Evil has a face...Again!

 

The last time I wrote a post like this was when Putin invaded Ukraine. I said he was the new Stalin and labeled his actions evil. The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the acquisition of land, and the attempt to wipe a nation off the map...and if that does not work, to kill as many people as possible, kidnap children, and execute innocent men, women, and children just because they are Ukrainians is off the charts evil. War crimes abound. In that war, there is a clear side of innocence and evil.

Yesterday, it happened again, this time in Israel. The slaughter of children, women, and other civilians, the kidnapping of civilians to be taken back to Gaza as bargaining chips, the killing of 260 people at a music festival, and the cheering for those who perpetuated these ungodly acts in Gaza, Tehran, Lebanon, and other assorted places is a sad commentary on the state of our world. We are reticent to label things as evil today. But this is, and it must be said. Oh, and don't forget 3,000 plus missiles fired into civilian towns. 

Here is what I know from Scripture. God's heart is deeply saddened when evil abounds. And that includes the taking of innocent life. It happened in Syria in the recent conflict, in Bosnia Herzegovina, Rwanda, and in places like the eastern part of Congo. 

Here is the thing. God created us in His Image. Think about that. The destruction of those made in His image in an indiscriminate way is from the pit of Hell. In fact, John 10:10 says that the Evil One comes to steal, kill, and destroy. Satan hates God with an intractable hatred, but he cannot get at God. He thought he had at the crucifixion but didn't count on the resurrection! The resurrection sealed his fate for eternity.

Because he cannot harm God, Satan does the next best thing. He kills God in effigy by inciting people to kill other human beings in cold blood. And just as Abel's blood cried out to God when Cain killed him, today, the blood of those killed in Israel does the same. Behind such despicable actions is the Evil One. Please join me in praying for the security of Israel, whom Hamas has vowed to destroy. This is no different than the holocaust in terms of its evil - just different in scope.

Please hear me. I am not condemning all Palestinians, just as I don't condemn all Russians. I am blaming the perpetrators of this despicable violence. There are many peace-loving Palestinians, and Russians. I have met many. We cannot condemn a whole people for the actions of a few. But we must condemn those who target the innocent, the vulnerable, and civilians. Hamas has vowed to wipe Israel off the map and teach that every Arab must kill the Israelites they come across. That is what they tried to do this week. 

As to the Palestinian refugees, there needs to be a solution. And by the way, the Arab states who will now condemn Israel are mostly unwilling to do much for the Palestinians except to allow them to live in camps. And when the governments of Gaza and the West Bank teach violence to solve their issues, this is the logical outcome. 

Evil has a face...again! Join me in prayer for those who have been affected, for the security of Israel, for a peaceful solution to the Palestinian crisis, and for accountability for those who perpetuated this evil. The one thing we can all do is to pray. And God's heart is deeply grieved. He will have the last word. Now or on that final day.

(Photo from the New York Times)

The devil's ponzi scheme

Treasures are powerful magnets that have a tremendous pull on our lives one way or the other. They are never a neutral force. Our use of our treasures and our attitude toward them will either help or hurt our relationship with God. With treasure there is never any neutral ground. This is what Jesus wants us to understand.

Matthew 6:19-21: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Here is the connection between our hearts and our treasure: Our hearts always follow our treasure! “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Our heart follows our treasure so making sure our treasure is in the right place is foundational for how we relate to God.

Our treasure impacts our relationship with God!

Each of us has two investment strategies we can follow with the stuff God has given us and which strategy we choose will determine how connected we are to our Father.

The first investment strategy is that we can invest in ourselves. The mindset of the person who uses their treasure to invest in themselves, their priorities, and their desires without regard for what God might want with their treasures can be described this way: What I have is mine, life is about me, I am the owner of all that I have, I earned it and the focus of my life is on me.

In verse 19, we see what Jesus has to say about investing in ourselves: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.”

Do you see why Jesus says this is a bad idea? It’s the Bernie Madoff thing. You think you can store it up – that it can provide security – that it can deliver on its promises that it will make you happy and satisfied and fulfilled and you find out that is not true and in the end the treasure box is empty because you can’t take it with you.

Actually, thinking that our stuff can buy us happiness is the Devil’s Ultimate Ponzi Scheme: He wants us to think that our stuff will make us happy, that our stuff will buy us security, that life is about us and our pleasure when in truth his promises are empty promises and all of us have learned one way or another that stuff cannot deliver on its promise.

Have you ever wanted something really, really badly? You thought about it, fantasized about it, dreamed about it and finally the day came and you got it. And a couple of years later you asked yourself what the big deal had been?

