How Satan Is Like a Roaring Lion

The Savo River is about 80 miles long. It's in Kenya. It's not much of a river. It's nothing like the Nile or the Mississippi. In fact, most people would have never even heard of the Savo River. Some people have because of an incident that took place there back in 1898.

At that time, if you would have been on the Savo, every place you looked in every direction was just gently rolling plains. That's all it was, with high grass and lots of scrub brush filled with thorns. And so you would have seen scrub brush all over the place on these rolling plains. There had been a tree here and there, maybe a clump once in a while, not too many trees, and some rock outcroppings. So anything that looked like a hill when you got to it, it was just a pile of rocks. There was no reason for anybody to be there, except the British Empire was building a railroad across that part of Africa. And they had put a huge amount of resources into building this railroad, and they came to the Savo River. Now, the bridge they were going to build over the Savo River wasn't much of a bridge. I mean, it wasn't much of a river. They had a couple thousand men, Europeans, a lot of the African natives that they had hired on, and they had a large contingent of men from India. Because India, of course, was part of the Empire at the time, and they had a lot of trained workers that they would ship all over the world to do construction projects. One night, one of the men was sleeping in one of the seven-man tents, and he woke up. Unga Singh was the biggest man in the entire group of a couple thousand men. Biggest, strongest man. He was from India, and he was snoring so loud he woke the guy up. But just before he dozed off, he saw a shadow passing outside the tent. And then before he could react, a lion that weighed about 500 pounds came into the tent, grabbed Unga Singh, dragged him out just outside the camp where another lion came to finish the hunt. He was a strong man. It took him a long time to die. And all the two thousand men could hear him screaming, and he could hear the lions, but nobody reacted. It was so frightening, no one even reacted. Well, they began to realize that there were two extremely large male lions circling their camp. They couldn't see it. They couldn't find them. They were out there someplace. And so they began to build a thorn structure around the camp.

They went out and they tore up every thorn bush they could find, and they built a wall so high that no one, no animal could get through it, and it was too high for anyone to jump over it. A few nights later, there was some screaming in the camp. Some men jumped up and got their lanterns up just in time to see a 500-pound lion drag a screaming man right through a thorn bush wall.

It happened another night or two later, and this time it simply jumped over it, carrying the man with him.

They didn't know what to do. There were some professional hunters with the group. They tried to hunt these lions down. They could not find them.

They finally began to set traps for them. And every trap they set, they got out of.

Eventually, work began to slow.

In fact, it stopped entirely. Night after night after night, these two lions would come into the camp, grab a man and drag him out. They had fires lit. They did everything that was supposed to scare off lions.

These were two male lions. They were almost white.

The Indians especially started to say that these aren't real lions. They called them demons or ghosts. There was a movie, sort of a fictionalized movie about this, made I think it was 1996, called The Ghost in the Darkness. What actually happened was more frightening than what's in the movie.

And so what happened was, night after night, until it stopped, hundreds and hundreds of workers started to leave. The trains would come up to bring supplies and hundreds of men would jump on it and it would take them back. They brought in a professional hunter. He couldn't find them.

The government of England became involved because the entire empire, the image of the entire empire was at stake. You've got two animals that are brought to complete halt the most important project going on at the time in the British Empire, which controlled 25% of the world.

But nobody could stop them. Nobody could find them.

Before this horror story ended, and it's amazing the different things they did, the different things they tried, at least 100 people died. They started to realize they weren't just hunting them because they were hungry.

They were hunting them because they enjoyed hunting them. What these lions saw was a giant herd, and it was a slow-moving herd. And at 500 pounds, they were bigger than anybody. And instead of doing what lions a lot of times do, go after the smallest thing in the herd, they were picking the largest ones in the herd.

They were thinning the herd out. So eventually, they could just kill whoever they wanted. Turn to 1 Peter 5. I mean, that's a horrifying story, but there's a purpose for it.

