We have an enemy whose goal is to destroy our ability to see ourselves the way God sees us.

Look in the mirror long enough, and it’s easy to pick apart the things you see. It starts with your looks, moves to your abilities, then your worth, your purpose, and before long it’s hard to know why anyone even gives you the time of day. The condemning voices certainly are convincing voices. But they aren’t God’s. God calls Gideon—an unassuming, and formerly nameless Jewish boy—a “mighty warrior”. And God calls us—just as unassuming, and sometimes nameless—His. Imagine if students left middle school and high school believing that. Imagine if we, as adults, started living like we knew that. Do we let the Enemy’s voice skew our thoughts and twist our value? Or do we trust God’s freeing declaration that in Him, we are enough? We are worthy? We are accepted? Then what would it take to start acting like it?

We have an enemy whose goal is to destroy our ability to see ourselves the way God sees us.

Look in the mirror long enough, and it’s easy to pick apart the things you see. It starts with your looks, moves to your abilities, then your worth, your purpose, and before long it’s hard to know why anyone even gives you the time of day. The condemning voices certainly are convincing voices. But they aren’t God’s. God calls Gideon—an unassuming, and formerly nameless Jewish boy—a “mighty warrior”. And God calls us—just as unassuming, and sometimes nameless—His. Imagine if students left middle school and high school believing that. Imagine if we, as adults, started living like we knew that. Do we let the Enemy’s voice skew our thoughts and twist our value? Or do we trust God’s freeing declaration that in Him, we are enough? We are worthy? We are accepted? Then what would it take to start acting like it?

(Before reading this devotional, re-read Luke 15:11-32.)

Have you ever arrived somewhere and thought, “How in the world did I get here?” Maybe you zoned out one day and walked from lunch to your next class with no recollection of what happened in between. Or maybe it happened in some bigger stuff.

Maybe you felt that way at the checkout line when you handed over the credit card or the cash to buy another pair of jeans, another video game, another thing to satisfy your appetite for more. Or maybe you felt that way when you lied to your parents for the umpteenth time about where you were going and what you were going to do when you got there. Maybe you felt that way one night when you found yourself, again, on the web site you know you shouldn’t be looking at, but the urge to go there felt uncontrollable. Regardless of how, we end up in these places saying, “How in the world did I get here?”

I read this Chinese proverb recently that said, “If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.” When I first saw it, I thought, yeah, no kidding, not exactly profound. But it got stuck in my head. And it resurfaced again and again over the course of the next few days. And suddenly it seemed a lot more profound than I first thought. Because sometimes we live like that isn’t true. Sometimes we hear a voice that tells us differently, and sometimes we listen to it. Sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly, we start out in a direction and we truly believe that the outcome will not reflect the choices we are making.

When we first overspend and overindulge do we actually believe the things we own will end up owning us? When we first lie to our parents, do we honestly think it will become a habit? When we first go to the inappropriate web site, do we truly feel it will turn into an addiction? Or do we listen instead to the voice that lured us there in the first place? That if we don’t do these things, we are missing out, that there is something available to us that looks far better than our current circumstances. And as poor, as unwise, or as flat out stupid as our current choices may appear, we think that when we arrive at our destination it will be totally different. Do you think it ever really turns out that way? Ask the younger son.

“If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.” True. But do you know what might be even more true? If we keep listening to the voice of the Enemy, we will end up nowhere near where he has promised to take us. Our poor choices, influenced by a misguided voice, will lead to a poor destination. So the younger son ends up in a pigpen. And you and I end up imprisoned by our bad decisions. An addict. A slave. A liar. And we ask ourselves, how did I get here? By thinking that the voices we listened to were true, by thinking that the choices we were making were going to get us some place different than where we arrived. We end up confused, overwhelmed and possibly defeated.

Maybe one of the best things we can do in learning to overcome the Enemy is begin to work backwards. Where do you want to be? Where do you want to end up? What dream do you have for your future—a year from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now as a full-fledged adult? And then determine if the voice you are listening to is going to get you there. If you keep going the way you are headed, will you arrive where you want to, or come to your senses in the pigpen?

No one wants to wake up one morning asking, “How did I get here?” with the realization that we have a lot of cleaning up and a lot of making up to do. The younger brother had a long walk home to his father. He had a lot of backtracking to do. A lot of time to think through all of the things that had gotten him to where he was. And he ended up right where he started. Back on the farm. But this time with no cash, no inheritance and some hard-learned lessons under his belt.

So what can you do to make sure you don’t have to make the long walk back to the farm? What can you do to start quieting the Enemy’s voice today, so you don’t end up in the pigpen tomorrow? What can you do now to ensure that the direction you are headed in will get you to where you want to go?

Questions:
• Have you ever asked yourself, “How did I get here?” What were the circumstances? Have you ever heard anyone else ask this? Was it obvious to you, from the outside how they got where they were?

• What do you think was going through the younger son’s head as he was walked back to the farm? If you were in his position, what would be going through your head?

• Evaluate different areas of your life: friendships, relationships with your parents, studies, sports, relationship with God. Based on the Chinese proverb, “If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going,” where are you going in these areas?

