satan's Tactics

I worked for a radio station, and I didn't work there very long. It was in Austin. It was the number one station in the market. I finally was excited because I was in a big market. But I wasn't doing all the things I liked to do. They just...all I did was go out and sell advertising and write commercials. I didn't... You know, small market radio...you know everybody. Everybody knows you. You know all the business people. You do live activities, and hundreds of people come out. It's just a fun thing to do. Well, this was a real doggy dog business. And I started to realize working for the number one station wasn't fun.

And they gave me a book, Sun Tzu's The Art of War. And that's how I was supposed to do business. And I mention Sun Tzu in sermons every once in a while because the book was fascinating. And how this philosopher, this Chinese philosopher, no one's quite sure who he really was. He's supposed to exist in Claremont back in the fifth century BC. There's all kinds of legends around him. And we have this manuscript that's been passed on for generation after generation in Chinese. So Sun Tzu explains how you are to fight war. I'm going to actually mention a few things that he wrote in the context of something we talk about all the time. But I'm afraid we don't realize the reality of it. And that is that we are in a spiritual warfare. We talk about that all the time. We're in a spiritual warfare. Oh, what does that mean? I mean, we know Satan is the god of this world. We know that he affects humanity. We know that he has effects on us. He doesn't control us, but he does affect us. How does that happen? Where is this warfare fought? What happens in our lives? How do you and I fight better the spiritual warfare and understand the spiritual warfare that we're in? Let's go to Ephesians 6 to begin with.

Ephesians 6, verse 10. And this sentence is important in what he says next. We usually look at the last few verses of this passage, and that's what we zero in on. I'm going to zero in on the first few verses. The first one is, finally my brother, and be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. When we talk about a spiritual warfare, this isn't something you and I fight on our own, because we cannot. We can't fight Satan's influence on our own. The entire world is influenced by what Paul called the God of this world.

God has given him limited time, limited power, and this is the place that he's designed. This mess that we live in is not God's. God has allowed him to do it. God's going to stop him from doing it. It's not like he took God's power away. God's allowed him to do it. God keeps interfering in his plans. Satan is going to fail. It's predicted in Genesis, chapter 3, he would fail. And so he's going to fail.

But during this time period, humanity has the influence of Satan. Where we have to learn to choose between good and evil. And the only time you really can make that choice is when God calls you and reveals goodness to you. Reveals what he is, who he is. And at that point, we can begin to choose. You and I are in living our lives choosing between one way of life and another way of life.

One way of thinking and another way of thinking. One way of processing emotions and a different way of processing emotions. That's the spiritual warfare that we are involved in. And so he says here, and he starts this passage, which Paul does, the power to do this can only come from God. It's only when we are close to God that we can win these battles. By ourselves, we're overmatched. But with God, we can win. With God, we will win. He says, put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

You know, he's sly. Actually, you could probably better translate that from the Greek into the schemes. In other words, he's actually working out a plan. He has a set of tactics. He's using against us, against humanity. But he has tactics he's using against you personally. Now, once again, he doesn't have control over us. But he has tactics. He is influencing the world. The society we live in reflects much more the values and the beliefs and the concepts of Satan than it does of God. We know that, right? We look around and say, well this isn't God's world.

This isn't God's way. That's right. Well, what's it reflecting? It's reflecting Satan and this influence he has on humanity. He goes on, 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. That's a frightening verse there. He says, as a Christian, we are wrestling. We're in a spiritual warfare. And our warfare is, it's existential.

It's what reality is all about. Whether we follow God or we don't. And if we're not following God, we're being influenced and following Satan. There is no middle ground here. There is no ground to be in this warfare and say, well I'm a non-combatant here. I'm just sort of in the middle, right?

And so I don't declare allegiance. I just...there is no middle ground. We are either following God and winning battles. There's still lots of battles we lose along the way, but we're winning the war. Or we're following Satan. So there's no middle ground. We're in this whether we want to be in it or not.

