Resisting the Lion: Standing Firm in Faith

Those of you who were in the small groups this morning did take this week to get acquainted with Satan a little bit better. The reality is that we don't really know many facts about Satan. There are things the Bible tells us sort of hints one place or another, and we sort of have to put those together, excuse me, sort of have to put those together to guess in the in-between times, but really it's not very important where he came from, when he was made, where he lived, what he looked like. What's really important is what he does, and even though we may not know very much about all these other things, I stand before a group of people who have imminent experience with the devil. He's part of our lives all the time, every day. We're never free from his presence and his action in our lives. The Bible warns us that the circumstances we're faced with are very, very serious. In the book of 1 Peter, Peter's writing to the young men of the church where he's been acquainted with, chapter 5, beginning with verse 5, what the Bible tells us is that when God made the world and he made people, he provided a place for them to live, the Garden of Eden. Everything he wanted that people would want was found there, everything. He gave them all that they needed. They had a perfect world. Now this gives us a clue as to God's intention for your life. He intends you to have a life, as they talked about earlier, that thrives. He wanted us to have a life with everything that was possible for us to be able to have in this world that would be good for us. That was his intention. You know what happened in that garden. The people there rebelled against God, did exactly what they were not supposed to do, and everything changed. Everything changed. But when Jesus came, he said to the people who were there, I have come that you might have life in all of its fullness. So you get a picture that what was meant for us in the Garden of Eden and failed to take place, Jesus came to make sure that what was failed in the beginning was restored. His intention for human beings was that we would have life in all of its fullness. Without the things that hurt and destroy us, but the things that build us up and strengthen us. That's God's intention. In the middle of all this, just like in the middle of the Garden of Eden, there is one foul player in the play. First Peter, chapter 5, verse 5. Young men, in the same way, be submissive to those who are older. Clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Clothe yourself, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion for someone to devour. Resist him. Stand firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings. Peter knows what it's like to be confronted with the power of Satan. Jesus was telling them all that they would betray him. Peter voiced and said, Lord, I wouldn't do that, no matter what happened. His implication was everyone else might fold, but not me. I'm going to stand with you until it's all over, and he meant it. And he tried. When they came to arrest Jesus, he took his sword out and was ready to give his life, but it wasn't what Jesus wanted to have happen. Now he writes, later on in his life, a story for us. I want you to remember that you live in a world where Satan is after you. He describes Satan as a lion seeking to devour us, eat us alive. He's talking not about the animals that you see in the zoo that are caged and they go in and throw food to them. He's talking about people who would watch their sheep out in the wilderness, and then suddenly as they walked around the boulder, a lion would be there, hungry, ready to eat them. People were killed and eaten in the biblical days by lions. We don't know what that's like, to think that you might be walking down the street and a lion would attack you, but they knew what this was. Here's an animal of such ferocious power that his jaws can clamp you. He can simply take a hand, take his mouth and tear out a part of your body. If you've ever seen on the nature channels how the animals, how the lions just get an animal down and they bite and just tear its flesh out. This is the picture that he had. You are in danger, that's his point. This is not some far off thing around the rest of the world. Every human being is in danger. For the lion, Satan is stalking your life. His desire is to destroy you. He's looking for every opportunity in which that might take place. He wants to destroy you. God is giving us a warning of the nature and the world in which we live. Satan is a powerful, powerful force. He wants us to beware that he stands at every side looking for weaknesses that he might find in us, that he might deceive us and trick us into doing things that we shouldn't do, that would make us enemies of God. He talks in his passage something about the protection we have. He said, you younger men should be careful to listen to those older people like himself. I know what it's like to start out following Jesus and say, I'll give you everything in my life and I'll die for you. And then to find that Satan finds my weakness and he turns me into a traitor for the very person I love. The story of Peter is no different than all of our stories. He meant well. He said what he really wanted to do. But the time came when Satan found him at a vulnerable position in his life. He was around the fire when they were trying Jesus. He had the courage to go in there, listen to what was going on. And then he was found. You remember that story? The girl said, you're one of them, the followers of this man from Galilee. He was found out. He could admit it and then he might be kicked out or even taken to trial with Jesus. Those look like the only options for him. Or he could say, I don't know what you're talking about. And Jesus and his disciples gathered around the table. No one there threatened Peter. And Jesus said, in a while all of you are going to deny me. And Peter said, Lord, you don't know what you're talking about. I would never, ever deny you. I would give my life for you. And in that setting, he meant it, every word of it. But the lion was there and he was waiting for the moment when he was vulnerable. And in that moment, when he looked at this girl and he heard her words, he knew the promise he'd made to God. He