THE WAR JOURNAL

by Ed Mabrie

Section Eight: Sword Training — Part One

In basic training, you receive your rifle within the first few days of joining your platoon. You do not fire it for weeks. But from the moment it is issued, it never leaves your side. You name it. You sleep near it. You carry it through every march, every drill, every exercise. You break it down and rebuild it obsessively. You clean it in conditions that make cleaning feel absurd. You learn its weight, its balance, its tolerances, until you stop thinking about it consciously and simply know it the way you know your own hands.

This is not accidental. In offensive warfare, your rifle is the instrument with which you push the enemy back. It cannot be something you pick up occasionally or reach for in a crisis without having held it for weeks. It has to be an extension of who you are. When the moment comes to use it, there is no time for introduction.

By the time we were finally scheduled for rifle training at Fort Jackson, we had been carrying our weapons for weeks and had never fired a live round. We were champing at the bit. We expected to march to a range, receive ammunition, and begin engaging targets. That is not what happened.

When they told us it was time for weapons training, we marched to a field. There were no targets. There was no range. There were benches, open air, and our drill sergeants. They taught us to mount the rifle correctly on the shoulder, to look through the eyepiece, and to operate the trigger mechanism — without a single round in the chamber. We drilled the motions of firing without firing. For over a week.

The cadence we learned was called BRAS. Breathe. Relax. Aim. Squeeze. And frankly, it sounded nothing like what we expected from people who had spent the previous weeks screaming at us about war. It sounded like yoga. But we practiced it, because they made us — and because, as with most things in basic training, there was a reason for it.

The BRAS Cadence — and What It Actually Teaches

Breathe first. Not hold your breath — breathe. The instruction was to make sure your breathing was steady and easy before anything else. If your breath is erratic — from exertion, from adrenaline, from anything — it throws off your aim. You will miss. The target does not move, but your weapon does, because you do.

Then relax. This was the most counterintuitive instruction in the entire cadence. You are about to fire a weapon at an enemy, and your drill sergeant is telling you to relax. The point is precision. Tension in your hands, your shoulders, your jaw — anywhere in the body — translates into movement in the weapon, and movement means inaccuracy. The drill sergeants, who had been the loudest, most aggressive presences in our lives for weeks, became remarkably quiet and calm during BRAS training. They wanted us to mirror that.

Then aim. Only after the breath is steady and the body is relaxed do you lock onto your target. Not before. Aiming with an erratic breath and tense muscles is wasted motion. The sequence matters.

Then squeeze. Not pull. Not jerk. We were told explicitly that there is no quick, hard trigger pull — not in proper marksmanship. A slow, steady, smooth squeeze until the round fires. And the measure of whether you did it right? You should be slightly surprised when the weapon discharges. If you anticipated the moment and flinched into it, your aim shifted. If you were surprised by the recoil, the round went where you pointed.

That last detail stayed with me. The effectiveness of the shot is confirmed by surprise. You do not force it into being. You prepare everything correctly, you execute the motion, and when the result comes — it surprises you.

LETTER	STEP	TYPE	WHAT IT MEANS IN RIFLE TRAINING	WHAT IT MEANS IN SPIRITUAL WARFARE
B	Breathe	Physical	Steady, easy breath — not held, not erratic. Erratic breathing throws off aim.	Intentional calm. Step away from reaction. The Spirit does not shout over panic.
R	Relax	Physical	Release tension from hands, shoulders, body. Tension produces distraction and inaccuracy.	Release the urgency. God’s voice is still and small. Tense posture cannot hear it.
A	Aim	Mental	Lock the target. No target selected, no round fired effectively. Know what you are engaging.	Identify the attack precisely. What lie? What fear? What principality? Name it before you fire.
S	Squeeze	Physical + Mental	Slow, steady trigger pull — not a jerk. The shot should surprise you when it fires.	The word or authority spoken with steady conviction — not emotional, not rushed. The enemy’s defeat should feel almost inevitable when it lands.

