42 Warfare Part 2: Accusation

was something I believed in, but I didn't understand how it actually played out in my day-to-day life. And uh Eldridge and Alender have really helped me understand this. So if we are living in a world at war, a war between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness, what is the goal of the kingdom of darkness? It is not to cause your death. Your death results in a newfound nearness to the triune God. So evil doesn't really want to end your life.

Jesus articulates the goal of evil in John ten when he says The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. The goal of evil is to steal, kill, and destroy. Broadly speaking, evil aims to steal every opportunity you have to experience something of the goodness of God. To kill every opportunity to experience the goodness of God, to destroy any and every opportunity you have to experience something of the goodness of God. And in addition, we can put it this way.

Evil seeks to steal the goodness of your relationship. To kill the desires of your heart and to destroy the beauty of your face. In other words, the unique way that you represent the image of God.

If this is evil's goal, what are the tactics that it employs to achieve its goal? In warfare, each side employs specific tactics, so let's get down in the dirt. For there is nothing abstract about the warfare that is brought against you day in and day out. The Kingdom of Darkness primarily uses two simple tactics. accusation and deception.

And this should come as no surprise, since the two descriptive names given to the evil one in Scripture are accuser and deceiver, and in Revelation twelve we find both names back to back. This is what it says, Revelation twelve, nine to ten. And he was thrown down, the dragon, the great one, the ancient serpent, the one being called the devil and the Satan, the one deceiving the

The whole earth. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say, Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night has been hurled down. Revelation twelve Jesus' name for the evil one is simply the father of lies. In John 8 44, Jesus says that the evil one was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth.

For there is no truth in him, when he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Evil is a liar. Evil's art is deception. Perhaps the most vivid image of how evil operates in our day-to-day lives is found in 1 Peter 5 8. where we read that the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Evil's goal is to devour. Evil's tactic is to prowl around like a roaring lion. How does a lion prowl in the wild?

It quietly hides, patiently waiting for its prey to misstep. Evil likewise quietly hides, waiting for us to misstep, waiting for an opportunity to pounce or The biblical term for this tactic is the word scheme, So in Ephesians six eleven, Paul exhorts us to take a stand against the devil's schemes. And again in Second Corinthians two, Paul says we are not unaware of his schemes.

Sadly, many Christians today are completely unaware of his schemes. We have no idea when or how evil schemes to take us down. The dictionary defines the word scheme as a large scale systematic plan or arrangement. In other words, scheming implies strategizing with intent. In First Timothy three verse seven, Paul warns of falling into the devil's trap. One of the devil's schemes is to set traps.

If you think of a military trap, the image is of the enemy hiding just around the bend, patiently waiting to make a surprise attack as soon as we come into view. Traps are set up ahead of time in a place where we will not expect them. Now, the two schemes most often used by the Kingdom of Darkness are accusation and deception. More specifically, the two schemes are first to accuse you of sin and second to deceive you into forging agreements.

Today we're going to talk about the first accusation, and next week we will unpack the second, this whole notion of making agreements with evil. But first, accusation. Evil will accuse you of sin, sometimes accurately, sometimes inaccurately. The enemy often makes a claim against you by appealing to your sinfulness. The accuracy of the claim, please hear this, the accura the accuracy of the claim is largely irrelevant.

Let me say it again. The accuracy of the claim is largely irrelevant. For no claim against you, accurate or inaccurate, has any power to condemn you. Because Jesus has nailed each one of these claims to the cross. Here here's what we read in Colossians two. When you were dead in your sins, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins. Having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us, he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

Paul's point is that on the cross Jesus took away all our sins. which stood against us and condemned us. The judgment, in other words, is in. You are innocent of all charges. Satan is not your judge, he is merely your accuser. Evil is not your judge, evil is your accuser. The purpose of bringing accusations against you is so that you might labor under the weight of shame.

Evil's accusations aim to shame you by accusing you of something unlovely about yourself, some weakness, frailty, failure, sin. And, as Dan Alender points out, the accusations will almost always have a kind of fittedness to your story. In other words, the scheme of evil against your heart has been strategic and consistent and intentional over the course of your life.

How do the accusations that level you today have a kind of fittedness to your story? Have you asked that question? In other words, when did the accusations that come at you first take root?

When did they first appear in your story? What accusations do you routinely hear as you are going about your day? You're a bad member. You're incompetent. You're not working hard enough. You're dangerous. You're a fraud. You're overweight. Now ask yourself this simple question how old are those accusations? A fifty year old woman who labors daily under the accusation that she is fat.

usually has a history of being battered by this specific accusation. It often goes back to high school, middle school, or before. Likewise, the person who is leveled by the accusation of you're too sensitive or you're too emotional, there was a day, a story, a moment. When evil first accused you of being too sensitive. And I guarantee you that it was a moment of heartache.

Your brother had just ruined your art project, and you went to your mom in tears because you had worked so hard on it, and your mom turned to you and she said, Sweetheart, you're just too sensitive. It's only an art project. Boom. If we could only put you in an FMRI machine in that moment, that's a functional MRI, it's a scan. if we could put you in an FMRI machine in that moment, we would see your brain massively reorganizing around that accusation.

And then next year you overhear one of your girlfriends tell another friend that you're always overreacting to things, and evil whispers see, your mom was right. You are too sensitive. Do you see what I mean? The core accusations that plague you in your day to day life have their origins in the heartache of some of the core stories of woundedness in your life. I mean h here's a simple exercise that might bring you immense freedom.

