Heavy, Deep & Real ministries

I’ve been reading a lot about spiritual warfare lately and the thought struck me the other day that God is not the only one who believes in you. Satan believes in you as well! Stick with me here!

Clearly God believes in you in that He made you knowing beforehand all the stupid things you’d do in your life and did it anyway! God believes that we have massive potential to strive to become like Christ in our faith walk. God is our biggest cheerleader wanting us to have “life abundantly” and all of the spiritual fruit (Love, Peace, Joy, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, Faithfulness, and Self-Control).

But Satan believes in you, too.

Satan believes that you are weak and can be pulled away from your relationship with God through a variety of tactics he employs against you in your spiritual warfare battle.

Satan believes in your trauma and pain and uses it against you to make you believe that God doesn’t care about you or your suffering.

Satan believes in your mental health struggles and convinces you that you don’t need counseling, medication, or any other kind of help, and really, it’s everyone else who is messed up not you!

Satan believes he can make you believe your feelings instead of the actual truth of a situation.

Satan believes in your right to be angry and sin in that anger.

Satan believes in your addictions and entices you to go deeper down that rabbit hole no matter what it costs you.

Satan believes he can convince you that sin isn’t really sin so if it feels good do it!

Satan believes he can separate families and other relationships through unforgiveness, bitterness, and pride.

Satan believes in your inability to love yourself and encourages your negative self-talk to the point you are abusing yourself.

Satan believes you are a fool as scripture says who is easily led away from God and His Word believing it to be nothing more than a guide or at worst fairy tales.

Satan believes he can make you so angry with God that you turn on Him instead of toward Him when things go wrong.

Satan believes in your inability to tell the difference between your own thoughts and the ones he implants into your head, so you believe everything you think!

Satan believes you are easily blinded by his half-truths and outright lies which keep you from seeing the truth as written in scripture.

Satan believes in that inner darkness you have and enflames it to become overwhelming in your life.

While there are tons more that Satan believes about you it comes down to this:  

Satan believes he can make you believe him over God.

He did it in the Garden with Adam and Eve; he did it with Cain when he killed Abel; he did it with Judas to betray Jesus, and he’s doing it with you and I every single day.

Ephesians 6 tells us about the Armor of God that we are to wear in this battle against Satan. We “wear” these pieces so that we can “Stand Your Ground” against Satan and his attacks against us. It’s instructive to go through these pieces of protection that we need to put on every day as Satan works to make you believe him over God.

Belt of Truth – There is only one truth and that is God’s truth found in His written Word. We are to gird ourselves with that truth and we do so by simply asking the question: “What is the truth” when confronted with any confusing, conflicting, or confounding situation. If what you’re experiencing conflicts with God’s word you need to lean into the truth of God’s word no matter how uncomfortable it may feel.

Breastplate of Righteousness – I don’t know if any of you are military types but those of us who are know that you always wear your breastplate in your vest to be sure you don’t take a round center mass! Satan is always firing “fiery darts” are your heart trying to kill you through temptation and sin. The breastplate of righteousness is what protects you from these projectiles. And what is righteousness? Well, certainly not ourselves! We rely on the Righteousness of Christ! Jesus is the only one who is righteous and His righteousness is granted to us through His sacrificial death on a cross which paid the price we could not pay for our sin. We are marked as God’s through the Holy Spirit and we stand on Jesus as our righteousness which means that if we love Jesus, we do as He commands!

Feet Fitted with the Gospel of Peace – To understand this we need to understand what the Gospel – Good News – is! Let me put it this way: Through Jesus taking on our sins, dying on a cross and being resurrected, we have been reconciled with God. We were enemies of His because of our sin. But while we were still sinners Jesus died for us and now we are seen as holy and righteous through Christ. That IS good news!! While our destination was Hell we are now saved from that and have eternity waiting for us with Jesus! So, we are to have feet fitted with this Gospel of reconciliation and peace with God so that we can share it wherever we go. Why is it part of the Armor of God? Because Satan HATES the Gospel. He thought he had killed Jesus, but Jesus rose and destroyed Satan!!! We boast then in Gospel and share it with as many as we can so they too can share in the Good News!!

