6 Ways the Enemy Keeps Us in Pain
Our enemy is terrified of who God created you to be. And for good reason. When one Christian actually steps into the adventure God created him to live, the enemy’s kingdom suffers tremendous losses. Structures of lies that took decades to build come crumbling down in a moment. Whole people groups are set free. The atmosphere of an entire city changes.
The influence of one person living out her calling is felt for generations into the future, destroying the false works of a thousand ungodly pagans or compromised Christians. Seriously. One puts a thousand to flight.
“One of you routs a thousand, because the Lord your God fights for you, just as he promised.” –Joshua 23:10
So the enemy fights with everything he has to keep us from living the adventure God created us for. His primary strategy is trauma or sin against us which is not our fault. (Of course if he can deceive us to sin and inflict trauma on ourselves, that’s a bonus.) Wounding in our lives causes tremendous pain. Pain produces fear, and fear keeps us from living the adventure God created us for. Goal achieved.
He’s an expert at getting us to live in fear because he lives in fear. He’s read the Bible; he knows what’s coming. He’s terrified of his future, and he’s terrified of ours.
He provides false ways to deal with the pain in our lives. They all alleviate the pain (temporarily) without dealing with the underlying wounding. Hence, they all are doomed to fail in the long run.
See if you recognize any of these 6 demonic strategies operating in your own life. Some of them have certainly operated in mine. Often, they operate in combination.
1) Denial
Pain? No, there’s no pain here. Nothing to see, go back to your lives, citizens. It’s amazing how obvious it is when some else is denying an issue in their life, and equally amazing how blinded we can be to our own.
We see this in the church all the time. That thing in my past, no problem there. It’s all under the Blood! Yes, our entire past is covered under the redeeming Blood of Jesus. But being forgiven and being healed are two entirely different things.
We don’t go looking for things in our past, or new hip things to blame our parents for. But consistent bad fruit in our lives comes from somewhere. Too much of American church life is sin management, where we just deal with the obvious bad fruit without getting the root causes.
We too often deal with the symptoms, not the disease. All that does is teach us to get really good at hiding the symptoms while the disease goes merrily on, secretly wreaking havoc in our lives until it explodes.
If our past planted roots in our life that bear bad fruit in the present, then it’s not a past problem at all, is it? It’s a present problem, and we might have to go into the past to heal it.
2) Addictions
Medicating the pain. This is a bonus for the enemy, since many addictions, even when legal, lead to their own nasty consequences. Smoking leads to cancer. Drug and alcohol abuse lead to lying, theft, violence and/or jail time.
Sex addictions lead to broken relationships, exploiting other people as objects, epidemic fatherless in our society, and a deep-rooted self-hatred.
Yet in the moment, the addiction numbs the pain. So we learn to live for the moment, regardless of future consequences. We find ourselves in the bondage of just living for the next hit of our drug of choice.
3) Busy, Busy, Busy!
Fill your days with busyness, doing all the good, safe things. Never take a moment to hear the passionate cry of our heart.
In inner healing we call this Performance Orientation. It’s another form of addiction. It’s hard to identify because it looks so good on the outside. But it’s just a socially acceptable way of medicating pain.
4) Constant Media
Barrage your thoughts with a constant stream of noise, drowning out the whisper of God’s calling. The goal is to avoid any quiet moment when the Holy Spirit might speak to us.
The practice of silence is a lost art in our society. But it’s desperately needed. Please take some time each day to unplug. Even if it’s just 10 minutes.
This practice probably saved my life. When I went through my rebellious time in high school, I filled my days with noise. The Holy Spirit spoke to me in the quiet moments when I’d be getting ready for bed. Fortunately for me, we didn’t have earbuds back then that could keep the distractions flowing dawn to dusk. I heard him in those quiet moments and repented, turning back to him. Otherwise, I probably would not have survived the more difficult times in my adolescence that were to follow.
5) Cause Pain in Others
If I’m creating victims, I must not be one, right? Hurt people hurt people. The enemy gets exponential mileage out of this one. The perpetrator medicates his own pain by inflicting trauma on others.
