The Christian Life

Experiencing practical victory over the darkness involves identifying the enemies of every Christian. Bob did some sniffing around the Bible to help us know what we are up against and what to do about it.

The Three Big Enemies

The Christian’s struggle is with sin. Sin is present in three dimensions: the “world” (1 John 2:15-17), the “flesh” or “sinful nature” (Ephesians 4:22) and the “devil” (1 Peter 5:8-9).

The “world” in the Bible has a couple of meanings. God loves the world, that is, the cosmos with its creatures and all creation. However, another use of “the world” are all the institutions and organizations throughout the earth which operate apart from God’s Word and will. A more contemporary way of saying this is “systemic and structural evil.” (Galatians 4:3; Ephesians 6:12; Colossians 2:8, 20; Jude 1:19)

The “flesh” is not the physical body but the sinful nature. This refers to an old life dictated by selfish desires, manipulation of others, and hustling for love. It is a bent toward hiding from and shaming others. The flesh pursues radical independence from God and others. The sinful nature seeks to not be dependent on anything or anyone. A person might want to do good but is unable to because of these base motives. (Romans 7:5, 19; 8:5, 8)

The “devil” or “Satan” is the one who seeks to exploit the world and the sinful nature to tempt and move us into rebellion against God. He is our ancient enemy. Since he’s been at this for a long time, his craft and deceit are formidable. (1 Corinthians 7:5; Ephesians 2:1-3; 4:26-27; 1 John 3:8, 10)

The good news is that Jesus Christ has obtained deliverance and freedom for people from each of those enemies (1 Corinthians 15:56-57; Colossians 1:13-14; 1 Peter 2:9). For this deliverance and freedom to be a practical victory over the darkness, each believer in Jesus must know and practice the truth.

The Fall of Humanity

In the original Fall of humanity there was a passive response to the temptation of the serpent, the devil. There was an acceptance of doubt concerning God’s Word, through Satan’s insinuations that God is not so good. The original people made a deliberate choice to follow the suggestions of Satan and disobey the true and living God. (Genesis 3:1-6).

The seriousness of that Fall into disobedience cannot be overemphasized. The Fall introduced sin, lust, depravity, slavery, ignorance, death and every form of evil into humanity. People became alienated from God and enslaved to the devil. (Genesis 3:7-24)

The final effects of this sinful bondage will not be completely severed until the final judgment (Revelation 20:10). The hold of the devil is so profound that it took the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to experience victory over the darkness. (Romans 5:17; 2 Timothy 1:9-10)

Satan

The descriptive titles given to Satan indicate his activity and what he is up to: Tempter (Matthew 4:3); Deceiver (Revelation 12:9); Accuser (Revelation 12:10); Adversary (1 Peter 5:8); Murderer and Liar (John 8:44); the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4); and the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2).

The Bible indicates a Christian can be significantly influenced by Satan through:

Indeed, the Christian ignores the activity of Satan at their peril.

Satan aims to keep every believer in Jesus from spiritual progress and maturity, from the daily experience of living in the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and from victory over the darkness. Unfortunately, the evidence of Satan’s success is all around us. All Christians are under the attack of the enemy in some way, shape, or form.

When well-meaning Christians have trouble in prayer, reading Scripture, witnessing to the truth of Christ, overcoming sins, or maintaining right fellowship with other believers, then this is a tangible reminder of the subtle and powerful effect Satan has in the church, not to mention the world. Such a situation requires that we know and understand the provision we possess in overcoming the evil one.

Overcoming the Devil

The most basic truth to know and practice is that in the crucifixion and resurrection the Lord Jesus Christ defeated Satan (Colossians 2:15).  Jesus, through his death and rising from death, destroyed the power of death and delivered those held in bondage (Hebrews 2:14-15).  In fact, Jesus, the Son of God, came to this earth so that he might destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). What’s more, through the Ascension, Jesus is seated in triumph over Satan. This tremendous victory over the darkness is given to every believer in Christ (Ephesians 1:19-21; 2:5-6).

For this incredible access to become a reality there must be a complete and honest confession. Repentance and renunciation of past and present sins are needed.

“If we admit our sins—simply come clean about them—God won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing.” (1 John 1:9, MSG) 

Rejecting Evil and Living the Truth

There must be a complete and honest practice of the truth in the obedience of faith and love through standing with the truth (Ephesians 6:10-18). In addition, there is a need for aggressive resistance of Satan’s work through constant vigilance and standing firm (1 Peter 5:8-9).

When you feel guilty but don’t know why – then be pugnacious about rejecting it. If feeling accused on the inside, i.e. “If you were really a Christian you would not be thinking a thought like that…” then be steadfast about refusing such guilt. If your thoughts, emotions, and desires threaten to get out of hand – then take charge of them and bring them into subjection to Jesus. The truth is that you have all the authority of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension behind you to reject error and refuse satanic whispers.

