Drawing Near to God

Backsliding, we saw last week, from God's perspective,
is serious business.
It's serious business because it means
that we turn our back onto wisdom from above.
And we revert back to wisdom from below.
In the language of Scripture,
we are like a dog returning to its vomit,
kind of a colorful picture,
or a pig that has been washed,
returning to a roll around in the mud.
Backsliding, as you know,
means we are no longer walking by faith,
no longer walking obediently,
but going back to the old way of life.
Backsliding is an easy thing to do
because as I said a few moments ago,
it is powered by three sources of energy.
Our own sinful nature, the power of the world,
and the power of the evil one.
Each one of these, if you've ever come up against them,
as I'm sure you have,
is a formidable enemy in its own right.
Throw them all together,
and you can begin to understand why sometimes living,
the Christian life can be very difficult,
and why sometimes there are people who slide back
and who turn their back to the Lord Jesus.
So a big question for us this morning, then,
is how do we remain faithful to the Lord?
How do we avoid backsliding?
And that's the subject that James now begins to introduce
in the verses seven and eight when he says,
"Submit yourselves then to God, resist the devil,
"and he will flee from you,
"come near to God, and he will come near to you."
Notice how in those two little verses,
there are three imperatives.
Three things that you and I are to do
in order to avail ourselves of the grace of God.
The first thing that we need to do
is we need to submit ourselves to God.
The second thing that we are to do
is to resist the devil.
And the third thing that we are to do
is we are to come near or we are to draw near to God.
Notice they're all imperatives, they're all commands,
they're all things that you and I in Christ
are not only called to do, but we are said to be able to do.
There's always this balance between divine sovereignty
and human responsibility.
God gives us the grace in Christ.
And then these are the responses that we need to undertake
if we are to remain faithful to the Lord
in times of testing and in times of difficulty
and if we are to avoid sliding back as do so many,
turning their back on the Lord who has saved them.
So let's make a start this morning.
We won't be able to finish it,
but let's make a start in looking at these
three very practical things that we can
and that we must do if we are to remain faithful
to the Lord particularly in times of testing.
First of all, then, James says,
we are to submit ourselves to God.
Submit yourselves, then he says in verse seven,
to God.
Now the word submit means to place yourself
under somebody's authority to submit to God, then,
means that you place yourself under God's authority.
The popular notion of freedom,
particularly in North American society,
is that freedom consists of not being under anybody's authority.
You see it in movies, you see it in popular literature,
you see it in the culture of the day
where there is this mistaken notion
that somehow or another true freedom consists
in being free from every form of authority.
And if somebody wants to exercise authority over my life,
whether that be parents or teachers or bosses or whoever else,
then the hackles rise in the back of my neck
because really I want to think of myself as being free,
but think that through with me.
The only one who can truly be free is God.
And the only way that you and I could ever truly be free
is if we were truly God's that is to say,
not dependent on anybody.
Well, I don't know if you've ever entertained
delusions of grandeur, thought of yourself as God
or met other people who thought they were God,
there are places where we put people like that.
Because fact of the matter is, we're not.
Fact of the matter is, we're all dependent on life
from outside of ourselves.
Because the universe is full of power and powerful beings,
and we are often at their mercy.
And if we refuse to submit to God's authority,
we end up enslaving ourselves to other authorities.
And a good instance that comes to mind
is the story of the prodigal son.
In Luke chapter 15, you will recall
that he got tired of being at home
and he wanted his inheritance now.
And irony of ironies.
He leaves home a father who truly loves him,
truly has his best interests in heart,
goes out into the world, thinks that he can just do
what he wants to do, but he can only do it as long
as he has money, and when his money runs out,
what does he do?
He ends up hiring himself out as a slave to a farmer,
and he ends up slapping hogs, and the pigs
are eating better now than he does.
That's the biblical picture of what happens
when we turn our backs on God.
And ever since Adam and Eve wanted to be free,
they wanted to be like a God.
The human race, ironically enough, has become enslaved
to the very things that promised us liberty and freedom.
I mean, think of all the many people
who are driven by their own fleshly and carnal desires.
People who are driven by their appetites,
whether for physical food, emotional input,
or sexual gratification, people who are not free
because they cannot stop what it is that they're doing.
Think of all the people you know,
who are always looking over their shoulders
for approval from significant people in their lives.