Shield of Faith – Like the breastplate, the Shield of Faith keeps us safe from flying projectiles of Satan’s temptations and lies. We us our faith in God to protect us even from the most convincing half-truths. Faith tells us God is good even when we don’t see it. Faith tells us that God loves us even when we don’t feel it. Faith tells us God is for us even when it feels He is against us. Faith tells us God’s Word is truth even when it doesn’t seem to play out that way. Faith is believing in what we can’t see or really understand. It’s stepping out of the boat into the raging sea to take the hand of Jesus even though our whole being tells us that we’ll be overcome by the waves. Faith is hard especially when your life’s circumstances challenge what scripture says about God. But this Shield of Faith – while heavy – is what keeps us from being absolutely smoked by Satan’s incoming missiles.

Helmet of Salvation – This is one of my favorite pieces and perhaps the most important. You must protect your head in battle. In this case, you must protect your mind and thinking! Satan constantly entices us to what are known as cognitive distortions – thinking errors that make us come to the wrong conclusions. I may have shared them before but here are some worth noting:

10 Common Cognitive Distortions

Psychologists such as Aaron Beck and David Burns identified several primary patterns of flawed thinking:

• All-or-Nothing Thinking: Viewing situations in extremes (e.g., “If I’m not perfect, I’m a total failure”).
• Overgeneralization: Taking a single negative event and assuming it will happen constantly.
• Mental Filter: Dwelling exclusively on the negatives while ignoring all the positive aspects of a situation.
• Discounting the Positive: Insisting that your accomplishments or positive experiences “don’t count”.
• Jumping to Conclusions: Assuming how someone feels about you (mind reading) or predicting negative outcomes without evidence (fortune telling).
• Magnification or Minimization: Blowing mistakes out of proportion or inappropriately shrinking your positive traits.
• Emotional Reasoning: Believing that the way you feel is an accurate reflection of reality (e.g., “I feel guilty, so I must have done something wrong”).
• “Should” Statements: Trying to motivate yourself or others with rigid rules like “I should” or “I must,” which often leads to guilt or resentment.
• Labeling: Attaching a global, negative label to yourself or others instead of looking at the specific behavior (e.g., “I am a loser” instead of “I made a mistake”).
• Personalization and Blame: Taking personal responsibility for events that aren’t entirely your fault or blaming others for your own circumstances.

Satan uses our own minds against us, so we use the Helmet of Salvation to ward off these attacks. The truth for me is no matter what I think it is always well with my soul – I have salvation so the troubles of this life – while irritating – are nothing compared to the riches that await in the next life. I have to keep my mind firmly planted on heavenly things and not earthly things – I have to keep the right perspective by protecting my mind from these thinking flaws. I can tend to be a black and white thinker (concrete thinker), as well as seeing things through a negative prism instead of searching for the good in situations. I have to know that these are faulty ways of thinking and see things the way Jesus wants me to see them (which gets us back to what is the truth!). So, we wear our helmet of salvation to protect our minds, or we will suffer from an array of “stinking thinking” and even worse decisions and conclusions from that thinking.

Sword of the Spirit Which is the Word of God – Did you realize this is the only offensive weapon in the entire Armor of God? When tempted in the desert, Jesus used the Word of God to defeat Satan’s temptations. Satan quoted scripture, purposely taking it out of context and Jesus responded with the proper scriptures to correct and rebuke Satan. We too must use scripture to attack Satan but first we must know scripture which means we have to read scripture repeatedly to know it in our hearts and heads. Satan knows scripture better than we do which is why he’s able to twist it so easily. Every Christian should have read through the Bible at least once in their lives if not more. Scripture reading should be a regular discipline – without scripture you’re heading into a gun fight without a weapon! With scripture Satan doesn’t stand a chance as Jesus proved!

Here’s the thing, Satan believes you won’t do any of this because you either don’t believe it, you’re too comfortable to do it; you’re too lazy to do it; or you don’t believe it really could happen to you.

Don’t fool yourself. Satan hates you – yes, little old you – and wants to destroy everything in your life especially your relationship with Jesus. Satan is busy attacking your marriage, your family, your work, your hobbies, your mental health, your physical health, your joy, and everything God has promised you. Satan is in the middle of every part of every day doing everything he can to mess us up! And he has so much belief in us that he’s sure we’ll fall for his schemes.

The accuser tells God that I fail Him every day – and Satan is right, I do fail God every day. That’s why Jesus died for me and why I can tell Satan to buzz off because nobody can snatch me from Jesus’s hand no matter how much Satan believes in me!

Know that I pray for you all out there that you don’t believe Satan’s lies about you, your life, and about God. I pray you know the Truth as told to us in scripture. And I pray that no matter how hard things are that you lean into God in such a way that even in the darkest times – the most testing of your life – that you can see God is good, loving, caring, and engaged in your walk.