Spiritual Warfare: Forgetting Our Identity and Standing in Christ

Discerning the dark lord’s tactics

The moment we remind ourselves of our identity in Christ, especially that of our righteous standing, the dark lord swoops in to say, “No you’re not.” It isn’t always that blunt. His responses can be:

• “You have to first live a holy life.”

• “Well...not quite yet. You need to do just a tad more and then you’re good.”

• “You should doubt that because of what you did in the past.”

• “You still haven’t repented or confessed enough of this sin.”

• “You forgot about this sin in your life. You need to deal with that first before you can truly embrace this identity and standing.”

• “You’re only semi-holy. Other people are truly holy. You’re on a lower level and that level isn’t sufficient.”

• “Don’t you see all your mess? Are you telling me that Jesus just decided to forget about that? You think you can really call yourself holy?”

• “If other people knew what I know about you then you would never be able to call yourself holy.”

• “You say that it only matters what Jesus says but, let’s be honest, it really matters that the super-spiritually mature people declare you holy. And, if you are not like them then I don’t know how you’ll ever be holy.”

He is skillfully subtle. You must remember that everything the dark lord does is filled with some level of truth. He never comes to you flying the flag of hell so that you clearly know it’s him. He wants to sound like the Holy Spirit. He wants to sound like Scripture. He wants to sound like your conscience that is in line with the truth.

When Jesus was tempted, why was it so difficult for Him? The dark lord was skillfully subtle. He is a professional pretender and provoker. He knows what he is doing. When you forget that, you’ll be overwhelmed. He approached Jesus the same way. He used the truth, not outright obvious lies. He sought to go after Jesus’ affections, desires, and wants. He wasn’t trying to knock down the front door. He tried to sneak through the back door quietly and friendly.

This is how the dark lord uses truth to attack you:

• He uses a truth out of context.

• He applies truth to an extreme.

• He uses a half-truth.

Notice that he is always using truth. He manipulates truth. This is what he does with us whenever we try to embrace our righteous standing in Christ. He uses beautiful truths about confession, pursuing holiness, and repentance and he just ever so slightly tweaks them. 

He often does this by taking a common Christian cliche and makes it sound so right but applies it so wrongly. Did you notice above how he whispers these lies? He is using the truth about confession, holiness, and repentance but in extreme ways, out of context ways, or half-truth ways.

He wants to do anything he can to keep you from saying, “Yes! This is who I am in Christ.” He wants to get you to default into a works-righteousness mindset. He loves to put the Ten Commandments before “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:2).

He says that you’re not doing enough. You are not enough. You haven’t dealt with this sin sufficiently. If you don’t deal with the sin to the fullest extent then you’re quenching the Spirit. Oh, you don’t want to quench the Spirit. That’s a big time sin! He is the Holy Spirit. You better be holy like Him or He might leave you. You have to make sure you deal with your past perfectly or else that righteous standing should be called into question. Did you just remember some way in which you just sinned recently? Did you just remember that one horrible sin from the past? Well, if you want to be able to say, “I am righteous before God” then you better go and make sure you deal with it to its fullest extent first.

The ways in which he attacks here are endless. He aligns his army to attack us here more than anywhere else. He knows that if we embrace Christ then he must retreat. He wants to keep us thinking that we have to earn Him. He wants to get us to go back to trying to be good enough. He wants to keep us focused on doing enough before resting in Jesus.

How to fight by faith

Why does the dark lord want to keep you from embracing your righteous standing before God? Because if you knew who you were in Christ, if you really knew, then you would assault his kingdom with more force than 10,000 angels. When we know who we are in Christ, we experience joy and not shame. Joy, as Martyn Lloyd-Jones often said, is what the world needs to see in Christians. 

The dark lord wants to keep you in shame as you see your sin. If he can keep you in shame and keep you focused more on your sin than Jesus than he knows you’ll be timid to walk in faith. He knows you’ll be scared to be bold He knows you’ll be too ashamed to share your faith. He knows that if he can keep you focused on your sin then you’ll stay in the Slough of Despond (or spiritual depression as Martyn Lloyd-Jones called it) rather than moving closer to Jesus. Knowing your identity in Christ, your righteous standing before God is what casts away the cold darkness of shame.

