The Lord Our Guard

The Reality of Evil and the Evil One

Our text for the preaching this morning is a continuance in 2 Thessalonians 3, I'll read verses 1 -5 in a moment, but we will preach verses 3 -5. In verses 1 -3 you'll recall the apostle asked the Thessalonians to pray for both success for the gospel, that the gospel may run ahead, may speed ahead, excuse me, and also he asked that they be delivered from wicked and evil men.

So he prayed for their deliverance, for Paul, Silas, and Timothy's protection. And now he writes to them about the protection that they have against evil and wicked men. But Paul is going to be more specific, not just against evil generally, but he's going to speak to them through the scripture about the evil one, the evil one, and a particular evil one against whom God offers divine protection.

So if you'd stand please for the reading of God's word, 2 Thessalonians 3, 3 -5, and again I'll start at verse 1. Finally, brothers, pray for us that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored as happened among you, and that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men.

For not all have faith, but the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one. And we have confidence in the Lord about you, that you are doing and will do the things that we command.

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ. God bless the reading. And now the preaching of his word. Please be seated. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that the words of my mouth, the meditations of my heart, the preparations to declare your word will be pleasing in your sight.

I pray it would be explained well and heard well, that the word of God would take root in all our hearts and would change us as we encounter you, the true and living God, through this true and everlasting and living word.

So Father, bless us now as we attend to this, for we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, have you ever heard the name Herman Webster Mudgett, also known as H .H. Holmes, also known as Dr. Holmes? No, most of you have not.

This man lived from May 16th, 1861, when he was born, to his death on May 7th, 1896, when he was executed by hanging. He was one of the most notorious serial killers in U .S. history. Just before he was executed, he confessed to 27 murders, though several of those he confessed to having killed, he actually never met.

Those people were alive and well. He made that confession only to traumatize people. And so even just before his execution, this man, this notorious serial killer, was also a notorious liar. He toyed with his victims, many victims.

He reveled in the terror that they had once they realized how they had been duped by him. He was a con artist par excellence. He gained the confidence of creditors and bankers and merchants who gave him all sorts of furniture and equipment for his business ventures on credit, and he never paid a dime for them.

He was able to charm the creditors, the bankers, the merchants, and even from far away, young girls who wanted the adventure of living in the city where he resided, which was Chicago at that time. Creditors would come to him with their bills unpaid for a couple of years or three years or even more, and when they came with proof that he owed them the money, they borrowed the money, and there was the equipment, they're going to repossess it.

They would leave spellbound by his charm, and they left with their wallets empty and their lips full of praise for this cultured, sincere, and polite man. All the while, the bodies are piling up in what can only be described as a chamber of horrors.

He felt no regret for his victims. He was only irritated by the inconveniences of being incarcerated. He reminds me of John Steinbeck's Kathy Ames in East of Eden, the one who was a monstrosity because she was born with no conscience, but H. H. Holmes was all too real.

He was the epitome of evil. He was as wicked a man as you could ever imagine. He said of himself, I was born with the devil in me. I can no more not murder than a poet not sing. Now perhaps in the way of Caiaphas, he spoke the truth unwittingly.

Maybe in the manner of demons that believe in shudder, he stumbled onto some truth because he stated plainly his tendency to do evil. I can no more not murder, and then of the origin of his evil, he spoke of a literal being, the devil.

He said I was born with the devil in me. Now we make no excuses for men's sin or iniquity, but there's a revulsion today in the world generally to evil. There's a revulsion to evil. By that I don't mean that the world at large is repulsed by what is really evil and strives to avoid what the scripture would call evil.

They call light dark and dark light and so forth. You do mean is that there's a reluctance. There's a real revulsion today to actually call something evil. It's your choice. You get to make your own way in the world.

You did something bad. Perhaps you were raised in a bad toxic environment. You have the disease, not the sin, but the disease of addiction to an alcohol or a drug or something like that, and this is why you do things that are not as good as they could be, doing anything they can and dancing all around this word evil, doing evil.

What we have today before us in 2 Thessalonians 3, 3 -5 is reality, where of course Paul, as we do we see throughout scripture, calls it like it is, and he calls evil it's a reality. It's a reality that we need to sort of get our arms around and understand because in these verses is the Lord's protection against this evil and particularly this evil one, this evil one, and we need to understand that the Lord God himself protects us against this thing, that this thing we're protected against is real.

