Activating the Power of God’s Word

No weapon that is fashioned against you shall prosper, and you shall confute every tongue that rises against you in judgment.

SATAN LAUNCHES ATTACKS for much more than just the sheer fun of it. Each handcrafted weapon aimed at you is a “smart bomb” zeroed in to succeed in a particular mission.

One of the Bible’s greatest promises regarding Satan’s attacks comes through the words of the prophet Isaiah: “No weapon that is fashioned against you shall prosper. . . . This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD” (Isa. 54:17). While it is certainly a comforting word, many question its reality. The devil’s weapons appear to achieve their mission all the time. People lose their jobs, their health, and their loved ones. Disasters destroy homes and neighborhoods. And the list goes on. Certainly plenty of bad things happen to God’s servants every day. I am sure you can name some attacks that seem to have succeeded in your life.

So what do we make of God’s promise? Has He forgotten or reconsidered? Absolutely not! God’s Word is His bond. In fact, He has already made good on His promise. As we will explore here, the key to its realization in our lives is first to know what the ultimate mission of Satan’s attacks is and to stand on what God already did to abort that mission.

You must understand that an attack is a means but not an end. In other words, financial struggles, health problems, and disasters, for example, are merely the weapons Satan uses to accomplish a goal that is even greater than stealing from you or causing you pain.

Consider the infamous attacks on Job. The Bible records that he was a man whom God called righteous—“one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). One day, after observing Job, Satan barged into God’s courts to insist that Job’s fear of the Lord wasn’t genuine. He believed that Job loved God only because he was blessed and protected by Him. Satan contended that if God’s blessing and protection were taken away, Job would reconsider God’s goodness and curse Him to His face (Job 1:8–11). So Satan proceeded to test his theory with attacks from every angle. He took away Job’s possessions, family, and health.

You might think that the extreme physical, mental, and emotional anguish Job endured because of these attacks was enough to satisfy Satan. But these attacks were not designed only to harm Job. No, as we see from the earlier conversation between him and God, ultimately Satan used these attacks as a means to get Job to question God’s goodness. In the New Testament Paul indicated something similar. He revealed that attacks are meant to keep us from knowing that God is for us and that He loves us (Rom. 8:31–35). In other words, the ultimate mission of an attack isn’t only pain, but to put God’s good character in question to cause distance and separation from Him.

Think about the attacks you have faced. Don’t they almost always incite questions that try to make you doubt God? When our health is under siege, many are tempted to believe it is the result of God’s punishment. “Is God mad at me?” one might question. If finances are stricken, God’s faithfulness comes into question. “Does He really care for me?” one might ask. Given enough time, each of these weapons matures into provoking a total distrust of God. This is a slippery slope where doubts or questions become definitive declarations, such as “God doesn’t love me” or “God has abandoned me.”

If the devil can bring you to the point of eroding your confidence in God, then he ultimately traps you in despair. After all, if you can’t trust God, then who can you trust? Nothing is more hopeless! In this place many destructive decisions are made, which only perpetuate feelings of separation. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. God never moves; He remains as close as ever. Still, for many perception is reality. And the devil achieves his mission.

The Bible gives two job descriptions of Satan: adversary and accuser (1 Pet. 5:8; Rev. 12:10). Many of the attacks mentioned so far fall under his role of adversary. But it is his role as an accuser that is especially effective at achieving his goal. With accusations he attempts to hold you in separation from God through guilt, shame, and condemnation. At this point he changes your concept of who God is based on who you are and what you have done. To do this, he whispers lies such as “You are too dirty—God can’t love you,” and provokes fear with “Because you have failed, God will punish you.”

I well know the destructive power of Satan’s accusations, for accusation is the weapon he used to try to shut me down at the very beginning of my ministry. Literally within months of stepping out, I was bombarded with threats about insecurities, weaknesses, and sins dating all the way back to potty training!¹ The devil’s accusations provided the evidence to back up why I would never be good enough or why I was too messed up to be used by God. I started to believe that he was right, and I considered quitting ministry to do something else.

About a week into this warfare, when I was beat to tears, I heard the Lord speak to me. “You stand at a crossroads,” God said. “You can go to the noose or to the nails—to be hung or to be held.” It was a curious word, but then the Lord began to reveal its full meaning. He showed me the effects of Satan’s accusations on Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. I saw that it wasn’t so much the horrible sin of betraying Jesus, but the follow-up accusations that overwhelmed Judas with so much shame that he ran to a noose to hang himself. This was the road down which Satan intended to lead me. As he did Judas, Satan sought to hang me with accusations.

The other direction from this crossroads was the way to the nails—to be held. That is when God directed me to the Via Dolorosa, which is the historical road that Jesus traveled on His way to the cross. Suddenly there I was at the end of this road. With my mind’s eye I saw myself standing at the foot of the cross, looking up at Jesus, who was covered in the ugliness of my sin and shame.

As I peered deep into Jesus’s wounds, I began to grasp the extent to which He went to destroy the works of the enemy in my life. I saw how the nails of crucifixion laid to waste every weapon Satan had formed against me. Every sin from my past, every word spoken against me, every insecurity, and every lie was intercepted and canceled before it could achieve its mission. Seeing the cross left no question about God’s goodness and His love for me; it dramatically proved just how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love really is (Eph. 3:18).

After I spent some time in reflection and repentance, the Lord asked me to list each accusation hanging over my head. When I was finished with this painful undertaking, He instructed me to cover the list with the word blood and with drawings of a cross. Though excruciating, I followed God’s directions until I could no longer make out the accusations I had itemized underneath. Then God said, “Rip that paper to shreds!”