I remember reading a book about it years ago, and some of the eyewitness accounts would just... I mean, it's like a horror movie. They can't get away. They can't go anyplace. Unless you jump on a leaving train, you can't leave your encampment, and yet these lions come into the encampment every night, no matter what you do.

1 Peter 5, verse 8 says, Now, the lions of the Middle East at that time, they're extinct now. Probably one of the things that driven them to extinction was the Romans used them in the different Colosseums.

In the combinatorial games. And so there's a number of animals that lived through the Middle East, and even Europe, that are gone because they killed them, that many of them in the combinatorial games. But when Peter was alive, there were still lions in the Middle East. Now, they were smaller. They weren't as big as the central African lions. But, you know, they would live in thickets. They would live in the desert area, and they would attack people. And you see in numerous times in the Bible where someone was attacked by a lion. And Peter says, understand Satan is like a lion. Satan is like a lion seeking whom he may devour.

It's very difficult for us at times to accept that Satan, I mean, we accept that he exists, that this brilliant supernatural being has any interest in us.

Why would he have an interest in us? Because he's like a lion, and we're just a slow-moving spiritual herd that he wishes to destroy.

What I want to do today is I want to show how Satan is like a lion. Okay, he's like a lion. We've all seen lions in zoos, right? We've all seen lions in zoos. We've all seen him on television. How is Satan like a lion? Why would he use that analogy? I mean, just to frighten people. Obviously, in a world where you could see a lion, I mean, I've been hiking in the woods numerous times and come across bears. I've been in the desert in Texas, in the desert mountains, and had people come up and say, we just saw a mountain lion. I've always wanted to see one, but at a great distance.

If you see a mountain lion, it's never at a great distance. You never see them far off. They're always close when you see them. They don't let you see them. And, you know, 150-pound mountain lion is a frightening thing.

In Salvo, both these lions were close to 500 pounds each. That's bigger than an average African lion.

How is Satan like that? That's what we're going to talk about today. Because you have to realize that there is a reality going on in your life. There's a battle for your mind.

And we're about to celebrate holy days, which represent the removal of Satan.

When Christ comes back, He removes Satan. And humanity, for the first time since Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden, are not being pursued spiritually by a being who wishes to destroy you.

And that is real. Now, that doesn't mean we're to go around in fear all the time. In fact, as we understand how He's like a lion, and we understand how God interacts with us spiritually, we don't have to fear that. But if we're not aware of it, well, you don't see a lion until it's too late.

You never see a lion until it's too late because of the type of animal that it is. So here's some ways to understand a lion, and when we do, we understand Satan.

Lions are deceptively fascinating. They're just fascinating. And they can be so large.

I mean, they can stand from nose to tail if you stretch them out up to 11 feet long.

And they can stand up to 4 feet high.

Now, most lions are going to weigh between 300 and 400 pounds. At Sabo, they weigh close to 500. There's been a few that have been more than 500. It's a big animal.

They are remarkably fast for a short distance. For an animal that size, they have a small heart.

You will see a lion sleep a lot. That's because they have a small heart.

So they can run real fast for a short distance. If you're in the herd and you keep moving, a lot of times you can outrun them.

That's why you don't see them until they begin their attack.

You don't even have to watch a National Geographic special or Smithsonian special that shows lions hunting.

They're creeping because they have to get very close.

Any animal that sees a lion far off just goes away.

But you know what's amazing is how fun they are to watch.

When a lion isn't hunting and they're with the pride, they're all together, they play. They're like big kittens.

They play, they roll around, the cubs usually go over and they bite on the males' ears and stuff, you know, and he just sleeps and tries to get off of me.

And you watch. They're just fascinating to watch.

I've always wanted to go to Kruger National Park and take a photo safari, and they take you right down to Lion Prides.

Of course, there's a guy there with a gun.

I had a friend that took a safari to Kruger, and he had an interesting experience.

They were all standing in the back of this pickup truck looking at some lions probably only 30 feet away.

And the guy taking the video turned, and a lion walked up to the back of the pickup truck.

