022 Thy Kingdom Come Part 2 (Lord’s Prayer Series)

In this episode of Holystic Christian Prayer, we continue our exploration of the Lord’s Prayer, focusing on the powerful phrase “Thy Kingdom Come.” Join us as we delve into the profound spiritual truths surrounding our role in God’s kingdom and the reality of the spiritual battle we face daily.

With a blend of heartfelt reflection and a touch of humor, I share insights on the nature of prayer, the influence of sin, and the importance of recognizing our identity as soldiers in God’s army. Drawing from Scripture and personal experiences, we’ll discuss how understanding our spiritual state can transform our prayer life and relationship with God.

I humbly invite you to listen as we navigate these complex themes together, seeking clarity and encouragement in our faith journey. Whether you’re a seasoned believer or just starting to explore your spirituality, there’s something here for everyone. Let’s uncover what it truly means to pray for God’s kingdom to come on Earth and how we can actively participate in this divine mission.

Join me for a thoughtful conversation that aims to inspire and uplift, reminding us all of the hope and strength we find in Christ. Your feedback and insights are always welcome, and I look forward to growing together in faith!

Transcript

022 Thy Kingdom Come Pt 2

Introduction and Opening Prayer

Hello and welcome back to Holystic Christian Prayer. We are continuing our in depth study of the Lord’s Prayer in part two of “Thy Kingdom Come”. Before we get started, I would like to make two small announcements.

 I’d love to receive more digital feedback from you guys—reviews, follows, and ratings—but as I wait for that, some local church listeners have suggested improving the podcast’s tone. Specifically, it was said that I should try to adopt a more conversational tone. The person who told me this admitted that’s hard to do on a podcast where I’m the only one talking, but nevertheless I think they are right. Therefore, I ask if you have any desire to be a guest on my show to contact me. I’m looking for any Christian who takes prayer seriously to share their insights, and if possible, to be repeat guests who can tell us about what’s been going on in their prayer life. I’ll put some links in the show notes for anyone interested in that.

I have a confession to make. I’ve been holding back a part of myself on this podcast. Outside of this show, I am known for my humor, always cracking jokes, making puns, and playing with words. Even in serious situations, it's sometimes hard for me to stay serious. I worried that if I showed this side of myself, you might think I don’t take God or prayer seriously. But it’s time to be the real me, and that means the tone of this podcast is going to change a bit.

There will still be plenty of solid, serious, and accurate teachings, but now it will be sprinkled with my sense of humor. I believe this will make the content more engaging and will help create a more conversational tone. So, get ready for some laughs, or, like many of my friends, be prepared to roll your eyes at some of the silly jokes coming your way. 

That’s all for announcements. Let’s pray.

Father, thank You for guiding me in this message. Open our eyes to see Earth as a battleground between good and evil. Ignite a righteous fire within us to take action. Equip us with Your strength to demolish the enemy's works and establish Your kingdom's authority in every area of our lives. Transform us to reflect Your image and align our will with Yours in prayer and action. Lord Jesus, secure us in Your deliverance, transferring us from darkness to light. Through You, we claim victory over sin and death. Amen.

A Rebel In Enemy Territory

If you’ve been following this podcast from the beginning, you’ll know that I’ve spent a lot of time building up foundational ideas. The necessity of prayer, making time for prayer, what is prayer, common types of prayer, your identity and your approach to prayer, establishing a routine of prayer, discerning the voice of God from your own and Satan’s, the character of our Heavenly Father vs our earthly fathers, and what it means to Hallow God’s name. I had to do all that in order to prepare you for what comes next. If you rushed headlong into prayer without understanding these things, prayer might have been a frustrating and confusing spiritual discipline for you. However, if you’ve listened to everything prior to this, I think you’re ready to engage in prayer that will yield some fruit. That’s Christianese for, “you’ll start seeing results for your labors”. 

