“Overcoming Satan's Strategies” Part One

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 915 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text

--Brother Phil Enlow: Praise God! Don’t you know that your feelings are a great barometer of how things are going spiritually?

( laughter ).

Oops, is right. But don’t we all fall into that trap? I stumbled on a verse, and I’m not going to use this particularly. Something that David said in Psalms 30 — you can look it up later. But in the NIV it says “Oh Lord…” well, let’s see…well, it’s verse 6, “When I felt secure….” “When I felt secure…” notice, “When I felt secure I said I will never be shaken.” (NIV). How many of you have felt that way in church? You come and the Lord just blesses, and you just feel like you could go out and lick the world, and everything’s just great.

“O Lord, when you favored me, you made my mountain stand firm; but when you hid your face, I was dismayed.” You know, God’s not called us to walk by what we see and feel. He’s called us to walk by faith. We are so prone to…when we feel good and the Lord…it just seems like everything’s going our way…Lord, You’re such a good God. Oh, how wonderful You are! Does that make Him a bad God when you suddenly don’t feel good?

( laughing ).

How come we employ that strategy? It doesn’t work too well, does it? We need to understand, I think many times we need more wisdom. We need more understanding of how it is that Satan attacks. Has Satan attacked anybody here lately? Yeah. That’s kind of the norm. One of our reactions that’s fairly typical is, Oh, God, what’s wrong? It’s a very legalistic way to look at things. We think, oh, I’m going good--I’m praying, I’m seeking you, I’m wanting to do good, I’m doing everything I know to do to serve You, and look happened. Oh God, something must be wrong.

Well guess what? We’re on a battlefield. And what are you so surprised about? What are we so surprised about when we get attacked? We somehow mistakenly suppose that there is a place in God where we’ll never get attacked again. Nothing bad will ever happen. Everything will just go great, and oh if we could just get to that place that we could just sit back and go on permanent R and R. It doesn’t work that way, does it?

( congregational amens ).

As long as we’re here we’re gonna face attacks of Satan. Now if anybody could have reached and should have occupied the place that we imagine, wouldn’t it have been Jesus? He suffered some pretty relentless attacks, a lot more than you and I will ever face. He faced everything the devil could possibly think up to throw at Him, and He never failed once. He conquered every attack. We’ve got an awesome Lord this morning!

( congregational amens ).

We’ve got someone who knows what it’s like. He didn’t just sit up there and try to say, what’s the matter with you all? Come on. Get with the program. He came down and lived among us as a man dependent on the grace and the strength that His Father gave Him every day. And He conquered, and He showed us the way that we need to take up our cross and follow Him.

But you know we seem to have our problems, don’t we? We seem to get blind sided, and the worst attack is when you’re just going along whistling and the blue birds are singing and everything’s going great, and wham! Out of nowhere, all of a sudden something hits us in the face and man, we weren’t ready for that. And the devil comes.

Some attacks are like that, and some are just kind of a wear-you-down, relentless, I’m here. I’m still buffeting you--sort of like Paul, what he experienced. You remember how the Lord revealed to Paul that what he was experiencing at that point in his life was a necessary thing. His heart, his desire was to serve God, and God had lifted him up and shown him things that no man could take, no man could experience without just being flooded with pride. He was made of the same stuff you are. Just think about what would happen if suddenly you were singled out by God to be carried up to the third Heaven and see things that nobody had ever seen before and come back to tell about it. And God was just revealing things because He wanted His people to know some things. Oh my God! Wouldn’t you kind of feel I must be very special?

And so God did exactly what was needed to him and let him experience not just an attack, but a relentless day by day, you get up in the morning and there it is again and there’s that attack. There’s that warfare that we’re involved in. You know I was just thinking about…yesterday morning I woke up and just started thinking about some of these things because we all are prone to the same strategies. The devil, he studies us like any military person would study an enemy. He studies us, and he tries to ascertain our weaknesses. And so his attacks are very personalized, but yet because we’re made of the same stuff they tend to fall into the same categories.

Let’s just go to one scripture, and maybe that’s a good jumping off point--1st Peter chapter 5, a very familiar scripture. Right after the Lord tells us to humble ourselves in verse 6 and to cast all your anxiety on Him in verse 7,verse 8 we come to the familiar scripture, “Be self-controlled and alert....” Well there’s a lot of our problem right there. We’re neither self-controlled nor alert much of the time. That’s something we are in a school to learn.

