The Devil's Costume

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone. Welcome to our worship service. It’s good to see everyone here. If you’re visiting us for the first time this morning, you’ll find a visitor card tucked into the back of the chair in front of you. Please fill that out and drop it in the offering plate as it passes to let us know you were here.

I have a few announcements I’d like to mention as we begin this morning. Thank you to everyone who came out to help with out trunk or treat last night. It was another rousing success — I think the counts put it at about 300 kids showing up — and everyone had a good time.

The men’s ministry will be meeting at 6:00 tonight down at the pavilion.

A reminder that our Operation Christmas Child packing party will be held next Saturday from 10-12. We do have plenty of things to put into the boxes, we just need some help in packing them. So if you’re free next Saturday, please come and make this the best Christmas ever for a little boy or girl.

We’ll be having a church council meeting this Tuesday at 7:00.

Twila will be on a much-deserved vacation this coming week, so the church office will be closed.

And finally, please be in prayer for the congregation at Sherando United Methodist Church. Terrible thing, that church burning down, and I appreciate Vonda’s idea to reach out to their pastor and offer our own church as a place for them to worship.

Harvey, do you want to give us an update on your brain training class?

And Jesyka, do you want to talk a bit about last night and the pumpkins?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank and praise you for the life you have so richly given us. Thank you for the incredible blessing of being your sons and daughters and for the beautiful creations you have made us to be.

Lord, we give you all that we are and ask that we might engage with your Spirit today. We lift our hearts that you might fill them with new love. We lift our minds that you would pour fresh hope into our thinking.

We lift our souls that they may bathe in your grace. We lift our hands and our voices to sing your praises, as we come to worship and adore you our Lord, our great Creator. Today we offer you our whole beings in worship to you. Amen.

Sermon

I’ve never minded Halloween, though I understand why some Christians shy away from having anything to do with it.

I’ve always enjoyed a good scary movie. Not the new ones, they’re generally pretty terrible, but those old ones with Vincent Price, or the Hitchcock movies like Psycho and The Birds.

More horror movies have been released during the pandemic than at any other time in the last 30 years, did you know that? It seems like the worse things get in the world, the more people want to sit down for two hours and watch something that’ll scare them half to death.

Psychologists say that sort of thing is actually good for us mentally and emotionally. Getting scared in a comfortable environment is actually healthy, because it helps us process the things in our lives that are causing us anxiety.

There are ghosts in the Bible. Spirits. Demons. Even witches. So I guess that’s one reason I don’t mind Halloween. Plus there’s the candy. I’ve always been a give-one-piece-of-candy-out-and-eat-two sort of person.

But really the main reason I adopt Halloween is that it tends to get us thinking about something a lot of modern Christians dismiss and a lot of churches don’t bother teaching anymore.

It’s this: there is a spiritual world riding right alongside the physical one, and even though that world is mostly hidden from us, we are laid bare before it. To think otherwise is not only to make one of the biggest mistakes we can in the Christian life, it actually puts us in a great deal of danger.

Because this spiritual world that we often can’t see is a world of constant battle. It’s a world of war between good and evil, light and darkness, angels and demons, and you are a part of that war whether you believe it’s true or not.

Every sin you commit, every problem you encounter, every bit of news you see or read that happens not just down the street but on the other side of the planet, has not only a physical or worldly aspect to it, but a spiritual one as well.

They’re linked so tightly that you can’t separate one from the other. And as Christians saved by the grace of Christ, we are especially bound up in this cosmic war. There’s no hiding from it, because our hearts are the front lines.

That is exactly why the Christian life is filled with so much meaning. There are no dull moments when Christ is your Lord. Because every second, no matter where you are or what you’re doing, sways that war one way or the other depending on what word you speak or action you take. Every choice you make counts toward eternity.

The Bible is filled with references to how we should go about fighting this war, but the one I want to talk about today is found in 1 Peter. Turn there with me now to 1 Peter 5:5-11:

Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.

And this is God’s word.

There’s a lot to talk about in these few verses, but here we’re introduced to the one who’s responsible for this war. Satan. And we can put what Peter says about him into four categories: who Satan is; what Satan wants; how Satan tries to get it; and how we can drive Satan away. Let’s take these one at a time.

First, who Satan is.

C.S. Lewis says there are two traps that people fall into when it comes to the devil: one is to have an unhealthy fear that sees the devil behind everything and so gives him too much credit. The other is to think the devil is just a fairytale and so give him too little credit. So it’s important to get this out of the way first off: Satan is real.