The reason I say this is because the moment that a person puts their faith in Jesus, they enlist themselves in God’s army and belong from that point on to God’s kingdom. Their old ways of thinking remain, and their favorite sins remain their favorite sins, but a new power begins to work on them from within. The reality is, we’ve always been in the middle of a battleground, with fiery arrows and spears flying in every direction, but we haven’t been able to sense it. Sin dulled our senses, weakened our will, darkened our reason, and left us blind to the war raging around us.

 Unable to see the enemy or his weapons, we were perplexed. We saw friends and family fall from invisible wounds from an invisible attacker, and were unable to do anything to help. This was actually a reoccurring dream that I had for many years after first becoming a Christian. I believe it accurately depicts the spiritual warzone we are all in, whether we recognize it or accept it. 

You guys already know I’m a big fan of C.S. Lewis, so it’s no surprise that I’m about to share a quote from him. Listen to what he says about the Christian faith in his book, Mere Christianity:

“Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.

Enemy-occupied territory — that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going...”

But when we enlisted in the unstoppable armies of God, we were fashioned with armor, given the Spirit of God, given the Sword of the Spirit, and commanded to pray at all times. Why pray at all times and circumstances if we have all those other things? It’s because it’s through prayer that those things become the most effective. 

Think about this with me. If a soldier doesn’t think there is an enemy approaching, will he bother to put on armor? Would he bother calling for reinforcements if he thought he could take on the enemy all on his own? Would he bother even to pick up his sword or shield? Would he rally his fellow soldiers to attack an enemy who seems to pose little or no threat? Or suppose he were to suddenly become able to see the great armies of the enemy, would he be able to confidently stand if He didn’t know and trust the victory promised by his commander? What if a soldier didn’t know what his commander sounds like?  He might mistake the enemy’s voice as his commander, or he might just listen to his own panicked voice in his head. A soldier has to know he is a soldier, who the enemy is, what the enemy’s tactics are, who his allies are, what weapons he has at his disposal, and what His commanding officer sounds like so we can hear Him over the din of battle. 

That’s why I prepared you with everything I have so far. My only concern is that I didn’t address answered prayer and unanswered prayer before now. The enemy likes to weaponize unanswered prayer as a way of confusing us. He wants us to see God like he does; cruel, stingy, stuffy, unfair, unjust, and unloving. 

The enemy loves to use unanswered prayer as a weapon against us, making us doubt God’s goodness. I promise that I will address this topic in time, and at length. 

For now, just know that prayer is the way we make the armor and Sword of God effective. If prayer is the way we make the armor and Sword of God effective, then you can be certain that the Enemy will do whatever he can to get you to pray as little as possible, and if possible, not at all. 

 In the last episode, we saw that we were initially intended to rule the Earth in a manner that reflects the image and likeness of God, and we saw how that kingdom was both stolen and surrendered to Satan. In this episode we will see how Satan uses our fallen nature to rule the Earth, expedite our death, increase misery, and even obtain worship. 

The Sinful Nature and Satan’s Rule of the Earth

Death and Destruction From the Inside

From the moment mankind sinned until Jesus came, we were never again free from the power and influence of sin within us. Before humanity’s fall, Satan could only attack us externally—tempting and deceiving, but never working from within. Satan had to first lie and tempt us into sinning before he could gain greater access to us and rule more effectively over us. Scripture doesn’t tell us explicitly what Satan was capable of before we sinned, but I tend to think it was significantly restricted compared to what he’s permitted to do now. Let’s look at how getting the human race to sin gave him better ability to rule us and the world.

Why do I believe that Satan wasn’t able to influence us from the inside before the fall of mankind into sin? In the first place I think it highly unlikely that God would tolerate any attempt by Satan to force human beings into sin against their will. Our ability to choose for ourselves is a characteristic trait of what it means to be made in the likeness of God, and it’s a trait that God honors even if it means we choose evil instead of good. However, as we will see later, a fallen human race doesn’t need to have its will overridden in order for Satan to get us to do as he wishes.

“The Flesh”, It’s Desires, and Satan

The Dead Do Nothing

After the fall, what we naturally gravitated towards was sin rather than righteous obedience to God. This new nature is one that seeks to disobey and rebel against God. In Christianese, we simply refer to this new sinful nature and it’s desires as, “the flesh”.

