In Pursuit of Peace: 21 Ways to Conquer Anxiety, Fear, and Discontentment by Joyce Meyer
Through faith in Christ we are placed in right standing with God. And by faith, we are covered with His robe of righteousness (see Isaiah 61:10 AMP). In other words, because we are trusting in Jesus Christ’s righteousness to cover us, God views us as right instead of wrong. His righteousness becomes a shield that protects us from Satan. He absolutely hates it when a child of God really knows who he or she is “in Christ.”
In and of ourselves, we are less than nothing; our righteousness is like filthy rags, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God (see Isaiah 64:6; Romans 3:23). But we are justified and given a right relationship with God through faith.
“Therefore, since we are justified (acquitted, declared righteous, and given a right standing with God) through faith, let us [grasp the fact that we] have [the peace of reconciliation to hold and to enjoy] peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One)” (Romans 5:1). This Scripture teaches us that righteousness brings peace and joy. When we feel all wrong about ourselves, we do not have peace. Satan seeks to condemn us in order to steal our peace. Remember that Satan is your enemy, and you need to know that it is he who tries to make you feel bad about yourself. He works to steal your peace.
Satan uses people and circumstances, but they are not our real enemy; he is. He finds things and people through whom he can work and delights in watching us fight and war without ever realizing he is the source.
When Satan used Peter to try and divert Jesus from going to Jerusalem to complete the task God had sent Him to do, “Jesus turned away from Peter and said to him, Get behind Me, Satan! You are in My way [an offense and a hindrance and a snare to Me]” (Matthew 16:23, italics mine). Satan used Peter, but Jesus knew that Peter was not His real problem. He turned away from Peter and addressed the source of His temptation. We need to look beyond what we see or initially feel and seek to know the source of our problems too.
Usually we blame people and become angry with them, which only complicates and compounds the problem. When we behave in this manner, we are actually playing right into Satan’s hands and helping his plans succeed. We also blame circumstances and sometimes even God, which also delights Satan.
Yes, we need to know our enemy—not only who he is but what his character is like. The Bible encourages us to know the character of God so we can place faith in Him and what He says. Likewise, we should know Satan’s character so we do not listen to or believe his lies.
SATAN IS A LIAR
First and foremost, Satan is a liar, and Jesus called him “the father of lies” (John 8:44 NIV). All lies originate with him. He lies to us in order to deceive us. When a person is deceived, he believes lies. This is a terrible condition to be in, for one does not know that he believes lies. The lies are his reality because he believes them.
For example, I believed the lie from Satan that I would never overcome my abusive past. I believed I would always be tainted, second best, and soiled merchandise because of the things that had happened to me in my childhood. As long as I believed these things, I was trapped in my past. I could not really go forward and enjoy the future God had always planned for me (see Ephesians 2:10). I could not receive it because I was not aware of it. I believed what Satan said because I did not know what God had said.
I was miserable, hopeless, bitter, and in turmoil all because Satan was lying to me, and I believed his lies. When I began to study God’s Word and His truth started renewing my mind, I knew Satan for what he is: a liar!
People who have had long-standing financial pressure are often convinced by Satan’s lies that things will always be the way they are. The enemy tells them they will never have anything, never own a decent car or have a nice house. They believe they will never have enough, and so it becomes reality for them. We receive what we believe, whether what we believe is positive or negative.
God’s Word says that He wants us to prosper (see Deuteronomy 29:9). It states we can and will be blessed in every way when we walk in God’s statutes. Satan seeks to keep people hopeless. Hopelessness steals our God-given peace and joy.
Refuse to be hopeless. Be like Abraham, of whom it is said that although he had no reason to hope, he hoped on in faith that God’s promises would come to pass in his life. As he waited he gave praise and glory to God, and Satan was not able to defeat him with doubt and unbelief (see Romans 4:18-20).
SATAN IS A THIEF
I often repeat John 10:10, which states that “the thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy.” The passage is referring to Satan and his system. Just as God has a system that He encourages us to live by, and He promises blessings if we do, Satan has a system and his hope is that we will live by it so he can steal our blessings. Remember, he wants to prevent us from having righteousness, peace, and joy.
He steals through lying, and all of his tactics are connected in some way. They are all perverse in nature and the opposite of anything God would have for us. Satan steals from us through fear. Actually we receive from Satan through fear, just as we receive from God through faith. One might say that fear is faith in what Satan says. Fear threatens us with thoughts of harm or disappointment. Satan shows us a circumstance and then makes us afraid it will never change. God wants us to believe His Word is true even while we are still in the midst of the circumstances. Romans 8:37 says, “Yet amid all these things we are more than conquerors and gain a surpassing victory through Him Who loved us.”
In God’s economy, we must believe before we will see change or the good things we desire. Satan seeks to steal our vision and hope for the future. He tries to steal our sense of right standing with God through guilty feelings and condemnation, through self-rejection and even self-hatred. He steals our joy because the joy of the Lord is our strength, and he wants us to be weak.
