How We Cooperate with Satan’s Tactics

In our girls group at church we have started going through the book, Lies Young Women Believe by Nancy Leigh DeMoss and Dannah Gresh. It makes a really interesting read and is practical and challenging.

• He uses our own desires – ‘Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then when desire has conceived it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown brings forth death.’ James 1:14,15. Eve had a desire for knowledge and also for good food, which just shows that the desires themselves may not be wrong, but can lead to wrong things.
• He promises to fulfil them – the key thing here is that while the desires may be OK, the way that Satan promises to fulfil them is the wrong way. He promised to fulfil Eve’s desires by a path that meant disobedience to God.
• He uses lies as a bait –a lot of the lies have elements of truth to them. But that is why they are so dangerous – because they are in part truthful they are easier for us to believe and justify. In the garden of Eden, Satan lied and said, ‘You will not surely die.’ The truth in that is that she wouldn’t die straight away, but it was also a lie because she would die eventually, and of course it was a direct contradiction of what God said.

But we can’t blame Satan for everything – we cooperate with his lies, just like Eve did:

• By listening to the lies – she could have run from the serpent but instead she stayed and listened to him. In the book we were reading it pointed out that there are many ways that we listen to lies, like through music, TV, magazines and films.
• By dwelling on the lies – she engaged with him in conversation. If we don’t get rid of the lies in our head immediately, we start dwelling on them and thinking about them.
• By believing the lies – she believed the serpent, just like we believe many lies when we hear them enough times or if they sound reasonable, or enough people say them.
• By acting on the lies – she then acted on them, and ate the fruit.

• Run – 2 Timothy 2:22 says  ^‘Flee also youthful lusts; but pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart’. Eve could have run from the serpent in the garden and got away from the temptation. We need to run from the source of these lies and stop our minds from dwelling on them.
• Spend time retraining your mind with the truth – instead of believing and dwelling on the lies, we need to stop those thoughts. But it’s not enough to just stop them – it’s like saying, “Don’t think about an elephant”. You’ll start picturing one! We need to replace the lie with truth from God’s Word. Like if you’re thinking the lie, ‘I can’t cope’, replace it with ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ Or if you’re thinking the lie, ‘Nobody loves me’ replace it with the truth that ‘God loves me’, ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…’

If you want to buy the book and read more you can get it from Amazon UK, or Amazon.com

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