There is an oft-repeated story about the time Satan gathered his co-workers together for a strategy session. The purpose: find more effective ways to tempt Christians into sin.
One evil spirit said, “Let’s set before them the delights of sin.”
Satan shook his head. “That works up to a point, but not with the strong believers.”
Another incubus suggested, “We can show them that virtue is costly.”
Satan again shook his head. “They know that the rewards are worth it.”
The third little demon had a knowing look in his eye. “Let’s bring discouragement to their souls.”
“Now you have it!” cried Satan. “Discouragement is the weapon!”
How true it is! Right now I am worn down by lack of sleep. I thought I had won a victory over sleeplessness and dependence on sleeping pills six years ago. But lately I’ve been in the pit of despair. Nor has going back to a mild sleeping pill helped.
This morning I want to put on paper what it is like to try and sleep. I go to bed fatigued, yet am not able to let go. The sleep mechanism of the frontal lobe of my brain is apparently all askew. It’s as if the stay-alert function is working overtime—night and day. Even at moments when, out of total weariness, I am about to drop off, the brain sends the message, “Wake up!” and I jerk to.
There is a constant tiredness behind my eyes, lids are heavy as if pressing the eyes back into the head.
I cannot find any comfortable position in bed. Make elaborate arrangements with pillows and sheet, but no sooner settled than I am moving again. What to do with the arms to keep them from aching? How to place my neck?
My faces itches and I must scratch. There’s a cramp in one leg and I flex and unflex my toes. The sheet is scratching my chin. Right arm is hot. Finally I tumble to the fact that there can be no sleep until I lie still for a while. Yet it’s agony to force myself to do so.
The nights seem endless. How can they be so long?
When I do drop off, toward dawn, the “sleep start” wakens me abruptly. A muscle in my leg gives a sudden jerk.
I have come to hate the bed, yet am drawn to it, always hopeful. Isn’t it man’s natural state to sleep? Lord, I’m exhausted and discouraged.
So many times discouragement has been the doorway through which the powers of evil have flooded into my situation. For discouragement says, “My problem is bigger than God, who is not adequate to handle my particular need. So herewith I take my eyes off God, bow down before my problem, and give myself to it.”
In digging through Scripture on this subject, I have discovered that no matter how difficult the situation, Jesus’ attitude was always a calm, “Courage, My son, My daughter. Have no fear. There is nothing here that My Father cannot handle.”
It was not that Jesus minimized the problem, but rather that His faith was a magnet for God’s power. He knew that no problem was any match for the Lord God Almighty.
I confess now that I am discouraged because I have been relying on myself rather than on you, Lord; I have expected something from myself and am deeply disappointed not to find it there. I want to think that I can handle things myself, succeed better, and do more than others.
In The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence writes that he was never upset when he had failed in some duty. He simply confessed his fault, saying to God, “I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is You who must hinder my failing and mend what is amiss.” After this admission, He gave himself no further uneasiness about it.
What the devil wants us to do, of course, is to focus on our failure rather than on Jesus. For when we keep our eyes on Him, we find that no problem—of the 1st century or the 20th—has ever defeated Him.
Jesus never encountered a human situation that discouraged Him. Sickness and disease? Jesus healed a man blind from birth, a woman who’d had an issue of blood for twelve years, and another bent double with arthritis for eighteen years. At not one of these cases did Jesus look with a despairing heart.
Did sin get Him down? Never, no matter how heinous. Jesus insisted that He had come into the world not to condemn us, but to save us. (John 8:15; 12:47) His attitude was that any time spent in condemnation, in wallowing in old sins and regrets, in recriminations, in kicking ourselves around, is wasted time.
The woman taken in adultery, He forgave and restored—immediately.
Zaccheus had spent a lifetime in greed and grasping. Yet Jesus told him, “This day has salvation come to thy house.”
Jesus’ word in any situation was one of encouragement. To the paralytic borne by four: “Courage, my son!” To the ruler of the synagogue whose daughter was dying: “Have no fear, only believe, and she shall get well.” To Martha, grieving over her dead brother: “Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?”
Hear that Satan? In the name of Jesus, I kick you and discouragement out of my life.
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