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The devil goes to church. That might be a surprising statement to some, but it is one that I believe that is absolutely true. We even have scripture for it; several times in the Gospels we find Jesus attending a Sabbath meeting at the local synagogue -- the Jewish local assembly -- and the devil showing up and causing a scene. If the thirty-something miracles of Jesus that are recorded in the Gospels are just a small representation of what happened in Jesus' ministry as the Apostle John said, then it must have been a fairly common occurrence for devils to be cast out of people during a synagogue service by Jesus Christ. John the Baptist made his church the wilderness area beyond the Jordan river and that was precisely where the devil was when he came to tempt Jesus. In the temptation, the devil even took Jesus to the temple at one point. That was probably the first and last time the devil ever brought anybody to church! And, boy, did it backfire on him! The devil learned that such "reverse psychology stuff" is not very effective in the kingdom of God. By the time Jesus' ministry was in full swing, the devil was ready to fling himself off the temple pinnacle!

I might add that the devil does not go to every church. And the reason is simple: Jesus doesn't go to every church! It is interesting that we never read in the Gospels of reports of the devil disturbing or causing commotion at a synagogue service in which Jesus was not in attendance. Obviously the devil knows that only if Jesus shows up to a service is there any worry of anything powerful happening! And so the devil is not worried about some church services, because Jesus hasn't showed up in years and done anything of significance and the people aren't coming this week expecting anything different. To such places, the devil doesn't have to attend because nothing spiritual is going to happen either way! Let us never forget that Jesus makes the service and not vice versa. If God cannot show up here and have His liberty, then we are simply wasting our time!

It is also an interesting Biblical fact that we read several times of the devil showing up in the local synagogues, but we never read in scripture of the devil ever showing up or manifesting himself within the temple of Jesus' day. The synagogues were a local meeting place in every town. The temple -- of which there was only one -- was in Jerusalem and was the religious center of the day. The reason that the devil never showed up at the temple during a sermon of Jesus is simple: he didn't have to show up because there were humans there in leadership who willingly did his work for him! Think of it:

The devil didn't have to show up to express doubt at Jesus' ability to do the supernatural because there were religious leaders there that would be quick to do it for him!

The devil didn't have to show up to try to stir the crowds up against the doctrines of Christ because there were Pharisees and such so jealous of Jesus that they willingly did the work of the devil.

The devil didn't have to show up with a divisive spirit or try to teach man's traditions that negated the truth of Jesus, because -- again -- there were scribes and such there that did it for him. And in many ways, they were better opponents because if the devil had showed up, Jesus would have just cast him out and kept going, but the humans could stay. As my dad used to say, "It's easy to cast the devil out of the man, but it's hard to cast the man out of the devil." When you show up to church, be sure that you are not doing the devil's job for him! Be sure you are not fighting against the will and word and man of God in your spirit! You are either for all of the Word of God or against it and if you are against it, you need to realize whose side that places you upon. The devil needs no help!

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The devil comes to church services where Jesus has showed up and intends to show out. And he comes to fight against the success of that service. But he doesn't fight as we would think of fighting; in fact, the devil has a secret that he would rather you not grasp because it reveals that he is not as powerful as some people give him credit for being. This secret is revealed by our text in 1 Peter, a familiar one to many of you:

People are everywhere; there are 6 billion people on this earth -- why does the devil have to "seek someone to devour?" In Job, when the devil came before the throne of God we find God asking him a question:

The devil had been going "to and fro on the earth" and had walking around continuously. He's prowling around like 1 Peter 5:8 said, but why? Because the devil cannot just devour and consume and attack whomever he wants. For the devil to devour us or even come against us and fight against us, somebody has to give him permission. The NKJV puts 1 Peter 5:8 like this:

"Seeking whom he may devour!" Somebody has to give him permission before he can attack. In rare cases, that permission comes from God -- we find that in the example of the story of Job. God was just bragging on Job and gave the devil permission to take everything he had -- even Job's health -- to prove to the devil that Job wasn't just serving God for the blessings and prosperity but that he really loved God. In that particular case, God gave the permission for the devil to devour.

Most of you have heard the story of Job preached on extensively and I believe that the story really happened and is truth. But consider this: there are slightly over 3,000 named men in the Bible and about half as many named women in scripture. Of all these people, Job is the only one where it is recorded that God gave the devil permission to actually physically come against him and attack him. Odds are that the calamity in your life isn't the devil having gotten permission from God to attack you. It can happen, but more often than not, the devil gets permission from us. Remember the story of Eve? God didn't give permission to the devil to have his way with her, but rather Eve gave the permission and just as she granted the devil power in her life, is exactly how we give him access to us:

And here is the big secret that the devil doesn't want you to know about him: even in the case of Eve, still all the devil could do is talk! If he could have killed Adam and Eve or forced them to eat the fruit, he would have done so in a moment because he hated them because he hated the God in whose image they were created. But the devil couldn't destroy them and the only thing that he could do without permission was talk to them!