If it isn't a wife, or a husband, or a child, or a friend,
it's a boss, or whoever else exercises,
or holds the strings of power.
And then, of course, underneath it all,
just think of the many, many people
who are ultimately sold out to Satan's power
incapable of breaking free.
And James says, if you want freedom,
if you really want life, then he says it begins
by submitting yourself to God's authority.
It means repenting of taking matters into our own hands
and returning to God.
Submitting ourselves to God's authority, then,
really has two components.
It involves accepting Him as Lord.
I believe there has to be a time in your life and in my life
where God, through His Word and by His Spirit,
convinces and convicts us of the fact
that we have been living in the kingdom of the world.
We need to understand how sinful that is,
and how it doesn't lead us anywhere,
and there needs to come a place where we bend the knee,
and we say, "Lord, I repent of my sea,
and I want to become part of your eternal kingdom."
That is known as conversion.
And without conversion, nobody enters into the kingdom of God.
And it doesn't matter if you're going to church all your life
or it doesn't matter if you've lived in the world all your life.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
All are under the power of the flesh.
All are under the domination of the world.
All are under the domination of Satan,
whether you know it or not, and whether it's obvious or not.
And the only way out of there is to bend the knee
and to say, "Lord Jesus, you are the one who can deliver me."
And if I'm going to choose who it is that I'm going to be under,
I want to be under you because you love me.
And you see that in the story of the prodigal son.
When he finally comes to his senses
and he says, "Even the slaves in my father's household
are better off than I am."
I will get up and I will go to my father,
and I will say, "Father, I have sinned against heaven
and against you.
I'm not worthy to be called your son."
You know how the father stood there looking for him to come home.
That is the expression of God's heart
for every lost and lonely sinner.
Ask yourself the question this morning.
In the course of living the Christian life,
has there been a time in my experience
where I have said no to sin, where I have said no to say
to no to running away on life?
And I've said yes to Jesus.
You can't even backslide if you haven't been there
because you haven't yet slid forward into the kingdom.
But it begins with that kind of commitment.
It'll change your life as many of us here can testify.
So it means accepting him as Lord,
but it means more than that.
It means entrusting our lives to him.
It means that we are willing to trust
and submit to his leaving in our lives.
Most of us here, we know well enough by now
that once you become a child of God
and God starts working in you
to produce his character in your life,
then he begins to arrange the circumstances of your life.
And sometimes those circumstances are wonderfully
paused out blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace,
but sometimes it involves difficulty.
Sometimes it involves a measure of pain.
Sometimes it involves a measure of testing
because the Lord is trying to lay bare
what really lives in our heart.
And a submissive Christian is a Christian
who, like Job, is able to say the Lord is given,
the Lord has taken blessed be the name of the Lord.
The measure of faith is our willingness to trust
that even when I cannot see it,
even when I cannot feel it, even when I cannot experience it,
God is still good.
And he is at work for my good.
Later on, James refers to the story of Job
and how God's compassion and kindness shows up
in the fact that when he had stood the test of time,
God was able to bless him beyond all imagination.
So ask yourself this morning this question
when life is sometimes hard
and when you're walking in the darkness.
Are you still able to say, Lord, I still believe in you.
I still want to trust you.
I don't know how to do this.
Show me what it is that you're about,
but don't ever let me turn my back on you
just because the road is difficult or the journey is painful.
How do we remain standing?
How do we avoid backsliding?
It begins by submitting ourselves to the authority of God,
crossing that line and saying, Lord, I accept you
and you're right to run my life
and I will not turn away from it
because when all has been said and done,
the only thing that matters
is that your name be hallowed and your kingdom come
and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
You with me so far?
Nothing you haven't heard a thousand times before,
but I'll tell you, hearing it alone won't do it.
And the invitation to take up a cross
and to follow Jesus is an invitation
that comes to us daily because if somebody has said
the problem of being a living sacrifice
is that you keep crawling off the altar.
It's one thing to say, one day, Lord, yes, I'll serve you.
I love you. I'll do your will.
But tomorrow when the rubber really hits the road,
well, this isn't quite what I bargained for, Lord.
So let me find an easier way.
We're to submit ourselves to God into his authority.
And then James goes on to say, we are to resist the devil.
Now the word devil comes from the Greek word,
diabolos, from which we get the word diabolical.