It is the reality of where we were born. We are in this warfare and God has called us to receive the power to fight this. God has called us to give us the ability to win this, which we cannot on our own. He says, verse 13, therefore take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done so, done all to stand.

And then he goes on and talks about the armor of God. Now you've heard all kinds of sermons and sermonettes about the armor of God. I'm not going to go through that, but I want to look at how he set this up. That this armor must be worn because you are in an actual warfare with an enemy that wishes to destroy you.

Now that's what's sort of hard to understand. I mean, us, we're nobodies. I mean, we're not important in any way. But we are because God has called us. We are because God has given us his spirit. And in that, the enemy wishes to destroy you.

And that's sort of hard to grasp. And yet he does. It's not that you're unknown. It's not that you can sort of hide from this battle. You know, let's just get off the grid so Satan can't find us. It doesn't work that way. In the spiritual battle that's going on throughout the world, you and I are involved. That's what our Christianity is. So we have to understand that. And that's why it's mentioned so much in the New Testament. So, what are the tactics that Satan uses against us?

Okay, well if he actually is fighting a war against you, he knows you personally. He wishes to destroy us. We have to understand some things about his tactics. Understand that it's not as if, like I said, he possesses us. But think about the sensitivity we have as human beings. Have you ever been around somebody that's really, really angry? And you're there, and you're trying not to be involved, and you find yourself getting angrier and angrier. Because somehow, that anger, that behavior, what they're feeling affects us.

Now I want you to think about Satan, the greatest spiritual being created by God. He and two others, the archangels. And think about that power, and that mind, and those abilities, and since he's all over the place, moving back and forth all over the place. We feel him. We just never think about it. That's how he affects us. He affects us emotionally, and he affects us sometimes with thoughts. He doesn't control us. But the whole world has absorbed that.

So when you're with somebody who is incredibly angry, that doesn't necessarily mean Satan is like directing them, but it means they've absorbed Satan's nature. All of us have absorbed a certain amount of Satan's nature. That's what corrupted human nature is. So we're already at a disadvantage, is that we're already, when God calls us, we're already in the enemy camp. We're already in the enemy camp when he calls us. And as we come out of that camp, what we've learned from the enemy is still here, and it's still here.

And we can still be affected by the very power of that enemy. That's why it's a spiritual warfare. A lot more complicated than just facing some kind of physical enemy. So the first of his tactics I want to talk about is from Sun Tzu. It's actually from Satan, but Sun Tzu was talking about warfare. And one of his first points was, you always have to attack the enemy where he is weakest. You never want to attack the enemy where he's strong because you probably will be defeated. So you must attack the enemy where he is weakest.

And that's why you and I need to understand and cannot ignore our own spiritual weaknesses. Because that's where we're going to get hit. Look what James says in James 1. James 1.

And let's pick this up in verse 12.

Blessed is the man who endures temptation. Now, the Greek here can have different meanings. A temptation could just be a test. Like, okay, take this test and we'll give you a grade and see how good you're knowing. Or it could mean to be actually drawled and pulled towards something that is not good for you, that's harmful for you. And we're going to see that meanings here of that word used in this set of verses.

So those who love God will have the ability to resist temptation. They'll receive the ability to win the fight. I know someone's right now saying, oh, I lose fights all the time in my spiritual warfare. No, no, no, wait a minute. It's not a single battle that determines this war. Okay? It's what God is doing in our lives as we learn, as we win, as we sometimes fail. And we'll talk about that in a little bit, too. There's failure involved in this as we grow and we learn, but we can't go back. We must keep fighting.

