SESSION NOTES:

The workout was humid! We did some great new exercises picked up from the camp gladiator folks. This weekend was also the birthday weekend for the disadvantaged child we sponsor. We bought her presents and delivered them to her. It was an awesome experience.

WORD OF THE DAY (WOD):

Note: This is based off of a sermon by Dr. Charles Stanley. I quote him directly throughout since his words fit so perfect.

Satan’s Strategy

“If I were the devil I would assemble all my minions and my demons in my strategy room, and I’d give them your phone number, your picture, your email address, and I would review with them your weaknesses one by one.

I would tell my staff about your bouts with doubt. How I all but had you convinced that the bible was a joke. So, if I were the devil, I think I would try to take your joy. I’d try to load you with so much anxiety and fear and dread and trepidation that you couldn’t sleep at night.

The devil knows he can’t touch your Salvation because you’re a child of God bought with the blood of Christ, and no one can snatch you from your Father’s hands. He can’t take your Salvation, but boy can he take the spring from your step and the sleep from your night, and the love from your relationships.

So if I were the devil I might download a dump truck of guilt on you, and I would every time you stepped forward in faith. I would remind you of the times you fell, the times you stumbled, just last week, just two decades ago. I just keep that scrapbook of sin circulating through your mind, and I would whisper “You really think there’s enough grace in the world to cover you?”

I would leave you just in the shadow of a doubt and if that didn’t work, I would try what seems to be his most popular tool of the day, and that’s distraction.

I would post my minions on every corner every stairwell, every office and they would load on you things to do, people to see, tasks to complete, sales to make, assignments to complete, one thing after another, do this, do that, do this, do that until if at all if you even came home, you’d come home exhausted & distracted.

Busyness, clutter, hurry, catch another flight, write another report, hurry, hurry, hurry. Or distraction in the form of what you read and see, staring at a phone or a computer for hours and hours, leading life through a screen, counting likes, counting friends, how many hearts did I get? Measuring self-worth according to the number of people who looked at your Instagram.

I would keep you so busy you’d never have time to read God’s word.

I can tell you that Satan’s plan today is to keep people so busy with the things of this world that they have no time to devote to their spiritual lives. I love this acronym for BUSY – Sometimes being busy b-u-s-y just means:

Being Under Satan’s Yoke.

You see, if Satan can encourage us to get our lives so full of other things that we have no time for God, then he’s begun his work in us and the ultimate end of it will not be something pretty. You have to see the devil for who he is… The devil is a liar, the father of lies. And you can be sure he has carefully studied each one of us for a very long time.

I wonder, how long have you studied him?

The devil begins early in our life by bombarding our minds with cleverly devised patterns of little nagging thoughts of doubt & fear. The thing is, he moves slowly and cautiously. Below the radar. After all, well laid plans take time. You can be sure, we’re in a war and our enemy is Satan, not people.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (EPH 6:12 KJV)

He’ll do everything he can to distract you, and he takes his time to work out his plan. If we don’t know our enemy, we don’t have much of a chance to win over our enemy. We should remember that our enemies are not people. We must see beyond people, Satan may use people to persecute us, he may use people to lie to us or cheat us or hurt us or even kill us, but our real enemy lurks unseen in the shadows, moving people like pawns on the chessboard.

The devil is a divider – he likes to split marriages, he likes to split friendships, he likes to split any sense of community, any place there’s gossip or tension or separation or hostility or unforgiveness the devil’s marks are all over it. Think about this, what he did in the garden of Eden was separate Adam and Eve from God. And that is what he wants to do with every person – separate us from God and separate us from each other.

Satan is the opposite of Christ.

He wants us to hate God or doubt God and hate our neighbor. He dwells in the world of isolation & loneliness. Wherever you see Satan at work there’s always division, and he loves to divide people. Especially God’s people. If we could only understand that we would step back from our petty differences and realize that we’re just playing into the hand of our enemy, whose purpose is to divide. He does not know the meaning of unity; he has no concept of unity. His whole strategy is the strategy of division.

