Ferocious Warrior: Dismantle Your Enemy and Rise

By Cora Jakes Coleman

When the fight gets fierce, you have to get ferocious.
 
This book will teach me how to train with my pain, push with my prayers and conquer what’s trying to conquer me.
 
SUMMARY:
This book isn’t about winning pretty. Rather, it will show you how to punch through your pain, deliver a fatal blow to the enemy, possess all God has for you, and experience ferocious victory. The devil is striking from every side and it’s not because he wants to distract you or ruin your day—he wants to take you out! He’ll do anything to break you down. But you can flip the script and dismantle him instead!  When the enemy attacks, the fight gets ugly.  Your prayers and your faith have to get intense. You have to remove the makeup, take off the tie, and get down in the dirt of life to destroy the work of the devil.
 
In Ferocious Warrior, Cora Jakes Coleman shows you how to win. Sharing keys that helped her through personal battles with depression, insecurity, infertility, and loss, Cora offers strategies to help identify the tactics and agenda of the enemy, and the obstacles to your breakthrough.  Ferocious warriors don’t shrink back from the enemy—they go into his camp and take back everything he stole from them.  
The book also reveals:

• How to use the weapons of warfare that are already at your disposal
• How to implement the five principles of prayer
• How to let your pain push you to your next level
• How to think like a warrior and win even the toughest fights

 
FEATURES AND BENEFITS:

• Prayers and affirmations to help readers activate their faith
• How to experience and maintain deliverance
• Guidance to develop the lifestyle of a warrior and sharpen the weapons that bring victory

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charisma House
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781629996608

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1

Ferocious Faith

MY NAME IS Cora Jakes, and when I grow up, I am going to be a preacher just like my daddy." Those were the words of a five-year-old girl. I didn’t know then that I was planting seeds into my destiny, but I became a daughter of faith and declaration that day. Since then I have lived my life by faith, and I can tell you, it is no easy walk. But you cannot become a ferocious warrior without ferocious faith.

Ferocious faith believes God relentlessly and follows Him even into dangerous and uncomfortable places. It doesn’t give in to fear and is the shield that protects the ferocious warrior. It is a bold, powerful faith that is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the enemy but instead makes him cower in fear.

When you have ferocious faith, you see victory instead of defeat. You have hope instead of shame. You believe what God says about you and not what others have said. When you have ferocious faith, you walk into uncharted territory and enter rooms you never thought you would access because God makes room for you. When you have ferocious faith, you make the enemy sorry he ever counted you out.

Ferocious faith is a fighting faith. I like to describe it as a violent belief in God. It is when your faith in God is so strong, so relentless, and so brave that it literally becomes a weapon to conquer the enemy. But this kind of faith doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. To develop this kind of faith, you have to be willing to go through some hard times. In order to tap into ferocious faith, you have to consider it pure joy when you face fights that seem as if you are going to lose, because your strength is made perfect in the things that make you appear weak.

FACE YOUR FEARS

God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

—2 TIMOTHY 1:7, NKJV

You cannot be ferocious if you are bound by fear. I sometimes think of ferocious faith as first-responder faith, because it is the kind of faith that runs toward the obstacle instead of away from it. You will not become ferocious until fear becomes a steppingstone and not a stumbling block.

Ferocious faith is built as you choose to stop living in the past, take hold of your vision, and refuse to let fear keep you from seeing your vision come to pass. I want you to become the best version of yourself, but you cannot do that if you constantly run from the fight. The things that scare you can either stop you or elevate you.

We all are trying in one way or another to move forward. We want to be in a different place from where we are right now. There is always something more to reach toward. How you respond to fear will determine whether you reach the place of victory. It is time to stop being afraid of the devil and start taking him down. You are too strong to be overwhelmed by a defeated foe. You are too strong to be a slave to fear. You are called to be ferocious.

Being ferocious means you have to stop being weak for the enemy. Yes, I said it! When you allow someone who is already defeated to take your power to overcome, you’re being weak. Don’t let the enemy make you feel weak—start to bring weakness to the enemy.

Being ferocious may mean you have to release some things. When I decided to get ferocious, I had to let go of things that were hurting me and stop trying to be everyone’s savior. I am a fixer, and at one time in my life I was always trying to make sure everyone’s problems were solved and they were doing OK. But I did that at the expense of taking care of my own needs. I held on to relationships that were unhealthy and became the person others thought I should be instead of who I was called to be. I have learned you cannot let pleasing other people become more important than pleasing God. Ferocious warriors cannot worry about people’s opinions. Your elevation to ferocious faith is going to come when you are ready to stop being broken by your fear and stand up to the inner enemy that says you aren’t good enough.

