Late last night I was working on a revision of our Free Indeed manual that we use at Mid-Cities for our eight week study on Freedom in Christ and our weekend of healing and breaking the power of the enemy. That’s the curriculum from which Born to Be Free was developed. As I was going over the manual I was reminded how patient and subtle the enemy can be in getting us to compromise our faith so that we compromise our effectiveness and slowly quench the Spirit within us.
No doubt the enemy sometimes comes at us with a full frontal assault in an effort to overwhelm us. When that happens we quickly recognize what is going on and call up the troops for prayer. Those can be exhausting moments or seasons but we usually draw closer to the Lord and become more aggressive in our faith in those seasons. Sometimes the more destructive strategies of the enemy simply are seasons of relative peace during which we drop our spiritual guard and become susceptible to his subtle influences. Those not-so-noticeable influences can gradually accumulate in our lives and lead us to compromise in ways we barely notice.
Think about movies today. Most Christians feel pretty good about attending PG or PG13 movies today while drawing the line at the R rated flicks. However, what is PG13 today was R rated or even X rated just a few years ago. Television has normalized partial nudity, bad language, violence, adultery, homosexual relationships, and so forth. When we see something everyday it becomes “the norm” and whatever is “normal” seems to take on an air of acceptability because it doesn’t shock us anymore. Satan is fine with taking twenty years to move us from a perspective of sin being repugnant to it being normal and then to “maybe it’s not all that wrong” and, finally, to acceptance or approval.
As believers we are prone to think that because we have become comfortable with sin or have become callous to it that the Holy Spirit has become comfortable with it as well. Paul counsels us not to grieve or quench the Spirit within us. Sin grieves the Spirit and our choices to ignore the conviction he brings us as we watch, read, or participate in things offensive to him tend to quench the Spirit within us. Satan presents those things slowly but persistently so that we find the sin barely offensive.
It’s almost like an enemy putting a small piece of tainted meat in your stew. As you eat it you notice that an occasional bite seems a little odd or distasteful but the rest seems fine so we eat away. If we eat that stew everyday, we don’t even notice the subtly odd taste anymore. It becomes the “normal” taste of stew for us. Then the enemy can increase the amount of tainted meet again. After a year or two we may believe that there is nothing wrong with the stew because it tastes “normal” although by then 90% of the meat is tainted. Even when we find ourselves feeling sick every day we don’t think that the stew is the problem because it tastes “okay” to us. In fact, we may not even recognize that we are sick because the fatigue and body aches have become our norm as well.
Satan introduces sin and compromise in the same subtle ways. There were times when Israel would go up on high places and worship idols (demons) and then immediately go down to worship Jehovah in the temple at Jerusalem. After a while, Israel placed idols in the temple itself and worshipped both false gods and the one true God at the same time. My guess is that it took years of worshipping idols before it was comfortable or “normal” enough to set them in the temple of the living God. The culture had become so full of idolatry that even the priests seemed to accept the presence of demon worship in God’s holy temple as somehow permissible. They fell into the trap of believing that if they were not offended then surely their God was not offended. However, God was offended and eventually his presence left the temple altogether.
My question is, “What has subtly become the “norm” in my life or in my mind that has slowly taken on an air of acceptability to me that is in no way acceptable to God? Ultimately, I believe the tainted meat the enemy introduces slowly into my life is more dangerous than the frontal assaults of the enemy. May the Lord give me wisdom to detect those areas of compromise and correct my compass so that his Spirit is neither grieved nor quenched in my life. I pray the same for you. Be blessed and aware today!