What happened next was revolutionary. With my list obliterated, I was reminded of what Paul wrote to the Colossians:

You who were dead in your trespasses . . . God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

—COLOSSIANS 2:13–14, ESV

The legal demands of a debt of sin is separation from God. And the list that God instructed me to create represented this record filled with everything Satan used to accomplish his mission. By asking me to shred this paper, God wanted me to freshly see the power of the cross to abort the assignment of Satan’s weapons. In this moment, when I understood the enormity of what had happened, I heard Jesus’s final words on the cross declared personally over me. “It is finished,” He assured (John 19:30).

This was a life-changing encounter through which God revealed how I am held. The finished work of the nails of Jesus’s crucifixion was meant to hold me in an assurance of righteousness not based on who I am and what I have done but on who He is and what He has done.

If you study God’s promises, you will notice that they are often coupled with two parts: God’s part and our part. God’s promise to thwart the success of Satan’s weapons is no exception. To see this, look at the breakdown of Isaiah 54:17 (NLT):

As God revealed to me, the cross was His once-and-for-all solution to destroy the works of the enemy. There is nothing more for God to do. Some two thousand years ago He made good on His part of the promise through the righteousness given to us by Jesus’s shed blood.

Our part to ensure that Satan’s weapons don’t succeed is to silence his accusations. We do this with a counterattack based on two surefire weapons of righteousness:

They have conquered [the accuser] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.

—REVELATION 12:11

Yes, we completely demolish the power of Satan’s accusations by the blood of Jesus and the word of our testimonies. Let’s now look at how to practically apply these two weapons.

When I so intimately saw the magnitude of what Jesus did on the cross, I was led to repentance. This is exactly what Paul indicated that Jesus’s taking our punishment is supposed to do.

Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?

—ROMANS 2:4

Unfortunately, for many today repentance is a foreign concept. Yet it is the way we conquer Satan’s accusations using “the blood of the Lamb.” Allow me to explain.

Throughout the New Testament, the Greek word for repent is metanoeō, which simply means to “change one’s mind.”² According to the Dictionary of Biblical Languages, repentance leads to a changed life based on two mind changes: one concerning sin and one concerning righteousness.³ Too often people teach about only one of these changes and not the other. But that is a mistake. As we will see, both are crucial to accomplishing real transformation.

As we go throughout our Christian lives, it is easy to become calloused to the effects of sin. If we aren’t careful, we can slowly slip into destructive lifestyle patterns by believing, “God doesn’t mind; I will just ask for forgiveness later.”

The power of a fresh look at the cross is that it reminds you of just how terrible sin really is (Rom. 7:13). In the moment that I truly saw the mutilation that my sin and shame caused Jesus, I fell to my knees, wept, and immediately apologized to God for the ways I had hurt Him.

If you feel bombarded by accusations, I emphatically encourage you to take them all to the cross—right now. If you have sin in your life, confess it there and freshly apply the blood that Jesus shed so long ago to cleanse your sin today. Make this declaration: “I take my sin and shame to the cross, and I receive the forgiveness that Jesus’s blood provided for me” (1 John 1:9).

Sometimes the enemy brings up sins that you already confessed. He wants to invalidate the power of the cross to make you believe that they were never really forgiven. To be sure, you don’t need to confess these sins all over again. You simply need to remember the cross in order to change your mind concerning their power over you. Let’s look at this now.

Confession of sin is vital, but once you do this, God doesn’t desire for you to stay in sorrow. The second part of repentance is that God wants you to renew your mind: by Jesus’s blood, you are made righteous.

A fresh look at the cross is an opportunity to do as Paul instructed: clothe yourself in Christ (Rom. 13:14). God doesn’t want you to continue to see yourself as filthy and sin-stained. No, He desires for you to see yourself covered in the clothing of Jesus—blood-stained and holy! You have nothing to grieve. In Christ you are clean, pure, spotless, and white. Yes, you get to look like Jesus because you are covered in Jesus! Make this declaration: “I clothe myself in Christ. I am no longer identified by sin and shame, but by the righteous identity of Jesus.”

To silence Satan, it is crucial that you change your mind concerning your standing before God. In Christ you have a blameless identity that the devil can’t accuse: you are loved, you are accepted, and you are made new. Yes, you are brought near to God by the blood of Christ (Eph. 2:13). This is amazing! The plot of the enemy is made powerless because the plan of the cross has made you righteous.

The Bible assures that we conquer the accuser by the word of our testimony (Rev. 12:11). To put it simply: your testimony is the evidence of the Lord’s work in your life. Some people have dramatic stories about overcoming lifestyles of addiction, abuse, or promiscuity. Others have inspiring stories about how God’s grace helped them to live purely since their youth. Our stories are all different, but they are all equally important.

Giving your testimony is tremendously powerful way to have an impact on both yourself and others. Recounting your testimony reminds you of God’s goodness in your past, which helps you remain confident in His goodness for your future. Sharing your testimony with others builds faith and expectancy that what God did for you, He will also do for them.

The devil is acutely aware of the power of testimony, which is why he works vehemently to keep your story from being told. Remember the illustration from chapter 17, about how a lion goes for the kill? A lion attacks the throat or covers the mouth of his prey to suffocate it. Satan uses accusations for this same goal. If he can convince you that your past is beyond the forgiveness of God, he silences you with the belief that you are not qualified enough to be used by God.

As we have learned, the power of the cross canceled the evidence that stood against you. There is nothing for Satan to hold over your head. When you share your testimony, you stand on the truth of your righteousness in Christ. And thus you alert the devil that his accusations are dead to you; his mission is aborted!^*

#ActivateTheWord

No weapon formed against me will prosper.

At the cross Jesus canceled the record of my wrongs so that I am forgiven and declared righteous. There is nothing for the devil to hold over my head. I silence Satan’s threats and accusations by the blood of the Lamb and the word of my testimony. I won’t let up, give up, back up, or shut up!