You and I and Others: Tilting Windmills
With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in two parts, published respectively in and , during the latter part of a historical period known as the Spanish Golden Age. During this age, Spain pursued military conquests in parts of Europe and conquered large parts of the Americas, which brought great riches to the country and inspired a flowering of the arts.
In La Mancha , Castilla, Cervantes' setting for the novel, there still exist some examples of the era's windmills that Don Quixote found in his adventures. In Don Quixote , the eponymous protagonist consistently misinterprets the motives and actions of his adversaries and allies, and struggles to even understand his own at times — a conundrum regularly resulting in apparently unjustified violent actions and consequences. One way of interpreting Don Quixote's tilting at windmills could be allegorically, thereby promoting critical, skeptical, or satirical evaluation of either a hero's motives, rationales and actions, or the ultimate aims of a nation's foreign policies.
The movie They Might Be Giants features a reference to Don Quixote thinking that the windmills are giants, and the movie is named after that reference.
Tilting at windmills - Wikipedia
Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot , in a album release by the same name, wrote and recorded the song Don Quixote which contained the lines "through the woodland, through the valley, comes a horseman wild and free; tilting at the windmills passing , who can the brave young horseman be Named for the love interest of Don Quixote, the album features the song "Windmills. As such, the reality of the character Dulcinea does not correspond to Don Quixote's fantasy of her. Australian folk rock band Weddings Parties Anything released the album Roaring Days in , which contained the song "Tilting at Windmills".
Tilt at windmills - Idioms by The Free Dictionary https: The CEO seems to be tilting at windmills lately, flinging accusations at members of the press for no reason. The company keeps tilting at windmills with its insistence on implementing a service structure that serves no immediate purpose. As with the fictional character, Don Quixote, who attacked windmills.
Aren't you too smart to go around tilting at windmills? I'm not going to fight this issue.
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I've wasted too much of my life tilting at windmills. Engage in conflict with an imagined opponent, pursue a vain goal, as in Trying to reform campaign financing in this legislature is tilting at windmills. Do I object to looking kooky?
- De la force du Gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de sy rallier (French Edition).
- mugennokanousei (Japanese Edition).
- Mnemonic Latin.
Absolutely not, as long as we're looking kooky for the right reasons. Christians are weird for the wrong reasons much of the time, not for the right reasons. If the truth is kooky to other people then let them be offended, but when we offend and look ridiculous not for the truth but for some theological chimera that we're jousting with then our blood is on our own head and we have to take responsibility for that. I am convinced that spiritual warfare has little or nothing to do with the kinds of things that pass as spiritual warfare, the binding, the loosing, the pleading of the blood, the addressing of demons, the dealing with generational demonic influence in a person's life.
Why do I say that?
- Miss Merivales Mistake.
- Reward Yourself;
- hit those bullies?
- Tilting at windmills!
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For a very simple reason. This is never seen in the New Testament. I've mentioned this before and it's a good rule of thumb, friends, if you're embracing or engaging something as a spiritual discipline then you ought to be able to find it taught as a spiritual discipline in the Scriptures. Sometimes what we do is take a verse which has a particular meaning to us and expand it into a complete discipline and then we enjoin people to follow this discipline. Hearing the voice of God is one thing that I'm concerned about.
There is nothing in the New Testament about that yet you can go to a seminar on it. The same thing with spiritual warfare. It is actually very easy to deal with these kinds of issues. It's very simple if you want to know what spiritual warfare is: When I was in India we had a lot of what I would consider well-meaning but overly zealous Christians from America looking for demons in India.
As a matter of fact, the local Christians in India were concerned because it bothered them, to be honest with you. Certainly there is demonic activity there and it needs to be dealt with, but there isn't a demon under every bush even in India. Some of the team would come back from the field and tell me how they cast out demons. I asked how they knew the person was demonized and they said they "could see it in their eyes.
Were their eyes big? Is it possible to have wild eyes and big eyes without being demonized?
Now a very easy way to resolve this problem and find out what a demonized person looks like is to go through the Gospels and the book of Acts. There are a number of illustrations where we see demons being cast out. In the process we are given details of what that person looked like. Some were mutilating themselves. Others were living in a bizarre fashion, like living in the tombs. Others were speaking with strange voices or were clairvoyant and had supernatural information.
Others were called unclean spirits which referred to their foul sexual references and filthy language. Others were being thrown down into the fire in epileptic fits. There was one case where one person was mute because of the demon. What you can do by simply going through the text and finding these illustrations is make a simple list of the characteristics of demon possession. I'm not suggesting that this is exhaustive, there may be other characteristics. But at least it gives you something biblical to begin working with before you start claiming that people are filled with demons.
Most of the times that people tell me that they think someone is demon possessed it usually means that this person was just basically weird so they assume that there is a demon living inside them. My appeal is to simply judge these things with biblical criteria. If we have a guideline and have listed eight or twelve things and see somebody with one of those things it may not mean that they're demon possessed; but if we see someone with five or six or seven of these characteristics, well it's a pretty safe call that there's a demon in them and we'll know what to do.
My conviction is that most people who are weird are not demon possessed, they're just weird. Christians throughout history have not dealt with spiritual warfare in this fashion.
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I'm not contending that there is no spiritual warfare; there's intense conflict in the heavenlies. The issue is how do we fulfill our soldierly duties; how dow we take part in the battle? For that we must go back to the text, to our operations manual. These men stood in the gap and proclaimed the truth. They didn't bind and loose. They didn't cast out demons. They didn't plead the blood over the nation of Germany or over the guns of the Allies. They spoke the truth. I am convinced in my assessment of Scripture, and I've looked carefully through the New Testament on this issue, that spiritual warfare is not principally a power encounter but a truth encounter.
I have in front of me maybe fifteen or twenty different verses that talk about the weapon that Christians wield in spiritual warfare.
The principle verse as far as I'm concerned is 2 Corinthians It's usually accomplished by using a certain type of, what's in my mind, an incantation. Say the right words of binding and loosing and pleading the blood of Christ and you've done the job. But what does Paul describe in 2 Corinthians? He doesn't describe that kind of thing. He says something entirely different.
tilt at windmills
He continues, "We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. You never see Paul binding and losing. In fact, he avoids encounters in the book of Acts and when he does he deals with it in a word. But I see all through the text words about the true God.
There are phrases about "true knowledge" in Colossions 2 and 3. Then in 2 Peter two references to "true knowledge. In 2 Timothy, "Retain the standard of sound words.