He was maybe three feet away. They could have reached out and touched him, and just sort of looked up and then walked around the truck.

Now, they're all standing out in an open truck.

A lion can leap probably eight, ten feet with no problem at all.

And they just looked at him and walked around him.

But he showed me that, and he said, you know, that was a little frightening when I looked down and saw that it had come around the truck. That means it had been behind us.

You don't see them until it's too late.

They're so fascinating, though.

It's amazing how everybody, you know, everybody likes to tell stories about them. Now, some people aren't fascinated by them, but most people are. We want to see them. We want to watch them.

Children usually, oh, the lions are so fun to watch.

They're like watching, like I said, big cats.

They're just like watching the old kitties that you have in your backyard.

It is that deceptive fascination that is so dangerous.

You and I have a deceptive fascination with Satan's ways.

Not necessarily with him. Now, some people do. That's why they watch horror movies and movies about obsession, and they're interested in the occult, and they're interested in all these things because they have a fascination with the being of Satan.

Most of us don't have much of a fascination with the being of Satan.

But remember, he's deceptively fascinating.

We are fascinated with his ways, and we don't even know it.

There's a story in Genesis. Go to Genesis 34.

Genesis 34.

How easy is it for us to look at others and say, Well, you know, if God didn't say this, that would be so much fun.

Well, I don't understand God's approach to this. There is a better way.

I always have to laugh. One of the ways that Satan will convince us that he has a better way is trying to prove God really isn't fair. God really isn't that loving.

If God was fair, if God was loving, he wouldn't have killed all the children in Sodom.

Interesting argument. I've seen people get all messed up because of that argument.

It's a fascinatingly deceptive argument.

That's a good point.

Unless you know who God really is, you can get deceived by that.

Verse 1. This is about Jacob and his children.

Now, Dina, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land.

I just want to read that statement. We'll talk about what happened here in a minute.

It doesn't say Dina wanted to go disobey God.

It doesn't say Dina wanted to go throw out her parents' religion.

It doesn't say that at all.

Dina is part of a nomadic tribe that moves around.

That's who the ancient Hebrews were.

The family of Abraham, Isaac, and now Jacob.

That tribe kept getting bigger and bigger.

There were hundreds of men, so there were probably thousands of people in this tribe.

They moved around through the Middle East, where they could find water, let their cattle, sheep, and their goats graze.

They had come to a town.

Wow, towns are exciting.

People don't smell like sheep in town.

They dress so pretty.

They have such nice jewelry.

The boys aren't like my rotten brothers.

I just want to go see... I want to go talk to some girls.

That's all I want to do.

There's nothing here that says her intent was wrong.

There's nothing here that says that she wanted to do something bad.

What it says is, she said, I want to go see what this is like.

It seemed so much fun.

It had to be fun.

I hear they have parties.

And Dina went.

Of course, the story is so tragic because it shows how some of her brothers really were rotten guys.

Because she went and she ends up being seduced.

The implication in the Hebrew isn't that she wasn't raped, but she also wasn't always, let's say, completely a willing partner.

But he was the prince of the town. His dad was the king of the city that was there.

So now she's ashamed.

She goes back and all her brothers are angry and they're ashamed.

And of course, Jacob says, well, what are we going to do?

I mean, you can't just go take a town.

She actually, as it appears, goes in and lives in the town because the man sends out an envoy and says, look, I was wrong.

In fact, what's interesting is it actually says that he was an honorable man.

I was wrong for what I did.

But I love her. I will marry her. I will make a treaty with your tribe.

And your tribe and our city shall live together in peace.

And I will honor whatever your customs are.

Well, without Jacob knowing, the brothers got together and said, oh, whatever our customs are. Okay.

So they went and told him that they were special before God and God had a covenant with them and required them to circumcise.

So if you wanted to be special like us, you'd have to be circumcised.

And the man went to his father and said, I love this woman this much.

Besides, look, they're a wonderful tribe of people and they have lots of goods and they're very wealthy.

It'd be good to make this treaty between our city and them, and we'll become one people.

