Is the gospel in your church being limited in effectiveness? If you havent thought about it then there may be an issue. For a start, any church that tells you to ignore Satan and he will leave you alone, is lying to you. Satan is like a prowling lion ready to devour all he can. Don’t think that because you are a Christian, that you are immune. You are still in the flesh physically whilst on this earth. You still sin.

I believe it is important for all Christians to understand who their enemy is. There is a lot in the Bible on who Satan is and are we to ignore that because we can’t be touched by Satan? NO! Otherwise why does the Bible both to even mention this topic a LOT. We know passages such as putting on the armour of God. Why is that in there if we can’t be affected or influenced by Satan? We know that if we fall into sin and stop attending church, we will certainly be influenced by Satan and his ideas. We will probably lose some discernment and not see things we should be seeing when instead we should walk by faith in God, not by sight.

Think of it this way, if Alexander the Great just attacked strongholds without worrying about the enemy or studying them, would he have succeeded in his conquest? If the Allies in World War 2 just did their battles without any intel, would they have won the war? NO! The Allies relied VERY heavily on intel about the enemy, understanding their moves and their attacks and what weapons they had. Without this intel it is unlikely the Allies would have won.

We too must understand the same about our enemy. We must understand how he attacks.
This way, we will see his attacks clearly and understand exactly how to defend. So first point is, understand what we are up against. We obviously need to spend a lot of time studying the Word of God in order to understand this. This gives us more discernment. Then we will clearly see where Satan is attacking us and the church and we will see how compromise in our lives and the church affects the effectiveness of the Church to present the Gospel and truth.

In my studies there are clearly attributes that anything of Satan will have. Things such as ‘Control’. God doesn’t force us or control us, He has given us free will. This brings about the topic of calvinism, which I see as a satanic doctrine. They don’t believe in free-will as they believe this limits God’s sovereignty. However, God choosing to give man free-will does not limit His sovereignty as He will also make us accountable for that free-will. All will face judgment at the end. There is no need for judgement if there are no actions to be accountable for.

I believe calvinism limits the gospel’s effectiveness as it is not the true gospel. You may have heard a calvinist mention that calvinism is the gospel. If calvinism is the gospel then are they adding their own beliefs to God’s word?

I can deal with this more in the next post.