It's literal and we need to avail ourselves of the protection that he gives us. We speak of course of the devil in 2 Thessalonians 3 and verse 3. He's called the evil one, the one against whom God has established and continually guards you.

So biblical truth, reality, the reality of the devil, which is the origin of all evil, the reality of God's protection for us against him, the reality of our responsibility to go steadily further from evil and closer to God, what Pastor Owens just spoke about, about sanctification, a work of God within, and in these verses a work of God within and something we avail ourselves and we work towards that same goal, but it's God working within that brings us about.

So it's the reality of the devil and the one against whom we are protected by God, the reality of his protection and how we avail ourselves of it and our responsibility to go further away from that and closer to the image of Christ within us.

We find that the Lord's faithfulness and great is his faithfulness is married to our obedience and that's our protection from evil. God's faithfulness and our obedience. The Lord protects you against a real being, a real being, and that's the devil, but the Lord is faithful.

He will establish you and guard you against the evil one. You see, your protection against evil, against the source of all evil, has been taken up by the Lord God himself. The grammar here makes it very clear and it comes out as well in your English as it does in the original language.

The fact that he establishes and the fact that he guards are both centered towards this one goal against the evil one. You're established against the evil one as much as you're guarded against the evil one.

We all confess the reality of God, do we not? You know, the picture I always draw is, you know, when you're standing around the coffee machine in the break room at work or the water cooler. Of course, we don't gather together in break rooms anymore, so I don't know how to quite how to picture that social interaction at the office, but in that time when you're just gathered around people that you work with, that you know, and having casual conversations, most of us are willing to confess, are we not, the reality of God and even to go so far quite easily and actually that I believe in God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ, who went to the cross for my sins and who died and on the third day was raised and now resides and have most of us are willing to make confessions like that, are we not?

Sometimes it's a little difficult, but we're willing to say that about God. We confess the reality of God and his triune nature. As the apostle Peter put it, though you have not seen him, you love him.

Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. So we confess and we rejoice and we revel in a God that we've never seen by faith in a resurrection that not one of us witnessed, all by faith in what God has revealed to us, but not one of us has seen.

What Paul brings up here in second Thessalonians chapter three in verse three, another one who not one of us has ever seen and he does so in a matter-of-fact way that makes him as real as the Lord God himself.

You notice the personal nature here, he will establish you, that's God, he the literal God, God the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, God will establish you and protect you against the evil one. They're both personal, they're both put matter-of-factly in literal language here, the evil one, the devil.

Isn't that a little harder for us to confess in some ways? I mean, some people might disagree with you about believing in God the Father and so forth, but you tell them, I believe in the devil too. Oh, so you believe in that guy with the funny tail and the horns and he's all red and he's got yellow teeth and all that?

No, that's not the picture at all. The apostle Paul says he disguises himself as an angel of light, he looks good, he looks wonderful. He panders to what makes us feel good, panders to our pride, panders to our flesh, panders to our sensuality.

Now when you go back to that conversation where you spoke of the reality of God whom you cannot see or the resurrection which you did not see, but our hope, our faith all rests on that. Just as literally this one who you've never seen and cannot see and God willing will never see, it's just as literal and just as real.

Now you go tell that co-worker, that friend, that unsaved family member that you believe in the devil, the evil one, the tempter in the garden, and the father of lies, the origin of evil. I sort of camped on this a bit because in order to understand the protection, in order to thank God for how he guards us against this evil one, in order to protect ourselves against him, we have to recognize the danger, do we not?

We have to recognize that this thing, this entity, this being actually exists as much as God exists. Now he's the opposite of God in every way we can imagine. He's the father of lies and God's word is truth.

Jesus said, sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth. All through the Bible, God's truth stands firm. The devil is the absolute opposite of that. Everything God does is good and he desires our salvation.

Everything the other does is evil and he desires our condemnation. He's the opposite of God in every way. He's the tempter. God cannot be tempted by evil. He's the father of life. God's word is truth, but we need to be aware of the danger before we will take action against it, before we will even avail ourselves of the protection of the one.

We have to, as much as we believe anything else in the Bible, believe in the literal nature of this being and the danger he represents to us. Otherwise, why would God establish and guard us against this very one?

You know, several years ago, before multiple sclerosis took it away, I took a group here, a half-dome in Yosemite. As we're walking along the river, there was a crowd and they're very excited. It was like 10, 11 people that kind of gathered in a circle.

