©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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02/22/04 |
Spiritual Warfare – The Battlefields |
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2/22/04 Spiritual Warfare - The Battlefields
Even before I started last week
I knew there were a few more things about Spiritual warfare
that I wanted to share with you
than I was going to have time to share in one morning.
So today,
before we return to the next item on my list of Life’s Surprises,
I want to complete what I started last week.
If you were not with us
just a little background on what we’re doing may help.
For the past several weeks
I have been sharing with you
a number of things in my Christian life
that I see so differently now
compared to what I had expected,
or what I had believed when I first entered the family of God.
I’m calling these things “My Life’s Greatest Surprises”,
and I’ve shared three of them with you so far.
The first was the great surprise of God Himself,
both that He is,
and then who He is.
The second was the discovery
of the true nature of the Church,
realizing the huge distinction between the true Church established by Christ
and all of those human institutions and organizations that call themselves “churches”.
And the third surprise,
and the one we spent our time looking at last week,
was the surprise of the true nature of spiritual warfare.
We spent quite a bit of our time affirming the existence of the unseen world around us,
recognizing the existence of both good and evil forces within that world,
understanding that those forces are involved in an intense warfare,
a warfare being fought for influence over us - our minds, our spirits, our emotions, and our decision-making processes.
Then we ended by my sharing with you
what is the central issue in this warfare.
From the very beginning of all that is,
God has been fighting a battle designed to reveal to us the true nature of His love for us,
and Satan has been waging a battle
designed to prevent us from discovering the true nature of that love.
There is one thing
that truly has the power to change the human spirit,
one thing that has the ability
to transform our lives at the deepest level.
It is our personal discovery
of the central truth of all of creation,
the truth that our God is truly good
and in every way good to all who come to Him.
Without that discovery
our lives are quickly filled with the poison of lies
that bring about bitterness,
complaining,
anger,
and endless resentments against our circumstances and other people,
all of which are simply our thinly veiled resentments against a God we don’t really like very much
and certainly don’t trust.
But to the degree we discover the truth,
to the degree we discover that our God loves us
as no one else has ever loved us before,
we find our spirits overflowing with a gratitude to Him
that gradually alters literally every aspect of our lives.
There is only one pivotal issue in this great cosmic warfare raging around us,
it is the battle for our discovery of the love of God for us, His creation.
And that is where we stopped.
But, having made those statements,
I realized that it might be helpful
if I point out the two major weapons
used by Satan and his forces in our lives
as he attempts to undermine our trust in the love of our God for us.
There is no better preparation for his attacks
then knowing where and how those attacks will come.
We touched on the first of these two last week
when we spent a few minutes looking at the type of moral battles we so often face in our lives.
And it might be easiest if I begin first of all
by illustrating what I see happening between us and our God
through something that is a little easier for us to relate to.
Those of you who are parents,
or who work with children as teachers,
or as mentors in some way,
what is it you seek most of all in your relationship with those children?
For some of you
I would guess the first thing that comes to mind may be obedience -
you want them to obey you.
But the truth is,
just obedience will never bring about the results we long for.
An overbearing adult
can force a child into obedience
yet at the same time crush the child’s spirit,
or alienate the child in a way that makes access to the child’s mind and heart impossible.
What we really long for,
and hope for,
and pray for
is that the children entrusted into our care will trust us,
and that through that trust
they will grant us access to their minds and hearts
in a way that will enable us to prepare them for life.
If they trust us
obedience and respect for the boundaries we set
can then be established within the context of that trust relationship.
But if they do not trust us,
even if we can force them into obedience,
we will accomplish very little of any lasting value in their lives.
This is at the heart of what Paul was talking about when he said,
COL 3:21 Fathers, do not exasperate your children, that
they may not lose heart.
To force a child into submission
without building a trust relationship with the child
will break the child’s spirit in a way that makes it impossible
for us to reach them
and teach them at the heart level.
The same principle applies in our relationship with our Creator.
Too often I think we have been deceived into believing
that obedience is at the head of God’s list
in the things He seeks from us as His creation.
It is not.
Obedience in itself can never bring about the kind of union between us and Him
that He seeks and we so desperately need.
What God seeks between us and Him is trust,
our willingness to trust Him,
to trust His love,
to trust His perfect understanding of our needs and how those needs can be met.
And Satan’s first great strategy
in his efforts to blind us to the love of our God for us
is to create for us what appear to be clear proofs
that God either doesn’t understand
or doesn’t care about meeting our needs.
This is precisely the strategy he used on Adam and Eve,
and it always follows basically the same pattern.
It begins by his taking some legitimate basic need within us
and then redefining it for us
in a way that convinces us God has forbidden us to meet that need.
