The Devil No.8 - His Tactics (iv psychology)

Now it's no surprise that I take you once again to Ephesians. Would you like to turn to that, please? Ephesians in chapter 6, and we're going to read together from the 10th verse, Ephesians chapter 6. If you've got the NIV, join with me, and we'll read right down to and including the 13th verse, Ephesians 6, 10 to 13, inclusive. Well, we're back again on this theme of the devil and his tactics, and I think it's very important for friends who've not been with us on previous occasions to bear in mind that when the Apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians, he does so by asking God in two recorded prayers to make them very, very strong Christians.

For example, in the first chapter and the 18th verse, he says, I pray that your eyes may be enlightened. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe that power is like the mighty working, is like the working of his mighty strength which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead. And he more or less says the same in the third chapter and the 16th verse.

I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being. And then, as though two references were not sufficient, you find him more or less using the same phraseology, but passing it out as an exhortation in the sixth chapter and the 10th verse to which we've just referred. Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.

Now, why is Paul so concerned? You see, when he writes to the Ephesians, he's writing to real people who are going through real difficulty. And because the Word of God is contemporary, that means it's always up-to-date. Paul, under the inspiration of the Spirit, is writing to us also.

And he's saying, look, I'm praying. I'm praying that you Christians, and he's got the authority of Christ to say this, that you might know power in your life, that you might know what it is to be filled with the Spirit, that you might know what it is to be strong in the inner man. Why is he saying these things? Well, I'll tell you why, bluntly.

Because being a Christian is a jolly difficult thing to be. Being a Christian is a jolly difficult thing to be. You see, Christians are, by definition, soldiers.

Soldiers of Jesus Christ. They're engaged in a battle. He commenced fighting it, and it's not actually complete as yet, though the victory is guaranteed.

And so the Lord Jesus brings you into His army, and He says, I want you to stand against the evil forces that oppose the proclamation of the gospel. And as you stand, you will be up against great resistance. You'll find sometimes that it seems as though all the powers of hell are let loose against you.

And so the Apostle, gathering up the teaching of our Lord Jesus, and in the words of the Authorized Version of the Bible, says, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, and so forth. We wrestle. Are you wrestling, my friend? Again, I say, as I did two or three weeks ago, the problem of many a Christian is that he stops after that third verse, that third word, in the Authorized Version's translation of verse 12.

We for, we wrestle not. We wrestle not. Well, if you're not wrestling, then you can't conceivably be a Christian, because you cannot be a follower of Jesus Christ, and not at times, no attack, because the devil gets at Jesus through his church.

He can't, he can't reach Him. Our Lord Jesus is in heaven, but He can reach His followers. He can reach the likes of you and me, and so we're called to fight.

And there has been this great struggle throughout the centuries against the church of Jesus, and I tried to show you last week, by taking you into my understanding of the wiles of the devil, the evil devices of the devil, in the 1850s, right through to the 1980s, how there has been a concerted attack by the devil himself, against all those who are maintaining the truth. And thus, you've got the mushrooming of the cults, and you've got the great problems that Christendom is now facing with men who are supposed to be leaders of the established church, denying the very resurrection of Christ, and seemingly getting away with it. Now I say this is all part of the great evil schemes of the devil to rob the church of its very life, of its very reason for existence.

But this morning, I feel it incumbent upon me to narrow what I want to say now, not so much the broad sweep of the devil's workings in the last 100 years of our history, but I want to think about himself and you, himself and me, and the way that the devil understands our psychology, and as a result of this, he pits his evil schemes over against the weaknesses of our nature. Now hear me, for I guarantee, if you'll listen, that you can all understand what I'm saying. Don't let that word psychology, in any sense, be a problem to you.

Psychology is the study of human behavior. And I believe that one of the great necessities for those who would be able to fight and hold their ground in the day of evil, is that they understand themselves. They understand themselves.

Three things. Firstly, God understands you. He knows our frame.

The language of the Authorized Version, Psalm 100 and I think it's 32. He knoweth our frame. He knows all about you.

It said of the Lord Jesus at the end of the second chapter of John's Gospel, He didn't entrust himself to man because He knows what is in man. He understands your psychology. God knows all about you, my friend.

