Spiritual Warfare (NES, PC game, 1992)

2015.9.17: Spiritual Warfare (NES, PC game, 1992)

11:44am – 12:55pm

One memorable game from my childhood is this Spiritual Warfare game published by Wisdom Tree in 1992.  The goal of this game is to evangelize people by throwing the fruits of the Spirit at them and to defeat the various mini-bosses (which is always a challenge), and finally, Satan.  You win the game when you saved the whole city.  As always, I’m into these RPG/Action-type games.  Screenshots of the game can be found at the end of this blog.

A concept I remembered that is important for the Christian walk is endurance.  Just as we need physical endurance to finish a race or to exert our body for an extended period of time, we need spiritual/soulical endurance to handle the stresses of life and to follow God’s principles in this world.

One of the key factors that got me through my Army experience is realizing that I need endurance and then focusing on this attribute.  Recently, however, I find myself lacking this trait.  When I drive on the street and drivers do an injustice on me, I get angry.  When life becomes hard, I want to take the easy way out and I become frustrated.  When people close to me say or do something that is mean, I get offended.  I would cry out to God, yes, but I would cry out to Him for justice, and maybe vengeance and revenge.  I believe measured justice is ok (Matthew 5:38), but I also need to pray that that punishment can bring that person to God.  But, after talking to my mentor, maybe I shouldn’t even think about justice.  God will bring justice anyways because it is in his character.  What I should do is to pray for their salvation and forgive them. 

I realized that those symptoms of anger, frustration, and offense are signs that my spiritual endurance is weakening.  My spirit is under stress but I don’t have enough “muscle” to endure it.  So, I am going to focus on this attribute again.

In the game Spiritual Warfare, “endurance” or “hit points” is measured by the amount of hearts the character has.  I used to think of that as physical hit points.  Once those bad guys beat you up too much, you lose the game.  But, now, I realized that those hit points are not physical in nature, but spiritual. I will get hurt; I will get hit; but will I continue to evangelize?  In spiritual warfare, for both definitions, you lose when you give up. 

God, increase my faith and endurance so I can have more hearts.  And, in the morning, fill those hearts up (or me up) so I can endure the difficulties of life [and the Christian walk]. 

P.S.

If you want to play and download the game: http://gamefabrique.com/download/spiritual-warfare/

Spyware checked (using Spybot)

Note: For Windows 10, set the program file to Windows 95 compatibility, disable display scaling, and run as admin on the “Compatibility” tab in the “Properties” window.  Once you run the game, open it using the “Genesis” option in the “File” menu and then press Esc for full screen.  :)

Some screenshots of the game:

Theme song for this blog:

2015.9.8 The Life Index Indicator

2015.9.8 The Life Index Indicator

How often have you done an assessment on yourself?  Yesterday night, while I was browsing the Web, I thought about making an assessment tool so I can better myself.  I would like to share with you this assessment.  I made this in about two hours (or half?).  PS: I have made similar indicators in the past but I would like to share this one.

The Life Index Indicator

This index shows the total well-being of a person's life.  It combines a person's spiritual, willpower, mental, and physical indexes into one.  The individual indexes will follow shortly.

Value System:

0 = None, no indicator of this attribute

1 = Very limited attribute, shows rarely

2 = Poor attribute, shows once in a while

3 = Okay attribute, shows often

4 = Good attribute, shows many times

5 = Excellent attribute, shows always

This value system, from 0 to 5, is used for the purposes of calculating the different indicators and indexes.

Rather than going into too much technical detail, I will start with the first major index, the Spiritual Index.

The Spiritual Index

The Spiritual Index is the most important index as it determines a person's well-being and future state of his/her life.

You might need to scroll a little to the right to see the full table.  This table describes the sub-indicators for the Spiritual Index.  I included Time spent with God, Prayer, Worship, Devotion, Evangelism, and Helpfulness, with its description.  The value is what I currently have now, using my intuition.  I thought about hiding it but for the purposes of sharing this tool, I decided to show it.  

The importance is the percentage that each sub-indicator carries.  For example, Prayer carries 0.25 or 25% of this index's total score.  All of the sub-indicators add up to 1 or 100%.  The asterisk shows the top two most important sub-indicators of the index.