And I peeked over and I was looking at what they were looking at. I was a bit of an experienced outdoorsman, hiking and backpacking and climbing and hunting. And what I saw, it wouldn't take a very experienced Daniel Boone type to understand the danger, was a rattlesnake.

They're all very amazed at this rattlesnake. They're taking pictures and they're, you know, getting really close to it and they're amazed by this thing. And I could tell by the the coil that he could strike out about two and a half feet.

They can strike a percentage of their body. And I started tapping. I said, you know, that snake only knows two things. He's getting angry and he knows how to bite. I say, this is not good. And they wouldn't go away and they wouldn't understand the danger.

It was just a pretty snake. We do need to understand the danger before we'll back away. And when the danger is what we're speaking of here in 2 Thessalonians 3, it's not back away, it's turn as Joseph did with Potter for his wife and run away.

You know, some things are known by their effects, even things we can't see. You don't see gravity, but you know it by its effect, by its effects. You cannot see the warmth of the sun, but you know it's real by the effects that it has.

And in both cases, by the effect, we know the cause. Warmth is caused by the sun, which you can see, but gravity, gravity is caused by what? It's mass of an object, say the earth, but you cannot see the mass, you cannot see the gravity.

But we believe in the reality of it. We trust airliners to be able to overcome the effects of something we can't see. People get dizzy near cliffs for fear of what gravity would do to them if they slipped and fell.

Before we look at how the Lord protects us, we must believe in the danger from which we need to be protected. Protection against the literal, real, malevolent being who's invisible, also called Satan, the devil.

As Paul puts it here in 2 Thessalonians 3, the devil, the evil one. So I admonish us here this morning, at the outset of this message, don't treat him as make-believe. Don't treat him as some made-up fable.

God spoke to him personally in Genesis chapter 3, and again in Job chapter 1, and again in Zechariah chapter 3. Jesus Christ spoke to him personally in his temptations of Matthew 4 when he rebuked the devil, but he spoke to him as a real being.

In Acts chapter 19, 15, an evil spirit, one of the minions of that evil one said, Jesus I know him, Paul I recognize, but who are you? This is the one against whom the Lord stands as our guardian. God has no doubt as to his existence, and neither can we.

As there can be no warmth but by the sun, there's no evil but by the evil one. Whoever strives to draw us away from Christ, whoever works to tempt you to abandon this word of God, again he panders to your pride, panders to your flesh, panders to your self-sufficiency.

The Lord stands to guard us against that. Do you believe this? Sometimes there's sort of an intellectual sense, sort of, well the Bible says the devil is. I believe the Bible, so I guess the devil is real.

So what's the next question? And we kind of pass it by, but you'll never put up your guard if you don't believe that fist is coming to do damage to your nose. We need to believe in what Paul says really exists.

Paul says God believes in his existence, otherwise why would he be protecting us against him? He protects you by this inner work of establishing you and this outer work of guarding you. He says he will establish you.

The Lord is faithful. He will establish you. This is a work he does in you, a work he does inside. The word establish is one we've run into before, sterizo, and we know that that's where we get our word steroid.

It means to be firm, it means to be steady, it means to be fixed on a course, and we're not going to be knocked off of it. One example, you remember in Luke 15 with Lazarus and the rich man, Abraham explains to the rich man as he's suffering that the chasm between heaven and hell is established, it's fixed, it's sterizo, in place.

And this is what the apostle Paul says, this is the word he uses, the Lord is faithful, he will sterizo, he will establish you, he makes you firm, the Lord established you, he established you as a protection against this evil one, he changed your heart and drew you to Jesus Christ.

The apostle Paul says we are by nature children of wrath, we're born in iniquity, in sin we're conceived. We belong to that one in our natural state, and so when God establishes us in Jesus Christ, well he determined this before time began, Ephesians chapter 1 verse 3, he chose us in him to be in Christ before the foundation of the world.

He established you in Christ Jesus to save you, to draw you away from Jesus, away from not Jesus, that evil one. He established you when he brought you into Christ, he established you when he put you in a church, made you a member of a body, that's first Corinthians 12, that's Romans chapter 12, where we're members together, drawing ourselves closer to the image of Christ, drawing ourselves further away from evil as we admonish one another, as we encourage one another, as we together immerse ourselves in the means of grace that he's given us.

We together through edification and mutual accountability, we're working to maintain a distance from and even a distaste for evil, where we learn by the hearing of God's word to recognize evil more quickly, how cleverly it's disguised, and all this God establishes us, he strengthens you against the evil one.