But as soon as we say this is the truth, we open ourselves up to all kinds of ridicule from modern society. Even a lot of modern Christians leave that part of our faith out. There are a lot of denominations that refuse to talk about the devil at all. They tend to make Christianity more about how to get along in life and how to make the world better.

They turn this great war we’re all a part of into something not spiritual, but practical. To them, the problems we face don’t have their roots in what Paul calls “powers and principalities.” Those roots are instead in the problems with our justice system or educational or health systems, or our politics.

These Christians — and there are a lot of them — are quick to go along with Jesus’s teachings about taking care of the poor, and loving your neighbor as yourself, and forgiving the trespasses of others.

But when they read of Jesus casting out demons, and his parables like the sheep and the goats, and when he warned the disciples not to fear those who kill the body but him who can destroy both soul and body in hell, that all gets dismissed as Jesus being a product of his time.

They say we know more now than people who lived 2,000 years ago. We’re enlightened. Those weren’t real demons that Jesus chased out, he just cured mental diseases. There’s no hell, because a loving God wouldn’t allow that. There’s no devil, there’s just our own human weaknesses. There may be angels, but there aren’t any demons.

The problem with thinking that way is no one in the Bible speaks more often about Satan and hell than Jesus himself. Over and over, Jesus teaches there is a personal supernatural force that is evil.

And you cannot accept most of what Jesus said and dismiss the rest as out of date. You can’t pick and choose between what you like and what’s uncomfortable. You have to accept every word Jesus said as truth, and Jesus said there is a devil called Satan, and he is constantly stalking you, and he is extremely evil and powerful.

If you read through the Old Testament, you’ll find that Satan is largely absent. He makes an appearance in the Garden of Eden and again in the first chapter of Job. As far as this great spiritual war that rages all around us, the best picture we have in the Old Testament is Daniel chapter 10, where the angel does battle with the Prince of Persia.

But then we get to the New Testament and fine those pages filled with mentions of angels and demons, lakes of fire and heavenly battles. Why is that? What happened?

From the moment Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden all the way through the four hundred years of silence between the Old and New Testaments, God had allowed something like a war of attrition to exist between good and evil.

A little ground would be gained here, a little lost there, but for the most part, the battle lines were pretty well drawn. The war was a stalemate.

But then a baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem, and everything changed. God himself came into the world, and the war of give and take that had gone on since the creation suddenly became God’s massive offensive against the devil. The tide of that war suddenly shifted in a way that meant certain victory.

Satan knew this. He had always known that he would lose in the end. You don’t fight God and win. Christ’s birth put his back against the wall, and so the devil had only one play left — he would literally unleash hell.

He set free every demon upon the earth to do as much damage as possible. He couldn’t win, but he would take down as many people with him as he could.

The Bible calls him the great red dragon. The strong man. The god of this world. The prince of the power of the air. He is the adversary. The accuser. The enemy. The tempter. A murderer from the beginning. And here, Peter describes the Devi’s costume—the clothes he wears when he comes into the world. He’s “a roaring lion”.

Violent. Hungry. Determined. Cruel. Fierce. That’s how Peter describes the devil.

It’s an animal defined by its power and the terror it strikes in the hearts of anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in its path.

That’s a lot different than the way we’re used to seeing Satan pictured, isn’t it? We’re used to the pitchfork, the horned head, the tail, the red suit. That picture is actually a product of the Middle Ages, when the church decided the best way to deal with Satan was to make fun of him.

They painted him that way for a specific reason which we’ll get to in a minute, and what happened was that the following generations started believing this was actually what Christians thought the devil looked like. But that’s the wrong picture. This picture that Peter gives is much closer to what Satan is.

A lion. Peter says a “prowling” lion, a lion in a constant state of activity, sneaking in the darkness, looking for prey. A roaring lion. A lion roars when it leaps onto its prey, and that sound is enough to terrify every living creature.

That’s who Satan is. And what does he want? That’s included in verse 8 as well. He wants to devour. To destroy. That’s his only goal. Satan can create nothing, he can only ruin. He can’t make, he can only spoil what God has made. He can only devour. And what is he prowling around for? Who does Satan want to devour?

You.

It’s as simple and straightforward as that. Satan wants to devour you.

Of all the people on this earth, you’re the one he wants the most, and I’ll tell you why: because you have a cross-shaped target on your soul.

Generally speaking, when a person has no God, he has no devil. And why is that? Because Satan’s very happy with us paying absolutely no attention to him. Actually, that’s what he prefers. So of all the time in human history, this has to be his favorite, because so few people believe in him — really believe in him — anymore.