How do we fight? We fight with God’s Word. This is why the doctrines of inspiration, inerrancy, and sufficiency are so crucial to the Christian faith. Is the Bible God’s Word? If it is, that is our reality. Our feelings aren’t our reality. Our conscience isn’t always our reality. Our personality tests aren’t our reality. God’s Word is our reality. God makes an authoritative statement about who we are in Christ. This is not sometimes true and sometimes false. It is always true. We need Scripture to rework our thoughts and to readjust our feelings. 

This is actually what the Psalms do. The Psalms are not a book merely about learning how to express our emotions to God. Rather, the Psalms are about expressing to God what we really feel and then learning to realign our feelings, affections, emotions with God’s truth. It is a collection of the Christian’s experience of living a life of faith in a fallen world par excellence. 

If you notice in Psalms 32 and 51, the two most popular psalms about confession of sin, they both move so quickly from conviction and confession to the reality of who they are by God’s grace. They do not stay in this phase of trying to beat themselves up. They do not say, “I cannot embrace God’s grace until I deal with this sin to its fullest extent. I cannot experience God’s grace until I make things totally right. I cannot draw near to God unless I first handle this on my own.” They move towards God’s grace and their righteous standing.

Must we deal with our sins? Yes. But, the subtle danger is to think that we must do that before embracing God’s grace. It’s only when we embrace God’s grace that we are enabled to deal with sin. God’s grace is not merely for forgiveness but for our ability to walk in His ways. Anything that keeps us from coming to God is a form of works-righteousness. 

I was once told that “we will never find closure if we merely seek justice; We will only find closure if we rest in grace.” Is this hyper-grace? Is this antinomianism? No. Grace is not opposed to justice. Grace comes through justice. But, if we seek to only rely on justice then we will never be able to rest.

Why is this? If we only seek to justly deal with our sins then we will never find an ending. We are so deeply depraved, so deeply shattered, so littered and polluted with sin that we will never come to the bottom of it. If we have the mindset that we cannot rest in grace until we deal with our sins in totality then we aren’t actually acting in obedience and in faith. We’re disobeying God because we’re not running to Jesus.

Typically, the people who are afraid of being antinomian are usually those who are struggling with legalism. Those who are afraid of being legalistic are usually those who are struggling with antinomianism. Every person has a default leaning and all of us go through seasons where we struggle with each one. As Sinclair Feguson’s book The Whole Christ says, the only way to fix this problem is to embrace the whole Christ. You don’t fix legalism by embracing more antinomianism. You don’t fix antinomianism by embracing more legalism. You embrace Christ!

We have made so many mistakes. We have sinned so much. If you think that you have to go back and deal with every instance of sin then you will never rest. Every memory will cripple you with shame. Every reminder will overwhelm you with guilt. It is not quenching the Spirit to rest in grace and embrace forgiveness in Christ. It is obedience. 

As Chase Maxey, Executive Director and Counselor with BCTM Ministries, once asked me, “Who told you that you were so much stronger than the Holy Spirit?” The dark lord tempts us to think we’re quenching the Spirit at times by taking that truth from 1 Thessalonians out of context, to its extreme, or making it a half-truth.

To be sure, the dark lord can use even this truth to keep us from our holy duties before God. He can take this out of its own context or take it to its extreme or half-truth. This does not mean we ignore our sins. This does not mean we don’t repent or confess. As Paul says in Romans 6:1-2, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” It means that if we have the mindset that we have to turn over every stone and make everything right in our lives then we are no longer resting in Christ’s atonement but we are trying to atone for ourselves.

It is obedience to rest in grace. It is obedience to stop trying to fix and start resting. When God wants you to deal with something in your life, He will give you the opportunity and the power to do so. Look how patient He was towards Jonah. Look how He took His time to work in Jonah’s heart. He will do it with you too. What you must do is rest in your righteous standing. You must hold onto this righteousness in Christ. You must let that determine your reality.