I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. Okay. God does test us at times, just like you give a test to a child to see how much they know or to make them learn more. This tempting here means to try to draw you towards evil. God never tries. God never puts you in a place where He is drawing you towards doing something wrong. So we have to understand, yes, God will put us in difficult situations. He's never going to put us in a place and then say, try to push us, okay? He's going to push us towards doing something wrong. He doesn't do that. In this battle, He's the one who gives us the power to push the other direction, to move away from the temptation. So we have to...where does the temptation come from then? But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. So we all have weaknesses. You know how many times someone says, I just...in a moment of weakness. Yeah, we all have weaknesses. And sometimes you can make a stand and sometimes you're not. So the point here is, in our weaknesses, we are drawn towards something wrong. God never draws us. He never pushes us towards that. You might put us in a situation where we have to make a decision. That's totally different. Satan, on the other hand, draws us towards what he knows is our weakness. He knows it. It doesn't take much to figure us out, right? If someone could see you in every moment of the day and knows everything we do, you know, you can start figuring things out. So he draws us towards it. But what? God doesn't tempt us. Satan tempts us. Verse 14, but each one is tempted when he is drawn away of his own desires and enticed. It's our weaknesses that Satan plays on.

Satan plays on our weaknesses. That's why there are some people here that don't have any temptation to do certain things. I mean, I've known people that can't even stand alcohol, right? The taste of alcohol, the smell of alcohol. You know, they take wine at Passover and that's it. They have no temptation. They have no desire to ever drink alcohol. Now, there's other people where alcohol is a temptation, a weakness to sin.

So that's why we have to understand the battle. God is here to help us. Satan is here. He's going to tempt us and try to break us. The battle happens inside of us. And it's our weaknesses that Satan plays on. To pull us, to draw us towards something that we have an actual desire to do. That's part of our corrupt human nature. There's a desire in us to do certain things and it's different with each person. I mean, some people just have this drive. You can see it. They're just envious of everybody. And some people just don't have any drive to be envious. So guess which one Satan is going to hit with with envy?

He knows your weakness. He's not going to come after your strength. He's not going to come after an issue that you're really strong with God. He's going to come after your weakness.

And then, verse 15, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin. And when it's full grown, brings forth death.

Now, this is really important to understand the process. We're drawn away because we have a weakness. We have a desire. We're pulled towards the thing that we desire. The sin that part of us desires. Even though with God's spirit we may be hating it, part of us is wanting it. There's the problem. We have two natures warring within us.

And so Satan knows how to attract us to the things that are like him. Every sin is part of his nature. So he knows how to hit us with it because it's part of his nature. We're actually fighting between the nature of God, which we're growing into, and the nature of Satan, which we're growing out of. There's where this war takes place. We're becoming like one and leaving the other. And the one we're leaving doesn't really want us to leave. He appeals to this corrupted human nature with attitudes and emotions and thoughts. He appeals to us through other people. Someone says, oh, come on, it doesn't matter. He appeals to us through the society we live in. Everything in this society has been touched by Satan. I mean, there's a lot of good. I'm not saying we can't see the good in society. But everything, whether it's media, electronics, workplace, everything in our judicial system, our government system, everything has been touched by Satan. Everything in our society has been touched by Satan. And so the more we're drawn towards God, the less we trust the fact that there's goodness. We see goodness, but we know that eventually everything in this life will fail. Let me show you an example of this. Let's go to Acts 5. So remember that you're tempted, you're drawn by your desires, it's conceived, and then it produces sin. There are steps here. The conception means that you now wish to take action. So you have this temptation that comes, our desires that are drawn towards it, and then we conceive it, and then we have an action. Let's look at how this actually takes place in Acts 5. Acts 5. Because it's this process that helps us understand how to keep up our guard so that Satan doesn't hit us in our weaknesses.

I mean, that's why when you don't get enough sleep, when you're under a lot of stress, you think of all the things that have to physical things happen to us, right? Have low blood sugar because you haven't eaten anything all day. Or have too much caffeine. All these physical things bring us to the point where it's easy for us to be pulled. You might never say a swear word, and then you drink two cups of coffee and eat two donuts. And suddenly you just sit and blur it out, right? I've lost control. I'm not saying me. Okay, I'm saying you've lost control. And it's why? Because this physical nature is part of the battle. This is the battleground in which this is taking place.

So, verse 1 of Acts 5, But a certain man named Ananias and Sapphira his wife, sold a possession. They kept back part of the proceeds, his wife also being aware of it, and brought a certain part and laid it at the apostles' feet. Now, what's happening in the church is people are getting a lot of recognition for selling some of their possessions and bringing it in and giving it to the church, because there were a lot of people there in the church that had come from all over the world.