The calculations is simply getting the raw score by multiplying the "value" by the "importance" then I add all the values up.  If I get a perfect "5" on all my sub-scores, for example, I should also get a "5" in the sum of the calculations.  

Then, I derive the total index, which is the percentage format of the sum of the "calculation" score.  So, 2.03125 / 5 in percentage format is 40.625%.  

On a side note, maybe I fudged too much on "time spent with God" and placed too little emphasis on "evangelism."  I have my biases but I will do my best to be truthful.

The following indexes are similar so I will not repeat the technical details again.

The Willpower Index

The second index determines attributes of the soul, which is a person's willpower.  I included four indicators for this index: Life purpose, Discipline, Focus, and Foresight.

I added "Life Purpose" before listening to Pastor Patty's preaching on Identity on Sep. 4.  But after listening to it on Soundcloud, it is more important than ever.  The life purpose also determines a person's identity.

I know that each of these values are interlocked or correlated with each other.  For example, it is impossible to have a strong prayer life without spending a lot of discretionary and/or total time with God.  By discretionary, I mean free time and God knows how much free time each of us actually has.  So, improving one sub-indicator can influence and improve others, including those from other indexes.  

I included "Focus" because I wanted to include sin and temptation.  "Focus" also determines how successful we are in resisting and/or fleeing from the devil.  

I tried to include base factors or factors that people can improve on.  You are comparing to yourself, to the person that God wants you to be.  So, I didn't include factors like "courage" because it will come naturally when other indicators improve (?).  I try to add intrinsic factors as opposed to extrinsic.

The Mental Index

The other index of the soul, the mental index, covers a person's brain, or mental-related skills.  Again, I tried to keep this short and simple by adding as few factors as necessary and by using intrinsic factors.  

I added "Happiness" to this index because a person's emotional state can greatly influence mental capacity.  

The Physical Index

The fourth and least important index is the Physical Index.  "For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things" (1 Timothy 4:8a).  However, it is still important since we are still in the body.

I remember Pastor Frank said he maintains great physical health so he can travel around the world to preach the gospel.  

The Life Index

So, the Life Index is a combination of all four of the other indexes.  It is like the stock market, but on a global scale.  By the way, maybe I made this because I'm into investing and I look into the stock indexes of the world.  But in this world, the "world" is you, the whole person, and the major indexes are the major components of that person.  

The percentages or "Index Value" won't make sense unless I add its interpretation:

The index value scale is from 0 to 100.  I added its interpretation.  This can fit with the Total Life Index, or any of the major sub-indexes.  

As so it happens, the spirit, of course, is greater and thus carries more weight than the soul or the body.  And the soul carries more weight than the body.  But, all of them are important to the overall score and neglecting one will cause the other indexes to drop.  Similar to globalization in the real-world stock markets.  :)  

Conclusion

So based from this exercise, and I will do an assessment on myself using this or similar tools on a regular basis, I have come with the following conclusions.

The first one is that this indicator shows that seeking God is the most important and that by seeking Him, everything will fall into place.

The second is that God is giving me mercy and grace.  My spiritual index is the lowest and, yet, God hasn't given me what I really deserve.  God is merciful and slow to anger.  He gives us time to repent and to follow Him.  

I thought about how this assessment can apply to people who claim that they don't need God or don't seek God and, yet, are successful.  Their spiritual index may be very low, if they rank themselves with spiritual eyes, but the other scores may be high.  They may be healthy and strong:

Truly God is good to Israel, to those whose hearts are pure. But as for me, I almost lost my footing. My feet were slipping, and I was almost gone. For I envied the proud when I saw them prosper despite their wickedness. They seem to live such painless lives; their bodies are so healthy and strong.  (Psalm 73:1-4)

However, God is still the judge and this discrepancy in the index scores will be corrected in time.  He may be giving those people, like he's giving me, time to repent.  What is normal is that the spiritual index should be the highest and all the other three indexes should lag behind.

So this is the assessment tool that I developed in a nutshell.  :)  Thank you for reading and God bless you!