The Devil Is Real

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, it’s good to see you all gathered here for worship.

I have a couple of announcements I’d like to highlight from your bulletins. The mens group will meet tonight inside at 6:30. All men are invited to that.

Quarterly business meeting - Nov. 8, please try to attend.

Helping @ The Gathering Place, Sat. Nov. 11 10-12, see Della or Sandy Harper

Amy [Love INC dinner?]

[Shoeboxes?]

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Father, you are our Rock, you are the firm foundation for everything we build. You give gifts to your people for the good of the church. You equip and train your people to carry out the good works you have prepared for us in advance. As we gather here in your house today, we ask that you would provide wisdom, guidance and direction. Remind us that you are our loving ally, you are our fortress, you are our tower of strength and you are our rescuer. Everything we need is found in you. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Sermon

We’ve been talking a few weeks now about what the Christian worldview is and how important it is for you to live by that worldview. So far we’ve talked about God being real and truth being real, and I thought today, with Halloween coming up, it would be a good time to talk about how the devil is real.

I’ve never really minded Halloween, even though we don’t decorate the outside of the house like a few of our neighbors, and we can’t hand out candy because the dogs would just go crazy. But a lot of the dark and scary things Halloween tends to focus on are actually found in the Bible.

There are ghosts in the Bible. And spirits. And demons. Even witches.

And maybe that’s why I’ve never minded Halloween, because it tends to get people thinking about something that a lot of modern Christians dismiss and a lot of churches don’t bother teaching anymore.

It’s this: there’s a spiritual world that is just as real — and even more real — than the physical one we see all around us. There are hidden things happening all around us every day that we can’t see or know but can only sometimes feel, and even though we are usually blind to the things of that world, everything in that world can see us as clear as day.

To think otherwise isn’t just to make a huge mistake, it actually puts you in a great deal of danger.

Because that spiritual world you can’t often see is a world that’s constantly in battle. It’s a world always at war around you, a war between good and evil, light and darkness, angels and demons. And you are a part of that war whether you acknowledge its truth or not.

Every sin you commit, every problem you encounter, every bit of news that happens down the street or on the other side of the planet, has its roots in that hidden world of the spirit. You can’t separate one from the other. And as a Christian saved by the grace of Christ, you are especially bound up in that war. There’s no hiding from it, because the front lines of that battle run right through your heart.

That’s exactly why the Christian life is chock full of meaning. There are no dull moments in your life when you’re a child of God. Everything you do or say or even think sways that war between good and evil a little bit one way or the other. Every choice you make counts toward eternity.

So if you’re in the middle of this great spiritual war that’s coming at you from all sides — including from inside you — how are you supposed to act? How are you supposed to think about things like evil and demons and the devil in a world that now just turns up its nose at things like that?

The Bible is filled with references to how we should go about fighting this war, but the scripture I want to talk about today is found in 1 Peter. Turn there with me now, to 1 Peter chapter 5. Today we’ll be reading verses 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 the word of the Lord.

There’s a lot to talk about in these few verses, but here we’re introduced to the one who’s responsible not only for this spiritual war we’re caught up in, but for much of the evil in this world.

Peter calls him the devil, otherwise known as Satan. And we can take what Peter says here about the devil and put it into four categories: who the devil is; what he wants; how he tries to get it; and how we can drive Satan away. Let’s take those one at a time.

First, let’s talk about who Satan is.

C.S. Lewis said there are two traps that people fall into when it comes to the devil.

The first trap is to give the devil too much credit. It’s to be so afraid of the devil that you see him behind everything that happens to you, and you live in fear of what he might be doing.

Some people blame the devil for everything. There’s a demon in the cough you have, or a hateful spirit in the stoplight that turned red right when you made the intersection, or the devil attacking you by someone’s bad mood.

There are some bad things that happen to you completely apart from anything the devil might be trying to do, because that’s just life, and sometimes life just stinks. Life is hard. Life is disappointing. A lot of that isn’t the devil’s doing. He doesn’t really need to run around much to stir up trouble. We can stir up plenty of that on our own.