Every time we repent of something, at some point we must stop confessing and saying “sorry”. If we think we must continue to confess our past over and over then we aren’t trusting that God is faith and just to forgive and cleanse us (1 Jn. 1:9). Jesus never said, “Go and fix your past.” Rather, He often said in one way or another, “Go and sin no more” (Mk. 5:34; Lk. 7:50; 17:19; 18:13-14; 18:42; Jn. 5:14; 8:11). He knows that fixing our past isn’t the answer. He knows we can’t re-live or re-write our pasts. He knows we must move forward living differently.

We seek holiness because we are holy. We seek to progressively grow in holiness because we are already positionally holy (Rom. 1:7; Eph. 1:1; 5:3; Col. 1:2,12; 3:12; Heb. 2:11; Jude 3; Rev. 13:7). We don’t receive the position of holiness because we worked hard to become holy. God graciously brought us into the definitive position and that compels us to go and live in light of who we are.

We fight by getting the gospel logic straight in our heads. We fight by embracing God’s grace. We fight by dismantling the attacks of the dark lord and his minions. We fight by resting in Christ.

Spiritual Warfare: When Satan Tempts You That There Is Sin Left Undone

Discerning the dark lord’s tactics

The dark lord is relentless in his attacking the saints. He has you right where he wants you if you think that you’re not going to be attacked by him. One of the ways in which he moves under the radar and sneaks in the shadows of our conscience is by tempting us to think that there is sin left unrepented of or left unconfessed in our lives. 

He knows that the gospel compels us to repent and have faith (Mt. 4:17). He knows that Romans 6:1-2 says, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” He knows that Psalm 32:1-3 says, “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, who sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.” Let’s be clear: the dark lord knows more of the content of Scripture than we do and he seeks to use it against us.

The dark lord loves to take Scripture out of context or to its unbiblical extremes (see the temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4:1-11). He knows that we would not fret if he came to us with wildly contrasting temptations that clearly aren’t biblical. He likes to take that which is good and distort it. One of the ways in which he does so is by taking the command of our Lord to repent and uses it to torment us with the thought that we have some sin left unrepented of.

Now, to be sure, there really might be some sin left unrepented of. We need to discern what is conviction versus what is condemnation. Condemnation has no hope. Condemnation only points out the bad and never gives you grace. There is always work to do. There is never any rest, joy, and peace in Christ. You are always under the Law. You are always to be ashamed. The Holy Spirit is always pointing out where you have failed. This is not how our gracious Lord and His Spirit acts towards us. As the hymn writer says, “When Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward I look and see Him there who made an end to all my sin.”

The Extremes He Takes Us To

One of the extremes in which the dark lord does this is by hounding us with the thought that we have not repented enough. There is something in our past that we haven’t confessed. There is something that we have only halfway repented of. Or, there is some element of something that we have not confessed in its absolute fullness.

It sounds awfully close to the truth doesn’t it? Of course we must repent and live a life of constant repenting! Of course we must confess our sins and seek to hide nothing from the Lord (1 John 1:8-10)! He will take this good and life-giving truth and use it to condemn and drain the life out of us. He will take God-centered proclamations of the gospel and turn them into man-centered efforts to make ourselves clean. This, as Paul says to the Galatians, is not the gospel!

As long as he can convince you that you cannot rest in Christ until this particular sin is drained completely dry then he has you where he wants you. He will continue to hold the law over you time after time and keep showing you that there is more to do. He knows that the law never quits condemning sinners. There is always confession that falls short. There is always repentance, even in the best saints, that falls short. There has never been anyone anywhere who has ever fully and completely repented or confessed the depths of their sin. 

Take Martin Luther for example. He would confess his sins for hours upon hours a day because the law was ever before his face. The dark lord sought to convince him that there was more to do and that he couldn’t rest in the grace of Christ until he had dealt with it exhaustively.

He wants you to think that until you express absolutely every feeling, every emotion, every detail, and every instance of such sin that you are under God’s wrath. When he hounds a saint with this, he causes the saint to fret and worry about whether they have done enough. They can’t rest because if they do then they must be quenching the Spirit who must be giving them this thought.

