My own daughter made this for me! Can you believe it?

Stephanie Newton and John Ramminger, not to mention all the people in front of the camera, helped to put together this going-away video, which was shown in Vinebranch last Sunday. Enjoy!

Kenyan UMC pastor Paul Matheri speaks at the North Georgia Annual Conference in Athens last week, flanked by my friends Bill and Chat Coble.

The theme of last week’s North Georgia Annual Conference in Athens was “Bridges to Mission.” My friends Bill and Chat Coble, UMVIM missionaries, talked to the 3,000 or so people there about their work in Kenya. They also had a question-and-answer session last Wednesday evening, at which Kenyan pastor and district superintendent Paul Matheri spoke.

Yesterday, Bill and Chat gave a testimony in both Vinebranch services about their work in Kenya—and I’m sure they inspired some of my congregation as much as they’ve inspired me. They are two of my heroes. Find out more about  their ministry, Start With One Kenya, here.

I put together the following video, which I showed in yesterday’s services. In the video, Chat is teaching a church in an IDP camp about the life-saving water filters that their ministry distributes.

In Part 1 of this sermon, I talked about the skepticism we usually have about Satan’s literal existence. In this sermon, I talk about the ways that Satan and the other “principalities and powers” often attack us. This sermon is both a warning and an encouragement for Christians: a warning because we need to take seriously the deadly Enemy that we face and an encouragement because we have all the power necessary to defeat this Enemy.

Sermon Text: Ephesians 6:10-17

The following is my original sermon text with footnotes.

I met a man recently named Bob, who goes to Hampton UMC, the church that I will soon be pastoring. Bob retired from Delta Airlines. But before that, he was in the Air Force. He flew U-2 spy planes 70,000 feet up in the air, at the edge of outer space, over enemy territory, at the height of the Cold War—probably while being fired upon by enemy missiles! I didn’t ask him where he flew U-2s, but I know U-2s routinely flew top secret missions over the Soviet Union, and China, and Cuba, and North Korea. They were used for surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence-gathering.

Today, in Part 2 of our sermon “Devil in the Details,” I want us to fly over enemy territory ourselves and gather intelligence on our Enemy, which we identified last week as Satan and the “principalities and powers” that Paul talks about in today’s text. I talked about the challenge we modern people often face in believing in a literal Satan—even though Jesus himself certainly did. I also said that if Satan did exist—and he does—he would undoubtedly want us not to believe in him—then he could do so much of his work unimpeded.

In his commentary on this text, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright said that whenever he writes on the subject of Satan and spiritual warfare, odd things happen. “One time,” he writes, “a workman outside the house drove a nail through a main electricity cable, and I lost half an hour’s writing on the word processor. Sometimes domestic crises suddenly arise and distract me. Today,” he said, “the computer jammed completely just when I was about to begin writing. I have come to accept this as normal—and to be grateful that this is all that has happened. So far.” He writes, “I have noticed over the years that the topic of spiritual warfare is itself the subject of spiritual warfare.”^[1]

Did you get what he just said? Tom Wright—a retired bishop in the Church of England, the prolific and bestselling author of Simply Christian, a leading New Testament scholar with a doctorate from Oxford University, a funny and down-to-earth guy who once matched wits with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report—this brilliant man just blamed Satan for breaking his computer when he was writing the spiritual warfare. In fact, he said, Satan does this sort of thing all the time in an effort to prevent the truth from getting out.

Some of you are probably like, “Duh, Brent, that’s how Satan works.” But I suspect many more of you are like me a few years ago—someone who never believed that Satan did things like that to us. I mean, maybe… maybe… Satan is like that little devil on your left shoulder whispering “yes, yes, yes” in one ear while you have the little angel on your right shoulder whispering “no, no, no” in the other. But to think that the devil can actually affect stuff in our physical world—can actually manipulate things and people—in order to harm us or harm the work of God’s kingdom.

Brothers and sisters, if that’s true, haven’t many if not most of us Methodists at least, badly underestimated the power of Satan? I have!

