Life Lifter SP – 189 April 29, 2012
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Pushing Back the Darkness
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I. The Battle Against Evil
Do you remember learning about antonyms in school? Antonyms are opposites or contrasts. For example, what’s the opposite of light? Darkness? What’s the opposite of day? Night. What’s the opposite of love? Hate. What’s the opposite of enemy? Friend. What’s the opposite of good? Evil. What’s the opposite of God? Many people say Satan. That’s not true. Michael the archangel is actually Satan’s opposite. Satan is a finite, created being. God is infinite and eternal. He has no equal.
Many people make the devil too big and God too small. It’s important that we get the absolute power of God right because we live in an evil world and the evil of this world often seems greater than the power of God. Life is a constant battle between good and evil. It seems like evil is winning more and more. Because it seems like Satan has the upper hand right now, we can feel powerless. Our tendency is to stand back, thinking, “What can I do? What little difference can I make?”
One analogy the Bible uses for following Jesus Christ is to describe us as soldiers. The Salvation Army has adopted that as its identity and how it’s going to carry out ministry. The Salvation Army realizes that we are engaged in a spiritual battle and God needs every soldier on the front lines! For years we sang, “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master leads against the foe; forward into battle see his banners go!” As His soldiers, we are to be marching forward into battle, but often we are AWOL—absent without leave.
The Scriptures use war terms like fight, conquer, strive, overcome, warfare, battle, victory. We are engaged in a spiritual battle and it is real. If you are in God’s army, His kingdom cannot afford for you to be AWOL. As Eugene Peterson says in The Message paraphrase of Ephesians 6:12, “This is no afternoon athletic contest that we’ll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the devil and all his angels.”
We try to run away from this battle, isolate ourselves from it, and avoid it as much as possible. I’ve heard people talk about trying to stay away from “the bad parts of town.” That is a fitting description of what we Christians do in general—we try to stay away from the bad, sinful, evil world and try not to think about how terrible it is for people who live right in the middle of its worst horrors. But this is “a life-or-death fight to the finish.” How can we walk away from the very battle we were created, saved and are empowered by God to fight?
Jesus said that the evil in the world would get progressively worse: “There will be more and more evil in the world, so most people will stop showing their love for each other” (Matthew 24:12 NCV). Why is the world moving from bad to worse? Because of population growth—there are more and more people. There are more hearts for evil to reign in and more lives that are affected by evil.
What does God want us to do with evil? How does He intend for us to respond to it?
II. How God’s Army Responds
In four words, we are going to see how God wants His army to deal with evil:
A. Face Evil
Evil is everywhere. Watching the news tells you that it is present no matter where you live. We used to think that we could escape it. Move to a small town or find a “safe” neighborhood. If those places ever existed, they exist no longer. It is true that some places are more dangerous than others but it is not true that there are places free from the dangers of evil.
The most common reaction to evil is to deny it, ignore it, avoid it. We choose to close our eyes, change the channel or make sure that we stay out of that neighborhood. Why do we do that? One reason is because we don’t want to feel the pain evil brings with it. When we see people who are the greatest victims of evil, it does something in our hearts because we know this is not right, this is not the way it’s supposed to be, this is not what God wants. We often see the physical effects of evil in people’s lives and that bothers us, but the deeper pain is what we usually don’t see—the spiritual and emotional impact that it is having upon them; how they are being destroyed from the inside out.
The other side of this is if we ignore evil than we can evade our own personal responsibility in doing anything about it. If you see the guy standing at the intersection holding the sign, “Will work for food,” that begins to bother you a little but as long as you don’t have to stop at the light or give him eye contact, then you can go on through the intersection and not give it another thought.
I’m not saying that we can directly get involved in every pain and difficulty that people have as a result of evil, but must not be an excuse for ignoring it and refusing to do anything. As F. B. Meyer put it, “I believe that if there is one thing which pierces the Savior’s heart with unutterable grief, it is not the world’s iniquity but the church’s indifference.” If we avoid eye contact we avoid the fact that here is a person made in the image of God who is being destroyed by the evil of this world and at the same time we avoid any responsibility we might have in trying to do something about it. Instead, we choose apathy.