But anyway, this is not just a suggestion by Peter and by the Lord through Peter. This is a necessity. If we’re gonna live the life that God has called us to live, if we’re gonna live the life that Jesus died to provide for us, we can’t just sort of go to sleep and imagine that somehow it’s gonna happen. We are going to have to contend with the same kinds of things, the same devil that the Lord Jesus contended with, and we’re gonna have to have a control of ourselves because if we don’t…what’s the opposite of self control? It’s yielding the control over some part of us to somebody else, and that somebody else isn’t nice. He is a thief, a robber, a destroyer. He’ll do everything in his power to make life worthless and miserable if we let him.

And so he says, “Be self-controlled and alert....” That’s where we’re just assuming that we have entered blue bird land some of these times, and suddenly wham! Out of the blue the Lord allows something to happen. Do you understand that nothing that comes our way is something that’s slipped up on the Lord? The Lord’s always alert. He always knows exactly what’s happening. And even though something takes us by surprise it never takes Him by surprise, nor is it something where the devil has the power and the Lord’s hands are tied behind His back, and there’s nothing He can do about it. He just sort of hopes we muddle through. No. Everything is absolutely orchestrated by God. As was said this morning, it’s for our good, for our strengthening, for something that needs to grow and develop and become stronger in us.

“Be self-controlled and alert....” Now the reason is given right afterwards, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” Now I’ll point out as I’ve pointed out many times in the past, this was not written to unbelievers. See he’s already got them blinded in a place of vulnerability, in a place where they don’t see. They don’t understand what’s going on. They attribute their troubles to other people, to their upbringing, to their past, to the genes they inherited, to a thousand and one things without understanding the role of…that there’s a real spiritual enemy that is unseen to us but who definitely has an influence upon our lives if we allow it. And the thing is, if you don’t know that you’re pretty defenseless. Satan’s gonna overcome you with one thing if not another.

But here is a warning to Christians. Now his warning is not that Satan has the power to steal you out of Christ’s hands so that you one day wind up in hell. That’s not the warning. The warning is that Satan can do a great deal of damage to our lives here in this world and make us ineffective and cause us to fail to experience the things that Jesus died to give us. I want those things, don’t you? I believe we need to honor the One that we sang about this morning. How could we live in one manner and then come in and say oh Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you. God help us to live in a way that brings honor to Him, that says, Lord I love you with our lives. That’s what this is about.

“Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.” Oh, does he ever tell you you’re the only one? You’re this… you’ve been singled out. God’s mad at you. It’s not so. We need to come back to the Word and say this is common. I’m experiencing the same things. You look down the pew and you’ll see somebody that’s sitting there smiling and you have no idea that on the inside they’re going through the same thing you are. We are very good at coming in putting on a Sunday face. But I tell you God…and that’s all right to worship God and to exercise faith, but to the extent that it’s just pretense, we need to be real. God wants us to have something that is real that comes from in here. Yes, we may be embattled. We may be embroiled in something that is difficult, but God wants us to have a victory in spite of that-- in the presence of it many times.

( congregational amens ).

Paul was called to continue to serve God. He didn’t find the magic switch that suddenly…or the magic weapon or whatever you…however you want to put it that would make that devil leave him. In that particular instance, God’s revelation to him was that My grace is enough. I’m gonna give you strength. I have allowed this for a reason, but I’m also…with it I’m gonna give you the strength so that you will be able to serve me anyway. So what I’m doing here, I’m holding down your pride and I’m giving you the strength so you can serve Me. Every one of us has needs in our lives where God needs to be killing something so that we are set free to serve Him.

( congregational amens ).

We don’t ever need to be thrown for a loop when we get in the fire. As I started to say awhile ago, one of our first reactions when we’re blind-sided by something is, oh God, what’s wrong? Well the implication of that is if we were where we ought to be, spiritually speaking, if we were doing right, if we were doing everything… if everything was right, why, we shouldn’t be experiencing this. Well by that measure Jesus should never have experienced a thing. It just isn’t that way. The devil uses that, doesn’t he? Something’s wrong. It’s kind of like the proverbial wife. Now I know nobody here would ever be guilty of this, but husband’s in the doghouse. Something has upset the wife, but she won’t tell him what it is.

( laughter ).

And so he’s going around, and he can just feel the icebergs and the darts and everything.

( laughter ).

Honey, what’s wrong? You should know!

( laughter ).

I shouldn’t have to tell you. You know what you did. Well this is a side note, but if you ever meet anybody who does this you’ll know what to say.

( laughter ).

Look, I know we’re a bunch of clueless jerks and all of that stuff, but help us out. Tell us what’s wrong.

( laughing ).

( laughter ).

It’s not like we’re sitting there planning a strategy saying, how can I annoy my wife?