The day of Pentecost had happened. There were more people there than could be taken care of. People weren't going back home. They were staying. And there's thousands of them. And so people were selling some of their goods, maybe an extra piece of property or whatever. They were actually bringing it and giving it.

And this man and his wife did it. But they conspired to tell everybody they sold everything they had. Okay, look at our big sacrifice. What you have is a man whose weakness is, he wants recognition. His weakness is, I want to be seen as someone important. And I can give them something, which is good, pretend that it's everything, and I will get the recognition I want. But Peter says in verse 3, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the price of the land for yourself?

While it remained, was it not your own? And after it was sold, was it not in your own control? Why have you conceived this thing in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God. Now notice, Satan tempted him. He had a desire. His desire is to be somebody special, somebody important, to be recognized by others. Satan tempts him. Look, other people are getting this recognition by selling things. Sell something. Now that's a thought. He has the ability to not cast out the thought. He has the ability to say, no, that's wrong.

I'm not going to do that. Now, Satan isn't there talking to him. It's just a thought. But notice the thought is playing on his real motivation. And when that happens, he says, it was conceived in your heart. The conception is, here's my desire, here's Satan's temptation. I want to take an action.

Now you're going to see, that's where it gives birth to sin. It gives birth to an actual action. And so now he takes this action. The result is, so the few times in the New Testament, God publicly kills a man. And he's a Christian.

He's not a pagan. He's a Christian. We see what his motivation is, so we see his desires. We see the seed Satan planted. We see that those two things conceived, and it gave birth to this action. That was just living a grand lie. It was the ultimate hypocrisy. And God was quite upset with it. So, Satan attacks our weaknesses. Now, if he's going to attack our weaknesses, there's something else that Sun Tzu said.

That you do. And that is, be careful to choose the ground you fight on. Choose the ground. Don't let the enemy choose the ground. Well, we can't let our enemy choose the ground. He's always trying to choose the ground. Here's your weakness. Here's a situation I can now manipulate, so that you will give in. You will give in to your weakness. This means that the battle must really be fought back when the desire and the temptation takes place.

After it's conceived, you've decided to take an action. The battle gets much, much, much harder. Because you've decided something. Satan decided. You decided. You decided to do something. You've decided to go out with the guys to the bar on a Saturday night, knowing that they always get drunk. And, you know, I'm strong enough I won't do it.

I'll just go have a couple of years. But sort of you know what's going to happen, right? But you do it anyways. You convince yourself it won't happen, but you do it anyways. It's conceived. In the conception, now we begin moving towards the action. That's the hardest place to fight it. That's the hardest place to fight it. You know, yeah, it's easy to have...

I just think of things boys do as teenagers. Challenge each other, you know, to do stupid things. It's easy when you're caught breaking into someone's garage, stealing something, because someone... It's easy at that point to say, Mr. So-and-so, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do this, but it's too late, right?

All the process that came up to that happening started with just wanting to be liked by the other guys. That's your desire.

And we get pulled into it, and we wrestle with it, and we conceive it, and once it's conceived, you're now just taking step by step. Every step you take, you can still go back. But then there's a point of no return. You already have committed the sin. And now there's no going back. It's already done.

That's why we have to choose our battleground. We have to choose the battlefield. We don't fight it when we're right, you know, five seconds before the sin.

You fight it long before that. You know, the greatest example of that is Joseph, when Potiphar's wife tried to seduce him.

Now, there's a whole lot of things that could have gone on in his head, like, wow, you know, I'm a young guy. I have no marriage prospects. I'm a slave. There's just not a lot of marriage prospects. She's a gorgeous woman. I mean, there's all kinds of things. Or, you know, I will stand here and stand up against her and show my spiritual strength.

You know, there's all these things he could have done, but every step he would have taken would have been slowly giving in to a desire and being manipulated until it was conceived.

Then it's like, you know, he's kissing her and then runs away. Well, okay, you're deep into this.