Jake Thoene says, “Apathy and evil. The two work hand in hand. They are the same really. Evil wills it; apathy allows it. Evil hates the innocent and the defenseless most of all. Apathy doesn’t care as long as it’s not personally inconvenienced.” If there is anything many Christians avoid today—it’s being uncomfortable and inconvenienced, and yet we claim to follow one who hung on a cross for us!
Jesus showed us the appropriate response to evil and it’s not to ignore it. “Anyone who knows the right thing to do, but does not do it, is sinning” (James 4:17 NCV). We listen to our heart when it’s comfortable and convenient but how well do we listen when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient? That’s when our defenses come out. But here is the hard reality of the Bible: If you know there’s evil in the world (and you know that there is), to ignore it and choose to do nothing about it IS SIN. Sin is not just you do personally against God; it is also what you refuse to do for God.
The Old Testament gives us the story of Israel’s relationship with God. What we see is that too much of the time they were following the so-called gods of the nations around them rather than the One they claimed to worship. One of these gods was Molech, the god of fire, the god of the Ammonites. Worshiping Molech included sacrificing children as burnt offerings to Molech.
Here’s what God said about those who do such things and those who ignore it: “If the people of the community close their eyes when that man gives one of his children to Molech and they fail to put him to death, I will set my face against that man and his family and will cut off from their people both him and all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Molech” (Leviticus 20:4-5). God expected His people to do something about this evil. If they refused, He would do something about it. The sin was not only the man who was sacrificing his children. The sin was also God’s people refusing to do anything about it.
This same kind of evil is still going on in our world—sacrificing children to the false gods and pleasures of this world. This is just one kind of evil and you may wish you hadn’t come today because it would be easier to avoid it, to not let it bother you. What I am talking about is human trafficking. What I am talking about is the buying and selling of people for personal use and pleasure and many of these people are children.
It is estimated that human trafficking is a 30-40 billion dollar business in our world and there are between 25-30 million men, women, boys and girls who are slaves. Slavery is not just an issue of the past. There are more slaves today than at any other time in the history of the world. People are being bought, sold, used and thrown away. These are people who are deeply scarred and who live without hope.
There’s the Street of the Little Flowers in Cambodia. It is where young girls are held behind iron padlocked doors while western tourists sit and wait until dark. When it’s dark, the padlocked doors are opened and you can buy a little girl for three hundred dollars. For three hundred dollars, you can take her for a week, do whatever you want to with her and to her and bring her back at the end of the week and be done with her. That is a horrible thing to talk about, think about and speak about. We would rather avoid it, ignore it and pretend it doesn’t happen.
You say, “That happens over there but it doesn’t happen here.” You can comfort yourself thinking that but it’s probably not true. Last year I met with someone who has been intricately involved in the sex industry here in Springfield. He told me that he had been approached by federal authorities on one occasion to find out about human trafficking that might be happening through Déjà Vu. You can’t get much closer than that.
But, the evil is even closer. How close? Look in the mirror. Look in your heart. We can think of evil as being out there or down the street but it’s in your home and right inside your own heart. Evil is not done only done by people. It’s not just in them. It’s also in us. There are Christian people who like to think that Christian people never do evil or sin. I wish that was true. There’s an old Puritan teaching that says “our best works are shot through with sin, and contain something that needs to be forgiven.”
The day your personal battle with sin and evil is over with is when you are in the one place it doesn’t exist: Heaven! Until then, it is an every-day, moment-by-moment, temptation-by-temptation battle. Don’t kid yourself. We think we have a bad day or I’ve had a little trouble with this or I struggle a little with that…and we don’t want to call a spade a spade. We might finally admit that it is sin but we don’t think of ourselves as people who do evil.
I’ve had people ask whether man is basically good or basically evil. How would you respond to that? What does the news tell you? What does your own heart tell you? What does the Bible tell us? Paul says, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Romans 7:18-19). Paul is talking in the present tense. He recognizes that he still has an evil heart that is bent on doing the wrong thing.