( laughter ).

I know if I just do this I’ll get her good. This is gonna be good!

( laughter ).

So help us out a little. Now nobody here would ever do that of course. But you know, aren’t we kind of accusing the Lord of the same thing? Something’s wrong, and He won’t tell me. I don’t know what it is. Oh God! What’s wrong? Why? What have I done? What have I done? Well praise God! You might have just stepped out in faith, and said, Lord, I want to be closer to You. I need to gain higher ground here. Wham! The first thing that happens is the devil just blind-sides you. Oh I must have done something wrong. Oh God, please tell me what I did wrong.

That’s a bunch of junk. That’s a lie. That’s a strategy of Satan. You know Satan has no real power over a Christian. Did Jesus not destroy his power at the cross and through the resurrection? Yes. He paraded him in defeat just like the old military commanders who would go out into foreign lands. And they would conquer the enemy, and then they would bring in their king and their military commanders in chains and parade them down the main-street and say, here’s the enemies we went to defeat, proof that we are the victors. And they’d have a great parade and just all kinds of cheering. There’s your enemies you were so afraid of. That’s what Jesus has done for us.

( congregational amens ).

So the only way that Satan can gain an advantage over us is through trickery and strategy and deceit. And he wages something that I guess we could liken in modern warfare to psychological warfare. That’s a pretty major part of a military campaign. The soldiers may go out to fight, but there’s a whole division or unit…I don’t know how they organize it. I’ve never been in the military. There’s a whole division…there’s a whole section of the military that is devoted to undermining the morale of the enemy.

And they do that a thousand and one ways. They might broadcast messages. They might drop leaflets. They might infiltrate with people and just spread rumors--a thousand and one things to try to get the enemy to say, whoa…wait a minute. You hear the stories about World War II. I guess you had Tokyo Rose. Wasn’t that one of them? They get some sexy sounding woman who would broadcast daily and try to undermine the morale of the fellows. Don’t you know your girlfriend back there? She’s probably broken up with you. Now she’s going with someone else. You need to go home and be with her — just a thousand one different ways to just…or they might employ the strategy.

I guess they did this in the Korean War. There was a case of some brain washing. They caught some American soldiers and just brainwashed them to the point where they were more or less like tape recorders. They could have told them anything. They could have told them the moon was made of green cheese, and they would have said it. But they brought them to the point where they were so psychologically broken down that they actually repudiated the United States and said, no, I don’t want to go back. I want to live here.

Well don’t you know the enemy made a lot out of that? All of a sudden, that was spread out. We’ve got some American soldiers that hate America. They don’t want to go home. Now what would the effect of that be on other soldiers? But that’s a major part of military strategy. Well that comes from Satan. That’s a strategy that comes out of his character and his nature. And he employs that against every one of us. And you know Satan…Not Satan, Paul.

( laughing )

…a little difference! Paul was writing to the Corinthians, and he spoke about Satan’s devices, Satan’s strategies. He said, we’re not ignorant of them. In that particular case he was talking about a man that the church had had to judge because of sin. And he commended them for what they had done, but he said it’s time to forgive him. We aren’t ignorant of how Satan works. You need to forgive him. You need to help him out here. You need to receive him, and let’s go on because we don’t want him to become discouraged. Those are the kind of things we experience--every single one of us--when Satan attacks.

Now all too often the strategy that we employ is to stew in our own juices. We just sit there and we let the enemy just trample around in our mind. Here’s a good strategy. You just sit there and you think about it, and you think about it, and you think about it, and you think about it until that’s all you think about. The dark…the negative thoughts and what somebody did to you or what you imagine they did to you or why your lot should be different or why you’re singled out. You name it. You’ve been there. So have I.

But isn’t that a great strategy! Let’s just sit there and really think about it. When somebody comes in and tries to speak a word of encouragement, oh, you just don’t understand. If you’re really into it good, you know, you can just bite their head off. You can say, get real! You know it’s fine in church to talk about the victory, but this is real life here. You just don’t understand what I’m going through. Does that sound like a good strategy? How come so many of you use it?

( laughter ).

We every one fall into that same trap, don’t we? And God wants us to learn through the battles that we face how to do what Peter is talking about--to be able to resist what the devil throws at us and to come out the victor. Do you think that we can do that? I know that we can, not because of anything that’s in us. But you know, just some of the things that the devil throws at us besides…the fact…if we fall in the mud, now there’s one that we all experience. We suddenly catch ourselves. We’ve done something wrong, and we know it. But instead of just coming to the Lord and recognizing, Lord, I’m weak. I messed up here. Oh God, please help me and forgive me, and then taking Him at His Word and thanking Him and rejoicing and praising Him that what Jesus did has already paid the full price for that. That God didn’t look…that didn’t take Him by surprise. He thought about that. He knew about that. He knew about things that haven’t happened yet. He knew about it all, and He took care of it at the cross.

