Targets

 If the enemy’s going to go through the trouble of sneaking someone into a church to sow doubt, his target isn’t going to be some tertiary thing but a fundamental one. The enemy is not out to cause division among the brethren regarding whether we should pray standing up or kneeling but about things like the sufficiency, supremacy, and Lordship of Jesus.

Jesus is no longer the objective but a means to an end, a way by which we attain what our hearts truly desire. If He is not the desire of your heart, if He is not the object of your pursuit, if He is not your all in all, the enemy succeeded in derailing you from the path. Things that matter, matter, and one need only look at what the agents of darkness are attacking within the household of faith to understand what those are.

The enemy desires to leave the children of God powerless and rudderless. He wants to separate the children of God from either the Word of God or the power of God, both being necessary components for a healthy spiritual life. One guides, and one gives the strength required to endure. One sets the course and determines the destination; the other provides the requisite energy to reach it. A Christian without the presence and power of God will falter and flail, grow weary, and lose confidence. A Christian without the Word of God will fall for lies and falsehoods because the litmus test is missing from their life.

My daughters are getting to the age where they’re asking prescient questions, especially the older one. Most mornings, when they wake up, they’ll find me in my chair with my Bible and a cup of coffee beside me. The other day, after saying good morning, Victoria scrunched her nose and asked, “Why do you read your Bible so much, daddy? You have other books on your shelf, but every morning you’re just reading the one.”

I waved her over, and she came and sat in my lap, and I explained to her that the Bible is the only book of its kind. It not only tells us where we come from, who we are, who we ought to be, where we’re going, and how to get there but what we will find once we arrive.

Think of yourself as a kite. The wind that propels you is the power of the Holy Spirit; the Word of God is the string that keeps you from blowing all over the place. It’s through His Word that God keeps us on course as we fly higher toward the heavens. 

The enemy’s target is the foundational tenets of the gospel. Those things that are not given to debate but are yes and amen, without equivocation or qualification. The enemy’s minions might not start out attacking those tenets, but that’s where they always end up. Some take a circuitous route to their objective, and others make a beeline for it, but their targets, the things they will focus all their energies on, are the salvific issues of the gospel.

Their goal is division, doubt, and destruction. Without a firm hand on the rudder and a steady eye that can see the dangers and avoid them, any congregation of any size is susceptible. Personally, I believe the bigger a congregation, the easier it is for the enemy’s minions to creep in and begin slithering their way into positions of authority where they can do the most damage.

It’s difficult to be swayed by someone you barely know and trust even less. The enemy’s agents are willing to invest time and resources and earn trust and deference so they can then turn around and cause as much havoc as the situation allows.

The best way I can describe those who creep in is like the sleeper agents certain governments are said to have embedded in the United States, living everyday lives and staying under the radar until it’s time to act and do what they were sent here to do. We’ve seen the unfortunate effects of what a handful of determined souls can do, going so far as to cripple a nation the size of America. What do you think a handful of well-placed people speaking lies and tickling people’s ears can do?

The men Jude speaks of are demonstrably evil, men who were long ago marked out for this condemnation, meaning that in His foreknowledge, God knew they would exist, what their intent would be, and that they would be a dangerous threat to the wellbeing and spiritual wellness of the church.

Before we can let the entirety of the church wriggle off the hook and just blame the agents of Satan for the chaos that is being wreaked throughout Western Christianity, if there were no demand for extra-biblical, flesh-elevating, materialism-centered teaching, there wouldn’t be such a vast supply.

The world calls it success modeling, where you find someone that succeeded in your field of choice, then you model their actions, the idea being that since they were successful doing what they did, you too will succeed in like fashion.

The genesis of the problem is how we define success in the church. If we define success the same way the world does, by flaunting big buildings, big bling, and big budgets, then it goes without saying that we will devote all our energy to full bank accounts rather than preaching the truth. When we come to realize that the less truth we preach, the bigger our accounts get, and money being the metric by which we measure success, the more successful we become, the truth we dare to preach becomes infrequent and eventually ceases altogether.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.