This past week and a half I've noticed how good Satan truly is...now before you bash me or wish me to hell, I mean how good at his job he truly is. Satan's BIGGEST claim to fame and his BIGGEST success is staying invisible. He lurks in the secrets of your heart, the darkness of the unknown, but yet he lurches out at us without us even having a clue that he's the one attacking.
WHY?!
Well, Satan is the master of deception, the king of lies, the losers of losers, blah blah blah. He is awesome and most capable of staying hidden while being the instigator because that's when he's most potent--the invisible enemy is always lethal. Think about playing your favorite sport or game. Take chess for example. How in the world do you have a shot at winning chess? You anticipate your opponent's next move and you definitely pay attention to his previous ones. If you can't see who you're up against, no better yet, if you FORGET that you're up against someone but yet they're still playing well and hard, you are most definitely going to lose. Fail. Vamoose.
Yesterday, I got a text from someone who was pretty concerned about my brother. This person said that he didn't seem to be doing well at all and that she was concerned for him...crap. I just got out of my last class for the day and just decided to walk the 2 miles home. Anyways, as I decided to walk, I started to just wonder. Wonder why if my brother made that decision to follow Christ just a little over a month ago now, why in the world he would be worse than before. I wasn't necessarily angry--at God anyways--and I wasn't all that sad, I was more at a loss of words and an almost lost sense of hope. I didn't even know what to say or pray to God because I've prayed it all exhaustively before and quite honestly I didn't think it was working...
As I was wrestling through this trying to figure out what in the world I should do or what should happen, etc. I saw it. I had my head down looking at the ground in front of me as I walked and the first thing I saw was, "Do you believe in God?" then 3 cement slabs later, "You can be GOOD without GOD!" I kept walking and literally every other cement slabs for the next 2 minutes alternated these sayings. They were advertisements for the IU Student Atheist group. With each one I was getting ever so angry to the point where I had tears streaming down my face--BAM! It hit me, Satan was attacking me at my very core. He wanted to slap me in the face and I have never been so aware of his attack against my soul than at this very moment.
The next thing I did was the best thing, in my opinion, I could've possibly done. I stopped trying to talk to God about why things weren't getting better for my brother and I started fighting for my brother against Satan--obviously talking to God is always best, but in this case I needed another plan of attack in addition. It was almost like a prayer to Satan but for him to leave well enough alone and to realize that he has been defeated FOREVER. As I did this I started to feel the burden lifted and I kept reminding Satan of how much of a coward he is that he has to fight while hidden, that he already lost my brother's soul so now out of a bitter 2-year old's temper-tantrum he's taking it out on my brother with everything he has. I felt this power well up inside me and I yelled at Satan with everything I had (all this going on while walking home mind you). I told him how pitiful he is that he was not only stripped of his glory when he was thrown out of Heaven, but he had also already lost the biggest fight of his life--this world.
You see, Satan has and will bring down churches and God's people not because they're "bad" people but because he's mad as hell (I was going for the pun ;) and he will do EVERYTHING in his power to drag them down with him. He's already lost the war but we CANNOT let him win these battles. Take Satan down with all you have and not only should you plead with God but you should also fight Satan to the very core. There's two sides to this war, let's not forget our enemy.
With that said, I have one challenge for thought for you and I would LOVE your feedback to the answer:
Is it important for us to forgive Satan just as we would any other person who has wronged us?
September 02, 2009
August 13, 2009
Terminating the Veil
So, since I'm jobless (not by choice) and have no life going on right now, I watch a lot of TV :). Last weekend, I think it was Saturday night--remember, no life right now--I was watching the Terminator II. I thought it was pretty cool, you know, seeing Arnold in action again. Well, I didn't think much of it until Sunday when I was at church.
I went to this different church than I normally do to try it out and to see if I wanted to be a regular attender. It was okay, but one thing that really struck me was during the sermon when the pastor was talking about how he became a Christian.
Now, if you're reading this you may not know the exact definition of a Christian the way it's meant to be lived--it often gets lost in this jumbledness of the world. A Christian is a person looking to Christ as his or her personal savior and dedicating one's life to following God in his or her life. A Christian is not a person who's parents were Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, etc. A Christian is not a person who attends church on Sundays, even Bible studies on Wednesdays, or even church functions any other day. Christ defines the Christian--not the person.