When we questioned the drill sergeants about the pace — surely in a firefight we cannot spend sixty seconds on each round — they had a simple answer. The first time, BRAS takes thirty seconds. Then twenty. Then ten. Then five. Then one. Then a fraction of a second. With enough practice, it becomes an instantaneous reflex. You are not slower than the enemy. You are more accurate under the same conditions. The training lasts more than a week precisely so that when the moment comes, BRAS is not a checklist. It is simply what your body does.

The Enemy’s Preferred Weapon: Distraction

In the armor of God lesson, we identified the sword of the Spirit as our primary offensive weapon — the Word of God, specifically the rhema: the right verse applied at the right moment against the right attack. But any weapon requires the person wielding it to be functional. And the enemy knows this.

When most people think about spiritual attack, they think of the dramatic. Oppression. Fear. Supernatural events. Things that announce themselves. And the enemy does use those. But C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, puts the most revealing strategic insight into the mouth of a senior demon advising a junior one on how to handle a human target:

“Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signpost.”

— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Distraction is that gradual slope. It requires no supernatural event, no moment of crisis, no obvious spiritual confrontation. It simply needs your attention to be somewhere other than where it belongs — and sustained there long enough that the habit forms. How many times have you intended to pray, to spend time in the Word, to sit quietly with God, and discovered an hour later that you had been scrolling? One image led to the next. One video led to another. The next time you looked up, the time was gone.

That is not neutral. It is not wasted time in the passive sense. It is time actively diverted from the battlefield of the mind — keeping you not just unproductive but specifically unfocused on your authority, your defense, your offense, and your connection to headquarters. The enemy does not need to defeat you in direct combat if he can simply keep you distracted indefinitely.

This is why BRAS exists. The entire cadence is a distraction-elimination protocol. Breathe — because an unsteady breath is a distraction. Relax — because tension is a distraction. Aim — because without a locked target, you are firing at nothing. Squeeze — because a jerking, anticipatory motion is the mind’s last-second intrusion into a process that requires its absence. The goal of the entire sequence is a mind so focused and a body so settled that nothing competes with the moment of engagement.

The enemy does not need to defeat you. He only needs to keep you distracted. And in the current age, he has more tools for that than at any point in human history.

Step One: Meditate — But Know What That Word Actually Means

Biblical meditation is not what most people mean when they use the word. The most culturally prominent form of meditation in the modern world — transcendental meditation, mindfulness meditation, and their variants — involves clearing the mind. Releasing thought. Achieving a receptive blankness. And this is described, even in secular contexts, as restful, as healing, as spiritually opening.

It is also dangerous. Here is why.

In the Combat Manual lesson on triggers and the unconscious brain, we established that your free will operates from your conscious mind. When you intentionally disable conscious thought — when you clear your mind and become directionless — you do not enter a spiritually neutral state. You enter a state without the faculty that resists manipulation. This is the same neurological state that makes hypnosis possible. A person who cannot be hypnotized is not someone with exceptional willpower — they are someone whose conscious mind refuses to disengage. They keep thinking, keep evaluating, keep resisting the suggestion that they stop. Their mind is active. An active, directed mind cannot be hypnotized. An empty, passive mind can be.

What enters a cleared mind is not nothing. It is whatever comes through the open door. And in a spiritual environment where there are real entities whose entire agenda is your deception and destruction, clearing your mind and waiting is not peaceful. It is an invitation.

TRANSCENDENTAL / SECULAR MEDITATION	BIBLICAL MEDITATION
Goal: empty the mind. Clear all thought.	Goal: fill the mind with one specific thing — the Word of God.
Method: release focus. Let thoughts dissolve. Receptive but directionless.	Method: concentrate on a passage, a verse, a name of God. Turn it over repeatedly. Ask what it means. Ask what it means for you.
What enters: anything. An empty mind is an unlocked door. Whoever knocks can enter.	What enters: the Holy Spirit, who communicates through the unconscious when the mind is occupied with God’s Word rather than emptied.
Spiritual risk: high. No active conscious thought means no free will in operation — the same state that makes hypnosis possible. An open, empty mind is a primary access point for demonic influence.	Spiritual benefit: the most concentrated form of council meeting available. The Holy Spirit can speak directly into what you are meditating on — delivering a causeless, precisely targeted answer to your specific situation.
The key error: mistaking passivity for spirituality. An empty mind is not a holy mind. It is simply an unguarded one.	The key insight: your attack is personal and specific. Your familiar spirit knows exactly how to come at you. Generic meditation on nothing produces no specific defense. Meditation on God’s Word produces a specific answer for a specific battle.

