We have a new enemy and that enemy is Satan and under Satan is this emissary, this army of demons.
Hey everyone, today I'm going to be talking about the gates of hell shall not prevail.
I'm Dr. Steve Holt and for you that are a part of Empower You, you've seen some of my messages
or maybe this is actually your first time to join us. We're so glad you're a part of Empower You.
And today I want to talk about this aspect of the power of the kingdom of God.
But I want to start with the enemy and how the enemy works.
And I've done a series on Satan, demons in the fourth dimension.
You can see that series in Empower You and I go into much greater detail there.
But what I'm going to be doing in this series on the gates of hell shall not prevail
is looking at the ministry of Jesus and the power of his spirit to come against cosmic rulers,
principalities and powers in the heavenly realm in his ministry.
And then as we move along, we're going to start talking about how that plays out in our own personal lives.
So in Satan, demons in the fourth dimension, I talked a lot about demonization and demon possession
and what that is. I'm not doing that here.
I'm actually going to be talking from the perspective of kind of two things.
And one is that Satan enslaves and Jesus saves.
So one is about the salvation that comes through what I would call Jesus, a freedom fighter.
So Jesus is a bondage breaker and freedom fighter.
Satan comes to steal, kill and destroy.
And why this is important is because in our world today, it is just so prevalent to embrace things,
even religiously, embrace things in church, embrace things in culture that are going to enslave you.
And there's demonic powers behind it.
And so Jesus approached his ministry from the perspective of having an enemy.
He truly saw that there was an enemy that he had to face,
there was an enemy that he had to do battle with.
And it's exactly the same way for us today.
And so when we become Christians, when we become born again into Christ,
we have a new enemy and that enemy is Satan.
And under Satan is this emissary, this army of demons that oppose us.
And they battle on the front of lust.
They battle on the front of envy and strife and jealousy.
But they also can incite and create sickness, depression and other ailments that affect us
that many times, especially us in the West,
totally look at as just a sickness that we have and a pharmaceutical we need to take
rather than taking it to God in prayer, the power of prayer and the power of deliverance.
So I want us to turn, if you have your Bible, if you turn to John chapter 10.
I want to start there.
And John 10 is a very interesting chapter
because this is where Jesus talks about being the good shepherd.
But then he comes in to this, I would consider it kind of the highlight of the chapter
in comparing himself to Satan and what the differences are.
So I'm going to call this today Satan's job description.
So for this episode one, I want to talk about Satan's job description.
We're going to start at verse 7 of John 10.
Then Jesus said to them again, Most assuredly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.
All who ever came before me are thieves and robbers.
Y'all to underline thieves and robbers.
But the sheep did not hear them.
I am the door.
If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and he will go in and out and find pasture.
Now, verse 10 is where this is headed.
This is a crucial verse.
The thief, meaning Satan, does not come except to steal and to kill and to destroy.
I have come that you might have life and you might have it more abundantly.
So here we see the job description of Satan.
He comes to steal, kill and destroy.
That's Satan's job description.
So jot this down.
This is really important.
Number one, Satan comes to steal your heart.
Now, why do I say that?
Because at the heart is not only the seat of your emotions,
but it's also where your passions are.
So when we look at a heart from a biblical perspective,
And by the way,
The one word that's used the most in all of the Bible,
used in over 70% of the verses of the Bible,
is the word heart.
So Jesus is fascinated with the heart.
He's always talking about the heart.
He's instructing us on the heart from Malachi to,
I mean, excuse me, from Genesis all the way to Revelation.
The heart is a crucial part of the Christian life.
And that's where Jesus even says,
when he was challenged,
what's the greatest commandment of all?
What is the commandment
that sums up all other commandments?
And he says in Matthew 22 and Mark 12,
he says, love the Lord your God with all of your heart,
soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor yourself.
So he starts off with heart, loving God with your heart.
So Satan's main goal,
the main objective of the demonic rim
is to steal away your heart,
steal your passion for living,
steal your heart to move forward in your life,
to take away any incentive within you
and to steal your heart,
to cause your heart to be full of envy,
jealousy, comparison,
looking down on yourself,
considering yourself a loser.
That's all the heart.
So the enemy comes to steal your heart.
Number two, Jesus says, steal, kill, and destroy.
So kill, if you steal the heart,
his next objective is to kill your vision,
to give you no purpose for living,
no vision for your life.
I'm telling you, you show me a man or a woman
who's got a vision for the life,
and I'll show you someone who's got discipline,
who's going somewhere,
who has a desire to work hard
because they have a vision.
Vision's important.
Vision is seeing the future
and what you wanna accomplish in the future.
It is looking at your life.
I think everybody should write down
what their life vision is.
Satan does not want you to have a life vision.
Satan wants to kill your vision.
Steal your heart, kill your vision.
You steal any man or woman's heart
and you will kill their vision.
I mean, this is what happens a lot of times in prisons.
Men get thrown into prison.
They've done something wrong.
They're having to pay for that.
And in the prison, they lose their heart.
