In the spiritual battle between Christ and Satan, we can see how important it is for us to keep our spiritual sword in good condition. Jesus immediately took out His spiritual sword to battle Satan. He quoted a passage from the Old Testament. Peter instructed us to be always ready to give a defense of the hope within us I Peter 3: Just as we eat our physical food daily, we also need to eat our spiritual food.
Christ said that man shall not live by bread alone. Yes, we might be physically alive, but are we spiritually alive? We need to live by every word of God. Sometimes, we have the tendency to just pick what is convenient for us and just disregard the rest. Satan took Christ on a pinnacle of the temple and from there, he quoted a scripture. From this instance, we can see that Satan can quote the scripture and even use it against Christ! There are interesting lessons we need to learn here. Satan knows the Bible. He even memorized everything in it. However, does that made Satan a Christian?
Indeed, Satan can use the spiritual sword to counteract our spiritual sword. We must also recognize that Satan shows us the pleasure of sins but not its dire consequences. He will sugar coat sin and wrapped it with attractive trappings. We must not be fooled by the pleasures of sins. One of the most common strategies of Satan to deceive people is to pervert the truth. We can see from Matthew 4 how Satan can easily pervert the truth.
It is true that God will protect His people. However, Satan misapplied the scripture and taught that the promise of protection extends to those people who foolishly put themselves in danger.
While yes, God can still have the choice to help those kinds of people, most often than not, God will just let the physical law to take care of them. We must not foolishly tempt God. Satan shows all the glory of this world, including all the pleasures that it can give. In the same way, Satan can show us the pleasure of sin and tempt us to disobey God.
We must remember that all the things in the world will just fade away. Satan is cunning and horribly wise. He has a lot of evil schemes to try and tempt us. For us to defeat our enemies, we need to know our enemies and part of that is understanding their strategies. Sometimes, he will strike us when we least expected it. Notice how Satan offered all the kingdoms of the world to Jesus. Jesus understood that Satan is the real ruler of this earth. Satan is the god of this world. This is supported by scripture. Read II Corinthians 4: This explains why this world is full of sadness, confusion, suffering, pain, and death.
Our allegiance should only be to God. Our loyalty is only for him. If we put something between God and us, we are committing the sin of idolatry. Now, God does not need our praises because of pride, but He wants us to recognize that He is our God and that is for our own good. So many people today made money, status, career, education, and their selves as their god and we see the results if we do that. Their lives are full of pain and suffering. Worshiping God is good for us. It directs us to the right path of living this life. It shows us how to live a life of happiness and blessedness.
These are the 12 lessons we can learn from the temptation of Christ. In this life, we will be tempted and tried to know whether our faith is genuine or not. More importantly, we need to stay strong, motivated, and zealous in doing the will of God in lives. Years ago when I was in a quiet state I asked God why this world had to be do polar opposite from. For everything God has put in place , the enemy , and ruler of the earth for now has a counterfit for everything. For God, For Marriage 2 men or 2 women and the list goes on endlessly…until we are out of here we need to plan on it. I really appreciate your thoughts and insights on the temptations of Christ.
I found it very insightful. As such, I love the New Testament. Continually, she would ask herself, "What would Jesus do? Finally, one of the guards allowed her to speak to him and, after several weeks, he even allowed her to talk to him about the Lord. This was the biggest and greatest blessing of all — not only to be allowed to talk to another human being, but to be able to talk to them about her precious Lord. Eventually, the guard opened up and shared how much he hated working in the prison and shared some other personal matters.
Even though Corrie suffered greatly the year she survived the horror of solitary confinement, she, nevertheless, committed herself to God every moment of every day. And, just as He had promised, He was faithful to never leave her or forsake her. As she used to point out, "there is no pit so deep, that Jesus is not deeper. In the same way, God desires to make our souls a reflection of His own, just like He did Corrie's. He entered in by the "narrow gate" and He walked the straight and "hard road.
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This is "Brokenness" — John Collinson wrote a short piece about suffering and "the narrow road" that I think sums everything up perfectly. Sometimes it is asked what we mean by brokenness. Brokenness is not easy to define but can be clearly seen in the reactions of Jesus, especially as He approached the cross and in His crucifixion. I think it can be applied personally in this way:. Someone once said there will be no revival, either personally or otherwise, until there is first a Gethsemene and a Calvary in each of our own lives. Life Includes Suffering — I purposely ignored studying the sufferings of Job for years because it scared me.
