The Work of the Evil One

In my sermon on Sunday, I mentioned a verse from 2 Corinthians chapter 4, where Paul says that “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” (4:4) Hearing Paul talk about a lowercase ‘g’ “god of this world” probably sounds a little odd, but I bet you can guess whom he’s referring to: Satan is the so-called “god of this world” who’s trying to blind people to the gospel. That reminds me of what Jesus says in the parable of the sower in Matthew 13:

A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up… When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this what was sown on the path. (13:3-4, 19)

Again, the evil one—Satan—is at work to keep people from receiving the gospel message. Apparently, that’s one of the goals of the evil spiritual forces in the world: to keep the good news from taking root in people’s hearts.

What I’m left wondering is, What does that look like? How, exactly, do these spiritual powers blind us and snatch away from us the words God’s Spirit whispers to our hearts?

I’m tempted (very tempted) to talk about cellphones right here. They have this uncanny ability to somehow tune out everything going on outside your head (like the other people trying to talk to you) and everything going on inside your head, too (like God’s “still small voice”). I think that kind of distraction is absolutely a powerful tool for Satan and very useful for snatching up gospel seeds in our hearts. Some of us need to take that more seriously.

But maybe it would be more useful if each of us investigated our own lives to uncover the methods Satan uses on me.

When I read something in scripture or a devotional that challenges me or inspires me, what snatches that away? When I feel God speak through a song, a sermon, or a conversation, what can eventually blind me to the message I'd heard?

Is it my phone?

Or is it my temper?

Maybe it’s my preoccupation with the news, or my anxiety about the future.

It could be that really good looking someone who just walked through the door, or the person who gets under my skin who walked in after them.

The busyness at work, the craziness at home, my favorite menu item at the restaurant I’m driving to, or the driver behind me who ought to have his license revoked—whatever it is, whether it’s a steady habit, a regular temptation, or a flash of disruption, it erases everything else that was written on my heart a moment ago. It snatches. It blinds.

You can find Satan in gut-wrenching atrocities and manipulative lies, but you don’t have to look anywhere so shocking. You’ll see Satan wherever the hope of forgiveness and promise of new life we have in Jesus is uprooted or obscured. If you investigate, I imagine you’ll find your heart and mind are smudged with diabolical fingerprints. Because evil does not want you to hear, doesn’t want you to know, doesn’t want you to find the life that you were created for.

Maybe we need to start investigating our lives, uncovering Satan’s methods, and rooting them out.

Listen to this week's devotional here:

Enduring Love

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

When I think of scriptures that talk about gratitude, the first passage that comes to mind is Psalm 136. You might recognize it as that one really repetitive psalm:

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.
His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the God of gods.
His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the Lord of lords:
His love endures forever.

to him who alone does great wonders,
His love endures forever.

who by his understanding made the heavens,
His love endures forever.

who spread out the earth upon the waters,

      His love endures forever. (136:1-6)

It's a song of thanksgiving to the Lord for all of God’s “great wonders.” The verses ahead describe the first Passover and the crossing of the Red Sea (136:10-15), the journey through the wilderness (136:16), and the conquest and settling of Canaan (136:17-22). The examples are all different, but each one illustrates the same thing, the words of the refrain: His love endures forever.

Israel filled their praises with specific and tangible instances of the enduring love of the Lord. They gave thanks and sang of God’s love because they had seen it. They could point to it. If this psalm had been expanded by Christians in New Testament times, they might have said,

He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,

His love endures forever.

He assumed human likeness,

His love endures forever.
He was obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,

His love endures forever. (see Phil 2:5-8)

The incarnation—when the Son of God became a human being—and the cross are specific and concrete instances of the enduring love of the Lord. That’s love you can point to.

But where have you seen that love in your own life? If you were going to expand the psalm, what instances of God’s enduring love would you point to? I want to challenge you, today or tomorrow, to write another few verses and add your praise to this song. Name some specific and tangible examples of the love of God that you’ve experienced, and then call them what they are: his love enduring forever.

The four final verses of Psalm 136 declare:

He remembered us in our low estate
His love endures forever.

and freed us from our enemies.
His love endures forever.

He gives food to every creature.
His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the God of heaven.

      His love endures forever. (136:23-26)

Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you see the enduring love of the Lord all around you this holiday.