And what is more, the devil knows all about you. He understands what sort of person you are. You see, we're all different, not only facially, not only physically, but in our psyche, in our personality.

Now, this is nothing new. I'm just expressing various conclusions that anyone can make from Scripture. Let's go through Scripture just for a moment, citing a few examples.

What you have in the Bible, well, you meet many different categories of people, do you not? And you can almost put them into a category by maybe making some sort of description about them. Let's think about Cain for a moment. Cain, the man who was engaged in the first murder, contemptuous Cain, category on his own.

And sometimes we talk about raising Cain, don't we, in our own personality, raising anger, contemptuous Cain. Meek, Moses, the meekest man that ever lived, jaded Jonah. At the end of doing the Lord's service, he was through.

The Lord had let him down. He'd preached that wrath and judgment would come unless they repented, and Nineveh repented, and therefore wrath and judgment didn't come. And as a result of this, poor old Jonah, because he was a successful preacher, got depressed.

I found that so difficult to understand, but that's why I call him jaded Jonah. What about pushing Peter? Well, he always speaks first, with great respect to Carl Isaacson. I was reading a comment by A.W. Tozer, and he said that Peter would have made a great American.

Tozer was an American, so I'm not applauding him, I'm just quoting him. He must be right if he's an American. A man who speaks the first of the disciples.

Who do men say I am? Well, you're the son of God. That's not what they're saying, that's what I'm saying. Blessed are you, Peter.

You got it into words first. And Peter's always the first, but it's not always something that we can compliment him for. He's the first out of the boat, but maybe he didn't weigh up the issues as he started to move towards the Lord Jesus.

He's the first to say that he won't deny the Lord Jesus Christ, and after the resurrection, he's the first to go fishing. Precocious Peter. What about Martha? How do you describe Martha? Well, ministering Martha.

She's always doing something, isn't she? And we love her because of that. What about persevering Paul? Always in the front line, always going from one difficulty to another difficulty, persevering in his faith. What about timid Timothy? A man who has so much fear that Paul addresses two letters to him, and the heart of both letters is to tell him to endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

Now, I've just run my thumb, so to speak, over several examples as they've come to me from the Old Testament and the New Testament. Capricious Cain, meek Moses, jaded Jonah, precocious Peter, ministering Martha, persevering Paul, timid Timothy. Now, you can perhaps put them into similar compartments because two or three of them would more or less fit together, but you see what I mean? That there are similarities and there are also dissimilarities.

You can't say that all the men and all the women in the Bible were the same. Neither can you say of our congregation that we're all the same. I mean, our extrovert church secretary was quite comfortable here, whatever he said with four or five ladies behind us as they were ultimately taking our service.

Seriously, we're different, aren't we, in Lance's character and my character, our temperaments are differing in degree, as yours are. Now, the Bible recognizes the difference in our psychology, and God knows about our differences, but this is the problem, you see, the devil does, and this is why he puts his traps so carefully. When Peter is speaking of the devil, he says he's like a roaring lion who goes around seeking whom he might devour, and then when Paul writes to Timothy, he says, watch out for the traps of the devil, the snares, and the way that he sets those snares differs at the individual level in relation to the type of personality that he's confronting.

So, he needs a different attack on Cain than he needed, shall we say, on Moses, or than he needs on Peter, and he's got a snare for each personality. General Montgomery was perhaps one of the greatest, if not the greatest, British soldier in the last world war. Now, how was he able to confront Rommel in the deserts of Egypt? He didn't have superior forces, he didn't have superior weapons, but what Montgomery did was this, he studied the way that Rommel reacted.

He was a genius as far as knowing Rommel's strategy is concerned. What does the devil do with you? Well, you see, he studies your behavior pattern. He's fully aware of your psyche.

Now, that seems frightening, but it's not if you invert it, and you talk about yourself in the way that Paul speaks of himself in 2 Corinthians in reference to the devil, and he says, but we are not unaware of the devil's schemes. In other words, we have got a fair idea as to where he's going to set his traps for us. And so, where does he set his trap? Well, where we're weakest.