I am in no way excusing any sin against you. And the perpetrator should go to jail if it was a crime. You deserve justice. But it can help in your healing to reprofile that person, realizing that they were acting out of their own wounding. Forgiveness is not pretending they didn’t do evil to you or letting them off the hook, but coming to the place where they are not the evil they did to you.
6) Control
Often, as a result of trauma or pain in our lives, we make inner vows to control so we won’t get hurt again. The problem is, that never works. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying. We’re deceived into thinking it’s safer that facing the pain. It certainly hurts less.
All of These Strategies Reinforce Shame
Shame is the #1 reason people don’t get healing. Shame makes us feel like we are something wrong. And since we are the thing that’s wrong, we can never be healed. The truth is, we have something wrong, but Jesus can totally heal it. It doesn’t have to be this way forever.
But God
Eventually, because of the pursuit of God’s relentless love, these things stop working. When what used to work in our lives no longer works, that’s a sign God wants to heal something. Although it doesn’t feel graceful because some aspect of our life is falling apart, it’s actually God’s grace to bring us into a season of healing.
So How about You?
Can you relate? Have you experienced these strategies in your life? Tell us in the comments; your story will help others. Or are you experiencing them now and want freedom? Shoot us an email; we’d love to share your journey with you. And please share this post to reach more people.
I can relate to all six of these demonic strategies, but I will comment on three; denial, busyness and addiction combined, and control.
I appreciate the reminder that being forgiven is not the same as being healed. At first, for me, sin management presented as being healed, but now sin management has revealed itself as a temporary bandage over a deep, underlying wound. Early in life, I learned to master and deny my symptoms. I convinced myself that my past had nothing to do with my present and certainly not my future. But as you have so insightfully stated, the truth is…
If our past planted roots in our life that bear bad fruit in the present, then it’s not a past problem at all, is it? It’s a present problem, and we might have to go into the past to heal it.
As an impressionable child, the church taught me about not preferred, but somehow acceptable additions like busyness and overeating. Church acceptance can contribute to these addictions going unidentified, because after all, these endless tasks are things that need to get done. And of course, we need to keep eating to maintain our strength for getting all these endless tasks done.
Identified, these addictions are just socially acceptable ways of medicating pain.
Control can be so subtle. For many years in my life, control went unidentified and masked as being responsible. As a single parent to my teenage children, I saw my controlling behavior as taking care of, and wanting what’s best for my children. In an effort to control my pain, I made an inner vow to not let my love out, and to not let their love in. It hurt less, but it did not work.
I’m undone, now that I have seen and tasted good fruit. Never again will I be a slave to the taste of bad fruit.
Thank you for all you and Janet are doing through this ministry.
I pray you receive back hundredfold 🛐💟✝️
Wow, thank you Janice! Yeah, it’s unbelievable to me that so often we as the church wink at certain addictions while vilifying others. And in reality, the addictions are not the problem anyway, they are just the bad fruit. The real problem is the root in the heart that the addiction is medicating. Thank you so much for your thoughts, Janice! They will help others. And we love hearing from you.
Hi Dave and Janet, This is so true and well put as Jane said! I’m reading “Healing the Child Within” which is also very eye opening! Blessings! Gillian
Thank you so much! Great to hear from you Gillian! I’ve got that book but I haven’t started it yet; it’s next on my reading list though.
“ Wounding in our lives causes tremendous pain. Pain produces fear, and fear keeps us from living the adventure God created us for. Goal achieved.” WOW! I’ve never heard it put so simply and beautifully. Regardless of whether my wounds were self- or other-inflicted, I can trace my pain to the fears that I medicated with alcohol, work and futile attempts to control my situations and others. But God…when I finally knocked myself out with my futile attempts to change…He showered me with grace and I was able to humble myself, accept His forgiveness and seek help. Thank you for this beautiful post.
Thank you Jane! It always makes our day to hear from you.