Listen to this week's devotion right here:

A Bunch of Hypocrites

“They’re a bunch of hypocrites!”

Have you ever heard someone talk about churches like that? Maybe you’ve said it yourself.

I get it. I've spent as much time around church folks as anybody over the last 25 years, and, on occasion, I've seen the judgment, the meanness, the gossip, and the moral lapses that you hear about.

But could there possibly be a redeeming message to take away from Christians’ endless inconsistencies and failures?

In a great book called Jesus Outside the Lines: A Way Forward for Those Who Are Tired of Taking Sides, pastor Scott Sauls points out all of the hypocrites we meet in the stories of scripture:

• Paul wrote about gentleness (it’s a fruit of the Spirit!), but he didn’t always use it when writing about his opponents.
• Peter happily welcomed uncircumcised Gentiles into God’s family—unless the circumcised Jewish believers from Jerusalem were watching.
• Noah was supposed to be the most righteous man in all the world, but he drank himself legless.
• King David kept composing psalms after what he’d done to Bathsheba and Uriah.

Just to name a few! But, after he points this out, Sauls says,

“It is the hypocrisy… in the Bible that sometimes encourages me more than anything else. It reminds me that God’s relentless grip on me, not my relentless grip on God, keeps me in his love.”

Hypocrisy isn’t something to be celebrated, but it is a reminder of a central gospel truth: it’s God’s grace that saves us, not our ability to do all the right things and avoid all the wrong things. My feeble grip on God is enough, because it’s his strong grip on me that does the saving. Sinful Christians actually shine a spotlight on the love, faithfulness, and mercy of our God. Like Romans 5:20 says, “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.”

And because we serve a God whose forgiveness pardons sinners and whose grace embraces even hypocrites, Sauls says, he has the

freedom to be honest about my sins, shortcomings, and inconsistencies… I can allow my hypocrisy to be brought into the light by God and others. I can also invite God and others to help me forsake my hypocrisy and grow into the person God has created me to be.

Once we admit that Christians are going to fall short and that the church will never be free of hypocrisy, we don’t have to pretend to be perfect anymore. Everybody sins. Hypocrisy happens. You can own your faults and sins, instead of trying to hide them or justify them. And once you own them, you’re in a position to repent and change.

Yes, Christians are a bunch of hypocrites. And the sooner we’re honest about it, the sooner the Holy Spirit can enter our hearts and lives and start to heal and transform our hypocrisies by God’s power and grace.

You can listen to this week's devotional below:

Our Golden Calf

Recently I preached on the infamous scene in Exodus 32 where Aaron casts a golden calf for the people of Israel to worship. It’s a pretty shocking moment, really. The people haven’t even finished finalizing their covenant with the Lord, and they’re camped at the foot of a mountain blazing with God’s glory (24:17). Yet, they seem to think it’s a very sensible thing to exchange “the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (Ps 106:20), to trade the God of the plagues and the Passover, the God who stomped through the Red Sea like a kid in a puddle, for an inanimate object they just made out of old earrings. (32:2-4)

After everything that’s already unfolded in Exodus, this scene exposes the sad truth about idolatry. No matter how brightly that gold glistens, it pales in comparison to the Great I Am.

In that sermon I said that modern idolatry is more subtle than the Old Testament variety. Offering sacrifices to a golden statue should set off any modern believer’s alarm bells. The idols that seduce us today don’t demand literal worship—they simply ask for more and more of our time, money, energy, and devotion.

This point really came home to me a few days after I preached the sermon, when I was at a Bible study on Ephesians, and we read Ephesians 5:5: “For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.”

I typically think of greed as an issue of stewarding your resources well. Are you using what God’s given you to satisfy your desires, or to pursue God’s? Are you heaping up non-essentials, while some Lazarus lies at your gate, going daily without life’s most basic essentials? (See Luke 16:19-21.)

But Ephesians isn’t concerned with our priorities, our contentment, or even the needs of our struggling neighbors.

Ephesians is concerned about idols, and it calls greed idolatry. This is the subtle kind: you don’t bow down to anything, but you set your heart on material things that make life more pleasant. If I devote my life to working for money to spend on more possessions, I’ve devoted my life to more possessions. And if that’s what I’ve set my heart on or devoted my life to, how can they belong to Jesus?