On his blog recently, another theologian I admire, Baylor University professor Roger Olson, said that similar things have happened to him. He used to teach a seminary class on religious cults and the occult. For research, he went to occult bookstores—which in his experience are distressingly easy to find. One day, he was going to one shop that had a reputation as a hangout for both Wiccans—witches—and Satanists. Olson writes:

I drove up to the bookstore, parked across the street and attempted to get out of my car… I found myself literally unable to get out… I sat there for a very long time trying to exit the car but could not. It wasn’t fear; I’ve been in many occult and esoteric bookshops and was not afraid of any mere bookstore. As I sat there pinned inside my car by some mysterious force, I remembered praying for divine protection. Eventually I pulled away and never did go inside that bookstore.

Sound hard to believe? Neither Roger Olson nor N.T. Wright are crackpots; and they’re not gullible people. I talked to a Methodist clergy friend who, when he was in seminary, used to work with a street ministry that ministered to junkies and prostitutes. From that vantage point he had an opportunity to see Satan’s handiwork up close and personal. He shared with me a few stories along these same lines—stories in which Satan physically manipulated people and events in a mysterious but direct sort of way. My friend is no crackpot either.

But the fact that Satan works in this way shouldn’t surprise us because the Bible tells us that he does. In Job 1 and 2, Satan is shown having command of armies, natural disasters, and illnesses. In the gospels, Satan offers to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world,^[2] which implies that Satan has firm control of kingdoms, nations, and empires. And why wouldn’t he? Three times in the gospel of John, Jesus refers to Satan as the “ruler of this world”^[3] Paul calls him the “ruler of the power of the air.” Also in the gospels, Satan causes sickness and suffering. As we saw a few weeks ago, Satan gave the apostle Paul a physical ailment that Paul referred to as his “thorn in the flesh.”^[4] Far from just having power to cause illness and disease, however, according to Hebrews, Satan even “holds the power of death.”^[5]

Satan has the power to take possession of non-believers, as he does throughout the gospels. Short of taking full control of them, however, we see him influencing people and acting through them. This is true of Judas when he betrayed Jesus. This is true, Paul says, of false teachers and false apostles in the churches. This is true even of Peter, when Jesus rebukes him, saying, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” If Satan can manipulate and use Jesus’ closest disciple, then it goes without saying that Satan can manipulate and use even good people and good Christians—including people like you and me.

To say the least, we’ve come a long way from the cartoon devil on our shoulder whispering temptations in our ears. But it should go without saying, I hope, that Satan and his fellow demons also do the thing that we most often associate with them: which is to tempt us to sin, tempt us to doubt, tempt us to lose faith; to trick us and trap us; to manipulate us inwardly; to make us question our salvation and question God’s love for us—all in an effort to see to it that we’ll either wind up in hell ourselves, or that we’ll be a poisonous influence on others, or that we’ll utterly fail in our effort to be a good witness for those who need to come to a saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

C.S. Lewis’s insightful, funny, and slightly depressing book The Screwtape Letters describes this type of Satanic work better than anything else I’ve read. As I mentioned last week, the book is a series of letters written by a demon named Screwtape to his inexperienced demon nephew Wormwood on how to cause the spiritual ruin of his human “patient,” an Englishman who’s recently become a Christian.

He tells his nephew that all of us Christians experience peaks and valleys in our spiritual lives. Sometimes even God, whom Screwtape refers to as “our Enemy,” wants us to go through valleys. When we feel spiritually dry or empty, however, Satan tries his hardest to convince us that God isn’t there anymore, so we’ll abandon the faith. As Screwtape warns his nephew, “Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”^[6]

Do you ever find yourself in a spiritual desert? Don’t listen to Satan’s voice telling you that God isn’t there.

In another place, Screwtape says that Satan tries to make us Christians feel really guilty about our sins—to really wallow in them, to beat ourselves up about them—to do anything but act upon them. Satan loves when we feel things without letting our feelings influence our will. Screwtape tells Wormwood that God doesn’t want us Christians to think too much of our sins: “once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.”^[7]

Do you keep on beating yourself up because of past sins, even though you’ve confessed and repented. Even though God makes it clear in his Word that he forgives you? Stop it. That’s the devil speaking to you.