Eventually, in God's timing, the story of Job became incredibly real to me as I began to experience deep suffering in my own life. I learned I had a choice: God put the book of Job right in the center of the Bible for a very good reason: God intends for all of us to use it as a "road map" on our journey through the dark night, always keeping in mind that at the end of the road, Job finally "saw" God as he never had seen Him before, and it changed his life forever. Suffering has as its goal the sanctification, the purification, of our souls and spirits.
Suffering comes about as God unrelentingly identifies the most potentially damaging hindrance to our relationship with Him, and then lovingly begins to strip that thing away from us. He crushes us, He breaks us, He shakes us and removes anything that is in the way of His accomplishing His will in and through our lives. Some important points to remember when we are going through suffering are:. Satan, obviously, does not want that — therefore, he does everything he possibly can to stop it.
Therefore, it is not our battle, but His. God always has a reason for the things He allows into our lives. He is preparing us for a future which He alone knows. He is preparing us as His "bride," not only perfect holy , established, strengthened and grounded in Him, but also joint heirs with Him. One of my favorite poems about suffering and brokenness was written in the early s by G. Watson, a Wesleyan Methodist minister.
This poem has brought my focus back to Christ countless times in the past ten years, as I have found myself straying from the " narrow path. If God has called you to be really like Jesus, He will draw you to a life of crucifixion and humility , and put upon you such demands of obedience that you will not be able to follow other people, or measure yourself by other Christians, and in many ways, He will seem to let other good people do things which He will not let you do.
Bringing the gospel of Yeshua back to Israel
Other Christians and ministers who seem very religious and useful may push themselves , pull wires, and work schemes to carry out their plans, but you cannot do it; and if you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent. Others may boast of themselves, of their work, of their success, of their writings , but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing, and if you begin it, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.
Others may be allowed to succeed in making money, or may have a legacy left to them , but it is likely God will keep you poor, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, namely, a helpless dependence on Him, that He may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by day out of an unseen treasury. The Lord may let others be honored and put forward, and keep you hidden in obscurity , because He wants you to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory, which can only be produced in the shade. The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch over you, with a jealous love , and will rebuke you for little words and feelings, or for wasting your time, which other Christians never seem distressed over.
So make up your mind that God is an infinite sovereign and has a right to do as He pleases with His own. He may not explain to you a thousand things which puzzle your reason in His dealings with you. But if you absolutely sell yourself to be His Settle it forever, then, that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hand, or closing your eyes, in ways that He does not seem to use with others.
Now when you are so possessed with the living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule [entrance] to heaven. We have been exploring the topic of faith — faith in the night seasons. For some this is a difficult subject, but for others it's of the utmost importance. The latter group sees the trials and tribulations that Christians are now facing becoming more intense than ever before, and they are longing for understanding.
In 1 Peter 4: How will we make it through this time of testing, if we don't understand what God is doing, and if we crumble at the first hint of suffering? We desperately need to have a grasp of what God's purpose is for allowing these kinds of trials and, most importantly, we need to understand what to do and how to act in them. What Is a "Night Season"?
In his book Abandoned to God , Oswald Chambers states, "The mystics used to speak of 'the dark night of the soul' or 'night season' as a time of spiritual darkness and dryness, not the direct result of sins committed, but rather a deep conviction of sin itself within the heart and mind. It is a time the person 'is being brought to an end of himself,' and made aware of the utter worthlessness of his own nature when stripped of all religious pretensions. Moreover, there was the willingness to abandon all for Christ's sake, to deny — not only his evil self but also his good self.
During a night season, God initiates a purging, a cleansing and a purifying of our souls from everything that is not of faith. At this time, God crushes our self will, so that He can merge it with His own. In other words, it's our own private Gethsemane. As Jesus cried in the garden, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful unto death By depriving our soul of spiritual blessings, God can begin to transform our reliance on soulish and sensual things to things of the Spirit.
He wants us to learn to walk by faith, not by our senses, our feelings or our understanding. Many will feel like Job, who "looked for good" but only "evil came "; and for "light," but found only "darkness" Job Or like Isaiah, who uttered, "We wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness. If we can only remember during our night season that the Holy Spirit has led us into this darkness on purpose.
He desires not only to "replace us with Himself," but also to make us holy so that we can fellowship and commune with Him. As Moses was led into the wilderness to experience God's presence Ex It's a path that will lead us to greater light than anything we have ever known before. The whole purpose of the sanctification process is not only to learn how to reflect Him, but also to learn how to have intimacy with Him. Who Experiences the Dark Night? As stated earlier, the Lord allows the dark night to happen to all of His beloved children, and especially those who are the most faithful, the most loving, the ones who want all of Him.