What hope does he have? “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25). Jesus Christ is the only one who can change our evil heart and tendencies to response to life in sinful, evil ways. So is man basically good or evil? My response is that man is basically sinful but he has the capacity to do good when Jesus Christ reigns in his life. We are born evil. Only Jesus Christ can change us into people who do the right things but as long as we are here, His work is not done.
Susan Smith was sent to prison after drowning her two small sons. When Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, visited her prison, he heard that she had signed up to hear him speak. He looked for her in the crowd but never saw her. Afterwards, he found out that she had been sitting right in front of him! What was his point? “The face of evil is frighteningly ordinary.”
Apart from Jesus Christ, I’m an Adolf Hitler; I’m an Osama bin Laden. This is not an exaggeration! If you think I’m exaggerating, then you do not have a good sense of your own heart. We flatter ourselves by looking at the great evils others have done or are doing and say, “I could never do that.” Maybe you’ve never met a person or another Christian who one day found themselves doing things they thought they would never do. Until you get a grip on the proud illusion that thinks you are better than you are, you will never begin to comprehend the depths of your sin and the greatness of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (1 Peter 5:5). The proud deny that they have evil hearts. The humble admit it and admit their daily need for God’s life-changing power.
Why am I talking about this? Because until we face the evil in us we probably won’t face the evil in the world. If you think “I’m one of the good guys and you’re one of the bad guys, then all you will probably do is judge what is wrong with other people rather than do something about it. Or, if you do something, it will be from a superior position of “how I need to help those poor people.”
God can’t use proud people. Instead, we need to approach broken people out of our own brokenness. I’m not the good guy who is coming to rescue you. I am a broken man or a broken woman, saved by God’s mercy and wanting you to experience that same mercy in your life. I’m one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. Facing the evil in the world begins with facing the evil in me.
Most of what I have to say today has to do with this first response to evil. We need to face it because until we do, we’ll live in denial rather than the truth of how God wants us to deal with it. “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins” (James 4:17 NIV).
B. Hate Evil
Instead of accepting evil, we need to hate it. You are awakened to it. You can’t live with it the way it is anymore. “Let those who love the Lord hate evil” (Psalm 97:10). “Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the Lord Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good” (Amos 5:14-15).
Hate is a strong word. It is an emotional word. It is heart-affecting word. Evil should outrage us. Evil should disturb us. Evil should break our hearts. Evil should bother us so much that we are willing to rearrange our lives to fight it. This is not an easy change for us to make, and it will require God’s help.
Until we hate sin and hate evil, we will compromise with it, we will play around with it, we will ignore it and we will pretend it’s not that bad. I’ve noticed in myself and in others, that until I hate the sin and evil that is in me, I will not do anything about it and I will not allow Jesus Christ to help me with it.
We can get so disturbed about trivial things—like the person who cuts me off or upset about latest buzz going around, yet when it comes to the things that should disturb us, the evil that is destroying people’s lives, we look the other way or we comfort ourselves with, “There’s not much I can do about that.” We just leave it and go about our own business
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I decided this last year that I can’t do that anymore and I’m trying to make some changes. When are you going to be done with apathy and start hating evil? Jesus was so disturbed by our brokenness that He rearranged His life totally to deal with our evil. He had it all and left it all because He hated what sin was doing to us. He broke Himself over our brokenness. How willing are you to let your heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God? Until your heart is broken, somebody in this world doesn’t have a prayer because God wants to use you to show His mercy and to bring the life-changing hope of Jesus Christ.
C. Resist Evil
The first two responses to evil are awareness steps. The next two steps are action steps. It is not enough to become more sensitive to evil. Einstein said, “The world is too dangerous to live in—not because of the people who do evil but because of the people who sit and let it happen.” Instead of sitting back, we must expose and push back evil.
We need to resist evil where we can instead of running away from it. “Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God” (3 John 11). Instead of going along with evil, we promote what is good because that’s what God’s people do!
In any war, there is a resistance movement. There’s a group of people who say, “You may be trying to take us over but we’re not going along with it. I refuse to give in.” Resistance fighters are among those who turn the war around. They say, “You may do evil but I’m not going down without a fight. I might die in the battle but I’m going to do my best to turn the tide.”
What are some ways you can resist?