And diabolos means literally slenderer.
It's one of the descriptive characters
of who the enemy is.
Of course, the other very familiar name
is the name Satan, which means adversary.
And between those two names,
you get a pretty apt description of who the devil is.
Contrary to what a lot of people believe,
he's not merely the figment of somebody's imagination.
Nor is he sort of the collective human consciousness
that embraces and embodies the dark side of humanity.
No, he is very much a living person.
He is very much a powerful person,
probably created as Lucifer, an angel of light,
whose pride and beauty went to his head,
tried to overthrow God, got thrown out of heaven,
lost his position of authority,
and has been seeking to oppose God
and the purposes of God ever since the day he fell.
He is God's adversary.
And if God's purpose is to gather us into his family
and to get us to do his will
so that we can have a relationship together,
then Satan's strategy is to try to drive a wedge
between God and us.
To bring us under his own influence and authority
so that he can impose his will upon us
and he can build his kingdom in opposition
to the kingdom of God.
You can understand human history from a biblical point of view.
Unless you understand it throughout the course of history,
there are two kingdoms that are at work in the world.
The kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan.
I call it the great battle, the conflict of the ages,
it rages throughout the pages of Scripture,
comes to its ultimate expression in the final days,
the Battle of Armageddon where the kingdoms of this world
finally yield their authority to the kingdom
of our Lord and of his Christ and he shall reign
forever and ever.
In the meantime, Satan though he knows he is defeated
is a formidable fold, don't ever underestimate him.
And he has, I believe, at least a threefold strategy
that he uses to try to ween us away from God
and to bring us under his authority.
Let me try to walk you through that as quickly
as I can this morning.
His first strategy is a strategy of deception.
Let us to say he is known in Scripture as the great deceiver.
Jesus in John chapter eight calls him a liar
and the father of all lies.
There is not an ounce of truth in him
and when he speaks as Jesus, he speaks according
to his own nature.
And one of the most powerful tools that he has to use
to ween us away from God is to lie to us particularly
about who God is and what his character is like.
And the best example that I can think of
and I often come back to this
is the story of Adam and even the garden.
You'll recall how God had made them
in a wonderfully open relationship with himself
and how every longing, every desire
that the human race could ever want
was all freely given to them in the garden.
They had dominion, they had authority,
they had each other, they had purpose, they had focus.
And here's the snake, the serpent in the grass
who is trying to wreck what it is that God has made.
What is his beginning point?
How does he drive a wedge between God and Adam and Eve?
Well, he does it by challenging the character
and the nature of God.
Has God said he says to the woman
that you may not eat from any of the trees in the garden?
Is that what God said?
What was it that God said?
God said you can eat of all the trees in the garden,
they're good for food except this one.
And the reason you can't eat from this one tree
is because it is bad and it will kill you.
And so Satan takes the compassionate love of God
that comes to expression in the generosity of God
and the preventive instruction of God.
He turns it all around and he says God's pretty stingy, isn't he?
Doesn't really like you, doesn't really love you.
He's holding back on you.
Now the woman didn't know any better.
She hadn't talked to a serpent before.
She was totally naive and it sounded pretty tempting
that she could become like God.
That is to say, have the knowledge of good and evil
in her own heart without having to submit
to somebody greater than her.
And so she took the fruit and she ate the Bible says
and she gave to her husband.
And there you have the nature of temptation.
The devil knows that he can't just
really nearly walk into your life and into my life
and drag us away from God.
If he's gonna get us away from God
that he must first convince us
that we're better off without him.
And so the nature of deception is that Satan comes along
and he will pinpoint all the reasons in the world
why you should not trust God with your whole heart.
And he will point to your losses
and he will point to the times you prayed
and your prayers didn't get answered.
If he can set you up to experience pain and trauma
and then can reinterpret that as being
the fact that God's not there for you.
If he can sow those seeds of doubt
as he does among so many people,
then he will drag us away
and he will have started that process of backsliding.
Backsliding doesn't commonly begin
by some huge temptation into sin.
Now it begins with a little doubt planted in our hearts
that were better off with God than without him.
And if the enemy can persuade us the opposite,
then he's begun that process of weeding us away.
It's like a child living at home.
How do you persuade them to become runaways?
Well children become runaways because they don't believe
their parents love them
or that they're going to be looked after properly.
