Devotions

With all the talk going on in the church about spiritual warfare, Christians still have not learned how to stand up to the enemy. We are pushovers for the devil!

I don’t believe every misfortune that befalls a Christian comes from the devil. We wrongly blame him for a lot of our own carelessness, disobedience and laziness. It’s easy to blame the devil for our foolishness. That way, we don’t have to deal with it. There is a real devil present in the world today, though, and he is busy at work.

Let me tell you something of Satan’s strategy. If he cannot pull the Lord Almighty off of his throne, he will try to tear God’s image out of you. He wants to turn worshippers into murmurers and blasphemers, but Satan cannot attack you at will. God has put a wall of fire around each of his children, and Satan cannot go beyond that wall without God’s permission. Some people are afraid to pray because they think the devil eavesdrops on them. Others think the devil can read their every thought. Not so! Satan cannot read a Christian’s mind. Only God is omnipresent and omniscient.

Scripture commands us to stand up, be strong and do battle against the flesh and the devil: “Watch, stand fast in the faith, be brave, be strong. Let all that you do be done with love” (1 Corinthians 16:13-14, NKJV), and “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Ephesians 6:10-11).

You have to become fed up with being held down by the devil, living low, depressed, joyless, empty, harassed! We need to say what God is waiting to hear: “This has gone far enough! We serve a mighty, victorious God. Why do we go on, day after day, taking this abuse?”

God will not do anything until you are thoroughly disgusted, until you are sick and tired of being sick and tired. You must cry out to the Lord! We serve the same God that Israel did. If he heard Israel’s cry in their idolatry, he will hear you in your sincerity.

I grew up in a Pentecostal church where every Sunday the preacher railed at us about various sins that we either had committed or were thinking about committing or very soon would commit. He taught us that every time you commit a sin, you lost your salvation; so you had to come to the altar and re-give your life to Jesus Christ once again.

That’s called preaching the law, and it was full of should. You should. You should do this. You should do that. You shouldn’t do this. You shouldn’t do that.

Now when I was a teenager in the 70s, I noticed a shift in the church. It shifted away from this law of “you should” to a new charismatic movement of “you can.” You can do this. You can prosper. You can dream any dream. You can have anything you want. You can just name it and claim it. You can be all that you want to be, and God is there to assist you.

As a matter of fact, the reason you want to get saved is because God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. If you come into a church and you hear the pastor say, “God loves you” and you’re thinking to yourself, “Excellent, because I love myself too!” Then he says, “God has a wonderful plan for your life,” and you say, “Beautiful, because I have wonderful plans for my life too! This God sounds like he could be a great help, a great assistant to my agenda of loving myself greatly and having a wonderful plan for my life.” So people join churches based on a false gospel.

During that time, we shifted from a ‘gospel’ that said, “You should do this, and you shouldn’t do that” to a ‘gospel’ that says, “There’s nothing you can’t do. It’s still all about you!”

No matter which way this so-called ‘gospel’ flip-flops, it’s still a man-centered gospel.

The gospel is not ‘you can.’ The gospel is not ‘you should.’ The gospel is ‘Jesus did.’ Once you accept that, you’re finally at a place where the resurrection power of Jesus can lift you up and his righteousness can start working in you and through you.

One year, we had an Easter outreach. We had three services, and lines were around the building; it was a long day. Afterward, I’m sitting on the edge of the platform by the pulpit, and people are being ministered to at the altar. I look up, and I see this dude with his cap in his hands, looking bad. He looked 50; he was actually 32. He gives me a sheepish look like ‘Can I get close to you?’

Now at that time, in that building, we had everyone coming in off the streets to mooch money. People were coming in with incredible scams they were running, and they would go to church members and collect ‘subway fare’ from 25 different people.

I thought to myself, “Man, this is a downer, but maybe he wants lunch. I’ll give him some money.”