Which, of course, God had told them not to become one people. Dinah's curiosity was now creating an avalanche of problems.

But her intention wasn't to do wrong. It was the deceptiveness of it. It was the curiosity of it.

It was, this has to be exciting. Just like I know how excited I would be if I'm ever standing in Kruger looking at a pride of lions 30 yards away.

I hope it's not 30 feet. Of course, it doesn't matter. You're not going to outrun a lion.

So, now her actions are creating an avalanche. The young man goes to a dad and says, we need to do this.

And the king brings in every man in the city and says, we're all going to be circumcised.

And they circumcise every man in the city.

And while they are incapacitated because of that operation, two of her brothers go in and kill every man in the city.

They kill every man. Then they take all the women and children as captives to be their slaves.

That's a horrible story.

And what the two brothers, her brothers do, are just even Jacobs. How could you do this? This is terrible. This is wrong. What they did was just sin. But notice it all started innocently with a person who said, that looks like fun.

This is where we have to understand Satan. We're not fascinated with him, but we become fascinated with his ways. We become fascinated with his ways.

You know, I drink so much. I know I drink a lot of beer, but I couldn't even feel it. I can handle my booze. And the policeman pulled me over and took a blood test and arrested me for being over the...

I was legally drunk, but you know, I was fine. I was in control of myself. I've heard that a hundred times.

We walk up to the line.

I mean, I want to be in the back of that pickup thirty yards away.

Hoping the one behind me isn't looking and saying, oh, there's a slow one.

I'm hoping he's saying, that one's this too old and tough. We need to get someone else.

It's attractive.

So we walk up to the line, and we like standing on that line.

How close can we get, but it's not really sin, in our conduct?

It's fascinating. It seems exciting.

But remember, you don't know the lines there until you seem charging.

The second point is, lions are camouflaged. So they're very fascinating.

Did you see the other day? Where was it? A woman literally got into a lion...

It wasn't a cage, but it was one of these in a zoo displays. She got into it and tried to walk up to the lion.

And that lion looked to be probably 300 pounds and just stared at her, like, what are you doing here?

Fortunately, it didn't feel threatened, or it wasn't hungry.

How many of you saw that? I just thought, people see these animals on TV. Most of the time, they're in cartoons talking to each other.

And it's so fascinating, right? They don't understand.

You cannot tame lions, really. You cannot tame a lion.

I went to a circus once, and it was a small circus, and the guy that was doing the lion... He was working with lions and tigers, and he said, you really can't ever tame these cats.

He says, I've raised them since they were little. We know each other. We trust each other.

But he said, if they were ever frightened or scared, or for reasons I don't even understand, I will never turn my back on them.

Because I really don't know what they're capable of, after working with them their whole lives. But lions are camouflaged. Lions don't live in the jungle. They live on the plains. That's why they have that color.

They're furs, the color of dried grass. They can walk through that tall, dry grass so silently you don't see them and you don't hear them.

A lot of animals never see them coming because they're camouflaged.

The apostle Paul tells the church that Satan can appear as an angel of light.

In other words, he can be camouflaged so that what we see is something that's good. Once again, we're not fascinated with him, but we're fascinated with his ways. And his ways become camouflaged, just like he's camouflaged. Let's go to Ephesians 6. Ephesians 6.

He says in verse 10, Finally, my brother, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Now what he's going to say next is predicated on this, that statement there.

You and I do not have the intelligence, the moral strength, or the abilities to deal with this being whose ways are deceptively tantalizing and he's camouflaged. But with God, he can't get to us. Understand that. With God's help, we can drive him away. God has that power, and he will use that power through you. He will be there to guide you and protect you and drive him away. You and I will fall prey to him, which we all do occasionally, and every time it's because we're too far from God.

We've strayed from God. If we stray from him, we're out there on our own.

We're out there on our own. The closer we are to God, the more that lion does not want to try to come up to us. He can't.

