Christian Warrior Training | Christian Warrior Bible Study
DOWNLOADS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS ARTICLE👇
In the space of about 48 hours last week, the governments of Poland, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Lithuania, and Switzerland each issued public warnings about Russian escalation against Europe. Warnings from individual European officials have become routine over the past two years, and they usually come one at a time or on the sidelines of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. These came from leaders in their own capitals, on ordinary working days, one after another. French President Emmanuel Macron called party leaders and presidential candidates into the crisis room at the Élysée Palace for a briefing on classified intelligence, then ordered his government to prepare a plan protecting critical infrastructure and the most sensitive defense sites against drone and cyberattacks.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk started the sequence by warning that Russian drones or missiles could enter the territory of one or more NATO countries on the eastern flank in the coming months and cause destruction, and Macron called that assessment sound and well documented. The Dutch prime minister said it was no coincidence that Tusk was speaking out so strongly and that the warning had to be taken very seriously. Germany is preparing its hospitals for mass casualties, Lithuania has updated its plans for evacuating civilians, and Finland’s president told his country it was worth preparing mentally for something to happen, including sabotage and Russian drones.
On September 18 the Swiss Federal Council adopted a new national security strategy with 46 measures against hybrid threats, cyberattacks, drones, and missiles, including preparation for a possible armed attack on Switzerland. Nine days earlier the chief of the Swiss armed forces, Benedikt Roos, said publicly that Switzerland is in Russia’s sights and that many Swiss people have not yet grasped the seriousness of a crisis he considers imminent. Switzerland has held to neutrality for roughly five hundred years. It broke from that tradition in 2022 to join sanctions against Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and the new strategy ties the current danger to the security deterioration that invasion set in motion. Swiss voters go to the polls on September 27 in a referendum on the country’s neutrality.
These warnings follow a year of Russian activity inside NATO territory. On July 30 a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crashed into a field near Tarnawa-Kolonia in eastern Poland, and Warsaw determined that the missile had been manufactured near Moscow in the second quarter of this year. NATO jets have shot down a Russian drone over Lithuania, a Russian warship fired flares at a Danish military helicopter, and German authorities concluded that Russian intelligence was behind an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport. A count cited by Politico put officially attributed Russian hybrid incidents in Europe at 100 between January and August, up from 60 over the same months last year, and a senior NATO official told the outlet the real number is likely above 200.
United States intelligence assessments reported in August concluded that Vladimir Putin could test NATO with a limited attack on an alliance member in the coming years, in forms ranging from a cyberattack to a small land incursion. Later that month Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow and warned Russian officials against attacking NATO members, with particular emphasis on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The closest precedent is November 2021, when CIA Director William Burns traveled to Moscow to warn the Kremlin against invading Ukraine, less than four months before Russia invaded.
NATO has said publicly that it sees no imminent threat of attack. Lithuania’s foreign minister said his government held the same intelligence Tusk cited about a possible Russian operation carried out under a foreign flag, that the information dated to July, and that he viewed the wave of public statements as a coordinated campaign to warn Moscow against a miscalculation. Coordinated public disclosure of intelligence is the same method Washington and London used in the months before the 2022 invasion, when they published what they knew about Russian preparations in an effort to deter it. Several of the governments involved this time are also putting money into hospitals, civilian evacuation, infrastructure protection, and air defense.
On September 15 federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment charging five men with conspiracy to finance terrorism and murder-for-hire conspiracy. The Justice Department describes them as part of a Russian intelligence network that paid, or tried to pay, people inside the United States to conduct surveillance and carry out targeted killings, including a plot against a prominent Russian dissident believed to be living in Washington, D.C. The defendants include a former Russian intelligence colonel and his son, along with two Cubans and one Venezuelan, and all five remain at large. Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg said the network tried to recruit U.S. citizens to carry out killings for the Kremlin. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has used the same method in Europe and the United States, hiring local criminals for surveillance and violence so the work is harder to trace to a foreign government.
The United States is fighting its own war at the same time. Major combat operations against Iran began on February 28, a spring ceasefire and a June memorandum of understanding both broke down, and fighting resumed in July with the Strait of Hormuz as the main flashpoint. The U.S. Navy has reimposed its blockade on Iranian shipping, and the President said last week that he faces a decision on returning to large-scale strikes. In the Pacific, China has shifted its pressure on Taiwan toward coast guard and civilian vessels, with Taiwanese authorities counting 1,247 of them near the island since May, while Taipei plans a record defense budget for 2027.
Nobody outside a handful of governments knows whether any of this becomes a war between the United States and another major power, and a Christian family can prepare without that answer. In a war of that size, the effects reach an American household through prices, supply shortages, pharmacy shortfalls, and infrastructure failures long before anything kinetic touches the continental United States. Most families never prepare for that version of a war. They picture something cinematic and conclude it sits outside their control, so the parts they could have controlled go unbought and unplanned.
I spent close to thirty years in law enforcement reading indicators, and the method transfers to this work. Start from the household systems that would fail during a major conflict, then fix them in order of cost and consequence. For almost every family, water and medication come before generators and ammunition.
The rest of this article covers what a major war does to an American household and what to do about it, in order of priority. The Scripture section sits at the end deliberately. Readers who are not believers can work through the practical material on its own terms, and the reasoning at the end will land better once the preparation itself looks ordinary.
What a major war does to an American household
Prices and supply shortages
Wartime economies reorganize around the war. Manufacturing capacity gets redirected, shipping lanes close or reroute, and marine insurance rates move first because underwriters price risk faster than governments act. At the consumer level this shows up as sharp price increases on imported goods and intermittent availability in specific categories rather than uniformly empty stores.
The American version during the Second World War included ration books, price controls, and government allocation of fuel and rubber. A modern version would more likely arrive as purchase limits at the retail level and allocation decisions made quietly between manufacturers and distributors. Distributors do not announce those decisions publicly, so the first indication available to a household is an empty category on a shelf that was full the week before.
The electrical grid and municipal water systems
I rank this vector highest for American households, and it carries the strongest public sourcing of anything in this article. In February 2024 the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) published joint advisory AA24-038A. The advisory confirms that a People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored group known as Volt Typhoon has compromised the information technology environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations, primarily in the communications, energy, transportation, and water and wastewater sectors, across the continental United States, its territories, and Guam.
The authoring agencies assess with high confidence that these actors are positioning themselves on information technology networks in order to move laterally into operational technology assets and disrupt their functions. They describe their concern as disruptive or destructive attacks during a period of geopolitical tension or military conflict with the United States. Reporting on the advisory noted the group had gone undetected inside some environments for more than five years.
Three federal agencies have stated in writing that a foreign government has placed operators inside the systems that run American electricity and water, and that the purpose of the access is disruption during a conflict. A household plan for extended loss of power and municipal water addresses a documented capability rather than a hypothetical one. Everything in the water, food, and communications sections below exists to cover that specific scenario.
Chinese laboratories operating on American soil
I have reported on this before. It belongs in a war preparation article because it describes a delivery mechanism that requires no missile, no port of entry for military cargo, and no declaration of war.
In late 2022 a code enforcement officer in Reedley, California followed up on a garden hose running through a warehouse wall and found an unlicensed laboratory inside. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party investigated and reported that the facility was run by a PRC citizen who was a wanted fugitive from Canada carrying a 330 million Canadian dollar judgment against him for stealing American intellectual property. The committee found that he had been a senior official at a PRC state-controlled company with links to military-civil fusion entities, and that the operation received millions of dollars in unexplained payments from PRC banks. Investigators catalogued thousands of labeled, unlabeled, and encoded potential pathogen samples including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and COVID, a freezer marked Ebola holding sealed bags consistent with how the site stored high-risk material, and close to a thousand transgenic mice engineered to mimic the human immune system.
The committee also documented how the federal government responded. It found that the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially declined to investigate despite repeated calls from local officials, and it recorded accounts of CDC staff hanging up on those officials mid-conversation. The site was found by a city employee doing routine code enforcement work, not by any agency tasked with biological detection.
The activity did not end in Reedley. In early 2026 the FBI and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department announced that the same operator was linked to a similar laboratory in Las Vegas. The matter was raised on the floor of the House, where the Las Vegas site was described as running under the same limited liability company and the same Chinese nationals as the California operation.
A separate case ran through Michigan. In June 2025 the Justice Department charged Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu, both citizens of the People’s Republic of China, with conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements, and visa fraud. The charges involved Fusarium graminearum, a fungus that causes head blight in wheat, barley, maize, and rice and whose toxins cause vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive defects in humans and livestock. The complaint alleges that Jian received Chinese government funding for her work on the pathogen and that her electronics held material describing her membership in and loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, and that Liu carried the material through Detroit Metropolitan Airport concealed in his backpack.
Plant pathologists interviewed after the charges were announced disputed the agroterrorism characterization. They noted that Fusarium graminearum does not appear on the federal list of plant pathogens designated for heightened regulation and that the organism has been present in the United States for well over a century. The smuggling, the visa fraud allegations, and the foreign government funding are documented in the criminal complaint. The weapon framing is contested among the scientists who work with the organism, and both of those conditions hold at the same time.
For household planning purposes, these cases establish two conditions. Biological material tied to foreign state interests has been moved onto American soil and operated here with minimal federal reaction. In the best-documented case the discovery came from a local building inspector, which means a family should assume that official warning of a biological event will arrive late or not at all, and should keep the supplies described later in this article on hand before any announcement.
Pharmaceutical supply
Most finished drugs consumed in the United States depend on active pharmaceutical ingredients produced overseas, with China and India carrying a large share of the upstream chemistry. A shipping disruption, an export control, or a sanctions regime reaches the pharmacy counter within weeks. Generic antibiotics, blood pressure medication, insulin supply chains, and common pediatric formulations all sit downstream of that chemistry. Families with a chronically ill member face the tightest timeline in the house and usually carry the least awareness of it.
Fuel and freight
Diesel allocation governs almost everything downstream of it. Groceries, pharmaceuticals, and municipal services arrive by truck, and in a declared emergency diesel goes first to defense and agriculture. A regional diesel shortage empties grocery stores faster than consumer panic buying does because the resupply trucks stop arriving while the shelves are being cleared.
Conscription
Selective Service registration remains a legal requirement for men aged eighteen through twenty-five. Actual conscription requires Congress to act and the President to sign, a slow and politically expensive process, which puts it well down the probability list. It belongs on the list because the families it reaches are reached completely, and because the conversation with a nineteen-year-old son goes better when it happens before any letter arrives.
Churches as targets
Wartime raises the value of soft targets for anyone conducting sabotage or intimidation inside the United States. A church sits unguarded by default, publishes its meeting times, and fills with people at a known hour. Everything I teach on the security side of my work applies harder during a war than during peacetime, and safety teams should expect their posture to be tested rather than assume the front door stays a low-interest location for the duration.
Nuclear and radiological
Strategic nuclear exchange remains the lowest-probability item on this list and carries the highest consequence. The preparation for it costs very little and takes one afternoon, which is why it appears here at all. It does not deserve to dominate your planning time or your budget, and the section below keeps it proportionate.
Water and food
Water fails first and costs the least to fix. Store one gallon per person per day and set thirty days as the floor, which comes to thirty gallons for one person and one hundred twenty for a family of four. Rotate stored tap water every six months, or buy commercially sealed water and skip the rotation. Add a gravity filter rated for bacteria and protozoa, plus unscented household bleach at a concentration of 5 to 6 percent sodium hypochlorite for chemical treatment.
Food storage works best when it runs on what your family already eats. Buy two of every shelf-stable item on your normal grocery run for eight weeks and you will reach a thirty-day supply without a single specialty purchase. Layer long-term staples on top once the thirty days is secure: rice, beans, oats, pasta, cooking oil, salt, sugar, and canned protein. Set ninety days as the goal for a wartime scenario rather than the thirty-day floor used for a storm, since wartime shortages run in months.
Write down what you have and where it sits. A pantry inventory sheet taped inside the door takes ten minutes to build and prevents the two failures that ruin most food storage, which are buying duplicates of items already on the shelf and finding expired cases you forgot you owned.
Medication and medical supplies
Call your physician and request ninety-day fills on every maintenance medication in the house. Many insurance plans allow this through mail order at a lower cost than thirty-day retail fills, and the request takes one phone call. Where a ninety-day fill is refused, ask specifically whether an early refill is permitted so you can build a rolling one-month buffer over the course of a year.
Stock over-the-counter depth in four categories: fever and pain reducers in both adult and pediatric strengths, oral rehydration salts, antihistamines, and anti-diarrheal medication. Dehydration from a gastrointestinal illness kills more people in austere conditions than the underlying illness does, and a box of oral rehydration salts costs a few dollars. Buy ten packets per person.
Keep trauma supplies in a separate bag from illness supplies. A trauma kit with tourniquets, pressure dressings, and chest seals solves a different problem than a shelf of cold medicine, and storing them together means digging through cough syrup while somebody bleeds. Take a Stop the Bleed course or equivalent tourniquet training rather than relying on the device alone.
Build a family medical binder holding each person’s diagnoses, current medications and dosages, allergies, immunization records, physician names, and insurance information. Print it on paper and keep it with the trauma kit. During a grid-down event the version stored on a phone becomes unreachable.
Household response to a biological event
Buy one box of twenty N95 respirators and two boxes of one hundred nitrile gloves, and store them somewhere you can reach without electricity. Choose in advance which room becomes the sick room, which bathroom the sick person uses, and which adult serves as the designated caregiver, so that exposure concentrates on one person rather than spreading through the whole family.
Food and water already in the house provide the deepest protection available against a communicable outbreak because they let you stop shopping. Every trip to a grocery store during an outbreak is an exposure event, and thirty to ninety days of supply converts that from a daily risk to an occasional one.
Buy two digital thermometers and one pulse oximeter. Both cost under thirty dollars together, both produce objective numbers instead of guesses, and both let you give a physician something usable over the phone when clinics are overwhelmed. Keep household bleach on hand for surface disinfection at the dilution printed on the bottle, and write that dilution on an index card taped to the bottle so nobody has to work it out under stress.
Communications
Build a Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency (PACE) plan for your family and write it on paper. Cell phone serves as primary, text messaging as alternate because texts often get through when voice calls will not, family radio as contingency, and a physical rally point as the emergency fallback requiring no technology.
Family Radio Service (FRS) radios require no license and work at short range. General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) requires a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license with no exam, and one license covers your entire immediate family. Apply for the GMRS license this month while the process stays routine, then run the radios often enough that your spouse and children operate them competently before a situation demands it.
Receive-only capability carries more weight in a wartime information environment than transmit capability does. A shortwave receiver, a scanner programmed to your local public safety frequencies, and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather radio together cost less than a decent rifle optic, and they let you hear what is happening when the internet runs degraded or censored.
Choose one out-of-area contact several states away and have every family member memorize that phone number. Local circuits saturate before long-distance circuits do, and a single distant relative acting as a switchboard solves the problem of everyone trying to reach everyone simultaneously.
Money
Hold cash in small bills, inside the house, somewhere you can reach in the dark. Electronic payment systems fail during infrastructure attacks and banks close during liquidity events, and a hundred-dollar bill does nothing at a gas station running on a cash box. Keep twenties, tens, fives, and ones.
Reduce revolving debt ahead of any anticipated disruption. Wartime inflation combined with a variable-rate credit balance raises your monthly obligation at the same time your purchasing power falls, and every dollar of obligation you remove now is a dollar you do not have to earn during a period when earning may be harder.
Keep your emergency fund in a form you can access within one business day. Precious metals have a legitimate place in a diversified household balance sheet, and anyone telling you to convert your savings into coins because a war is coming has coins to sell. Treat that pitch the way you would treat any other sales call.
Nuclear and radiological protection
Three variables govern radiological protection: distance from the source, shielding between you and the source, and time spent exposed. Every practical measure below adjusts one of those three.
Fallout decays rapidly and predictably. The rule of thumb used by emergency planners holds that for every sevenfold increase in time after detonation, radiation intensity drops by a factor of ten. Two days of sheltering removes the large majority of the hazard, so the correct action in the first forty-eight hours is to get inside, move to the most interior and lowest part of the structure, and stay there. Evacuating into fallout on the first day places you outdoors and stationary in traffic during the highest-intensity window.
Potassium iodide (KI) saturates the thyroid so it cannot absorb radioactive iodine. It protects one gland against one isotope. Buy a supply for each family member, store it with the medical binder, and understand its single function so you do not treat it as general protection against radiation.
Identify the best-shielded space in your home this month, whether that is a basement, an interior bathroom, or a center hallway. Put a case of water, a radio, and a flashlight in it now so the space is ready without a scramble.
The young men in your family
Have the conversation now if you have a son between sixteen and twenty-five. Selective Service registration already applies to young men in that age range, and he should know what it is and confirm that he has done it.
