One truth we believers often have to learn the hard way is that the first thing the Enemy goes after is our time with God. It’s basic military strategy — cut off communication, and all the soldiers run around and don’t know what to do.
When I was a kid, my dad would make us watch Westerns with him. I’d be in the middle of Bugs Bunny, and during a commercial he would turn the channel to a Western and say, “This is a classic, son. It’s a classic!” I’d have to sit there and watch it, which I hated at the time.
Usually it was a movie about cowboys and Indians. Dad would say the same thing every time. “All they gotta do is kill that Indian chief. If they can cut down that chief, it’s all over because nobody will know what to do.”
Satan wants to go after our communication with God to make us useless. We scurry into all manner of trouble when we don’t hear God’s voice. I’ve seen it in my own life. I see how I thrive when I dig my roots deep and draw from Jesus on a regular basis, and I see how I dive when I don’t.
When I stop communicating with God, life tends to get a little grayer. I start living off my gut and using my own common sense and instincts to make decisions, and black-and-white turns to gray. The next thing I know, I’m thinking things I never think, saying things I never say, and doing things I never do. Then life slaps me upside the head and I realize my slow fade with my own unspoken question. What just happened?
That’s where one of my latest songs starts. “All You Ever Wanted” is about the guy who wakes up at the bottom of his Psalm 1 slow fade (walking to standing to sitting). The first verse describes him rousing from his Conceit Coma:
I just looked up today
And realized how far away I am from where you are
You gave me life worth dying for
But between the altar and the door
I bought the lies that promise more
Now here I go again
That last line points to the cycle that all believers experience at some point — failure, conviction, and remorse. Hopefully, it leads to repentance. At these times I have to remind myself of the difference between false guilt and God’s conviction. Satan throws guilt at us to tell us we’re the worst Christian and biggest hypocrite ever. The Lord gently convicts us of a particular sin, maybe using a particular Scripture, and in his kindness he leads us to repentance. Godly sorrow produces repentance (2 Corinthians 7:10).
We fail because we take a God-given need and try to fill it with the world’s answer. That’s what sin is. We most often trip over our wants — the want to be loved, the want to be needed, the want to matter. We can boil down most of our sins into one of three areas — the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16).
Satan tempted Jesus with these same allures in the wilderness.
He tried the lust of the flesh: “Aren’t you hungry?”
He tried the lust of the eyes: “I’ll give you everything you see.”
He tried the pride of life: “If you’re the Son of God, get your Father to send his angels to rescue you.”
It’s the same three approaches. It’s all he’s ever had.
Jesus answers him every time with Scripture:
• “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).
• “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve” (verse 10).
• “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (verse 7).
Just as he did with Jesus, Satan sees our legitimate needs and perverts them. “If you’ll just meet them with this shortcut, you’ll be happy.”
I start to listen to his coaxes when I’ve allowed him to rob me of my time with God. Just when I’m a little off balance and he throws me yet another storm, my grayed-out thinking can turn me sideways long enough to where I’ll make a bad decision. I’ll choose the world’s path to meet God-given needs in my life.
Notice that I wrote that our needs are God-given. We usually only attribute things we consider to be “good” as God-given. Talents are God-given. Bodily attributes (strength, beauty, athleticism, and so on) are God-given. We seldom consider that God gave us our needs — but he did. In fact, they’re gifts. It is a gift to want to be loved. Why else would we pursue and give love? It’s a gift to want to be needed. Why else would we reach out to others or fill voids? It’s a gift to feel the need for significance. Why else would we pursue excellence and God’s plan for our lives?
Yet we sabotage God’s intentions to meet our needs when we pursue our own answers and the world’s shortcuts.
I wrote “All You Ever Wanted” as an answer to this cycle. We learned earlier that Peter checked out, almost for good. But this song examines another angle, one we all know well. It’s about the guy who thinks he can come out of the slow fade through his own efforts.
When we fall, we finally wake up and say, “Oh, man, what just happened?” Now that we’ve drifted from spending time in God’s Word, the biggest influence on our minds is the world and not the Word. We’re not being renewed. We’re being re-olded. We’re letting the Enemy define what fulfills us, and once again we resort to lost thinking on how to turn it around.
So how do we fix this? We think God is mad at us, so we shrink back from being transparent with him. That’s when our brains reboot to the old way of thinking:
Well, what was I doing before when I was intimate with him? For one, I was going to church.
“OK, I’ll do it. I’ll go even more often.”
I also belted it out during worship.
“You thought I was singing then? Wait till you hear me on Sunday. I’m going to be rocking.”
I served in all kinds of outreach.
“That was nothing. I’m going to feed every homeless person in the city . . .”
We take the things we were doing because God loved us, and now we do them so God will love us. The problem is that they don’t go anywhere because we’re doing them in our own power.
We’re not down here trying to live holy lives so God will love us. We’re trying to live holy lives because he loved us before we even knew the definition of holy. Somehow that got redefined when the Enemy snuck in and started asking questions that seemed logical. “Did God really say that?” That was his only question to Eve, and he used the same attack against Jesus. “God said he was going to do this, right? He said he’d give his angels charge over you and protect you. Let’s test him.”
Ever so craftily, with great subtleness, Satan attempts to alter truth and mute our ears to God. He makes perfect sense from a human perspective. We become a gerbil on the spiritual wheel: “I’m not doing this spiritual thing good enough. I have to do it better. But now that I say I’m a Christian, I can’t act like I have problems, so I don’t want to tell anybody.”
I’ve been there before, so I know firsthand that these feelings and motives are sincere. We all want to be joyful. We don’t want to seem like we’re not doing well. We may be a student leader. Maybe we’re singing in the choir. Maybe we’re trying to be a good witness on campus. Sometimes we think we can fake it until we make it. Maybe we can do this checklist as a jump-start to get us to God.
But flesh never got us to God in the first place; flesh will never keep us with God; and flesh will never make any of this work.
Lord, I know I let you down
But somehow I’ll make you proud
I’ll turn this sinking ship around
And make it back to you
But all my deeds and my good name
Are just dirty rags that tear and strain
That you’ve already washed away
That’s the second half of the first verse of “All You Ever Wanted.” My guy in the song is starting to grasp the truth. It takes him a while because he’s like the rest of us. At last he has awakened from the slow fade, but instead of looking in the Word, he first looks in the mirror. When he looks in the mirror, he wants to fix the problem himself. When he finally looks in the Word, he sees that God already has fixed him.
The song’s chorus offers the only solution to the mistake of trying to right our own wrongs and climb our way back to God. We don’t have to climb anywhere. We have only to look up.
Freedom’s arms are open
My chains have all been broken
Relentless love has called me from the start
All you ever wanted was my heart
Point to Remember
We can’t fix our messes; all God wants is our hearts.