In the last post on this, I suspect I said something that left some people baffled.
I said that the other side (world, demonic) is
very accurate on our proclivity to sin.
Let me make it clearer.
Those of us who have travelled a lot will tell
you some strange things we have seen.
You will go to a new place where nothing is
familiar, even the language is strange with a mixed team, probably workmates or
something similar.
It is interesting that the whoremonger will
have gotten a whore in the shortest time even in a place a normal person sees no
trace of whoredom.
The drug user will have gotten their dose in a
few short minutes.
The alcoholic using those concentrated and
illegal concoctions will be swaying side by side before you have finished
eating your plate of food.
How are they able to see those things when they
are hidden from the rest?
I dare say that they each release a spiritual
scent. A scent that is discernible by the spiritually alert (from the other
side of course, though God can give discernment to a few in His kingdom for
particular purposes).
It is a scent that is very ‘visible’ that one
does not need to explain themselves to be understood.
How many ministers have not experienced shock
when someone you have never met calls you by your spiritual function? How many
ministers have not met a mad man (or woman) calling out to their spiritual
position? How many have not gone to a new church in a new place where nobody
knows them yet they are kindly called upon to share the word to a congregation
even when they had made themselves as inconspicuous as possible?
You see, Paul was not the first or last person
for whom demons were announcing their ministry as happened in Acts 16. Even
Jesus had to restrain those announcers.
What I am saying is that demonic (or the world,
to be polite) spirit-led persons are acutely aware of the spiritual temperature
around whoever they encounter.
What does this have to do with our topic?
Everything.
And when the devil had ended all the
temptation, he departed from him for a season. (Luke 4:13)
You see, the devil came to Jesus at His
weakest.
He was very hungry from not having eaten for
forty days.
And we know he was not tempting Him to try to
perform a miracle because he knew Jesus could easily convert stones to bread.
The temptation therefore went something like this.
You are hungry and you are powerful. Why not
combine the two realities to sort yourself out?
But I want us to realize that the devil came to
Jesus ONLY when Jesus was at His lowest physical and spiritual point.
And he left Him so that he could look for
another opportune moment.
You realize that the devil never came to Jesus
haphazardly. Any time you see Him being confronted He will be at a position
when it was very easy to fall, either from pride or exhaustion.
I am saying that the devil can smell the state
of your spiritual vitality from afar.
And he does it as he is always hammering at
your armor to see how quickly you are repairing the dents and breaches thus
created.
Look also at Job.
It is at the time he is thinking that death is
better than life that his wife (the person closest to him) asks him to curse
God and die.
Let me go to the animal world.
Lions do not put down the big game quickly. I
want us to realize that they will resort to the big animals when they are left
with no options since the weak and sick are completely protected by their herds
They will attack and bite and injure as much as
they can, leaving some of them wounded, even dead from the effort.
In a day or two they will return and do the
same. This of course because the injured will be unable to keep up with the
herd.
They will continue until their target becomes
too weak to fight back then they kill and eat it.
Isn’t that how the devil deals with us?
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary
the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: (1Peter 5:8)
We are therefore dealing with an enemy who is
relentless with his pursuit.
He is never a hit or miss type of adversary.
He will walk with us all the time, hitting and
scratching us here and there until we have given him the littlest space to
penetrate our armor, either from exhaustion or anger at those petty little
scratches due to their consistency.
That is when he will bring in his most potent
weapon to fell us in one swell hit. But it will not be as huge as we might
think.
That final hit did not just come but was the
culmination of a consistent weakening of our resistance.
We could call it the straw that broke the horse’s
back as is said.
And a straw on its own, even thousands of them
have no capacity to do anything to a horse’s back.
But that back became so loaded that it required
that single straw to break.
That is the journey of sin I am talking about
here.
I believe that God will give me another chance
to build on this, especially on what we will need to do to be always ready to
overcome long before those last straws come.
But it is important to repeat the statement
that is the backbone of this post
Sin is not an activity or event. Sin is a
journey, a journey whose end is the actual act of sin.
The sin seed was growing in our hearts for a
long time until it finally brought fruit that is the actual sin.
That tells us that to effectively deal with sin
we must tackle it from the seed point instead of the fruit stage since plucking
a fruit can have no impact on the tree bearing it.