By default, all human beings are born spiritually dead, and the flesh keeps us from seeking out, knowing, and obeying God. We are born into this world as physically alive, but spiritually dead. I want to emphasize this point because what this means is that we all start off on equally bad footing with God. We are all born into a stolen kingdom ruled by an evil tyrant, born with a sinful nature, and born spiritually dead. People tend to think of “spiritually dead” in terms of separation from God, and primarily in relational terms. Our life-giving and sustaining relationship with God was like an umbilical cord that was cut in the garden when mankind fell into sin. While I think that’s right, I think the phrase “spiritually dead” involves a bit more than simply separation from God relationally. 

When God told Adam in Genesis 2:16-17 to eat of any fruit of any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God warned him saying that if he ate of that tree he would “surely die”. Not just die, but surely die. Many translators believe that the repeated Hebrew word muwth (mooth) that appears as “surely die” in Genesis 2:17 can either be translated as die-die, or die as you die. I think die as you die is a very accurate way to think of it. 

I once taught on Ephesians 2:1-10 for a young adults group, and to this day people tell me that the teaching really stuck with them and helped them understand a spiritual truth. I’m going to read out this passage because I will reference parts of it again later, and will help make my point clearer to you. Here’s the passage.

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—3among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—6and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9not a result of works so that no one may boast. “

Here's a bit of the teaching I gave about this passage. First, this is part of a letter sent to the early church in Ephesus, comprised of both Jewish and Gentile Christians living in modern-day Turkey. When you stop to look at what is being said to them, especially the first three verses, a mystery arises. The very first two verses comes out and says, “you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…” Here, Scripture uses much stronger language to describe our “separation” from God—“dead”. Before I studied this passage deeply, I thought of our pre-Christian state as mere distance from God—making relationship harder but not impossible. This passage, however, reveals a far starker reality: we are dead.

Any of you guys ever watch the 1985 Romero film Day of the Dead? In the film, they captured and conducted experiments on a domesticated and highly intelligent zombie named "Bub". They gave Bub multiple every day items like razor blades, books, and a telephone to see if he could recognize them and use them correctly. Bub recognized the items, clumsily used the items, and even surprised a soldier who entered the room with a salute when Bub recognized that uniform. Despite all of this of course, Bub was still a zombie, and neither dead nor alive in the conventional sense. 

When it comes to our relationship with God, we aren’t like mindless zombies, or even semi-intelligent zombies like Bub wandering about clumsily attempting to call God on a disconnected phone. When sin entered our world through Adam and Eve, our bodies began to die, but spiritually we died right away. And so, we die as we die. The Ephesians passage makes it clear; we were dead in our sin and trespasses. The trouble with dead people is that, well, that they are dead. Physically dead people aren’t just restricted from doing what the most healthy and alive people struggle to do, they are restricted from doing anything at all. The dead can do nothing at all. 

The spiritually dead, though physically alive, can do nothing at all about their spiritual deadness. They are unable to restore their connection to God and come spiritually alive again. Dead people are completely unable to restore themselves to life. They need someone who lives to bring them back to life. Prior to coming to faith, a person is spiritually dead to God, and has just as much ability to restore their relationship to God as a corpse has the ability to run a marathon. Our physical bodies, though they are slowly dying, are not yet dead. The problem with that is that the flesh is not dead, and it hungers. Not for brains, like Bub, but for sin. Until a person becomes a believer, they feed their flesh, they remain spiritually dead, and sin expedites their physical deaths. 

I mentioned that the passage we read from Ephesians was written to a church made up of both Jewish people and Gentiles. This is important because the Jewish people are being reminded alongside the Gentiles that they were once dead, once followed the passions of their flesh, once were by nature children of wrath, and that they were saved by grace through faith by God. In the early years, it was difficult for the Jewish Christians to fully accept or welcome the Gentiles into the church. Letters like the one sent to the church of Ephesus was written, among other reasons, to unify the believers by demonstrating the even playing field of all before God. Everyone who is saved is saved by identical means. Their good deeds, their charity, their obedience to commandments, how often or how long they fast, how large their tithe is, their job, their wealth, their possessions, and how often they choose to pray has no bearing whatsoever on their salvation. If anyone is saved, they are saved for the same reason as all the rest who are saved: God’s grace.