Satan also wants to prevent us from praying. He suggests to us that prayer is a waste of time Screwtape tells Wormwood to follow a “heads I win, tails you lose” strategy. He writes, “If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and ‘therefore it would have happened anyway’, and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.”^[8]

Do you ever experience doubt? Next time it happens, ask yourself: is it possible that Satan or his forces are actively planting these ideas in your mind?

In another part of the book, Wormwood’s patient is having trouble with his mother, just normal, everyday irritations that causes a great deal of strife between them. So Screwtape arranges for the demon assigned to the patient’s mother to conspire with Wormwood to make the whole thing far worse than it would otherwise be. Can you imagine for a moment that demons are conspiring with one another to harm you, to make you lose your faith, to make your existing problems worse, to make your relationships worse, to make your life worse? I’m with Lewis: I believe strongly that they are!

Listen: I believe that Satan is real not because I’ve had some dramatic, supernatural encounter with dark spiritual forces—at least not yet. And it’s not primarily because of what the Bible says on the subject—as I said last week, I was really good at rationalizing that away. And it’s not primarily because of what all of these really smart people have written to convince me of the reality of Satan—although I find their words compelling. No… I’ve became convinced that Satan is real mostly through painful personal experience—by being attacked by the devil of course but also, at times, acting like the devil—going along with the devil’s plan instead of God’s plan: at times hurting others; at times hurting myself; at times hurting my Christian witness.

So when I hear Stephanie’s testimony I think, “I wish I had a pastor, professor, or friend somewhere along the way who tried to warn me that spiritual warfare is real and dangerous—that Satan is real and dangerous—especially when we try to obey God, answer God’s call, and do important work for God’s kingdom.” There’s been a steady drumbeat of articles and blog posts recently about the alarming dropout rate and burnout rate among us pastors and what’s behind it? What’s causing it? Is it because we’re overworked? Is it because we’re under-appreciated? Is it because we have “compassion fatigue.” Oh please! When I read those things, I want to say, “Maybe it’s all those things for all I know… But let’s get real: it’s also Satan!”

So this is your pastor warning you right now: Satan is real. He wants to harm you. He wants to harm your family and people you love. He wants you to abandon your Christian faith. He’s very resourceful and opportunistic. And as you grow in your faith, look for his attacks to become more forceful and aggressive.

Among other things, Paul tells us to put on the “helmet of salvation.” A helmet protects our head. Because with our head, we remember important truths: We remember that because we have confessed with our lips “Jesus is Lord” and believed in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved.^[9] Amen? We remember that the Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.^[10] Amen? We remember that our Father loves us with a love from which “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us.”^[11] Amen? We remember that “he who began a good work in us will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”^[12] We remember that “one who is in us is greater than the one who is in the world.”^[13]

We remember that the Lord is our light and our salvation; whom shall we fear? the Lord is the strength of our lives; of whom shall we be afraid?^[14]

And the answer is no one… Except God of course.

Certainly not the devil! Because he’s already been defeated by our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. And you might say, “Then why is he still fighting so hard?” To which I say why did the Germans keep fighting after D-Day—that was the decisive battle that secured the Allies’ victory. Christ has won the decisive battle for us. Since he’s won the big one, he’ll give us the power to win all the little ones!

In a stanza of his hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is our God,” Martin Luther wrote:

And though this world, with devils filled,
should threaten to undo us,
we will not fear, for God hath willed
his truth to triumph through us.
The Prince of Darkness grim,
we tremble not for him;
his rage we can endure,
for lo, his doom is sure;
one little word shall fell him.

If you remember Stephanie’s testimony from earlier, then you remember that “one little word”: Jesus. Amen?

In the following passage Screwtape discusses with Wormwood the Satanic lie of being “in love” as the basis for marriage. I could have used these thoughts in my recent sermon on marriage. (Remember that “the Enemy” is God and “our Father” is Satan.)