Know the enemy’s lies and deceptions. Be aggressive about dealing with falsehood using gospel truth.

May the kingdom of God come in all its fullness as we together learn to renounce evil and practice the truth of Jesus Christ. Amen.

See you on the trail!

 

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I used to live across the street from a small cemetery. Each morning, after arising, I would go to the large patio window facing the old tombstones and I was reminded of the brevity of life. Yes, we all shall die. From dust we came, and to dust we shall return. But the daily look at the graveyard, along with each day’s walk with Bob the bloodhound through the cemetery, was much more than a future reminder of what awaits us all; it was also a very present call in dying to self and living for Christ.

One way of looking at our lives is to discern that they are a pilgrimage into the inner depths of our souls. As we move within, there is a great need to put away selfishness, arrogance, and the hubris of settled certainty about everything. When I became an adult, I discovered that life was not all about doing whatever I wanted (as I so naively thought as a kid). Instead, life was also full of responsibilities, stewarding my work, school, and relationships.

I found that if I were to do anything well, it involved a significant degree of dying to self. When I married my lovely wife, I quickly discovered that marriage was a whole lot more than sex and being fed grapes from a beautiful woman while lounging on the couch. Instead, it was a new journey of dying to self, to my expectations, and learning to meet the needs of this other person. And just when I thought I might be getting a handle on this new way of life I became a father. Then my whole life seemed upside-down in caring for this helpless little baby girl who only seemed to scream and poop if she was not sleeping and eating. My goodness, more dying to self and awake to living so that I may care for another.

I could go on and on with this motif of death and dying to self (the Apostle Paul did! Romans 6).  Caring for others as a pastor and a chaplain; becoming a grandfather; being attentive to the great needs of society and the world; it all involves being reminded each day that the cemetery awaits me.

As I write this, the Church Year is beginning the season of Lent. Christians across the world are engaging in spiritual practices which remind them of Jesus Christ’s life and death. The coming of Christ is quite the fascinating and gracious reality. If you think about it, Jesus could have just appeared on earth. He could have shown up as a fully developed adult ready for his ministry. Jesus could have circumvented the whole thing about experiencing the pain of growing and learning, especially of facing torture and execution.

But, instead, Jesus came to earth through a woman. The King of the universe gestated in the womb of Mary and was born in humble circumstances. Christ was a baby, a child, a young man, a teacher, and Savior. Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered (Hebrews 2:10-18). And then he died. Yet, death could not hold him in the grave.

When I used to look at that old cemetery I was also reminded of a bigger picture, and a larger portrait God is painting. I would daily learn, and have continued discovering even now, the ways of dying to self so that Christ might live in me. Jesus must grow and gestate within, overtaking me so that Christ’s life might be preeminent.  More of Jesus, less of me. He must increase; I must decrease.

However, out of dying to self, something extraordinary and supernatural occurs. Living for Jesus is an extraordinary resurrection to new life. Someday, just as Christ came in his first Advent, he will come again in a second Advent. The graves will open. With the presence of the living Christ in me, I shall rise again, just as he did.

There cannot be a resurrection without a death. All great spiritualities have in common the need to let go in dying to self. Christianity just puts it in the frame of living for Jesus so that the world will be blessed by encountering the great truth that Christ is the great Immanuel, God with us.

The graveyard does not have the last word. It is a daily reminder in dying to self. Yet it is also an abiding picture that new life is possible through that death, both in this life and in the life to come. This is the hope which the Christian has, that there is glory at the end of suffering, an amazing life as the result of dying to self.

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To be frank, the giving and receiving of love is something that everyone on planet earth needs. Bob the bloodhound knows this, likely better than most people. I can testify that Bob is not shy about making his needs and wants known and letting me know when he wants love in the form of dog food, a walk, or a good old-fashioned pet.

We all require love, in both receiving love, and giving love. But not everyone has a heart open to accepting love, and, so, find it nearly impossible to dispense love. However, the good news is that love is near to each one of us. We only need to reach out and touch it because it is so close.

We have all likely heard the dictum “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”  Even if we have not used the phrase, the concept is common throughout the world.  Perhaps the chief hindrance to receiving and giving love is this reciprocal notion. It would be weird if I expected Bob to scratch my back right after I give him a good scratch.

Much of Western society turns on the wheels of transactions. This is seen in the many words we have for money and financial exchanges: bills; coins; cash; credit and debit cards; stocks and bonds; bank accounts; 401k; paychecks, etc. You get the idea. We can scarcely imagine a culture without putting something into an account so that we can engage in commerce and consumerism.

None of this is neither inherently bad nor good; it just is. A problem arises, however, when people allow the idea of transactions to seep into relationships. When a person chooses to view the world primarily through the financial lenses of a transaction, we set ourselves up for a deficit of love.

It works something like this: A parent invests time, money, and resources into a child’s life. Mom and Dad do everything they can to set up little Johnny for success in this life (which, by the way, is often defined as getting a good paying job someday and being financially independent). But when little Johnny decides to go all avant-garde and does not live up to his parents’ expectations, their reaction betrays the transactional: “Look at all we did for you, and you repay us by not going to college and running off to do only God knows what!?”

Put in the context of a workplace, some bosses are only happy when the employee is producing and making money. Management doesn’t understand why workers are upset. Paying them more money doesn’t seem to do it. They only see the transactional view of the world. Employers often fail to understand that money and wages cannot fulfill the need for giving and receiving within healthy relationships.

In the realm of personal relationships, we might send a card to someone, and they never sent one back, and that makes us mad. When it comes to God, we went to church, kept our nose clean and were ethical in all our dealings, and now something terrible happens in our lives. We believe that God did not make good on us. We invested in this God thing, and then he didn’t follow through with the transaction to give us the good life we were expecting.

But God operates in a different economy. Grace overwhelms transaction and is the currency of God’s kingdom. Grace is the gears and the grease of God’s love toward us. The good news of Christianity is that God loves us, even when we have nothing to give, and even when we are far from the words and ways of Jesus.

“Christ died for us at a time when we were helpless and sinful.  No one is really willing to die for an honest person, though someone might be willing to die for a genuinely good person. But God showed how much he loved us by having Christ die for us, even though we were sinners.” (Romans 5:6-8, CEV)

It is likely that all of us, at some time or another, have felt the sting of someone else’s disappointment with us.  They “invested” in us in some way. We “repaid” them with a decision or a different direction than what they expected. Or it went the other way. We put time and effort into someone or a group of people, and they didn’t come through for us (ironically, pastors and church volunteers often feel this way).

The first step in awakening to love is forsaking a transactional view of relationships and adopting a gracious approach to people and to God. God is gracious, merciful, and kind. It isn’t just what God does; it is who God is. God gives love because God is love. Until we get that basic understanding, we will flounder in our human relationships because true love will forever be elusive due to the transactional view. It will throw out of whack the true giving and receiving of love.

Grace is the most effective way to the world of love, and the best way to the good life. Yet, surprisingly, this is at no cost to us. So, what are we to do? We are to give ourselves to God, as people who have been raised from death to life. We are to make every part of our lives an offering to God. Don’t let sin keep ruling your lives because you are ruled by God’s kindness and not by the law of the transaction.

Awaken to love because God is love. (Romans 6:12-14; 1 John 4:8-11)

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Those who are in Jesus Christ become living beatitudes, walking, talking blessings to the world.  Those who live with Jesus in his kingdom have a destiny to be witnesses to another subversive, yet wonderful, way of life, where the last are first and the greatest are the least.

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It’s hard to fool Bob the bloodhound.  That’s because his nose always knows.  Bob can spot a fake a mile away.  He only goes for the real deal.  With Spring in full bloom, Bob is on the trail having the time of his life.  He’s all excited about what he’s discovered in the contents of the Bible.

Some things are patently unrealistic.  But for a lot of things in life, you often cannot tell a fake by the external appearance.  When it comes to living from a place of biblical integrity a person might give a good outward performance, but not be the real deal because he or she is full of bitterness and death on the inside with a heart far from God.

What is sobering for devoted observers of the Bible is the reality that there may be Christians who are religious on the outside but not really be a Christ follower on the inside.  

Having all the outward signs of faith without the inward reality to match it is like putting perfume in a vase – it might smell like flowers, but the flowers aren’t there.  Bob just tells me that if it smells fake, it probably is.  After all, he is the expert on all things olfactory.

At the heart of Jesus Christ’s teaching is to be humble and avoid pride by not comparing ourselves to others and wondering if we are getting our due attention; rather we are to compare ourselves only to Christ and the Bible and, so, become truly meek and humbly serve others out of a genuine heart that loves God.  What we proclaim and profess cannot be separated from who we are.

Jesus condemned the religiously committed Pharisees because they put heavy burdens on people and were unwilling to help them carry those burdens. 

Throughout Jesus’ ministry he approached the crowds with the understanding that they were following him for a variety of reasons, some noble and some not so noble.  Some of those people heard of Jesus and genuinely wanted to be healed.  Some followed him because their hearts burned within them when he spoke, and they wanted to know God better.  Some desired a true way of living and saw in Jesus fresh hope for their lives.  Yet others followed Jesus around wanting to see the next cool miracle, to maybe get a free handout, or just to hear him so that they could tell all their friends that they heard him speak and saw him heal.  Jesus was always trying to press and challenge the vast crowds of people into a genuine, real righteousness from the heart that would submit to God’s kingdom.  But the Pharisees and teachers of the law kept undermining Jesus, talking behind his back, and tried to stir up resentment against him.