 It’s the same today. Every single person has sinned, is spiritually dead, can’t resurrect themselves, and will continue to feed their flesh and expedite their physical deaths. Just as neither the Jewish person nor the Gentile person could not claim to earn their salvation by their works, no Christian today should think that they can earn their salvation by outweighing their sinful deeds with righteous ones. Salvation can only be received as gift from God through faith in Jesus Christ. If any Christian acts superior to another Christian, or displeased when someone they dislike receives salvation, then they have forgotten that their own salvation was a gift from God they could never earn.   

Unlike every other religion, where people work their way up to God, Christianity teaches that God came down to us. Christianity is the up-side down religion. In every other religion, you work way up to God and Heaven. In Christianity, God comes down from His Kingdom, God does the work to save man, and man receives his salvation by faith. Oh yes, the Christian has commandments to follow, but God’s Spirit lives in him and empowers him to do what’s commanded. Christians obey not to gain salvation, but because they have already received it.  

Do you remember that I said that Satan doesn’t need to override our will in order to do as he wishes? Well, listen carefully to what I say next. Sin has thoroughly damaged us and created many access points for Satan to manipulate.

Total Depravity Granting Greater Access to Us

It’s time to discuss a bit of reformed theology to help us understand how the flesh gives Satan greater ability to manipulate us. Total depravity refers to the idea that sin has affected every part of humanity. Our mind, our physical bodies, our desires, our affections, and our spirits. Imagine yourself as a grid on a sheet of paper, with one hundred little white squares. Now imagine sin as an inky blob. When mankind fell into sin, it was as if an inky blob was placed in each of the 100 squares. Those 100 squares aren’t filled with inky blobs, but there isn’t a single square that is free of the inky blob. That’s the concept of total depravity in a nutshell. Now before I get buried beneath hate mail, in saying that mankind has become totally depraved, we are not saying that mankind is unable to do good moral things. All that it means is that sin, like the inky blobs in each of your 100 squares, affects every single part of you. 

Earlier I told you that before we sinned, Satan was limited to trying to steal from us, destroy us, and kill us from the outside, but once we did the door was swung open for him to begin doing the same things but from within us. 

Our sin nature, which from here on I will refer to simply as “the flesh”, predisposes us to sin. The flesh, makes sin attractive to us, and the more we sin, the greater that attraction grows. 

But continually committing sin is like drinking saltwater; our thirst increases with every drink, and in the end we die of dehydration. Physically speaking, death by dehydration takes several days, and the process is ghastly. Your kidneys try to reabsorb water from your urine first, and when that isn’t enough to keep you going, your body will try to draw water from other organs to maintain blood pressure. Your outer appearance wastes away beginning with your eyes, your lips shrivel away completely, your skin blackens and dries out, your tongue shrivels up in your mouth. Finally, in a last ditch attempt to keep you alive, water is drawn from the brain, it shrivels up, and you die.

Spiritually speaking, sin does many of the same things on a much slower pace, but in ways that are largely invisible. Living in continual sin increases our thirst for further and even greater sins just as drinking saltwater increases our thirst. Sin dehydrates us too, drawing away life until there is nothing more, leaving an image of God in us that is broken and shriveled. As we waste away spiritually, our spiritual eyes shrivel, and we can’t see spiritual realities like God’s blessings and the deceptions of Satan. Our vision will become so poor we can only see what is right in front of us, and even then, because we walk in darkness, only dimly. And therefore, we can’t see any of the dangers along our slow march to death.   

Before the fall, mankind was given a garden to tend and work, and the animals were theirs to name, care for, and have dominion over. Mankind freely chose to obey God to do all those things and showed a bit of what God is like to all of Creation without any contrary power at work in or around them. But after the fall of mankind into sin, the corrupting power of sin grew, tarnishing the image and likeness of God within us, darkened our minds, and created a predisposition to disobey God and sin all the more. 

