Here's an excerpt -
"This is how it works! Satan gets another Christian to sin against
us in deed or word.
It pleases Satan if a person with spiritual
significance or authority, such as a parent, pastor,
spouse or leader in
the Church sins against us. Their spiritual status, their office,
magnifies
their offense and intensifies the damage that it does.
This is
a kind of ritual abuse, the misuse of holy things against us.
After the offense has occurred, Satan gets us to brood over it,
like a stuck track or a video loop, repeatedly and obsessively in our
minds, with every greater emphasis on the gravity and
injustice of it.
As we process the offense and its effect on us, Satan gradually distorts
our remembrance and our assessment of it. He uses this offense to
encourage us to bring our mental accusations against the offender in the
court of our minds. There he presides over the proceedings as we hold a
secret trial in which we both prosecute and pass judgment on the
wrongdoer...."
Has anyone else out there had Satan try to get in their "back door" with this method?
Well I have, and it is every bit as damaging and corrosive as the article points out. Exposing these tactics of our Enemy makes them lose their power as we become aware of their source, their goal, and the damage they are causing. We are in a spiritual war, we mothers at home. Any evil thinking we allow in our own minds against any member of the body of Christ will be picked up by our children and will affect the state of the church, for we are all members of the church, one Body, present and future, and we always need to hear and speak words of conviction that help keep us clean, over and over.
Amen. It's good to be washed continually from our "opinions" and stories or they do take hold and cause a lot of separation & damage to true fellowship. Children are very quick to pick up on stories so building and prophetic speech causes such a different attitude in me and them!
ReplyDeleteYes, each time I've heard this read or re-read it, this has helped me. Thanks for posting it. I'm glad for this sentence at the end: "In fact, God uses it to destroy our self-righteousness and to build up the Church as a community of grace, a society of forgiven and forgiving sinners."
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated his coming to that conclusion with this article, because it is really the point, isn't it? That God would shut all our mouths and that we would realize again that if God judged our iniquities, we would no more be able to stand than one whose trespass against us we could not seem to let go of. Each one of us by God's working in us will come to see that the bookkeeper of sins in us is the one who is graceless.
DeleteThank you Leah. As I read this I was reminded of the part in Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which says "sin wants to keep a man alone..." It is usually only through conversation and baptism that I can stop the "holding court" in my mind.
ReplyDelete