It should come as no surprise, then that the most often reoccurring element in the passages of scripture about devils is that they speak. In our text, the demon cried out to Jesus in the synagogue. They did likewise in the other synagogue example of a devil being cast out. The Legion in the demoniac of the Gadarenes came worshipped Jesus and cried out in a loud voice to Him. The devil is a lion, but all he can do is talk! But unfortunately, if you listen to it, his roar can be much worse than his bite!

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So, if the devil regularly shows up to church services and fights against services where Jesus Christ shows up and does great works in people's lives, then that means that the devil comes to this church often -- because Jesus regularly meets us here! The Holy Spirit transforms lives regularly here! It could be that the devil has shown up tonight and if that is so, then you should know he is here to fight against this service being everything that God wants it to be. And so, keeping all of this in mind, let me preach to you about how the devil most often fights church services today. He doesn't usually come in the form of a devil-possessed person who causes a disruption as he tried the first few times in Jesus' ministry. That was the first time that the devil had ever had Jesus come to church and by now the devil has already figured out that such tactics are too easily countered by simply casting the demons out of the person and then that person gets delivered and everybody's faith gets boosted and everybody just loves Jesus more. That little tactic has backfired so much in Apostolic churches that the devil doesn't use that one as much as he used to. But don't think that he doesn't fight against these services. He does, but he just uses more subtler means.

The devil fights against church services:

You should have seen that one coming, but we often forget the obvious. Think of the ideal church service:

God can speak directly and powerfully to a man of God who has prepared himself with prayer and fasting and people of faith can come together and worship God with the right songs for the service and God can move mightily amongst them, and the testimonies can be the most faith-building ones that you've ever heard and miracles, signs, and wonders can be happening left and right, and even more importantly, the preacher can preach the best sermon with the most powerful Word you've ever heard and it be exactly what you needed right at the moment that you needed it most and God can move in at the end to mightily do the word that you need Him to do with supreme power never before seen in your life and . . .

If you are not there, it didn't change your life one bit!

Don't think that the devil doesn't know that. Don't think that he doesn't know the obvious. To revert back to my Louisiana roots for a moment: "If ya ain't at da church, den ya ain't gonna be blessed." Some people always have a headache on Sunday morning. Some people always have bad days at work on Wednesday day. I knew a person one time that was always at church on Sunday morning, but about 40 weekends out of the year, she always started "feeling bad" before Sunday pm service. I understand that people get legitimately sick and I'm not saying to come and infect us all with your virus or whatever, but at the same time we must remember that Satan's best strategy to keeping God from doing great things in your life is to keep you away from church!

And here's the deal: if the devil realizes something works, then he will keep doing it! If you having a bad day on Wednesday keeps you out of church Wednesday night, then don't be surprised if you have a bunch of bad days at work on hump day! If a headache Sun Am will keep you more often than not from going to church, then get ready for a bunch of those headaches! Why would he stop -- it's working, isn't it!?

But there have many times that I felt tired or sick or whatever before church and then after the service was over, I left with passion in my heart and energy in my step and I was so glad that I came because God showed up and had exactly what I needed! To have a testimony like that, you have to just get up sometimes and do what you don't feel like doing!

But let me move on because the devil doesn't wait until church days to start fighting against the services, he begins much earlier than that:

He cannot force you to sin against God, but he can make sin so appealing that you desire it. That's what he did to Eve and ever since then, the devil has been in the advertising business. If you don't believe me, just count the billboards between your house and work tomorrow and then on the next trip see how many of them have to do with things that destroy your temple or your walk with God or weigh you down in trying to live for Him. It will be a high percentage of them and that's no accident!

Here's how the devil uses such advertising of sin to hinder God's church services in your life: he gets you to thinking that sin is desirable until you give in and partake of it. Then he waits until you are at church and then turns on you and begins to heap condemnation on you for having done what he wanted you to do! Conviction is of God but after true repentance, conviction leaves. Conviction produces a desire to get things right with God and a desire to serve God no matter what and to come to an altar and clear your life of those things that you have done. That is conviction. Condemnation is not of God and if after repentance, you still feel heavy and burdened and weighted because of your sin, then you should know that such feelings is from the devil! Condemnation causes an attitude of "giving up" and "I can't make it living for God anyway" and "what's the use of trying?" That's of the devil.

