James 4:7
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
We’ve all heard that scripture before, but what does it actually mean to submit?
Submit:
hupotasso¯
hoop-ot-as'-so
From G5259 and G5021; to subordinate; reflexively to obey: - be under obedience (obedient), put under, subdue unto, (be, make) subject (to, unto), be (put) in subjection (to, under), submit self unto.
G5259: under
G5021: put in order
Submit (subordinate, OBEY, make subject to) yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil (false accuser, slanderer), and he will flee (shun, vanish) from you.
Submitting means doing things God’s way when you’d rather do them your way, which is the proper order of things.
Submitting means staying put when you’d rather leave.
Not moving when you’d rather be anywhere than where you are, simply because you know that’s where God wants you.
Staying silent when you’d rather let someone have it.
Holding back when your flesh wants to go all out.
There is no blessing in giving into our fleshly wants and desires, but every blessing when we don’t.
When we walk in His ways, things begin to go right for us.
The enemy finds less opportunity with us.
You know why? Because walking in right ways is a form of spiritual warfare in itself.
Walking in love when we are feeling like acting any way but loving towards someone who is acting badly towards us, is spiritual warfare.
It’s not opening the door to the enemy to bring strife and division, to sow hurtful words into the life of another.
That other may be a coworker, your belligerent teenager, your spouse or just some rude person on the street, but we are supposed to walk in love regardless.
Let me tell you, once you open the door and let strife in, it’s really hard to get it closed again.
So many demons come in with that one, you can be months trying to get the house all cleaned out.
James 3:16
For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.
Y’all know where envy comes from? Jealousy and envy are caused by being dissatisfied with something about your own life or yourself. That’s what makes us envious of someone else or covetous of what they have.
Confusion comes in with idolatry.
Isaiah 45:16
They shall be ashamed, and also confounded, all of them: they shall go to confusion together that are makers of idols.
If we want something so much we’re almost lusting after it, then we’re making an idol of it, and that brings a spirit of confusion.
The reason is because any idol in your life replaces God on the throne of your heart. Obviously, that’s total confusion. No one else can BE God but Him.
Means to trust in Him, not ourselves, and let Him have His way in our lives. It means to obey by doing what we know is right in spite of our flesh sometimes wanting to do what is wrong.
We need to trust that what we have is what we need, or God would be bringing us something else.
We need to just trust Him enough to stay in submission to whatever His plan is right now.
We need to walk in His ways and trust Him to meet all our needs, not run to something or someone in the world to meet them.
He will lead us in what we need to do next if we will only trust and obey.
Psalm 32:8: I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.
Psalm 23:1: The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He IS the good shepherd. If you let Him lead you, you truly won’t be in want.
It’s when we don’t, or when we stop trusting that we get into trouble.
Okay, let’s talk about how to submit to God with our spirits. We know our spirits are willing, it’s our flesh that causes all the trouble.
Spirit –
To resist the devil with our spirits, we need to be continually renewing our minds in the Word of God – keep it going in your eyes and ears as often as possible.
The Word washes anything not like God out of our thoughts and keeps our spirits pure and our atmosphere light.
Our goal should be to have the word going in at least several times a day, whether that’s from television, on the radio in our vehicles or reading it in our study time.
Let me tell you something. Reading a devotional a day and going to church for an hour on Sunday is not going to be enough Word to get you through what’s coming, can I just say that? You are going to need far more of God for what’s coming, far more wisdom of how He thinks and operates, far more revelation, to survive these end times. Even though we see evil increasing almost daily, it hasn’t even begun to get bad here in America yet, y’all. What’s coming is worse than anything our minds can even comprehend. We need to be as ready as possible so that we can glorify Him in the midst of it all, so we can be beacons to the lost in this time, when everything around us will turn so dark and become so evil and so terrible that the lost will flock to the Christians looking for Jesus. Hopefully they can tell by our lives we ARE Christians so that we can be used in that time. Some people don’t want to be known as Christians because they don’t feel saying Jesus is socially acceptable, so if you’re like that, you won’t have to worry about anyone coming to you because they won’t even know you’re one of us. And what did Jesus tell us about that in the Word?
Matthew 10:32-33
32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.
33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.
You know there’s a lot of ways you can confess or deny Him, not just with words.
We confess or deny Him by our lifestyles as well.
Years ago, D.C. Talk recorded a song called What If I Stumble, it starts out with one of the singers saying “The greatest cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” (from the album Jesus Freak)
And we wonder why no one finds our witness believable?
Are we denying Him by the way we live?
Are we denying Him by the way we talk? By the way we treat people?
By our worldly pursuits?
I’m talking to somebody.
Your worldly pursuits have come between you and God. He has tugged at your heart and you know this is the case but you don’t want to give them up.
God is saying to you tonight you are falling away from Him and it will bring results you don’t like.
He is giving you another chance to repent.
You need to repent. He’s shown you again and again in your heart what you’re doing is wrong but you keep going.
You know better, you have enough knowledge of His word to know better,
Turn back to your first love, He said. Turn back to Me. I love you and the enemy is setting you up to fall.
He’s setting you up for destruction. There is still time.
You think you’ve gone too far, but He is saying there is still time if you will give your heart to Me now, come back to Me now.