Guard your mind. Ephesians 6:10-18 talks about putting on the armor of God. God says that you’ve got to protect your mind and heart against evil because it is attacking you. It will discourage you and defeat you unless you are prepared and protecting yourself. You’ll give in or go back to denying and ignoring the evil in you and around you. That’s why you need get into God’s Word and get God’s Word into you. It’s called renewing the mind (Romans 12:2). “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).
One of the weapons Paul mentions is prayer. Prayer is one of the most underutilized resources God has given to us for battling evil. The battle for evil begins in your mind and one of the greatest weapons for overcoming it is you thinking, praying and living by the Word of God.
Don’t laugh at evil. That’s a subtle one. It’s a slippery slope. Evil can be disguised at humor. We read about people saying or doing evil things and we laugh. Or we watch people doing perverse things on TV and we think it is funny. Evil is not funny. We should not laugh when people are caught in the foolishness of their sin or are doing things that destroy lives. To laugh at evil is to live in denial of what it is doing in other people and it is living in denial of what it is doing in your own thinking.
Don’t participate in it. That may seem to be rather obvious. Yet, more and more, Christians are thinking, acting and making the same choices that people make whose hearts are darkened toward God. “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong” (Exodus 23:2). When you start compromising with evil, you can’t see the truth of your own evil heart.
Raise your voice. “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8-9). Edmund Burke is known for saying, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” I’d like to revise that to say, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for godly people to stand back and say nothing.” The church is God’s voice for truth. Evil is shouting and we barely whisper! We must speak the truth in love and let the Spirit of God do the rest in people’s hearts.
How do we have the courage to do this? “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4). God is with us as we resist the evil in us and around us. We don’t need to be afraid of evil, not because it can’t harm us, because it can. But because God is with us! “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). When God is on your side, there is nothing that can ultimately destroy you or what He chooses to do through you.
Say YES to God by pushing back the darkness. That is another way we resist:
D. Overcome Evil
We are going to talk a lot more about this next week. Romans 12:21 says, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” That is what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was all about. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:18). Ultimately, Satan himself will be defeated.
Remember the way we started out today? Satan is not equal to God. Satan will not win! He’s winning now more than he would except that we are not engaged in the battle. Too many of us are standing on the sidelines. We have taken a passive position. We are in a defensive mode. We’ve huddled ourselves in the church building and locked the doors. We’re just waiting for the day when evil comes knocking and we are forced to say “Uncle.”
If you want to be on the winning side, you had better be on God’s side because the Bible tells us that evil is going to lose. Jesus said in Matthew 16:18, “I will build my church.” What God builds lasts! The church is not going down; the devil is going down! Jesus says, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
Are gates offensive or defensive tools? Do you use gates to attack or to defend yourself? In our thinking the church is on the defensive and Satan is on the offensive. That’s not the way the Bible reads or how God’s kingdom works. It is Satan who is on the defensive and the church that is on the offensive. The only reason it doesn’t look that way today is because we are sitting back and letting evil have its way. Jesus is saying, “Because I’m building the church, Satan will not be able to stop it.” If the church is being stopped, it is not Satan’s fault.
So how is God going to overcome evil? Not through the government? Not through social organizations. Not by improving the economy or creating the right kind of environment. Not through better education. God is going to do it through the church. The church is the hope of the world. Nothing can change evil hearts except the Spirit of God. The hope of the world is the power of Jesus Christ displayed through His people, the church.
As I was coming in the entrance on the day of the primary election, I noticed a sign that had been posted on the front door. It said DANGER. We think the danger is out there. The real danger is in here. The danger is that we will keep the truth to ourselves and not do anything with it. We often pray for God to keep us safe. The church should be the most dangerous place to be because we are encountering God and being changed by Him. The church should be dangerous presence in the world because we are engaged in fighting the darkness with the power of God.
General George Patton, known as “Old Blood and Guts,” was one of the most famous generals of World War II. It is said that Patton said to his troops, “There is one thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying we are holding our position. We are advancing constantly.” His motto was, “Always take the offensive. Never dig in.” How about you? Have you dug in somewhere or are you on the offensive for Jesus Christ?