For a long time when I heard the word “Satan” or “devil,” I had a very grade-B horror movie image come to mind. Isn’t that typically how we imagine this Prince of Darkness? Hard to take seriously, tough to see as a real threat, someone you are more inclined to see as a bunch of smoke and mirrors, an illusion that may have been scary at one point, but is much less believable in the 21st century? It can be challenging to give serious consideration to the idea of a red man with pointy ears ruling a sulfurous and fiery cavern under the earth.

So let’s not. Scratch that picture. Those pictures don’t make for good movies, and they don’t make for good reality either. Consider this instead. What if the Enemy, what if Satan was much more like the really scary movies, the ones that make you sleep with the light on? What if you threw out the idea of ghosts and goblins and opted instead for a picture much more realistic, but much more threatening, much more intentional?

You can thank a guy named Dante who wrote The Divine Comedy for coming up with the modern picture/image we have of the devil. The Bible itself doesn’t have much to say when it comes to the appearance of the Enemy, but he shows up in Scripture at the beginning, the very beginning, in Genesis. Are you familiar with the tree, the fruit, the snake and the bite that changed it all? And while that may mark one of his longer cameos on the pages of Scripture, his story doesn’t end there.

We learn lots about him simply by reading what other people say about him. His name itself is quite telling. Satan means “accuser”. If he has one objective, it is to accuse you, to accuse me and to accuse God. The apostle Peter refers to the devil as a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.

Jesus had some strong words to describe the Enemy and those who listen to his voice: “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!” (John 8:44-45 NIV).

In the Bible, there’s not one mention of a tail. Not one reference to a pointy goatee and eyebrows. Interesting. It is easy not to take that storybook image seriously, but much harder to dismiss the idea of someone out there is has made me his target, who’s objective is to deceive me, accuse me and destroy me.

C.S. Lewis, one of Christianity’s greatest modern thinkers said this, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.” I think that for far too long we have let the image of Halloween costumes with red plastic masks and rounded off pitchforks define the image we have of Satan. We dismiss him as childish, outdated and no longer relevant. We start to, as Lewis suggests, disbelieve.

And this can be dangerous. We’ve all seen the movies where the telling music, the darkened rooms, and the oblivious soon-to-be victim falls prey to the manipulative and strategic moves of the villain. The longer we act like there is no Enemy, there is no threat, there is nothing to be concerned about, the more prone we are to be caught-off guard, to be lured unknowingly into Satan’s traps.

In 6th century BC a Chinese treatise was written called The Art of War. It is considered to be one of the oldest books on military strategy, and one of the more famous quotes it is credited with is, “know your enemy”. I think the proverb could apply to us as well. We need to know our Enemy. We first need to be willing to acknowledge he exists. Then we need to learn how he works. What are his tactics? What is he known for doing? What has he done in the past, and how is that a predictor for how he will act in the future? Where are you vulnerable? Where do you need protection? How well do you know the Enemy? It may be that you need to take another look, and live a little bit more alert of his workings and his intentions.

We need to be motivated in finding the balance between the two errors Lewis refers to—to disbelieve, and to over credit. We can’t walk around like there is a boogey man around every corner, but neither can we live clueless to the Enemy’s goal for our lives. It is a delicate balance, but it is something we need to care enough about to find, otherwise we lose. Too little attention to the Enemy makes us more susceptible to his plans for us, too much attention and we live more focused on him than on Christ, distracted from the purpose God has for us. The idea is to learn to live aware of a real and dangerous Enemy, but not to live in fear. To live with Satan’s objective in mind, but not to live paralyzed. To live with an understanding of the spiritual realm at work around us, but not to live dominated by the drama. Live like you know your Enemy.


Questions:
• What kind of picture comes to your mind when you hear the word “Satan”?

• Do you take that representation of him seriously? Why or why not?

• When you start to view the Enemy the way Scripture describes him (for example, John 8:43-45 and 1 Peter 5:8), how does that change the way you perceive him?

• How would “knowing your Enemy” change the way you live in light of the existence of Satan?

We have an Enemy whose goal is to destroy our trust in God.

Most of us can recall a time when the Enemy’s voice lured us into a temptation that appeared too good to resist. On the other side, we see the error of our ways, but at the time, the whispers seemed impossible to ignore. The lies and the deception we are so quick to believe often have to do with the character of God. Is He holding out on me? Does He want me to be miserable? Are all of these rules keeping me from being truly happy? And the Enemy steadily and stealthily whispers, “Yes.” Our battle with the Enemy comes down to this one thing—whose voice do we trust? Are we willing to surrender a sense of wonder in our big God for the voice of empty promises coming from the one who is set on our destruction? In our own lives, whose voice do we allow to get the last word?

This is going to sound weird, but every one of us hears voices in our heads. It’s the voices that say, “Life would be easier if only I could or had . . . ” It’s the voices that whisper when we look in the mirror or compare ourselves to someone else. These voices are trying to lead each one of us somewhere, but is it somewhere we really want to go? Or is there a better voice to follow? Yes, there is a voice that has our best in mind. A voice that knew us before we uttered our first cry. A voice that is designed not to bring out the worst in us, but the best.