So, how are we going to avert his snares? By recognizing ourselves where we are weak. This is why I say, you see, that to tackle the devil, you've got to understand not only him and psychology of approach, but yourself. And one of the hardest things in life is to be, is to know yourself and to take measures when you recognize what your particular difficulties are.

Now, you know, the unbeliever, he's not bothered. The way that you can distinguish between the Christian and the non-Christian, generally speaking, is this, the non-Christian is not too concerned about understanding himself. In fact, to tell you the truth, he doesn't know where to go to discover an answer to who am I, so he doesn't bother.

Psalm 36, it well sums up the condition of the unbeliever. It says in the first part of the opening verse, there is no fear of God before his eyes. And in the second verse, for in his own eyes, he flatters himself.

Too much to detect or hate his sin. You see, he doesn't know the real man. He flatters himself.

He doesn't understand that in the eyes of God, he's a sinner. He's let the Lord down. He doesn't really care a fig about this, generally speaking.

Not so the Christian. You see, when you come around the Lord's table, what happened this morning? Well, Len Bickerton, as he was superintending our worship, helping us in our worship, he read to us from 1 Corinthians, setting up the scriptural basis for keeping the table of the Lord, breaking the bread and drinking the wine. Let a man examine himself.

You can't take the bread and wine without doing it, can you? When Paul's writing to the Corinthians in the second letter in the 13th chapter, he uses the same terminology. Examine yourself, measure up your life, see whether you really be in the faith, understand yourself. Now, this is precisely what I'm arguing, you see.

If you're going to meet up with the devil and be victorious, you have to look at yourself, see what you're like, and take measures to prevent him getting in where you're weakest. Do you have a Cain-like temperament? In the sense that, well, jealousy can steal into you. Now, admit it if you do.

Don't fool yourself. Look into the mirror and see if jealousy sometimes comes out in your personality. The Bible says in Hebrews that the root of bitterness can destroy.

One of the ladies that I got to love and respect most in my Christian life, ultimately, I think, killed her spirituality by the root of bitterness. See, the devil knew just how to put a snare, and she fell for it because, well, she had this particular personality problem. And you might share it, too.

Here is Peter. He's precocious. He's a self-confident man.

I don't say this critically of him. I'm analyzing him, and very often when I analyze Peter, I analyze myself because I can see a similar sort of thing, speaking before I think, getting myself involved in situations before I've really worked out the implications. And what does Jesus say to Peter? Peter, Satan has desired you.

No, he had desired Peter. He wanted to stop Peter being an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he desires me. Now, how is Satan going to get into Peter? Well, this business of speaking first, of getting himself involved in situations, at least theoretically, and not having the ability to realize that there is a profound weakness in his psyche.

And so Jesus says to Peter, look, he wants to have you. He wants to shake you up and down. But remember this, Peter, when he does, I prayed for you.

I prayed for you. Do you have timidity? Is this a problem with you? Problem with a lot of people, isn't it? I was coming across, when, in my reading, as I was in the north of England preaching earlier this week, I was reading about a society, it was somewhat humorous, a society of meek people whose favorite text is, the meek shall inherit the earth, if that's all right with everybody. Members of the dependent order of really meek and timid souls.

If you put the acrostic together, it gives you a doormat. Dependent order of really meek and timid souls. You see, you can have such a fear.

I'm not saying that meekness and fear are synonyms, actually, but you can have an exaggerated fear, can't you? And the devil realizes this, so he sets his snare. There's Timothy, and he's ministering for the Lord on the Isle of Peace, but he's so afraid. Have you never felt like running away from some situation in which the Lord has put you? Well, you're a remarkable person if you haven't.

Well, here is Timothy, and what does Paul say to him? Well, Timothy, there's the snare, but remember this, this isn't what the Lord wants of you. He hasn't given you a spirit of fear, but a spirit of a sound mind. What about Martha? I hesitate to speak about Martha, because you see, her virtue became a stumbling block, ultimately, and this is the problem, even with virtues.

You know, you can be doing something so wonderfully well, and it's admirable, but when you push it out of balance, then your virtue becomes a veritable vice. And here is this lady, and she's tied to the kitchen, and instead of teaching, she is making tea. Now, tea is necessary, but so also is teaching.

