An ancient teacher of correct speech was interviewing a prospective student. At the early age of six, the boy continued with constant talk, telling the Master all about his life. The tutor turned to the mother and said,"Madam, I will have to charge you twice the normal tuition!"
She exclaimed, "Why is that true?" To which he replied, "Not only must I teach your boy how to speak, I must first teach him how to shut up!!"
How many of you have a relative that just will not shut up? I know this very well In my family.
Well my hope is that today you will not be wishing that I sit down and shut up before I get done.
Today I want to go back to our subject of spiritual warfare and spend one more week on our adversary the Devil.
Peter tells us that he is our adversary and that he is like a lion going about looking to devour.
Paul reminds us in Ephesians 6 of the reality of spiritual warfare.
We are in a battle that is greater than any other that we could imagine.
A few summers ago we took a trip to Richmond, VA. Allison’s brother was in the Sudan with the Darfur people as a missionary and he came home for a few days.
We went to meet him and we learned a lot about Richmond and the Civil War.
We learned a lot about the battle of Richmond and other battles that took place that lead up to it.
One such battle that I loved to learn about is Gettysburg and I loved the movie Gettysburg.
General Lee expected his officers to make quick and good decisions when needed.
. Decisiveness can spell the difference between victory and defeat.
General Robert E. Lee, one of the greatest military strategists to ever wear an American uniform, knew this well.
He was fond of saying that “battles neither turn on a division or a brigade let alone a company or a squad. Rather, battles turn on the will of a man holding a rifle who takes aim or takes to heel.”
Battles turn on individual decisions. Such was the case of the battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.
Lee, with a force of several hundred thousand Confederate troops, had marched through Maryland and into the lush Pennsylvania countryside.
With surprise and speed on his side, Lee took to the offensive and pushed into the city.
He knew that the Union army was to his rear and that by the morrow he would be facing them.
Nonetheless, there was high ground just outside of the city, a hill called Culp’s Hill.
With the city under occupation and his artillery on that hill, Lee could command the approach of the Union army and put them on the defensive.
However, everything hinged on taking that hill.
The hill was on Lee’s left flank directly in the path of General Richard Ewell’s corps.
Lee sent a message to General Ewell directing him to “take that hill if feasible.”
As Ewell’s corps advance through Gettysburg and over the field leading to Culp’s Hill, the Union Army began to pour into the Gettysburg countryside.
Elements that had been routed earlier in the day were streaming eastward toward General Meade’s Union army encampment on Cemetery Ridge just to the east of Culp’s Hill.
If Ewell could take that hill, his guns would be trained right down upon them.
Ewell paused his forces. What should he do? Should he attack with full force and push them off the hill?
Should he take a small detachment and engage the enemy for strength?
Should he stop his advance and wait until the next day’s light? Ultimately, Ewell decided to do nothing.
Two days later the Confederate Army, defeated, straggled back toward the Potomac River and the safety of Virginia.
The moment had been lost. The day had been lost. The battle had been lost. And, ultimately, the war had been lost. For the sake of a moment’s indecision, all had been lost.
Ewell risked failure because he couldn’t make a timely decision.
Only one decision, but so much depended upon that moment’s value.
When you think about it, our lives are like that terrible battle. Satan’s army lies before us waiting to destroy us. God is behind us, though.
He tells us to take the high ground and put the foe on the defensive. We can either advance or retreat. But, remember, this battle hinges on your ability to be discerning.
Delay can be costly when you are fighting the good fight. Every moment has its value.
IN Matthew 16 Jesus says that He will build His Church – and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it.
We for so long have misread this passage as a defensive posture of the Church.
Jesus is not saying that we should build a wall and hide behind it, but the Church is an offensive weapon against Satan.
We take the fight to him but to do that we need to know something about him.
The last two weeks we have talked about Satan’s origins and last week we talked about his plan to deceive us.
We talked about How Satan deceives through:
False Philosophies of this world
False religions
False Ministers
False Doctrine
False Disciples
All of these are areas of Satan’s deceptions:
Today we will bounce around in the Bible but our goal is to be equipped to take on Satan and know his plan.