I’ve often heard Christians lament our culture’s gradual acceptance of certain practices—unrestrained sexuality, widespread profanity, Wednesday and Sunday sports for kids, pervasive cohabitation, the list goes on. I rarely hear anyone worrying over our deep-seated consumerism. Yet, it seems to me, that our commercials, store displays, online ads, and shopping apps are training all of us, every day, in greed. They’re teaching us what to desire—the next car, the new tool, the latest device, the handiest appliance, the trendiest look.

Meanwhile, scripture and the Church try to point our desires in a different direction: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” (Ps 42:1-2)

Are you paying attention to which desires preoccupy your mind?

Have you ever stopped to evaluate your contentment and your desire for more?

What can you do today to guard Jesus’s place at the center of your life from any would-be challengers?

You can listen to today's devotional below!

Israel's Magic 8 Ball

By the time you reach Exodus 28, all of the epic stories of deliverance from slavery are over. The Red Sea has been crossed. Manna has been miraculously delivered. Water has poured from rocks. The only popular story still to come is the incident with the golden calf in chapter 32. Almost everything else here in the last part of the book is instructions for building the tabernacle (a tent where the Lord will dwell with the people) and its various accessories and descriptions of building the tabernacle and its various accessories. There's lots of detail and lots of repetition. 

Chapter 28 is focused on crafting the garments for the priests to wear when they're serving at the tabernacle. If you're into sashes, gold embroidery, and scarlet yarn, this is the chapter for you. To me, this stuff gets pretty mind-numbing after a while, but I did find myself chewing on one odd detail when I reread this chapter recently: the Urim and Thummim.

What's the Urim and Thummim, you ask?

While describing the priest's breastplate, it says,

put the Urim and the Thummim in the breastpiece, so they may be over Aaron’s heart whenever he enters the presence of the LORD. Thus Aaron will always bear the means of making decisions for the Israelites over his heart before the LORD. (28:30)

They are the “means of making decisions for the Israelites.” Scripture is pretty spare on the details, but the priest somehow used the Urim and Thummim to inquire of the Lord, when the Israelites wanted to discern God’s will (see Numbers 27:21 and Ezra 2:63). They sound like some kind of Magic 8 Ball that speaks for the Lord. “Yes definitely.” “My sources say no.” “Ask again later.”

Now, why would the people need these mysterious objects to help them know God's will? They were just given laws detailing exactly what the Lord wanted from them. Not only do they get the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, but they then receive dozens of more detailed laws applying the Ten Commandments to different, everyday scenarios (in chapters 21-23). God already told them what to do, in black and white. So what are the Urim and Thummim for?

There's not one verse in the entire Bible, much less in Exodus, that discusses gambling. 

There's no verse that tells you exactly how much of their money Christians should give away, only that we should be generous and ready to share (1 Tim 6:18). On a related note, there's no precise definition of greed, nor is there ever a clear line drawn between innocent desire and covetousness. 

How do you balance being a "friend of sinners" (like Jesus) and "bad company corrupts good character"? (1 Cor 15:33)

Do "love your enemies" and "turn the other cheek" apply in times of war? Can Christians take up arms against the enemies of their nation?

I could go on. 

Some situations are too complicated for a simple "Thou shalt not." If you want to follow Jesus faithfully in all the moments of life, having laws isn't enough. You need the Urim and Thummim, too. You need discernment.

Today, we don't have an Urim and Thummim. Those are long gone, and it’s not even clear what they were or how they worked. There are no more Magic 8 Balls for discerning God's will for your life.

What we do have are: 1) the words of scripture, 2) the example of Jesus, and 3) the guidance of the Holy Spirit. These won't always yield as clear answers as we'd like, though. There may be times when there's more than one right option. There will be moments when you pray, study, and listen, and you're still not sure what God desires—but it’s time to make a choice. Sometimes you'll make the wrong choice (and then grace abounds).

Discernment isn’t always simple or easy. But it’s essential. The Bible, long, deep, and inspired as it is, will not resolve every predicament or question in black and white. Maybe that’s God’s way of teaching us to rely on Him, not just a book. To “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding,” to “in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” (Prov 3:5-6)

So, how are you inquiring of the Lord and trying to discern God’s will in your life today?

Listen to this week's devotional right here: