Living on the Edge

Chip Ingram: Today on Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram, where do good and evil come from? Have you ever thought about that? Today on Living on the Edge, we'll discover the force behind the evil in this world and we'll find out how to protect ourselves from Satan's attacks on us and those we love. You're going to want to hear this. Stay with me.

Dave Druley: Welcome to Living on the Edge. I'm Dave Druley, and today Chip Ingram continues a steady series called The Jesus Revolution. Join the movement by holding up a globe and asking a blunt question. Whose agenda is shaping your life right now? God's or Satan's? He'll also introduce us to an enemy who is not passive, not distant, and not philosophical, but strategic. And speaking of strategy, later in today's program, we have details about a very special opportunity happening this month, our mid-year match. That's just ahead. But first, here's Chip with a lesson entitled Divide and Conquer.

Chip Ingram: Holding something in my hands that you've probably recognized maybe from junior high or elementary school as you were learning about the world, but this is the globe. And what I want you to know, that for this entire planet and everything and every person on this planet, there are two competing agendas.

God has an agenda for every person on this planet. He has an agenda for nations, He has an agenda for every man, every woman, every child, and it's an agenda of unstoppable grace, of compassion and love and restoration. By contrast, Satan has an agenda for this planet. He has an agenda for nations and how they function, for communities, for every man, for every woman, and every child. And his agenda is to kill and to steal and destroy.

We're going to talk about Satan's agenda for planet Earth, including you. We looked at God's unstoppable agenda in Acts chapters 1 through 5. Jesus defined the agenda in one verse. John chapter 10, verse 10, He says, the thief, speaking of Satan, his agenda or purpose is to kill and steal and destroy. He says, my purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. I love the way the New Living Translation put that. I came that you might have it life, Jesus said, and have it more abundantly.

And so I just want you to get a macroscopic view of the whole world and the planet and history and realize God's agenda is one word, life. Would you write that in your notes? Satan's agenda can be described in one word as well. It's death. His is diabolical. It's not passive. It's not kind of bad. It's not something over there if you know, if we don't mess with it, it won't mess with us. No, it's diabolical.

You need to understand that you're in a battle and there's competing agenda and God has one and Satan has one. And your soul and your relationships and your life are constantly being bombarded by agents of grace and agents of evil. There's evil in the world. This isn't philosophical. This isn't metaphysical. There's evil.

Let me give you just kind of seven things that the scripture teaches that will give you a framework as we talk about this diabolical agenda. Number one, precepts to remember, good and evil are realities, they're not merely concepts or metaphors. It comes right out of the life of Christ. Matthew 4, it's Jesus face to face with Satan. This wasn't just some ethereal. It was a real angelic being who is evil trying to tempt our Lord to bail out on God's plan. Very real.

Second, God is the source of all good and Satan is the author of evil. James chapter one says, every good and perfect gift comes from above, above from the Father of lights with whom there's no variation or shifting shadow. He says, don't let any man say when he's tempted, I'm tempted of God, for God can tempt no one. Evil was introduced into our world system through our enemy Satan, through our original parents. It's Genesis chapter 3.

Third fact, Satan is a fallen angel who led one third of the angels in rebellion against God. You can read about that in Ezekiel 28 or Isaiah 14. Sometimes with all the Hollywood and all the different TV shows and all the sensationalism, we get this idea that, you know, there's this gory, scary, crazy, sensational, that's what Satan is all about. Actually, Satan was called Lucifer, star of the morning. He was the chief of all the cherubs, which were the highest level of angels. He served at the side of God. He was the most beautiful of all the angels. He was the wisest and most knowledgeable of all angels, and his fall was he got caught up in his own beauty and his own pride, and he started to coup. He wanted to take, he wanted God's job.

And a third of the angels followed him, and when angels, that's what they are, when they turn evil, they're called demons. And so there's a, there's a battle that's very real. Four, we're in invisible war with temporal and eternal consequences. I, I want you to step back from emails and voicemails and work issues and relationship issues and realize, you are in today an invisible war and a battle for your soul and the souls of people. That's real. Ephesians 6 will tell you very clearly the armor that you have, the protection that you have.

You're being bombarded by what? By lies, by condemnation, by feelings and senses that you don't measure up, by relationships where you think it's all your fault. There's something behind evil that provides all the resources for us to hurt one another in relationships. We own and realize that we do things wrong, but there is a tempter. And you need to be very aware and you also need to know how to address it.

Five, we face a formidable but defeated foe. I just want you to know as we're going into this. I don't want anybody going home with bad dreams, you know, like, ah. Okay? He's formidable. He's a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, but he's defeated. Colossians 2:15, he was defeated at the cross, which leads to the very next point. We don't fight for victory. We're not trying to figure out who's going to win this. We fight from victory, not for victory.

Greater is he that is in us as followers of Christ than he that is in the world, but it's still a real battle. You need to know who you are in Christ. You need to know how to do spiritual warfare. You need to identify, is this just me? Could this be demonic activity? You need to understand all that because the very last point is that ignorance is lethal. I mean, lethal. You are so set up to get hurt or to hurt others or to have everything that God wants to do in you and through you thwarted if you're ignorant.

When the Apostle Paul wrote about these issues, he said like this to one church, he said, you are not ignorant of his schemes. We get our word strategies. You're not ignorant of Satan's schemes or strategies, the way he divides and the way he condemns and the way he lies and the way he deceives. I don't think Paul could write that to most churches today. I think most churches, most people are absolutely ignorant of his schemes.

Now, I don't know what your expectations are, but this will not be a series about kind of overt sensational spiritual warfare. We're going to look at behind that, the subtle agendas. I'm going to talk about huge, subtle agendas and movements that are wrapped in goodness, that are often wrapped in religion, that are wrapped in practices that you and I unconsciously accept that ruin us and ruin other people. And so first, I just want you to get, here's some precepts you got to remember. Here's the framework of what we're talking about.

The second thing before we dig in, is there some perceptions I want to challenge? I mean, when you talk about Satan, when you talk about the devil, you know, we all have some background and pictures pop up. I love C.S. Lewis. He, he said, there's two great errors when you talk about Satan. One is you think too much about him, and the second is you think too little.

Second perception is, uh, when I thought of this term diabolical and I thought, well, I'm going to name this series Lord, because you, best I know, that's what you want to do. I think we have a view of diabolical. And as I've been studying, God has a different view. It's not that he doesn't think that axe murderers and serial killers and genocide, that is evil for sure. You know, we think those are those diabolical, evil, terrible things out there that can, that's not us.

I've been reading through Proverbs, and as I've been reading through Proverbs, this little phrase, the Lord detests, and then it'll say this, the Lord abhors, God hates. And as I was reading through, pretty soon, I thought, I start in my Bible, I put a little box around the, the Lord detests, or every time he hates this or hates that. And I came up with a list. And I thought to myself, you know, it just dawned on me as I was studying, if God hates something, it must be diabolical, right? I mean, he hates it.

But I don't have any verses like he hates serial killers or he hates genocide or he hates infanticide or although those things would certainly be true. But can I just give you a highlight of this is just what Proverbs says is diabolical in God's eyes. Chapter 3, it says, God detests perverse men, perverse women. And then so, so what is a perverse man? Well, the passage goes, a perverse person in this passage, one who withholds what is good when it's in your power to repay. In other words, you owe someone money, you got the money, you don't pay him. God hates that.

He thinks that's diabolical. It's when you, uh, plot to harm someone else. It's when you accuse someone for no reason. It's when we envy violent people. God says he hates that. Later on, it says he hates and detests haughty eyes, a lying tongue, the shedding of innocent blood, a heart that devises evil, feet that rush to evil, and then he ready to and people that stir up dissension. People that gossip, people that take a little thing and divide, people that make you think less of other people, people that mess with God says he detests it. He hates it.

Haughty eyes, thinking I'm better than other people, a proud heart, arrogance. God says he hates it. All of a sudden, I realized I needed to get my little box into a much bigger box. Cause all of those, those who oppress the poor, he abhors. Those who have different weights, business deals where you put stuff on Craigslist, you know it's worth this and you lie a little bit about it. He detests it. And all of a sudden what I realized was it's in the lying and the scheming and the deception that happens in small areas in our hearts. God detests.

And the things that we call diabolical are just what happens when they bloom and they multiply over time.

Dave Druley: You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Before we continue, a quick word about something happening right now with this ministry. June is mid-year match month, and for a limited time, every dollar given to Living on the Edge is being matched, dollar for dollar, by a generous group of partners. That means your gift works twice as hard and reaches twice as far. You can learn more about it at livingontheedge.org, and Chip will tell you more after the message. Right now, let's get back to it.

Chip Ingram: So you ready? We're going to go on a journey. Open your Bibles to Acts chapter 6, and we're going to learn a pattern to recognize. Now, I want to give you a little context here. Write down, the context is rapid growth or change. I want you to get that.

So what's happening now is that there's tens of thousands of people in the marketplaces are full and Peter is, you know, he's, he's, boy, his John and James and, boy, there's all these demands and organizationally it's growing. They never expected something like this. The second thing I want you to notice is the complaint. There's going to a complaint's going to come up of unmet needs. When things grow rapidly or if there is change in your world and my world, it almost always surfaces unmet needs.

When there are unmet needs in a marriage, unmet needs in a friendship, unmet needs in a small group, unmet needs in a church, our tendency is to look at the differences and begin to blame the other person, and that's where the enemy causes division. Here's what I want you to recognize. Here's agenda number one. Satan wants to divide and conquer. He wants to divide you from your friends. He wants to divide you from your mate. He wants to divide you in your small group. He wants to divide you with your parents. He wants to divide you with your kids. He wants to divide you at work. His agenda, this is the agenda. He'll use lots of different ways and temptations and people and personalities and backgrounds and differences, but the goal is to divide you.

And the easiest place to divide us is when we have differences. Because left to ourselves, we move from where not we're different, but I'm right and they're wrong. Now, what I want you to do as I read the passage is notice how the early disciples dealt with the differences and the complaint, how they didn't allow the superficial issue to be, they went to the core, and how they address it. You ready? Acts chapter 6.

In those days, in the days of this rapid growth, the number of the disciples was increasing. The Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebrew Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of the food. So the twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, it would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Now, here's the solution side. So you have a complaint.

The complaint is rooted in here's the historical situation. Uh, Judaism is made up of three groups now. We read this and we, we kind of have our Christian eyes. Right now, it's all Judaism. Inside Judaism, you have the largest faction are people who do not believe Jesus is the Messiah. You now have a growing faction inside this. You have one circle of people who speak Hebrew and Aramaic, who've lived in Jerusalem, who've received Jesus as the Messiah, and they're Christians.

You have another group who don't speak Hebrew. They probably know some Aramaic to get around because it's the trade language along with Greek. But they're Greek speakers. They came from all around the area, and when they came at Pentecost, they heard the message. They've become Christians, and now they're living in Jerusalem. So they speak Greek. They speak Hebrew. This group, because they've lived elsewhere, they look at the world differently. I mean, people who speak a different language from another country, we all get along, but we eat different food, we think differently, we have different values, we have different styles. That's the situation.

Now, you imagine now from 120 people to a few hundred, to a few thousand, to 10,000, to maybe 40, 50,000 people. And let's just say one or 2% of them are really poor and have needs. A complaint is, now they're saying, wait a second. If you're a Hebrew-speaking person, your widows are getting the food, but ours aren't. Add to this historically, if you spoke Hebrew and came from Jerusalem, this is well documented, you just look down your nose at every other Jew. You are of the pure, unmixed ancestry here in Jerusalem.

So, that's the story, that's what's happening. Notice what happens. The disciples say, we got a problem. They realize they're going to have to realign their priorities. Here's the response. Brothers, choose seven from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them, and we will give our attention to prayer and to the ministry of the word. Well, this proposal pleased the entire group, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and also Philip and Procorus and Nicanor and Timon and Parmenius and Nicholas from Antioch, who was a convert to Judaism. And they presented these men to the apostles who prayed, laid hands on them, basically delegated the authority.

Now, if you had time to study this, all seven of these names, guess what? They're Greek names. So what the apostles basically said was, wait a second, this thing is growing, but we got to step back, not respond emotionally. I mean, this is real stuff, they're complaining. What's wrong with you? Hey, Peter, I thought you loved God. How come my, you know, my aunt's a widow? What's the deal, right? This is, this is heavy stuff. They step back and they realize, we're overwhelmed. We need to be servants, but the ultimate goal, Jesus said, what? Go in there for all the world, make disciples. We're overwhelmed. They listen, and they say, you know what? So they appoint seven of the most godly people, who all have Greek names because they're closest to the problem, and they come up with a solution.

And it pleased the people. And then look at verse 7. So the word of God spread, and the number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith. And so, notice on your notes here, you, you've got rapid growth, you have an unmet need, and then here's the core. Differences are fertile ground for division when growth or change create real or perceived unmet needs.

See, the core issue is the disciples understood that when things grow and multiply, unmet needs accentuate the differences. And when there's differences, that's where the enemy gets in. Notice also here, that the cure is new wine demands new wine skins. The presenting problem is, hey, these widows aren't getting enough food. The disciples' response is, our goal has to remain the same. We can't allow the differences to divide us. So leaders step back, re-evaluate roles and priorities to make sure the needs get met.

In fact, what you see in this passage is in the first half of this passage, you see differences that could have divided. And you get wise leadership and we'll talk about our practical application in a minute. In the second half of the passage, you'll notice now that Stephen, it's, it's more than these guys just waiting on tables. You basically have part of Judaism having a worship service in Hebrew, another part of Judaism having a worship service in Greek. But now this group is giving oversight and as they're giving oversight, Stephen now begins to have ministry more than just this. In fact, pick it up in verse 8. And you're going to see that something happens, but the division and the desire and the differences get people doing some very, very ungodly things. Watch how the enemy gets into this.

Now Stephen, verse 8, a man full of God's grace and power, did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people. Opposition rose, however, from members of the synagogue of the Freedmen as it was called. They were Jews from Cyrene and Alexandria, as well as men of the province of Cilicia and Asia. So these are these Greek-speaking people who've come into town. Stephen is one of them. He's doing these amazing miracles. He's authenticating that Christ is the Messiah. These men began to argue with Stephen, but they could not stand up against his wisdom or the spirit by which he spoke.

And so they're saying, wait a second, Stephen, what are you talking about? You can't change anything about the law. And Stephen would say, no, Christ fulfilled the law. Well, what about the temple? And Stephen would say, no, yeah, we had a temple, and that was a former day. And this temple's important, but we are now the temple of God. So Stephen is applying all that Jesus said, and it's causing this huge division. But see, here's what happens.

When change or growth begins to mess with your world and my world, there's certain traditions and habits that keep us comfortable. And sometimes we don't want any truth. And we don't want the change and the implications of truth. And the enemy gets in and instead of it being different or I need to grow, the enemy gets in and says, you know what, you got to take that person out.

Dave Druley: You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram, and a message titled Divide and Conquer, Part 1, part of our larger series called The Jesus Revolution. We'll hear more from Chip in just a moment with details on the mid-year match, so don't go anywhere. Today, Chip didn't just give us a description of Satan's agenda. He made it personal. That list from Proverbs of what God actually detests isn't about serial killers and genocide. It's about haughty eyes, a lying tongue, gossip, stirring up division between people. The kind of thing most of us would never classify as diabolical.

But God calls it exactly that, because the seed of what blooms into catastrophe was planted quietly in ordinary moments by ordinary people who never saw themselves as the problem. Chip's challenge going further into this series is simply open your eyes, name what God hates, and refuse to let the enemy use you. And before we continue, let me remind you that every message in this series is also available on the Living on the Edge podcast. And for Chip's full-length sermons, subscribe to the Chip Ingram Sermon podcast wherever you listen.

Well, now here's Chip with why this moment and this mid-year match matter so much.

Chip Ingram: Here's something I've noticed. The enemy doesn't waste his time on things that aren't working. He goes after what's bearing fruit. In Acts chapter 6, the early church is growing fast. Lives are being changed, communities are being transformed. And that's exactly when the opposition shows up, both from within and from without. Right now, I'm presenting a teaching called The Jesus Revolution, and the message is both sobering and deeply encouraging. When your faith is under attack, it may be the clearest sign that you're living in a way that really, really matters. In other words, when you start making a difference, attack often comes.

If you're in a hard season right now and you feel like I just can't go on, I want to remind you, you're not alone. And what you're experiencing has a name. It's called spiritual warfare. In fact, that's why every single day, Monday through Friday, our entire staff at Living on the Edge, we pray because we understand, we're in a battle. This is a real battle. It's not flesh and blood. There's spiritual powers coming against you. And so we pray. Here's what you need to remember. The early church didn't retreat when pressure came. They advanced. And this June, I'm asking you to advance with us. Your gift to the mid-year match, every dollar matched, is your declaration that the opposition, the enemy simply will not get the last word.

Dave Druley: Your gift helps that work go on even further. Join this mid-year match today and double your impact at livingontheedge.org or call us now at 888-333-6003. Every dollar given this month is matched dollar for dollar, and the deadline will be here before you know it. So don't wait. Call our team right now at 888-333-6003 or go online to livingontheedge.org. I'm Dave Druley. Next time, Chip digs deeper into Acts chapter 6. The five principles for what to do the moment you see division beginning to form. Don't miss next time on Living on the Edge. Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge.