Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 5:8-9
Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter
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Sermon Series: Spiritual Exiles
Message: Battling Our Enemy
Airdate: 11/10/2026
Program: 2397
Battling Our Enemy: Part A
Last week, we were ushered into a reality that all too often we do not think about, and that is the reality that we have an enemy. As Christians, we have an enemy, and this is an ancient and a powerful enemy. He is an enemy that hates us with a malice more intense than any human hate can be. He never sleeps. He is incredibly powerful. He has us under a constant surveillance. He is second only to God in this world in terms of power and authority. He has a huge and powerful army. And I believe that he or one of his associates is lurking right here in this room right now. If we had eyes to see this spiritual world, we would suddenly become very serious about what it means to be a follower of Jesus, to be a child of light, and to engage this enemy.
He is called also Apollyon in the Bible, dragon, Beelzebub, serpent, ruler of this world, tempter, slanderer, antichrist, power of darkness, and the devil. His ancient name was Lucifer, but now his name is Satan. And as we learned last week, from 1 Peter 5, Satan is a created angel. He has not always existed. He was created somewhere between Genesis 1 and Genesis 3. He was given incredible beauty and authority, more than any other angel. He was glorious. He was beautiful. The only glory that was higher than his glory was the glory reserved for God Himself. Ezekiel and Isaiah, the two prophets, describe how this glorious being looked up to the glory that is God’s and aspired to it. Pride in his beauty and authority filled his heart, and he was not content with his standing as God had designed him, and he aspired to the status reserved for God alone.
And if you take one passage in Revelation this way, a third of the angelic hosts followed Satan in his rebellion, and God judged Satan by casting him out of heaven and sending him into this world. We live in his house. He is the god of this world. He is the prince of this world. He offered Jesus the kingdoms of this world in the temptation, and Jesus did not deny that he had the right to do so. All unredeemed humanity belonged to him, and death is his ultimate weapon, and his goal in this world is to defame the name of God and to take as many people as he possibly can with him to hell forever.
And I think this should lead us to ask the question as Christians, A, do I think about this nearly as much as I should? Satan is thinking about this every second of the day. He is not ignorant of what his goals are in this world. But as a Christian, do we realize the stakes? And what is really going on in the world and in society, the values, the doctrines of demons, as Paul writes, the ebb and flow of society, who is directing that and what lies behind that, and how we are pawns in a sense in a much grander battle. I think most of us just try to make it through the day. And for most of us to think about, “Man, I just got to make it through the day, and then also do battle with the sworn enemy of God?” That’s an overwhelming thought, isn’t it? Like, “I can’t just, you know, pay my bills, much less battle Satan.”
And yet the testimony of Scripture and the words in Peter, we’re doing a series in 1 Peter, by the way, exhort us as Christians to realize the battle that we’re in and to realize that God has not left us powerless in this battle. He has not left us weaponless in this battle. But we need to make sure that we’re fighting the battle rightly and in the power that alone comes from God by His Spirit through the victory of Jesus on the cross. Amen. Therein lies our great hope. As we ended last week, He is a conquered enemy. Satan has already been defeated in the sense that the cross dealt him a fatal blow, and prophecy dictates where his eternity will be. But we live in this time between the actual defeat and the final culmination of it.
A book I read, I’m going to recommend in a little bit, on this, great illustration of this. It’s like, when does lightning strike? When you see it or when you hear it? And there’s always this gap, unless it hit your backyard, there’s always this gap between the lightning itself and the thunder. And we live in the time between the lightning of the cross and the thunder of final judgment. I like that illustration.
So with that said, this message is about how we do the battle. I told you last week that that’s what we’re going to talk about today. How do we fight against this ancient foe and do so in victory? So let me read what Peter has to say about this, but I’m going to, in this message, kind of broadly speak from the New Testament about spiritual warfare. But let’s begin with Peter. This is our text. I begin in 1 Peter 5, verse 8. Peter writes this. “Be sober-minded. Be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.”
We’ve talked about Satan last week. This week, Peter gives four exhortations in his little theology of spiritual battle. And you’ll notice that he says that we’re to do four things, to be sober-minded, to be watchful, to resist him, and to know that others are suffering as well. Now, the last one quickly I’m just going to mention briefly is the encouragement to know that we’re not alone in the battle. A really discouraged soldier in a battle is somebody that thinks he’s the only soldier on the battlefield, the only one that’s suffering. And Peter says, your brothers and sisters are suffering all over the world. And certainly that is true to this day, right? All over this world, every single Christian is in this battle, suffering troubles and trials of various kinds. We ought to be encouraged with the fact that even in this room, we look around, that person next to you, three rows behind you, the dude standing up front, we’re all in this same battle. We are in it together. And that is intended to encourage us. The other three fit more clearly in the New Testament’s teaching on how to do battle with the enemy. And so I want to focus on these three.