 Our fall from grace didn’t remove the original command from God to fill the Earth and to rule it, but it did impact our ability to be icons of God as well as our ability and desire to rule the Earth as God intended. We were removed from paradise, but still expected to rule in some capacity. Satan however wasn’t content to simply poison us with sin and leave the kingdom of Earth untouched. He now uses “the flesh” to expedite our death, increase our suffering, and to do his bidding.  

Consider Romans 8:5-8, which describes the fallen spiritual state of all people before coming to believe in Jesus:

“Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires… The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.”

The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God and it can’t submit to God’s law. But why? Let’s look at Galatians 5:17-18 from the New Living Translation. I like the way it phrases this unique problem.

“The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions.”

Now, these verses are primarily talking about the conflict between the Spirit of God in a believer, and the fleshly nature we are all born with. If there’s conflict between opposing forces within a person who has the Holy Spirit in them, what do you suppose happens with a person governed by the flesh and doesn’t have the Holy Spirit? Well, if there is no opposing force to the fleshly desires within us, the flesh will win out. Remember that Satan wants us to satisfy our flesh, because those sins will destroy us faster, our sin is disobedience to God, and Satan accepts our obedience to sin as worship. We have to remember that in our fallen state we have a predisposition to sin, that is, when faced between the choice to sin and the choice to do right, we are more attracted to and often make the choice to sin. We just aren’t as free as we once were to reject sin and choice obedience to God.

I often liken this to the difference between a person who has never used drugs or alcohol and a person who has. The one who has never used is more free than the one who has used, to resist the temptation to use drugs or alcohol. The one who has never used has lacks the inner impulse to use the drugs or alcohol, whereas the one who has used has, at the very least, a biological component driving them to use drugs or alcohol again. Both technically could choose not to use, but it will be harder for the one that has used before because they have a predisposition to use, while the one who has never used does not. In a similar way, human beings are now predisposed to sin in a way that they weren’t before the fall. It therefore became much easier for Satan to influence and manipulate us through this predisposition to sin. 

An Easy Sale

    How does Satan use the desires of the flesh to do this? Well, he first understands that our flesh, that is, our sinful nature, makes sin attractive to us. Even without him lifting a finger, we already desire to commit sin, and he uses those desires to serve him. This might not seem like a very great advantage, but it makes it so much easier for him to manipulate us into doing whatever he suggests. Any good salesman knows that one of the hardest parts of getting a potential customer to buy their product is to make them want it or believe they need it. There’s nothing more annoying, to me anyways, than a salesman who tries to aggressively sell me products and services that I have no interest in. But it’s an entirely different story when I already desire to buy what they are offering. Here’s a quick personal story to demonstrate what I’m talking about.

    Even though I loathe sales, I was once a hot tub salesman working out of a factory warehouse. The warehouse was full of various displays of the hot tubs that customers could look at and even climb inside of. 

Part of what made me so successful at that job was the fact that I never had to engage in cold call sales. There was no need to pull people away from whatever they were doing to look at what I was selling. It’s all because the people who came into my warehouse were already interested in purchasing a hot tub, and were either prepared to pay in full on their own or opt to finance their purchase.

The hardest part of my job was already done for me. I didn’t have to make them see the benefit of a hot tub, I didn’t have interrupt their day, and they usually had a good idea of what they were looking for before they even walked in. I was able to be friendly, offer options according to what they were looking for, and the stuff that I could cross sell were actually necessary things for a hot tub such as filters and water treatment chemicals. My manager always used to say that it’s not a question if they will buy a hot tub, it’s a question of if they will buy it from you. They already want what you’re selling.

          It’s a very similar set up for Satan. Well, he isn’t selling hot tubs… but he is trying to sell us on things that we already want. The flesh produces all kinds of sinful desires within us, and Satan merely has to make satisfying those desires available to us. The whole world is his warehouse, and it’s filled with all the things we are already looking for. But, while he’s a good salesman for sin, he isn’t a morally good salesman. 

Like a crooked car salesman, he entices you to buy more than you want. He doesn’t care if you have a car payment you can’t afford, he just wants the sale. He will make it easy for you to make the initial purchase, but he writes in nasty surprises on the contract we sign without even looking. Satan’s number one strategy is to give us everything the flesh wants. He does this because it gives him what he wants. He wants to be in control, and to be worshipped like God is.

    Because Satan craves to be worshipped, and because he hates human beings, he put his cunning to work and devised a plan to thoroughly destroy us as we thank him for it. He wants to be worshipped, but because there is nothing in him to praise, he settles to be worshipped for what deadly gifts he imparts to those that obey him. The totally depraved human heart, now inclined to sin, merely follows the easy roads that the devil has carved out ahead of us, knowing that the end of the road he made leads to an eternal fire that he himself cannot escape. 

Don’t believe me? Jesus spoke of this path in Matthew 7, verse 13 when he said, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.” Along this long road to destruction and death however, Satan uses the totally depraved heart to achieve his ends upon the earth. 

 Safety in Numbers

        The reason so many people are entering by the wide gate that leads to destruction, is because Satan twists our desire to fit in with others against us. If everyone else is satisfying their flesh, we feel safe to do the same. We look around at each other and as long as we aren’t much worse than our neighbors, we wrongly assume that we must be morally good people. But that’s the effect of sin upon our minds. We can’t reason and perceive all of what’s going on in and around us. We don’t see how far we have fallen from the image of God. 

We were once mirrors of God, and as we looked from person to person, we could see the image of God reflected in each one of us. But we became a broken mirror of God, filled with large cracks and many pieces falling out. The image of God became distorted in us, and we could no longer reflect His image. The long-term effect of the erosion of God’s image within us is that the Earth is filled with billions of broken mirrors reflecting their own broken images amongst themselves. Over time we forgot what we are supposed to look like, and when we look around at one another we are comforted because the image that we reflect is much the same as everyone else. This is all according to the design of Satan. If, when we look to the left and right, people who, in our fallen minds, seem to be just as moral as us, or less moral than us, we wrongly conclude that we must be good people. 

But we don’t understand good and bad as God judges it, because we have assured ourselves by our own standards that we are good. In a world of a continually darkening gray, we don’t perceive how dark our inner and outer world has become. With each new generation of people, the memory of what real bright white looks like, becomes ever more lost to us. We acclimate poorly to ever darker conditions, and frequently stumble in the dark, causing yet more cracks and more missing pieces within us. Worse, the human race stopped trying to reflect God’s image, turning our face from His towards one another, hoping to see our own image reflected everywhere.  

Obedience to Sin is Obedience to Satan

The way that Satan has orchestrated things in his stolen kingdom, the way he “rules” it, is to feed the sinful nature in mankind by giving it what it wants. This is very crafty of our enemy.

Why? It creates the delusion of greater freedom, while actually ensnaring us deeper in the trap of sin. God gives orders, and creates boundaries for our good, but sin twists our minds and spiritual eyes to see this as God cruelly denying us harmless good gifts. In this way, Satan sets himself up as one who gives us true freedom and as one who doesn’t deny good gifts. The message that Satan declares to the world is, “you’re not really free unless you can do whatever you want, and I will free you”. He positions himself to be seen as a liberator, a grantor of great gifts, and a bringer of truth and light. 

Satan is happy to give us bad things as well as good, so long as the good would injure them somehow. When God gives us good things, He gives them at times and in ways that He knows we will be able to handle maturely. And as we will see in future episodes about unanswered prayers, when God doesn’t give us the good that we ask for, it is always for a good reason, even if we can’t puzzle out what it might be in this life.

Satan likes to give us the things that our flesh wants, because what we want is to sin, and sin quickens our individual deaths. I want to give you just one example of how this works.  