And so he ran. He picked his battleground, which isn't this ground here. I'm not going to fight on this ground. I will leave. We pick our battleground, and so much of the time we're not aware of the battle until we're too deep into it.

We're not aware of it until we're too deep into it.

Don't let Satan pick the battleground. Now, in this warfare, he's going to target something, and he's going to target, first of all, our thoughts and emotions.

That's where our desires are. So that's where we get targeted in our thoughts and emotions.

Now, once again, okay, you're tempted to do sin. It doesn't mean Satan himself is attempting you to do it. All of society is set up to tempt you to do that. Since he is the god of this world, it's the way the whole system works. Understand, the system works. You know, that's why there's not going to be big market capitalism in the millennium.

The whole purpose of big market capitalism is one thing, to make you buy something. I mean, it's not going to be a communist system either, but it's not going to be big market capitalism.

Where everything's designed to make you buy something. Everything's designed to trick you. Everything, you put a man in a white smock, and you stand up there and say, some actor who, you know, is dumb as a bag of hammers, and he gets up there and he says his lines, which is, you know, four out of five dentists prefer this toothpaste. It's like, whoa, four out of five dentists, and this dentist, and he's good looking, he, this guy knows what he's talking about. I trust this guy, and it's some actor, right? It's all designed to make us buy things. That's the whole system. The whole system is designed to make us do things. To draw us into even things we really don't want. You ever buy something because it's a great display, or you saw the ad, or something, and then you get home and say, why in the world did I buy this?

It's all the same principle. There's a desire, there's a temptation, there's a pulling towards the action, there's a conception, and there's an action. No, I'm not saying buying something you don't want to sin. It's the same process, though.

It's the same process. All of our lives in the world we live in is the same process as he pulls us towards giving into our weakness. One of Sun Tzu's principles for warfare is the greatest victory doesn't come through battle, but through breaking the enemy's will to resist.

The greatest victory is when you don't have to fight at all. It's when you've broken their will, and they just give up.

And that happens all the time in history. There's lots of battles in history where the men fighting hadn't lost, but because of all the things that were happening, their will was broken, and then they lost.

Satan wants to break our will. Now that takes work, and that comes through a constant barrage on our thoughts and on our emotions.

He wants to manipulate our feelings. That's where we have our greatest weaknesses in our own emotions.

Look what it says in Ephesians 4. Just one emotion here, but this applies to all kinds of emotions. Ephesians.

And let's go to chapter 4, verse 26. Now you've heard this. Probably this is a memory verse for many of you.

Be angry, and do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your wrath. That's a very good principle of life, but it's not the complete sentence.

Verse 27 says, nor give place to the devil.

In other words, if we let anger settle within us, if we let anger drive us, if we become obsessed with our own anger, sooner or later, the being who is angry all the time pulls us, because the pull us.

That's why uncontrolled anger, there is a place for anger. All anger isn't sin, but anger is one of the most dangerous emotions.

Because if we keep it long enough, we will come to the conclusion that our anger is good.

Other people deserve what I'm about to do to them, or we'll justify our actions.

And we'll be tempted now to go in a direction that is not godly.

And in that pull, eventually we conceive an action.

And it's a lot easier to stop that before you get there, because once you conceive the action, you start taking steps towards it.

Every step you take, it's harder to step back, until you finally you've done it.

Finally you've done something. You've lost your temper at work and lose your job.

Or you've hit your wife, or hit your husband, and you've lost that, and now you have to fix it.

So emotions and everything, every type of emotion that we have, even the good ones can be twisted.

Empathy can be twisted. Empathy is a good thing. God has empathy.

But people have so much empathy that they will condone sin, absolutely condone sin, and other people.

They'll accept things that God does not accept because of empathy. And they'll just get step by step, drawn away from God.

There's an interesting story in 1 Chronicles. Ananias is an example of someone who was punished.

This is an example of someone who was punished in a different way.

It's in 1 Chronicles 21. Verse 1, now Satan stood up against Israel and moved David. He didn't control David.