First of all, he says, be sober-minded. Be sober-minded. That is the Greek word. It’s the opposite of intoxicated. So if you think of somebody who has had too much alcohol to drink, their sensory abilities have been compromised, right? They are unable to process. They’re unaware of everything going on around them. The word means to be clear-headed. If you’re going to fight Satan, you better be clear-headed about it. Why? Well, this is why. Because he is so crafty. He is so cunning. He is so devious. He is so intelligent. He is so powerful that the only way that we have a hope of having any victory in the spiritual battle is to be serious about it. To be serious about it.
It’s kind of like these videos you’ve seen, and there’s lots of examples of this, circus videos and all of that. I saw recently a bullfight from Spain or somewhere where the stadium is filled with people, and they’re all drinking and carrying on frivolity and laughing about all of that, you know, the bulls and the bullfighters. And all of a sudden, one of the bulls jumps over the wall and right into the crowd. Everybody got very sober-minded in that moment. Everyone’s running, and, you know, they’re screaming and trying to get away. They got very serious about the bull.
And I think it’s a picture of how often in churches. You know, it’s easy to be sort of the crowd. And to think I’m, you know, even maybe right now, here you are and you’re sort of, you know, watching the thing going on here, and you don’t necessarily see any danger in what I’m talking about here until all of a sudden you realize that the lion is loose amongst the crowd. The bull is loose right here in the rows of this room and in your homes and in your marriages and in your... your children. And all of a sudden you get really serious when you realize there is a danger, and it is a real danger. It is an invisible one in the sense that he... he lives in the spiritual world, but his entire goal is to ruin your spiritual life. And when Christians see it that way, they get very serious about their spiritual walk. They get very serious about their spiritual disciplines. They get very serious about the stakes that are at play because Satan, Peter says, wants to devour you.
Too often I think we live like there is no danger. We’re lighthearted. There’s a certain kind of Christian, I think, that is that way, unfortunately. They’re just lighthearted about it. It’s a part of their life, yes, but “Let’s not get too serious about this stuff,” right? To parent your children like there’s no danger. To lead your home or family like there’s no real danger. To live close to worldly values like there’s no real danger in that. I think it’s like that line, famous line of the Joker, “Why so serious?” And the lighthearted Joker Christian type looks at the person who’s really serious about stuff with their Christian life, and they think, “You’re just like... you’re like overboard here.” And the reason that we need to be sober-minded is because Satan is sober-minded. He is serious, more serious than any of us begin to imagine, about what he is trying to do to destroy us. And the only way that we’re going to win in this battle is if we have a grim determination to win it.
So let me give you some practical tips on being sober-minded. Here’s one. Sober-mindedness avoids two extremes when it comes to this battle. On the one side, there is the obsessing over it, okay? And maybe you’ve talked to people like this. There’s a demon behind every bush. Every hangnail is a demon causing it. You know, “My car didn’t start today. There was a demon in the battery,” and la, la, la. That is not a biblical theology on the way that the enemy... I wish all he did was mess with our batteries. Wouldn’t that be great? I wish it was that easy. So that’s the one extreme. On the other extreme, you have the people that are just ignorant of it and have no thought about the enemy and the fight and the battle and what’s really going on here. So don’t do either one of those. The middle of the road is to be sober-minded. Sober-minded.
I would encourage you, because Jesus encourages us, to have a daily prayer about the spiritual battle. If you think about the Lord’s Prayer, He synthesizes prayer down to the essence of it, and part of that prayer is lead us not into temptation but deliver us from what? Evil. Some translations go “the evil one.” Jesus inserts the spiritual battle into His model prayer. I take from that that we ought to, on a daily basis if we can, bring to mind in our prayer that there is an enemy. And in that prayer to ask God for deliverance.
I also would encourage you, if you want to be sober-minded, avoid hanging out with people that are not. The lighthearted Christian that I mentioned earlier, they just sort of flit and flither around, and they want to be around Christian things, but they don’t take it very seriously. If that’s your friend group, guess what? You’re going to be exactly like that. If you find yourself in one of our small groups, A, report them to our small group director. Secondly, get a different small group. We need people in our life that take the battle seriously. Now, we don’t take ourselves seriously. That’s being boorish. We just all walk around sober-minded... that’s not what we’re talking about. But we need to have people in our life who are also serious, that are in the battle, that understand the stakes. Build friendships with people like that. Their iron can sharpen your iron in this way. So first of all, Peter says, you’ve got to be sober. You’ve got to be serious about it.
Second thing he says is that we need to be watchful. What is the most dangerous lion? It is the one you can’t see. And lions are really good at prowling and sneaking up on you. That’s their whole thing. They sneak up on you. If you’re going to battle a lion, you’ve got to be on the lookout for the lion. You’ve got to be watchful for that lion. I think what Peter is exhorting here is that we need to actually see the world through this spiritual lens and to avoid the kind of atheistic, naturalistic, secular perspective on reality that says the only world that matters is the one that I can see, touch, and feel. The Bible says there is this world and there is another world. There is the spiritual world, which is as real as this world. But if we live like this is the only thing that matters, if we live materialistically, we will not have in our mind any fear or concern about somebody from the other world trying to destroy me.
So the first thing we’ve got to do is to see reality biblically. To see the world the way Jesus did. And again, you look at the life of Jesus, all the time He’s in confrontation with Satan and with demons. He didn’t just see the world materialistically. He saw another world. The world He came from and the world that He is in right now. So can I just ask you, seriously, do you think you’re in a spiritual battle? Like, is that part of your core beliefs? I’ll let you think about that.
Satan is a master of disguises. If only Satan arrived on our doorstep going, “Trick or treat,” we’d be like, “Got you. I know exactly who you are.” We get how disguises work. The Bible says that Satan is a master of disguises. He doesn’t come the way that you expect him to come. So if you leave here going, “We’re gonna really be on the lookout for Satan,” and you’re looking for the caricature of the horns and the pitchfork and all of that, you’re never going to see him. In fact, I think we rarely see Satan. But boy, can you smell him. Satan stinks. You can smell him. It’s hard to see him because he’s such a master of disguise, but you can smell him.
What do you smell when a church goes through a devastating split? What do you sort of smell about that? What do you smell when a brother or sister suddenly falls into some devastating sin? What do you smell in your own life when you feel that inner conflict between right and wrong, and your conscience is engaged and you’re struggling in some sort of way? Can you smell anything going on? You may not see the lion, but you can smell him. And I just wonder who here today is not really paying attention as I talk, and a year from now you’re in the devastating sin, and what we’re talking about right now could save your spiritual life.
I’m just going to add quickly another one here. We have to realize that the world that we’re living in is not a fatality. The causalities behind what is happening are not merely what you apparently see, that the enemy is actively shaping our culture and our society in directions that in his devious plans he intends to lead increasingly away from the glorious purposes that God has, even for, in common grace, human society. So what do you smell when you see something that God designed as glorious, like marriage, for example? What do you smell when you see marriage, as God intended it, being shaped in a way that doesn’t glorify God’s purpose for marriage? Like, what’s really going on there?
Take gender. Gender identity. You look in Genesis 1, God made us in His image. “Male and female, He created them.” Gender, by God’s design, is part of our imaging of God. God knows that. Satan knows that. What do you smell, what do you see really going on as gender identity is taken away from biological plumbing? What’s behind that? Should we be surprised? Pick anything that God... you go back to Genesis 1 and 2, anything that God put into this world to be a reflective glory of Himself, Satan is going to want to diminish it and twist it and corrupt it. Remember, he is a parasite. Satan has never painted a pretty picture in his entire life. He can’t make anything beautiful. He was beautiful at one time. Now he is twisted and perverted and corrupted, and he is a parasite on the good things that God has done, no matter where it is. And you could just predict where he is going to put his twisting, perverting finger. What’s behind that?
I think being watchful as a Christian means that we see what is really going on in our world around us and within our church and within the sort of the doctrinal world around us and all of these things that are all the time in flux, but constantly. You look at human society, you look at human history, you look at Greece, you look at Rome, you look at Western civilization, the United States of America, it always follows the same pattern. It is Satan and Eve in the garden. It is order to disorder. And Rome was corrupted from within, and it fell, and Western civilization is being corrupted from within, and guess what’s going to happen? History 101, you just see the same patterns at work. It’s like Satan doesn’t come up with any good ideas. He’s like, “Man, let’s just go...” It’s like the football team. It’s, you know, power plunge right. It works every time. He just keeps going and going at that play that works. And we just see the same patterns over and over again. We have to smell him out. We have to be watchful.
And the third thing that Peter says here is that we need to resist him. And I want to spend the rest of time on this one. Because if there is anything that the New Testament calls us to repeatedly when it comes to how we do battle with the enemy, it is that we are called to resist him. Peter says it this way, “Resist him, firm in your faith.” James says, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” And those are great admonitions there, but I feel a little bit, just looking at those, like the boy who has the bully at school, and dad goes, “You stand up to him,” and the boy walks away going, “But I don’t know what does that mean,” you know? And the dad’s like, “Okay, you know, whatever he’s saying...” I’m not encouraging that behavior, by the way. But it’s one thing to say you need to stand up. It’s another thing to actually be equipped to do so.
So how do we resist the devil? Satan has strategies that he uses against us. Here’s 2 Corinthians 2:11. “So that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs.” If you’re on defense in football and you want to compete against an offense, you have got to understand their plays. It’d be great to know their playbook. Imagine if you knew the playbook, man. You could look at the way they’re setting up, and you’re like, “I know what play they’re running here in advance.” And now we can do our defense to counter it.