Biblical meditation is precisely the opposite structure. God’s instruction throughout Scripture is never to clear the mind — it is always to fill the mind with a specific thing: His Word. Joshua 1:8 instructs meditation on the law day and night. Psalm 1 describes the blessed person as one who meditates on the law continuously. Psalm 119 has meditating on God’s precepts, statutes, and wonders as its sustained theme.

What this means practically: you take a passage, a verse, a phrase, a name of God — and you sit with it. You turn it over. You ask what it means. You ask what it means in your specific situation. You ask how it changes what you are facing. And you stay there. Not wandering. Not jumping to the next thing. There.

This is not passive. It is one of the most intense forms of focused mental effort available to a human being. And it is in that focused state — with your conscious mind fully engaged with God’s Word — that the Holy Spirit can communicate through your unconscious. Not to an empty room, but to a mind already occupied with the right material.

If You Do Not Know What to Meditate On

There will be times when you are under attack, you know something is wrong, but you cannot identify the verse that applies. You are in the middle of a spiritual situation and you do not yet have the specific rhema for it. This is where a practice I have found consistently effective comes in, and it is deceptively simple.

Find the verse you think is closest to your situation. Then ask God: where am I wrong?

That question does several things simultaneously. First, it is an act of humility — and the Bible is explicit that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. Asking where you are wrong signals: I do not have all the answers and I know it. Second, God loves giving that answer. He loves nothing more than correcting a person who is genuinely open to correction and putting them on the right path. In my experience, that question has never gone unanswered. It may not be answered in the moment, but the answer comes — causeless, precise, landing as though from outside you — because it is.

WHY THE ANSWER SURPRISES YOU — AND WHY IT SHOULD In the BRAS cadence, the measure of a correct trigger squeeze is that the shot surprises you. You do not force it or anticipate it. You prepare everything, execute the motion, and the result comes when it comes. The same principle applies to the answers God gives in meditation and council meetings. You do not manufacture the insight through effort. You prepare — through intentional meditation on His Word — and the answer arrives causeless, unexpected, precise. That surprise is confirmation, not confusion. It is what distinguishes a genuine answer from your own reasoning.

Step Two: Be Patient

Jesus counterattacked all three wilderness temptations with immediate, precise, perfectly chosen scripture. He had the right verse ready for each attack before the attack came. What most people do not factor in is the context: Jesus had spent thirty years in direct communication with God before that wilderness confrontation. Thirty years. And He went into the wilderness directly from His baptism, at the beginning of His public ministry, with thirty years of preparation already complete.

If you have not had thirty years of that kind of communication, and most of us have not, then you will not be that fast initially. And that is not a failure. It is exactly where the training begins.

There will be attacks you do not immediately have a sword for. There will be situations where you feel the assault but cannot yet name the verse. When that happens, the protocol is not to panic or to fake precision you do not yet have. The protocol is to stop. Get focused. Enter your council meeting. Ask God what is happening. Ask where you are wrong. Ask for the passage. Ask for the word.

The goal of this course — and the goal of the entire twelve months — is to get you to the point where the spiritual sword is as automatic as BRAS became on the range. A fraction of a second. An immediate, fluid response that does not feel like effort because it has become reflex. But that does not happen in week one. It does not happen in month three. It is built, steadily, over time, through thousands of repetitions. The twelve months of this course are not a finish line. They are the beginning of a pattern of training that continues for the rest of your life.

Every elite soldier was once a recruit who could not get through BRAS in under thirty seconds. Patience is not a consolation for beginners. It is the posture that makes mastery possible.

Step Three: Start With the Basics — Build From the Biggest Picture In

The third principle in your sword training mirrors what happens in any genuine military training: you do not begin with advanced tactics. You begin with the largest, most foundational framework, and you work inward. From the overview to the specific. From the general to the personal.