And if you can appeal to that,
you can make them do almost anything you want.
He starts with deception
and then he graduates to accusation.
He's not only known biblically as the great deceiver
and the liar and the father of lies,
he is also known in the book of Revelation
as the accuser of the brethren.
An accuser is one who slenders.
It's one who sullies your name.
It's one who zeroes in on your failure.
And I believe scripture teaches that there are two places
and two ways in which Satan accuses us
and the first is before God.
That is to say whenever your name or my name
comes up before God,
Satan would love to be right there
and he would like to remind God of where you and I have failed.
And a good example of that is the opening verses
in the book of Job.
You'll recall how God is holding court in heaven.
That's how it's described.
And all the sons of God or spiritual beings
come perating before God to give account.
And Satan is among them and God says to Satan,
"Have you seen my servant, Job,
"about good and blameless and righteous he is?"
Or even remember what the serpent does?
He challenges the integrity of Job
and in the process of doing that,
I might add the integrity of God, what does he say?
Well, anybody would serve you
if they're blessed the way Job is blessed.
I mean, you prosper him in every possible way
if put a headgear protection around him,
take away the headgear protection,
cause him to experience difficulty
and you will see how he will turn around
and curse you to your face.
You can understand the book of Job
just for the record unless you understand
that what God is after is trying to demonstrate
to the principalities and the powers, his wisdom,
namely that he can get a people
who will love him and serve him,
not because of what they're getting out of it,
but simply because he is worthy to be loved
and worthy to be served.
Satan is the ultimate legalist.
He likes to remind God of what his holy standards are
and he likes to tell God,
I don't know how this works,
but that's what Scripture says.
He likes to remind God of how you and I fall short.
Not because he loves God and certainly not
because he loves you or me.
No, he's a cattle.
He wants to get us in a trouble.
He wants to try to force God to use his justice
to wipe us out and to curse us instead of blessing us.
That's why he accuses the brethren
according to the book of Revelation day and night before God.
Now we'll get into more of this later on,
but you know what the antidote to that is biblically, right?
There is at the right hand of God
an advocate whose name is Jesus,
who intercedes for us.
And when your case and my case comes up before God
and Satan is trying to remind God is the great prosecutor
of what all our transgressions are
and all our sins are, Jesus prays God steps in there
and he says, excuse me folks, but I died in the cross
for all of that.
Those sins have been wiped away
and that person by faith in me is righteous
and therefore God, my father, you must bless and not curse
and devil, get out of here
because you will not be the accuser of the brethren.
So we'll see later on, they overcome him
by the blood of the Lamb.
So he accuses us before God.
There's a lot that takes place
hey in the universe, you and I have no idea
that it's happening behind the scenes.
Every so often scripture pulls back the veil
and shows us what's really happening
and you need to know what is happening
because a lot of what happens in the here and out
doesn't make sense unless you understand
what is happening back there.
But he not only accuses us before God,
he also accuses us to ourselves.
How many times haven't all of us had it?
You try to live the Christian life
and you are confronted by some temptation,
the devil, the world, the flesh, they're all pulling on you.
You try manfully or womanfully to resist
and you succeed for a certain period of time
but you get tired, you get weary.
You look for relief, something happens
that you don't annoys you, you allow seed
to be planted in your heart, and before you know it,
you yield to the temptation.
You say things you shouldn't say.
You engage in activities that you ought not to engage in.
And while that brings you a certain measure
of relief for the moment, for the time you come back
out of that cycle, how do you feel about yourself?
Pretty ashamed, pretty embarrassed, pretty humiliated,
and down on yourself because I just can't do it.
Well, it's one thing to beat ourselves up
but we get a lot of help beating ourselves up
and he sits right on either shoulder
and whispers in our ear, doesn't it?
He's the accuser of the brethren.
He knows exactly what buttons to push in your life.
He knows exactly how to tell you what a failure you are.
He knows exactly how to remind you.
You're never gonna succeed.
How can you call yourself a Christian?
Why if everybody else in the church could see
what it is that you've been doing in the dark
behind everybody's back, nobody'd want you.
Better hide your face and shame.
Don't you dare show up in church
and raise your hands and worship
because you don't only be a hypocrite,
anybody been there?
At least one honest soul here, Richard.
You know what I'm saying?
He is the accuser of the brethren.
