Evening & Morning Shade Podcast
Recognizing The Devil On The Prowl
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Evening and Morning Shave Podcast with your host, Pastor James Shingle Sr. Amen. Good evening out there in podcast land. This is another, it's amazing, I know I say it every week, but it's amazing how time fast code. This is Evening and Morning podcast, James Shingle, a host of you, a host for you on this podcast. However, you all been since last Wednesday. You ever heard the old store? I'm sure you've heard the somewhere along the line there. As you know, as we get older, it seems like time picks up, speeds up, the older we get faster and faster to go. So I always wondered, I mean, what caused that? Because it seemed like it took you on 100 years to get grown, right? And I've heard that the reason for that is that when you're born, you come into the world. Almost every experience you do is a new experience. So your entire person is in the process of learning new things constantly. And then you, when you get to a certain age, and you begin to kind of even out and your learning processes slow down. And because of that, it just seems like time speeds fast. Of course, time is one second, one minute, one hour at a time. Time doesn't change at all, but it just seems like it changed to us. Nevertheless, it's good to see everybody on this season. I'd like to talk to you just a little bit. I don't know how, and I will soon be done how long this podcast will last, but I'm anxious to talk to you this evening. I talked to you about the thought of recognizing the devil on the prowl, excuse me, recognizing the devil on the prowl. And this will be taken out of 1 Peter chapter 5 verse number eight. And the reason I believe we need to recognize it is because as a Christian, to experimental life, we come to an understanding of the technique of how Satan works. And in the process of time, we should actually be able to see Satan coming in ways where you can sit back and look at that old devil and say, man, that ain't nothing but the devil, right? And so we got to recognize him for what he is, to single him out and to specialize so we can get up an agenda, okay, in order to fight him so that he does not get the victory over almost never or at least certainly not in a consistent way. And then, and then it's also the devil on the prowl because this is exactly what it is. I want to reach to you a very scripture that I'm sure that you've heard multiple times in your life of the first Peter chapter 5 verse number eight. I'm reading you out of the New American standard of the Bible, which is my favorite version. And in my opinion, although I'm not a Greek expert, but I believe I'll be by men that have, that there really no Greek in Hebrew, exquisitely that certainly in the top five of the translations, you cannot, when it comes down to be an accurate translation of the original Greek, you cannot really beat the New American standard of the version of the Bible. So, first Peter chapter five verse number eight comes to us in this manner out of the eighth verse of that first Peter chapter five belongs as fallen. Be of a sober spirit, be on the alert, your adversary, the devil prowls around like a rowing lion seeking someone to devour us. That's quite a scripture isn't it? And when we approach this, we want to approach it in a way that Peter is, is writing this epistle. Peter is known as the apostle of holiness, that if you want to live a victorious Christian life, okay, okay, we got to have an understanding of the technique of the devil and an understanding of that he is a, one thing I believe we got to understand right away is that the devil is a formidable enemy to each and every one of us, and we got to get that into our very psyche, okay, that the devil is no way to play with. Now, of course, scripture tells us that greater is he the Holy Spirit that's in us Christ than he the devil that's in the world, and there's no question it is, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he is our home and he is our enemy and he takes no prisoners. Otherwise, Peter would have had no reason to, on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to add this verse into his work because we have to understand he tells us that every single Christian ought to be sober, and sober means that you're alert, that you are put yourself in like a century walking post or a century on guard, how the constant looking out, looking out the territory, looking out from the width and the length, looking out for any sign or any movement of the enemy whatsoever. So Christians have to be alert to the very fact that yes, Satan is out there, and then also, yeah, I just about being alert, new Americans stand in verse and uses that word spirit. We have to have a spirit within us, okay, that is quickened to the aware, are you aware? Are you aware of Satan in your life? I'm quite sure that you are, aren't you? Now, you know, I was thinking, I don't know about a month ago, we just have once in a Bible study, and before the study, I started to meditate and think about how the techniques of Satan, and I came to the conclusion that came to my mind, you know, through the Scriptures and through also