The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father’s first great victory, we have rendered the former very difficult to them. The latter, for the last few centuries, we have been closing up as a way of escape. We have done this through the poets and novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually shortlived, experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding. This idea is our parody of an idea that came from the Enemy…

In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to regard as the basis for marriage a highly-coloured and distorted version of something the Enemy really promises as its result. Two advantages follow. In the first place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves ‘in love’, and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion.^[†]

Let me highlight that last line: They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion.

† C.S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters” in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperOne, 2002), 236, 238.

A couple of Olson’s recent blog posts (here and here) were one inspiration for this current sermon series on Satan and spiritual warfare. (We Methodists don’t talk about those things, either!)

In this first post, Olson offers reasons why many modern Christians shy away from the topic of Satan. One reason that spoke to my own experience is our desire for cultural respectability: believing in Satan is uncool, unsophisticated—childish even—and don’t we know better now? I’ve already blogged about that.

Another reason, however, which I hadn’t previously considered is the following:

A third reason may be the influence of philosophical reasoning, channeled through rational apologetics, among evangelicals (including many who consider themselves moderate, centrist). A big part of such apologetics is theodicy—the explanation of evil in light of the existence of God. Theodicy rarely finds place for Satan or demons in explaining the existence of evil in God’s universe.

Think about this: He’s saying that Christian apologists themselves often argue for God’s goodness in a world filled with evil without resorting to Satan or the demonic. Having read some apologetics myself, I happen to know that he’s right. My systematic theology professor at Emory, who otherwise believed strongly in defending the faith, never said a word about Satan when he was giving an account of evil in an otherwise good Creation.

At the very least, without Satan, theodicy becomes more difficult. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but theologian Michael Green, in his magisterial book I Believe in Satan’s Downfall, would.

I believe the Christian doctrines of God, of man and of salvation are utterly untenable without the existence of Satan. You simply cannot write him out of the human story and then imagine that the story is basically unchanged. At the beginning, at the mid-point of time and at the end, the devil has an indelible place in Christian theology. The fallen nature of man and of everything he does, the self-destructive tendencies of every civilisation history has known, the prevalence of disease and natural disasters, together with “nature, red in tooth and claw” unite to point to a great outside Enemy. I would like to ask theologians who are sceptical about the devil how they can give a satisfactory account of God if Satan is a figment of the imagination. Without the devil’s existence, the doctrine of God, a God who could have made such a world and allowed such horrors as take place daily within it, is utterly monstrous. Such a God would be no loving Father. He would be a pitiless tyrant.^[†]

Strong words! Keep in mind: I don’t entirely agree with Green here. I think he overstates the case. But it’s undeniably true that if we reassert Satan’s important role in Christian theology and doctrine, we avoid or better explain many problems with theodicy. And remember: we had no good reason to “write him out of the human story” in the first place.

† Michael Green, I Believe in Satan’s Downfall (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 20-1.

If we are Christians, we are at war. We face an Enemy who constantly works against our health and well-being, our family and friends, our success, our happiness, and—not least—the work that we do on behalf of God’s kingdom in this world. As if this struggle weren’t bad enough, many of us modern Christians also struggle to believe that the Enemy even exists. If Satan were real, wouldn’t he want to keep us in the dark about his existence? 

Sermon Text: Ephesians 6:10-17

The following is my original sermon manuscript with footnotes and graphics.

When Stephanie and I were planning out my last few worship services here in Vinebranch, she asked me, “Is there something that you’ve been wanting to preach over these past several years that you haven’t gotten to? If so, you’ve only got a few weeks left.” I said, “No. Nothing I can think of. Although there are probably several things I’d like to re-preach—preach over again—because I messed it up or didn’t do it well the first time.” Then I half-jokingly said, “How about a do-over sermon series?” Do-over! Remember those days on the playground or ball field? I call do-over on some scriptures and topics that I’ve gotten wrong or haven’t done justice to in the past. Stephanie thought that this was a great idea. In fact, she was a little over-enthusiastic about it, if you ask me!

I’m like, “What are you trying to tell me, Stephanie? Do I need to do a lot of do-overs?”