He not only accuses them before God,
but he also accuses us to our own heart.
I mean, he fights so unfair.
First he tempts you into sin
and then he rubs your nose in your failure.
And the whole idea is to undermine our confidence
that we are the children of God.
And if he can just convince us that we're hopeless,
we're beyond redemption,
we may just as well throw ourselves back into sin wholeheartedly
because who do I think I was anyway
that I thought my life could ever really fundamentally change
and that I could really be different?
You see how effectively he uses his tools,
he is a deceiver and he is also the accuser of the brethren.
Now a little later we're gonna talk
about the weapons that God gives us
so as to protect ourselves from that.
The enemy does not fight fair
and don't ever think that he's gonna give a quarter
or be nice to you just because you're weary or tired.
He's gonna find your vulnerability
and he's gonna drive the issue home.
I've often said, you know,
he's got much of the world under his power.
Why does he bother so much by the occasional Christian
who wants to turn his back on him
and serve the true and the living God?
You know why?
'Cause he's a sore loser.
And because he knows that even one Christian
who becomes an overcomer through faith in Jesus
will mark the end of his kingdom
and he'll get knocked off his throne
and God's kingdom will be established
and his purpose is accomplished on the face of the earth.
So these are deceiver.
He is our accuser, but he's not done yet.
He is also one who harasses us
because the Bible calls him a murderer.
He was a murderer from the beginning.
Now a murderer takes life.
And if Satan is the opposite to everything God stands for,
Jesus said, I have come that you might have life
and have it abundantly,
but the thief comes a lot to rob and to kill and to destroy.
And if God is in the business of generating
and creating life that can unfold
into God's destiny and purposes
and that gives glory to God and joy to humankind
and the enemy is looking for every opportunity
to snuff out that life.
And whether that is a new baby growing in its mother's womb,
whether that is a child who is growing and developing
its skills, whether this is a new believer
who is just starting to take baby steps of faith
or if this is a more mature believer
in whose life to sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit
is starting to unleash and release the heart to go places
and to live in places where it has never lived before.
Satan doesn't care.
He will do everything he can to try to snatch out that life.
And the picture that comes to my mind
again is the book of Revelation chapter 12
where you have the woman who is about to have a child
and there stands the dragon, the ancient serpent.
Waiting for that child to be born
so that he can gobble it up.
And whatever is the full and correct interpretation
of that passage, I think you get there a picture
of how the enemy is a murderer
and he wants to rob us of life.
And I believe it's so important for us to understand that
because as a community, we are I think in a season
where God has been unleashing an unprecedented level of life.
New pregnancies, new babies, new Christians,
people that have gone to church all their life
learning to open up their hearts to God
and learning how to step out in places
where they have never stepped out before.
And what's our common experience when we start living
in places where we have never lived before?
Have you ever noticed how hard it is?
Have you ever noticed how many things come against you
when you try to go places where you've never gone before?
We've talked some months back
about that whole influx of premature babies that we've had here.
We don't wanna look for a devil behind every bush
but neither do we wanna be blind to the wiles of the enemy.
More recently, and we haven't talked about this publicly
because we don't want to spook any expected mothers
but we've had a significant number of moms,
miscarried babies.
Again, we don't wanna look for a spook behind every tree
but I'll tell you something according to scripture
when God wants to pour out life,
the enemy's gonna be right there to try to pull it out.
Any of you, that's a new believer.
Well, know that after the initial joy and excitement
of your commitment to Jesus sort of wears off,
you are confronted by temptations and by challenges
unlike anything that you've ever seen before.
And if he can get us to fall back into our old ways
then he will have accomplished his purposes.
Most of all, I think we've been going through a season
of unprecedented heart opening.
A season where God is making it safe for us to say,
yes, Lord, I wanna be alive in the deepest places
of my heart, places where I always used to have to guard myself.
I wanna give my heart in a new way
and I want my life to really matter for you
and I wanna step out in faith into those places
where you're calling me.
And if that means learning to speak my mind
when I've always learned how to shut up
because I'd be exposed if I didn't
or if that means leaving one job and going into another.
If that means taking on one business venture
over against another business venture,
whether that's duking it out with my spouser
with my kids in ways that I've never done before,
Lord, I wanna live here.
I wanna obey you.
I want my life to matter.
But I'll tell you, you won't have gone very far
before you discover the enemy is a murderer.