Anyways, the pastor was talking about the veil that covers our eyes--the one that separates us from knowing God and Christ for who They are and for what They've done. He was talking about how Satan is the one who holds this veil over eyes until enough is done that this veil is tore down and everything suddenly, makes sense. Well, I thought that was interesting and then all of a sudden, the Terminator starts playing in my mind--awesome. haha
What was kind of interesting was the way God was helping me to visualize this idea. The movie has this cyborg dude who is made of some type of pretty awesome liquid metal/mercury type deal that makes him unstoppable. When you shoot the dude, homeboy just morphs back into his little human front while barely even slowing down. He just keeps coming back--it almost seems impossible to stop him!
Well, at the end of the movie, good ol' Arnie has this huge shotgun that he's using to blast this dude. Every time he shoots him, the guy stumbles back just a little bit at a time and his human-like appearance is shattered more and more. But here's the thing, there is a huge cauldron of molten metal at the edge of this platform that the cyborg is inching towards each time he's shot. Right when he's getting ready to go over the edge, one more shot would obviously do it, Arnie runs out of ammo. Ah shoot! The mom, kid, and Arnie thought they were defeated until someone (I honestly can't remember who) pulls out a gun and shoots the dude to make him plunge to his ultimate demise. Game over. He doesn't come crawling back on this one. He's dead. Defeated. Gone.
This is EXACTLY how it is when we share the love of Christ with strangers, family members, friends, co-workers, whomever. We keep shooting at the veil, that cover that shields their eyes from knowing Christ for who He truly is. We get to a point where we feel defeated because it seems like it's impenetrable, an unstoppable force that we just cannot seem to kill once and for all. It is a process, it is something that we have to keep shooting at, keep speaking truth into that veil to make it burn until it is no more. I tell you, it is not impossible. It is not unstoppable. It is not impenetrable. Don't give up hope, don't lose sight, and for the love of God never stop sharing the best thing that ever happened to you!
I went to this different church than I normally do to try it out and to see if I wanted to be a regular attender. It was okay, but one thing that really struck me was during the sermon when the pastor was talking about how he became a Christian.
Now, if you're reading this you may not know the exact definition of a Christian the way it's meant to be lived--it often gets lost in this jumbledness of the world. A Christian is a person looking to Christ as his or her personal savior and dedicating one's life to following God in his or her life. A Christian is not a person who's parents were Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, etc. A Christian is not a person who attends church on Sundays, even Bible studies on Wednesdays, or even church functions any other day. Christ defines the Christian--not the person.
Anyways, the pastor was talking about the veil that covers our eyes--the one that separates us from knowing God and Christ for who They are and for what They've done. He was talking about how Satan is the one who holds this veil over eyes until enough is done that this veil is tore down and everything suddenly, makes sense. Well, I thought that was interesting and then all of a sudden, the Terminator starts playing in my mind--awesome. haha
What was kind of interesting was the way God was helping me to visualize this idea. The movie has this cyborg dude who is made of some type of pretty awesome liquid metal/mercury type deal that makes him unstoppable. When you shoot the dude, homeboy just morphs back into his little human front while barely even slowing down. He just keeps coming back--it almost seems impossible to stop him!
Well, at the end of the movie, good ol' Arnie has this huge shotgun that he's using to blast this dude. Every time he shoots him, the guy stumbles back just a little bit at a time and his human-like appearance is shattered more and more. But here's the thing, there is a huge cauldron of molten metal at the edge of this platform that the cyborg is inching towards each time he's shot. Right when he's getting ready to go over the edge, one more shot would obviously do it, Arnie runs out of ammo. Ah shoot! The mom, kid, and Arnie thought they were defeated until someone (I honestly can't remember who) pulls out a gun and shoots the dude to make him plunge to his ultimate demise. Game over. He doesn't come crawling back on this one. He's dead. Defeated. Gone.
This is EXACTLY how it is when we share the love of Christ with strangers, family members, friends, co-workers, whomever. We keep shooting at the veil, that cover that shields their eyes from knowing Christ for who He truly is. We get to a point where we feel defeated because it seems like it's impenetrable, an unstoppable force that we just cannot seem to kill once and for all. It is a process, it is something that we have to keep shooting at, keep speaking truth into that veil to make it burn until it is no more. I tell you, it is not impossible. It is not unstoppable. It is not impenetrable. Don't give up hope, don't lose sight, and for the love of God never stop sharing the best thing that ever happened to you!
August 07, 2009
The Invisible Universe
So, being the nerd that I am, I spent a couple hours the other night watching a show on the History channel about the universe. I was so amazed, haha!
I couldn’t help but be in awe of how absolutely STUNNING all of existence is! The placement that we have in our galaxy is so that we are far enough from the center that we aren’t much affected by the enormous gravitational field of the black hole that lives there, but we are so close to the edge that we are able to see so many of the other galaxies out there. We are in an amazing place for survival and for discovery.
I couldn’t help but laugh when one of the scientists even said that most all of our universe is invisible. That’s nuts! Only 20% of the universe is made up of planets, stars, asteroids, and whatever else we see—80% is made up of “invisible” or “black” matter. Most of this matter is so small that we cannot even see it with the finest microscopes—-some smaller than atoms! We are completely surrounded not only by gases from our atmosphere and other dust, but we’re also surrounded by subatomic particles and even possible mini black holes from our own universe and even other universes thousands of light years away. That’s part of what they’re trying to find by use of the Large Hadron Collider (the particle accelerator) in Switzerland.
I also had to laugh when they talked about how weird so many things were. Things that occurred without real rhyme or reason but just because it could, I suppose. For example, there is an asteroid called Toutatis that orbits in the asteroid belt and it doesn’t rotate around any of its major axes, it just tumbles. There’s no reason why the asteroid should randomly tumble rather than rotate around one or both of its axes, but it does and it has a huge impact on our very galaxy and even our planet. It’s the asteroid that came 100,000 miles from hitting the earth in 2004 because it has a more elliptical orbit that puts it in an orbital path that intersects that of earth.
This is just a scratch at the surface of what goes on all around us! So many times people don’t want to believe in God because He is not visible to us here on earth…more than the majority of our very makeup in the sense of our universe is not visible to us! We see the results of these particles and gases and phenomena to realize that they do in fact exist, do we not? When was the last time you saw wind? Nope. You saw those leaves move because the wind caused them to move; you didn’t see it. When was the last time you saw air? Consciousness? Gravity? Your mind? Now ask yourself, when was the last time you saw God?
We see through our experiences, through our experiments even. We see the effects and for us that has to be good enough because our eyes are just not equipped to see 80% of our universe and better yet, a perfect God. We trust the unseen out of faith everyday, that's no excuse to not trust God.
I couldn’t help but be in awe of how absolutely STUNNING all of existence is! The placement that we have in our galaxy is so that we are far enough from the center that we aren’t much affected by the enormous gravitational field of the black hole that lives there, but we are so close to the edge that we are able to see so many of the other galaxies out there. We are in an amazing place for survival and for discovery.
I couldn’t help but laugh when one of the scientists even said that most all of our universe is invisible. That’s nuts! Only 20% of the universe is made up of planets, stars, asteroids, and whatever else we see—80% is made up of “invisible” or “black” matter. Most of this matter is so small that we cannot even see it with the finest microscopes—-some smaller than atoms! We are completely surrounded not only by gases from our atmosphere and other dust, but we’re also surrounded by subatomic particles and even possible mini black holes from our own universe and even other universes thousands of light years away. That’s part of what they’re trying to find by use of the Large Hadron Collider (the particle accelerator) in Switzerland.
I also had to laugh when they talked about how weird so many things were. Things that occurred without real rhyme or reason but just because it could, I suppose. For example, there is an asteroid called Toutatis that orbits in the asteroid belt and it doesn’t rotate around any of its major axes, it just tumbles. There’s no reason why the asteroid should randomly tumble rather than rotate around one or both of its axes, but it does and it has a huge impact on our very galaxy and even our planet. It’s the asteroid that came 100,000 miles from hitting the earth in 2004 because it has a more elliptical orbit that puts it in an orbital path that intersects that of earth.
This is just a scratch at the surface of what goes on all around us! So many times people don’t want to believe in God because He is not visible to us here on earth…more than the majority of our very makeup in the sense of our universe is not visible to us! We see the results of these particles and gases and phenomena to realize that they do in fact exist, do we not? When was the last time you saw wind? Nope. You saw those leaves move because the wind caused them to move; you didn’t see it. When was the last time you saw air? Consciousness? Gravity? Your mind? Now ask yourself, when was the last time you saw God?
We see through our experiences, through our experiments even. We see the effects and for us that has to be good enough because our eyes are just not equipped to see 80% of our universe and better yet, a perfect God. We trust the unseen out of faith everyday, that's no excuse to not trust God.
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