Satan attacks by…
1) Bringing sickness.
If your remember the story from the book of Job we see a man that was upright in every way and was so blessed.
The book of Job is a theophany – which basically asks the question, Why do you serve God?
Do you serve God because he blesses your or do you serve God because He is God?
Satan asks permission from God to attack Job with all types of problems and also asks to take his physical health away from him.
Job 2:4-6
“Skin for skin!” Satan replied. “A man will give all he has for his own life. But stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.” The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, then, he is in your hands; but you must spare his life.”
In this story we see that God is still in control and it must go through God before Satan can do these things to Job.
In Luke’s gospel we meet a woman that was totally dominated by arthritis. She can’t even straighten up and Jesus heals her.
He heals her on the Sabbath and the Jews were indignant about it because they felt he was breaking Rabbinic Law.
Jesus says:
Luke 13:16
Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”
Even if Satan does not intentionally make people sick physically many of the attitudes and things that he fosters can make people sick because of the hatred that they have in their heart for other people.
In his book, None of These Diseases, Dr. S.I. McMillen says,
"Medical science recognizes that emotions such as fear, sorrow, envy, resentment and hatred are responsible for the majority of our sicknesses. Estimates vary from 60 to 100 percents."
One patient was told by his doctor, "If you don’t cut out your resentments, I may have to cut out your intestinal tract."
It is good to know that the one who created these bodies of ours is simply in control.
We need to see sickness and disease as a bad thing and hate it but also see that through these things God’s power can be made manifest.
Paul speaks of these physical infirmities:
2 Corinthians 12:7-9
Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me-to keep me from exalting myself! 8 Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. 9 And He has said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me
2) Persecuting the saints.
Revelation 2:10
Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.
What Satan intends for evil, God can turn to great good. The early Christians would say that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.
Persecution is alive and well today and you could rest assured that Satan is still at work trying to attack God’s people.
What Satan intends for Evil God can use for His Good.
John Rucyahana, the Anglican bishop of Shyira, Rwanda, served as a preacher in Uganda during the brutal reign of dictator Idi Amin.
Amin targeted 200,000 political opponents, Christian leaders, and members of certain ethnic groups for extermination.
One day the government soldiers came for John.
He remembers, "One put the cold barrel of a gun against my ear and held his finger on the trigger.
They put me in a vehicle and made me sit on a sack of explosives. As we began moving, I thought, Even the slightest jolt, and I’m dead."
The soldiers finally released John, figuring they had successfully intimidated him and that he would no longer speak out.
What the oppressors (and Satan) meant for evil, though, God used for good. Two days after John’s harrowing brush with death was Sunday.
That day, John walked into the cathedral to find it packed—people were standing in the aisles.
People had heard what happened and had come to find out what he would say. Would he speak out for Christ?
Preventing service.
1 Thessalonians 2:18
For we wanted to come to you—certainly I, Paul, did, again and again—but Satan stopped us.
Many scholars believe that a massive persecution had broken out to prevent Paul and Silas from visiting the church at Thessalonica.
They wanted to check on the brethren there but Satan prevented it and most folks think it was a persecution at Berea that slowed them down.
So what do we draw from this? Is Satan powerful enough to just stop the gospel from going to Thessalonica.
No, Timothy was sent instead and the work continued.
Here is the neat thing – God works it out for His glory – We get the book of 1 Thessalonians in our Bibles because of this,
In the same way Paul had intentions of Going to Spain to preach the Gospel but we know from history that he never got to go.
He was killed in Rome by beheading.
When Paul wrote Romans he was building up the church at Rome to be his base of operation to take the Gospel to Spain.
What was intended to be a letter to a church that was struggling to build them up to base mission operations turned into one of the greatest books of our bible and greatest works of literature of all time.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon had this type of experience.
Even as a young lad he was conscious of sin, but couldn’t find peace.
It so happened under the providential over-ruling of God that one Sunday morning he was prevented from attending his usual place of worship because of a snowstorm.
He was obliged to stop on the road because of the weather conditions.
Rather than not go to church at all he went into a little Methodist chapel that happened to be near by.
