One of the major keys to keeping the enemy at bay is holiness in our own lives.  Yes, we do stand before God as holy because Jesus has imparted his righteousness to us. He became sin for us that we might be become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). Our position is righteousness, but that is not always our condition.  God saves us by grace and gives us the legal position or standing of being forgiven, being children of God, and being citizens of heaven, etc. That relates to our salvation, but other important things relate to our sanctification.

Sanctification is a theological word that simply means “how much have we become like Jesus?”  To the extent that we have areas of our lives that are unsubmitted to Jesus and his righteous standards, the enemy has access and authority to harass and oppress us.  Sanctification is not the same as salvation.  We can be saved and still have much of lives or thoughts that are not in agreement with God. 

My experience is that many believers (all of us from time to time) are blind to many areas that need to be confessed and repented of. That is typically because we compare our holiness to the world around us, rather than the standards of heaven. We look at the people we work with who are unredeemed and compare our lifestyles to theirs or we know those who are struggling with addictions or homosexual sin and we aren’t.  When we do, we think that we are living at a higher standard than those around us, so God must be pleased.  However, we often ignore or justify much in our own lives that needs to be submitted to the Lord…our words, our pride, our judgmental attitudes, our unbelief, our indifference to the lost and the poor, and so on. 

! believe that even the great prophet Isaiah fell into that trap because when he was given a vision of God in Isaiah 6, the text says he cried out, “Woe to me…I am ruined for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5). Compared to the culture around him he was a righteous man, but compared to the holiness of God and the standards of heaven, he was overwhelmed by his own sense of sin and undone.

I know that I let the culture around me creep in and desensitize me to sin. Even on primetime television nudity, bad language, adultery, homosexuality, fornication, and violence are normalized and I believe we lose our sensitivity to such sin so that we are no longer offended by it.  When we are no longer offended, we no longer guard against it and eventually start to compromise with the world. However, the Holy Spirit has not been desensitized and as we willingly watch those things or read those things, we defile the temple in which he lives and grieve him. That willing participation (even passive participation) gives the enemy reason to accuse us and gives him access to us and our families.  

We must guard against the “culture creep” that numbs us to those things that offend the Father.  Let’s pray that the Holy Spirit would re-sensitize us to the things that offend God and open the door to the devil. Let’s pray as David prayed, “Search me O God and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139: 23-24).