Satan attacks the church through division. In unity, Christians can stand against him. Learn 12 ways the church can remain united. Let’s broadly review what Thomas Brooks has taught us about Satan in the main points of the previous three chapters. Satan tries to lure use into sin through craft, trickery, and deceit. If this […]
Failure: Learn how to overcome persistent sin
Persistent sin defies logic and reason. It short circuits common sense. We will rationalize, minimize, and explain away to whatever degree is necessary our “darling sins.”
Breaking free of that deadly pattern requires a power greater than our will, stronger than our resilience, and more trustworthy than our self-directed promises.
From Thomas Brooks’ Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, here are six truths that counter our failure to conquer persistent sin. Satan uses our weakness to discourage us. But that’s when God’s strength is made perfect.
Six qualities of a spiritual warrior
Look into the heart and soul of a Christian. You’ll see how God has uniquely equipped the spiritual warrior for a lifelong battle against sin. A computer. A car. An appliance. Examine an object’s structure and makeup, and you’ll learn what it was made for. What lies inside reveals the thing’s purpose. Lacking the particular […]
Do you want to be healed?
We are sometimes like the paralytic by the pool at Bethesda, lying dejected, consumed by our weaknesses, with the Source of our healing in plain sight. Satan blinds us against the power of forgiveness by shining the glaring light of our sins in our faces.
But as Brooks reminds us, “A Christian should wear Christ in his bosom as a flower of delight, for he is a whole paradise of delight. He who minds not Christ more than his sin, can never be thankful and fruitful as he should.”
And so we have six remedies available to us, weapons against Satan’s hounding our minds about the sins that so easily entangle us. It is in dwelling on our Healer rather than on our disease that we will be made whole.
Four ways Jesus promised us better things
Thomas Brooks began his explanation of this first device against Christians’ devotion to God by illustrating four negative qualities of wealth. Its weakness, meaninglessness, unreliability, and danger make it a terrible substitute for the riches of our inheritance in Christ. The length of Brooks’ writings on this device made necessary our dividing it into two posts.
As he closes this segment, he writes: “I have been the longer upon the remedies that may help us against this dangerous device of Satan, because he does usually more hurt to the souls of men by this device than he does by all other devices.”
For an entire book dedicated to learning how to defeat our greatest enemy, this is a sobering statement. We would do well to pay special attention to the advice of this wise teacher here.
We continue through this first device against Christian devotion with Brooks’ final four remedies. This second half illustrates how the promise of better things in Christ, based on God’s eternal promises to us, can help us look beyond temporal pleasures.
Four strategies for avoiding negative influences
We Christians must be salt and light to the world. We must be in and not of the world as we proclaim the gospel. But we also must discern when it is time to walk away from certain people for whom our message is nothing but bitterness and gall.
Thomas Brooks helps us recognize when the influence of wicked people is too great for us to bear and will become a temptation to sin.
How to avoid the dead end of bad doctrine
Adherence to biblical doctrine can never be assumed. God in his Word calls us not only to obey his commands, but to keep them. We must hold tightly to them, preserve them, and teach them. The Bible is sacred. It is our sacred duty to assent to this.
Thomas Brooks provides seven remedies by which we may hold fast God’s word and resist Satan’s efforts to undermine it with doctrinal error.