Life Lifter SP – 189 April 29, 2012
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Pushing Back the Darkness
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I. The Battle Against Evil
Do you remember learning about antonyms in school? Antonyms are opposites or contrasts. For example, what’s the opposite of light? Darkness? What’s the opposite of day? Night. What’s the opposite of love? Hate. What’s the opposite of enemy? Friend. What’s the opposite of good? Evil. What’s the opposite of God? Many people say Satan. That’s not true. Michael the archangel is actually Satan’s opposite. Satan is a finite, created being. God is infinite and eternal. He has no equal.
Many people make the devil too big and God too small. It’s important that we get the absolute power of God right because we live in an evil world and the evil of this world often seems greater than the power of God. Life is a constant battle between good and evil. It seems like evil is winning more and more. Because it seems like Satan has the upper hand right now, we can feel powerless. Our tendency is to stand back, thinking, “What can I do? What little difference can I make?”
One analogy the Bible uses for following Jesus Christ is to describe us as soldiers. The Salvation Army has adopted that as its identity and how it’s going to carry out ministry. The Salvation Army realizes that we are engaged in a spiritual battle and God needs every soldier on the front lines! For years we sang, “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master leads against the foe; forward into battle see his banners go!” As His soldiers, we are to be marching forward into battle, but often we are AWOL—absent without leave.
The Scriptures use war terms like fight, conquer, strive, overcome, warfare, battle, victory. We are engaged in a spiritual battle and it is real. If you are in God’s army, His kingdom cannot afford for you to be AWOL. As Eugene Peterson says in The Message paraphrase of Ephesians 6:12, “This is no afternoon athletic contest that we’ll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the devil and all his angels.”
We try to run away from this battle, isolate ourselves from it, and avoid it as much as possible. I’ve heard people talk about trying to stay away from “the bad parts of town.” That is a fitting description of what we Christians do in general—we try to stay away from the bad, sinful, evil world and try not to think about how terrible it is for people who live right in the middle of its worst horrors. But this is “a life-or-death fight to the finish.” How can we walk away from the very battle we were created, saved and are empowered by God to fight?
Jesus said that the evil in the world would get progressively worse: “There will be more and more evil in the world, so most people will stop showing their love for each other” (Matthew 24:12 NCV). Why is the world moving from bad to worse? Because of population growth—there are more and more people. There are more hearts for evil to reign in and more lives that are affected by evil.
What does God want us to do with evil? How does He intend for us to respond to it?
II. How God’s Army Responds
In four words, we are going to see how God wants His army to deal with evil:
A. Face Evil
Evil is everywhere. Watching the news tells you that it is present no matter where you live. We used to think that we could escape it. Move to a small town or find a “safe” neighborhood. If those places ever existed, they exist no longer. It is true that some places are more dangerous than others but it is not true that there are places free from the dangers of evil.
The most common reaction to evil is to deny it, ignore it, avoid it. We choose to close our eyes, change the channel or make sure that we stay out of that neighborhood. Why do we do that? One reason is because we don’t want to feel the pain evil brings with it. When we see people who are the greatest victims of evil, it does something in our hearts because we know this is not right, this is not the way it’s supposed to be, this is not what God wants. We often see the physical effects of evil in people’s lives and that bothers us, but the deeper pain is what we usually don’t see—the spiritual and emotional impact that it is having upon them; how they are being destroyed from the inside out.
The other side of this is if we ignore evil than we can evade our own personal responsibility in doing anything about it. If you see the guy standing at the intersection holding the sign, “Will work for food,” that begins to bother you a little but as long as you don’t have to stop at the light or give him eye contact, then you can go on through the intersection and not give it another thought.
I’m not saying that we can directly get involved in every pain and difficulty that people have as a result of evil, but must not be an excuse for ignoring it and refusing to do anything. As F. B. Meyer put it, “I believe that if there is one thing which pierces the Savior’s heart with unutterable grief, it is not the world’s iniquity but the church’s indifference.” If we avoid eye contact we avoid the fact that here is a person made in the image of God who is being destroyed by the evil of this world and at the same time we avoid any responsibility we might have in trying to do something about it. Instead, we choose apathy.