How to fight by faith

You will forever have duties left undone if you think Jesus won’t accept you until you have dealt with everything fully and perfectly. The antidote is first and foremost to soak in the finality of the Cross. In John 19:30 Jesus cries, “It is finished.” This one Greek word, tetelestai, has a lifetime of meaning in it. Think about it. Jesus did not have to say this right before He died. Why would He exert this final portion of His physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual energy to say this one word before dying? He did it to confirm to us of His work on our behalf. As they say, “Last words are lasting words.”

When Jesus says it is finished He means it. Robert Mounce says, 

“This one word summary of Jesus’ life and death is perhaps the single most important statement in all of Scripture. The word means ‘to complete,’ ‘to bring to perfection.’ Jesus had fully done the work God the Father sent him to do… But the tense of the verb, the ‘perfect’ tense, brings out even more of what Jesus was saying. The perfect describes an action that was fully completed and has consequences at the time of speaking… Because Jesus fully completed his task, the ongoing effects are that you and I are offered the free gift of salvation so that we can be with him forever.”

What does Mounce mean by this? He means that there is nothing left undone in the work of Jesus. There is nothing that we need to go and do first in order to be saved. There will never be enough confession. There will never be enough repentance. You will absolutely never feel as sorry and convicted as you should about your sin. You cannot rest in your work. You must rest and trust in the finality of the atonement of Christ for all your sin (past, present, and future). 

Knowing What The Truth Really Is

We must have a robust doctrine and understanding of repentance and confession so that when someone tells us something differently we can spot it out. There is the common story that you might have heard about how the FBI detects counterfeit currency. They spend so much time looking at the real thing that when they see the counterfeit they know it immediately. We too must spend much time looking at Christ and looking at the reality of what the Bible says about repentance and confession so that when the dark lord tempts us to go back into slavery we can detect it.

Paul dealt with something similar to this with the Galatians. He knew that any subtle change to the gospel made it no gospel at all. The addition of anything to Christ and the gospel made Him no Savior and the gospel no good news. There is nothing but faith in Christ that saves us. It is out of that faith that we overflow into repentance. Indeed, faith and repentance are two sides of the same coin. That is why Jesus would say “repent and believe” and not “repent and then believe”. The dark lord will draw too much of a division between repentance and faith. He wants you to think that you must repent enough before you can have saving faith and free forgiveness (which would not be free at all!). It is another form of works-righteousness.

What Does It Mean To Confess?

In 1 John, the apostle John is writing to people who have been infiltrated by false teachers. He seeks to show them what it means to be truly saved. It’s only true Christians that admit and confess their sin. Christians do not think they are without sin. They are to declare, acknowledge, and to say the same thing about their sin as God says about their sin. They are to confess their sin not merely for confession sake but to express their need for Jesus on their behalf. This is the ongoing lifestyle of the believer. It is not a one time thing. This tells us that there is always something to confess and repent of. We are deceiving ourselves and being deceived if we think we have confessed and dealt with everything.

Like a sound apologetic argument, we can actually use the dark lord’s attacks on us against him. He says that we must always be confessing our sins and we can agree. He says that there is sin left undone and we can agree. It’s the very fact that we can’t confess everything that we must rest in Christ on our behalf. It’s the very fact that we can’t repent of everything to the fullest extent that we must look to Jesus to find peace of mind.

Now, to be sure, we must not use this as a biblical excuse to not confess or to shirk our Christian duty before God. Trust me, the dark lord will use this also to deceive you. We must deal with sin but we also must know when we simply cannot do enough and we must lay down and rest at the Cross. 

The Holy Spirit knows our frame. He knows that this is a lifestyle that lasts a lifetime. He doesn’t put believers on a “doomsday” countdown clock which tells us that if we don’t deal with everything exhaustively then we are inevitably going to fall under God’s displeasure and harsh discipline.

How God Looks Out For Us

Think about how God speaks about this in the Old Testament. Leviticus 4 is a chapter that is all about sacrifices for sinners who sin unintentionally. There are those who may not even realize that their actions or thoughts were actually sin and yet God provides a sacrifice for them. Wouldn’t it be horrible if we were only forgiven for the sins we knew of? Calvin talks about these sacrifices as follows:

Moses does not refer to those transgressions into which we are ensnared, when we are led astray by the appearance of rectitude, so as to think ourselves without blame; but to those of which we take no heed, and whereby our minds are not pricked; or to those sudden falls, wherein the infirmity of the flesh so stifles the reason and the judgment as to blind the sinner.

And isn’t Christ the ultimate fulfillment of Leviticus 4? Isn’t He the true sacrifice? Isn’t He of so much more worth and value as a substitute on your behalf? Doesn’t He give you a positive righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21)? Oh, Christ is capable of covering all your sins! He is enough for you! He has ended the war. He has taken away your guilt and shame. He no longer points the finger at you but welcomes you with open arms.

Why does this matter to you in the midst of such a daunting and exhausting fight? Because God knows your frame. He knows that there is always sin that we leave undone. He knows there is a grand difference between our actively running away from Him (like Jonah) and our negligence, ignorance, or just flat out spiritual exhaustion. Our Lord knows that we can’t bear to see all of our sin all at once. He knows we can’t repent of everything at once. He knows that repentance itself is not our restitution or atonement. He knows that we cannot merely focus on the faults and the failures in our lives. Where would be the good news in that? Besides, we are built up in faith when we take our eyes off of ourselves and place them about the righteousness we have in Christ. 

The Path of the Gospel

This is where the dark lord attacks. He tries to do anything to take your eyes off of Christ. In Psalm 73, he almost had the psalmist forsake God and the covenant community by taking his eyes off Yahweh and placing them upon his circumstances and the world. It was when the psalmist returned to the temple that his sight of reality was restored. The same is true of us in our spiritual warfare. When we take our eyes long enough off God and place them upon us there is a temptation to do away with the gospel. Satan doesn’t want us to see the grace we have in Jesus. He doesn’t want us to realize that our sins are dealt with in Christ. He doesn’t want us to realize that Jesus is enough for us. He wants us to either do nothing with our sin or try to do everything with our sin. That is no salvation at all!

As always, the path of the gospel is a narrow path with ditches on either side. The dark lord lassos us from either side trying to pull us down into either extreme. He will either make us hound ourselves with condemnation until every aspect of the totality of our guilt is dealt with (as if that were somehow possible) or he will tempt us to ignore it all and continue to live as if we have no sin. Do not let the dark lord hire you to be his own co-accuser against you.

He will dress himself as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14) and make it sound as if he is the Holy Spirit. After all, he knows the Spirit will convict us concerning sin (Jn. 16:8). He wants to sound like the Spirit so that we fear the thought of saying “no” to the Spirit if we seek to stop and rest in Christ. He will tempt us to think that we are quenching the Spirit (1 Thess. 5:19; Eph. 4:30). But think about this, would Jesus invite us into a salvation of Sabbath rest (Mt. 11:28-30) and simultaneously say that we must always be on the sin-hunt in our lives? No, my friend. He wants you to rest. Trust Him. He will bring you to conviction in His timing and He will help you to confess and repent. You can rest in Him.

Elizabeth Holmes and Our Need For Repentance

If you have found yourself in a conversation with me in the past two weeks, there’s a good chance I’ve brought up the Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos story. After listening to an 11 hour audiobook and a six episode podcast about her rise and fall in silicon valley, I’ve asked myself why I’m so intrigued by this story. If you haven’t listened to me ramble on about it and you’re asking yourself, “Who in the world is Elizabeth Holmes?” here’s a quick summary:

Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos' founder and CEO, dropped out of Stanford University at age 19 to launch Theranos in 2003 as a cheaper, more efficient alternative to traditional blood testing. After serious allegations about the legitimacy of the company’s technology, Theranos’ valuation of $9 billion collapsed, and Holmes along with a former COO were indicted on federal fraud charges in June 2018. The podcast (The Dropout) and book (Bad Blood) seek to tell the story of Elizabeth’s demise through first hand accounts of former employees, investors, and journalists.

Now, I’m about to ask something from you. Instead of hearing this story and thinking, “Wow what a shame someone could go to such great lengths just for money and fame,” I want you to ask yourself, “In what areas of my life am I like Elizabeth Holmes?”

Sin has a sneaky way of revealing itself to us when we have gone much too far than we ever intended. The World, The Flesh, and The Devil want us to think we are doing just fine until suddenly we are in uncharted waters wondering how we got so far from shore. Listening to Elizabeth’s story has made me reflect on where she went wrong, and how we can apply steps in our lives to keep our souls from going where we never intended on going in the first place.

1) You cannot serve two masters - Elizabeth’s technology was a healthcare device that would give blood test results. The catch was, it never worked consistently well, and she knew it. In some very real instances, this caused patients to take medical care steps for illnesses they didn’t even have. Elizabeth put the money she would gain from partners and investors before the lives of patients.

We cannot serve God and money (Matt 6:24) just like she could not serve money and patients. The Bible makes this so clear through several parables spoken by Jesus (Luke 16:13). We must rely on the Lord for our provision and sustenance - our daily bread (Matt 6:11). When we serve money over God, we are serving an idol made in the image of man. When have you treated others in a sinful way because the stake of money was in the balance?

2) Put yourself around others who will hold you accountable - Elizabeth ran a company of 700 employees including scientists and researchers who were working on her technology. There was very high turnover of employees. Why? When someone would question the product or the process of the technology, they were fired. If someone suggested the quality control was skewed, they were fired. She didn’t want to hear someone tell her she was running her business unethically. Elizabeth may not be facing criminal charges today if she took some of these critiques to heart and slowed down the roll out of her devices to stores.

We must not run away from loving and wise rebuke (1 John 1:8-10). When we only surround ourselves with friends who “only lift us up and ‘support’ us” and not those who love us too much to leave us in our sin, we are not pursuing holiness and will find ourselves in very deep sinful patterns before we realize they even started.

Elizabeth convinced herself, along with many others, that she was doing a revolutionary work for humanity while in reality she was lying about the legitimacy of her device in order to keep cash flowing. Have you sought a seemingly good end through self-justified sinful behavior? Have you closed off relationships that convicted you about a certain sinful behavior?

3) We must have a repentant heart - Elizabeth still hasn’t pleaded guilty to defrauding investors. According to a former employee, he saw Elizabeth this past January and she didn’t apologize or even act like there was a wrong doing on her end for his firing. It is also alleged she is pursuing another technology venture while she is still on trial for her time at Theranos.

When we see our sin, it is the grace of God and the Holy Spirit that gives us eyes to see and brings us to our knees with a contrite heart (again, see 1 John 1:8-10). When we have this posture, we can come to the ones we’ve hurt and ask for forgiveness (Matt 6:14-15). We can do this because we have seen that we have fallen so short of the glory of God, yet he still pursues a relationship with us and still covers us with his mercy. This allows us to battle our sin patterns and have freedom from them - the freedom you can only receive through being In Christ (Rom 8:1).

It is one thing if we sin and then quickly come to the Lord through repentance, but it is another thing if we live in a perpetual sinful pattern with no returning to the Lord with a contrite heart. Is there something in your life that you are living in sinful bondage to? Have you sinned against God and others and have yet to reconcile either? Do not hope that time will fix all, but run to the cross where mercy is given.

So what was Elizabeth missing that we could be missing too?

What draws many of us to stories like Elizabeth’s is that we think this could never happen to us. That we are so separated from this story that it is entertainment. We may never defraud investors of upwards of 700 million dollars in our lifetime, but we may slip into a sin pattern that leaves irreparable damage to relationships, jobs, or even the view of all Christians to others. But lift up your faces, there is good news for us and even for Elizabeth Holmes if the Holy Spirit lifts the veil from over her eyes:
No matter how small or big our sin may feel or look, God is Bigger. God is Sovereign. God is Merciful. God is Just. He has known before time every sin you will ever commit, and Jesus paid for every bit of it on the Cross (John 19:30). He knew you intimately before the beginning of time, and still chose to love you like He loves his perfect son (Eph 1:11). Will you take this love over Money? Over Power? Over an Affair? Over Comfort?