A reader requested that I have a look at the book Victory in Spiritual Warfare (VSW) by Tony Evans, and in the interest of productivity, I decided to turn it into a Popular Pastors entry on Evans.
Yes, I usually read at least three books when I profile a Popular Pastor, but there are times (like this one) where it's pretty clear one is enough. When you come away from a book 250 pages long with enough substance to barely fill a thimble, there's no reason to continue the torture.
As you might guess from the title, Evans is in that mold which thinks that Satan is out to get you in any way he can. He never quite achieves the bathos of Joyce Meyer (who thinks God tells her to make fruit salad, and that Satan ruins her family barbeques)…but he comes close enough for discomfort.
In a pastoral sense, VSW is typical fodder: Chapters devoted to expounding on the various parts of the spiritual armor (e.g., belt of truth) plus chapters on defeating certain "strongholds" (like gambling). But it's also typical pabulum of the same genre: One analogy after another, interspersed with exhortations you can almost hear Evans shouting from the pulpit. The analogies, though, don't always make sense. For example, the chapter on the "shoes of peace" starts with a reach to the movieForrest Gump, and Gump's observation that you can tell a lot about people by their shoes. It's cute, but we never quite get back to how this relates specifically to the shoes of peace. Forrest ran from the analogy, and never came back.
Credit where it is due, though: Evans rightly recognizes that prayer is not a gumball machine, but rather, as he puts it colloquially, it's "knowing what God has already said." (I'd just change that to "allowed.") And at least he reminds us that Jesus rose from the dead, which you couldn't get Joyce Meyer to do if you threatened to take away her fruit salad as an eternal punishment. Altogether, I'd rather have people reading Evans than Meyer..but that's only like saying I'd rather be hit with bricks than with boulders.