By immersing you here in truth, God willing from this pulpit, as well as Pastor Owens and I can, you hear the truth. There's a great illustration, I don't know which pastor came up with it, but thousands and thousands and thousands of pastors have used it, and I will use it again here.

How do you know the truth? The way bank tellers learn to spot counterfeit bills. You know how they do it? They handle real bills over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over thousands of them.

They just flip through them, they don't have to look at them, and when they touch one that's a counterfeit, there's a treasury driver will slip one in there just to train them, and they're working, working, that one's wrong.

How do you know? You can't even see it, it feels wrong, it doesn't slide like the other ones, the texture's off, just the slide's different. They know that one's not true, and it's the same way for us, and that's where this illustration is so wonderful.

How do we know the truth? By immersion in the truth. How do you know the evil? By knowing that it's a counterfeit because you are immersed, you are familiar with the Word of God, you're studying it, you're reading it, you're praying it, you're hearing it preached to you.

That's the establishment, and established against the evil one. Remember that that's the purpose of it there. He guards you against the evil one, and that's the inner work that's drawing you to Christ, that's placing you in the fellowship, that's giving you the means of grace, that's the scripture, that's prayer, that's our fellowship together, that's taking the Lord's table together and strengthen ourselves by that, and in all this, established against that one.

Now, establishment is that work of God in your spirit. It says He will guard you. This guardianship is the work that God does outside ourselves. It's Him. He hedges us about with angels, as we like to put it.

We don't have an exact verse for that, but there is this protection, this spiritual boundary that God places around His people, guarding us always. The psalmist, Psalm 121 verse 7, the Lord will keep you.

That's the same word we have in 2 Thessalonians 3. He will guard you from all evil, guards us by limiting the devil's range and the devil's influence. That's Job chapter 1. There's a responsibility there too for us.

2 Timothy chapter 2 verse 14, Paul writes to young Timothy, he says, protect that good thing entrusted to you through the Holy Spirit who lives within us. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Have you repented of your sins and fled to the cross and there found forgiveness by faith in Christ and the work He did?

If this be the case for you, then this verse applies to you. The Holy Spirit who lives within you. See, Apostle Paul says this to the Corinthians, you are the temple of a living God. You are the temple of a living God because God dwells with His people.

Jesus Christ says, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them. Here He is with us this morning. And if you're in Christ, as 2 Timothy 2 verse 14 says, the Holy Spirit lives within.

He guards you and He keeps you from the evil one. This is not so much about particular evils, the particular sins that we give into and we need to repent of. This is about the particular evil one. Now understand that the Lord will never leave or forsake those who are His, those for whom His Son bled and died on the cross.

Matthew chapter 12 verse 29, Jesus speaks about how He has bound the strong man, that's the devil, and He's plundered his house. That's you, the devil's goods, the devil's treasure. And Jesus Christ has gone in, bound him by His work on the cross and His perfect life and His offering of Himself to God.

He's bound up the strong man and plundered from him His people. God willing, that's you. And He will not relinquish you. He will not give you back to the world or to the devil. You're guarded by the Lord who established you.

Establishment Through the Word, the Church, and the Means of Grace

The Lord protects you by your devotion to His word. By your devotion to His word. And we have confidence, this is verse 4, we have confidence in the Lord about you that you are doing and will do the things that we command.

This is related to God's establishment and guarding. That's what God does. Here's what we do. Here's what Paul's confident of in them, God willing, in us here today. Doing and will do the things that are commanded by the apostle, the scriptures.

You see, protection against evil is a personal responsibility. It's the work of God. If God does not protect us, we're lost. That snake's going to bite. That fist is going to meet your nose. But God's protecting you by His Son, Jesus Christ, by His Spirit with us.

But there's also a personal responsibility here. Here's the means that God uses to accomplish the end that He's decreed. He establishes you in Christ. You avail yourself of this by doing the things commanded in scripture.

So the Lord guards you against the inroads of the evil one and you avail yourself of God's guardianship by doing the things commanded in scripture. Does that sound too simple? In concept, it's simple.

It's hard to do. But the answer is here in the scriptures. God's Word is truth. God's Word reveals evil to us. And Paul's confidence in them is that they were doing what he commanded. He saw them doing what he had commanded.

And he's confident that they will continue to do. By confident, Paul means he's fully persuaded about this thing. He's seen their obedience. He's persuaded that it came from the inner work of God by God's Holy Spirit in concert with them following the dictates of the new and believing heart that God gave them.