So this two-part sermon series on spiritual warfare represents a “do-over” for me. It’s not that I haven’t dealt with the topic at all over these past six years, but I haven’t said enough about it. And I haven’t said it with enough urgency. And I haven’t said it emphatically enough—that we face a deadly Enemy in our Christian lives every day: We are at war. Every day we fight the battle. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: if we lose this war, we may lose our very souls and go to hell. Or, at the very least, if we wage this war poorly, we will bring upon ourselves a great deal of needless suffering, heartache, and frustration.

Or, worse, we may even hinder other people—people we love; people we want to have with us in heaven, in resurrection—from receiving God’s gift of forgiveness and eternal life for themselves.

So… I call “do-over.”

The first thing I need to say about spiritual warfare is that hell is real. Jesus tells us that hell is a place that was prepared for the devil and his angels.^[1] Jesus tells us in the parable of the Sheep and Goats, among many other places, that at final judgment some people will be sent there. Last week’s scripture from Revelation 21 makes that point even as it describes heaven with some of the most beautiful poetic imagery imaginable. Hell is the ultimate wet blanket, I know. And to preach it makes me sound more like John the Baptist than John the Methodist—although one Methodist named John, John Wesley, certainly had no trouble preaching it!

These days we Methodists are the worst when it comes to talking about hell. And I completely understand our reluctance: Given that so many of us who have placed our faith in Christ have experienced first-hand the reality that God is “gracious… and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing,”^[2] we have an impulse to believe that God will have mercy on everyone in the end—that God will forgive everyone; that God will save everyone; that hell, even if it exists, will ultimately be empty.

All I will say to this idea is that God wants to save everyone and God wants hell to be empty. I believe that as much as Rob Bell believes it in his controversial book Love Wins. Bell devotes a chapter to discussing the question, “Does God always get what he wants?” And he implies—because Rob Bell rarely comes out and just says what he means, he just implies—that if we believe that God always gets what he wants, then why do we imagine that, ultimately, God won’t get what we wants when it comes to saving everyone?

My answer is that God wants more than just one thing. It’s true that Jesus died on the cross because God wants to save everyone, but God also wants to make sure that justice is done. Name any atrocity in the world—for example, Sandy Hook last December—and imagine the sin of Sandy Hook not being punished. Is that what any of us wants? Why would God want that? We would not worship the God we worship if we believed God shrugged off that kind of evil! No, if God cares about justice, he cannot let evil stand. And if we know ourselves and our hearts, and know the sin that resides there, we know that we deserve punishment for our share of evil. So Jesus Christ, God’s Son, died on the cross in part so that justice would be done—that the penalty for all kinds of evil and injustice would be paid. Otherwise all of us sinners would stand guilty before God because all of us deserve hell. The cross is the means by which we are saved from hell.

But… the only way that we can receive the benefit of Christ’s atoning death on the cross is through faith.

And people who refuse God’s offer to save them through Christ go to hell. It’s as if God has thrown the life preserver in the water: it’s floating right in front of everyone who’s drowning in their sin. If they won’t grab hold and receive the only means of their rescue, what’s God supposed to do about it?

Is he supposed to force them to take it? Is love something God could coerce from people and still call it love?

No. The sad fact is that many people resist God’s love and the good news of his Son. I used to think that given enough grace and enough time—even an endless amount of time—everyone would freely choose God’s gift of salvation in Christ, but why would that be the case? I preached last week that what we do now matters for eternity—why would that not also include the choices we make concerning God and his gospel on this side of eternity? What we know for sure is that God has given us this time in their lives to repent and turn to him. And we know for sure that God is calling us Christians to help persuade them to believe in the gospel. It’s deeply uncomfortable to think that people we love—family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers— might go to hell. But it’s good for us to think about it from time to time. Because it reminds us of our urgent mission to reach them with the life-changing love of God in Jesus Christ! Time is running out.

But the main reason I’m talking about hell today is because we need to realize the stakes of this battle that we’re in. All of these evil spiritual forces that Paul describes in today’s scripture—the “principalities and powers,” the “cosmic powers of this present darkness,” the spiritual forces in the heavenly realms—all of them have one main goal. Which is to do everything in their power to ensure that you and me and everyone we love will wind up in hell alongside these demons for all eternity. Does that thought anger you? Does it make you want to fight?

