Be Careful, The Devil is After You

Good morning. It is delightful to be with you this morning. I speak in various churches.

This is the first time I have spoken in a hundred years that didn't have a big screen and a video projector and smoke and lights.

It's really nice for me to be in a church that has pews and it's just delightful to be with my friend

Bart whom I have not seen for a while have known for a good deal of time.

Let me tell you a little bit about how I came to be here today. The story really begins when

I was back in high school. Don't worry it's going to go fast. I grew up in a very non -Christian home and came to know the

Lord at the end of my sophomore year in high school. I began going to church where there were a lot of pretty girls which

I liked a lot. My first year in college there was a particularly pretty girl that I was dating and really liked her a lot.

And then after a date about February she says to me, what would you say if I said

I was going to Central America this summer on a missions trip? And I said, and leave me alone without a girlfriend?

You can't do that. I'll join the Navy. I knew nothing about the Navy but that that would keep her from going on this mission trip.

It did not. She said, well I'm going so the next day I went down and joined the United States Navy.

I went to boot camp in San Diego and then she was done with her missions trip but I had another couple years of obligations with the

Navy. My math was not very good. And so I went to school in Mississippi for nine weeks.

At the end of that they gave me orders to Japan and assured me it would be shore duty. So I went home on 19 days of leave and proposed marriage to my girlfriend, told her we'd go to Japan on honeymoon for two years.

She said yes. We were engaged for 10 days. We had a large formal wedding with 300 people, attendants, cake, flowers, all of it.

We did it in 10 days. Just so that you know, it was amazing. I left for Japan and when

I left I found out that it wasn't going to be a shore duty but they were going to put me on a boat and send me to sea.

She came to Japan anyway two months later and I had found a very small paper house, an apartment, a

Japanese apartment that was made completely out of paper that we could rent. But it was a long way away from the base.

In order for her to get to the base she had to walk a half a mile, take a bus, take a train and take two more buses.

And twice a week she would load up or once a week she would take a red wagon on that journey and go to the commissary and load it with groceries and then pull the wagon home.

And then the next day she would fill it with laundry and go to the laundromat and pull it home. We had no phone, no

TV, no car. She did not talk to her parents for two years while we were there.

We were very, very poor and it's impossible to describe to you how difficult that time in our lives was.

The first year we were married I only saw her for 62 days. I spent the rest of it floating on a ship out in the

Pacific Ocean. And it was during that time that we discovered Cadence International, the mission we served with.

They had a Christian serviceman center there in Yokosuka and we wandered into this place.

They offered home -cooked meals, Bible studies, trips and that place saved our lives.

That is not an understatement. We met friends and Christians and people who would help us and it became very, very dear to us.

And largely because of that ministry in our lives we ended up going to Bible school. After that in 1982 we joined

Cadence International and we went to Germany for 18 years opening up our home to military people, doing home -cooked meals,

Bible studies. For the last eight years we've done it with airmen in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

But we have spent our 40 years of our life opening up our home to young men and women who are in the military who are away from home.

And about a year and a half ago the Lord laid it on our hearts that perhaps we should visit those that we were still in touch with.

There are 260 people we're still in touch with from our time of ministry. So we bought a travel trailer and we've been pulling it around the country visiting all the men and women that we've led to the

Lord, that we have discipled, people who were 19 when we met them whom we loved with all of our hearts and now they're 30, 40, 50, even 60 years old.

And so we have hung out with them. Some of them are pastors. Many of them are leaders in their church and some of them have fallen away from the

Lord. They don't go to church anymore. They don't believe in Jesus anymore.

They just aren't interested in any of it. And as we have visited with those people it becomes clear to me that the devil is after them and he's after you.

He is after me. First Peter chapter 5 verse 8 says, be self -control and alert your enemy.

The devil is after you like a hungry lion looking for someone to devour.

And he does not care how long you've gone to church or whether you've gone to seminary or Bible school.

He doesn't care whether you're five years old or 105. The devil wants to destroy your life.

He wants to destroy my life. And that's what

I've been thinking about as we've traveled the country, how the devil is after us and how many people he has worked on destroying.

For our text this morning I want us to think about two verses from the book of Ephesians chapter 5 verse 15 and 16.

It says, be very careful then how you live not as unwise but as wise making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil.

Let's pray and we'll dive in. God thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning.

Thank you for your word. God may your spirit open our minds and our hearts. God I pray that we would see your truth, that we would hear your voice, and God give us courage to be obedient to what we see and what we hear this morning.

We ask in Jesus name, amen. The first phrase, be very careful then.

Careful about what? I'm going to suggest we're to be careful about our hearts.

Proverbs chapter 4 says, above all else guard your heart for from it flows your entire life.

Guard your heart. Now by heart what we mean is that is the deepest part of you. They're the things that you think, things that you do, the things that you can go your whole life without thinking about because it's down deep somewhere.

The Bible says be careful. Guard your heart. Now if you really look in your heart you will find things down there that are very disturbing.

You will find things like anger, envy, lust. It's all in there and if you pay attention you'll see it.

You will repent of it but if you don't pay attention you don't even know it's there.

I want to say very clearly that the Bible teaches this is true of all of us.

True of you, it's true of me. If I look into my heart I'm going to see things that are awful and I'm a pastor.

I've studied Greek. I am brilliant and yet my heart there are things in there are wicked.

So on this trip we started in California and we spent an extra day in San Diego because the wind was blowing and I didn't want it to blow my trailer over.

Debbie and I watched 20 seconds of YouTube video of trailers falling over and that was enough.

I figured if we watched any more we'd never do it and if we watched less we wouldn't be careful enough.

So we're stuck in San Diego. So on a wonderful sunny afternoon we go out to the

Hotel Del Coronado. This is a wonderful hotel that was built in the 1920s.

It is spectacular. Presidents have been there. Movie stars have been there. They've shot movies there.

If we were in a church with a screen I'd show you a picture of it. It's amazing and we went out there and we walked through the lobby and we looked at the old pictures.

It had a grand ceiling and chandeliers and then we walked out on a long pier out onto where the beach was and they had a restaurant out there and we walked out there.

We got some coffee and a cake and we started chatting with our server David who was just delightful and we watched the surfers and the people on the beach and it was just lovely and at the end of it they bring our check and inside this envelope they bring us a pen to sign the check which is not unusual.

What was unusual was how neat the pen was. This feels like an expensive pen.

It feels like a cross pen and you twist it and it says Hotel Del Coronado on it and it's so cool.

I said to myself I'm going to take this pen. Now this is ridiculous on a number of levels.

One, I have enough pens to last two lifetimes. I don't need it and two, if I really wanted it

I could buy it in the gift shop but the devil is there. He says just take it.

Nobody will see it and because at that moment I'm paying attention I rebuke the devil and I repent.

I go what's wrong with me God and I put it back and then as we're walking out we said goodbye to our server

David and I said I really like the pen. That was special and he says really would you like one?

Here keep it. Oh and here's a couple more. Have a great day. What do

I see if I behave righteously? God will honor that. If I say no to the temptations of the devil

God will bless me. When you're in school tempted to cheat.

I'm sure none of you in here are ever tempted to cheat while you're in school. I was all the time. You don't need to cheat.

God will bless you. If you're in a lifetime commitment to someone else and you are a lifetime commitment with a partner and you see someone who's very attractive to you, repent of that.

God wants you to take something that's not yours. Repent of that. Guard your heart for your whole life flows from it.

You gotta think and if you think you'll find it down there. Now there are two things that keep us from being careful.

One is you can't be careful if you're in a hurry and you can't be careful if you're distracted.

If you're in a hurry you will not see what's going on in your heart and some of you are probably always late for something.

How many of you are late? Don't well some of you raise your hand. Thank you. I appreciate that. When you're late you want to hurry.

You're late for school. You're late for work. You're late for coffee and you're rushing and some of you perhaps have lives where your whole life is doing nothing but rushing from one thing to another to another.

You're so busy and you're in such a hurry and when you're in a hurry you can't see what's going on in your heart.

You have to slow down. When we were in New Orleans we were camped outside of the of the town and we were meeting someone down in the center of New Orleans.

I'd not been to New Orleans before and I figured because it's an old historic place parking would be difficult so I googled on my phone where to park in downtown

New Orleans and it suggested I download an app that would give me parking directions and it would be cheaper and I thought that's a good idea so I downloaded the app and then things really went south on me.

They wanted my license number. They wanted my credit card. They wanted all kinds of information.

Some of you have seen this and so I just keep patting and whatever it's a next a neck and I couldn't get to the end of it and time is ticking by and I'm getting

I'm getting really frustrated and then I finally click on I want the parking space and it was $49 and I thought that's an awful lot for one night but I'm that far into it so I take it we get in the truck and now we're late because I spent so much time messing around with the app.

Have any of you ever done anything like that? I'm late so I'm in a hurry so I get down I follow my

GPS I park the truck we get out we have a lovely time with our friends and when I come back to the truck it's got two boots on it and one of my questions why did they need two boots wouldn't one have been sufficient and I call and I say

I paid for this and they said well when the guy shows up take it up with him so the guy shows up and I said look

I paid and he says oh that's for the lot next door we have the same address you should have been more careful why wasn't

I careful I was in a hurry I'll share with you

I paid $150 to park one night in downtown New Orleans why because I was in a hurry now $150 is a small price to pay when you think the devil's after you some people ruin their whole lives because they're in a hurry and do things that they regret the rest of their lives because they're in a hurry the other thing that will keep us from being careful with our heart is if we're distracted and you guys just know we live in a world of distractions cell phone tv movies work bills if you're going to really guard your heart you have to spend time where you're quiet and you're alone and you really ask yourself what is going on inside of my heart and a great time to ask that is when you're in conflict when you're mad at your wife when you're mad at your husband when you're mad at your boss when you're mad at your teachers to look inside and say what is going on inside of me now if you don't do that you're going to say you're going to notice what's wrong with them but the issue is never what's wrong with them this is what's wrong with me

I've done a little bit of marriage counseling in my life and every marriage counseling starts out the same way the husband looks at his wife and says fix her and the wife looks at the husband and says fix him