He’s a product of superstition, he’s a scapegoat for our own faults and failures, he’s an imaginary boogeyman no different from Dracula or Frankenstein, and Satan loves that because he operates in the shadows and the darkness.

In fact, he is like Dracula in that way, because the moment we drag the devil out into the light is the moment he’s done for.

Truth is the devil’s poison. That’s why he’ll gladly leave the person who doesn’t believe in God alone. He’ll take great pains to protect the person who doesn’t realize he’s a sinner in need of a savior. He’ll keep far away from anyone who refuses to ask the big questions of life, because why get in the way of people who are already going in the very direction he wants them to go?

It’s when we decide we want to know the ultimate truth of life, the real purpose of why we’re here and the real meaning of eternity, that he starts prowling. The closer you get to God, the closer the devil is going to try to get to you.

That’s why one of the worst mistakes people make when they first become Christians is to think that life is finally going to start getting easier. Not true. Life becomes more full. Life becomes more meaningful. Life becomes sweeter. But life does not become easier.

And we know why, don’t we? Before we come to Christ, our lives are defined by selfishness and disbelief. The devil loves that, so he’s going to leave us alone. He figures, Why mess with a good thing? He’s going to do all he can to keep us in that lost state, which means our only enemy is God himself.

And what a great enemy to have! When God is your enemy, what’s he doing? He’s constantly chasing you. He’s constantly putting things in your life that draw you to himself. He’s always tugging at your heart to get you to start asking those big questions.

But when we come to faith in Christ and God becomes our greatest friend, we find that all of a sudden our enemies increase. The world was once for us, but now it’s against us. Satan once left us alone, but now he’ll hound us to the end of our days. We fight not only him and not only the constant pull of the world, we fight our own sinful natures. Because God wants to save every person in the world, and the devil doesn’t want to lose anybody.

He loves the atheist. Adores the doubter. Gives fuel to the tyrant. But he hates you, and that’s not because of who you are, but because of whose you are. The devil would pick up those mountains behind us and throw them right at you if God allowed it.

He wants to see you ruined. He wants to see your faith gone. He wants you to look at your savior and say, “I’m tired of all this struggling, all this ridicule I’m getting from people who don’t believe in you, tired of all the questions I have and the answers that never seem to come. I’m tired of living by your rules, so I’m going to go live by my own.”

That’s what Satan wants. But how does he try to get it?

There are times in our lives, usually on the heels of some great spiritual victory or in the middle of a period of peace, when the devil will come at us full force to try and tear down everything God has built.

But for the most part, he’s sneaky. He won’t try to break down the front door, he’ll look for an unlocked window instead. He’ll feel around for any weak spots in our lives, any cracks in our faith, and that’s where he gets in.

The devil is always looking for a foothold, and the Bible says he always finds one because of our sin. The devil and our sin are bound up together, and so the way to rid our lives of the devil is to get rid of his footholds.

Scripture is filled with warnings about areas of our lives where the devil can get in and wreck everything. Peter mentions two of those areas right here: pride and anxiety.

Those are two sins that we have to resist if we’re going to resist the powers of darkness in our lives. The more we give ourselves over to pride and anxiety, the more we open ourselves up to evil.

Let’s take them one at a time. Peter begins with pride by laying out its problem in verse 5, followed by its cure in verse 6.

“Clothe yourselves in humility,” he writes, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

On the surface, pride doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, does it? If anything, this country’s in the mess it is not because there is too much pride, but because there isn’t enough. No one seems to take pride in themselves anymore. We tell our children and grandchildren, “Study hard. Look your best, do your best, and be your best. Take pride in yourself.” And in a way, that’s exactly right.

But pride as Peter describes it is a very different thing, and it’s also the sin that Satan loves to use the most often because that’s the sin that got him kicked out of heaven. Pride led to his fall. He became so impressed with his own beauty, intelligence, power, and position that he began to desire the honor and glory for himself that belonged to God alone.

That’s why the church in the Middle Ages drew him looking so ridiculous — to mock his sin of pride. And since that was the sin that cast Satan out of the kingdom of heaven, that’s his favorite sin to keep us out of that kingdom as well.

God hates pride because pride keeps us from knowing him. Pride looks down, and the only way we can see God is if we look up. Pride says, “It’s all about me,” while the truth is that it’s all about God’s grace. It’s the greatest sin because it’s the heart of every sin. Every sin says to God in pride, “My will be done.”

