Know Your enemy

Many Christians are easily fooled when it comes to dealing with their designated troublemaker.
 
Ephesians 6:12 We do not wrestle against mankind but against principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world and spiritual wickedness in the heavenly realm.
 
The devil is a master at instigating unwarranted problems between people and then stepping aside to let them fight it out.  When people come to their senses and look back over the feud they were in, it was over nothing that made any difference.  What they need to recognize is that they were pawns in a game the devil plays every day of the world.  Until man recognizes the true enemy, he will be played as a fool over and over again.
 
A wise man learns from his mistakes and the mistakes of others; a fool never learns.
 
I have spent numerous hours teaching the church about the devil’s snare of “offense”.  I no sooner get done teaching and someone falls for the “bait of satan”.  I have watched people get offended over the most trivial things you can imagine.  One man in particular got offended at me because I never talked to him.  Never mind the fact he always came in late and left early, he said that was not a good reason!
 
Psalm 119:165 Great peace have they which love Your Word: and nothing shall offend them.
 
People who are readily offended have not assigned the importance to the Word of God as they should.  In essence, they ignorantly choose to be more important than God’s Word.  Despite all the warning from Jesus, people are allowing themselves to be manipulated by the devil unawares.  The Lord warned me long ago.  He said “if you think too highly of yourself, you will be susceptible to offense”.  So where does all of this begin?  How does the devil entice us into a war we cannot win?  The battlefield is the mind, that is where it all begins.
 
2Corinthians 10:5 Cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.
 
Picture yourself standing on the battlefield having never been defeated and equipped with supernatural weapons issued to you by God Himself.  And the devil comes up to you a fraction of your size and totally disarmed.  All he has to intimidate you with is vain threats.  Now if you don’t acknowledge him, he can’t move you in any direction.  If we would learn to dispel all these lying thoughts that come to our mind we will not be manipulated by the defeated foe.
 
The word “offense” comes from the Greek word scandalon which means trap stick.  Men in that part of the world would use a scandalon to capture monkeys.  They would hollow out a rock and then put a trap stick in the rock.  The monkey would put his paw in the hole to grab the stick but he couldn’t get the stick out and he would not let go of it so he was easily taken into captivity.  The bait of satan is nothing more than a stick.  Are you willing to be taken captive at satan’s will over a stick?  No, you are too wise for him.  Amen.