didn't want to turn away from Jesus, but then he weighed the thoughts. If I say I know him, I might be killed too. And I won't be much good to God if I die here. What am I going to do? I know I really love Jesus and I want to do everything for him. But for this moment, it won't hurt if I just say I don't know him. That's what Satan does. He comes to us in moments of weakness when we have a choice, a choice to do what we know God wants us to do, or to do at that moment what seems to us to be a better choice. You know what happened in the story, Satan didn't stop there. Someone else came up and said, oh, you're one of them, I saw you with him. Now he's already said he didn't know him, now he has to be more firm about it. Then someone else came up and they said, yeah, you're one of them, and now he's already told them twice, so now he has to cuss a little. So they'll think he really isn't one of them, and he does. Jesus said three times before the rooster crows, you're going to deny me, Peter could not around that table imagine a set of circumstances in the world where he would do that. But there it was. When he finished the rooster crowed and he looked up and there was Jesus. His heart was broken. He had done exactly what he promised he would never do. You come to the front of the church and you come to the baptistry and you say, Jesus Christ is my Lord. I'm going to serve him the rest of my life, whatever takes place. And the lion is watching. He's watching you. He doesn't doubt the truthfulness of what you say, he just knows that there are going to be times when you come to places, when you face choices, where one choice looks like it's disastrous and the other choice looks like it's safe for the moment. And you're going to be caught. Now what do you do? He said here, you should remember what your elders have taught you. He's talking about there, no written scriptures at the time, the only way they could hear about God was from the teachings of people who knew him, and they were older than the younger men he was talking to. And he was telling us a very important ingredient. You can never be deceived if you have information. If I had a dollar bill here that had a picture of Mickey Mouse in the place of the president, I don't think any of you would even believe that you could take it and go spend it somewhere. Why? You've seen money before. You know that in the center of that bill, there should be a picture of a president. And you're pretty sure that Mickey Mouse never won the election any time. So you're safe. Your knowledge about what's right and wrong rescues you from doing something foolish, being deceived. There are many people who start on this walk with Christ because they don't know the Bible who are deceived. They don't know it enough to be able to tell when they get in tight and difficult situations what the right thing is and what the wrong thing is. You'll notice in Jesus' life, he never was asked to do anything wicked or evil. In his temptations before he started his ministry, he was asked to make bread for himself because he'd been 40 days without any food so he wouldn't starve to death and could get on with his ministry. He was asked to accelerate his task instead of taking three years, just go to the temple, jump off the top, and the angels would catch him and everyone would say, this is a miracle, it's the Messiah who's come. He wouldn't have to spend three years, all the trouble, and die on a cross. It was a shortcut to the very purpose for which Jesus was sent into the world. But he wouldn't have to go through all this pain and difficulty. That's Satan's trick. I don't want to stop you from doing what you're supposed to do, but I can give you a better way to do it than God's way. And so we're deceived by this ravaging lion. And see what happens is, you do it once and you don't get caught, Peter. You do it the second time and you don't get caught. And then the third time you get caught. Oh, but it's not that easy all the same night for us, no, it's not that way. For many years, Lance Armstrong told everyone in the world he never doped to win the races. They tested, they did everything they could. He consistently said, I never did it. And he was famous and popular, got rich. Everyone thought he was a wonderful guy. But he made all those choices to do the wrong thing, and finally the day came when the lion devoured him. You look at people all the time in the news, Mr. Madoff, one of the most successful financial investors in the world, was on the stock exchange, and everyone thought of him as the greatest investor there was, and now he's in jail for the rest of his life. Two of his sons are dead. His name is now the epitome of evil, wicked people. You can wait a while, and Satan doesn't bring you the death sentence immediately. He gets you far enough in making the wrong choices until one day you're exposed. Before you know it, your life has been eaten, and you're destroyed. The Bible warns us that living this life in this world as a follower of Christ is like putting a target on you. Satan is looking for you. He wants to do everything he can to get you to deny your promise that you've made to God. I will give my life to you, and I will live my life in obedience to you. One of the big reasons is because we do not know what God has taught us that we should do. You look at the Ten Commandments, and they're pretty easy to get. You look at the Sermon on the Mount, you get some things that are easy to do. And we don't even get past that, really. We justify not keeping those because of the circumstances we're in, thinking we'd get by with it. The Ten Commandments said we're to take one day in which we make God the center of that day. When Jesus came, he said we should have him as the center of our life every day. Paul went so far as to say you should pray without stopping. It's not one day of the week, but every day of the week. But you know what happens. You get busy. Lots of things going on. You get up in the morning, and you're faithful to read your Bible, talk to God about the needs that you have. And you miss one, and you straighten out, and you get it right. Nothing really bad happened, and two or three weeks or a month later, you miss a couple of days. Two years down the road, you're not even opening the Bible