Where the Enemy Operates

Usually, when something sets me to thinking, I will try to improve or expound further on what I've heard if possible. Sometimes though, what's said is so spot-on correct, that improvement is difficult, if not impossible to come by...so it was with a sermon I heard not too long ago.

The pastor speaking told us that, in the arena of personal temptation, Satan works most often through our thoughts. People have thoughts all the time, and as long as whatever a person thinks is just that, a thought, it can be taken or left, processed or discarded, acted on or not. The example he used is a spouse cheating on the other spouse. Let's say there's a thought that it might be fun to act on the sexual attraction a spouse has to a co-worker. At the thought level, the spouse can quickly and easily get rid of that thought, thereby heading off any possibility of acting on that attraction and messing up the marriage on the front end. But what happens when the thoughts sticks there, when it gains a foothold?

The thought then graduates to the imagination stage. Once the thought metastasizes (like cancer) into imagination, it is much harder to get rid of. Now it's to the point where instead of a "Oh this person is attractive." thought, it's become "What might they look like with no clothes? How might it be to touch them?" And once they've gotten here, it's easier to go down the bunny trail of magnifying the shortcomings of their spouse, minimizing the pitfalls of being with the person to whom they are now attracted, and possibly even rationalizing that having feelings for this co-worker is OK in spite of being married...very dangerous stuff.

After that, at some point comes action...now you've started spending time with this person, confiding in them, maybe it's even graduated to physical infidelity. The marriage is now in trouble, if not destroyed, and all because thoughts were not properly controlled. What was once only a thought has now become a stronghold, immune from the effects of mere willpower alone. At this point, some heavy duty spiritual lifting/warfare is required to tear it down, but obviously it's much easier if we never let it get there in the first place.

In the arena of relationships, friends or otherwise, I think the Enemy operates primarily from a place of fault. If there's a disagreement, it might occur to me that the other person is at fault, and if it does, that presents me two choices, to forgive them, or to meditate on the disagreement, allowing anger and resenment to breed. If I choose the latter, soon those negative feelings escalate into preparation, trying to figure out how to win the fight, how to prevail in the argument, what cutting words might I say to make my point. Finally, if I persist long enough in assigning fault and failing to forgive, eventually there will be a grudge or sustained unhappiness, either of which could doom the relationship.

The best we can do as humans is to lean on God, to ask Him to help us keep around only helpful and productive thoughts and to discard the rest...and in relationships, ask Him to help us be strong enough to forgive freely and fully and let the chips fall where they may.