Satan's Plan for Your Church

Satan has a plan for your church. If you are part of a Bible-believing, Jesus-loving, Gospel-centered congregation Satan has a plan for your church. And his plan is to destroy it. He either wants to destroy it in the sense that it no longer exists or he wants to destroy it in the sense that it no longer matters that it exists. Either way that is his purpose and agenda for your church.

Satan is a crafty schemer and strategist (Ephesians 6:11). He knows what works. For your church he has a threefold strategy that is progressive with each phase of his plan building upon the one that has gone before it.

Phase one: DISTRACT
Satan’s major point of attack is upon a church’s focus. His main goal is to get the people of God to take their eyes off Jesus and the Gospel and to place them upon something else; something temporal. If God uses a church that is focused on the Gospel then Satan knows that the most effective thing that he can do to stop the work of God is to get the church focused on something other than the Gospel. And he throws out everything in the world in an attempt to distract. Like a fisherman with a tackle box full of lures, he keeps changing the bait until we bite. And oftentimes the bait is not bad or sinful. Sometimes the bait that he uses is something that is good, but is just simply not the Gospel.

This is always his first step, so if he can be stopped here then he is rendered virtually powerless in the church. That means that our eyes must continually be fixed upon Jesus and the Gospel.

Phase two: DISUNITE and DIVIDE
Unity is broken when the thing that holds us the people of God together, which is the Gospel, is not front and center. And Satan knows that if he is able to distract the church then disunity will almost always happen; it is nearly always inevitable once distraction has occurred. Because when the Gospel is ignored then we look around and realize that we really have nothing to hold us together. When the Gospel is not center-stage then we no longer have a common purpose and goal and mission together. And when this happens we all seek to come up with a new agenda of our own because we are not anchored to the agenda of Jesus and the Gospel. Most (not all, but most) disunity that occurs in the local church has as its root cause the fact that people are looking at something other than the Gospel.
When our eyes and focus are not on the Gospel then we no longer see what unites us and there is division that ensues.

Phase three: DISCOURAGE
Once a church gets to this point it becomes obvious that the work of God is not being accomplished. When this phase takes place there is an absence of vision and focus and spiritual life and vitality and vibrancy and passion. And everyone becomes discouraged. Everyone sits around and sees nothing but the problems because they no longer see the promises of the Gospel. And discouragement leads to inactivity and an inactive church is not a healthy church. When a church gets to that point then you can just picture Satan sitting back and laughing because his work has been accomplished as the work of Jesus has ceased.

But none of this happens when everyone’s eyes are fixed on Jesus and the Gospel. Satan cannot touch a strong and healthy church like that. May God’s people “turn their eyes upon Jesus” as Jesus uses His church to accomplish His will in the world!