This is chapter one of my book, “Man of the World, Battling Satan’s Infiltration of the Church.” Click on the link to the right to see more.

There seems to be a default mode that people lean towards in church life. While the invitation of the gospel is to enter into a unique and special relationship with God through Christ, many people seem content with a life of religion. The problem is that there is nothing in the gospel that even hints that that is God’s goal for a believer. Yet, there are many people who are active church members who are content with their religious routine and not even remotely concerned that the life of God is not a living reality for them. Yet, that is why Jesus came. He said, “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3, NKJV). And, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). The thief is Satan. He is the author of lifeless religion. But, Jesus came that we may know God and experience His life as a living reality on a daily basis. And notice, He said He came to bring an abundant life. This is not a normal, run of the mill common life that is content with sitting in pews and attending committee meetings. This is a supernatural, extraordinary, uncommon life that walks with the living God! This is the kind of life that is filled with a joy that is inexpressible and full of glory (1 Peter 1:8). This is a life that experiences a peace that transcends understanding (Philippians 4:7). This is a life that knows every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ (Ephesians 1:3). In short, this is a life that knows God. Let that sink in. Knows. God.

So, before we look at the specifics of how Satan seeks to derail God’s will for the church, (something that he is quite skilled at) I have a question for you. Do you know God’s goal for your life? That is not an academic question. It is a matter of life and death. Get this answer wrong and everything that follows will take you in the wrong direction – away from God. But, in reality, the answer is simple. He wants you to love Him.^[1] Period. He loves you with an everlasting love, and He has gone to great lengths to share His love with you and to enable you to love Him in return.

This is important to understand. Love is relational. The first and greatest commandment that God revealed to the world was that we are to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. We are to love God with our entire being and with every fiber of our will. Love is life; and God wants that life to explode within us and ooze out of every pore of our body to those around us. And we need to understand that God’s love for us is more than we can possibly imagine.[2] His love is so great that He came to die for us so we never have to be separated from Him.

But, He is jealous for our love. He will not tolerate us loving something or someone else more than Him.^[3] Loving something other than God is the very definition of idolatry. That doesn’t mean He doesn’t want us to love our spouse, children, or friends. No, in fact, He wants us to love them very much. But, He has created within us a very special place that was meant to be reserved only for Him, and He is jealous of that place – very jealous.

That place is meant to be the most important part of our life. It is where we are connected to God. Think of that place like a room. God has placed a room in every heart that has ever lived. And in that room God seeks, through faith in Christ, to place a doorway that opens to a very special place: the eternal presence of God. As the author of our life He has reserved the right to have complete and sole ownership of the room and have complete access through the doorway. He wants to enter the room of our life and commune with us forever.

As such, the room is meant to be the most significant and important part of our life. It is where we are meant to be intimately connected to God. But before He can enter the room He must place a doorway there. In our fallen, sinful state, the doorway has been blocked so we cannot have fellowship Him. The Bible says, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Our sin effectively blocks the door so God’s presence is absent from our life. Jesus is the One who opens the door, and who becomes the door which leads to God. Through that door the Holy Spirit of God floods our lives with His life, love, hope, truth, and righteousness. So the Bible teaches that “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” True life can only be acquired and experienced when God enters our life through Christ.^[4]

Therefore, allowing Christ to open the door into the room is the most important thing we can do this side of heaven. That door is opened when we place our faith in Christ. It’s not opened because one sits in church every once in a while. When the door is opened we receive the most valuable treasure that we can possess. We receive the fullness of God’s forgiveness, life, and unconditional love. Our Father knows that of all the essentials we need to survive, these things are the most important of all. Therefore, He is jealous to open the door, and to keep the door open so He can fill the room with these vital needs.

But God knows if the door is not opened and remains shut we will find ourselves in desperate peril. He does not want anything blocking the door. Blocking the door is akin to cutting a baby’s umbilical cord while still in the womb. Spiritually speaking we cannot survive such an event for long. If the room remains empty of His presence, our life is eternally forfeit! Let that sink in. Eternally. Forfeit. Lost. And no amount of church activity can change that.

However, after Jesus opens the door we learn to love God. And, when we love God as we were meant to, we make sure the room is always ready for Him and that nothing blocks the door. When we learn to do this, He dwells in this special place and fills it with His eternal life. Everything we experience with God begins in that room after He enters it.

Unfortunately we all have a sin problem and are subject to this danger. But sin has an author. His name is Satan. For reasons we will discuss later in the book, he hates God, and he desperately wants to shut the door of God in our lives, and fill the room with sin, despair, enmity, hopelessness, and death. Satan has many devices he employs in his efforts to pollute the room and block the door. But one of his most successful and enterprising efforts is to create a mirage which leads one to believe the room is full and the door is authentic. This is his most deadly of deceptions.

When an unsuspecting person walks into this mirage he believes the room has everything needed for life, and he believes the door leads to God when in reality it leads only to death.  This is the deception Satan uses to trap people into believing they are okay with God, when in fact they are on the road to hell. Satan achieves his mirage through religious sentiment and activities. He wants us to believe that all we need in the room is a bunch of religious stuff; and he wants that religious stuff to give the appearance of Christ – but be devoid of the life of Christ.