You know, David didn't hear him speaking. He wasn't possessed or anything. But he moved him. He tempted him.

He moved David to number Israel. Now the only reason for numbering Israel would be to see, 1, how big my army is.

Well, 1, how big is my nation? How strong am I as king? And 2, how big is my army?

And God had told them, never do that because you will then trust your numbers and not me.

So he's doing something directly against God. So this is now, he's driven by pride. Now you can imagine the thoughts, you know, as king and as big as my nation is, it really would be good for me to know how many people I have.

Solomon would really have been interested in that because he wanted to tax everybody.

David wanted to know how big his army was. You know, if I get attacked again by Syria, how big an army can I call up from all 12 tribes? So David said to Joab, who was his main military advisor, or general, and to the leaders of the people, go number Israel from Beshiba to Dan and bring the number of them to me, that I may know it.

And Joab, who was not an ethical man, he was violent and not exactly a righteous man, but he was a good general.

Even Joab saw this was a problem. And the answer said, May the Lord make his people a hundred times more than they are, but my Lord the King, are they not all the Lord's servants?

Why then does my Lord require this thing? Why should he be a cause of guilt in Israel?

In other words, you can't do this. It's against what God has instructed.

David didn't listen to him, and David numbered Israel.

God was working with David. He had just lost a major battle in his spiritual warfare.

God did not kill David, but he punished him. He punished him by punishing the people, the people that he loved, and it devastated David, because he realized there's consequences to all sin, and those consequences hurt other people.

They devastate other people. We don't live in a vacuum. Everything we do affects somebody.

Everything we do has an effect on other persons. Everything we do has an effect on God.

So, there's a man driven by his pride, driven by his pride, and you can see how he's tempted, he has a desire, he gives in, it's conceived, he takes an action, and something terrible happens from it.

In this attack, one of the things that Satan always wants to do, his ultimate goal, is to target and break our faith.

This means, and this was tied into the sermonette, this means that you and I, in this spiritual warfare, understanding its reality, must daily be going to God, must daily be reading the Scripture, must be daily meditating on our own actions, on our weaknesses, on God and his greatness.

Sun Tzu said that victory is achieved before the battle through preparation and training.

So many of the times, we go into the battle saying, oh, I guess I should have trained a little bit.

It's like, can you imagine a boxer getting into the ring for the world championship and saying, wow, I should have been training for the last three months.

That's okay, I started yesterday.

Okay, it's a one-round fight, right?

Our training, our preparation, is with God all the time, all the time.

You will find through the Scripture all kinds of situations where someone, a great man or woman of God, lost battles.

We just went around David.

I think of Peter saying, I won't forsake you. And Jesus saying, yeah, you will. No, I won't. Yeah, you will.

But when you return to me, I will use you to help your brothers.

That's what's fascinating in that story.

Yes, you're going to fail, but you'll come back.

And when you do, I will work with you, and you will do what I want you to do.

He knew he was going to come back.

He knew this failure would just make him come back and be closer to God and to Christ.

And, you know, Peter had to live with that failure the rest of his life, the knowledge that he had betrayed Jesus Christ.

But he was forgiven, and it made him stronger in the end because God takes...

Sometimes it's in our weaknesses, sometimes it's even in our failures, that God will take and make us. He will mold us. He will train us.

And he will make us have more strength. We have more of the power of God to fight the next battle.

Now, two things about defeating Satan. I want to conclude with this. Two things about defeating Satan. The first one is in Hebrews 2.

Obviously, there's a whole lot we could go through here. I just want to show you this basic process.

It's a desire that's already in us.

It's a temptation that's brought to us by Satan's world, by... Satan himself, just by the fact that we live in this.

And in that temptation, we either fight it then and fight the desire, or we begin to move towards conception.

And once we have conceived it, now it gets really hard because we're planning out the action.

We're planning out what we're going to do. Once you start taking the actions, it gets harder and harder, and pretty soon, okay, I failed. I've absolutely failed.

But remember this. Hebrews 2.14.