He’s the great deceiver, the great divider, and he’s the great destroyer. Think of the book of Job. When God allowed Satan access to the life of Job, what did he do? He destroyed everything – he destroyed his servants, his cattle, his children, and his family.

Satan is the destroyer.

Satan only has one plan for your life. He wants to destroy us. We should pray every day against him. We should pray that Satan would have no place in our lives. Because he comes to deceive, he comes to divide, and he comes to destroy.

There are so many people in the world are deceived by him, and their deception is very evident when they say, “I don’t believe in the devil”

One of the first things he does is to point out something in your life that you don’t have. He doesn’t remind you of how much you do have, how blessed you are, or how healthy you are.

He points out the one thing you don’t have.

He uses the same tactics he used in the garden of Eden. You’d think people would have caught on by now. He points out to Eve the one thing she doesn’t have, so that if you want to be complete you need to have it. And did it satisfy her? No. And it doesn’t satisfy people today. He creates this desire in order to get people off base, off track, if you only had that.

You can never have enough of anything that is not the will of God for your life to ever make you happy, ever make you feel complete or ever make you feel content.

Satan is perfectly happy convincing you to worship anything or anyone short of God. If he can convince you to worship a girlfriend or a boyfriend, to worship sex, if he can convince you to worship a career, or if he can convince you to give everything you have to get that new house or car, or whatever.

When we worship something, we depend upon that thing or person for our identity. We align ourselves with that thing or person so the devil knows if he can get me to worship a bass boat, then someday that bass boat is going to rot and I’m going to be disappointed and he’ll just chalk that up to another victory.

We’ll worship that person only to be rejected and heartbroken. We’ll worship that career only to be dejected and be heartbroken. We’ll go lurching through life – up and down, up and down, and finally when we get to the final days of our life, we’ll be cynical and disappointed. We’ll say life wasn’t all it was cut out to be.

For our own good God says, worship God. Worship the endless, strong, powerful, loving, radiant king of kings. Let your mind be consumed with heavenly thoughts.

Satan chooses his timing; he knows when we’re the most vulnerable, and that’s when Satan will attack. He knows exactly when to attack us, how to attack us. He knows our weakest points. Everybody has a weakness. You need to give your weaknesses to Christ before the devil uses them against you. The devil he’s an opportunist, when you’re the weakest, he’s the most evil.

The devil doesn’t control your thoughts, but he influences them. He wants to whisper thoughts of fear to us so we’ll accept them and he can control our lives.

God will never use fear to control your lives. God will never bring fear into your life to cause you to do anything. The devil wants you to believe that God’s always kind of mad at you, and he really doesn’t like you. That’s the concept of God the devil wants you to have. Go to Jesus when you’re feeling fearful. He will tell you He knows exactly what you’re feeling and let Me help you overcome it.

Fear is expecting the devil to move. Faith is expecting God to move.

Fear is the main thing that Satan uses to try to control people. Fear keeps you from doing so many things in life. Don’t let fear steal your life. Don’t let fear steal your relationships. Don’t let fear steal your joy. God wants you to have a good life but one thing’s for sure – you have an enemy and his name is Satan, and he does not want you to enjoy your life. He wants you to be afraid all the time. The devil would love for you to live by fear, because when you’re afraid you run away.

What you need to run to is the Bible. The Bible gives you two tools: number one pray – pray when the devil knocks at your door, you don’t need to deal with the devil on your own. All you need to do is turn to God.

Glance at the devil but gaze at Christ.

The second tool is God’s Word. Arm yourself with God’s Word. Arm yourself with God’s Word – load your pistol with scriptures and keep a finger on the trigger. Jesus reacted and responded to temptation by quoting scripture. Jesus responded to temptation from the devil by doing the same thing you can do, and that is he quoted scripture.

God’s book is enough.

Jesus overcame temptation not with special voices or supernatural signs, but by remembering and quoting scripture – that’s it.

You just need to read the Bible, and to read it and receive it. God’s word is an indispensable weapon in the same way prayer is essential in this ongoing warfare.

Pray long and hard. Pray for your brothers and sisters and use the two tools – God’s word and prayer. And the conviction that God’s spirit in you is greater than the devil of this the world.