For years and years I drove beater cars. Every time I got in my car I wondered what it would be like to have a really nice one. Every Sunday I would drool over the new car ads and finally one day I found the car of my dreams, a brand new white Accra with tan leather seats, six speeds (my son says it goes really fast like 120) sport tires and that awesome new car smell. I was in heaven…for a time. Nine years later I am used to it, I like it but it certainly did not deliver on much life satisfaction. It is only a car! You ever had that happen?

The ponzi scheme of the devil is that our stuff will deliver on life satisfaction when in fact, the more we have the more unsatisfying it is because the more evident it is that our stuff is just stuff. And one day like those who invested with Bernie – it is also all gone.

Jesus has an alternate investment strategy. He says we can invest in God’s Kingdom, verse 20. “But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal.” This is actually an amazing statement because Jesus says, you cannot take your stuff with you but you can send it on ahead of you.

Here is the mindset of those who invest in His kingdom. They see all of what they have as His rather than theirs. They see life as about Him, not me. Rather than owners they see themselves as stewards. Rather than I earned it, they know He gave it. Rather than a focus on me, they have a focus on God and His purposes.

Those are very different world views. The first world view says life is about me so that I will accumulate all that I can, spend all that I can and save all that I can. The second world view says that life is about God so that I will give all that I can, share all that I can and invest everything I can in things that will build His kingdom. These world views are 180 degrees from one another.

How is it that we can store up treasures in heaven with our treasures on earth? Think about this: There are only three things that cross the line from time to eternity. Our own spiritual maturity; the lives we have impacted with the love of Jesus; and the financial investments we have made that helped others find Christ or grow in Christ. Nothing else crosses the line from time to eternity.

But, any treasure that I invest in the expansion of God’s kingdom becomes a treasure that I store up in heaven because it resulted in lives changed and people coming to Christ. You cannot take it with you but you can send it ahead of you. The ponzi scheme of Satan cannot deliver and you lose it all in the end. Invest in God’s kingdom and you live with the investment results for all eternity. Which choice are you making with your treasure?

Why does it matter? Because our heart and life focus follow our investments! Verse 21, “For where your treasure is, there you heart will be also. Remember the two life views? Our treasures are either focused on ourselves or on God’s kingdom and our hearts follow the direction in which we invest our treasures: Self or God. Each of us has one treasure but two investment options. Our hearts will follow the investment option we choose.

Jesus wants us to understand that we cannot be focused in both directions! We are either focused on ourselves or on God’s Kingdom. Where we have our treasures is where our focus goes. Our hearts and life focus follow our investments. Jesus wants us to carefully consider which direction our lives are focused: On ourselves or on God!

Treasures are powerful magnets that have a tremendous pull on our lives one way or the other. They are never a neutral force. Our use of our treasures and our attitude toward them will either help or hurt our relationship with God. With treasure there is never any neutral ground.

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Small shifts of truth - the Evil one's tactics

Have you ever thought about the lies that the evil one loves for us to believe? His strategy is to move the ground of truth ever so slightly but that tiny move makes all the difference in the world in reality. Think about these lies:

• God is good most of the time. 
• You need to earn God's favor.
• Some of the Bible's moral commands are irrelevant in today's sophisticated world.
• You are just an ordinary person and not equipped to do much in ministry.
• God will never be happy with you given what you have done.
• Since God is love He will not condemn anyone to eternal hell. In the end it will be OK for most people.
• God does not heal today. That was for New Testament times.
• If someone is sincere they will be accepted by God no matter what their religious path.
• Believing in demons is pretty silly.
• You cannot afford to be financially generous with God. In a few years you will be in a better position and you can do it then.
• Some people are not worthy of God - or for that matter of my attention.
• Grace is for the lost, not for us who already know God. 

The evil one is skilled at customizing lies to fit our circumstances and our particular vulnerabilities. Often they play like tapes in our heads and we are hardly aware of them.

How does one counter the lies of Satan? Daily time in God's word where we constantly evaluate our lives and our thinking against His eternal, unchanging, life giving truth. The Psalmist says, "I have hid thy word in my heart that I might not sin against thee." Put another way, I have saturated my mind with God's truth so I know the difference between the lies of the evil one and the truth of God. And I know that one is life taking (Satan) and one is life giving (God).

Remember: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life,and have it to the full (John 10:10)." 

You can only counter the lies of Satan with the truth of God. Spend time with His truth regularly and you will recognize what is not truth. The reason so many Christ followers don't recognize the lies of Satan is that they have not spent enough time in the truth of God. Without knowing truth we cannot know the lies. Scripture matters to our daily lives in more ways than we realize.

