Power And Authority

Wow! Even angels were created to help us do what God has called us to do. Adam and eve foolishly disobeyed God and they sinned or did what he told them not to do. They did not protect what God had given them. They gave their position of dominion to the devil through their disobedience. For example, if I gave one of my children keys to the house, they could go give them to somebody else if they wanted to because once i give them to them, they’re their keys. Now I would hope they wouldn’t do that, but they could do that. So, when God gave Adam and eve authority, he certainly didn’t want them to go give it to the devil. But in order to be created free, which you have to be if you’re created in God’s image, you have to have the right of free choice. They were able to choose what they would do. They took the authority that God gave them and turned it over to the devil. Now let’s go to Luke, chapter 4.  You know the devil is real; he’s not just a halloween character. You do know that, right? How many of you have figured out that you’ve got an enemy? Alright. See, I didn’t know that for a long time.  I went to church for a lot of years and I never even heard a message about the devil being real.  I never heard anything about me having any power.  I knew God had power but i never heard anything about me having any of it or that I could do anything about any of my circumstances or that I could come against the devil. I never heard stuff like that. And we need to hear that. Luke, chapter 4, verse 1. I talked about this a little bit last night but now this morning we want to actually go to it and look at it.

First I want us to look at verse 6: and he — being the devil — said to him — being Jesus — to you I will give all this power and authority and their glory (all their magnificence, excellence, preeminence, dignity, and grace), for it has been turned over to me, and I give it to whomever I will. So we see right there that the devil is admitting that he now had power, he now had authority because it had been turned over to him.  God didn’t give it to him; God gave it to man and man gave it to the devil.  And we can still give our authority to the devil today simply by opening doors for him through disobedience, or even by just not knowing who we are in Christ or knowing that we do need to come against the enemy, or that we even have the right to come against the enemy, and we can just live passive, wishful lives rather than being active and aggressive and keeping the devil where he belongs which is under our feet. Now in telling you that you have authority over the devil, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m telling you that you can live this life where you never have a trial or a tribulation. I think more than anything when the bible says resist the devil it means resist acting like the devil. The thing that I find to be such a problem and it was a big problem in my own life, I was busy trying to resist the devil but I really wasn’t resisting the devil — I was resisting circumstances. I didn’t want circumstances that were uncomfortable. When I would get a bad circumstance, I would resist the circumstance and act like the devil, and what I needed to do was resist the devil.