So this is the basis. This is why there is no substitute for your daily prayer and your daily Bible study and your thinking about God's way. There is no substitute for that. We may get out there. Oh, yeah, they're cliches. Oh, keep praying. Keep studying your Bible. Understand, the closer we are to God, the farther the lion is.

But when we stray from God, we're in His territory, and you can't see Him.

What's frightening, you read about hunters in Africa. You can't see them until sometimes they're walking through the grass and they see their eyes.

That's really close.

That's really close.

I want to tell you, there's hunting hogs, those giant hogs in Texas. They'll weigh up to 1,000 pounds, and they'll kill people.

I don't know why I'm telling this because all my hunting stories are bad. I was never the great hunter. I'm looking through my sights at this 300, 400-pound hog, and it's standing there staring at me. I look off in the distance, and there's a farmhouse. This was a .22, and I thought, if I pull this trigger and I miss him, I don't know how I can miss him. But if I do, I can hit that farmhouse.

So he just stared at me and walked on by and took its herd into this cornfield. I was so angry, I was going to put down my .22. I had a .30. I was going to pick up the .30. I was going to go in there after him, which was real smart. But I forgot to pick up the .30. I went in with the .22. I'm in the middle of this cornfield, and there's all these giant hogs in there. I'm standing there, and I'm thinking, I'll shoot him five times, and their skin's so thick. I probably won't even bring him down. My best chance is to club him with this.

So I'm walking out backwards from the cornfield. And I get out, and I walk over. My son was there with another teenage boy, and they both looked at me, and their eyes were just here.

That was the dumbest thing I've ever seen anybody ever do! See, I was just a little riled, and I picked up the wrong rifle. Even with the .30-30, it was a really dumb thing to do. You never do things when you're not thinking straight.

Anyway, let's get back to lions. We're not talking about hogs.

Verse 11, Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Now, what he's talking about here is... He's using an analogy of soldiers, armor. But we can use the same analogy here as we talk about dealing with Satan. Because it's just hunting that he's a lion hunting us. We use the same analogy. We have to put on this armor of God. His wiles, his deceptions, everything he does has an element of a lie. Sometimes they're straight-out lies, but you know the worst lies is when they're half true. A lie that's half true is attractive because we see the truth. But you know a half lie is still a lie. It still is deceptive. He says that we can withstand the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle. This is what we have to remember. You're being stalked not by a physical animal, but by a spiritual being. And this is real. It's real. He says, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places. Therefore, take on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand. In other words, without God's help, we can't do this. That's an important point. The third point, lions love darkness. I read a National Geographic report a number of years ago, where they had studied a pride of lions. And they said that only 5% of lion kills are done during the day. Remember, they live out on the plains. You have to really crawl a long time. If there's a herd of antelope out there, and they see a lion, you're half a mile away, they just move on. Or they're just watching you, and if that lion gets within so much space, where they know they can travel that far, then they move. So they do it at night. But what was really interesting is, 85% of all lion kills that they were able to verify were done when the moon was not full. In fact, the moon was at the point where you could hardly see the moon. They love darkness. Lions love darkness. It's interesting that the movie about the Salvo lions was the ghost in the darkness. They never attacked anybody during the day. It was always at night. And they would sometimes have hundreds of men staying awake at night, beating drums, lighting fires, which drives usually, you know, no animal's going to come up to something like that. And they would just go someplace else. They would find somebody asleep. And then they'd see... they'd hear the screaming, and they'd see them just jump over this huge wall. Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, he was in charge of the Salvo bridge project, and he was a big-game hunter. He actually hunted tigers in India.

And he would build these real rickety sort of tree stands, which I would have been... the way they were described, I wouldn't have been in them if I was shooting deer. And these rickety lulz, and he would wait and set up a trap, usually a goat or something, and they would come after him.

There was a book written about lions a number of years ago.