through Christian reasoning, that the majority, the majority though, the issues we have in our morality as a Christian, okay, did not directly come by Satan himself, but comes through the world, and comes through the flesh. The scripture tells that the world, y'all, is lowering. It's just the world just has a lowering way to suck you up into it and spit you back out, because the world has something to offer us. And then it also goes on as the thought goes on to continue about our flesh. When the Bible talks about the flesh, the majority, as far as the Christian perspective goes, he's talking about our nature within us, that sometimes we blame things on the devil, that directly is not the devil. See, the devil cannot be omnipresent like God is, so he has his unks, he has his, we understand the one-third of the heavenly realm, but at the fall, decide to follow him, we have no idea about how one-third of what heaven might be. It could be hundreds of trillions, we just have no idea, but we can show this that is a heap of them. So sometimes, sometimes when we want to do, there's just something in our nature that just wants to do the wrong thing. Now, behind all this, okay, behind us in the world and in the flesh, it's just our change with us that we're going to be talking about right now, and that is the devil. So we need to be alert, we need to have a spirit that picks up on things, picks on around us what's going, always be alert to what's going on around you, where you're at, who you're with, and be alert to your surroundings. And then, he goes on to tell us this year, as he says, to be on, as to be on, look, that you're adversary. Satan is many things, okay, but the one, the main thing is he is our adversary. Don't you all ever forget, Satan, if there's nothing you get out of this short little podcast that you come out of here, understand, I want this to get this, Satan means us no good. He hates every single thing that you stand for. He hates what we stand, he hates the name of Jesus, he hates the word of God. He hates our relationship that we have with God, because he does not have that nor can he ever have that relationship we have God. And so, while we worship God, Satan is the absolute, his desire has always been for God to worship him. And because of that, he is a formidable adversary, and he's constantly avid. And how does he come to us? He comes us on our best days, he comes to us on our worst days. He comes to us when you're depressed, ever been depressed. He comes to when you're lonely, you've ever been lonely from time to time. He comes to us when we feel sorry for ourselves. We've all at times, we don't want to feel sorry for ourselves very, very long. If you ever come to that feeling, shake it off. Don't let yourself feel sorry for yourself very long. He can come here when you have your mountaintop experiences. Remember that the devil came to him in the 4th chapter of Matthew when you went out into the wilderness, not to be tempted, but to be tempted by the devil. So, if Jesus was tempted by the devil, what about you and I? So, he goes on to say, that being the case, that to be sober and our spirit, to be alert, that our adversary, the devil, I gotta say it again, the devil means us no good. The devil has no respect for us. I'm kind of, I'm kind of somewhat repeating myself because I want you all to come out here and understand this. Because sometimes we just get the feeling somehow that the devil can do more for us, knock on wood than God. You ever feel that way? Because he has, as Satan can actually help you achieve things that you want to achieve. But the reason that he does that, okay, is because he's a master and deception, deception, and we never want to have ourself decepted by our own unknowledge of what the nature of the devil is. Then, it goes on to say that he prowls. Isn't that something that he prowls? Usually, when people prowl, you all know a little bit about problem, right? Usually, when they're prowling, okay, in their own mind, they're up to no good. So, if you go into the book of Job, when the Lord questioned Job, when the sons of God came to present himself before the Lord, that Satan told him, when the Lord asked him, "Where have you been? Where have you been from?" He said, "I've been roaming the world and walking up and down in it." And guess what? He's still doing it. And taking just some consideration that he goes around, okay, he prowls around. Now, this is what he prowls around like. He doesn't say that he is a roaring lion, but he is as a roaring lion. The devil is not a gentleman, okay, he takes what he wants. He does not make excuses. He's not one that understands anybody's right to do anything, okay? He demands, he demands and leads him to him, okay, because he places, he sells wolf tickets, okay, because he knows that if he puts enough pressure on you and I, in his own mind, he can pretty much figure what we're going to do. Remember, in the book of Job, you know, when he told the Lord, he said, "You're blessing. I'll tell you what you do. You stop blessing. You put the heads of protection around you." I said, "You stop blessing. You take that heads of protection around you, and I'll give him to curse your face." Then