So the Holy Spirit within. And he's not just taking his time there. He's not just residing there, you know, for pleasure. He's leading you to something. He's guiding you somewhere. Guiding you always to the Word.

Devotion to His Word. Doing and continuing to do the things commanded. And he will pull you further and further and further from this world, from the domain of this evil one. We could say that their confidence, the Thessalonians' confidence was in God.

They were fully persuaded that obedience to God was worth any price. And we have to be there ourselves, do we not? Psalm 15 verse 4 speaks of the man who keeps his word even to his own hurt. As Jesus said, let your yes be yes, your no, no.

We shouldn't have to shake hands. We shouldn't have to give extra, I swear I'll do this by, you know, by my head and by the temple and all these things that Jesus spoke of the Pharisees back in his day.

No, and even when we make a commitment and it turns out not to be to our benefit when it comes time to make good the commitment, because we gave our word. Because God's Word says to do this, therefore to not would be evil.

Obeying the Word of God requires this kind of confidence, this kind of full persuasion that Paul saw in the Thessalonians. The evil one, the devil, Satan, would have you trust in yourself. The whole world exalts itself as being capable, as being precious.

I'm worthwhile simply because I'm worthwhile. I'm worthwhile because I am me. This is the kind of tune the devil played against Jesus in his temptations in Matthew 4. He tempted Jesus to trust himself rather than God his father.

He said, command these stones to become loaves of bread. Don't wait on God. You're hungry now. Don't trust your father. He said, throw yourself down off the temple. God will catch you. Your timing is as good as his.

Do it now. He shows him all the kingdoms. What does Satan say to Jesus? All this I will give you if you will fall down and worship me. Take it now. Grab the prize for yourself. Don't wait for God. Do like Saul did when Samuel said, wait for me.

I'm going to come and make the sacrifice. Saul got impatient. He made the sacrifice himself. His timing, not God's. And in all this, what do we have to be aware of ourselves? Is Satan always turning you to self, turning you to reliance upon you, raising the value of you and your desires and your agenda and the things that you want to do?

It's an effective strategy. When our self-confidence wells up, it can overcome any rational thought and behavior. Self-confidence can turn us back to the insanity that we were before Jesus Christ established us.

Why is it so hard to turn from self to God? Why is it so hard to rely upon God fully, as Paul says here, that you will do and you are doing and will do the things we command? Why is it so hard just to set aside our own will and our own desires and replace them with what God says in his word?

Humility, Resistance, and Perfect Peace

Peter answers some of that in 1 Peter chapter 5 and verses 6 through 9. You might want to turn there, these four verses. 1 Peter 5, beginning at verse 6. He says, Did you notice the connection here between the beginning of verse 6 and then verse 8 and 9?

Humble yourself, connected to resist the devil. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, and casting your cares, be so reminded, because your adversary prowls about, resist him. Well, the beginning step here is humble yourself.

Humble yourselves. You see, the failure to do what God commands is a failure to trust him. It's a failure to humble the self. It's a lifting up and exalting yourself. It's not waiting for God to exalt you in due time.

It's, I'm not waiting. I'm not waiting. As Jesus waited on God and would not turn the breads to stone, would not accept the challenge to throw himself down, would not take the kingdoms, all in God's timing.

Anytime we fail to trust God, every time we don't obey the Lord, it's a failure of humility. The Apostle Peter says, First, humble yourselves, admit your vulnerability to the evil one's work. Admit that you are weak against him.

He says, Second, to cast your cares upon him. In humility, seek help from the only source of true help, which is from God. Cast your cares on him and find his answer in his word, or through the counsel of like-minded brothers and sisters in the Lord, or your pastor.

And then resist the devil. That's third. Don't even open the door of resistance without first clothing yourself in humility, utter helplessness, defenselessness. When I was first saved, one of the first things my dear wife had me do was join Bible study fellowship and get immersed in the word of God.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever followed. And the leader, the director of the one I was at for a while, his name was Wise Warren. I don't remember what passage he was in, but it had to do with the devil.

And he's talking to all the men because it was the men's group. And he asked something like, you know, when the devil comes banging at the door of your house and your family's there behind, what are you men going to do?

What do you do when the devil comes a knocking? He had that wonderful sing-song way of speaking. I loved it. And boy, here I was six, seven months in the Lord. I said, I know I'm gonna do, man, I'm gonna open that door.