Your greatest ministry advantage

It is probably not what you think. It is not strategy, leadership skill, opportunity or execution - and I believe in all of these. It is the power of a prayer team behind you, lifting you and your ministry before the throne of God on a regular basis. 

I don't meet many believers who have a prayer team and that makes me sad. I am convinced that it is those who pray regularly for Mary Ann and me who are responsible for whatever ministry success is seen or advances that are made.

If we truly believe what Paul says in Ephesians six that there are spiritual forces at work behind the scenes to thwart God's work, then it is spiritual weapons we need and prayer is one of the most powerful. 

It is my conviction that every believer needs others who regularly pray for them. It is also my conviction that those of us who are in Christian leadership are foolish to do what we do without a strategic prayer covering for protection against the evil one. And, the greater the press into Satan's territory, the more concerted prayer we need. 

As I travel the globe in ministry leadership, I usually bring a prayer partner with me as part of my team. It is a significant annual expense but that expense is small compared to the benefits.

In our organization we encourage each staff member to develop a small prayer team of trusted and trustworthy friends to pray for personal needs (a group you can share anything with) and a larger team who desire to pray regularly. 

I usually send a monthly prayer update with me calendar so that the teams can pray specifically for the activities that I am engaged in. It is these teams that have prayed me through some very significant times including two life threatening illnesses. 

So convinced am I of the spiritual battle that rages around us, I will not enter into any major ministry initiative, trip or engagement without my prayer teams going there with me. If you don't have one, don't wait long to develop your team.

The fall and its direct connection to us today

While we don’t think of the fall very often, it changed everything for our world and for our lives. There is a direct connection between every sin we struggle with and every heartache we experience with the fall, when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God.

With the fall, what God had declared to be “good” and “very good” became bad and very bad. It is hard to comprehend the terrible consequences of that act of disobedience for in an instant everything changed. Immediately Adam and Eve lost the innocence of righteousness and realized they were naked and ashamed. Then when God came to commune with them as He did in the garden they hid from Him.

For the first time, they understood and felt guilt. For the first time they were afraid of God. For the first time they experienced relational disconnect as Adam blamed Eve. For the first time they blamed others for their sin: Eve, Satan and Adam, Eve. It was an awful, terrible, cataclysmic day of firsts that has dogged every one of our footsteps down to the present day. No longer would God walk with them in the garden. No longer could they even remain in the garden. For the first time, hardships would enter their lives and they and their offspring would suffer all of the effects of sin: Relational brokenness with God, with one another, disease, death, sorrow, pain, murder, war, bondage, addictions, and all the brokenness that we have experienced firsthand.

Of all the consequences of the image being broken the one most cataclysmic in its implications was the separation of the created with the creator. From friends with God we became enemies of God. Our sin made us objects of His wrath for sin cannot co-exist with absolute righteous holiness. 

From people destined for eternity with Him we now became people destined for eternity without him as well as physical decay and death.  Righteous hearts turned dark. Communion with God became distant where it existed at all. A friendly world turned unfriendly and uncooperative. It was a tsunami shift in every way.

Every heartache we have suffered, every fear, every setback, every funeral we have attended, every sadness we feel, depression we suffer from, sin we struggle with, physical ailment we deal with, emotions we struggle with – it all goes back to the fall. It was in every way a very far fall, a fall so far that it is impossible to adequately describe its impact. It was an eternal fall as people destined for life with God became absolutely separated from God. It was a massive fall as hearts that once embraced God now rejected Him. It was a fearful fall as people who once treated one another with love now used people for their own purposes. A perfect image became a ruined facsimile of its original form.

Yet, God in His love and grace left a residue of His image even in the fall. This includes a knowledge in the hearts of men and women that there is more to life than mere physical existence and a desire to understand what that is. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet on one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Think about that: eternity set in our hearts so that we would look for eternal significance. Yet it is still frustrating because “no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Paul makes a similar point in Romans 1:18-20, that God has indeed made himself known to mankind. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” 

The very magnificence of creation in all of its forms from the galaxies in the skies to the beauty of the depths of the seas clearly demonstrates that there is an eternal hand behind all of creation.

Furthermore, God left in the human heart the capacity, through our choice, and God’s call to respond to Him and to enter into new life with Him. In fact, His intention to come and rescue a world gone terribly wrong was announced at the very time that he pronounced judgment on Satan and Adam and Eve at the fall.

“So the Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will strike his heel.”

It seems that serpents were forever destined to crawl on the ground as they became a symbol of Satan who had appeared to Eve in the form of a snake. But more important is what God says about the relationship between Satan and the woman and her offspring. There will be enmity between Satan and Eve which is understandable given his part in this terrible event. Eve would never forget the awful event that Satan had enticed her to participate in.