Peter defines pride as any resistance to the grace of God. We have grace only to the degree that we control our pride, and I’ll show you why.

The gospel says that in order to be a Christian, you have to give up trying to be good yourself. You have to stop thinking that your good deeds or your good efforts will save you, because they can’t. Instead, we put all of that onto Jesus. He does all the work. Christ saves us because we can’t save ourselves.

But people reject this in one of two ways. They either say, “I don’t need God’s grace because I’m a good person. I work hard and raise my family and recycle and I don’t break any laws. I’m kind and I help people. I don’t need you to save me, all I have to do is be good.”

Or people go to the very opposite extreme and they say, “I’m such a terrible person and I’ve done such terrible things that God will never give me his grace the way I am, so I have to clean myself up first.”

You see? In both of those cases, the problem is pride. Pride says we’re either too good for God’s grace, or we’re too bad for God’s grace. We either don’t need God’s help, or we have to earn God’s help. And that’s the foothold Satan uses to get in.

But there’s another one as well, and Peter mentions it in verse 7. Anxiety.

We don’t usually think of anxiety as a sin, do we? But God says it is. We say we can’t help that we’re nervous and anxious and afraid. But God says that we can. Peter links these two sins to one another in this passage because they’re very much the same. Anxiety is actually a form of pride. It reduces everything to ourselves.

If the pride of God’s grace says that we’re either too good or too bad to receive mercy, the pride of anxiety says that we’re the only ones who know the way our lives should go, and we’re worried that God is going to somehow screw that up.

Anxiety is really fear, but it’s the sort of fear that doesn’t come and go. It’s not the fear you feel when you’re driving and almost get into an accident, when you get this sudden rush of terror but then later you feel fine again. It’s something much deeper and much more constant.

My family watches a lot of British mystery shows, and while they’re all different, they’re also much the same in one way. Beautiful scenery, but it’s always cold and rainy. That’s what anxiety is. It doesn’t go away, it’s always there. Just a constant cold rain on your soul.

That’s why it’s so destructive, because when we’re anxious, we’re afraid of everything but God, and the result is a spiritual blindness that keeps us from really seeing how much God loves us. Worry is always a stab at God’s love. It always makes us doubt, always makes us fearful, always makes us wonder if God will let us down.

It’s easy to see how the devil can get in there, isn’t it?

You tell yourself, _Look at what you’ve done, God doesn’t love you. Look at what you’re doing, God won’t help you. _

And all the while God is looking at you and saying, “I tore my son to shreds for you, and you’re afraid that I’m not going to give you what you need?”

That’s how the devil gets a foothold. Peter says that Satan devours, and that’s how he does it — from the inside out.

So what do we do about this? If Satan is that focused and that determined to get you, how do you keep him away? Peter gives us very specific steps to resisting the devil, and it begins with removing those footholds of pride and anxiety.

The key to doing that is the same for both, and it’s right there in verse 6: humble yourself.

Quietly submit to God’s will. Trust him. Stop focusing on yourself, because that’s what pride does, and instead focus on Jesus.

Verse 5 says to clothe yourself in humility. The literal translation there is to tie humility on. It means that you remind yourself of the grace of Christ, that free gift of salvation and security that’s given the moment you trust him with everything, and then you live in that truth.

It seems strange to say that humility is one of a Christian’s most powerful weapons, but it’s true. Pride is always going to make your feelings hurt. You’re always going to be looking at yourself.

But humility takes a very different form. When you’re humble, you don’t think less of yourself, you think of yourself less. Your thoughts aren’t constantly on you, they’re on God.

Humility is the result when you finally accept the truth of his grace being free. Your salvation isn’t based on anything you’ve done, and so you can’t be proud and think you’re better than anyone else.

And the great thing is that humbling yourself under God’s mighty hand doesn’t just take care of your pride. It also takes care of the anxiety. Remember, your anxiety is a form of pride too, because it always stems from an overconfidence in your own opinion.

If you can’t say, “God, I don’t know what’s coming, but I know you care for me. And even though it looks like nothing is going right, I know you know what’s best,” if you cannot say that, then you haven’t humbled yourself before God.

Peter says you have to do that, and the way to do it is to cast every bit of your anxiety onto the God who loves you, the God who died for you, the God who sustains you. In effect, this text is saying that we’re anxious because all of our worries are constantly at the edges of our lives, swirling like mosquitoes, always buzzing in our ears.

The way to fix that isn’t to leave all of those worries there. It isn’t to ignore them and hope they go away. It’s to confront them. It’s to take them all and place them right at the center of your life, take a long look at them, see them for what they are, and then think about God’s love and wisdom and say, “How dare I question God in light of all he’s done for me?”

