Mark 3:20-30
I don’t know how you all feel about being spiritually attacked, but I am a believer in it. If you don’t know or understand what it is, let me try to quickly explain it. Being spiritually attacked is something that happens most often when you are trying to do everything you can for the Kingdom of God and unexplained junk tends to happen. For instance, you begin feeling inadequate, everyone around you begins to criticize you, your past comes before you, all your insecurities surface, etc. Now this is going to sound brash to some degree, but it mainly happens in new believers and effective believers. Why? Because both are a threat to Satan.
But here’s the thing, not all bad things or “flare ups” of skeletons in the closet are spiritual attacks. Truthfully, I would argue if you are a “lukewarm” Christian (Revelation 3:16) then you have nothing to worry about. You are not a threat to Satan because you aren’t doing anything to build up the Kingdom of God. You are more focused on trying to get ahead at work, or whatever.
But let me say this, and hear this very carefully, if you are experiencing spiritual attacks in your life, you aren’t alone. Not only do I believe I was spiritually attacked last week, but here in our text today we see where Jesus is being attacked. I mean, here in Mark 3:20-30 everyone from Jesus’ family to the teachers of the law where trying to rip him apart. His family said He was “out of his mind,” and the teachers said He was “possessed by Beelzebub (the Devil)!”
Can you imagine? Here Jesus is healing the sick, casting out demons, teaching about God, making disciples, and the walls begin to crumble in around Him. His peers and His family turned their back on Him. He was alone in His journey.
I hope you can find comfort in that. I sure do. If nothing else, it lets me see that if I can’t find anyone to understand what it is that I am going through, Jesus knows because He experienced it. He was left alone. He was “spiritually attacked.” But not just Him, look at Jacob, Paul, Abraham and Sarah, David, Solomon, Job, etc; all were “spiritually attacked.” I can’t find one individual in Scripture that is talked about in any detail, that didn’t face an encounter with evil.
Not only did these people encounter evil, but at some point they felt alone. If they were alone, and Jesus was even alone, then I think it is safe to say we will be alone at some point in our journey. But hear this, there is no biblical figure that didn’t go to the wilderness (metaphor for going through a tough time), or find him/herself alone with God before big things happened in their life. To name a few: Daniel was thrown in the Lions den; the children of Israel had to walk through the desert; Moses went to the top of the mountain; Paul found himself in prison.
The truth is we will be alone at times in our life, but even in those times we don’t have to feel alone. Jesus knew that and tried to tell the teachers of the law that when they were jealous and calling Him names, etc. As the teachers were telling Jesus He was possessed, Jesus gave them a major hint in how we should live out our faith. He said, “If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand” (Mark 3:25). In essence, Jesus is saying, listen, being and doing what we were created to do is hard enough, let’s all chip in together so we can achieve the goal.
Paul kind of says the same thing when he talks about persevering in our faith. He tells us to run the race and be thankful for the trials that are ahead because that means we are on the right track. But here’s the thing, all the treadmills at the gym can be full and everybody running on them, but I can get bored and tired after about a mile. However if I go into the gym with a friend and we get on the treadmill together even if he isn’t on the treadmill next to me, I can run a whole lot further. Why? Because I know someone is in this with me; that someone on my “team” is not too far away sweating and running with me.
That’s how living the Christian life should be. We should be sweating and running, but knowing all along we are running with other people. Let’s keep running together.