He was also a big-game hunter, and he collected stories from different hunters. And he collected the writings of Henry Patterson, and he described one of those nights when Patterson was sitting up in that tree stand. If there's anything more courage-draining than listening to a pair of man-eaters advertising as they close in on your position, it's when they suddenly stop roaring, leaving you no idea of their location, although their silence means they've begun the hunt. Menets crawled to a half hour as Patterson stared with aching eyes into the darkness, his body screaming from the torture of the hard tree limb perch. I mean, you made it so that you couldn't sleep on it. You made this so that it was literally so uncomfortable that you could not fall asleep, because you did not want to fall asleep. But there's nothing but silence. Not even a murmur came from the terrified men below in their closed tents, because all the men were told to go to their tents, and I'm going to draw the lion to me, the lion to me, and I'm going to shoot him. So not too many men are asleep at this time. Then, from a half mile away, an earthly screams and shouts razored the night as the man-eaters broke into another tent at a different section of the railroad camp and dragged off a laborer. They used darkness. They came up on him, made him believe that they were hunting him, and a half a mile away took another man. They understood exactly what they were doing. They were hunting the hunters. Hunting the hunters. Using darkness. In other words, you can't see what they're doing. Satan stalks us in darkness. It's called spiritual darkness. It's called spiritual darkness. And you know what's hard for us to understand? There are people who love living in that darkness because it's become so deceptively attractive that they like it. They like the darkness. Let's go to John 3.16, the most often quoted verse in the entire Bible. John 3.16.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. Now, almost all quotes of this passage stop there. And that is a very encouraging two verses.

But it's part of a larger context. So let's read the rest of what Jesus actually said. He who believes in Him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already because he is not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

And this is the condemnation. Now, this is a condemnation from God. Why does God condemn somebody? This is the condemnation, that the light came into the world and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. Satan deceives human beings to the point that they reject the light of God. It just seems so much better. What's outside of what God has given me is so much better.

There's so much more fun. There's so much more good things. I can have more stuff. It seems so attractive. It's camouflaged. It seems attractive. And people can love the darkness. He's talking about here people who have seen the light.

The light came on. They could see the light. It's amazing what happens when you really, really see the light. You're afraid of the darkness. When your spiritual light comes on, you're afraid of that darkness. But we can edge onto the edge of it. You know what I mean? You just get away from the light. You can sort of still see the light. Oh yeah, I mean, I'm not stealing. I'm just...well, yeah, okay. I'm just...yeah, I fool around with my girlfriend. But that's okay. That's out here on the fringes of the light. I'm doing this, and we get farther and farther away. And what God does every once in a while, you hear the roar, and you wake up and realize, I'm out here in the darkness.

And you come back to the light. What's scary is when the person doesn't come back. We've all moved away from the light in our lives in one way or another. We all get out here on the fringe, and then we realize, we're all out here in this sort of quasi-darkness here. You know, I can still see the light, and we run back. What's scary is when we don't run back. We just sort of keep going away until you get to the place you can't even see the light anymore.

Now, this is an analogy, but it's a really good one because it's what we do. He goes on, He says, verse 20, For everyone practicing evil, He doesn't...we all commit sins. He says, practicing evil. It's our way of life. We won't change. We don't repent. We don't feel bad when we do wrong. We've been on the fringe of the light for so long.

We just do darkness. We do the dark things. We think the dark things. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come into the light unless his D should be exposed. People hate the light. We should fear that darkness. We should fear the ghost in the darkness and keep running towards the light. Back to the light. Back to the center of our lives, which has to be God. But He who does the truth...and I love the way He says it.

He doesn't say, He who believes the truth. He who does the truth. He who lives it. He who does the truth comes to the light that his deeds may be clearly seen. That they have been done in God. Those who love the light, let the light shine on them even though sometimes it says you're wrong. Even though God...that light shining from God says, hey, you need to change this.

You didn't do this right. They still love the light because they understand what's in the darkness. Do we understand what's out there in that spiritual darkness? And we don't entirely because if we did, we wouldn't do the things we did. Do. We wouldn't pretend. We wouldn't be on the edge of the darkness every chance we get. In the movies we watch. In the things we do. Live in the edge of the darkness.