There’s more. Peter says in verse 8 to be sober-minded and watchful, meaning that we have to understand the devil is always there, always looking for a way in, so we have to pray for the Holy Spirit to call our attention to our weak spots and also pray for the wisdom and strength to be honest with ourselves in dealing with them.

And most importantly in verse 9, “Resist him, firm in your faith ...”

That phrase is taken from a Greek military term that means to hold fast and don’t give an inch of ground. It’s a reference to that great war going on all around at all times that we are all a part of. These are the orders from our general, and those orders are do not run.

Remember what Lewis said: the only thing worse than not being afraid of the devil at all is being afraid of him too much. The way to fight him is not to turn and flee, but to stand firm with faith.

I spent the week studying about lions to get ready for this sermon, and I read an interesting article written by a park ranger in Africa. He said if you ever run up against a lion, never, ever turn your back and run. If you do that, you’re dead.

Lions are used to their victims running. As soon as they see that, their killer instinct kicks in. But if you stand firm and face them even when they’re charging, they’ll get confused. In most cases, a charging lion will stop short and run away.

That’s exactly what Peter is saying. Don’t run. Stand and fight. Don’t think about how small you are and how scary the devil is, because you might be small on your own, but you’re not on your own. You have God on your side and his angels all around you, and you can better believe that the harder the devil charges at you, the quicker he’s going to turn away once he sees what he’s up against.

Peter’s also saying something else in verses 9 and 10, and I don’t want to end this sermon without mentioning it. Satan will get at you. He’ll sink his teeth into you and shake you, and God will not only allow that to happen, he will say it’s for your own good.

There’s a whole other sermon there, but for now I’ll say these two things: one is to remind you of Romans 8:28 — God works all things, even the things that seem the worst, for our good.

God’s business isn’t just to save us, it’s to refine and strengthen us, and nothing does that better than withstanding the devil’s attacks. They are a part of the Christian life, and we should never allow them to weaken our faith.

We have quite a few military folks here, so you know as well as I do that the best soldiers are the battle-hardened ones, the ones who have seen the most action. The more frequent they face attacks, the more capable they become at defending themselves.

Second, pay attention to the promise at the end of verse 10. All those those attacks we have to endure will end with Christ himself restoring, confirming, strengthening, and establishing you. The more Satan comes after you and the firmer you stand, the more glorified God will make you.

In 1873, a man named Horatio Spafford received a telegram from his wife, Anna. She and their four children were coming across the Atlantic when their ocean liner struck another ship. Over 200 people died, including Horatio’s four daughters. The telegram from Anna said simply, “Saved alone.”

You can bet the devil laughed at the pain of this Christian man and his Christian wife. You can bet his mouth watered at the thought of their faith being shattered and gone. But Horatio and Anna Spafford knew that grace of God, and that grace was something all the devil’s power could not touch.

On his way across the very ocean where his children died, Horatio wrote one of the most famous hymns of our faith. And let that chorus speak to you during your times of hurt and attack. No matter what happens, no matter how bad things become, we can still say, “It is well, it is well, with my soul.”

The devil had no choice but to go prowling elsewhere. And that Lion is still out there prowling, looking for someone to devour.

He’s walking up and down these aisles right now, sniffing the air. But remember whose you are. Remember he has no power over you.

And remember that lions attack the sick, the weak. They choose victims who are alone and not watchful, who are cut off from ones who love them. That is why you need a church family. That is why we have each other.

Do you remember about 16 months ago when we lost our pastor? Our hearts broken, our emotions raw. Scared about where we were going, worried about what would happen to our church in the middle of a pandemic.

You can bet the devil walked among us on those first Sundays and laughed. Because devouring a Christian? That’s great. Devouring a church, though? That’s so much better.

But look at us now. Not only larger, but stronger. Not only happier, but more at peace. God’s grace did that. And if he will do that for our church, won’t he do that for you?

The devil seeks, therefore watch. But God provides, therefore do not be anxious.

Let’s pray:

Father, it’s so easy in this modern age to forget that we are part of something far larger than what we can see or know or understand—that there is a world of spirit, and that world is active around us at every moment. Help us to remember our part in that great war between good and evil. Help us to know that our greatest weapons are your grace, your mercy, and the kindness and love that we can give to everyone we meet. Guard us, Father. Protect us. Surround us with your angels, and help us to remember that our every moment is eternity’s front lines. For it’s in Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.