Enforcing Christ's Victory

Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today!

You have an enemy, whether you want to accept the fact or not. Satan and his forces know you, they know your story, and they prey upon your weaknesses until you tell them they can’t do that anymore.

You can believe that the loss of hope or desire, those negative or ambivalent feelings, are an internal reality when, in fact, they are coming against you from the outside in order to suck the passion and life right out of you, to deaden your heart, to make you pull back from God.

Dear one, Satan fears your intimacy with God.

Then, of course, there are the lies you are believing about yourself, about your life, and about God. Didn’t know you were? Oh, even here there is some excavation to be done under the fierce gaze of Jesus. He is fierce on your behalf.

I’m going to keep it simple here, though the spiritual realm is a complex one. But the first step in taking our stand against the enemy and resisting him as we are commanded to do in James 4:7—“Resist the devil”— is recognizing that we have an enemy to resist.

Yes, Satan has been defeated. Yes, Jesus has won our victory. But until the day the evil one is cast into the lake of fire— a day I eagerly await— we need to put on the full armor of God as we have been commanded to and enforce what Jesus has won.

We have a part to play in our own freedom, the freedom that has been purchased for us in Christ.

We can join in the accusation of the enemy against our own souls and against our good God. Or we can resist.

There is healing to receive. There is a reframing to be done. There is excavating to do. We must choose whether we will value what other people have said and done that has made us believe we are less than who God says we are. There is faith to be had in the mysteries that surround us in the world even when life is uncertain and unclear.

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