Daily devotion – When the enemy attacks
1Pe 5:8 Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.
When the enemy attacks what do you do? Do you crumple, hide, lose faith, or do you stand!
Eph 6:13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
Satan is relentless in his attack on God’s people. Just recently he has stepped up his hostility against us because of our studies in Galatians but especially Colossians, we have been emphasizing the pre-eminence and power of Jesus Christ! Col 1:15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
Why does God allow the enemy to have a go at us? Remember God allowed Satan to ‘have at it’ with Job.
God wants us to be soldiers in His army, He wants us to look to Him in the time of battle and to experience conflict in our lives that we may also experience God’s power and capacity to win each and every time.
When Daniel was living in Babylon, he heard the law had been passed to ban all praying except only to king Darius, what did Daniel do. Daniel was no shrinking violet, he just went on praying as he had always done, widow open in his bed chamber and he made sure that people knew he was still going to pray to the God of Israel, no matter what the law said!
I love the story of king Saul’s son Jonathan who took on the enemy with his armour bearer, seeking God’s permission to take on the enemies of God – 1Sa 14:6 And Jonathan said to the young man that bore his armour, Come, and let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised: perhaps Jehovah will work for us; for there is no restraint to Jehovah to save by many or by few.
We live at a time that Pastors of Churches that teach God’s Word, the congregation that calls the local Church their spiritual home and recognise their place in the body of Christ the Church, will come under increasing attack in a godless and immoral society.
Do we shut up shop, hide in our homes, no we publicly display our love for God and His people by gathering together on the Lord’s Day and bring worship and praise so that the community around us can see there is a light on a hill and not hidden under the bed, that there is salt to halt the onslaught of depravity and selfish living.
Yes the enemy has had a swing but all that he has done is drive us deeper into God’s Word, to raise up constant prayer and swing with all our might the sword of God, the Bible and Satan will lose again as he always does!
Rom 8:28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. This verse is often used in a melancholy manner by people taking big hits from the enemy but doing nothing in response.
I see this verse by Paul as being a wonderful acknowledgement that no matter what the enemy throws at us. No matter how many times he swings at us, he will lose!
The power of the Church is all that is holding back the onslaught of the enemy in a greater manner – 2Th 2:7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way.
We are living in the days that Jude warned us would come, Jde 1:4 For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.
We have a phenomenon unthinkable in any other century: churchless Christians, nomadic hitchhikers without accountability, without discipline, without discipleship, living apart from the regular benefits of the ordinances, and, perhaps most revealing, without responsibility.
If you don’t commit to a local Church, you don’t have to attend, serve or give – it’s not Christianity – it’s your god your way. Such people hitchhike from Church to Church on the perpetual take and its never costs!
Today more than ever, the Church is to make a stand!
The hitchhiking Church attendee, the consumer religious one’s will fall away and the ruin will be great. 2 Thess 2:1 Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, 2 not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. 3 Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first…
When the enemy attacks you it means you are a problem to the kingdom of darkness!
Take a stand!