And he has a whole series of strategies
to try to frighten us, to keep us from going.
My experience is it typically begins externally.
All of a sudden things go wrong in your outside world
that haven't gone wrong before.
You know, you get four flat tires in one week.
You run out of gas when you thought
you had plenty in the gas tank.
All of a sudden your spouse becomes ornery
about something that they should have been ornery
about a long time ago but weren't.
And your kid gets out of hand.
And if you successfully navigate what lies there,
then it turns on you internally.
And you get doubts and you get emotional up and downs
and rollercoaster experiences
and you say to yourself, God, what in the world is going on?
And if that isn't enough, then spiritually,
you lose the sense of God's presence
and it's like you're surrounded by the darkness
and the pain overwhelms you.
He's a thief, he's a robber, he's a killer, he's a destroyer.
And because so much of it happens behind the scenes
and so much of it happens in the normal course of living,
we don't even recognize the warfare that we are engaged in.
And so we often pray for God to deliver us
that we often cry out to God and that's good and fine
and there are many examples of that in scripture.
But you know what the text here says?
That comes a time when after you have submitted yourself
to God and know that you're committed to doing what he wants
you to do that comes a time when you take a stand
where you draw the line in the sand
and you resist the devil and James says, he'll flee from you.
And notice the fascinating balance
between submitting to God and resisting the devil.
Whatever God brings or allows into our life
for his greater glory, that we submit to gladly,
even if we don't understand it,
even if it should be very painful.
But I'll tell you something Satan capitalizes
and submitted Christians, now listen to me well.
And if he can cross over the line
so that we begin to receive from him
what God never intended for us to receive,
then he knows that he has succeeded
beyond his wildest expectation.
And there is a place in Christ as I said
where we draw the line in the sand
and we stomp our feet and we say, devil, get out of here
because I belong to God and you can no longer harass me.
Peter puts it this way, talking to Christians
who are going through intense persecution,
who have all the reasons in the world to freak out.
He says, be self-controlled and alert.
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 suffering.
We're to submit to God, but we are to resist the devil.
There are many things that come into our lives
that God has not intended for us to have to suffer through.
And we need to learn to stand against it in faith.
You say, how do we do that?
Well, very quickly, Revelation chapter 12 verse 11
gives us a threefold formula, they overcame him
by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony
and they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
Notice they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb.
The blood of the Lamb represents the death of Jesus
on our behalf on the cross.
And whenever Satan stands there before God
or whenever Satan comes up to you and me
with all of his accusations, what is our antidote?
What is our ultimate answer?
Don't ever think that you can argue your goodness
over against his accusations, hoping that your good deeds
will outweigh your bad deeds.
He'll route you every time because remember,
he's a legalist, he knows every detail of your failure.
But what's the antidote?
It's the blood of Jesus, you'll never be more righteous
than the fact that Jesus died for all you're seeing.
And so when Satan comes along and he wants to make accusation
as he says, who do you think you are anyway?
Then what we do is we confess or sins to God,
we lay hold of the blood of Jesus
and declare that in Christ we are righteous before God
and Satan's power is nullified
because that's what Jesus does as our high priest
at the right hand of God the Father.
You'll never be more righteous, as I've often said.
Then you are when you have repented of your sin,
confessed and received the forgiveness of Jesus.
Don't ever think that in this life you'll get to a point
where you are so together that you will not need
the blood of Jesus.
Every last one of us can only stand
because we have washed our robes in the blood of the Lamb.
They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb
and he goes on to say by the word of their testimony.
The word of their testimony is the declaration
of the truth in Christ.
How do we stand against Satan's lies?
When he comes along to you and he says to you,
who do you think you are anyway?
God doesn't really love you.
When he comes along and he says,
see God is punishing you because of some sin
that you don't even know about.
What chances do you have the antidote is to declare the truth.
The truth is that in Christ I'm a child of God.
The truth is that in Christ I am beloved of God.
The truth is that in Christ God is on my side
and that God is fighting for me
and that he has promised that nothing but nothing
can ever separate me from the love of God.
And we do that by taking scripture and holding it up,
not only the Sheila faith, but the sword of the spirit,
which is the word of God.
And our model for that, of course, is the Lord Jesus,
what he was tempted in the wilderness
and the devil tried to get him out of God's kingdom
under his control so that God's redemptive purposes
for the universe could never be realized.