Martha, you're encumbered with many things. You see, you're very psychic, you're an industrious person, you're a lovely person, but the very loveliness of your character, if it's taken out of balance, can become a stumbling block, where the devil puts his snare, and you settle for the lesser, rather than for the former. Now, are you beginning to understand why I'm saying to you that it's important to grasp your psychology? Now, I'm going further.

It's important that having grasped it, you don't despise it. You see, the devil is the accuser of the brethren. I was showing you about his seducting tactics last week, in terms of evil spirits, and so on and so forth.

But he's not just a seducer, he's an accuser. All right, so he can't rob you of your faith, he can't deceive you, you're one of the elect, he would like to, but he can't, so he gives that up. Now, what's his next tack? Make them feel miserable, make them feel utterly depressed.

Why so? Well, he comes along, and as Revelations chapter 12 says, his guise is as an accuser of the brethren, and he accuses them before our God, day and night. Revelation 12 and verse 10. And so, here you are, and you feel a timid person.

You're not an extrovert, you're an introvert, you're not quick with words, you're slow with words. And the devil comes, and he sits on your shoulder, so to speak, and he says, you've done it again, you can never really be a Christian. Look at him.

Look at what you've got yourself engaged in. Look at the way that you've got your priorities utterly out of place, and you let yourself down. Now, there's nothing the matter with your personality as such, but the weaknesses and the strengths need to be taken, as I'll show you in a moment or two, to the Lord, so that he can make even stronger what is good, and compensate for what is inadequate.

But the devil comes, and he tries to accuse you, and rob you of your peace. Let's go back to Peter. He's let the Lord down, and it's terrible.

The cock crows, and Peter is denied Jesus three times. Can you think of the horror that swept over his soul? He goes out into the blackness of the night, but there was deeper darkness in his heart. He's in a suicidal condition.

Peter, the devil has wanted to shake you, but I prayed for you. And always remember that, that when the devil sat on the shoulders of Peter, and the darkness inside was bleaker than the darkness outside, he still had the thought in his mind. He said he'd pray for me.

And you see, our Lord promises that, doesn't he? Not just to Peter, he promises it to each one of us. In the high priestly prayer, for example, he says that he prays not only for those whom the Father gave him during his earthly ministry, but he would pray for all those who the Father would give to him, so that when they are tempted from the evil one, they'll overcome. Verse 15, John 17.

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one. You see, we've got the prayers of our Lord Jesus. So the devil comes along, and he tries to, to rob us of our peace, to rob us of our assurance.

There you are, you've sinned again. You said that you were sorry last time, but you're in exactly the same mess as you, as you were then. You've repeated it, and there's really no hope for you.

He, he points his accusing finger. This is what he did to Wesley, you see. That's the reason why we sang the hymn that, that preceded my address.

Arise, my soul, arise. Why? Well, because Wesley is downcast. What caused him to be pulled down? The guilt of sins that he had recently committed.

Arise, my soul, arise. Shake off thy guilty fears. Be of sin that double cure, says Isaac Watts.

Save me from its guilt and power. I know people say from the power of sin, but not from the guilt of sin. The devil comes along, and he says, look at you.

And as a result, he snares you, he traps you, and you feel so utterly unable and inadequate, and you wish that you could change your psyche. You wish you could change your personality, because you hate and you loathe yourself so much. And I say, that's wrong, fundamentally wrong.

The devil comes to me. Don't think that a preacher is aware. Captain Carl was telling me of the problems that they have in the area of evil, and the, the assaults that are sometimes made on the ministry of the doulos around the world.

Well, he not only attacks the doulos, he attacks the man in this pulpit. How does he come? Well, he knows my pride. He knows my pride.

There you were, fumbling away at an address, and it didn't go well. You know it didn't go well, and you're going to go into that pulpit again next Sunday. How do you think you'll cope? Come away from it.

You say you're a preacher. Look at the time you've let the Lord Jesus down. You say you follow him.

How dare you? The accuser of the brethren. Somebody leaves the fellowship. You know why they've left? Well, because of you.

The way you handle things. Your own ministries. He has a go, you see.

