Life Ministries

Satan’s Whispers - Part 5
2 Cor 10:3-4 And, Eph. 6:10-18

    I want to start by reviewing some things we discussed earlier. It is important that we understand this because of the nature of our study on Satan’s whispers and the spiritual battle we are engaged in….First of all, we need to remember that “Despite all its obvious flaws, weaknesses, hypocrisies, sins, and excesses--the church has been the most powerful force for good on the face of the earth, century after century. But most Christians do not know that the churches’ ministry is not only to the world; In Eph. 3:9 Paul gives another purpose of the church when he says; “that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers In the heavenly places"  It is absolutely mind boggling to think that we have a dual responsibility in the church; To carry the gospel, the “good news”, concerning God’s plan of salvation through Jesus His Son to the world. And, at the same time, through us, the manifold wisdom of God would be shown, and made known, to “principalities and powers in the heavenly realm”.

    Secondly, we must remember that Satan’s tactics – his “battle plan” – is to #1 - Distort or Deny the truth of God’s Word…#2 – Do whatever he can to discredit the testimony of God’s people.… #3 – Satan will do his best to depress or destroy our enthusiasm for God’s work… and #4 – All of these and more will work together to dilute the effective-ness of God’s church.
    In Matthew chapter 13, Jesus uses a series of parables to describe conditions in the world during the time between His first coming and His second coming. That interval is called the “church age” and it’s the age in which we now live. He said that there would be false churches and false Christians…those who profess to follow Christ and believe God’s Word, but in the end there is no fruit, and what they really are is weeds!
    He said there would be false teachers and false preachers and prophets…Some of which are blatant and open and easy to recognize. People who are being influenced by the Moonies, under Sun Myung Moon, the Korean "messiah." Or, the Mormons who go about trying to convince people that the Book of Mormon is authentic history…Or, the Jehovah’s going door to door…
    They teach strange doctrines that have no correspondence with Biblical Scripture, and yet they try to hide under the general guise of being evangelical Christians. Then there is the Hare Krishna group. They meet you in the airport, pin a nice flower in your buttonhole, and seek to engage you in conversation on spiritual matters to set forth their teaching. There are the Scientologists, and so many others…
    Some are more subtle. They are within the church itself, such as those who espouse transcendental meditation and various “self-improvement” movements. Then there are many who are, perhaps, without question evangelical, and yet they are teaching legalism, spiritual elitism, or pushing some special experience as a shortcut to spiritual power.
    Now all these groups and all these individuals have one thing in common. Whether they know it or not, they are being used as a tool of Satan to derail the church, and to oppose and defeat the gospel of Christ. What can Christians use to counteract the cults and false teaching all around us? What weapons can we employ?"
    Well, first, we ought to look at what the world will use to try to solve the problems it recognizes in society…(Coercion, manipulation, pressure groups, compromise, demonstrations that ultimately result in raised voices, in clenched fists and outbreaks of conflict, boycotts, pickets and strikes, in attempts to pressure people into doing what others want. These are the weapons of the world. Do they work? (If they did, why do we have the same problems today?)
    What about the usual methods of human reform? Every problem we face is usually approached by using one or a combination of these three:
1^st. Legislation – that is, law. The law is used to merely control of the outward man. It has nothing to do with and cannot do anything to the in-ward man. It does not change the basic nature of man, but merely restricts him so that he does not manifest certain qualities under certain conditions and the threat of consequences.
2^nd. Education – Education does change man in certain ways, but it still does not change him inside. Education provides us with the ability to change. But ultimately, we still make our own choices. Someone has once said that education just makes for smarter criminals.
3^rd. Improved environment… Changing a man’s environment does not necessarily change him, either. I don’t know how long is going to take human society to learn that when you take a man and lift him out of the slums and put him into a nicer environment you do absolutely nothing to the man himself. And, unless you do something to change the man, in a little while, if given time, he will make that new environment a slum as well.
    These are the usual approaches to reform. I do not mean to suggest we scuttle them. They all have certain value when it comes to change, but they don’t come to grips with the basic problem within man. This is why, after a lifetime of trying to change man with these methods, it has gotten us nowhere.
    We have other weapons, says Paul. They are mighty, they are powerful, and they accomplish something. They will "destroy strongholds" of evil, he says. As he put it in Ephesians, "We do not wrestle against flesh and blood,"…our problem is not people…but rather, "principalities, powers and wicked spirits in high places, the world rulers of this present darkness." There is a spiritual realm, a spiritual battlefield, and we are right in the midst of it.
    Because Satan’s greatest strategies are to distort, deceive, lie and deny, our greatest weapon against him is “Truth.”  “Put on the belt of truth” Paul says.  Truth is realism. The wonderful thing about the Word of God is that, when you understand the world as the Bible sees it, you are looking at life the way it really is. That is why it is so important that we understand the Scriptures and that we refresh our minds with them all the time. For, in this constant bombardment with illusion and error that we face every day, it is easy to drift back into thinking the way everybody around us thinks. Unless we are finding our minds renewed by the Spirit with God’s Word, and refreshed by the reminder of what life is really like and what it is we are really up against, we will find ourselves acting and thinking like the world. (hello!)
    So, the first and greatest weapon of all is truth: If we know truth, and understand truth, we will recognize our real enemy, and what is really happening in our lives and in the church, as well as in the world. If we know truth, we will recognize the counterfeit, and the false, we won’t be swayed by Satan’s whispers.