Once Satan successfully generates this mirage he leads the unsuspecting soul to become loyal to it. Many people love religion. As we will discuss in a later chapter, religion gives one a sense of confidence. Because of this, once a person becomes loyal to their religion they become very jealous of it. They will guard it and defend it. But tragically, many will discover that what they are defending is not real.

When Jesus came to the height of His public ministry many loyal members of the Pharisees felt threatened by Him. Little did they know that Jesus was trying to show them the real doorway so they could have true fellowship with God, and have that special room filled with His life. But they substituted the fullness of His life for the empty shell of religion.^[5]

Because they saw Him as a threat, they defended their mirage to the point where they were actually fighting against God Himself. Think about that. As God was trying to open the door so they could have His life, they were desperately trying to make sure it stayed shut. This is the destination of lifeless religion. The height of their folly was revealed when they put Jesus to death. When they did, they effectively and eternally shut the door to God’s presence for themselves, and forfeited what God was trying to give them.^[6] Likewise, even today, many people fall in love and become loyal to their religion, but they do so at the expense of their salvation. And in their misplaced loyalty to religion, they unknowingly declare war against God.^[7]

In the following chapters we will see how Satan’s mirage takes shape, and we will look at the deception this mirage generates in our life. But before we proceed, it is important to understand a very vital point. God is not interested in religion qua religion. He is interested in people. He came to us so we can receive His life and enjoy Him forever. He wants to have a relationship with people that will never come to an end. We must make sure that we don’t make the mistake the Pharisees made by exchanging the life of Christ for religion.

Religion proper is a system of activities, and even an institutional identity, that has the ability to lead people to identify with God. But identifying with God is not the same thing as having a vibrant relationship with Him. One can be religious and have a relationship with God. But the relationship is the principle focus of God. The reality is that there are many religious people who have no relationship with God at all, and tragically they don’t know it. In fact, religion can become a distraction that prevents them from ever meeting God. Consider the rebuke God gave to His people through the prophet Isaiah:

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” says the Lord; “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”^[8]

Notice, they had all the religion their calendar could handle, but had none of the relationship their religion was meant to initiate. Though they believed they were worshiping God, and even pleasing Him, He declared that He was not listening and He was not with them. Instead of being in communion with God, He reveals they only had the pollution of sin. In all their religion they never knew God was absent. The true door was shut and their religious practices made sure it was nailed shut.

It needs to be pointed out that God did not hate their religion for the sake of hating religion. He hated their religion because it actually prevented them from knowing Him in spirit and truth. As such they continued to live in sin and believed they were worshiping God all the while ignorant of their great peril.

This is where Satan is a master. He can distract us from the realities of God’s life and lead us to see only the superficial adornments of a life-denying religiosity.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not anti-religion. After all, I am a pastor. But I am against the deceptive mirages the enemy creates. True religion leads to the life of Christ. As an under-shepherd to Christ I have a great love for the church and I desire to see the Lord’s sheep enter the true door where they can feed on green pastures and drink still waters that gives rest to their souls – a place where they can obtain strength for their journey and enjoy true fellowship with God. But as a pastor I cannot stand to see the sheep running into the desert where they will not find God’s life but will only suffer the scorching heat of sin and breathe the arid climate of despair, all the while thinking they are running to God.

At the same time I don’t want people to flee the church because they “hate” religion. The church was created to be, and should be the fragrance of God’s life in the world. As such, the church needs to reveal the true doorway to life – that it is found in Christ, not in religion. True religion always leads people to Christ, who is God’s life. To that end the church must wage war against the schemes of the enemy so the sheep can be free to come and go into the glorious presence of their loving God and shepherd, who laid down His life so they can freely and boldly come to the throne of grace.

The reality is that the whole history of God’s work of salvation can be distilled down to that one point: Everything God did was so Jesus could come to open the true door of eternal life and to make sure everyone has an opportunity to walk through it and discover a living, vibrant faith that brings one into communion with the God.^[9]

Thankfully, God did not come to bring us a dry, dead, lifeless religion. He came to bring us His indestructible life through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Through Him, God gives His life away in abundance.

However, a Man of the World is one who is satisfied with religion. He has fallen in love with it, and it has become his god. So when the true living God shows up, the lover of religion thinks it’s an intrusion and he finds it very distressing. The first area God’s presence disturbs in that person’s heart gets to the heart of man’s fallen condition. When God shows up He knocks on the door of that room and demands he hand over the key. He then commands him to relinquish control of the room and allow Him in.

But, despite all piety of religion, a true Man of the World says, “No!”

To that subject we turn next.

 

[1] Matthew 22:36-37; Deuteronomy 6:5

[2] Ephesians 3:19

[3] Exodus 20:4-6

[4] John 17:3

[5] John 5:40; Also, read the entire chapter of Matthew 23

[6] Matthew 23:15

[7] John 5:16; 7:1

[8] Isaiah 1:11-15

[9] John 10:10