You can be your own worst enemy. Being ferocious may mean resisting the voice that says you aren’t going to make it, even if that voice is your own, and instead believing what God’s Word says is true. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us (Rom. 8:37). Ferocious faith makes you resist social conventions and religious rules to reach for Jesus, just as the woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years did. According to the law of that time, she should not have been out in public, much less trying to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. But she believed Jesus could make her whole again, and the Bible says her faith made her well. (See Matthew 9:20–22; Mark 5:25–34; and Luke 8:43–48.)

Ferocious faith is so relentless, it makes you willing to stand in the lion’s den, just as Daniel did, rather than compromise the truth. Ferocious faith is so confident in the faithfulness of God, it makes you willing to be thrown into a fire, just as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were, rather than bow to anyone or anything other than the one true God. Ferocious faith stands on the truth of God’s Word: Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; you are Mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, nor shall the flame scorch you. For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior (Isa. 43:1–3, NKJV).

You were born to be ferocious because you were formed by a God who is ferocious. I challenge you to let the moments of fire, pressure, and pain grow your prayer life rather than paralyze you so you end up in sinking sand. The thing about faith is pressure helps build it. It cannot be built without pain and problems. You will experience many fights in life. No matter your gender, race, political views, or denomination, you will face obstacles. There is no way around that. What you can control is how you deal with the times in life that hurt you the most and what you choose to learn from them.

AVOID THE BLAME GAME

Being ferocious in your faith is about taking responsibility for where you are in life. If your vision has not become a reality, are you willing to make the choices necessary to change that? It would be easier to blame your mom, dad, cousin, auntie, neighbor, sister, brother, or even the bully from third grade for everything that has gone wrong in your life. But at the end of the day the only one who can truly keep you from moving toward what you desire in life is you.

You have to be willing to take responsibility for your life despite what you have been through. That is what it means to be ferocious. A large part of being ferocious is being able to admit you did something wrong and choose to make better decisions in the future. Most of your decisions do not directly affect anyone as much as they affect you. You may have been rejected, abandoned, neglected, overlooked, and ostracized by people, maybe even by family members, but that does not have to dictate how you view yourself right now. Whether you choose to love yourself is a decision you make; it is not a choice anyone makes for you.

You could spend your life saying the reason you are stuck or even broken is the person who hurt you or where you came from. But how does that account for who you are deciding to be today? When you consider your life, are you happy with who you are allowing yourself to be? Or have you let fear disable you?

Sometimes we make choices that keep us in painful situations. Having the humility and self-respect to accept our share of the responsibility for the pain we have experienced can be healing. I could have easily stayed depressed and broken for life, but staying broken and in pain would not have brought God glory, nor would it have helped me become the person I desire to be. Pain, crying, anger, losing things and people—believe it or not, they’re all steps to success. I know this from experience. The life of faith can lead you into many different places, and I learned the most about faith when I was in the darkest place of my life.

FIGHT BACK

Choosing faith is hard, but for me it was easier than being beaten, blocked, and broken by fear. If you refuse to confront fear and you keep letting it dictate your actions, you will only get what fear can produce. Fear cannot produce effective faith; it can only dismantle it. Ferocious faith takes on fear, depression, anger, loneliness, marriage madness, motherhood woes, etc. like a champion boxer defending his title in front of thousands of people. Every fight you choose to face can help you become better. But don’t think you can get in the ring with your greatest enemy without the fight getting ugly.

This is not a drill. The enemy has been after your faith since you were a baby, and you have to take your authority back. You may be thinking that is easier said than done. Well, let me help you by sharing a little of my story. At around the age of twelve or thirteen, I went through depression. As a young, brown-skinned girl, I didn’t feel like I was pretty or even valuable. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel loved. My family and friends made me feel extremely loved. I just didn’t love myself. I would look in the mirror and hate what I saw. I wanted to be lighter-skinned, taller, and more developed. Every day, my meeting with the mirror became more daunting, as I would find ways to hate myself more than the day before. It depressed me so much that I became comfortable in depression, so I began to find other ways to hate myself so I could continue in the depression and false sense of comfort.

I believe I attempted suicide at least three times during that season in my life. I was going to church, but I wasn’t praying, reading my Bible, or truly being faithful to God’s Word. I wasn’t open to believing anything good someone said about me because I did not see the good in myself. I let insecurity become my security blanket. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I became comfortable in my depressed, insecure state. Then I looked in the mirror one day and realized I had to make a different decision. I had to stop meeting up with depression like it was date night. I had to fight for my joy, my love, my peace, my healing, my hope, my endurance, and ultimately my power.

I let fear take what God had given me when He formed me in my mother’s womb, and I had to fight to get my stuff back. No, depression didn’t just pack up and leave overnight. It left when I started telling myself a different story—the story of what God said about me—and kept repeating it until I finally believed it. That is ferocious faith.