The Pharisees’ motives were not to help people know God better through service, but to just talk a good line.  Interestingly, Jesus did not chastise them for what they taught (Matthew 23:1-12).  Instead, he leveled condemnation on them for not helping people live-out their obligations.  The Pharisees knew their Bible and had a high view of Scripture.  The problem was not so much their doctrine but that they did not practice what they preached.

It isn’t so much what the Pharisees taught as how they taught it – it was neither gentle, nor had any grace.  

People need one another to truly live for God.  But if there is a double-standard that exists among Bible-believers then there is only heavy loads that aren’t getting carried because some individuals think they are above helping others or think too little of themselves and believe God could not use them.  In both cases the person declares “someone should do something!” Someone should give, someone should pray, someone should visit, someone should tell that person about Christ, someone should help.  To which Jesus would say that someone is you!

Jesus also condemned the Pharisees because they loved to do things for a show, for the attention.  Everything the Pharisees and the teachers of the law did was for others to see.  They thought they deserved the accolades of others.  We can be hard on the Pharisees, yet whenever we plaster on fake smiles, only obey and serve when others are looking, and/or pretend like everything is just peachy keen when we are dying inside then we have fallen under the same condemnation and need to put aside caring so much about how we look to others and grieve, mourn and wail asking the God of grace to have mercy on us.

We can be so obsessed about the right thing to say that we never say what is really on the inside because we think it isn’t spiritual enough and we fear looking bad.

The Pharisees also were men who sought status and prestige.  Respect and honor was everything to many Pharisees which is why they wanted the positions of prominence and insisted on being recognized for whatever they did in the synagogue.  In public they insisted that the people respect them in their greeting and acknowledgements.  They did not want to look bad, ever.

But facades will not do for Jesus.  Pharisees are very predictable because they always act with the spectator in mind and seek to elicit praise and respect everywhere they go.  To Pharisees, it does not matter what is on the inside if the outside looks good.  In his autobiography, Be Myself, Warren Wiersbe writes about his first church building project as a young pastor in Indiana. He and the church’s building committee were working with a church architect. At one of the committee meetings, Wiersbe asked the architect, “Why do we need such an expensive, high ceiling in the auditorium? We’re not building a cathedral. Why not just build an auditorium with a flat room and then put a church façade in the front of the building?” Wiersbe writes that in a very quiet voice, the architect replied, “Pastor, the building you construct reflects what a church is and what a church does. You don’t use façades on churches to fool people. That’s for carnival sideshows. The outside and the inside must agree.”

So, what do we do when we realize that the outside of our lives and the inside don’t match?  We become humble and meek just like Jesus.  

We are to revere and honor God, not people.  Putting people on a pedestal is not good because they are just people.  Instead of the mentality “look how great I am!” we are to treat everyone as an equal because at the heart of thinking people owe me something is the idea that I am better than the other person.  The answer to that attitude is to adopt Christ’s meekness and humility.  The zeal to feel important and respected is to be transformed into the desire to serve others.

The way up is down.  We are to descend, not ascend, into greatness. So, what does humble meekness look like?  Taylor University is a Christian college in Indiana. Years ago, an African student, Sam, was going to be enrolling in their school. This was before it was commonplace for international students to come to the U.S. to study. He was a bright young man with great promise, and the school felt honored to have him. When he arrived on campus, the President of the University took him on a tour, showing him all the dorms. When the tour was over, the President asked Sam where he would like to live. The young man replied, “If there is a room that no one wants, give that room to me.” Over the years the president had welcomed thousands of Christian men and women to the campus, and none had ever made such a request.  “If there is a room that no one wants, give that room to me.” That’s the kind of meekness Jesus talks about in the Beatitudes.

If there is a job that no one wants to do, I’ll do that job.

If there’s a kid that no one wants to eat lunch with, I’ll eat with that kid.

If there’s a piece of toast that’s burnt, I’ll take that piece.

If there’s a parking space that’s far away from the church, I’ll park in that space.

If there’s a need is someone’s life, I’ll meet that need.

If there’s a hardship someone has to endure, I’ll take that hardship.

If there’s a sacrifice someone needs to make, I’ll make that sacrifice.

The greatest among you will be your servant.  Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.  This applies not only to individuals but to groups of people and churches as well.  If we never get out of our comfortable little band of people, then we need to ask ourselves why not?  If we never look beyond the four walls of the church building to serve someone, we need to ask ourselves why not?  If we have a chronic critical spirit toward someone then we need to ask ourselves if the genuine article is within us?

The kingdom of God is not a matter of outward eating and drinking and displays of spirituality but is a matter of inner righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.  May we all serve one another deeply from a heart of love and grace.

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