And if the devil can get you to sin and then give into the condemnation then you come to church and you find it very hard to worship God freely because condemnation is telling you, "you did that this week." You are trying to tune into the Spirit and you can't because this voice is screaming in your mind: "you are a loser, you sinner you!" When the preacher preaches, instead of repenting and receiving all that you need from God, you interpret his sermon through your condemnation as just being negative and "dumping on you" and then the frustration that you feel from your condemnation is directed towards him and you suddenly begin to hate him and the church. All because you've fallen for the oldest trick of Satan in the book: condemnation!

Listen to this preacher: the source of both sinful vices and condemnation is the same, the devil. But many Christians who are quick to identify the source of sinful behavior aren't so quick to pick up on and identify condemnation for what it really is. If you've fallen, then get back up and keep trying! The righteous man falls seven times and yet he always gets back up! And let me say this: where the devil has a field day with condemnation is not the little attitude you had on the way to work, but rather with what we consider the "biggies." The times in our lives where we feel we royally flubbed up and failed God in a major way. And so some of us come into church weeks, months, maybe even years after something happens and God is speaking to us that He wants to give us this or use us this way or do this in our lives and this voice pops up reminding of us that monumental failure back then. That is condemnation and it is of the devil and somebody needs to make up in your mind to tell the devil "shut up in my life, God has forgiven me, there is no big sins and little sins in the kingdom of God and besides that big or small His blood has covered those things and I'm not returning to that and be quiet so I can receive with faith everything that God has for me now!" Don't let condemnation distract you from receiving all of God's will for your life!

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He works in the week before to hinder you receiving all that you need to in the service, and the devil works the day of service to give you every reason not to go, but in the actual services, the devil has his methods of fighting, also. Once you are here, he tries to keep you from hearing the Word of God. Not just hearing the Word of God but hearing the Word of God. Jesus said many times:

The Lord told Ezekiel:

Just because you hear the Word of God doesn't mean that you were listening or really hearing all that you needed to hear! And so the devil will do his best to cause the Word of God to go in one ear and out the other in the service; he can accomplish this in several ways:

We've all been there at one time or another. You are sitting there in service and everybody stands up to clap and praise God and you stand with them and all of a sudden you realize that you have no earthly idea what was so great that caused everybody to stand up because your mind had wandered and you really weren't thinking about what the preacher was saying. Or as you are seated after the reading of the text, your mind is thinking about what you have to do that afternoon or tomorrow or on the laundry or on what you've got going next week, or. . . When I preach I see some people some times, they are so zoned out and they have no clue what is really going on. And those who are that way often are the ones who end up "needing" the pastor so desperately later in their life.

The Bible teaches us that we wage spiritual warfare:

When your mind wanders and yet you force it to think on the things that it needs to think upon, then that is spiritual warfare! Taking every thought captive. The devil often speaks to you by a random thought. You cannot control what thought comes into your mind, but you can control what you do with it!

You train yourself to do this by regular prayer. I have people come to me and say "I cannot pray every day very well because my mind wanders." That is the whole point of prayer to train your mind to do what you want it to do. You'd better not use that as an excuse because when it comes to the house of God, you are not going to be able to receive everything that you need to receive! Keep praying and keep forcing your mind to go back to the things of God. The more you do it, the easier that it will become. You are practicing "taking every thought captive." Then when that lustful thought comes in, you will be able to take it captive and shun it aside rather than dwelling on it until you desire it and it becomes sin through your actions. Your ability to do that is tied directly to your prayer life. When you've been praying regularly and your mind starts to wander in service, you can say "wait a minute, I need this -- time to come back to focus" because you have trained your mind to do that! Every preoccupation that distracts us from the things of God is an earlier prayer failure. If we would pray as we ought, we would be able to more readily receive the things of God.

Remember the story of Mary and Martha? Martha was so busy preparing the meal for Jesus that she didn't have time to actually sit and listen to His voice and talk to Him. Mary, on the other hand went and sat at His feet and blocked out everything else to focus on Him. It's possible to get so busy serving God that you forget about having a relationship with Him and the importance of talking with Him and hearing Him. Jesus told Martha:

You can tell when you are so preoccupied with serving God that it is hurting you by two things: when it is time to sit at His feet, you are too busy thinking of all the things that yet need to be done to really hear what He is saying, and when you do pray it is to only ask God to help you with all that you've got going. That's what Martha did: she only talked to Jesus to ask Him to send Mary to help her finish her stuff. In serving God, we must be careful lest we get so preoccupied with serving Him that we forget Him!

But let us move on; the devil can also sometimes fight the service:

Distractions are unexpected scenarios that pop up right around service time. Some people -- even some preachers -- never realize them for the trick of the devil that they really are. You will notice that before church I only give you a quick greeting and then I'm back to preparing for the service. That's because I don't want to be distracted by a situation or problem or whatever right before church. If you come to me all bothered by something or wanting to talk or to give me something, I'll usually say "tell me after church." That's because it's easy for things to become distractions at the crucial moments right before we go into service. The devil is in distractions.

