Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.
It is Satan's constant effort to misrepresent the character of God, the nature of sin, and the real issues at stake in the great controversy. His sophistry lessens the obligation of the divine law and gives men license to sin. At the same time he causes them to cherish false conceptions of God so that they regard Him with fear and hate rather than with love. The cruelty inherent in his own character is attributed to the Creator; it is embodied in systems of religion and expressed in modes of worship.
The nature of the enemy's warfare in your life is to cause you to become discouraged and to cast away your confidence. Not that you would necessarily discard your salvation, but you could give up your hope of God's deliverance. The enemy wants to numb you into a coping kind of Christianity that has given up hope of seeing God's resurrection power.
Faith in God will elevate you to next level blessings.
Fight your battles through prayer,And win your battles through faith.
It is more important to go slow and gain the lessons you need along the journey then to rush the process and arrive at your destination empty.
We do well to be reminded that the devil hates a praying leader and a praying church. When we begin to pray, we pick a fight with the devil at a whole new level. Yet, our calling is to be praying menaces to the enemy.
Many Christians... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness.
If you want to fight hell and the power of darkness that seek to destroy the hearts of our daughters, I know a type of spiritual warfare that creates value in a daughter's spirit. It is called "Taking your Daughter out for tea" or "Going to Her Soccer Game", and it works in direct opposition to the agenda of hell and darkness that wants to destroy their lives.
They oppressed us but unable to kill our spirit.
The people living in land of deep darkness have seen a great light.
This is what the LORD requires of every man; to do justice, to love mercy and to humbly work with God.
Love evoke powerful force of divinity in every man.
You possess a great soul, awaken the spirit.
The one plus side to demonic infestation is that children cannot be harmed by a demon. The sanctified aura of a child somehow repels the demon and they can only oppress them if the parent makes a contract allowing them to do so. Because they can be very clever in tricking people into agreeing to additional contracts, it is important to never converse with a demon. Either call in a priest or move out as soon as possible.
Every victory won was first won spiritually!
You're looking at me as though I'm weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It's in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.
Prayer is picking a fight with the Enemy. It's spiritual warfare. Intercession transports us from the sidelines to the front lines without going anywhere. And that is where the battle is won or lost. Prayer is the difference between us fighting for God and God fighting for us. But we can't just hit our knees. We also have to take a step, take a stand. And when we do, we never know what God will do next.
The second cause whence these rebellions sometimes proceed is the devil, who, in order to disquiet and disturb the soul, at times when it is at prayer or is striving to pray, contrives to stir up these motions of impurity in its nature; and if the soul gives heed to any of these, they cause it great harm. For through fear of these not only do persons become lax in prayer—which is the aim of the devil when he begins to strive with them—but some give up prayer altogether, because they think that these things attack them more during that exercise than apart from it, which is true, since the devil attacks them then more than at other times, so that they may give up spiritual exercises.
Life is hope.Hope is faith.Faith is believe.Believe is possibilities.Possibility is miraculous.Miraculous is divine.Divine is supernatural.Supernatural is spiritual.
I am a great warrior.
Lord grant me a humble spirit and a willing heart.
Awake my soul, the glory of the Lord is upon me.
A difficult journey is spiritual rewarding.There is a more dependence on God, His supernatural power, grace and divine favour along the travel.
My body is a political battlefield.It is a place of war, of death and suffering, of triumph and victory, of damage and repair, of blood and tears and sweat.It is a place where memories go to find purpose for their existence.It is a place where humans cast all inhibitions aside to discover what exists at their very core.It is a place of growth wearing a mask of destruction.It is a challenge, not for the faint of heart, beckoning us to face it with eyes wide open.The only war is within. When you are ready to fight it, the field awaits.
Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people's lives above one's own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, ummah, or church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell. Whether combat is the dark side of the same version, or only something equivalent in intensity, I simply don't know. I do know that at the age of fifteen I had a mystical experience that scared the hell out of me and both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity.Most of us, including me, would prefer to think of a sacred space as some light-filled wonderous place where we can feel good and find a way to shore up our psyches against death. We don't want to think that something as ugly and brutal as combat could be involved in any way with the spiritual. However, would any practicing Christian say that Calvary Hill was not a sacred space?
Although terrifying, the evil ghost will probably pose no real danger to you or your family. On the other hand, if you have a demonic infestation, your entire household is in very real danger. A demonic entity will not usually confront you or induce you to flee the home. Because, unlike the evil ghost, the demon does not actually want you to leave. On the contrary, it wants you to stick around so it can destroy your life and sully your soul from the inside.
We as Christians are called to battle. The problem is, we don’t fight about the right things and we do fight about the wrong things. We aren’t getting in the battle that we should and so we fight over petty, insignificant things. Why? Because we are bored. We are soldiers created for fighting against the enemy, Satan, but instead we fight against each other.
Since the basic cause of man’s anxiety is the possibility of being either a saint or a sinner, it follows that there are only two alternatives for him. Man can either mount upward to the peak of eternity or else slip backwards to the chasms of despair and frustration. Yet there are many who think there is yet another alternative, namely, that of indifference. They think that, just as bears hibernate for a season in a state of suspended animation, so they, too, can sleep through life without choosing to live for God or against Him. But hibernation is no escape; winter ends, and one is then forced to make a decision—indeed, the very choice of indifference is itself a decision. White fences do not remain white fences by having nothing done to them; they soon become black fences. Since there is a tendency in us that pulls us back to the animal, the mere fact that we do not resist it operates to our own destruction. Just as life is the sum of forces that resist death, so, too, man’s will must be the sum of the forces that resist frustration. A man who has taken poison into his system can ignore the antidote, or he can throw it out the window; it makes no difference which he does, for death is already on the march. St. Paul warns us, “How shall we escape it we neglect so great a salvation” (Heb 2:3). By the mere fact that we do not go forward, we go backward. There are no plains in the spiritual life, we are either going uphill or coming down. Furthermore the pose of indifference is only intellectual. The will must choose. And even though an “indifferent” soul does not positively reject the infinite, the infinite rejects it. The talents that are unused are taken away, and the Scriptures tell us that, “But because though art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16).
Have you ever wondered why you did not rapture and go to heaven the day you became a Christian? It is because God has work for you to do here on earth! Having gone to heaven, Jesus expects you to be his body on earth. You are his hands, his feet, his voice.
Fear is a scheme that the devil uses to great effect. From my personal study, the words “do not be afraid” or “fear thee not” (depending on the Bible translation) appear over one hundred times in the Bible! The message from God is quite clear: we need not be afraid!
The Bible explains that Satan is real, nurses a serious grudge and has impressive power. But having been created, he has limitations. He can never be equal to God in anything."--Kristine McGuire, An Insider's Guide to Spiritual Warfare, Chapter 3, "Know Your Enemy.
The modern world has forgotten the necessity of encouraging men to be better. They speak of sick men or healthy men, of interesting people or uninteresting people; they never, or seldom, indicate that there is and must be an interior and spiritual improvement in man before any of the glowing coals of humanity can be reached. They have cultivated everything but the goodness of man. The result of such shallowness is everywhere apparent.
There can be no substitute for a personal study of the Word of God! Daily devotionals, Bible commentaries, and recorded messages by anointed preachers and teachers are wonderful and useful. However, they cannot take the place of the Word of God. They must not replace a time of personal study of the Word. Every Christian individual must study and meditate upon the Word for him or herself. Nobody can do that for anyone else.
Don’t attempt to fight the enemy in your own strength. You will experience burnout, and you will fail. Don’t even think about it! The key is to engage in spiritual warfare God’s way. And that is by resting in him and fighting from victory, not for victory!
God isn’t asking you to fight the devil. He is asking you to simply uphold or sustain the victory won byJesus at Calvary and enforce his authority over the devil. You’re like the traffic warden who raises his hand and the vehicles stop. They don’t stop because he can physically bring thevehicles to a halt, but because he is representing and upholding the authority of the state.
We have invented a moral sense which is rotting now that we can't give it employment, and when a moral sense begins to rot, it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavors which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my precious civilization was, contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.
What we are taught to seek or shun in prayer, we should equally pursue or avoid in action. Very earnestly, therefore, should we avoid temptation, seeking to walk so guardedly in the path of obedience, that we may never tempt the devil to tempt us.
The sheer size, extent, and magnitude of the blood vessels tell us two things: the awesomeness of God’s work in man and the fact that as human beings, every one of us is a walking wonder, an amazing work of art.
With the weapons that God has made available to you, he expects you to capture and hold captive every thought and idea that comes into your mind, and to examine these against the backdrop of the Word of God. Those thoughts that are in line with God’s will and purpose for your life are to be released and allowed to move freely within your mind. However, those thoughts and ideas that are contrary to the Word of God are to be held perpetually captive and cast out of your mind in the name of Jesus!
Just as you cannot stop a bird from flying over your head, in the same way you cannot stop the devil from dropping ideas into your mind. However, in the same way that you can stop a bird from building a nest on your head, you can stop the Enemy’s suggestions from wandering without restriction and taking root in your mind.
That is the heavenly Father's deepest impulse toward us. You are the apple of His eye. And anyone who messes with you messes with Him. His protective instincts are most poignantly seen at the cross - the place where unconditional love and omnipotent power for the amalgam called amazing grace. That's where the Creator stepped between every fallen sinner and the fallen angel, Satan. That's where the Advocate took His stand against the Accuser of the brethren. The Sinless Son of God took the fall for us.The cross is God's way of saying, "You are worth dying for.
As soon as you ascend to heaven in spirit, by being more spiritual and honest with yourself, you will notice that hell comes to you at the exact same time, and earth will literally feel like hell. Everyone that can't see it went on the opposite direction, from crazy to crazier. They see butterflies instead of worms and juice instead of blood, and can't smell their own rotting flesh. They went from surviving to becoming zombies. That's why I despite the vast majority of those that consider themselves spiritual. They are in fact lunatics disguised as saints.
The only appropriate war rhetoric is more rhetoric that calls our enemies spirits and people with flesh the victims of this war. Satan wants us to fight with one another, and I understand that some evil must be restrained, but our war, the war of the ones who believe in Jesus, is a war unseen. If we could muster a portion of the patriotism we feel toward our earthly nations into patriotism and bravery in concert with the kingdom of God, the enemy would take fewer casualties.
Rebecca, we live in a world where darkness seems, in the minds of many, something banished to the world of fairy tales and superhero movies. How surprising it then becomes—even for those of us who believe otherwise—that it may appear in our own lives, in our own battles. To face an opponent that is more than the average ‘jerk,’ who has made a deadly choice, is, let us admit it, nothing that we expect to experience.
a burning light(light having oil) will burn to a glowing light which will grow into a shining light to become an illuminator
If you are paralyzed by your past, if Satan is destroying your gifts and your calling by his incessant replaying of old tapes, you're actually being hit by a double whammy. The original damage in the past is one thing - but now you're letting yourself be hurt and sidetracked again by the memory of what happened... We should not be ignorant of Satan's devices, and these ugly memories are one of the main weapons in his arsenal.
When satan sees a baby, however, he doesn’t see a fragile, sweet, gurgling child; he sees a potential grown-up who is bought by the blood of the lamb and filled with the power of the Holy Ghost, a servant of God and a soldier of the cross, a great threat to his kingdom.