Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Truth about Lies

By now, you can see the real power of the lies of the enemy. Lies are his greatest weapon. The degree of control he exercises over us is proportional to the lies we believe. The more lies we believe, the more the enemy will control and enslave and destroy us. The lies can come from anywhere: the attitudes and beliefs of society, what coworkers and friends say, our parents, even our own minds. Satan uses them all to try to defeat us. The solution is to know the truth about God and us, found in Scripture. A lie had enslaved John, a good father who loved the Lord. He was serving on the pastoral staff of a growing church. The Lord had blessed him with a wonderful wife, great children, and much fruit in his ministry. John's major problem was his weight. He had been grossly overweight since his preteen years. Many times he had joined various weight-loss plans and several times lost close to one hundred pounds. Within a short time after coming off a diet, though, he had always packed the weight back on. The strange thing was that John exercised tremendous discipline in all other areas of life. He maintained a rigorous spiritual life. He led in his ministry most effectively. His wife and children were happy and committed to their lives together. So why couldn't John control his eating habits? In counseling I asked the Lord to bring to John's conscious mind what lie the enemy was using to drive John to eat so out of control. The Spirit of God illumined John's mind and as we talked and prayed together, he recalled a traumatic event and saw quickly its relationship to his eating problem. "I was molested sexually by a teenage boy my parents kept for foster care. He would put a knife to my throat and molest me. Then he would threaten to kill me if I ever told anyone. This went on from the time I was six years old until I turned eight. At that time the foster boy turned eighteen and left our home." It's astonishing to me how many lies Satan fixes in the minds of Christian people. They often stem from abuse: physical, emotional, and spiritual. But what was the lie Satan used on John? He believed that when he lost weight he would become sexually vulnerable to men. Homosexuals would select him as a "closet gay" and do the same unspeakable acts to him that his foster boy had done years before. This overeating became his way to protect himself from future male sexual advances. this might strike you as strange-why would he think that?-but that's the power of a lie like this. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you! As the Lord revealed that this lie lay behind John's overeating, he gained new freedom over food. He told me, "The next morning I began to eat my 'normal size' breakfast. I was only able to finish half of it. The powerful desire to overeat was gone." Today, he continues to control the problem, and he has not experienced advances from gay men. Dr. Ken Copley is available for counseling, conferences, and local church meetings.

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