But then God says something more interesting. He will put enmity between Satan’s offspring and hers. But the apex of this verse is the last phrase, “he will crush your head and you will strike his heal.” 

Here God introduces a single male offspring who will eventually come and who will crush the head of Satan once and for all even as Satan strikes his heel. This is the first reference in Scripture to the One who would one day come and defeat Satan. Even on this terrible day that changed all of history, there would be another day that would also change history, the day that a Savior would come and defeat the evil one.

Think about this. From that day forward, Satan knew that he would be defeated by an unknown male offspring of Eve. He lived in eternal fear of who that would be and when that day would come. It is clear he recognized Jesus for who He was when He ministered on earth, which is why Satan tried to entice Him to follow Him in the desert temptations immediately after Jesus’ baptism by John. And, on Good Friday he was ecstatic that God’s Son was crucified! He had won! He had defeated the one who came to defeat him. Little did he count on Resurrection Sunday and on that day he knew he had met his waterloo. He had lost. God had won and all he could do from that day forward was to fight a losing rearguard battle.

All of history from the awful day of the fall has been a story of redemption as God, out of amazing love for rebellious people put in place His divine rescue operation that would climax with the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus and culminate in a New Heavens and New Earth where God and His redeemed will live for all time. 

Where have all the demons gone?

I think demons have abandoned America. After all we are too sophisticated for demons. As proof, how often do you hear them talked about? Or your pastor talk about them? Maybe CS Lewis tricked us with his Screwtape letter stuff. Seriously, where are they? I see them in the majority world but this is with largely uneducated people. We are too educated for such thinking. So either they have abandoned us as irrelevant, or we have banished them as vestiges of a less sophisticated world.


And that is precisely what Satan and his minions desire us to think. They are the foolishness of a past and less sophisticated world, relegated to the silly pictures of the Middle Ages, red skinned martian like figures with pointed ears and tails.


Except, Scripture would have us believe differently. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 6:12). And since Satan and his forces masquerade as agents of light, they are not about to reveal their true identity. 


Satan loves to convince people that he is irrelevant and even non existent in the west. In the rest of the world he loves to make himself evident and a source of fear because his audiences there understand, believe in and live in fear of the spirit world. Satan will use whatever strategy He needs to in order to destroy people and lives, even if that means staying in the background and letting people think he is not there or even not real.


While we live in  a sophisticated society, what that means is that sin has become more sophisticated as well. The wonders of the internet bring us amazing gifts along with secret addictions of pornography. The basis of our society has as many believers wrapped up in materialism as it does non believers - perhaps the ultimate addiction and lie - that happiness is to be found in the abundance of our possessions. Our lone ranger American mentality makes it hard for us to live in community with other believers and our "bootstrap" success definition makes us blind to the injustices around us.


Who do we think is behind the sad fact that Christ followers are so ungenerous with what God has given them? Does it not lie in our own greed, and lack of faith that God will provide if we are as generous with him a he is with us? What wants to keep us in a place of bondage to our pocketbook or credit cards or inflated dreams? My guess is that we keep a lot of demons busy in areas like this.


Unfortunately for us, Satan is alive and well and we are in a daily spiritual battle that we cannot see but which is no less real. All unbiblical thinking, behavior and attitudes are fodder for Satan to  take advantage of. He is there and he is real. But the Lord of the Universe is more powerful which is why Paul tells us to "be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power (Ephesians 6:10)."


Don't be fooled about the realities of the spiritual dynamics around us. They are real but if we live in fellowship of the Spirit we will both recognize them for what they are and be successful in overcoming them.

Things Satan likes about the church

1. When we keep everyone programmed up in church so they don't bother their friends or community with the gospel.
2. When we have so many boards and committees that it takes forever to get anything done or decided.
3. When we hire people to do ministry so that others don't get trained or released into meaningful ministry
4. When we preach self help sermons that don't go to the heart of the Gospel
5. When we water down the text to make it non-offensive
6. When we focus on programming and numbers rather than Gospel impact
7. When we spend so much on our facilities that we don't have much left over for mission outreach
8. When we teach people how to be a good evangelicals rather than focus on real transformation of their hearts, thinking, priorities and relationships
9. When we get wrapped up in conflict so that we are distracted from our real mission
10. When we have no clearly defined mission so everyone is comfortable and no one is seriously pushing into Satan's territory
11. When we convince lay people that they are not really qualified to do real ministry by our professionalization of ministry
12. When we confuse bringing people to church for bringing people to Jesus
13. Our church growth methodology of simply outperforming other local churches so that we grow by transfer not evangelism leaving Satan's territory relatively unscathed
14. Our ineffective boards that make for ineffective ministry