This guy started walking up to me, and then the smell hit me. Feces, urine, sweat, hot street — stir gently for about an hour. It was the worst smell I ever smelled, and I worked on a dairy farm during the summer as a kid. He told me he was an alcoholic, did drugs too, slept in his truck the night before. He didn’t dare go to a shelter because people got killed in there.

So I pulled out my wallet. He pushed my hand down, and I’ll never forget what he said. “I don’t want your money. I’m going to die out there. I want this Jesus you were talking about.”

I raised my hands and wept like a child, praying, “Jesus, forgive me.” He felt what the Spirit was doing, and he started weeping too and threw his arms around me. We cried together, him for his sins and me for my sins. He went to detox for a few days and then spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at the table with my family. He joined the prayer group; he married a beautiful woman, and a couple years later, he got ordained into the ministry.

This is what Paul meant when he wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing…. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:1-2,7, ESV).

^{Jim Cymbala began the Brooklyn Tabernacle with less than twenty members in a small, rundown building in a difficult part of the city. A native of Brooklyn, he is a longtime friend of both David and Gary Wilkerson.}

You’ve heard of the prayer of faith. I believe there is a mirror image of this prayer, a prayer that is based on flesh. I call it the prayer of unbelief.

The Lord spoke these very words to Moses: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Why do you cry to me? Tell the children of Israel to go forward’” (Exodus 14:15, NKJV). Essentially, this verse in Hebrew would have read something like “Why are you shrieking at me? Why all the loud pleading in my ears?”

Why would God say this to Moses? Here was a godly, praying man in the crisis of his life. The Israelites were being chased by Pharaoh, and they had no escape. Most Christians would probably react as Moses did. He set out for an isolated hillside and got alone with the Lord, then he poured out his heart in prayer.

When God heard Moses shrieking, he told him, “Enough.” Scripture is not explicit about what followed, but at that point God might have said, “You have no right to agonize before me, Moses. Your cries are an affront to my faithfulness. I’ve already given you my solemn promise of deliverance. I’ve instructed you specifically on what to do. Now, stop crying.”

Beloved, God didn’t change between the Old Testament and the New. He’s a God of love and mercy as Isaiah points out, but he still hates sin because he’s holy and just. That’s why he told Israel, “I can’t hear you because of your sin.”

Consider the words of the psalmist, “I cried to him with my mouth, and he was extolled with my tongue. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear. But certainly God has heard me; he has attended to the voice of my prayer” (Psalm 66:17–19). The psalmist is saying, “I saw there was iniquity in my heart, and I refused to live with it. So I went to the Lord to get cleansed. Then he heard my prayer. But if I had held on to my sin, God wouldn’t have listened to my cry.”

As we face our own crises, we may convince ourselves, “Prayer is the most important thing I can do right now.” But a time comes when God calls us to act, to obey his Word in faith. At such a time, he won’t allow us to retreat to a wilderness to pray. That would be disobedience, and any prayers at that point would be offered in unbelief.

Let me give you one of the most powerful verses in all of scripture. Proverbs give us these prophetic words of Christ: “Then I was beside him as a master craftsman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and my delight was with the sons of men” (Proverbs 8:30-31, NKJV).

Beloved, we are the sons being mentioned here. From the very foundations of the earth, God foresaw a body of believers joined to his Son. Even then the Father delighted and rejoiced in these sons. Jesus testifies, “I was my Father’s delight, the joy of his being, and now all who turn to me in faith are his delight as well!”

So how do we love Jesus in return? John answers, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:2-3).

What are his commandments? The gospel says, “Then one of them, a lawyer, asked him [Christ] a question, testing him, and saying, ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ Jesus said to him, ‘”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.’” (Matthew 22:35-40).

The first and most important command is to love the Lord with all our heart, soul and mind. We’re to hold nothing back from him. The second is that we love our neighbor as ourselves. These two simple, non-grievous commands sum up all of God’s law.

Jesus is saying here that we cannot be in communion with God or walk in his glory if we bear a grudge against anyone. Therefore, loving God means loving every brother and sister in the same way we’ve been loved by the Father.