He comes at me, and he's got to be repulsed. You see, because the apostle Paul says that we ought to be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. How do you repulse him? Well, how did Jesus repulse him? Yeah, I mean, there was the devil having a nibble at the heels of Jesus.

He'd just been baptized, and the devil stalked him into the wilderness, and he waited 40 days before he sprung him. And that's exactly his methodology today. He waits until you're feeling depressed.

He waits until you're vulnerable, and then he lets all hell loose at that very part of weaker than the rest. So what do you do? Well, you come to the Lord. You see, this is Paul's teaching.

It's very, very practical, isn't it? He says, finally, brethren, be strong in the Lord. You have no strength apart from his strength. So you come to him, and you say, Lord Jesus, I'm not under pressure now, but I'm looking into my life, and I see that my weakness is in my mind.

I'm given to immoral thoughts, and I find it so hard to shut them out. Give me your strength. Lord, here I am, and I'm just like a puppy dog chasing its tail.

I'm so anxious about my family, about my son, about my daughter. I can't get any peace at all, Lord, and the devil is getting me through this. The Lord Jesus says, be anxious for nothing.

Commit them to me. But the point of the matter is that you're bringing this through to the Lord Jesus Christ, and you're exposing your weakness, and as he used scripture to repulse the devil, so you have to load your mind with scripture and repulse him. Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his mind by taking heed thereto according to your word.

The devil can't stand the word of God being properly quoted in his face. That's what put him to flight when the Lord Jesus was assaulted, you remember. He repulsed him by the word.

Don't come to the Lord and say, why didn't you make me differently? Why didn't you make me a real extrovert so that I can stand up in front of everyone else? It's not really fair. God made you, my friend, just as he wanted you to be. There's nothing basically wrong with the ingredients of your personality as God gave them to you.

What is wrong is the mess that the devil makes of them. But rather take what you have, your strengths, and offer them to him, and your weaknesses, and ask him to penetrate those areas, to steal you where you feel so very, very, very, very weak. You see, he's able to do that, and recognize who you are.

You see, I don't want anyone to go from this church into a sort of binge of introspection during this afternoon. Remember who you are. You're a child of the King.

All right, you're a mother, but you're a princess as far as God is concerned. You're a Timothy, and naturally you have a fear, but nonetheless you're in the army of the Lord Jesus. You're a son of the living God.

Don't sell yourself short. You are important in the kingdom of God. You have a dignity, a worth, a value that comes from Jesus.

You remember when the spies, and with this I'll close. I haven't yet got to my notes. You remember when the spies went into the promised land, and ten came back with a bad report, and two came back with a an optimistic one.

What did the tens say? Well, we've seen those great giants. And what did they say themselves? We're grasshoppers. Well, that wasn't exactly self-congratulatory, was it? I mean, you can't get much lower than the grasshopper.

But who were they? They were children of Israel. Children of the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Grasshoppers, not a bit.

All the resources of heaven were at their disposal. If only they'd been obedient and discipled enough to realize that God was on their side. And if God before them, who shall be against them? Even the Amalekites, overgrown though they be, should not have paralyzed with fear the ancient Hebrews.

And who are you, my friend? You're not a grasshopper. You're a child of a king. Jesus bled and died for you.

And the very energy that raised him from the dead, sis Paul, is available to make you with the personality that you've got, successful in his service and increasingly invulnerable to the diabolical traps that the devil deliberately places as he knows you. So you know his schemes and take a responsive measure to outwit him. In your strength? No.

But in the strength and in the power of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Let's really enjoy ourselves in singing to the praise of our God 379, which should be onward Christian soldiers.

379. Father God, we thank you for the inheritance that is ours, for the dignity that has been vouchsafed to us in Jesus Christ. We resist the devil and we say we are not grasshoppers.

We're children of the king. We pull our rank in his face. And we thank you that we are amongst those for whom Jesus bled and died, enable us to live with the spoils of victory in our mind and with the weapons of our warfare in our hands, and help us this week to overcome all semblance of evil in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the name of Christ Jesus the Lord.

Amen. Sing verses three and four. Oh help us our worthy king that we will make you king in our hearts and in the hearts of those that we seem to seek to bring to your throne in Jesus name.

Amen.