Good! Let’s give ’em a fight, for heaven’s sake. Let’s not make it so easy on them!

Of course… In order to fight this fight well… In order to resist Satan and all the demonic forces that work with him, it helps to believe that he and his forces are real. And this may pose an even bigger problem for us than believing that hell is real.

Some of you have read C.S. Lewis’s insightful and depressingly funny book The Screwtape Letters. The book is a series of letters written by a senior demon named Screwtape to his young and inexperienced demon nephew, Wormwood. In Lewis’s depiction of the spiritual realm, each demon has a “patient”—a human being who’s living and breathing right now. It’s the demon’s job to lead that person to hell. In one of the letters, Screwtape discusses whether or not to let the patient know the truth: that Satan and demons are real. There are benefits to both, Screwtape says, but official policy these days is keep humans in the dark about Satan’s existence—to turn us into into skeptics and materialists. To make us believe that there’s really nothing beyond this world of time, space, and matter. By the way, Lewis depicts hell as a large, unthinking bureaucracy, and if you’ve ever waited in line at the department of motor vehicles, you know he’s not far off!

But from Satan’s perspective, it’s very easy to see why he’d want us to be in the dark about his existence. Keith Green wrote a song in the ’70s from Satan’s point of view. He sings: “I used to have to sneak around/ But now they just open their doors/ You know, no one’s watching for my tricks/ Because no one believes in me anymore.”

Screwtape goes on to say that it’s not hard to keep the humans from finding out the truth about demons because, after all, he says, “‘devils’ are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination.” He writes, “If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that… he therefore cannot believe in you.”^[3]

And that’s the number one obstacle to believing in Satan: he’s become a cartoon character. He doesn’t seem real.

I grew up in a time and place and church in which pastors and evangelists used to talk about Satan a lot. Especially related to rock and roll, which was my passion even then. I had neighbors down the street who only listened to an “easy listening station” in Atlanta called WPCH—“Peach” Radio. It was literally elevator music back then. Unlike pop and rock, “Peach” didn’t play music with those Satanic drums. I kid you not: One of the children told me, in all seriousness, that he couldn’t listen even to “Christian rock” because the problem wasn’t simply the words, but also the beat itself—which tribes in faraway lands would use to summon demons.

I’ve told you before about a good friend, Chuck, who gave a testimony in youth group and smashed all of his rock and heavy metal records—because he believed that Satan played a large role in the music. In fact, a tape circulated around youth group in which a preacher, a former disc jockey himself, detailed all the ways in which Satan was behind much of our favorite music. The problem is, when when you find out later that the Canadian band Rush, for instance, really doesn’t stand for “Raised Under Satan’s House,” and they really didn’t worship the devil, well… Satan seems less real.

And let’s not forget Dana Carvey’s very funny “Church Lady” character on Saturday Night Live. The Church Lady saw Satan everywhere, in all places and in all people. In one skit, she even rearranged the letters of the name of that jolly old man from the North Pole in order to reveal his true identity.

You get the idea: all of these cultural influences combined to make Satan seem less than real to me. So much so that even before I went to seminary, I mostly stopped believing in a literal Satan. And seminary didn’t help: We mostly avoided the topic. Or we learned more sophisticated ways of thinking about the devil—that he is merely a symbol for the evil that human beings do. Of course, if that’s true, then what about Jesus? The gospels describe Jesus routinely casting out demons, speaking to demons, speaking about demons, teaching about Satan, being tempted by Satan. What do we make of all that? Was Jesus mistaken about the devil?

My seminary answer was, well, yes… But I could explain! In Jesus, God became human; to be human is to be limited in knowledge; therefore, Jesus was a product of his time and place. Everyone believed that mental illness was caused by demons back then. So when Jesus was healing these kinds of illnesses, he—along with disciples and onlookers—believed he was exorcising demons. He was mistaken, but being mistaken is no sin.