Jake Thoene says, “Apathy and evil. The two work hand in hand. They are the same really. Evil wills it; apathy allows it. Evil hates the innocent and the defenseless most of all. Apathy doesn’t care as long as it’s not personally inconvenienced.” If there is anything many Christians avoid today—it’s being uncomfortable and inconvenienced, and yet we claim to follow one who hung on a cross for us!
Jesus showed us the appropriate response to evil and it’s not to ignore it. “Anyone who knows the right thing to do, but does not do it, is sinning” (James 4:17 NCV). We listen to our heart when it’s comfortable and convenient but how well do we listen when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient? That’s when our defenses come out. But here is the hard reality of the Bible: If you know there’s evil in the world (and you know that there is), to ignore it and choose to do nothing about it IS SIN. Sin is not just you do personally against God; it is also what you refuse to do for God.
The Old Testament gives us the story of Israel’s relationship with God. What we see is that too much of the time they were following the so-called gods of the nations around them rather than the One they claimed to worship. One of these gods was Molech, the god of fire, the god of the Ammonites. Worshiping Molech included sacrificing children as burnt offerings to Molech.
Here’s what God said about those who do such things and those who ignore it: “If the people of the community close their eyes when that man gives one of his children to Molech and they fail to put him to death, I will set my face against that man and his family and will cut off from their people both him and all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Molech” (Leviticus 20:4-5). God expected His people to do something about this evil. If they refused, He would do something about it. The sin was not only the man who was sacrificing his children. The sin was also God’s people refusing to do anything about it.
This same kind of evil is still going on in our world—sacrificing children to the false gods and pleasures of this world. This is just one kind of evil and you may wish you hadn’t come today because it would be easier to avoid it, to not let it bother you. What I am talking about is human trafficking. What I am talking about is the buying and selling of people for personal use and pleasure and many of these people are children.
It is estimated that human trafficking is a 30-40 billion dollar business in our world and there are between 25-30 million men, women, boys and girls who are slaves. Slavery is not just an issue of the past. There are more slaves today than at any other time in the history of the world. People are being bought, sold, used and thrown away. These are people who are deeply scarred and who live without hope.
There’s the Street of the Little Flowers in Cambodia. It is where young girls are held behind iron padlocked doors while western tourists sit and wait until dark. When it’s dark, the padlocked doors are opened and you can buy a little girl for three hundred dollars. For three hundred dollars, you can take her for a week, do whatever you want to with her and to her and bring her back at the end of the week and be done with her. That is a horrible thing to talk about, think about and speak about. We would rather avoid it, ignore it and pretend it doesn’t happen.
You say, “That happens over there but it doesn’t happen here.” You can comfort yourself thinking that but it’s probably not true. Last year I met with someone who has been intricately involved in the sex industry here in Springfield. He told me that he had been approached by federal authorities on one occasion to find out about human trafficking that might be happening through Déjà Vu. You can’t get much closer than that.
But, the evil is even closer. How close? Look in the mirror. Look in your heart. We can think of evil as being out there or down the street but it’s in your home and right inside your own heart. Evil is not done only done by people. It’s not just in them. It’s also in us. There are Christian people who like to think that Christian people never do evil or sin. I wish that was true. There’s an old Puritan teaching that says “our best works are shot through with sin, and contain something that needs to be forgiven.”
The day your personal battle with sin and evil is over with is when you are in the one place it doesn’t exist: Heaven! Until then, it is an every-day, moment-by-moment, temptation-by-temptation battle. Don’t kid yourself. We think we have a bad day or I’ve had a little trouble with this or I struggle a little with that…and we don’t want to call a spade a spade. We might finally admit that it is sin but we don’t think of ourselves as people who do evil.
I’ve had people ask whether man is basically good or basically evil. How would you respond to that? What does the news tell you? What does your own heart tell you? What does the Bible tell us? Paul says, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Romans 7:18-19). Paul is talking in the present tense. He recognizes that he still has an evil heart that is bent on doing the wrong thing.