This night season happens to people walking with the Lord for a long time; people who love Him with all their heart, mind and soul; people who have surrendered their lives to Him; people who are obedient to Him; and, people who fear Him. Again, remember Isaiah Joy Dawson, a wonderful author and Bible teacher, shares that if we live righteous lives, then there is an inevitability that all of us will, at one time or another, experience God's fire or a night of faith. Therefore, the longer we walk with the Lord, the more we can anticipate this exper- ience, unless we choose to moment by moment surrender everything to Him.
Great Christians are made by great trials. Pain, sorrow and failure are what produce men and women of God. Those with the greatest dreams are often the ones who receive the greatest trials. Eternal lessons seem to require hard places. As Scripture declares, the way we are made "perfect," or whole or complete, is by suffering or by barring ourselves from sin and self Heb 2: Only by uncovering and exposing our defects can God really heal us.
First, He must take away all our external and internal supports other than Himself, then He can strengthen our inner man, enabling us to experience His fullness. The dark night of the soul happens to people who have already accepted the Lord; those who have already given their lives to Him; those already filled with the Spirit; those who have already dedicated their lives to Him; those who have already asked for intimacy; and those who have already been set aside for God's purposes of ministry. There seems to be three things that God is looking for in each of our lives: God wants to know the full proof of us.
He wants to know our real heart. Will we be obedient in all things?
Will we hold on to His truths even though we don't understand what He is doing? The kind of Love that God wants from us is a love that reaches to the point of full and total surren- der. Remember, to really love God agapao means to totally give ourselves over to Him. If we are discontent with what God has allowed in our lives, it's a sure indication that we have not completely surrendered and abandoned ourselves to Him.
Just as God had to keep testing and proving Israel, so He must continue to humble, abase and weaken us. That way, He will perceive if we love Him, and we will see our total inability to live without Him. The Lord wants believers who have faith like Job, and who can utter like he did, "Though You slay me, yet will I trust You. And it's often the same with us.
Survive the Wilderness Seasons of Life
God only tells us that He does have a plan for our lives and even though we don't understand what that plan is or how it is going to work out, we must trust that He always has our best in view. We must learn to rely upon Him in spite of our circumstances, in spite of our logic and in spite of our human reason.
Human circumstances, logic and reason are not sources for spiritual guidance. We must trust that only God knows what is best for our lives; therefore, whatever He allows into them He will use it for our good. Goal and Purpose of the Dark Night — God's purpose for all of His actions towards us is that Christ might be formed in us and that we might experience intimacy and fellowship with Him.
God wants to purge our souls from sin and self, so that we will be open and willing to follow Him at any cost. Our will controls everything in our lives. Thus, God wants us to have a will that is completely yielded and at one with His own. One of the major purposes, then, of the dark night of the soul or a night season is to formulate an unshakable resolve in us , so that even if everything goes wrong in our lives and even if we can't see or understand a thing of what God is doing, we will still choose to cling immovably to God.
He wants us to be governed only by our choice of faith — a faith that proclaims whether I live or die, I choose to trust in You, not in my own thoughts and emotions. God wants to produce in us a trust that can never be shaken. He is drawing us away from a life of senses and feelings and forcing us to turn to Him in naked faith , faith without feelings. He wants us to be able to constantly say and mean, "Not my will, but Yours" and "Though You slay me, yet will I trust You.
He wants us to love Him and rely upon Him regardless of what we desire, regardless of what our intellect is saying and regardless of what we are feeling. He wants us to be able to echo what Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 4: For we who live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. It shows Him that we have left "all," even ourselves, to follow Him. Joy Dawson made an awesome audio tape entitled, " In the Fire.
Understanding these seven purposes of God help us tremendously in weathering our own night seasons. Job learned this lesson well: Some of the blessings and benefits that we experience in our relationship with God are:. By going through the dark night of the soul, we should be able to come out with both a clearer understanding of ourselves, and a complete dependence upon God. Dark, Dark Night of the Soul -- by A.
Remember how they nailed Jesus to a cross. Remember the darkness, the hiding of the Father's face. This was the path Jesus took to immortal triumph. As He is, so are we in this world! First, He wants to convince Christians that it is actually possible for us to know the beauty and perfection of Jesus Christ in our daily lives. Second, it is His desire to lead us forward into victory and blessing even as Joshua once led Israel into the promised land.
Most Christians will honestly confess that there are still spiritual frontiers before them which they have not been willing to explore. There is still ground to be taken if our object is to know Christ, to win Christ, to know the power of His resurrection, to be conformed to His death. If our object is to experience within our beings all of those things that we have in Christ judicially, we must come to the place of counting all things loss for the excellency of this knowledge.
