Fighting a Defeated Foe: Live Humble, Watchful, Faithful

See, God wants to invest love and grace and hope and faith in you each and every day. So invest in him. Invest in his love. Invest in his word. Invest in brothers and sisters in Christ because you are a child of God because Jesus has made it so. So don't give up on your faith walk. Don't listen to the lies of the enemy. One more thing our text tells tells us is that Satan prowls like a what? Roaring lion seeking someone to devour. There's an important word in there. He prowls like a roaring lion. He is not a roaring lion. Matter of fact, he is defeated. He is a defeated enemy. He has no power over you except what you give to him. [00:54:34] (56 seconds)  #InvestInFaith

Blockbuster could have bought that if they'd have been paying attention to what was going on around them, but they were focused on the wrong things. It is easy for us to get focused on the wrong things. We do it all the time. Right? We get drunk on sports. We get drunk on TV. We get drunk on social media. We get drunk on all sorts of things that God would not have us drunk on. Now, none of those things are bad in and of themselves, but if that's our focus, our focus is on the wrong places, you might end up like Blockbuster. See, God wants to invest love and grace and hope and faith in you each and every day. [00:54:00] (42 seconds)  #DontGetDistracted

What God says to you when you're dealing with fear and frustration and anxiety is to cast it all on him. That's what it says right here in verse seven. Casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you, not just you. Y'all. And so the other thing he's saying is, you do not deal with this on your own. You come to your brothers and sisters in Christ and get help. Seniors, graduates, when you go off to school, worry and fear is gonna come upon you. It's gonna come upon you at different times. It's certainly gonna come upon you near the end of every semester when those finals come up. Right? And maybe you weren't staying alert the way you should. [00:48:27] (45 seconds)  #DontFaceItAlone

And I say all that to tell you this. What we learn in first Peter is that Satan is a ghost army too. The thing that we fight, the enemy that we fight is a defeated foe. When you go back to first Peter chapter three, it tells us here, Jesus bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds, you have been healed. Incredible. Your identity is child of God. And then he goes on over here in chapter three and says, Christ also suffered once for sins the righteous for the unrighteous that he might bring to us to God, [00:38:44] (41 seconds)  #HealedByHisWounds

And in humbling yourself, you're saying this, I can't defeat Satan. I don't have that ability. Jesus already did. But I'm a child of God. And I recognize that I cannot stand against Satan on my own. I gotta wear the armor of Christ and wield his sword. I humble myself to say, it's Jesus who does the work. Right? And out of that, what does Jesus tell us to do? He tells us to be sober minded. Now, usually, when we think being sober, we're we're thinking not being [00:41:18] (34 seconds)  #ArmorOfChrist

and and it would come to you in an envelope and you'd watch it. And you could keep it as long as you wanted without late fees. It's just if you went too long, you bought the movie and you'd had to pay for that. But Blockbuster was still sitting there charging us all these late fees and all these kinds of things. Well, Netflix came to Blockbuster when it got pretty big, and Netflix said, hey, you wanna buy us for $50,000,000? At this point, Blockbuster's worth $3,000,000,000, and Blockbuster said, no. We've got the market. We don't need you. What did Blockbuster do from that point? It tanked. Blockbuster, have you been to a Blockbuster lately? Have you seen one? But Netflix today, you know what it's worth? $582,000,000,000. [00:53:09] (50 seconds)  #DontBecomeBlockbuster

Now, he didn't destroy him in that moment, but he defeated him. So Satan is still alive and working today, and he wants you to think he is great and mighty, and all he can do today though is deceive you. He can't actually attack you and hurt you unless you invite him in. But he is the great deceiver, so he is there to lie to you, and the number one thing he wants to lie to you about is your identity. He wants you to make you think that you are less than, that you are unworthy, that God could never look at you and say, my child. But she'll [00:40:14] (35 seconds)  #IdentityInChrist