What hope does he have? “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25). Jesus Christ is the only one who can change our evil heart and tendencies to response to life in sinful, evil ways. So is man basically good or evil? My response is that man is basically sinful but he has the capacity to do good when Jesus Christ reigns in his life. We are born evil. Only Jesus Christ can change us into people who do the right things but as long as we are here, His work is not done.
Susan Smith was sent to prison after drowning her two small sons. When Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, visited her prison, he heard that she had signed up to hear him speak. He looked for her in the crowd but never saw her. Afterwards, he found out that she had been sitting right in front of him! What was his point? “The face of evil is frighteningly ordinary.”
Apart from Jesus Christ, I’m an Adolf Hitler; I’m an Osama bin Laden. This is not an exaggeration! If you think I’m exaggerating, then you do not have a good sense of your own heart. We flatter ourselves by looking at the great evils others have done or are doing and say, “I could never do that.” Maybe you’ve never met a person or another Christian who one day found themselves doing things they thought they would never do. Until you get a grip on the proud illusion that thinks you are better than you are, you will never begin to comprehend the depths of your sin and the greatness of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (1 Peter 5:5). The proud deny that they have evil hearts. The humble admit it and admit their daily need for God’s life-changing power.
Why am I talking about this? Because until we face the evil in us we probably won’t face the evil in the world. If you think “I’m one of the good guys and you’re one of the bad guys, then all you will probably do is judge what is wrong with other people rather than do something about it. Or, if you do something, it will be from a superior position of “how I need to help those poor people.”
God can’t use proud people. Instead, we need to approach broken people out of our own brokenness. I’m not the good guy who is coming to rescue you. I am a broken man or a broken woman, saved by God’s mercy and wanting you to experience that same mercy in your life. I’m one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. Facing the evil in the world begins with facing the evil in me.
Most of what I have to say today has to do with this first response to evil. We need to face it because until we do, we’ll live in denial rather than the truth of how God wants us to deal with it. “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins” (James 4:17 NIV).
B. Hate Evil
Instead of accepting evil, we need to hate it. You are awakened to it. You can’t live with it the way it is anymore. “Let those who love the Lord hate evil” (Psalm 97:10). “Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the Lord Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good” (Amos 5:14-15).
Hate is a strong word. It is an emotional word. It is heart-affecting word. Evil should outrage us. Evil should disturb us. Evil should break our hearts. Evil should bother us so much that we are willing to rearrange our lives to fight it. This is not an easy change for us to make, and it will require God’s help.
Until we hate sin and hate evil, we will compromise with it, we will play around with it, we will ignore it and we will pretend it’s not that bad. I’ve noticed in myself and in others, that until I hate the sin and evil that is in me, I will not do anything about it and I will not allow Jesus Christ to help me with it.
We can get so disturbed about trivial things—like the person who cuts me off or upset about latest buzz going around, yet when it comes to the things that should disturb us, the evil that is destroying people’s lives, we look the other way or we comfort ourselves with, “There’s not much I can do about that.” We just leave it and go about our own business
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I decided this last year that I can’t do that anymore and I’m trying to make some changes. When are you going to be done with apathy and start hating evil? Jesus was so disturbed by our brokenness that He rearranged His life totally to deal with our evil. He had it all and left it all because He hated what sin was doing to us. He broke Himself over our brokenness. How willing are you to let your heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God? Until your heart is broken, somebody in this world doesn’t have a prayer because God wants to use you to show His mercy and to bring the life-changing hope of Jesus Christ.
C. Resist Evil
The first two responses to evil are awareness steps. The next two steps are action steps. It is not enough to become more sensitive to evil. Einstein said, “The world is too dangerous to live in—not because of the people who do evil but because of the people who sit and let it happen.” Instead of sitting back, we must expose and push back evil.
We need to resist evil where we can instead of running away from it. “Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God” (3 John 11). Instead of going along with evil, we promote what is good because that’s what God’s people do!
In any war, there is a resistance movement. There’s a group of people who say, “You may be trying to take us over but we’re not going along with it. I refuse to give in.” Resistance fighters are among those who turn the war around. They say, “You may do evil but I’m not going down without a fight. I might die in the battle but I’m going to do my best to turn the tide.”
What are some ways you can resist?