I touched on this just briefly last week,
but this dynamic is such a powerful weapon in Satan’s warfare against us
that I want to go back into it again this morning in a little more depth.
And to do so
we need to return to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Beginning in the 3rd chapter of Genesis we read,
GEN 3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of
the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, "Indeed,
has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden'?"
Now, that is a remarkable statement.
Do you see what Satan is doing?
He begins with one of the most basic physical needs of human existence,
Adam and Eve’s need for food.
And then he asks Eve a question designed to make God appear utterly unreasonable,
even sadistic in His demands.
In effect, what he said to Eve was this. “I can’t believe this God of yours!
Here, He creates you with a desperate, driving, daily need for food,
and surrounds you with all of this fruit - it’s everywhere!
Then He comes along and forbids you to eat any of it.
How could you ever respect a God like that?
How could you ever trust Him?
I don’t know what game He’s playing, but it’s sure not one I would want to be a part of.”
And Eve’s response to Satan is just as fascinating.
She knows the facts as Satan has presented them are incorrect.
Not only did God not forbid them to eat of the fruit surrounding them,
He told them He created all of it just for them.
But even though she corrects Satan on that one point,
she buys into his underlying message about God
that He is unreasonable and arbitrary and not to be trusted in His demands.
And we know that because of the way she expands and amplifies what God said about that one fruit they were not to eat.
GEN 3:2 And the woman said to the serpent, "From the
fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat;
GEN 3:3 but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said,' You shall not eat from it or touch it, lest you die.' "
“You shall not eat from it OR TOUCH IT...”
Where did God ever say that?
Where did He say they could not touch the fruit?
He didn’t.
And as soon as Satan heard Eve’s response he knew she was hooked.
This God of hers was unreasonable,
drawing arbitrary lines that walled her off
from the things she really needed in life.
And once that lie was in place,
Satan sprung the trap.
GEN 3:4 And the serpent said to the woman, "You surely
shall not die!
GEN 3:5 "For God knows that in the day you eat from
it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and
evil."
And with that twisted and distorted half-truth
he created in Eve’s mind
exactly what he wanted - a choice that had no right answer.
She could choose to walk away from the tree
believing that this God of hers
was depriving her of the one thing
she needed most for a truly happy and fulled life.
He might be a God who must be obeyed,
but He was certainly not a God who could be trusted,
a God who understood her deepest needs
and cared about those needs,
and provided a means for them to be met.
Or she could choose to rebel against Him,
and in that rebellion
forever establish an adversary relationship between herself and he Creator.
GEN 3:6 When the woman saw that the tree was good for
food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to
make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband
with her, and he ate.
And when it comes to Satan’s attacks on us
in his efforts to blind us to the true nature of God’s love for us,
he attempts to repeat this same pattern in each of our lives over and over again.
The goal is to provide us with “proof” that this God cannot be trusted.
And he begins with us,
as he began with Eve,
by focusing on some legitimate need in our life -
the need for love,
or the need for a sense of purpose or fulfillment in life,
or the need for affirmation and respect from others,
or the need for a healthy sexual identity,
or the need for basic physical needs,
or any of the countless other needs in our lives.
Then he will bring into our lives
some perceived “answer” to that need
that we believe is only accessible to us by our stepping outside of God’s moral framework.
And once he has created that tension within us,
once he has convinced us that we must choose between obedience at the cost of meeting our own needs
or disobedience for the sake of meeting those needs,
Satan’s victory in our life is certain
because either way we choose
we lose trust in the love of our God for us.
And all true righteous living in our lives
comes from our recognizing and defeating
the root deception underlying this whole type of satanic attack.
Our God has loved us with an everlasting love.
He would never cheat us,
never create within us needs we could not righteously satisfy,
never withhold from us anything we need
for the most fulfilling life we could ever know.
PSA 84:11 For the Lord God is a sun and shield; The Lord
gives grace and glory; No good thing does He withhold from those who walk
uprightly.
HEB 13:5 Let your character be free from the love of
money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, "I will
never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,"
PHI 4:19 And my God shall supply all your needs according
to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
ROM 8:32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered
Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?
But all Satan has to do
is to create within us the perception
that our God cannot be trusted with the leadership of our lives
and he has won the only battle he needs to win.
And the second great weapon used by Satan in this spiritual warfare raging around us
is one that may come as no surprise to those of you
who have listened to my teaching for any length of time.
It is the weapon of religion.
And the truth is, it doesn’t matter which religion it is
because nearly all of them are built upon the same basic lie -
the belief that our standing with God
and our acceptance by Him is based upon our performance.