Inasmuch as the children, that's us, you know, we think of all people who are the children of God, well, all people are potentially the children of God, we understand that we've been called to be the children of God now. Inasmuch then as the children have taken a flesh and blood, he himself, Jesus Christ, likewise shared in the same, that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is the devil.

Remember Genesis 3.15. There's going to come someone who would conquer Satan.

This was the plan all along. I mean Psalm 110. And my Lord said to his Lord, and he comes and sits beside, there's a, there's a two powers in heaven. One comes and sits beside the other one, and is given kingship.

All through the Old Testament, we're told how this is going to happen, and it happened.

And now Paul, the writer of Hebrews, is saying, the next step has already taken place. He came. Satan has been defeated.

He's still here for a while, but he has no power, no hope of success.

And release those, in other words, release us, human beings, who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For indeed he did not give aid to angels, but he does give aid to the seed of Abraham. And of course all peoples become the seed of Abraham when they accept Jesus Christ. Therefore in all things he had to be made like his brethren. He had to be made like us.

So Satan would be defeated by someone like us. That's a brilliant plan. That's a hard plan. I have no idea. I still think, why did God do it that way? There's a lot easier ways. He'd just pick Satan up and throw him away, right? He didn't do it. Instead, Christ came here to become like us.

So Satan would be defeated by someone like us. Someone like us. Oh no, like us in a very general sense. Because he is God. He is the Son of God.

That he might be a merciful and faithful high priest, and things pertaining to God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. Remember, propitiation in the pagan world was what you did to please the gods. The dance you did, the singing you did, the money you brought, the sacrifice you brought, the chanting you did, whatever you did to please the gods, that was a propitiation. Only in Christianity is the propitiation to please God done by God.

Paganism, this would have been bizarre. No, it's what we do to make God like us. No. For God to accept us, Jesus Christ became a propitiation. He is the only action that allows us to come to God. That's it. His life, death, and resurrection is the only reason why we get to go. And God is pleased with that, and propitiation. For that He Himself has suffered being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted. Jesus Christ is able to say, I understand. Now, He never had corrupted human nature, but He understands the human condition. He understands what it is to be tempted.

He says, I know, I understand, I get it.

But I'm the propitiation. I'm what makes it possible for you to have a relationship with God.

That should remind us, that should inspire us. Even when we lose a battle, we come back to, no, Christ will win.

Christ will win. He already has. It's not like He's got to do something else. When He comes back, He throws Satan aside, right? He doesn't have to do anything else. The plan, that part of the plan has been carried out. Now it's just calling people to come into the family of God now, while Satan's rule winds down.

And Satan's going to get more and more angry and more and more insane as we get closer to the end.

So remember that. The second thing, and last thing here, that we need to remember in this warfare is in James 4.

We're not innocent bystanders in this.

We're not neutral parties. There is no neutrality in this war.

I'm sorry you can't be Switzerland.

There is no neutrality in this war.

We are in the middle of the existential battle between good and evil. God and Satan.

And God has all the power, but He won't use all of it right now because He won't take away our free will. That's what's amazing.

He just won't take it away. We have to choose. And that's why what James says here is so important. In James 4, verse 6, it's breaking into the middle of a thought, but you'll see where we're going here.

But He gives more grace. Therefore, He says, God resists the proud that gives grace to the humble. God gives His favor when we are humble before Him. When we realize we're in a war, we're overmatched, God has to do it. We have to submit to God. We have to follow God. We have to accept who Christ is and what He's done and what He is doing to bring us into His Kingdom, to bring us into that family.

And we can't do it on our own, but we have to fight the fight. We're in the middle of the battle.

Therefore, submit to God, verse 7, submit to God. We always daily have to be submitting our lives to God in that temptation.

Fighting our desires, resisting the temptation, not having it conceived in action, not carrying out the actions. We can stop the process anywhere up to the very end, right?

As we wrestle with it, we cry out to God and He gives us the help that we cannot do ourselves.

But we have to do this. We have to participate in what He's doing. He says, therefore, submit to God, resist the devil, and He will flee from you. So you see the point here He's making about submitting to God involves resisting Satan.