And when they lose their heart,
they lose any passion for vision in their life.
You show me a man who's lost his job
or gone through a divorce or been betrayed
or seen his wife get involved in an affair
or they've made sinful choices.
You're talking about someone who's letting the enemy come
and steal your heart and kill your vision.
So men and women, you have to have a heart and passion
for the kingdom of God.
And we're gonna talk about that in the next episode,
but you also have to have a vision for your life.
You just do.
So the enemy comes to steal your heart,
kill your vision and then destroy your future.
If you can get a person's heart,
if you can take away their vision,
you will destroy their future.
And I'll tell you, there's a lot of people out there
that are so talented, so gifted,
have so many opportunities in life,
and yet they have no future because they have no heart
and they have no vision.
Well, some of the ways in which Satan works
to destroy our future, kill our vision and steal our heart
is actually in this passage.
So read, go back with me to verse eight.
It says, all who ever came before me are thieves and robbers
but the sheep do not hear them.
So one of the ways that the enemy comes in our lives
is through false religions, false prophets,
false messiahs, even false churches, quite frankly.
And so he's saying here that there are thieves
and robbers that are demonized,
that come to steal away people who think they're the sheep,
who feel like they're in the sheep fold.
And this happens all the time.
I mean, I've grown up around so many cults through the years.
There's cults through Jehovah Witnesses,
there's cults through Mormonism,
lots of different kinds of cults.
There's cults with Jim Jones.
Probably some of you aren't old enough to remember,
but I'm old enough to remember back in the 70s,
there was this evangelist in the Los Angeles area
named Jim Jones who started a church that grew into a cult
and they actually left the United States,
went to the Northern part of South America,
set up a city called Jonestown.
named it after himself and just became a very licentious cult group and they became famous
because and you've probably heard people say don't drink the Kool-Aid.
That's where it comes from.
He actually put together a Kool-Aid and there was a mass, mass suicide and hundreds were
this, I think it was like cyanide laced Kool-Aid and they were killed, leaving their kids and
everything.
A really sad story.
But there are always going to be these new kinds of movements that pop up that are thieves
and robbers.
They're coming to steal, kill and destroy your life.
And so as you're growing as a new believer, if you're growing as a mature believer, you
need to be so aware of what's happening out there.
Even today with the progressive church movement that's happening that is devaluing scripture,
that is acquiescing to new kinds of theological viewpoints.
Let me just say this, there's nothing new theologically.
There's nothing new spiritually.
There's only old truths rediscovered.
So I like to say there's no new truths, there's only old truths that are being rediscovered.
For example, in the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, Martin Luther was rediscovering
that the just shall live by faith, that our salvation comes through faith alone and not
through the works of the flesh, not through the works of the law, not through the works
of the Catholic Church, but rather through a walk of faith, putting our trust in Christ.
That was a new truth rediscovered or a old truth rediscovered into a new principle.
And so be careful when you're hearing things that are new or stuff you've never heard before.
Be super careful with that because that's what cults do.
Cults come and they try to create new ways of looking at things that are not traditionally
or historically accurate to the Bible.
So let me give you four thoughts of a way to judge new things that you have coming in
your life that can steal, kill, and destroy.
Here's the first thing that I always ask is, does it line up with the whole of Scripture?
Does this teaching line up with all of Scripture, Old and New Testament?
Because if it doesn't, reject it.
It's not of the Lord.
Number two, does this teaching line up with the whole gospel?
In other words, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, does it line up with what we know
about what Jesus taught?
And so this is important because Jesus came and he did bring a new paradigm to the old
law.
And so it's not just all of Scripture, but it's also the whole gospel as well.
Number three, does this teaching line up with tradition and history?
Now not all tradition and history is of the Lord, but I'm talking about that which comes
out of Christendom or Christian history, we can trust those things in tradition and history
that the men of old, the patriarchs, the teachers of the church have accepted as being true.
And so I would say especially since the Protestant Reformation in 1516.
So the Reformation movement, that history there can, not a hundred percent, but basically
can be trusted.
We do know what are the truths, old truths rediscovered.
And then number four, does this teaching line up with theology?
So I have three volumes of systematic theology that at times I've had to go back to rereading
what the great theologians have said about certain aspects of the last days, eschatology
and times, sanctification, justification, what is the theological perspective on the
inerrancy and infallibility of the Scriptures.
So that's theology.
So all of that comes together when we're looking at something new.
So I want to challenge you to always use scripture, the gospel, theology and history,
excuse me, tradition and history and theology to judge new things that you hear about.
And so this is a job description.
When I think of the job description of Satan and demons, John 1010 gives us that job description.
He comes to absolutely steal your heart.
heart, kill your vision, destroy your future.
So in my next episode, I'm going to talk about the job description of Christ.
What did he come doing?
It's right here.
It's in our verse.
It says that he came to give us life that's abundant.
So I'm going to talk about the abundant life, the fruitful life, the super abundant life
that Christ can bring.
And so I hope this has been helpful to you.
Check us out in the next episode because I'll be talking about the job description of Jesus.