Good people are loved by God and go to heaven when they die,
and bad people are hated by God and sent to hell when they die.
Good deeds
and righteous choices improve our standing with God,
while sinful choices
cause God to turn away from us,
placing a wall between us and Him.
World religions vary all over the place
in the lines they draw between good and evil.
In some religions the act of killing any living thing is evil,
while with others ultimate good can be achieved
by strapping explosives around your body
and then blowing yourself up in the presence of as many other people as possible.
But the remarkable thing here
is that, when it comes to this battle for our discovery of the love of God for us,
it really doesn’t make any difference whatsoever
where we draw the lines between good and evil.
The problem is not in where we draw the lines,
the problem is in the acceptance of any religious system whatsoever
in which our standing with God
and our acceptance by Him
is based upon our performance for Him.
Once that mind-set is established
it becomes impossible for us to hear and respond to the love of God for us.
And certainly the most destructive forms of performance-based religion
are those that claim to be Christian
and identify Christ as their source.
I have encountered some of the most unhappy people I’ve ever known
within the Christian world.
Some of them have even lived lives of rigid moral obedience to their God,
but they have done so from a heart belief
that what they will get from God
is directly tied to what they give Him.
And so often their attempts to earn the blessing of God
have left them deeply bitter and resentful against Him
because they delivered the goods for Him
and He never came through with His end of the bargain.
LUK 15:29 "But he answered and said to his father,
'Look! For so many years I have been serving you, and I have never neglected a
command of yours; and yet you have never given me a kid, that I might be merry
with my friends;
But the truth is,
any approach to God
that rests upon our gaining His acceptance through our performance
is an approach that will make it impossible
for us to understand and discover the true nature of the love of God for us.
EPH 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith;
and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
EPH 2:9 not as a result of works, that no one should
boast.
The power of religion, of course,
the reason it is so effective in walling us off from the reality of the love of God
is because it allows us to avoid true repentance and brokenness before God.
We can stand before Him
holding our little pile of good deeds and righteous acts,
believing they must certainly be of some value
in making us more attractive to our God.
But the truth is
what we hold in our hands
is unneeded by Him
and a great barrier to our discovery of the true nature of our God’s love for us
as long as we have any illusions about it making us in any way more acceptable to Him.
I have been teaching a young friend of mine how to drive recently.
Whenever we can find the time
he and I find some deserted back road
and I put him behind the wheel of my 1985 Toyota pickup,
offer him a few words of instruction
that he is now firmly convinced he no longer needs,
and we take off with me gripping the seat and trying to look calm.
The truth is, we both enjoy these lessons tremendously
and he’s learned quickly and has been doing great.
But in our most recent lesson we had a bit of an incident.
The road was extremely icy,
and we were definitely going faster than I thought we should be going,
when all of the sudden
we were spinning around first one way, then the other
and then bouncing off of snow banks
until we finally came to a jolting stop
with the front end of my faithful little truck
deeply imbedded in a huge pile of snow.
In the thirty seconds following that abrupt stop
my young friend learned more about my heart attitude toward him
than he has been able to learn throughout the past six months of incident-free driving.
He learned that my friendship with him
and my acceptance of him
have nothing whatsoever to do with his performance.
It has nothing to do with how well he trusts my judgment over his own
or how closely he follows my instructions.
It has nothing to do with his driving skills or his conduct at any given time.
He learned that I care far more about my friendship with him
than I do about my truck.
He learned that whatever problems he and I encounter
we will go through together,
no matter whose actions caused the problems.
In other words,
he learned that the friendship we share,
and my involvement in his life
are in no way linked to his performance.
With a lot of digging,
and pushing,
and teamwork,
and eventually with the help of a long chain and passing motorist
we got back onto the road again.
But it was by far the best driving lesson we’ve ever had.
That’s what our God offers us through Christ.
That is not what religion offers us.
Religion offers us a professional driving instructor next to us
with a clipboard in his hands,
and a grading sheet on the clipboard.
He doesn’t share anything with us.
He just instructs,
and evaluates,
and marks,
and corrects,
and at the end of each lesson
hands us a sheet with a letter grade at the top.
Satan loves religion
because it forever separates us from the discovery
of the truth about our God’s heart attitude toward us.
But the good news for each of us,
and the hope for all humanity
is that in Christ we do not have a driving instructor sitting next to us,
we have the best Friend we’ve ever known.
But with most of us
we cannot make that discovery
until we’ve felt ourselves lose control
and bounced off a berm or two,
and found our wheels spinning
and our lives imbedded in the snowbank.
Only then will we reach out to the One seated next to us
and discover that our God is also our Friend.
ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.