Not that we should just presume on that and just try to live that way, but knowing what we are, knowing how frail we are, knowing that we’re in a state of growing up and that we do come short. Oh, how the Lord just longs for us to come and somehow we listen to the devil’s voice who just piles on the guilt and just piles on the condemnation and piles on all that stuff and makes us think we got to do some sort of emotional penance. We’ve got to put in some “jail time.” We can’t just go to God and believe His Word. It’s not that simple. There’s got to be some fine print in there somewhere.

Oh you know the way I feel--I feel so guilty. How can I go like this? I’ve got to get a grip here, and I’ve got to work through this. I’ve got to… a thousand and one little lies that basically put it off and allow you to stay in jail a lot longer. There’s nobody here who hasn’t been there. You might be there this morning. But does the blood of Jesus cleanse us from all sin or does it not? Praise God!

( congregational amens ).

Why don’t we stand on that and believe what God says instead of what the devil and our emotions say? We have ground to stand upon this morning. We need to stand up and say, devil, you’re a liar. I recognize your strategy here. I refuse to listen to it. You were defeated once and for all at the cross. What I did doesn’t change that. I refuse to listen to you. Yes, I regret what I did. I’m gonna repent before God, but I’m also gonna believe His Word and get up and go on and realize that I don’t have to walk like I’m …expecting to…like I’m walking on eggs. Oh my God, He’s about to throw me out, if I just mess up one more time. Another demerit went on my chart here. I’m in danger. Oh God!

Oh wow, do we listen to the enemy’s strategies against every one of us and we stay in spiritual jail. And we’re worth nothing to the kingdom of God when we’re like that. We walk around singing, I’ve got the victory. I’ve got the victory, and we don’t have a bit of it. Lord, help me. Help all of us, because we all fall prey to this same psychological warfare--deceit.

You know when Joshua was getting ready to go into the land, and he had just been commissioned to take over from Moses. You remember, some of the language the Lord used with Joshua. Be strong. Be of good courage. Don’t be dismayed. That’s one of the tactics that the enemy uses over and over again. Don’t be dismayed. Don’t be dismayed. Don’t be dismayed. What’s dismay? Dismay is when you suddenly feel like you’re in a situation where you’re in over your head. The situation is hopeless. You’re up against an enemy that has defeated you every time you’ve ever faced him, seemingly. There’s no hope in this situation. Oh my God. I was in church, and I was feeling great. All of the sudden…Lord have mercy. It’s hopeless. That’s dismay--is when you totally lose your faith and your confidence that you can stand and handle the situation that you suddenly find yourself in.

But the Lord said to him, don’t be dismayed. Now remember, Joshua was one of the ones along with Caleb and ten others who spied out the land years before, 40 years before. He knew what he was up against. He had seen the high walled cities. He’d seen giants that he had to look up to, and they felt like grasshoppers. But you know even then, 40 years earlier he had been one of the two that said, let’s go up at once. We’re well able to take this land.

And God wants us to never run into a situation where we yield to a spirit of dismay, where we feel powerless, helpless, we feel like there is no hope of handling this, or getting out of it, or here we are again. Oh, I guess I’m defeated. I suspect one or two of you maybe know what I’m talking about here this morning. Every one of us has areas of our lives where it’s easy for us to be dismayed. We’ve been there too many times, and God is wanting us to rise above that and take courage.

But you know something? There was a reason why God told Joshua to have courage. He wasn’t just telling him to have bravado. Do you know what bravado is? That’s when you pretend to have courage that you don’t really have. You’re just acting real big and tough. Like if you’re cornered in an alley and a bully’s there and you know that he can beat you up. You’re gonna act real tough like somebody’s about to arrive or you know Judo or you know something. You know Chuck…

-- Congregation: Norris.

-- Brother Phil Enlow: Norris. Thank you.

( laughter ).

The old brain ain’t what it used to be. You know Chuck Norris and he’s about to arrive or something. But you’re acting real tough. There’s animals in nature that do that. You’ve got certain kinds of fish that when they sense danger they just blow up and they expand like a balloon and make themselves look bigger and tougher than they really are. Well that’s not what the Lord’s wanting us to have. This is not a false kind of bravado where we pretend that we’re strong. The fact is you and I are weak.

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