Satan is a thief. He tries to steal every good thing that Jesus died to give us. Jesus gave us peace as our inheritance, but Satan does everything he can to rob us of it.
Recognize your enemy, know him, and stand aggressively against him.
SATAN IS A LEGALIST
You may already have deep furrows in your brow, trying to figure out what I could possibly mean by the statement that Satan is a legalist. This is what I mean: He pressures us to be perfect, to live without making mistakes, to never, never break any of the religious rules. When we do make mistakes—which everyone does—he then tries to make us feel condemned by our guilt because we have not followed all the rules and regulations.
What rules and regulations am I talking about? The ones some so-called religious organizations and systems impose. These include things like praying for certain amounts of time, doing good works, reading a certain amount of the Bible each day, observing religious holidays, and using various formulas that will supposedly give us God’s approval.
When Jesus stated in Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden” (KJV), He was talking to people who were struggling while trying to live under the law, but who were always failing. There is nothing wrong with any of the rituals I have listed, and they are in fact good Christian disciplines. But if we view them as something we have to do to gain God’s approval, rather than something we want to do because we love Him, they minister death to us instead of life. They become a burden rather than a joy. The Word teaches us that the law kills, but the Spirit makes alive (2 Corinthians 3:6).
Jesus had much to say about religion, and none of it was good. Why? Because religion in His day was, and often still is, man’s idea of what God expects. Religion is man trying to reach God through his own good works. The Christian faith teaches that God has reached down to man through Jesus Christ. By placing our faith in Jesus Christ, we receive the benefits from the work He has done for us. His work, not our own works of religion, not following rules and regulations man prescribes, justifies us and makes us right with God, as these Scriptures confirm:
• For no person will be justified (made righteous, acquitted, and judged acceptable) in His sight
• [All] are justified and made upright and in right standing with God, freely and gratuitously by His grace (His unmerited favor and mercy), through the redemption which is [provided] in Christ Jesus. (Romans 3:24)
Many might describe a Christian as “someone who goes to church.” This, of course, is not a Christian. A Christian may go to church, but one does not become a Christian through church attendance alone. I can sit in my garage all day, and that won’t make me become a car. A Christian is someone who has had his heart changed by faith in Jesus Christ. He has had a change in his moral nature (see 2 Corinthians 5:17). He is not just someone who has agreed to follow certain rules and regulations and observe certain days as holy.
Religion is filled with rules and regulations one must follow to be part of a certain religious group. Christianity, however, is agreeing to follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit entirely. We must remember that God has invited us into personal relationship and intimacy with Him through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His invitation is not to be in a religious organization, where we strive to follow rules in order to gain acceptance and right standing with Him.
Religious rules and regulations steal peace and joy. They rob us of what Jesus died to give us. Through religion we become works oriented, rather than faith oriented. We pray because we are supposed to, rather than because we want to. We study the Bible because we are obligated; we have made it a rule. We have been taught that we should, so we do because we are afraid not to. We may do good works, but our motive is wrong if we do them to gain acceptance from God, rather than to reach out to someone in love because of what Christ has done for us. Religion causes us to live under the tyranny of the “shoulds” and “oughts.”
Religion is the topic of discussion in John 9. The religious leaders were upset because Jesus had healed a blind man on the Sabbath. You see, with religious people, everything must be on the right day and done in the right way—their way. The results don’t really matter as long as you follow their rules. If you don’t follow the rules, they will not validate you.
The Pharisees interrogated the blind man over and over to learn exactly how Jesus did this work that gave him sight. They felt that Jesus must be a common sinner because He worked on a holy day.
Finally the man said, “I don’t know all the answers to your questions. All I know is I was blind, and now I see.” Then he asked the religious leaders if they wanted to be Jesus’ disciples, at which point they became enraged and stormed at him (see John 9:27-28).
The Bible says the religious leaders sneered and jeered at the man’s question. Isn’t it a shame they could not rejoice with him? But then again, rejoicing with others is not what those types of people do. Enjoyment is foreign to them, and they want to make sure nobody else enjoys himself or herself either. Righteousness, peace, and joy are not part of their religious system. The man whom Jesus had healed had a very simple answer: “I was blind, and now I see.” God intends Christianity to be simple, but religion and its systems can become very complicated and confusing.
I know many people who have struggled a lifetime to follow all the rules, and they still feel like failures. This is not God’s will for His children. Again, Jesus said that He came that we might have and enjoy our lives (see John 10:10).
You might ask, “Doesn’t God want us to be holy? Doesn’t He want us to do good things?” The answer is yes, a thousand times yes. But we don’t accomplish holiness through our good works. Christ Himself imputes holiness to us as a gift from God. We receive holiness by faith, not by good works. First Thessalonians 5:23 states, “And may the God of peace Himself sanctify you through and through.” It is God Himself who will do it, we don’t do it, and it is impossible for man to sanctify or make himself holy.