I'm gonna get that guy. I'm gonna rebuke him. He's out of here. But I kept my mouth shut, thank God. And Wise Warren said, no, you fall on your knees. You admit that you're helpless. This guy's real. And he's not some phony little red colored thing with the yellow teeth and the horns and the tail.

He's beautiful. He's attractive. You fall down on your knees, men. The wives, you kick the knees, you kick the back of the knees to get him down on his knees. All of us. This is what we do when he comes a knocking.

One of the best lessons I ever learned. God protects us. God does watch over us. Isaiah 26, three says, you will keep in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you. Again, your mind stayed on him.

This is the word of God. This is you are doing and will do the things we command. Here's what is commanded in the word of God. This is where perfect peace is found. A mind firmly fixed on Jesus Christ can't be moved or influenced by outside things.

Ponder what God's word says about you. It says, while we were yet sinners, while you're yet helpless and reckless and berserk, out of your mind and insane with sin. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, the godly for the ungodly.

They ponder this as a protection against the other. Or by grace, you've been saved and it's not of yourselves. It is a gift of God. Nothing you could have done, nothing that you added to the equation, only by God's sovereignty and because of his love.

You didn't establish yourself in Christ. God did. You didn't change your heart to believe the gospel. God, by his spirit, did to do and to keep doing the word of God as the means that he uses to guard your soul.

A humble spirit admits its own inability and it's as the necessary entrance into this means that God uses for your protection. So the protection, the establishment of you, he establishes and guards you against this evil one.

He's real. He's literal. God himself knows that you need to be guarded against him and then doing and will do the things that are commanded in scripture, which is to know the scripture and to obey it even when it hurts, to be fully persuaded that it is right.

And then finally, the Lord protects you by drawing you ever closer to his nature, to the image of Christ. Romans 8 .28 says you're predestined to be conformed to his image. There's a verse five. May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

Protection against evil, the evil one, comes by growth in knowledge of God's nature. And the more we know God's nature, the more we're going to imitate him, the more it's going to be manifest in our lives.

And the more we know God's nature and the more it's manifest in your life, the further and further and further you will come from evil. The more you'll be able to recognize it, that phony bill will come up and you'll recognize it more easily no matter how well it's camouflaged, no matter how well disguised.

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ. That love of God and the steadfastness of Christ, that could be the love that God has for you or the love that you have for God.

We're not going to go into a long analysis of whether it's the objective or the subject of this event here. I appreciate what John MacArthur said, who was, he's still alive, is an expert in the Greek.

He's very, very good in it. And he says it could go both ways very easily. So consider God's love for you. Consider that how much God loves that he sent his only son to die for you. Consider that we love God because he first loved us.

Think of the love of God that sent his only begotten son to die for your salvation. Think of the love of God and then let your love for God grow so it can go both ways. God's love for you and the more you ponder it, the more you're going to love God and the more you love God, the more you're going to want to follow his ways and the more you will follow his ways by the spirit working within you.

And the more this, then the less evil and the influenced you will be. It's the same with the steadfastness of Christ. As we ponder Christ's steadfastness, his endurance, his fixedness upon God's will, so will yours follow that nature.

Few contemplations can better strike out the differences between the Lord who saved you and the devil who would, if he could, condemn you. Few thoughts can better protect you than these. May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and the steadfastness of Christ.

Remember what this is for, against the evil one, against that one literal being, to be steadfast like Christ. Think of Luke chapter 9 verse 51 when it says that Jesus Christ set his face steadfastly, so he said his face fixedly, establishedly, if you will, towards Jerusalem and the cross that awaited him.

The apostle Paul, in this protection, in this guardianship that God would have for us, says look at these two things, the love that God has for you and let your love for God grow. The steadfastness of Christ that brought you salvation and let therefore your steadfastness to follow Christ's ways according to his word grow correspondingly.

Evil is real, wickedness is out there, and there is a source of it. There is one. God is not the author of evil, the devil is. God is not the author of lies, the devil is. God cannot be tempted by evil, the devil tempts with evil constantly, and yet the Lord protects you as you are in Christ Jesus against this real, literal, malevolent being, one who H. H. Holmes, this notorious killer, this cruel man, this man who was a con artist par excellence, who looked like an angel of light, and yet within, full of dead men's bones.

The Lord gives us what we need. Contemplate him, think of his love and Christ's endurance on your behalf, and let your love for God and your endurance in following his ways follow and grow and bring you further and further into Christ's image and avail yourself of the protection that God through him gives you.