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Wednesday April 23, 2025

Resist the devil

“We ‘agree with our adversary quickly’ as Jesus said in Matthew 5:25, or he will imprison us. If we agree with his right to attack us, we have well blunted his sword. By thus freeing Satan to exercise his rights, we are equally now free to exercise our own. We answer his assaults by affirming who we are, Christ in us/as us, which really is practicing the daily death-resurrection process of 2 Corinthians 4:10. The light of expressing ourselves as Christ (light through lamp) swallows up the darkness. Where we are tempted to hate, we love with God’s love, including enemies. Where tempted to fear (which is really negative believing in evil), we have the faith of God for the situation: anxiety with assurance; depression with affirmation of Him as our joy, though soul feelings may last. We ‘resist the devil,’ as James says (James 4:7) by submitting to God, and in that affirmation that coward of a devil flees.

We replace all negatives (without condemnation for feeling the pull of them, and thus accepting Satan’s right to pull) with the positives of Christ as us, and we as expressions of God as love, power, peace–recognizing who we are, Him as us, and we loving as He loves, walking as He walks, overcoming our world as He did by faith, just as John says in his letter. We even turn an infatuation for someone into a positive faith action so that, instead of being overwhelmed with condemnation that we should not have such an infatuation, we by faith see Christ forming Himself in that one. Depressions, tensions, compulsive jealousies, hurts and bitterness–perhaps going back a long time ago into our earlier life–are all transformed when they are not resisted with false condemnation (as if we were independent selves) but rather are received as temptations meant by God and which we therefore ‘count’ (though we do not feel) as ‘all joy’ (James 1:2). We deliberately replace all negative reactions by seeing them as His set purpose (we will later see how God ‘means’ all things). We meet them by reversing our negative believing–and affirming that He works all things after the counsel of His own will (Eph. 1:11) and that there is no power but God.”

Taken from: To All Believers…It’s as Simple as This

By Norman Grubb

Pages 32-33