I will not spend much time here except to say that if the devil can distract you, then he will and it will usually be through either somebody, or through the threat of a fear coming true. Another big one that he uses because they are so readily available is children. Or he uses the parent who doesn't realize that their "SHHHHHHHHH!" is more of a distraction than whatever the child was doing before you yelled! Distractions in church. Learn to recognize them and don't let the devil steal you away from the needful thing of receiving all that God has for you.

I'm not talking about racial prejudice, although in some churches that might be a distraction. "Prejudice" is simply pre-judging a person or a situation on appearance or your personal expectations. The devil uses it to fight against a church service in two ways.

First, he gets you so focused on somebody else in service that you cannot get anything out of it yourself. Because you know -- or you heard -- that so and so did such and such and "what is he doing up there praising God like that?" Or so and so supposedly said such and such about you and you can't even worship God because you are ticked that God would not toast them for even trying to worship after what they said about you. But you should be reminded that your knowledge or hearsay of whatever it is that causing you to focus on them is prejudiced to what you want to believe. Gossip is not necessarily true and besides you don't know what has happened in the meantime. Get your eyes off others and stop allowing the devil to use them to distract you!

The second way that the devil uses prejudice to fight against church services is by planting a pre-conceived idea of what service should be. You come in thinking that God should do this and if God does that, you feel that the service was a failure because it didn't match what you wanted it to be. Remember why your mother made you eat your carrots and spinach and just didn't give you all the candy you wanted? Because children don't always know what is best for them, and it is the same with our heavenly Father. Just because the preacher is not preaching on what or how you think he should doesn't mean that you should tune out. It could be that God knows exactly what you need better than you -- after all He knows what tomorrow holds and you don't. Don't let your pre-conceived ideas of church services dictate you to you what God can or cannot do!

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I'm talking about how the devil fights church services where God regularly shows up! He knows that your life can be forever changed and you can be blessed if you will get everything that you need to out of the service so he comes to fight against that happening. And if you have heard the Word of God and felt the Spirit of God, then the devil has one more great attack with which he can fight, and it is a biggie, his "biggest weapon:"

We preach against gossip and rightfully so but pride is much more common in the church than even those things. We preach against lying and cheating and stealing and murdering and all of that, but pride is just as serious a sin. We preach against lusts of the flesh and fornication and rightfully so but pride destroys more Christians than sexual sins do. It's been called the "most justified sin on the planet." And it is the devil's greatest tool to hindering a church service.

When you will not worship as you should or as you know you ought because you are worried about what someone might say or think, then you have been infected.

When you feel the tears wanting to come but try to hold them back lest you let go in public, you have been infected.

When you feel the tug of the Spirit drawing you to go deeper than you have ever been before and yet you don't see anyone else going to any greater commitment so you don't respond, it's slid in the backdoor.

When the preacher preaches right to you and the Word of God and Spirit of God is dealing with you and you know that you need to receive something before you leave and yet you don't get up and head to the front because you are afraid that someone else will interpret it as you are backslid or whatever, pride has arisen in your heart.

When you know to do right and yet do not do it because of what others might say, it's taken root.

When God's Word has pinpointed the exact condition of your heart and yet you would rather put up a front and act like the Word is for everybody else but you, you are eaten up with it.

I'm talking about pride! Or should I say, the sin of pride -- it is a most efficient weapon to kill a church service from being what it should be as per God. And in the true, Apostolic church of God it has become the greatest tool of Satan against a genuine, move of God.

Let me say that there is none righteous among us -- no not one!" Compared to His holiness our righteousness is as filthy rags! All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. All have failed. All have regrets. All are humans. All of us need a Savior. All of us need encouragement. All of us need an altar. All of us need to worship Him with everything that we have. All of us need God more now than we have ever needed Him. All of us need to obey His Word better. All of us need His help. Get rid of your stinking pride and receive all that God has for you every service! It doesn't matter what others think of you, it matters what God thinks!

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I've only given you a small sampling of how the devil fights against church services. I could have done a whole series on it. There are many others that work: unforgiveness, the attitude that you have many more services thus it really doesn't matter if you get all that God has for you in this particular service, the attitude of taking it for granted what we have in the opportunity to meet with Jesus. Realize that the devil will do his best to fight against anything that is really impacting people and if our church services are having that effect, then he will try to fight against them.

If you read the stories where the devil showed up at church, you will find one common denominator: despite the devil's best efforts and distractions, those who were present who wanted to touch Jesus and get everything that He had for them, still were able to press through and receive it! The devil is a weak lion compared to the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Jesus Christ! Jesus is even here right now! Why don't you press through and receive everything you need!