James 4:7 (NKJV) 7 Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
Last week we looked at two basic ideas that are keys to seeing God’s possibilities for our lives. Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” He was not talking about the work of the ministry here. He was talking about dealing with the pressures of life. We need the strength available to us in Christ to overcome the challenges of everyday living.
This strength is made available by grace and accessed by faith. However, if we are going to walk in Jesus strength we must be willing to acknowledge our comparative weakness. Both 2 Corinthians 12 and Isaiah 40 say that God’s strength is available to those who understand they are weak in themselves. This strength is our heritage in Christ. We need it to see God’s possibilities as real and viable options for our lives.
This week I want to move to another scripture that I think presents a key to the impossible. The thing that makes Christianity different from all other religious systems is personal relationship with the Lord. I remember some years ago I was listening to a commentator talking about President George W. Bush. President Bush was not shy about mentioning his faith in God and prayer. This commentator, who was a supporter, wanted to help the president by making sure people knew he was not some kind of crackpot. He said, “It’s not like he’s talking to God and God is talking back!” I thought at the time, “That’s exactly what it’s like.” That is what makes Christianity different.
We access the strength of God by relationship with him through Christ Jesus. That level of relationship is necessary if we are going to see God’s possibilities. This scripture points out two important aspects of how this relationship works. Let me start with what James says second. We often quote this part of the verse and it is valid to do so. “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”
Our relationship with the Lord has an enemy. One of the things I see happening in the church is a de-emphasis of the reality of the spirit world in general and our enemy, the devil and his forces, in particular. The church has been under attack by the media, education and many other leftist forces. The nature of this attack is to portray bible believing people as backward, ignorant and intolerant. Part of the way we have reacted is to minimize any mention of things that would reinforce that perceptions. The idea of demons and the devil would fall into that category.
I believe this is a major mistake. It may have started out as something we did to control perceptions, but too often perception becomes reality. I sense that we are increasingly pushing the reality of the spiritual battle to the background. This is not biblical. Look at what Paul says.
Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV) 12 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 the heavenly places.
Paul makes it clear that our enemies are not the flesh and blood we can see but the spiritual powers we cannot see. The first battle Jesus fought after his baptism was against an invisible foe, the devil.
Luke 4:1-2 (NKJV) 1 Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 being tempted for forty days by the devil. And in those days He ate nothing, and afterward, when they had ended, He was hungry.
Jesus was not tempted for 40 days by the Pharisees or the Romans. He would fight many battles with those groups but his first battle, and the one that mattered most, was not with them. It was with the devil. We cannot be successful fighting battles in the natural alone. Both Paul and Jesus dealt with natural opposition but they understood that to deal with the visible they had to do battle in the invisible. So must we.
One of the greatest challenges of our day is the fight against terrorism. There is a great press in many circles to make sure we do not offend anyone by naming the enemy. Although it is true that many groups have used terror as a weapon when more conventional means have failed to produce results, today there is really only one group that has embraced it as a viable and acceptable method to make war. That group is radical, Jihadist Islam. There is virtually no one else carrying out the attacks we read about with increasing frequency.
I know that there are wonderful Moslem people in the world who love peace and hate terror. However, that does not change the fact that to defeat the current terrorist enemy we must be willing to identify it as the enemy. As long as we do not we fail to expose it for what it is and we cannot defeat it. This is right out of the devil’s playbook.
The Satan’s greatest weapon against God and humanity is deception. His name means deceiver. His greatest deception is to convince people he does not exist. If he can do that, we will ignore him until he so corrupts that it is too late for us to overcome the corruption. Jesus said the thief, Satan, comes with a purpose.
John 10:10 (NKJV) 10 The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.
The abundant life spoken of by Jesus is the fullness of God’s possibilities in your life. That is Jesus will for you. However, we have an enemy to that and his name is Satan, the thief. He comes for one three-fold reason. He wants to bring death, destruction and corruption into your life. His most effective way to do that is by stealth. If you do not know he is there and if you ignore what he is doing you will not resist him.
James tells us in this verse that if we do resist him he will flee from us. James words are very positive and uncompromising. He does not say he might flee. He says that he will flee from the believer who resists him. You can understand why the devil would do anything he can to make sure we do not resist him. If we do resist him, the devil tries to limit our resistance to the natural. The real power of our resistance against the devil is not in the natural but in the spirit. If he can keep us from doing that, he will keep us from really winning the battle.
There was a time during the Charismatic movement that the focus was too much on what the devil was doing and not enough on what God was doing. There were those who saw every problem and every emotional issue as a demon. We used to say “They see a demon behind every doorknob. That was not right either. Everything is not a demon. There are natural things we need to do. There are natural issues that require natural solutions.
That said, our power is never in our natural ability. It is always in the power of the invisible world of the spirit. We need that strength we talked about last week and it comes from the inner man not the outward. Even the natural things we must do should be fueled by the power of the spirit. We must recognize that natural challenges have supernatural components and those components need to be dealt with in the supernatural.
Balance is the key to life and I think the balance is tipping too far away from the reality of the spirit. We need to get it right. We need to resist the devil. If we do he will flee. If we do not acknowledge or recognize that he is there, we will not resist him.
Although I think it is a good thing to quote the second half of this verse, it is only the second half. James did not just say “resist the devil and he will flee from you.” He said “Submit to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you.” That is a very different thing. To successfully resist, we need to be truly submitted to God. Tomorrow we will begin to find out what that means.
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