Lions love darkness. Satan loves spiritual darkness. And then our last point. Lions stalk their prey. Now there's a misconception that lions only attack the weak and sick animals. The reason they have their reputation is because they can only run real fast for a short period of time. So that's who they usually catch. Babies, weak ones, sick ones. But they'll attack anything they think they can bring down.

They know they can't bring down a lion. But there have been known cases where maybe eight lions bring down a lion. Or, I mean, an elephant. Eight lions bring down an elephant. One of them can't. Now two lions may die doing it, but it doesn't stop them. Once they decide they're coming after something, they come after it. Until they can't run fast enough. So they might back off, have an elephant, after it's killed a couple of them. But many times they don't even stop there. They can be relentless. Or, what's very interesting, they'll retreat and come up with a new plan.

That's what the ghost... or the ghost of the darkness... that's what the Sabo lions did. They hunted the hunters. Although that's not completely unknown. There's many African hunters that have realized, sometimes too late, that they're hunting, being hunted by what they are hunting. Satan looks for our weaknesses, and he stalks us. He takes his time. He moves real slow. Whatever that weakness is, alcohol, sexual lust, uncontrolled anger, resentment of authority, being easily offended, greed, fear, jealousy, self-righteousness, marriage conflicts that just eat away at our spiritual lives, inability to be cooperative, hatred, feelings of inferiority, being judgmental, being complaining, a lack of faith, constant anxiety, selfishness, lack of forgiveness, covetousness, whatever it is.

When you look at someone else and say, wow, they've got a big problem, I'm glad I don't, you're being stalked. He knows exactly what your weakness is. You're being stalked. 1 Peter 5. Let's go now to what we opened the sermon with.

Use this as our closing scripture. 1 Peter 5, verse 6. We read the verse about Satan, but I want to start a verse before that. Therefore humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you. We must believe this. We must believe God cares, and we put it on Him. And we must be humble before God. One of the biggest problems we have is when we, you know, at the center of the herd of the church is Jesus Christ.

You stay close to the center, no lions show up. But when we get on the fringe of the herd, and we drift off, and we, I can do this, I'm pretty good at this Christianity stuff. I've obeyed God all my life. You're being stalked. Humility is what keeps drawing us to God, the understanding what's in the darkness, the fear of what's out there, but then the fact that we don't fear when we're close to God.

When you're close to God, you don't fear Him. When we fear Satan, it's because we've drifted. It's because we drifted. And so we keep coming back to that center, because the closer you get to the edge, the more you're being stalked. He says, be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. He says, you've got to be serious about this, and you have to be vigilant.

We can't take this for granted. You and I must be spiritually vigilant. Sometimes the greatest danger that we face, spiritual danger, is spiritual complacency. Oh, we do it! Yeah! Look, Lord, I haven't committed any major sin the last month, and I go to church every week, and I did a bunch of good stuff this week. And we're moving farther away from God as our center to ourselves as our center, which means we're moving away from the center of the herd.

That means you're being stalked, because there are Satan's always stalking those who move away from God. You've probably heard of David Livingston, the English missionary that went to Africa in the mid to late 1800s. Well, actually, he was Scottish. He was a doctor, and he went over there to try to help people and convert people to Christianity.

And he spent the last years of his life in Africa. And he had a good hunting rifle because he would have to hunt, sometimes, lions that would attack villages. And one time, there was a lion that had come into the village, and it wasn't killing the people, but it was taking their goats and their cattle.

That was the easy thing to kill. Of course, you eat all the goats and the cattle, and you find out, hey, people run even slower. But, you know, there's a certain fear of human beings because of what we do. I mean, fire and noise and stuff. But, you know, goats and cattle, they're fairly simple. Cows don't run very well. And so he takes his rifle, and he goes out hunting. And he tracks this...he was an expert tracker. He tracks this lion. He goes through the brush and the scrub, and he came across the lion just sitting there, just laying on the ground, looking the other way.