Guard your mind. Ephesians 6:10-18 talks about putting on the armor of God. God says that you’ve got to protect your mind and heart against evil because it is attacking you. It will discourage you and defeat you unless you are prepared and protecting yourself. You’ll give in or go back to denying and ignoring the evil in you and around you. That’s why you need get into God’s Word and get God’s Word into you. It’s called renewing the mind (Romans 12:2). “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).
One of the weapons Paul mentions is prayer. Prayer is one of the most underutilized resources God has given to us for battling evil. The battle for evil begins in your mind and one of the greatest weapons for overcoming it is you thinking, praying and living by the Word of God.
Don’t laugh at evil. That’s a subtle one. It’s a slippery slope. Evil can be disguised at humor. We read about people saying or doing evil things and we laugh. Or we watch people doing perverse things on TV and we think it is funny. Evil is not funny. We should not laugh when people are caught in the foolishness of their sin or are doing things that destroy lives. To laugh at evil is to live in denial of what it is doing in other people and it is living in denial of what it is doing in your own thinking.
Don’t participate in it. That may seem to be rather obvious. Yet, more and more, Christians are thinking, acting and making the same choices that people make whose hearts are darkened toward God. “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong” (Exodus 23:2). When you start compromising with evil, you can’t see the truth of your own evil heart.
Raise your voice. “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8-9). Edmund Burke is known for saying, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” I’d like to revise that to say, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for godly people to stand back and say nothing.” The church is God’s voice for truth. Evil is shouting and we barely whisper! We must speak the truth in love and let the Spirit of God do the rest in people’s hearts.
How do we have the courage to do this? “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4). God is with us as we resist the evil in us and around us. We don’t need to be afraid of evil, not because it can’t harm us, because it can. But because God is with us! “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). When God is on your side, there is nothing that can ultimately destroy you or what He chooses to do through you.
Say YES to God by pushing back the darkness. That is another way we resist:
D. Overcome Evil
We are going to talk a lot more about this next week. Romans 12:21 says, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” That is what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was all about. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:18). Ultimately, Satan himself will be defeated.
Remember the way we started out today? Satan is not equal to God. Satan will not win! He’s winning now more than he would except that we are not engaged in the battle. Too many of us are standing on the sidelines. We have taken a passive position. We are in a defensive mode. We’ve huddled ourselves in the church building and locked the doors. We’re just waiting for the day when evil comes knocking and we are forced to say “Uncle.”
If you want to be on the winning side, you had better be on God’s side because the Bible tells us that evil is going to lose. Jesus said in Matthew 16:18, “I will build my church.” What God builds lasts! The church is not going down; the devil is going down! Jesus says, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
Are gates offensive or defensive tools? Do you use gates to attack or to defend yourself? In our thinking the church is on the defensive and Satan is on the offensive. That’s not the way the Bible reads or how God’s kingdom works. It is Satan who is on the defensive and the church that is on the offensive. The only reason it doesn’t look that way today is because we are sitting back and letting evil have its way. Jesus is saying, “Because I’m building the church, Satan will not be able to stop it.” If the church is being stopped, it is not Satan’s fault.
So how is God going to overcome evil? Not through the government? Not through social organizations. Not by improving the economy or creating the right kind of environment. Not through better education. God is going to do it through the church. The church is the hope of the world. Nothing can change evil hearts except the Spirit of God. The hope of the world is the power of Jesus Christ displayed through His people, the church.
As I was coming in the entrance on the day of the primary election, I noticed a sign that had been posted on the front door. It said DANGER. We think the danger is out there. The real danger is in here. The danger is that we will keep the truth to ourselves and not do anything with it. We often pray for God to keep us safe. The church should be the most dangerous place to be because we are encountering God and being changed by Him. The church should be dangerous presence in the world because we are engaged in fighting the darkness with the power of God.
General George Patton, known as “Old Blood and Guts,” was one of the most famous generals of World War II. It is said that Patton said to his troops, “There is one thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying we are holding our position. We are advancing constantly.” His motto was, “Always take the offensive. Never dig in.” How about you? Have you dug in somewhere or are you on the offensive for Jesus Christ?