Satan will always try to keep us from submitting to God. Once you submit to God, you're on a battlefield He can't win. He has to retreat.

When we submit to God, He has to retreat. It's a battle He can't win. He can never win against God. He can never win against Christ. It's not possible.

He's over matched. But when you and I are against Him, we're over matched.

So it's God that comes in to our lives and gives us the ability to keep struggling through this struggle.

How long would this struggle take? Two years changed.

We will struggle to the moment we're changed.

Then that war will be gone. We'll be totally victorious when that happens, when Christ returns. Total victory will be doing now and then we fight.

It is a struggle.

He goes on, He says, draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. He says, in other words, this is hard. This is a struggle.

It's not easy. It's called a war for a reason.

And there's a toll that takes on us. That doesn't mean, okay, there's lots of good things in our lives. There's plenty of wonderful things. There's times when God gives us, as David calls it, a wide space where the warfare doesn't seem to be that intense, although there's some every day.

There's times when it lessens. There's times when we're basking in the gifts from God. There's times where we're basking in the blessings, even the physical blessings God gives us. That's all part of this. But it doesn't mean that there still isn't a war that we're part of.

There's a struggle we're always part of.

That's one of the things that's hard for people to understand, especially if they're naive, maybe they grow up in the church, they come in, they're baptized. Oh good, I'm baptized now. All my struggles will go away. Oh no. No. There's a struggle to this for the rest of your lives.

But you know it's not all negative. There's positive, especially when you win a battle, right? When God helps you win a battle, there's a positive. God hasn't thrown you away because you struggled. God didn't throw you away because you were tempted. God didn't throw you away because it was conceived. God didn't even throw us away when we lose the battle.

What God does is say, okay, we have to learn to be better here.

He also doesn't always take away the consequences. There's unfortunate consequences to certain things we do.

You're dishonest at your job, and you're lucky you don't go to jail, you just get fired, and God doesn't save you from that. Right? God says, you have to fix that. That has to be fixed. That struggle has to be won.

Those battles are going to continue until you don't have that problem anymore. You know, people say, oh good, I finally conquered a sin I've worked with for five years.

It's so liberating, it's so wonderful. What's going to happen next? Oh, you don't have a new struggle, because God isn't done with you yet.

God isn't done with you yet. So it's not negative, it's the fact that this is what it is to be born into Satan's world, and what it is to be given an opportunity for salvation, to be given an opportunity to have a relationship with God, to be loved by God, and given the opportunity to be changed.

It's the greatest gift you can receive.

It's the greatest gift we can receive.

Verse 10 says, how about yourself in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.

Sometimes our greatest victories are when we feel like all is lost, and we're on our knees crying out to God, and then something happens.

Sometimes that's our greatest victories. We're seeing God win the battle in us as we continue to struggle. Of all the wars being waged on the face of the earth right now, and there's lots of them, none of them are as important as the one being waged in the hearts and minds of Christians.

Because this war has eternal consequences, and God has called you to fight, and God has called you to win, right? Through Christ. He has called us to win. He has called us to win this war, and struggle, and lose some battles, and get up, and move on. Keep fighting on. Because remember, Christ has already defeated Satan. It's already done. You don't think Satan is angry? He knows Christ is coming back. He knows what's going to happen. What's going to happen is he's going to be thrown, you know, removed from influencing humanity for a thousand years, and let out for a little while, and then he's gone forever. Everything that his existence is about is gone. He loses everything. That's why between now and the end, Christ's return, Satan's anger is going to get worse, and worse, and worse. And now he and the fallen angels are attacking people, and affecting us, and trying to motivate us. It's the subtlety of it that we miss, because it's just part of the world we live in, because the whole world we live in is under Satan's sway. But God says he will see us through. God says he's going to make this happen. He's going to make it work. He's not called us to fail. And when we understand Satan's tactics, when we understand who God is, we understand what he's doing through Jesus Christ to defeat Satan, then we can go to him and know that our victory is assured.