But Lewis says the other trap is even worse than giving the devil too much credit. It’s to not give the devil any credit at all. It’s to think the devil’s just a fairytale, that he’s not out there after you. That’s why it’s important to say this flat out: Satan is real.

But as soon as you say that, you open yourself up to all kinds of ridicule from modern society. That’s why 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, or hell, because they don’t believe in either one. The only bad in the world is the bad that’s in your heart, but that’ll be taken care of someday because everybody winds up in heaven at the end.

We’ve talked about hell before, remember, and why hell exists and why it needs to exist, but a lot of Christians just cut all those parts out of the Bible. They make Christianity more about how to get along in life and how to make the world better.

These Christians — and there are a lot of them — are quick to nod their heads when Jesus talks about taking care of the poor, and loving your neighbor as yourself, and forgiving the sins of others.

But when they read about Jesus casting out demons, and about Jesus separating the sheep from the goats at the last judgment, and when he warns the disciples about not fearing those who kill the body but him who can destroy both body and soul in hell, that all just gets dismissed.

The truth is that no one in the Bible speaks more 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 throw out the rest because you don’t like it or you think it’s not true. You can’t pick and choose between the parts of Jesus you like and the parts that are uncomfortable.

Jesus says to each of us, “Everything I say is true, even the hard stuff. And if you don’t believe some of what I say, that’s the same thing as not believing me at all.”

You have to accept every word Jesus said as truth, and Jesus said there is a devil called Satan, he is constantly trying to get at you, he is evil, and he is powerful — but, and this is important, God’s power is much, much greater.

If you read through the Old Testament, you’ll find 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 raging all around us, the best picture we have of that in the Old Testament is in Daniel chapter 10, where the angel does battle with the Prince of Persia.

But then we get to the New Testament, and everything changes. All of a sudden the devil seems to be everywhere. All through the gospels and the letters of the apostles we find angels and demons and lakes of fire and heavenly battles. Why is that? What happened?

Here’s what happened: From the moment Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden all the way up through those four hundred years of silence between the Old and New Testaments, God allowed this great war between good and evil to pretty much be a draw.

A little ground would be gained here, a little ground lost there, but for the most part, good and evil fought to a stalemate. No one side really came out above the other.

But then something incredible happened. A baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem and changed everything. God Himself came into the world, and that war of give and take that had gone on since creation suddenly exploded into an God’s all-out offensive against the devil. The tide of that war shifted so fast and so hard that it was obvious God would win.

Satan knew that. He’s not stupid. Satan had always known he would lose. Nobody can beat God. Have you ever noticed that in Revelation, the last battle of history isn’t fought between God and the devil? It’s not between the devil and Jesus either. Satan’s so far beneath God and so weaker that God’s not going to even bother. That’s why the last battle will be fought between Satan and the archangel Michael, who is like the general of all the angels.

You don’t fight God and win. Satan knows that. The birth of Christ meant God’s victory was certain, and so the devil had only one play left — he would literally unleash hell on the world.

He set free every demon on the earth to do as much damage as possible. He knew 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. He is called a murderer from the beginning. And in verse 8, Peter describes him as something new — the devil is “a roaring lion.”

Violent. Hungry. Determined. Cruel. Fierce. A creature defined by its power and the terror it causes in the hearts of anyone caught in its path. That is how Peter describes the devil.

That’s a lot different than the way we’re used to picturing the devil, isn’t it? We’re used to the pitchfork and the horns on his head and the tail and the red suit. That picture is actually from the Middle Ages, and we’ll get to why the devil was portrayed that way in a minute.

But that picture of the devil that you’ve heard of all your life is wrong. The one Peter gives us here is much closer to what Satan really is. He’s like a lion. Peter says he’s a prowling lion — a lion who’s never still. He’s always sneaking around in the darkness. He’s a roaring lion, the sound that a lion makes when it leaps onto its prey.

That’s who Satan is. And what does he want? That’s included in verse 8 too. He wants to devour. To destroy. That’s his only goal. Satan can’t create anything. All he can do is ruin what God’s created. And what does he want to ruin? What does the devil 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’re no longer in his power. When he looks at you, he sees Jesus. And because of that, you’re dangerous to every plan he has and everything he’s trying to do.

You are his enemy, not the people who don’t know God. Generally speaking, when a person has no God, he has no devil either. Because Satan works best when we’re paying absolutely no attention to him. He likes to stay hidden until the last moment when he pounces. He doesn’t like us watching out for him.

That’s why of all the eras of human history, this has to be his favorite, because so few people believe in him anymore.

They say the devil is 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.

Last week, we talked about how since God is real, absolute truth is real. Truth is the devil’s poison. That’s why he will gladly leave you alone if you don’t believe in God.

He’ll protect the person who doesn’t realize he’s a sinner in need of a savior.

He’ll keep far way from people who don’t bother with life’s big questions, because why would he get in the way of people who are already going in the direction he wants them to go?

It’s when we decide we want to know the ultimate truth of life, the real reason 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.

If anything, life gets even harder. Because now you have the devil on your heels.

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.

Christ broke the chains the devil had around you. You’re free of him now, and there’s nothing the devil can do about that. That’s why he hates you.

The devil would pick up those mountains behind us and throw them right at you if God allowed it. But God doesn’t allow it. Satan can’t hurt you, so he wants to do the next best thing — he wants to see you ruined.

He wants to see your faith gone. He wants you to look at your savior and say, “You know, I’m tired of all this struggling. I’m tired all this ridicule I’m getting from people who don’t believe in you. I’m 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 you full force and try to tear down everything God has built.

He’s usually sneaky about it. He won’t try to break down the front door, he’ll go around looking 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 there’s always a foothold for him to find 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 those sins that always seem to trip us up.

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’s 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 keeps our eyes on ourselves. 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 at the heart of every sin. Every sin says to God in pride, “My will be done, not Yours.”

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

The gospel says that in order to be a Christian, you have to give up trying to be good yourself, because you can’t. 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’s 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 more constant. Fear is like a crack of thunder. Anxiety is like a cold drizzle that never stops and soaks you.

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 Satan devours, and that’s how he does it — he eats you 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.

I know this is hard for you to believe, but you’re not as smart as you think you are. You don’t know as much as you think you do. So don’t trust yourself, trust Him. Don’t focuse on yourself, because that’s what pride. 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. You don’t have to be perfect. 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 anxiety says you know more than God knows.

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. He says 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.

I read an article a while back that was 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 so confused that most times they’ll just stop short and run away. They charged at you thinking you’re the prey, but you’re not moving. You’re not running. And so all of a sudden that lion starts thinking, “Why’s this person not afraid of me? Is he the prey, or am I?” And so that lion runs away.

That’s exactly what Peter is saying. Don’t run. Dig your heels in 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.

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.

What are you afraid of? Don’t you know who you are? You are a saved and forgiven child of the King whose eternal future is guaranteed. You have the almighty, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God of all creation standing right beside you, and He has promised that He’s not going anywhere. So act like it. Live like it. There’s nothing in this world that can break you if you have faith in Him.

I’ll give you an example.

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, in the middle of all that pain and grief, Horatio thought about the faith he had in the one true God, and how that faith is able to overcome whatever life or the devil throws at him. When he arrived in America, he had written what would become one of the most famous hymns of our faith, “It Is Well.” We’re going to sing that hymn now. 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.”

Let’s pray:

Lord, you promised that in this life we will have many problems. There will be dark times, frightening times, times when we’re more convinced that the devil is real than that you’re real. But you also said that we should all take heart, because you’ve overcome the world. There is nothing that can snatch us from your hands, no attack that you cannot defend, and no victory that we cannot have in you. You, Lord, have overcome the cross, and by that love you give us the power and strength overcome all things as well. So help us to live boldly with faith and every confidence, knowing that you control all things and will make all things new. Amen.