Have you ever thought about Satan's power? I had a thought the other day about how Satan hates God and anyone who follows God. Interesting that there are so many in the world today that also hate God and those who follow Him, but that is another post for another day. One thought lead to another while I considered what Satan's ultimate goals are.
The first goal of Satan is to keep people from getting saved. He doesn't want people to accept Jesus as their Savior. So, he uses his many tricks to keep as many people from salvation from hell as he can. He blinds people to the truth. He uses false doctrines. He uses worldly desires and selfishness to keep people from even inquiring about God and what God would want. He even keeps Christians occupied so that they stop witnessing. Yeah, Satan's ultimate goal is to keep people from turning to God.
When Satan loses a battle for a soul to Jesus and their eternity is forever sealed, he moves on to his secondary goal. This goal is to render as many Christians as possible ineffective. He uses many tricks for this, too. Some of them overlap with the ones he uses on people before salvation. Distraction and preoccupation are two of the biggest tricks Satan uses on Christians. He takes focus off church, Bible reading, serving God and keeps minds and yes, hearts, busy with the cares of the world. He removes contentment with what is already and brings desires that cause bigger bills which leads to working more hours to pay for those bills. He also keeps parents so busy making sure their kids have more opportunities, more things,and more activities than the parents had so that little by little the things of God are squeezed out. Church services and activities begin to be missed for sports, dance recitals, school activities, and/or extra hours worked to pay for the aforementioned and then once you begin missing, it becomes easier to miss. And as I have blogged about before, sometimes when you begin the move away from God, it's farther back than you think!!! It will take more work to get back on track than it would have if the effort was just made to start with to keep God first. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just saying it's harder. Just like it's taking much, much more effort to get this 52 year old broken down body back into good health and shape!!
Barren busyness is one of Satan's best tricks to keep Christians from being effective for God. All the chores, errands, day to day living with the occasional trials fill up the time each day and pretty soon it's bed time and all of a sudden you realize that maybe you didn't read your bible or pray today or maybe you did but never took time to tell anyone about Jesus or show forth His love by helping or caring for another person along the way. It happens to the best of us. The pressures of daily living are very consuming and at times downright overwhelming. We can pray for forgiveness and help to do better. That is the wonderful thing about a loving God who remembers we are dust and prone to backsliding but always allows u-turns back to His loving arms!
When the trials or distractions become too much just tell Satan "Not today, Satan. You can't have me or my family."
No comments:
Post a Comment