The service began but no minister appeared - he’d been delayed in the same way as Spurgeon.
At last one of the church officers came to the pulpit and opened his Bible and read the words: "Look unto Me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 45:22).
Spurgeon recorded in later life that he saw at once the way of salvation.
He said, "I’d been waiting to do fifty things, but when I heard this word ’LOOK’, what a charming word it seemed to me."
Spurgeon would become one of the greatest preachers of all time and that idea of simply looking to the Lord and Him alone totally transformed his life and his path to ministry.
One can look at that day as a hindrance to being able to get to worship that Sunday but he saw it as a blessing.
Even if Satan means these things for harm, God can use it for good.
Planting doubt.
Genesis 3: 1-5
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ “ “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil”
Satan wanted to plant doubt in the mind of the woman.
Satan wanted to muddy the waters. He wanted to make what was God’s clear teaching and make gray area.
Does not Satan do the same thing today?
Does he try to plant doubt in our minds. Does tempt people to neglect the clear teaching of Scripture to event doctrines by twisting the Bible completely out of its context.
I would say the answer to this is a resounding yes.
A worker asked for a pay raise and got this note back from his supervisor:
"Because of the fluctuation predisposition of your position's productive capacity as juxtaposed to standard norms, it would be momentarily injudicious to advocate your requested increment."
The puzzled worker went to the supervisor and said,
"If this is about my pay raise, I don't get it."
"That's right," said the supervisor.
Some of us see life as clearly as this note to this worker. We don’t know which way to turn or what to do.
1 Corinthians 14: 33
33 for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.
It is God that brings about Clarity in all situations – whenever we are confused about God’s will we can see that this comes from Satan and not God.
Satan wants to confuse you and throw snares in your path.
Destroying lives.
Hebrews 2:14
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil…
Satan wants to destroy lives, Satan wants to get people so entangled by sin that they cannot function.
The fear of death dominates those that are under the curse of sin.
The fear of death is held over them by the Adversary Satan because they have no assurance of eternal life.
Satan also ties them up with guilt – people that are living in sin are dominated by guilt to the point they are paralyzed.
Many years ago I remember studying about the great king of the Ostrogoths, Theodoric.
He reigned for decades over the fading splendor of the Roman empire and was known for his great bravery and cunning.
During his reign the empire, or what was left of it, experienced a very rare period of peace.
Yet in his last years, Theodoric disrupted that peace with a brutal act that would affect the remainder of his reign and his life.
He put to death two men, Symmachus and Boethius.
Both these men were honorable men but posed what Theodoric believed was a threat to his reign.
Both were brutally killed. This was an act that haunted the emperor for years to come.
He experienced difficulty making decisions and often awoke in the middle of the night in a sweat and great fear.
Remorse had closed itself upon Theodoric.
His conscience pestered and plagued him mercilessly to the point of distraction.
Finally, one evening at a feast Theodoric beheld the head of a fish that had been served on a platter and it instantly become the visage of the brutally murdered Symmachus.
Theodoric removed himself to his bed chamber and became very ill.
Trembling with fright and regret, he finally fell to his knees and repented to his physician of his great guilt. Three days later he died calmly and in a peace with His Lord.
The way to counter act Satan’s scheme that leads to death is lock people up in sin so much that they cannot function properly.
Conclusion:
Take the attack to Satan:
Paul Harvey said, "Too many Christians are no longer fishers of men but keepers of the aquarium."
The Romans were really good at scaring the populations that were under their control with very gruesome ways to kill people.
One such way was to chain a prisoner to a dead corpse.
He was forced to drag the putrefying corpse with him.
In the Aeneid, Virgil accuses the Etruscan king Mezentius of inflicting this macabre punishment upon some captives (viii. 485).
Eventually this punishment would kill the victim also and was a terrible way to die.
That might sound terrible but today there maybe people in this room that are experiencing something far worse that this.
Paul in Romans 7 talks about warring with the flesh. He talks about how he wants to do right but the flesh gets in the way.
He talks about the grip and slavery of sin.
He cries out in this passage – Who will save me from this body of Death
We are walking around carrying around this dead body of sin if we are not renewed in Christ.
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