And he was about to raise his rifle, and the lion stood up and turned around. And he said he realized at that moment the lion had led him to a place where he was just...he was exactly the length he needs to charge him. He wasn't hunting the lion. The lion had led him to where he was now, the game. And that lion shot it...it took off at him. He got off a shot. He eventually managed to kill the lion, but he was permanently maimed the rest of his life. He said it was a real important lesson. He thinks he's hunting the lion, big hunter.

And it had led him...he's tracking it and everything, exactly to where he wanted it. It was laying there looking the other way for a reason. He said when it stood up and turned around and just stared at him, he realized he was going to charge him. And he had put him exactly where he needed to be to be charged. That is Satan. We think we're doing real good. We live in our Christianity, and he's waiting for us. He knows where we're going.

He's just laying there waiting for us. We can sometimes become so confident in ourselves that once again we've drifted from God. And it's only God that can stop that lion. Now, verse 9, resist him. Resist Satan. We have the power from God to resist him, to push him away. He runs away. He runs away. Resist him steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world.

But may the God of all grace who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, established, and strengthened and subtle you. He says, we suffer when we resist Satan. Because why? Because he's deceptively interesting. His ways are. If Satan said, appeared and suddenly started talking to you, you'd run away screaming.

But he may tempt you with something that on the surface is good. It's deceptively good. So we're attracted to it. We're drawn toward it. He knows exactly what he's doing. And he's just out there waiting for you to walk towards him. He's not even coming after you. That's what Livingston said. He didn't come after him. He just waited for him.

He's out there waiting for us sometimes. But notice here what Peter says is when we resist and we have this power from God because we're humble before God, in the end we struggle. There's some suffering, but in the end we are perfected and strengthened and settled. And that's where we all want to be. Perfected and strengthened and settled.

In the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, there's two... They have a taxidermy section there with animals from all over the world. There's two lions there. They're a little bit of a strange color. They're lighter than most lions. They don't look that impressive. They just look like, you know, less than average small lions. And then you read a little plaque and it says how after the souvenir hunters chopped up the salvo lions, this is what they put together with the pieces that were left. They made rugs out of most of them. I'm thinking, wow, I'm thinking, no, they're not that big. Oh, no, these are the remnants after they chopped them up. It's hard to imagine they looked like toys. It's hard to imagine that they killed over 100 people and brought the entire British Empire to a stop, but they did. In one of the most unbelievable cases, horrifying cases of lions hunting human beings for the sport of it, because they didn't need to eat that much. Part of it was they just liked hunting them.

In fact, many of the African natives kept saying this isn't normal, even lion behavior, especially when there's so many thousands of men here and men are shooting at them. Every shot missed until Patterson finally shot one of them and then finally hunted down and shot the other one.

It took a long time before the men came back and started working on the bridges. They had to show them that they were dead.

When you see those two lions and you know the Salvo story, you realize they were twice that size. They were twice the size of those little pieces they put together. They were frightening.

The world we live in is just like the workers on the railroad. They live in a prison. Out in the open plains, but they live in a prison being attacked by a lion.

Under a reign of terror by a lion, and that's why we see all this evil, Satan is like a lion.

That's the world you and I live in. That's why it seems like, oh, that darkness seems so fascinating, but it's not. Christians, ask Christians, we don't have to fear that ghost in the darkness. They also call them the demons in the darkness. We don't have to fear them. This world is held captive. We are not. That's what these Holy Days are about.

You and I have been called by God to be freed from this, to be prepared for the return of Jesus Christ, where Satan is removed because he has no power against Christ. None whatsoever. He will be put into his own darkness forever.

Remember that you have been called by God, and you are a participant in a battle that you didn't pick.

The light has been shining on you, and the result is there's a battle inside your mind.

For your heart and mind, there's a battle going on.

Whether we submit to God, or whether we go off into the darkness where the lion waits for us. But Peter told us, stay spiritually vigilant, and Satan, just like a roaring lion who's brought into captivity, Satan will have no power in your life.