Here is the sequence I recommend for building your sword — starting with what is already available to you right now in this course:

#	RESOURCE	SCOPE	WHAT IT GIVES YOU	WHY IT MATTERS FOR SWORD TRAINING
1	Jehovah’s Story Bible Study	12 sessions (~30 min each)	The biggest picture: God’s will from Genesis to Revelation. What He wants, how He works, why history moves the way it does. Available now in the course resources.	You cannot pray God’s will if you do not know it. You cannot wield your sword on behalf of a general whose orders you have never read.
2	Modeling God — John Lenhart	One book	God’s nature: always and completely right and just. Understanding what God is and how He thinks gives you the framework to recognize His voice and distinguish it from counterfeits.	Every council meeting and every sword strike rests on knowing who you are speaking with and who gave you the authority.
3	The Four Gospels	Matthew, Mark, Luke, John	Jesus — the source of your authority for spiritual warfare. Luke 10:19 is your baseline verse. The Gospels show you how He used authority and how He trained.	Your sword fights in His name. Know Him. Know His methods. Know why His enemies fled.
4	The Revelation Series	60 episodes (40-60 min each)	How God wins. The complete end of the story — every power and principality defeated, God’s will established completely. Available through Faith By Reason in the course.	Knowing how the war ends changes how you fight the battles. You are not fighting to win. You are fighting from a position of established victory.
5	Paul’s Letters to the Churches	Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Colossians, Philippians, and others	The Christian walk in detail — how to operate as a believer in a hostile world. Not all of it will resonate equally. The passages that hit you hardest are the ones to meditate on.	The passages that cut deepest for you are the ones your familiar spirit knows to block. Meditate there. That is where your sword gets sharpest.
6	Holy Spirit guidance in council meetings	Ongoing — daily	Ask God to lead you deeper into the Word as your needs evolve. The sword grows more precise the longer you carry it and the more specific your battles become.	This is where the roadmap becomes personal. The Holy Spirit leads each person into the specific passages for their specific war.

Notice the direction. You start with the biggest picture — what is God doing, what is His will, what is His nature — and you work toward the most personal: the specific passages that resonate specifically with you, for the specific battles you specifically face. A sword sharpened against your particular war is not the same sword someone else carries. It should not be.

This is the foundational distinction between this course and a generic spiritual warfare curriculum. Generic curricula give you universal verses to apply broadly. They assume your attack is general. It is not. Your familiar spirit has been studying you specifically, knows your specific triggers, your specific history, your specific vulnerabilities. A sword forged for a general target is not precise enough for that kind of combat. You need the verse that applies to what is actually happening to you — and the only way to identify that verse is to know the Word broadly enough that the Holy Spirit can point you to the specific passage when the moment requires it.

A NOTE ON LUKE 10:19 While your sword will grow more personal and specific over time, there is one verse that functions as your baseline authority in every situation regardless of how well you know the Word yet. Luke 10:19: ‘Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.’ This verse does not require expertise. It does not require you to have identified the specific attack or found the exact passage for your situation. It simply asserts the authority you already have. Use it while you are still building the larger sword. It is effective now.

What Comes Next: Live Firing

This section is your BRAS training for the spiritual sword. Dry firing. Mechanics without ammunition. The foundational preparation that must happen before you go to the range.

You have been given three things here. First: the practice of biblical meditation — intentional, focused, Word-centered — as the spiritual equivalent of BRAS. The discipline of eliminating distraction and engaging God’s Word with your full attention. Second: the instruction to be patient — understanding that precision is built through repetition, not achieved through a single determined effort. Third: a starting framework — the biggest-picture-to-most-personal sequence that will allow your sword to grow from broad biblical literacy into specific, battle-tested precision.

The next section moves to live firing. We will get into the Word itself — the difference between reading the Bible and studying it, which turns out to be a critical and largely overlooked distinction — and we will show you how to train with the sword in practice rather than just in theory.

The preliminaries are done. The range is open.

Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. — James 4:7 (NKJV)

Submit. Meditate. Focus. Resist. And they will flee.

Breathe. Relax. Aim. Squeeze. Be surprised by what falls.