anymore. And life seems like it's just about like it was when you used to open the Bible every day, and you used to go to church every day. Well, yeah, there are little things that come along, but everybody has problems, until all of a sudden, one day, the harvest comes, or the lion eats you, and you're destroyed. Your home, your family, your business, whatever it is, the lion is out to get you. This would be a pretty bleak set of circumstances if that was all the story, for what he tells us here is very simple to say. Be self-controlled and alert. This is how you get yourself ready to face this enemy. Be self-controlled. I know what I'm supposed to do, so you read the Bible, you learn what you're supposed to do to follow Him, so be self-controlled. Get yourself under control so that you do what you know is the right thing. There is no substitute for that. You know what God wants you to do, you know how He wants you to talk, you know how He wants you to live, you know what He says is the right thing, and you make that the rule of your life so that you're under control. You don't do it one time and not the next, you do absolutely what God wants you to do. When you fail, you stop and say, God, I failed to do this. Forgive me for this. Help me to do what is right. He forgives you and gives you strength to start again. Self-control and be alert. Be aware that in your mind there is a war going on. The war starts whenever you face a situation where you have to make a choice about things. And you think, okay, what should I do? And maybe it's an issue that has to do with integrity or honesty or faithfulness, whatever it is, and you're faced with this situation and it looks like the best thing for you to do would be to do what looks good to you or fun to you or enjoyable to you or pleasurable to you. And then in the back of your mind, God says, that's not what I tell you to do. Well, God, you don't understand my situation. That's what I hear a lot of people say. You don't understand my situation. Yes, he does. He understands it. He knows that what you want, you need badly. But he also knows the only way you're really going to get what you really need is by obedience to him. And Satan is saying, no, that's not going to work. It's never going to turn out right. You've tried and tried and tried and tried and it's not working. Give up. Forget it. Go ahead and steal the money. Go ahead and lie to your spouse. Go ahead and whatever it is that goes on. And it looks like for the moment you could get away with it by just doing what your mind says. And in your mind, there's this battle going on. God is on one side and the lion is on the other. He will always tell you what is the easiest thing to do, the most enjoyable thing to do, and the thing that looks like it could work and you could get away with it. It's like, you know, you set a trap for a wild animal. Don't ever put the bait in the trap, something that the animal would never eat. Who would set a trap to catch an animal and bait it with a spark plug? No one. A juicy morsel is what you want. And he knows what's juicy to you. And so he puts that morsel there. And he says, look at that. You can get that and eat it and life will be great for you. God says this is wrong. It's not what I tell you to do. You hear that in your head and then you think, OK, if I do what God wants me to do, I can't see how this is going to work out to be good for me. God never shows you the end result of what he's going to do. Because if he did, you wouldn't live by faith. You would have to have God prove to you that he was going to do X before you would trust him. People of Israel left captivity, God took them across the Red Sea, they were out in the wilderness, there was no bread or food. They could only see starvation, no stores, no farms, no place to get it. Some of them said, I've had it. There's only desert ahead of us, desert beside us, desert behind us. There is no way we're going to get bread out here. They were right. You're not going to find any bread out there. So some of them turned around and went back to Egypt to be slaves. The rest of them who stayed, one morning God made bread rain out of the heavens. Everybody got enough to eat for the day. And from that day on until the time they entered the Promised Land, every morning they had the bread. No one could have imagined God doing this. It's actually impossible to be able to do. But he did. For those who said, we trust you, that's a big step. The just live by trust in God. What Satan does is he comes into your life and says to you, if you do this, you're never going to make it. And God says, if you trust me, I will provide for you. You don't see what's going to happen. You only have the promise he makes. So he says to them, here's what's going to happen. Be controlled, self-control and alert. Your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him. So when your mind is caught with those two options, and you look at one of them, and you know the Bible well enough to know it's wrong, you just write that one off. I'm not going to do that one. God says, that's wrong. I know I like to do it. I looks like I could do it and get away with it, but I trust God more than my judgment and my mind. I'm not going to do it. You have the ability, in every set of circumstances you're in, to resist the attraction of Satan. Unless you're a dumb animal who sees the meat and ignores the trap, and then you're caught. I will help you. You just resist. In fact, in the book of James, James is faced with the same set of circumstances that he was looking at in chapter 4, verses 4 through 10. You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think the scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us tends toward envy, but he gives more grace? That's why the scripture says, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourself then to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Two things. Submit yourself to God. When that battle is going on in your head, say to God, I'm going to do the one you tell me is right. You submit to God. And then you say no to the devil. That's a secret we have. And then the devil will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, sinners, purify your heart. You double-minded people, double-minded means you're looking at both options all the time to decide which one is right. You only look at one option, the one God has for you. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning, your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will lift you up. Here's the promise. When the battle's going on in your head and the lion is after you and you know one thing on one side is what God wants and the other is what seems best at that moment, you choose what God wants. And you say no to Satan. Satan is a very smart and shrewd guy. He won't stand there and stay after you once he knows you've made your mind up. And he'll come again with a little more deception the next time, but in that moment he will run away because he knows he's lost. There's not one situation in all of our lives in which we get into that we cannot resist the temptation of Satan. If we hold on to God, we do what we know he wants us to do, Satan will turn away from us. You live in a world of people, most of whom will not resist Satan's appeal because he appeals to our pleasure, he appeals to the things that are enjoyable to us, he appeals to the things that are easy for us, he appeals to the things that we can work out by our own mind and we can see. God on the other hand says, I ask you to trust me that I will take care of you. I am not going to tell you how I'm going to solve your problem. I'm not going to tell you when I'm going to solve your problem. I'm not going to let you know anything except I will take care of you. That promise against all the things that appeal to your human flesh, one side the promise of God, the other thing is you can see, feel, taste, and touch. And the just shall live by faith. Resist the devil and he will run away from you. He has no power over you except what you give to him. We live in a world controlled by Satan. Governments are controlled that way. All of our cultures are controlled that way. And we're asked to live in that world a different kind of life. A life of faith and trust that the things God says are true, are true. And he asks us to live in such a way so that the people around us will be amazed that we make different decisions than they do and ours turn out better than theirs do. Ours turn out better even though we've made decisions that seem irrational to them and foolish to them and even stupid to them. But suddenly they look at our life and it's better. That is your witness to the power of God. If you do the same things all the other people around you do, the same result is going to happen. Destruction and death to the things most precious to you. The devil is at work everywhere, even here in your mind and even in mine because he wants to deceive us into somehow getting us to do what he wants as opposed to what God wants. All God has to offer is to say to you, if you trust me with your life and you will let me guide your choices, you will go through hard times, difficult times, even disastrous times. But in the end, you'll look back and say, it was the best life I could have had. This is my promise. I promise it on my integrity. Now I will say to you that you'll get a lot better and more rewarding offers. But I warn you, they will eat you alive. Believe me and you will have life in its fullness. Ignore me and you will have hell in this world and forever. It's your choice. Who do you believe? Would you bow your heads for just a moment? Every one of us know of times in our life when we've heard the voice of both God and the lion. All of us have sometime or other taken the voice of the lion, only we've learned to regret it. Maybe it was a time like myself when I told my mother I didn't do that, and she found out I did, and then she whipped me. Maybe it was a little more serious when you were in school. Something happened and you got in serious trouble. Maybe it was something more serious than that, in which you did something that caused people who once loved you to love you no more. Maybe it hasn't even happened to you yet, the worst thing. But you know, you're on a course of choices that you know in your heart and mind God does not approve of them. You don't know where the precipice is where you're going to fall, but I can promise you it's out there. What Jesus came to say is, you will let me guide your life, I'll save you from all that. For I've come that you might have life in all its fullness, but you've got to do something. You've got to say from here on in my life, I will listen to you, I'll learn what you want me to do, and I'll make the choices that you tell me as best I can. And when I fail, I'm going to stop and tell you I failed and start again. This is it, the rest of my life. You do that, the Lord says, and when it's over, you will have found life. Now you have to believe that. If you've never made that promise to God, to give your life to him, I urge you to do it. Now I know the lion is in your head. He's saying, I don't know, this church, I've never been to these people before, they'll think I'm the worst person in the world. You'll have a thousand reasons why you shouldn't do that. Only one why you should. Come unto me, all you who labor, and I will give you rest. Trust me. You know it's the right thing, but it's not the easy thing. So you do, you say, God, from this moment on in my life, I'm going to live, pledging to live and learn what you want me to do, and do it. Maybe you know what he wants you to do. He's really made it clear to you today what you want, what he wants you to do. He may want you to come and say, I'm ready now to commit my life to Christ, be baptized so the whole world will know. Maybe he said to you, here's some things that you need to change in your life. Maybe he said to you, here's a job I want you to do for me, someone I want you to encourage or support or help. I don't know. But whatever it is, the lion will tell you that there's a better way or another time, something to put it off. Don't give Satan a chance to kill you. So I simply ask in this moment of quietness, you say to God, are you in control of my life? What do you want me to change? If you want me to pray with you, or Debbie to pray with you, just come to the front and tell us what your response is to God. The anus is going to play. You be quiet, listen to God, and do what he tells you, and you'll find life in its fullness.