Get on your knees before Me, I will forgive you. I am calling you back to My presence, back to Me.
Come back to Me. You know who you are. I don’t know who you are, but you know who you are. You know the Lord is speaking to you tonight as you are listening to this. You know Him. You know Him.
So my point is, if we keep the Word going into our ears and our eyes, we will be less tempted by the world and the temptations of the enemy.
We need to keep the word going in as much as possible. It washes us, it cleanses our mind and it renews our spirit.
It strengthens us, brings us revelation, gives us wisdom to know the right thing to do in every situation.
Okay, let’s talk about our minds. We know the mind is the battlefield we fight most every battle on.
All sin is conceived in the mind.
We think about things before we do them, don’t we?
We think about whether we’re going to obey God or disobey in every situation.
We think about whether we’re going to give in to temptation.
We think about worldly matters and pursuits.
We think before we act, so it’s important how we think and what we’re allowing in our thoughts.
The key to resisting the devil with your Mind is to capture every thought.
We know the carnality of our minds never wants to line up with God’s holiness.
It wants to do its own thing and be left alone, doesn’t it?
Romans 8:7: Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
We want to think about what we want to think about.
We want to apply our own reasoning and figure things out for ourselves and of course the enemy is happy to help us with that, too.
He’s hoping he can help us reason our way over to HIS way of thinking. So let’s see what the word has to say about that.
Prov. 3:5-7:
5 Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.
7 Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.
That means not trusting your own reasoning. The enemy will tempt you to reason, he will tempt you to compromise, to see things his way instead of looking squarely at what scripture says about something.
Who is it that wants us to be wise in our own eyes? The enemy.
The flesh wants its own way, too, and if we allow ourselves to think along the lines of anything besides what the Word of God says, we can convince ourselves just about anything is okay.
The enemy is more than happy to help you twist the meaning of scripture, and he’ll even send people to help convince you that what’s wrong is actually right and convince you that you just never realized it before.
The media is helping him at every turn. What is obviously perverse has become the norm.
We as Christians are not to conform to wrong ways of thinking.
When we do, we have changed sides and are working for the enemy.
We must stay on guard at all times against compromising.
Compromise leads to deception.
One of the things the enemy has always shown he can do is mix just enough truth with his lies to make them believable.
He can sow doubt about whether something is actually a sin into your mind.
That’s why you can’t entertain those thoughts, not even one of them.
They must be immediately cast down.
2 Cor. 10:5: Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
Some people say “Stupid Devil,” but the truth is, he isn’t stupid.
He’s had thousands of years to practice deception on humans. He’s far more experienced at deceiving that you are at resisting.
Don’t get into pride and underestimate him.
Common sense should tell us if he weren’t a formidable foe, God wouldn’t have warned us about him so much in His Word.
So what does overall submission look like? Jesus is always our example.
Phil. 2:5-8
5 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
7 But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
8 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
In order to resist the devil with your mind, you must constantly guard your thoughts and immediately – and I do mean IMMEDIATELY – cast down ANY thought that isn’t godly.
If you do that continually, you won’t have to fight temptation much.
Okay, let’s talk about how to keep your body from temptation.
Obviously, it starts with your mind, which we just talked about.
We must take captive every thought that isn’t godly and cast it down immediately. That solves about 90% of your temptation problems.
But there’s one more area we need to discuss.
Removing yourself from any situation or person that tempts you!
Some people want to live for God, but they want to do it while dancing by the fires of the devil.
The Lord has a message for you today - and you know who you are that I am speaking to
you want to act all holy, but you’ve been tempted by the enemy behind the scenes.
The Lord has convicted you before of this, but you won’t listen.
You think you are strong enough to stand while playing footsies with the devil.
There is a man who has been flirting with you, he’s a married man.
He is inciting lust in you – the enemy is using him to keep your walk from being pure because power comes with purity and he doesn’t want you walking in power.
He will expose you if you do not stop this folly immediately.
He said you are to remove yourself any time this situation presents itself from now on.
He said I’m not going to let you play this game any longer.
Rebuke that devil, and remove yourself from that place in Jesus Name.
You know the enemy often convinces the saints that they are strong enough to stand so he can get them to dance a little closer to the fire.
Eventually you fall into the fire enough times that you learn not to listen to him.
We can all fall. If we have flesh, we can fall, that’s the bottom line. No one is immune, but we can lessen the chance considerably.
The fact is, if you continue to dance close to the fire, it will eventually burn you.
We’ve all been tempted. We’ve all danced by that fire at some point in our walks, even if it was only in our minds.
Here’s a quote from a movie I watched long ago about human trafficking that is very true:
When you dance with the devil, the devil don’t change. The devil changes you. ~ 8mm
If we get on the wrong path and we realize we’re going the wrong way, we need to change direction.
That’s the thing about true repentance.
TRUE repentance isn’t just saying Lord, I’m sorry, please forgive me.
TRUE repentance is changing direction and going the other way from sin and not doing it any more. Its not saying you repent, Its showing you repent.
That’s real repentance. Saying sorry is just words. Words have no meaning unless actions follow them.
Because if we’re on the wrong road and we’re going the wrong way, we’re gonna end up in the wrong place.
If we don’t change our direction, our direction will end up changing US.