Jesus seriously chastised the religious leaders—the scribes and Pharisees—of His day. In Matthew 23, He called them “pretenders” and hypocrites because they demanded that others do things they were not doing themselves. He said they were play actors. They did good works, but their hearts were filled with wicked things. They paid their tithes and followed other rules, such as fasting, but they did not treat people justly and fairly. Jesus said they tied up heavy loads for others to carry but would not help bear the burden.
Like many others trying their best to serve God, I have experienced judgment and criticism from various people. Most of those people have been “religious” folks who actually don’t know me at all. They assume and presume and accuse, but they never come to me in a loving manner to give me an opportunity to share anything about my life with them. They don’t like anyone who does not do things “their way.”
They are faultfinders who magnify every flaw they can find but never bother to examine or even mention any of the good fruit that has come from my ministry over the years. In Matthew 7:17-20, Jesus explained that we will know people by their fruit. He did not say, “Examine people, and if you find any fault at all, broadcast it to everyone you know, hoping to ruin their reputations.” Faultfinders are angry with anyone who has prospered or succeeded. Their “ministry” becomes criticizing the ministry of others. This is a sad state of affairs. Jesus has called us to love Him and to love one another, not to be faultfinders in the body of Christ.
People like this have deeply hurt me in the past, as they have many others, but I must remember that even Jesus Himself was attacked by the religious people of His day. Satan attacks, hoping to get people to quit and give up. He wants to drain us and wear us out, but God gives us endurance and makes strong in Him.
Satan is the author of this legalistic system that sucks the life out of people. The Holy Spirit ministers life to people. The Holy Spirit adds to us, Satan steals from us. In John 10, Jesus was making reference to the scene regarding the man who had been born blind when He said, “The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows)” (v. 10). Remember that Satan is a liar, a thief, and a legalist. Don’t be deceived by him any longer—know your enemy!
SATAN IS A TROUBLEMAKER
The word trouble in Webster’s II New College Dictionary is defined in part as: “distress, affliction, danger or need; malfunction, to stir up or agitate; to inconvenience or bother.” Needless to say, we all experience these things on a rotating basis.
When people accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and begin to study His Word, when they make progress in any way, Satan launches an all-out attack against them. He wants to entangle people in trouble so they will focus on the wrong things. He wants us to focus on things we cannot do anything about, rather than growing in God.
Mark 4 illustrates what is called the parable of the sower. It tells us of four types of ground onto which someone sows seed. In this parable the seed is the Word of God, and the ground is the heart conditions of mankind. Verse 15 says, “The ones along the path are those who have the Word sown [in their hearts], but when they hear, Satan comes at once and [by force] takes away the message which is sown in them.”
Verse 17 says that some have the Word sown in their hearts, but “they have no real root in themselves, and so they endure for a little while; then when trouble or persecution arises on account of the Word, they immediately are offended (become displeased, indignant, resentful) and they stumble and fall away.”
Verse 19 says, “Then the cares and anxieties of the world and distractions of the age, and the pleasure and delight and false glamour and deceitfulness of riches, and the craving and passionate desire for other things creep in and choke and suffocate the Word, and it becomes fruitless.”
We can see from these verses that Satan works diligently to cause trouble and bring distractions.
The Word teaches that Satan will attack us for a season, and if we pass all of our tests, if we endure the testing and remain firm in our faith, he goes away for a while and waits for another time to attack. Luke 4:13 conf
This verse refers to Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Even Jesus Himself was not immune to Satan’s being a troublemaker. The Bible never promises us a trouble-free life, but we do need to know who the source of our trouble is. It is Satan!
Hold your peace. Satan may be a troublemaker, but Jesus is your Trouble Solver. He is your Deliverer, your Hiding Place. These times of testing, too, shall pass.
Satan tries to cause trouble in virtually every area of our lives. He does not attack every area at one time, but eventually he gets to everything. He will bring inconvenience of every kind, and it seems the wrong thing never happens at the right time. Problems never come when we are ready to deal with them.
He may attack people in their finances, relationships, physical health, mind, emotions, job, neighborhood, or projects. The apostle Paul said there were times when he was abased and times when he abounded (see Philippians 4:12). In other words, he experienced good times and hard times, as we all do.
We recently invited four different men from four different parts of the country to be guests on our television show. These men were all involved in the restoration of morality in America. They were all praying for revival. Dave and I are also very interested in this, and we wanted to impact the nation with some special programming along these lines.
Two of the four men had major delays with their flights. One had a flight entirely cancelled and was very late, and another sat on the runway for two and a half hours without any real explanation except that it was raining. What was Satan trying to do? He didn’t want them to come at all, but if they were going to come, he wanted them to be upset when they arrived.