We know our lack, but we are very slow in allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us into deeper Christian life and experience , that place where the intent of our heart is so cleansed that we may perfectly love God and worthily praise Him. In spite of our hesitation and delay and holding back, God does not give up, because the Holy Spirit is faithful and kind and patient and ever seeks to lead us forward into the life of the special kind of Christian. I well remember the caution of one of the old saints I have read who pointed out that "a persuaded mind and even a well-intentioned heart may be far from exact and faithful practice.
God will sift out those who only speculate about the claims of Christ and He will lead forward those who by His grace see Him in His beauty and seek Him in His love. The story of Gideon is an illustration of how God seeks His qualities within us and is not concerned with us just as numbers or statistics.
Gideon was about to face the enemy and he had an army of 32, soldiers Judges 7. Then the Lord said to Gideon again, "There are still too many. I can see those among you who are not prepared for what we are going to do. You will never be able to make Israelite soldiers of them. I presume that there are few preachers among us on the top side of this terrestrial ball who would have turned down those 22, , but God was putting the emphasis on quality, on those who would cooperate in the performance of the will of God.
Then Gideon took the 10, men to the river and tested them as God had directed and when this sifting was done, Gideon had an army of men. God seeks out those who are willing that their lives should be fashioned according to His own grace and love. He sifts out those who cannot see God's purpose and design for our blessing. Some of you know something of that which has been called "the dark night of the soul. You are tempted to ask, "How long can this go on? Remember the garden where He sweat blood. Remember Pilate's hall where they put on Him the purple robe and smote Him.
Remember His experience with His closest disciples as they all forsook Him and fled. Remember the journey up the hill to Calvary. Remember how they nailed Him to a cross, those six awful hours, the hiding of the Father's face. Remember the darkness and remember the surrender of His spirit in death. This was the path that Jesus took to immortal triumph and everlasting glory, and as He is, so are we in this world! Yes, there is a dark night of the soul. There are few Christians willing to go into this dark night and that is why there are so few who enter into the fight.
Crossing the Red Sea: Seven Lessons God Has For Us
It is impossible for them ever to know the morning because they will not endure the night. I think the more we learn of God and His ways and of man and his nature we are bound to reach the conclusion that we are all just about as holy as we want to be. We are all just about as full of the Spirit as we want to be. Thus when we tell ourselves that we want to be more holy but we are really as holy as we care to be, it is small wonder that the dark night of the soul takes so long!
We struggle to keep up a good front, forgetting that God says the most important thing is for us to be humble and meek as Christ gave us example. It seems that Christians are obsessed with keeping up that good front. We say we want to go to heaven when we die to see old Jordan roll, but we spend most of our time and energy down here just putting on that good front. It seems that many of us say to God, as did King Saul the apostate before us, "Oh God, honor me now before these people! We also are guilty of hiding our inner state. The Bible plainly tells us to expose our inner state to God, but we would rather cover it up.
God cannot change it if we cover it and hide it. We disguise the poverty of our spirit. If we should suddenly be revealed to those around us on the outside as Almighty God sees us within our souls, we would become the most embarrassed people in the world. If that should happen, we would be revealed as people barely able to stand, people in rags, some too dirty to be decent, some with great open sores.
Some would be revealed in such condition that they would be turned out of Skid Row. Do we think that we are actually keeping our spiritual poverty a secret , that God doesn't know us better than we know ourselves? But we will not tell Him, and we disguise our poverty of spirit and hide our inward state in order to preserve our reputation. We also want to keep some authority for ourselves. We cannot agree that the last, the final key to our lives should be turned over to Jesus Christ. Brethren, we want to have dual controls — let the Lord run it but keep a hand on the controls just in case the Lord should fail!
In this matter of perpetually seeking our own interests , we can only say that people who want to live for God often arrange to do very subtly what the worldly souls do crudely and openly. A man who doesn't have enough imagination to invent anything will still figure out a way of seeking his own interests, and the amazing thing is that he will do it with the help of some pretext which will serve as a screen to keep him from seeing the ugliness of his own behavior.
Yes, we have it among professing Christians this strange ingenuity to seek our own interest under the guise of seeking the interests of God. I am not afraid to say what I fear that there are thousands of people who are using the deeper life and Bible prophecy, foreign missions and physical healing for no other purpose than to promote their own private interests secretly. They continue to let their apparent interest in these things to serve as a screen so that they don't have to take a look at how ugly they are on the inside.
So we talk a lot about the deeper life and spiritual victory and becoming dead to ourselves — but we stay very busy rescuing ourselves from the cross. That part of ourselves that we rescue from the cross may be a very little part of us, but it is likely to be the seat of our spiritual troubles and our defeats. No one wants to die on a cross — until he comes to the place where he is desperate for the highest will of God in serving Jesus Christ.
The Apostle Paul said, "I want to die on that cross and I want to know what it is to die there, because if I die with Him I will also know Him in a better resurrection. He said, "I want a superior resurrection, a resurrection like Christ's.
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There are men and women who beg and plead for God to fill them with Himself for they know it would be for their good, but then they stubbornly resist like our own spoiled children when they are not well and they want us to help them. You try to take the child's temperature or give him medicine or call for a doctor and he will resist and howl and bawl. In the next breath he will beg for help, "Mama, I'm sick! He is stubborn and spoiled. People will pray and ask God to be filled — but all the while there is that strange ingenuity, that contradiction within which prevents our wills from stirring to the point of letting God have His way.
Those who live in this state of perpetual contradiction cannot be happy Christians.
Dark Night of the Soul
A man who is a ways on the cross, just piece after piece, cannot be happy in that process. But when that man takes his place on the cross with Jesus Christ once and for all, and commends his spirit to God, lets go of everything and ceases to defend himself — sure, he has died, but there is a resurrection that follows! If we are willing to go this route of victory with Jesus Christ, we cannot continue to be mediocre Christians , stopped halfway to the peak. Until we give up our own interests, there will never be enough stirring within our beings to find His highest will.
Why, then, does it take so long? I hope I have made it plain that it is our fault and not God's! It may be one of the quickest, shortest works that a man may know just as short or as long as your own will decrees. Many of us are hanging on to something, something that we hold dear to ourselves , something that comes between us and the Lord — it may be our spouse or our own children! God just wants to bring us out into a place of surrender so that our earthly possessions, and even our families, do not possess our wills to the point of worship. We must surrender everything in our lives to Christ, holding nothing back.
God oftentimes puts us though difficult trials to reveal to us the nature of our undying attachments to earthly things — there must not be a single thing in our earthly lives that we knowingly hold back from God. We who are Christians go through these times of testing and proving as our Lord seeks to deal with us about our treasures possessing us on this earth. With some it may be the commitment of a favorite boyfriend or girlfriend to God for His highest will.
Some people have put life's highest value upon their job and their security in this life. With some it may be a secret ambition, and it is driving a wedge between you and the Lord. Others may be possessed by the amount of your nice little nest egg lying there in the bank, and you just cannot bring yourself to quit calling it yours. You just cannot let go and that is in spite of the fact that you know you can perfectly trust the Lord and the leading of His Spirit.
Do you remember a rather comic character by the name of Sancho Panza in that well-known book, Don Quixote? There is an incident in the book in which Senor Panza clung to a window sill all night, afraid that if he let go he would plunge and die on the ground below. But when the morning light came, red-faced.
Fear kept him from letting go, but he could have been safe on the ground throughout the long night. I use that illustration to remind us that there are many professing Christians whose knuckles are white from blindly hanging on to their own window sill. The Lord has been saying, "Look on me and let go! Paul said we should be "straining toward what is ahead" Phil 3: Happy are the men and women who have given God His way?
They "press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" v. The faith of Christians is built on Presence. In thousands of hymns, we have sung of an experienced intimacy with God in Christ. We have prayed, wept, and rested in His presence. For a committed Christian, then, nothing is more devastating than Divine Absence, spiritual loneliness, the ceiling of brass meeting our every prayer. We enter the dark night, said John, as a tortuous but fruitful ascetic path to the mystical goal of union with God.
He was honored and widely cited by Catholics and Protestants alike. It seems a rather unpleasant episode, often associated with doubt, that may plague a Christian for a while but that, we hope, will soon pass. It would be one thing if this experience enveloped only, say, backsliders or immature Christians or those involved in obvious sin; but with great regularity, we find the experience in the life stories of those we think of as having been especially faithful witnesses to the faith — people such as C.
Lewis, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther. Of course, we could draw our own conclusions about why these saints have suffered thus — and secular historians have frequently done so, but their lack of spiritual credulity only serves to muddy the waters. Lewis in his late 50s finally found love. He married the object of his affections, American writer Joy Gresham; but four years later, after an agonizing battle, Joy died of cancer. During the period of intense grieving that followed, Lewis filled four note- books — first, with words of anguish and rage, then increasingly with an introspective record of the changes that this loss worked in his heart and character.
Not surprisingly, he asked the same sorts of questions that the grieving often ask: How could a good God allow this woman to die, and in such a painful way? Was He, after all, a Cosmic Sadist? Or did He even exist?