Former Military Chaplain Talks Becoming Battle-Ready to Serve in God's End-Times Army
Former U.S. Army chaplain Col. (Ret.) David Giammona believes the world is entering the end times, but people must continue to be fully engaged in this world, fulfilling their callings prior to Jesus Christ’s Second Coming.
Giammona served 32 years in the Army, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, before retiring in 2018.
In their new book “Your Mission in God’s Army: Discovering and Completing Your Faith-Filled Assignment Before Christ’s Return,” Giammona and his co-author Troy Anderson exhort Christians to lean forward in the saddle amid the signs of the times.
Giammona told The Western Journal the book’s message is that rather than disengaging, “the Lord wants us to work even harder.”
Anderson agreed, saying, “This is a very exciting time, in one sense, to be a Christian, because we’re watching all these end-times events unfolding, this massive acceleration and convergence of prophetic signs.
“And so I believe God is calling us to join his army, join this great procession of believers that he’s called to bring in the great harvest revival, to help fulfill the Great Commission, share our faith, take the gospel to the ends of the world. And so it’s all hands on deck,” Anderson said.
Hearing God say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” is the goal every believer should strive for, he argued, and that means using “our talents and gifts he gave us in the way he planned for us.”
Giammona noted that one of the problems with the Jesus movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the nation’s last major revival, is that people became too focused on the end times. Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth,” for example, was the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s.
Its central message was that end-times Bible prophecy was being fulfilled in events happening in the Middle East, starting with the rebirth of Israel in 1948. That may well be true, but 54 years have passed since the book was published.
“I think the church got burned out about the end times, about the coming of the Lord,” Giammona said. “No one up until the last few years [wanted] to talk about it because pastors are afraid not just that people won’t do anything, but they will also be so focused on the coming of the Lord that they’re not really doing discipleship.”
He pointed out that Christ’s exhortation to his church is to “work while it’s day before the night comes and no man can work.”
“So the purpose, the focus of the book is to get people out of their pews and get them back into the dimension of the mission that God has for all of us,” the former chaplain stated.
Anderson explained that God has people manifest his kingdom in all walks of life, not just church ministry.
“He has a perfect plan for our lives — a great, great life plan for us. Of course, we have free will and we can choose to do anything we want, but he will always work and the Holy Spirit will always work and guide us back onto his plan,” Anderson said.
“And if you pray, if you seek the Lord, he’ll show you what your destiny is,” the author added.
Giammona pointed out that there are parallels between how one becomes a soldier in the military and in God’s army.
Just as military recruits surrender their rights to direct their own lives to a large extent, the same is true when one joins God’s army. “Your life is totally changed,” Giammona said.
But a new recruit is not expected to perform the tasks of a trained, experienced soldier from the start.
“We don’t hand them a rifle when they get off the bus, and say, ‘OK, it’s time for you to go fight a war,’ because they would get themselves killed and they’d get us killed,” Giammona said.
He recounted that one of his assignments in the Army was to minister to troops going through basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, now Fort Moore. One of his important tasks was to encourage recruits to press through their fears.
“Some of them would cry at night” under the stress of being away from home and in the new Army environment, he recalled.
“The first thing I would tell them in a chapel or in counseling: ‘This is not going to last forever. This is just a phase in your life. It is stressful now, but I guarantee you, if you stick with it, it’s going to get better as you progress,'” Giammona said.
“And at the end, I talked to them and it’s a whole different story. ‘Oh, chaplain, this was easy. This was great. This was wonderful. I’m graduating. I’m so glad I stuck it out.’ But that’s not what they were saying at the beginning. So you have to get the process to work itself out.”
The Christian walk is similar.
“The Christian life is a progression of sanctification, of serving God every day. And so a lot of the fears that you have today, they won’t be here tomorrow because the Bible says that God has not given us the spirit of fear, but he’s given us a sound mind,” Giammona said.
He said the lives of Moses and Joseph offer biblical examples of how God shapes character for people to fulfill their callings.
Moses spent 40 years in the desert before God encountered him in the burning bush and told him to return to Egypt to lead the Hebrews out of captivity.
“That’s sometimes the best place you can be — in the desert. Because sometimes God wants to speak to you. He can’t speak to you when everything’s going well because you’re so busy doing things,” Giammona said. “We need to get alone with God regularly to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit.”
Joseph languished in slavery and prison for 13 years before Pharaoh called for him and ended up making him second in command of the entire country.
“These are wonderful stories, real stories of real people that went through very difficult times, but yet God was with them throughout the whole process,” Giammona said.
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