Is Your Life Being Polluted? How to Fight Back Against the Enemy’s Lies
Reading Time 5 mins 10 secs –
They didn’t know the water they had been drinking, bathing in, and cooking with was packed with poisonous chemicals and carcinogens.
But then the symptoms started to surface.
You’ve probably heard at least one news story about contaminated water.
- A million marines, sailors, and their families were exposed to carcinogens after the military allegedly dumped fuel and cleaning agents near two drinking wells in Camp Lejeune, which is in Jacksonville, North Carolina, from the 1950s through the 1980s.
- So many people were sick and dying in Hinkley, California, that the small town is now nearly nonexistent.
- More than 400,000 residents from the greater Milwaukee area were infected, and 100 people died after bacteria that causes gastrointestinal illnesses invaded the water supply—making it the largest documented waterborne disease outbreak in U.S. history.
Come on, Gary. Where are you going with this?
(Stick with me. There is a really good spiritual point coming.)
I’ve done an illustration during weekend services at Faith Life Church several times where I asked for a volunteer who would like to make a quick $20 or silver coin to help me.
I asked one woman who had raised her hand to come up front, and I opened a brand-new bottle of water and asked her to take a drink. She did.
Then, I told her I was going to add something to her bottle of water—a sample of water from a dirty pond behind our church building. The water was nasty!
Then I asked her to drink it.
Of course, she refused.
And, of course, I still gave her the $20.
The point was made though. No one wants to knowingly drink contaminated water.
But without knowing it, many people are.
Here’s where I stop talking about water contamination and start talking about the things that might be contaminating your soul, your mind, your body—your LIFE.
Because the culture is out to get you—to contaminate you—“to make you impure by exposure to or addition of a poisonous or polluting substance.”
Satan is out to get you—to contaminate you. He is set on killing, stealing, and destroying you (John 10:10).
Are you unknowingly drinking the “contaminated water”?
I love this illustration our son Tim once gave using the game of Jenga.
Have you ever played it? Basically, you have a big tower of blocks that have been stacked in opposite directions to allow pieces to be poked at and pulled out one by one without having the tower collapse. Only you have to stack the blocks you’ve pulled out on top of the tower, which means the block tower gets more and more unstable as the game goes on, because it’s getting taller and balancing on less and less stable blocks.
At some point during the game, the tower collapses.
Some of us are building our lives like that.
We think we’re building this strong tower day after day and year after year.
But Luke 22:31 tells us that Satan desires to sift us as wheat. Too often, we forget we’re in a spiritual battle, and we don’t take the spiritual adversary we have seriously. All of our lives, we’ve seen too many TV shows and cartoons that downplay the enemy as some creepy guy with horns and a red cape. But Satan is alive and demons are real, and they don’t want to see you prosper and live the destiny God has for you.
Satan wants you to fail. So, he’s always looking for loose blocks to poke and pull at—those little areas of your life that aren’t so sturdy and stable, those little areas that are contaminated—in his effort to make your whole tower collapse.
And he knows he doesn’t have to come at your tower of blocks with a full-on wrecking ball. That’s why the Bible tells us to watch out for the little foxes.
Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.
—Song of Solomon 2:15
Here’s the thing: Satan uses a lot of little foxes, a lot of tactics, to try to trick us out of our dominion. He knows that faith—your heart being in agreement with heaven—is the currency of the Kingdom. And he knows that if your heart holds on to the Word, it’s going to produce. He also knows that it’s imperishable, and it’s always going to produce after its own kind. Guess what? He doesn’t like that. He claims this place as his. So, he has tactics he uses to get you to agree with him—to contaminate your life with what he says instead of what God says.
And he’s pretty sly. He takes a little bit of the principle of God, a little bit of the Word of God, and twists it. He uses it to deceive, to contaminate. But if we know the truth, we can discern for ourselves.
But if you don’t know the truth, as Satan works on knocking out loose block after loose block, there will be more openings in your tower, more places for him to get a foothold, more opportunities for him to make the whole structure—your whole life—more rickety and ready for collapse.
And that’s the point.
Satan is after your fruitfulness. He’s after your assignment. He’s after your purpose. He doesn’t want you to be useful to the Kingdom of God. He wants to prevent you from being a demonstration of the Kingdom of God to other people.
So, he keeps going after your heart.
Just drink this little bit of contaminated water. It won’t hurt you.
Our culture, the earth curse system, is full of perverse ideas that they say won’t harm you.
That’s a lie.
What you think about, what you feed yourself, and what you look at all put images into your heart, for good or for bad. If you’re contaminating your heart, it’s going to be drawn away and produce what you’re putting into it.
You have to CHOOSE to turn your ears to the Word of God and CHOOSE to guard your heart, or you’ll begin to buy into the lies that the enemy and our culture are constantly screaming at us.