he came back the next time, and the Lord said, "Have you observed my servant Job? I was a perfect and upright man. One that fears God and assumes you, although you moved me to him without cause, do you think that he gave Job any credit whatsoever? Not on your life." He says, "Yeah, skin for skin." In other words, a man will do whatever he has to do, all this Jesus, Jesus' stuff. A man will do whatever he has to do, push come to show to save his life. So, he comes as this roaring lion, but also because as the serpent in the third chapter of Genesis came so subtle, the devil Satan, our adversary is so subtle and so smooth and so slick and so undermining, okay, that what he does, he can also present himself, the scripture says, he transforms himself into an angel of light. Do you think the devil comes to church? You know he does, doesn't he? Does the devil sometimes look good when he comes to church? Does the devil sometimes smell good when he comes to church? When the devil comes to church, does the devil sometimes talk religious stuff? Yes, he does, okay. But he's transformed, because what he does, if you go to that fourth chapter on Matthew, you will see that in all those different temptations that the Lord, the devil brought to his presenter to him, and every one of them, he presents the word of God to the Lord, which tells us that the devil knows the word of God better than what we do. But what he does is he uses the word of God to, he uses the word of God to deceive us because he likes to twist the word of God, so it comes out meaning a little bit different than what God means. When God says something in his word, that's just what he means, and it doesn't need, it doesn't need to be, get up, sound good, sound more cultural, sound more up today, sound more to the new millennial. We need to teach the word of God, we need to preach the word of God more accurately, and they're more closely, we preach the word of God rather than make it sound good, okay. The more effective it's going to be. It will do two things. Now when you preach the word of God effectively, okay, it's going to draw people, it's the attraction of what the word of God is, or it will also repel people, and that's okay too, but by doing that see you understand where did you stand. But let's just, all this thing about disguising and making the word of God sound more current and more up today, let's just drop that right now, okay. Because if you preach the word of God the way it is, okay, in the long run it's going to be much more effective than, than what you don't do. And then, as we understand this, how this, our enemy, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion. It goes on the same seeking someone, okay, to devour. We cannot overemphasize this idea that with Satan, Satan's just not going into the war, far Satan is concerned, is to take no prisoners, okay. Satan is this thing for keeps, Satan is this thing to keep people blinded. Before you got saved, okay, you were surrounded in darkness, okay, and you cannot get out, you had no desire to come out of the darkness, because the sin had you trapped into, even if you had a desire to come out in some kind of way, it was never from a spiritual perspective, okay. And you were surrounded in this dark, or pressed by this darkness until the grace of God one day shattered the darkness and you walk out of nowhere and you became a child of God. And once you became a child of God, you just wondered, where have you been all my life? Okay, God has always been right there. It's just because of the darkness, okay, that we could not see, we could not understand spiritual thing. And then, he goes on to say that when we're talking about the purpose, when we're talking about recognizing the devil on the proud, is that the devil is consistently doing what he does. He never takes time off, he doesn't take vacations, okay. He's consistently, he's a devil. And that's good, because that's part of recognizing him. We should not think the devil is going to be anything else than what he is, okay. He can come to you when you're good, he can come to you when you're bad, he can come to us on our high points, he can come to our low points. But he's just consistently, it's almost as if sometimes when you think you're on a spiritual high, I know we've all had spiritual highs where you just feel so close to God and you just God's moving in your life and you just almost want to get up and sit in God's lap, ever been like that. And 24 hours later, it could happen just that fast, you know. It seems like God is a million miles away. You just cannot see God through the cloud, through the darkness, you cannot see God anywhere in this situation whatsoever, okay. And Satan takes advantage of that. Now, before we get ready to shut this podcast down, I think that God wants us to come to the conclusion over everything that I just got through saying to us maybe in the last 10 minutes. And that is this. That in the next verse that I had read to you, in the next line, in verse number nine, he says, "But resist him." This is what we got to do. You recognize the devil for who he is. You give him respect in the sense that you know that he's a formidable enemy. But what we got to