Jesus didn't argue with him.
But Jesus quoted him scripture.
It is written and after three times
around the circle the Bible says the devil left him
because falsehood cannot stand
in the presence of truth.
That's why we need to learn to speak the word.
That's why many of our songs are confessions,
they're declarations.
They are declarations that in Christ this is what's true
of me.
Do I always experience it now?
Do I always need to experience it?
Do I need to feel it?
We'll talk more about that Lord willing some other week.
No fact of the matter is truth is truth
and it's quite independent of what you and I experience
at any given time because our feelings follow after faith,
which is based on fact.
They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb
with the word of their testimony and listen to this
because they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
According to the book of Hebrews, Satan's ultimate power play
is the fear of death.
And you say to yourself, I'm not afraid to die
and maybe you're not afraid to die physically,
but there's a thousand ways of dying.
If you've ever had a stand in front of people
and speak publicly, you know what it's like to die.
If you've ever done a job that you've never been able
to do before and everybody is staring at you,
you know what it feels to die.
If you've ever opened up your heart
and somebody has stepped on it, you know
that there are many ways of dying that are far worse
than having your head cut off or being laid out in a coffin.
And when the Bible says that Satan uses the fear of death
to hold us in lifelong bondage, you know what that means,
I believe?
Is that whatever you and I start coming to life.
And whenever you and I start trying to serve God
in new and more committed ways, what happens
is that he rubs our noses in our fear of failure.
You give that money away, you're gonna be in the poor house.
You speak as the Holy Spirit is indicating you to speak,
your wife or your husband will never speak to you again.
You correct your child in the way
that the child ought to be corrected,
your child will no longer love you
when you look like a failure as a parent.
You get up in front of anybody
and you try to teach them, you'll be tongue tied
and you'll be ashamed and embarrassed
and you'll wish you had never stepped into it.
That's how we die.
And as long as the fear of death is written on our heart,
it's only a matter of time until Satan finds your price
and he will pay the price to shut you down.
Do you hear me?
And as long as there is a place
where we are afraid to die, whatever that looks like,
he's got the power because he'll just up the ante.
But you see, when Jesus lives in us,
and he helps us to overcome that fear of death,
then all of a sudden, he no longer has power over us, does he?
Why are the suicide bombers in Iraq
so incredibly successful?
Why can all the armies of the United States
not root out the terrorists and bring peace to that country?
I'll tell you why.
You can't fight against somebody that's not afraid to die.
And you know why the early church was successful?
You know why they turned the Roman Empire upside down
their generation because they were not afraid to die.
In fact, the word for witness in the book of Acts
is the word "Martous," which is the word "Martyr."
And Jesus wants to bring us to a place
where we are so confident in our relationship with Him
that no matter what the price we need to pay,
God will raise us up and He will establish His kingdom.
Ultimately, that's what brings Satan down
from His lofty pedestal.
And that's what establishes the kingdom of God.
Much more to be said next time, Lord of the Willing,
when we go back to this, we're gonna look then
at what it means to draw near to God.
People often ask me the question,
how can I get closer to God?
I see people who have something in their relationship
with God that I desperately wish I had,
but I don't know how to get there.
Well, Lord willing, I'm gonna start looking at it.
I'm gonna start looking at the very practical steps
that you and I by faith need to take to draw near to God.
And then we're gonna see how as we draw near to Him,
He promises to draw near to us.
And as we resist the devil, He will flee.
Stand with me for breath.
Father, how we thank you for Jesus.
That He faced all the temptations
that help it throw at Him.
And all that compromises the world,
try to impose on Him.
And He resisted them all.
Was faithful even unto death and today,
reigns is king and Lord over all the universe.
You know our hearts this morning, Lord, better
than we know ourselves.
And we pray that if there are places in our lives
where we have not yet submitted to your authority,
that you will so show us your love,
show us your grace and your mercy,
that all our objections go out the window.
And we can ultimately bow to Me.
And Lord in places where we have bought the lie.
Places where we hear that voice of accusation places
where the enemy is trying to take from us the land
that you're trying to give us.
Help us to resist Him, firmen our faith.
And then Lord, what all has been said and done,
help us to draw near to you.
Knowing that you will draw near to us.
And we will give you glory in Jesus' name.
Amen.