Ferocious faith causes you to challenge yourself to be a better person every day. You cannot get to your destiny without discipline. We often become the abuser in our own story because instead of loving ourselves, we find a way to hate ourselves. The prisons of fear and insecurity we find ourselves in are often built with the things we tell ourselves.

Romans 10:17 says that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (NKJV). We develop ferocious faith by hearing the Word of God and believing what it says. What God’s Word says may be vastly different from what we constantly tell ourselves. Too often we become our own worst enemy by refusing to let positive affirmations or encouraging words penetrate our hearts and minds so we can be transformed. Rather, we hold on to our victim status and then get mad when we don’t get the victory.

You cannot believe in God and not believe what His Word says. Many people claim to believe in themselves, but they won’t examine themselves and make the necessary changes to align their beliefs about themselves with what God’s Word says. To be a ferocious warrior, you must be willing to make conscious decisions to become the best version of yourself. No matter where you are in your journey of faith, you should have at least a small desire on the inside to become the best version of yourself. There is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t work to be the best you that you can be.

NO, IT’S NOT EASY!

Not once have I said the journey to becoming a ferocious warrior is easy, because it is not. It is hard to look at yourself and say, No, I am the problem. I chose to hate myself, and if I can choose to hate myself, then I can choose to love myself. I couldn’t blame anyone but myself for hating on me, and I couldn’t blame anyone else for my insecurity. The blame belonged to me.

When I finally realized that, I got angry with myself. But I was so afraid of that emotion that I would bottle the anger inside and smile as if everything was OK, even though I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. I went on like that for years, suppressing my anger and screaming on the inside. Then one day I realized I was pushing people completely out of my life. That is what can happen with any negative emotion we don’t allow ourselves to process. It can become a wall that keeps everyone else out and traps us inside.

Ferocious faith was birthed when I was able to feel my anger, depression, pain, sorrow, and regret without falling into sin. The Bible tells us to be angry and sin not (Eph. 4:26). Man, that was hard, but I couldn’t become ferocious against the enemy until I was able to become ferocious against the things making me reject myself. I battled infertility physically, but I mishandled the pain, and it eventually consumed me until I was nothing but a shell. Yet in that place of emptiness I learned that God is everything. And I learned the strategy of my enemy.

Depression, fear, anger, doubt, worry, loneliness—those are the enemy’s favorite pieces to play. His strategy is to bring depression or some other negative emotion so you will get distracted and not activate your power in God. The enemy wants you to be consumed by confusion. He wants you to get comfortable in that dark place so you don’t attempt to break out. Ultimately he wants you to forget about your light. But letting fear keep you from being ferocious toward the enemy ends today.

Today you will make a decision to stop looking in the mirror and hating who you are. Instead you will remember that you are fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps. 139:14) and take responsibility for where you are and make decisions that ultimately bring healing. This may require hard work on your part, and it may even bring some pain, but it will be worth it.

THE DOS AND DON’TS OF FAITH

The enemy uses the same strategy over and over: he tries to intimidate you. But when you have ferocious faith, you will intimidate him with your power. There is power in your ability simply to believe that what you desire to do in life is possible. You have a power in your faith that makes you ferocious to the enemy.

When your faith is ferocious, you can destroy the enemy’s grip on you. You may lose some friends. You may lose some people you thought loved you. But it is all part of you gaining the intel for your fight. I am not here to make you comfortable—I am here to get you ready to fight back.

Sometimes when we feel as if we have been fighting, the reality is that we have not been fighting the right way. It is time for you to come out of your dead place and begin to have life and life more abundantly.

There is a type of faith that makes the enemy afraid of you. But before you can truly tap into that kind of faith, you must recognize what can cause your faith to falter. I call them the dos and don’ts of faith.

Don’t doubt.

To doubt is to call into question the truth of; to be uncertain or in doubt about or to lack confidence in.¹ Doubt is a lack of faith. When you are unstable in your convictions, your lack of confidence will show. A large part of walking by faith is walking in certainty. When you are uncertain, you open yourself up to being attacked by the enemy instead of using your faith to dismantle the enemy. You cannot use a weapon—or much less be a weapon—if you doubt your ability to do what seems impossible. Let me tell you a story from Matthew 14 about how faith empowered a man to do the impossible.

You may remember the account of Jesus feeding the five thousand with just two fish and five loaves of bread. Bear in mind that the five thousand only accounted for the men; there were thousands more women and children. After miraculously multiplying a young boy’s lunch, Jesus continued to minister to the people. Later He sent the disciples ahead of Him by boat to the other side of the Sea of Galilee while He dismissed the crowd and spent some time in