understand is that just because, just because we get tempted, all these kind of manners that we talked about, just because somebody acts like a fool, right, doesn't give you an eye a right to act like a fool. How we control ourselves, how we control our temper, we control how we use language, how we talk to people, we control how the fact that we raise our voice when we lower our voice, what we do with our eyes, what we do with our lips when we're talking, when we're dealing with different situations because we understand it. All these things that we're talking about, the devil is using these things to show us how we conduct ourselves in the world. And we know that when people come up against us, situations come up within us, tragic comes up within us, and we have to look through these circumstances. You have the circumstances are what they are, but the devil is never far from those circumstances. And once you have an awareness of that, okay, once we have an awareness with them, we can be rest assured, never, never, never, y'all, y'all get this, never allow the devil to intimidate you. We respect the devil in the sense about who he is, but do never back down, because as I said before, as a roaring lion, that devil comes as a roaring lion, okay, and because he's not really, okay, we got to call him as a bluff. You understand what I'm saying? Call the devil as a bluff in the sense that when you have, when you have, when you, when you have, confront the devil, it's never a good idea to have conversation with the devil, okay? But when you do it, when you have a conversation with the devil whatsoever, always in that confrontation with the devil is you scripture, because he cannot, he cannot, the devil not only does he hate scripture, but he will never use scripture to your benefit, he will always twist it for about his benefit. So when, when, when the devil brought all the accusations, the temptations with Jesus, in that fourth chapter of Matthew, Jesus came right back to him, okay, and also quote a description on him, but put it on him accurately. That is why when we're, when we're dealing with Satan, or not only that, dealing with Christian life period, we need to accurately, accurately discern, break down the word of God, and use it. Just because something sounds good, and if you've heard all your life does not necessarily, I'm going to use the word necessarily, does not necessarily mean it's biblical, okay? So we have, and the only way you can know this is might be so familiar with the word of God that you can recognize what people commonly believe and what the scripture teaches. And then as we get ready to close, I want to close with this understanding here about Satan, that we're all, we're all in this thing all together, okay? And we all might be going to remember, remember I said that we started these podcasts, recognizing that we ought to pray for one another, and we closed these podcasts, recognizing that we need to pray for one another, okay? That we're all going through this thing together. Every single one of us right now is sounding my weak voice. Why is I'm doing this podcast are going through things? You probably got, like I do, you don't need any more on your plate than you already have. But you, what you're going through, most probably is different than when I'm going through, and what I'm going through is most probably different than what you're going to. But the same devil, okay, okay, that is in the background doing all these things, okay, a lot, orchestrating all these things, okay, that we're going through, okay? This is why we have to pray for one another, because we're going through things together, and yet we're all part of the same body of Christ. So I'm so happy to share this with you. We trust that the Word of God, we know the Word of God will not go for it, that we'll always copy what you would have us to do. And constantly, this coming week, always put yourself in a position, you know, to be around to talk to the Word of God, talk to the Word of God with your friends, go to Bible studies, you know, meditate on the Word of God, and until next Wednesday, God bless you all, and let's pray for one another, and God bless you all. Have a wonderful week. Hey guys, it is Ryan. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm a bit of a fun fanatic when I can. I like to work, but I like fun too. And now I can tell you about my favorite place to have fun. Shumbah Casino. They have hundreds of social casino style games to choose from with new games released each week. You can play for free, and each day brings a new chance to collect daily bonuses. So join me and the fun. Sign up now at chumbah casino.com. Sponsored by Chumbah Casino, no purchase necessary. VGW Group, void word prohibited by law, 18 plus terms and conditions apply. Ever wonder what makes pandas so special? Join us on Amazing Wildlife to find out. Giant pandas and their habitat are unique and beautiful and extraordinary representation of the natural world. And if you get that opportunity to sit and watch a pan to eat bamboo, you will be mesmerized. Listen to Amazing Wildlife on America's #1 podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Amazing Wildlife and start