| tempt the person you
are promoting sin to. If you make a coworker or fellow employee or neighbor
or spouse or offspring or sibling feel they are hopeless, worthless or
no good, you are enabling Satan to test and tempt any faith and trust they
do have in God. But on the other hand, if you are always smiling and encouraging
holiness, purity, righteousness and trust in God, you are enabling the
Holy Spirit in that other person's life.
Now, so far, we have talked about
the negative and the positive enablers. But is there such a thing as someone
who is both a negative and a positive enabler? What about the person
who encourages holiness and righteous living, but is so militantly legalistic
about it that the person or persons he or she is dealing with feel(s) like
they cannot possibly attain the level of holiness and righteous living
required to enter heaven or to see God? Although enabling righteousness
in word, they may actually be enabling Satan to make the person feel defeated
so why try, and they give up, thus actually enabling Satan to bring in
discouragement and sin by an overzealous promotion of holiness. This
is someone whose words and intents would enable righteousness and holiness,
but in fact, much as the Scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' day, by the way
they go about to promote and enable the good, they actually enable and
promote discouragement and despair and ultimately sin and unrighteousness.
Indeed, Saul of Tarsus and Athanatius
of Alexandria, Egypt were both examples of this, but while Saul had a real
conversion experience and became a real enabler of righteousness and truth,
Athanatius promoted his errors until his death, thus enabling well-meaning
zealots to persecute and even kill more real followers of Jesus Christ
than all pagans put together.
So please, my Christian friend,
look at your own life. Are those who see you and know you on a daily basis
favorably impressed with your sincere godly love and compassion for all
and are |
they enabled to feel
encouraged in the Lord, to "Be strong in the Lord and in the Power of His
might," or do they feel that you are so much her than they could ever be
that they needn't even try? Do others see "Christ in you," enabling
"the hope of glory?" Or do you take extreme positions about Television
or Holiness or clothing standards that cause others to avoid you and your
church whenever possible, thus enabling Satan a toehold in their lives?
Or maybe you are a Fundamentalist who takes scriptures out of their intended
context to promote an easy believism plan of salvation that is no plan
of salvation at all, thus enabling Satan to vaccinate all who follow your
doctrine against real conversion and Bible salvation. Maybe you hold orthodoxy
above the Bible and insist upon more than one person of God, who is described
repeatedly from Genesis toRevelation as an Omnipotent, Omniprresent, Omniscient
Holy Spirit who at one point in human history robed Himself in human flesh,
took upon Himself the form of sinful man and became the Lamb of God, "slain
from the foundation of the world," then, when His work on earth was done,
returned to glory to His Father Holy Spirit in a glorified human body.
By this insistence, you enable Satan to cause many to be confused
about who Jesus really is and was and what and why He did it. And worse
still, those who hold to a triple god view go out of their way to wage
war on those who insist upon Biblical Spiritual accuracy to the point of
actual hatred and persecution, while true followers of Jesus Christ do
not hate those who teach the unscriptural "Orthodox" view, but pray for
them and love them with a godly agapé love, trying to enable the
Holy Spirit to show them God's truth.
So again and finally, What Kind
of Enabler are You? Pray about it and think about it and pray about it
some more, then let the Holy Spirit enable you to be a good enabler all
the time.
— S. M. S.
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