Take an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, and each time you feel an accusation hit you during the day, write it down on that piece of paper. Whenever the the particular accusation hits you again, just put a little tally mark next to it. Repeat the process for each accusation that comes at you this week. And then take a look at that piece of paper at the end of a week. Look at the tally marks. And then ask yourself, how long have the words I just wrote down been at play in my life?

When did these words first come alive in my story? The accusations that we suffer under today usually have a kind of fittedness to our story.

Until you become aware that these accusations are the voice of evil, You will tend to feel like the accusations simply arise from your own heart. When you don't realize that evil has a voice and speaks to you regularly, then the accusations won't feel like accusations at all. They'll simply feel like truths that your heart has always known. Now, often portions of the accusations are true. And sometimes evil will accuse you with outright total truth.

That's where you have to be discerning not just of the content of the accusation, but far more of the tonality of it. God's confrontations never lack kindness. The tone of them is never unkind. Evil's accusations are always pernicious. unkind, harsh, they carry a certain flavor with them, a tenor, a tonality. There is a difference between accusation and conviction of sin. How can you tell the difference? Tone of voice.

Tone of voice. Think of the woman at the well in John four. Jesus is talking to this Samaritan woman at the well and he and he says something rather confrontational to her. He says, Go, call your husband and come back here. I have no husband, she replied. Jesus said to her, You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.

Now, that sentence can be said with two different tones of voice. It can be said with contempt and condemnation, or it can be said with a fierce kindness. Likewise, that sentence can be said with two different facial expressions. the eyes Jesus offered this woman were so amazingly kind that she felt no shame when he said the that sentence. How do we know she felt no shame? Because she went home and told everyone what had happened. Shame makes us do the opposite of that.

Here's the point. You have to pay attention to the tone with which a sentence comes at you. Tone is what distinguishes conviction of sin from condemning accusations. Here's how you know that you are being convicted of sin. God may speak very hard words to you about something, but his voice will always be kind as he does so. God never accuses, he always convicts. Romans two says that it is the kindness of God which leads us to repentance.

Here's the difference between accusation and conviction. The difference is that when you are convicted You a always have a sense of surprise as you see the Father running toward you to embrace you and lift you up. And B, you always have a sense of hope about how Jesus will rescue you from your sin and redeem and restore whatever damage you have done. Conviction always leads to the surprise of God's embrace and his undeserved welcome.

Condemnation always leads to a sense of being pushed down under the weight of your sin and feeling shame. So you have to ask yourself, what you have thought of as conviction of sin, has it really been that? Or has it merely been a cycle of self-contempt and condemnation?

Many accusations are so subtle that it is hard to red flag them. This is where the deception and the accusation of evil, these two tactics, collide. Oftentimes the accusations are very subtle. Uh this is to be expected. The the primary deceptive practice of evil is to accuse you while escaping your notice. As the saying goes, the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he doesn't exist.

evil is threatened. When you begin to wonder If there are accusations hitting you, rather than simply thinking these are truths that your heart has always known, that you simply have to labor under. Now this is a bit of an aside, but it needs to be said. Sometimes accusations are not whispered in your heart by evil. Sometimes accusations will be verbalized by the people around you.

And sadly, some of the most heinous accusations against you will invariably come from other Christians in your community, even at times your friends. It has always been the case And it will always be the case. Jesus was accused by the religious leaders, the religious establishment. He was not accused by pagan people who hated God or who were not interested in God. He was accused and condemned by the leaders of the people who followed God.

The only way to get this point across is to say it like this. If you want to understand what it was like for Jesus, Picture the people who lead your church today. If you go to church, picture the people who are the leaders of your church. Now, imagine that one Sunday you get to church and the leaders have an announcement to make. They all stand up front together, and one of them reads a letter to the congregation, that voices the concerns they have about you. The concerns.

That's what it was like. That's the feeling of being accused by the followers of Christ. The most vicious assaults against Jesus came not. from secular people, but from the followers of God. He was condemned by the equivalent of the leaders of the church. And if you follow in the footsteps of Christ, you can expect that some of the fiercest accusations against you will be levied by other Christians and sometimes other Christian leaders. Why is this the case when

Because our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the forces of the kingdom of darkness. And one of the ancient schemes. of the kingdom of darkness is to appear godly. To masquerade with godliness. to cover wickedness in a robe of righteousness and goodness. This is Paul's point in Second Corinthians eleven where he says this. He says, some men are false apostles.

deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising then if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. That that's Paul in Second Corinthians eleven. Do you really think it's any different today? Now, does this mean that all pastors and leaders are really doing evil while masquerading as people doing good things? Of course not. But Paul says some, not not all.

But it does mean this evil's first tactic is to accuse you of sin, and it will often do so through the mouthpiece of other Christians. Evil is amazingly subtle and snake like. Often it is not your enemies who bring condemnation, but sadly some of your closest allies. Anyone who has been brought before a pastor or a group of church leaders in the name of being quote unquote confronted in love.

Anyone who that has happened to knows how hard it is to withstand the accusations of those who carry the name of Jesus. Okay, it was an aside, but needed to be said. That is accusation. Uh take a deep breath. Can you feel the darkness of it? Next time we will look at the second main tactic of evil, which is to entice you to make agreements with evil that will then keep you in bondage. Yeah.