Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08099 When the enemy attacks families he is going after the oldest institution God ever made. Before there was a nation, a temple or a church, there was a household, and God has been working through households ever since. That alone tells you why the family draws so much fire. Over the years I…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 08098 Understanding how the enemy attacks marriages begins with understanding why he bothers. Marriage was God’s idea before sin entered the world, and Paul tells us it pictures something enormous: the relationship between Jesus and his church. Anything that displays the gospel that clearly is going to draw fire. My wife and I have…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08097 Asking whether something is demonic or psychological is one of the most delicate questions a pastor gets, and getting it wrong in either direction causes real damage. I have seen unwell people treated as though they were possessed, and I have seen genuine spiritual trouble waved away as a chemical problem. So let…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08096 Knowing whether you are under spiritual attack is harder than most books on the subject admit, and I want to be honest about that before offering anything more useful. There is no diagnostic checklist in the Bible, no set of symptoms that appears only when the enemy is at work. What Scripture does…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 08093 Satan’s authority is the subject of the strange title Paul gives him in Ephesians 2, where he is called “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” It is a phrase people quote without ever quite deciding what it means, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08091 The phrase powers and principalities has become one of those bits of church vocabulary that everyone recognises and few can define. It sounds impressive from a pulpit, it turns up in hymns and prayers, and if you stopped ten believers on a Sunday morning and asked what it meant you would probably get…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08088 When James tells us to resist the devil, he is not handing us a slogan to shout at the ceiling. He is describing a settled posture that has a great deal more to do with what we submit to than with what we say out loud. Yet in a good many churches the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08068 Talk of spiritual strongholds has become so common that most believers assume they know what the term means without ever having looked at where it comes from. Conferences are held on breaking them. Prayer initiatives target them over cities. Individuals are told they have personal ones needing specialist attention. The phrase belongs to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08067 The instruction to give no place to the devil is one of those phrases that has floated free of its context and now gets used to mean almost anything. I have heard it applied to house layouts, to music, to hobbies and to whole categories of medicine. Paul had something considerably more specific…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08066 Whether a believer may rebuke Satan directly is one of those questions where practice has run a long way ahead of the text. In some circles you cannot get through a prayer meeting without someone addressing the enemy out loud, binding him, cancelling his assignments and ordering him off the premises. I want…