The just war tradition in Christian thought developed through Augustine and Aquinas and was refined for centuries afterward. It gives a framework for evaluating whether a particular war is just: legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, proportionality, reasonable prospect of success, and last resort. A young man who has worked through that framework before anyone asks him to serve makes a better decision than one working through it in an induction line, whether he concludes he should serve or concludes he cannot.
I worked in a profession that required a willingness to use force, and I do not treat that willingness as the moral problem. The moral questions are what the force accomplishes and who directs it. Teach your sons to ask those two questions rather than to answer them reflexively in either direction.
Propaganda and the family information diet
Wartime information environments are manipulated by every party with an interest in the outcome, including our own government and including outlets you currently trust. Artificially generated audio and video have made fabricated evidence cheap enough to deploy at scale. Public verification of any individual claim gets harder at exactly the moment when the stakes of believing a false one go up.
Choose two or three primary sources for your household and use them to check everything else. Primary means the actual document: the CISA advisory rather than an article about the advisory, the Justice Department press release rather than an aggregator’s summary, the congressional report rather than the commentary on it. Both major cases described earlier in this article are documented in primary sources that anyone can pull up and read in ten minutes.
Teach your family three indicators that a story has been manufactured. It demands an emotional reaction before it supplies any verifiable fact. No named source or document can be located behind it. Every outlet carrying it uses identical phrasing, which indicates a single origin point rather than independent reporting.
What to do this month, in order
Store thirty gallons of water per person and buy a gravity filter. Under one hundred dollars and finished in a weekend.
Call your physician and request ninety-day fills on every maintenance medication.
Withdraw cash in small bills and put it somewhere in the house you can reach in the dark.
Buy two of every shelf-stable item on your next eight grocery runs.
Apply for the GMRS license, buy two radios, and run one drill with your family.
Write the family medical binder and the communications plan on paper.
Identify your shelter space, stock it, and drive your rally point routes once.
Extend your food stores to ninety days and add a backup power source sized to your refrigerator and any medical equipment in the house.
The order runs cheapest and highest impact first. Items one through four cost less for most families than a single night out.
Where Scripture comes in
Everything above works for anyone who does it. What follows explains why I do it and why this work sits inside Christian teaching rather than alongside it.
Jesus addressed this situation directly. In Matthew 24:6-8 and again in Luke 21:9-11 he told his followers they would hear of wars and rumors of wars, and in the same breath he told them not to be alarmed. Both instructions arrive together. He said the wars would come and he said panic was the wrong response to hearing about them. Every prepper I know who burned out took the first half of that instruction and never got to the second.
He also closed the door on timelines. Matthew 24:36 says no one knows the day or the hour. That verse is the reason this publication carries no prophecy chart and no prediction, and the reason I treat anyone selling a date as a man with something to sell.
Preparation carries a long biblical record. Genesis 41 has Joseph storing grain through seven years of abundance against seven years of famine, directed by God through a dream given to a pagan king. Proverbs 22:3 and 27:12 both describe the prudent man seeing danger and taking cover while the simple keep walking and pay for it. Nehemiah 4:16-18 has the builders working the wall with a weapon at hand and a trumpet ready to call scattered work parties to a rally point, which is the same layered communications plan described earlier in this article, written down roughly twenty-five hundred years ago. First Timothy 5:8 states the obligation to provide for your household in language that leaves no room to treat preparation as optional.
The harder instruction concerns the people on the other side of the war. Matthew 5:44 and Romans 12:17-21 tell believers to love their enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil. Wartime propaganda is built to make that impossible, and a Christian household under mobilization has to guard against the point where legitimate defense turns into hatred of a people. You can prepare against a government’s capabilities while remembering that the Chinese Christians being persecuted by that same government are your brothers.
I store water and food because Scripture commands provision for a household. My confidence rests on Psalm 46:1-3, which describes God as a refuge while the earth gives way and the mountains fall into the sea. The supplies run out at some point for every man who stores them, and the question that remains is what he has behind them.
If you are working through this list, tell me where you are in the comments. I want to know which of the eight items your family has already done and which one you keep putting off, because the ones people put off are usually the ones I need to write about next. If you have a question about a specific medication, a radio setup, or a shelter space in your own house, put it below and I will answer as many as I can.
FREE DOWNLOADS
PAID DOWNLOADS
✅ Family Emergency Binder
✅ Household Dependency Register
✅ Food and Water Tracker
✅ Hit the Perks tab on the main page to get the comprehensive Christian Warrior Prepper Handbook