Have you ever stopped to think that when you try to do God’s will, the devil will oppose you? He will. The devil does not want us to live for Christ – in fact, he will oppose us whenever we try.
A couple weeks ago when we went to Indiana for the weekend, we knew that that is what God wanted us to do. It was a wonderful weekend. Stephen had so much liberty to preach while we were there. It was an amazing blessing to me, and it was evident in many other ways that God wanted us there. I told Stephen on the way home, “Just watch, now the devil will attack us for having gone up there.”
Sure enough, he did. He waited just long enough for me to forget about it, and then snuck in to attack. The only problem was that even though I anticipated it, I failed to recognize his attack for what it was when it did come.
Earlier this week almost like a comedy of errors. Anna got sick and only wanted to be held. Our air conditioner decided to get tired in the middle of a 95+ degree day and quit. Caleb stopped sleeping at night and started screaming relentlessly whenever we’d put him down to sleep. Samuel’s behavior even changed. I got discouraged, tired, and just plain irritable.
It is so easy to wallow in self-pity, and I seem to be so good at it. I got frustrated and overly sensitive. . . .which ended up causing disagreements between my husband and I. Disagreements between us are usually pretty rare.
Thursday morning, I sent the kids outside to play and tried to read my Bible. Yet my attitude was still not where it needed to be. Stephen came home to restart the fan on our air conditioner (which stopped again that morning), and I snapped at him. Oh yes, what a wonderful, Godly response that was!
Later, Samuel and I were talking about how we can choose to react to things. I was explaining to him how we can choose to be calm when we get upset or we can react out of anger.
At that point I realized how I’d been acting myself. . .modeling the very behavior I was warning him against. Here I was explaining to him about how the devil tries to get us to sin, when I had failed to see his attempts to get me to do the same thing. It was a humbling moment.
1 Peter tells us that the devil is like a roaring lion.
1 Peter 5:8-9
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:
It amazes me sometimes how sneaky he can be. We know his tactics, and yet we still fall for them. I don’t know about you, but it’s easier for me to try to resist him when I realize what he’s doing. Like I told Samuel – the devil loves to try to get us to sin, but it’s our choice whether or not we do.