God might choose to not give the person with an inflated pride and tendency to be verbally abusive the promotion at work that he asks for in prayer, because He can see how that will damage others as well as the man. The man may somehow discover how great his pride is, and the cruel way he speaks to others. Maybe a sermon causes him to reflect upon his own pride and he repents. Or perhaps a worship song or a Scripture during daily reading reveals the cruelty of his tongue, he may likewise repent and his mouth becomes a fount of blessing. If the man learns to reign in his pride, and to bridle his tongue and cool it with compassion, God might then decide to grant him the promotion. If he does all the this and God still doesn’t give him the promotion, the man may trust that God similarly has good reasons that are unknown to the man for not giving him the promotion he asked for.

Satan craves disorder, destruction, and death in all its varieties. He would love to promote such a person. For one, because then he can feed his pride and verbal abusiveness to grow up and become a domineering and physically abusive man to his wife at home, spreading destruction and death there too. 

Satan would also be delighted to see the man’s cruelty expanding into the lives of those that work under that man, spreading misery and chaos on a daily basis. In granting the man what he wanted, Satan opened the door for greater evil to grow in the heart of the man and made a path for sin to carry others into sin, death, and destruction. In giving the man what he wanted, he gained himself someone who is more willingly listen to his voice in the future, because it gave him what he wanted now. And don’t we just love getting what we want now? 

Being willing to do as the enemy wants in order to get what we want now, whatever the cost, this, Satan counts as worship. A man or woman who obeys his voice rather than God’s is in fact, worshipping Satan. God counts obedience as worship, and so does Satan. That’s exactly why Satan told Jesus during his 40 day fast in the desert to obey him and bow down and worship him. But Jesus refused to worship Satan. Jesus understood that Satan wanted obedience as worship unto him, just as God desires obedience as worship to Him.

The Purposes of Satan and of God

The purposes and designs of God, and the purposes and designs of Satan couldn’t be any more different. One is poised to glorify God and bless us in His glorification, and the other is poised to inject deadly poison into every aspect of human life to hasten our death. In this way he gains many people who knowingly or unknowingly participate in Satan’s design to bring death and destruction to the human race in as many ways as possible. They willingly do what he tempts them to do so that death, chaos, and destruction spread throughout the stolen kingdom of man. Satan rules our kingdom by enabling the sinful nature in us to hasten our death and destruction in every possible form.

Let’s look at part of that A.W. Pink quote I gave at the beginning of part one, the previous episode. 

“But Christ does mean, by the words “Thy Kingdom,” to distinguish sharply the Kingdom of God from the kingdom of Satan (Matthew 12:25–28), which is a kingdom of darkness and disorder. Satan’s kingdom is not only opposite in character, but it also stands in belligerent opposition to the Kingdom of God.”

It is this kingdom, the kingdom of Satan, that causes us to petition God to bring His kingdom to Earth. We pray to God, God bring your kingdom to Earth, because the kingdom here is foul, and the ruler works day and night to steal from us, destroy what’s ours, and kill us. 

Everything that I’ve said up to this point, I hope, has shown you the contrast between God’s designs and purposes, and the designs and purposes of Satan. Satan stole our kingdom from us, and in a sense, we surrendered it to him because he gives us what our sinful flesh wants. As we live in the flesh, we can’t rule the kingdom of Earth as God intended us to, and we are blindly led by our enemy into the great pit meant for him and the angels that rebelled. Thank God that He did not leave us to the designs of the enemy, and even more, he made us an instrumental component to seeing God’s kingdom break into the kingdom of darkness and setting us free the kingdom of darkness and setting us free.

Join me next time as we discover our role in God’s kingdom on Earth, and what we are asking God when we pray “Thy Kingdom Come”. Let’s close in prayer.

Father, thank you for directing my words, and I ask that wherever I was unclear, that you teach with clarity. Thank you for bringing us out of a kingdom of darkness and into your Kingdom of light. Jesus you are the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, and I ask that Your Holy Spirit constantly remind us of Your goodness, and how worthy you are to be obeyed. Give us great joy as we obey you, and let sin no longer delight us, nor let us have a taste for it. And if ever we sin, we know we can confess our sins and You will forgive us and at once we can have fellowship with You again. To the honor and praise of Jesus, amen.