Finally, I had one professor, at least—thank God—who told me how ridiculous that argument was, and after a while I started to believe him.

As one theologian said: “If Jesus was mistaken on a matter as vital as whether or not there is a great Adversary to God and man, why should we take him as our teacher on anything else?”—including, by the way, questions about whether God loves us like a father or freely forgives our sins. “It will not do,” he writes, “simply to take those areas of teaching of Jesus which we like and regard them as coming from God, while rejecting those areas of his acknowledged teaching which do not appeal to us… The fact that Jesus taught so clearly the existence of Satan is the most powerful reason for his followers to take the same stance and act accordingly.”^[4]

Are we doing that?

Someone warned me recently, “Brent, you don’t want to overemphasize the devil.” And I’m like, “You’re right: I want to emphasize the devil exactly as much as Jesus does! I want to take the devil exactly as seriously as scripture does! Can we just start there?”

But let me say one more word about skepticism for those of you who struggle to believe in Satan’s existence: Is it really so hard to believe? If you’re already a Christian, that means that you already believe in God—one invisible Spirit beyond our world that science can never prove. And you already believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus—another thing that science can never prove. And you already believe that God created the universe and everything in it, including you and me. Is it, therefore, really so hard to believe that God also created another form of life, spiritual beings—some of whom, like human beings, chose to rebel against God—one of whom, Satan, is their leader? The biggest hurdle, if you want to call it that, is believing in God. Once you clear that hurdle, you may as well take the little baby step of faith and believe in Satan, as well.

And why not? If Satan is real, wouldn’t that better explain a lot of the struggles and challenges we face in life?

In other words, if what I’m arguing is true, we don’t struggle to be faithful Christians simply because we’re born into sin and it’s deeply ingrained within us—although we are and it is. And we don’t struggle to be faithful Christians simply because of all the evil influences from other people or systems or institutions or culture—although we constantly face pressure to conform to their sinful patterns.

But we also struggle to be faithful Christians because we have an Enemy that’s so much larger than we are, so much more powerful than we are, so much more evil and destructive than we’re capable of being at our worst. And this Enemy severely tempts us. And this Enemy constantly works against us—against our health and well-being, against our family and friends, against our success, against our happiness, and against the work that we do on behalf of God’s kingdom in this world.

It’s not that we say, “The devil made me do it,” but we understand that the devil—quite literally—makes it a hell of a lot easier!

Is it possible that a lightbulb is coming on? Can we think of times in our own lives, in own own experience—perhaps even now—when, despite our best efforts, despite our best faith, despite our best intentions, we find ourselves teetering on the edge, and we just might fall. Is it possible to believe in those moments that there’s an active force at work in our world and in our lives trying to make us fall? Is it possible to believe that we “wrestle not against flesh and blood”?

If so, does that thought humble us and make us want to fall on our knees and pray? If so, we have our Enemy exactly where we want him.

I’ll continue this discussion next week…

That being said, my point remains: Our lives and our bodies are not ours to do with as we please. They belong to God. I’m sure of that.

C.S. Lewis makes this point in powerful ways throughout his writing. In Chapter 21 of The Screwtape Letters, for instance, the demon Screwtape describes a problem with which I frequently struggle: my sense that time belongs to me rather than to God. Referring to his nephew Wormwood’s Christian “patient,” he writes:

Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him… You must zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

The assumption that time belongs to human beings, Screwtape says, is absurd: time comes to us, like every good thing we experience, as “pure gift.” This would be clear to Wormwood’s man if he only thought about it. He’s a Christian, after all. He is, in theory,

committed to a total service of the Enemy [i.e., God]; and if the Enemy appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that total service for even one day, he would not refuse. He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing harder than listening to the conversation of a foolish woman; and hw would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one half-hour in that day the Enemy said ‘Now you may go and amuse yourself’. Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to realise that he is actually in this situation every day…

The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!¹

† C.S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters” in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperOne, 2002), 245-6.

I believe the seven sermons of this series are among the best I’ve preached. To be sure, they were outside of my comfort zone—but isn’t that often where we do our best work?

Here they are, all in one place: