Satan's Unfinished Sermon

Intro

Good morning, if you have your copy of God’s word, turn with me to Galatians 3. I’m honored to be able to fill the pulpit this morning as Steve is out of town celebrating a baptism of one of his grandchildren. I know that we have been building to the end of Matthew, but we only have one more week left. As much as I would have loved to preach the Great Commission, Steve and I thought it would be pretty weird for me to end a sermon series that has lasted like 5 years. So, come back next week for that exciting conclusion to the Gospel of Matthew.

However, this morning I believe that we are going to look at a text in Galatians in a slightly different way than our typical reading of it. I believe it is a message for all believers to better understand their spiritual enemy, the Devil. I believe we are in a fight against a spiritual enemy and this text can be immediately put into use by someone who might be weary in the fight.

So the word “phobia” is the fear of something. There are some common phobias that the world faces today. It seems like you can just add phobia on the end of something and anything can be made into a fear. The years, the most common phobia in the world was “arachnophobia” which is the fear of spiders, followed closely by “ophidiophobia” which is the fear of snakes. Other common ones include “acrophobia” which is the fear of heights, “agoraphobia” which is the fear of open or crowded spaces. Claustrophobia is the fear of small spaces, Mysophobia is the excessive fear of germs, Aerophobia is the fear of flying. Those are all common fears in the top 10 of most expressed fears.

However, there are other fears that I just don’t understand. Xenophobia is the fear of the unknown. In my mind, I just don’t get this one because do we realize how little we actually know? Meaning there is a lot that is unknown? Gatophobia and Cynophobia both have to do with fearing cats and dogs. Hippo - poto - monstroses - quippe - dalio - phobia — is the fear of long words. Yes, that’s actually real.

Theophobia is the fear of God or religion. I don’t think that, that is “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” kind of fear either. I find that interesting because God was never the one that I was fearful of. It was always Satan. There is another fear associated with the devil and the number 666 but it’s really long and just in case anyone hear has the fear of long words, I’ll refrain from using it.

As a child, I had your typical fears (monster under the bed, afraid of the dark, snakes/spiders, heights). Even as an adult, my fear of public speaking is something that almost kept me out of ministry to begin with. However, thankfully the Lord set me free from that. Since my dad is a pastor and I became a Christian at the age of 6, I have been aware of the prince of darkness for most of my childhood. I was always afraid that there would be some demon in the dark corners of my room. However, as my knowledge of God increased, I understood that I was a child of God that my subsided my general fear of Satan. I even remember as a child coming out of a church service all jacked up about following God and I yelled at the ground “bring it Satan.” Fast forward a lot of years and a lot of mistakes, I take back that challenge.

In my studies, one of the men that I gravitated toward the most was Martin Luther. I don’t know if you know much about Martin Luther but he was a man who probably had “theophobia” before the term existed. He was always terrified that God was going to strike him down because of his sin. After becoming a monk and throughout his ministry, he would spend a lot of time in solitary and he claimed to have regular conversations with the devil. There were stories of him waking up in the middle of the night, see Satan at the foot of his bed, say “oh its just you” and go back to sleep. Another story, which at this point its hard to know if its just an urban myth, had Luther translating the New Testament and Satan was trying to discourage him from doing it. So Luther picked up his ink cartridge he was using for his quill pen and hurled it at Satan’s head. If you visit Luther’s Germany home today, you can find a ink spot on the wall.

Luther was a man familiar with Satan and his schemes to get him to be discouraged and not focus on the work that God had laid before him. Thankfully, he did not let those hard times weigh him down, he overcame them and is now considered one of the more influential men in Christian History.

Body

Sometimes I’ll think about Luther’s claim of his regular interaction with the devil and I ask myself what I would do in that situation. If I was face to face with the prince of darkness, would I react the same way or would my reaction be different? What about you? If you came face to face with Satan, how would you react?

This morning, we’re going to be focusing on that idea a little bit. I believe the “large C Church” has done a poor job addressing the devil. Sometimes we have selective memories, we focus on Jesus (which is right and good) but we ignore the devil, which I believe harms us. We need to be reminded that we have an enemy who is out to destroy us. If Satan is ever mentioned, we might speed past it, in order to get back to Jesus. Now, I have no problem talking about Jesus all day every day, but we can’t pretend like there isn’t another side to this conversation. We can’t pretend as if the devil doesn’t exist. We can’t close our eyes and plug our ears and claim “out of sight, out of mind.” That would be like if we were playing hide and seek and I hid behind this podium. Just because I close my eyes doesn’t mean that you can’t see me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.

So let’s turn to Galatians. I’ll give a quick summary of some of the context of our passage today. The letter to the Galatians was written to the church in Galatia, which is modern-day Turkey.