritual discipline small and sustainable. A real five-minute daily appointment is worth more than an occasional hour. Find your climbing place (even if it's just a few steps in a park), and hand your battle over to the Lord, again and again. Surround yourself with brothers who can hold up your arms when they fall.
to take notes and ask questions.