May 1, 2023
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Well, there's an early part of my life where I didn't even know the word. Now everybody knows it - cholesterol. You'll see it in about ten commercials tonight. It's one of the most talked about words in our health and fitness vocabulary. Of course, my doctor gave me the alphabet soup...a seminar on LDL, HDL. You know. LDL is your bad cholesterol that clogs your arteries. You want to be low in that. But then there's your good cholesterol. Here we go - good guys and bad guys! Just like the old Westerns. Your good cholesterol is called your HDL; maybe that's happy. I don't know. And you want lots of that HDL. That's the good stuff. Now, my doctor says, "I'm not just concerned when a patient's bad cholesterol is high. I get concerned when you don't have enough good cholesterol."
I'm Ron Hutchcraft, and I want to have A Word With You today about "Stopping the Devil at the Door."
So, we've got our word for today from the Word of God, and it's ultimately a battle plan for stepping on Satan. Sound like something you'd like to do? Well, then you might be interested in the two-step battle plan outlined in Romans 16:19-20. It's all about getting rid of what's damaging to your spiritual health and loading up on what builds up your spiritual health. Here's what God says: "Be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet." Stay away from the bad elements in your system. Be innocent about what's evil and get a lot of what's good. Just like your physical wellbeing, your health depends on your diet - your mental and spiritual diet in this case.
So what are you filling up on? You do have to keep junk out of your heart or it's going to clog your heart. It will bring about spiritual heart trouble. The input you allow in creates the ideas you think about; and your ideas become your attitudes and your actions. So that means you've got to consciously and aggressively turn off the constant bombardment of impure ideas that are all around us. The videos, the movies, the Internet sites, the soap opera immorality, the music that makes you all too wise about what's evil. You've got to protect, you've got to restore your innocence. You can't afford even casual contact with the dark stuff.
But just like cholesterol, you can't just be against the bad input. You need to be making a conscious, daily effort to load up on God's ideas and attitudes. Jesus said if you clean out one evil spirit and you just leave an empty space there, seven spirits worse will come back and fill that space. So, you have to fill the space in your thinking and your emotions that the dark stuff was occupying.
For me, that means not just reading old news magazines but reading Christian magazines and books, making every effort to listen to Christian music and radio, and going to Christian websites. To make the last thing I read at night something about my Lord; to put the priority on reading things that have some eternal value. Be wise about what's good, and that means weaning yourself from a diet of mostly secular stuff to more things with spiritual value, with Christ at the center; using your wandering mind times to memorize or review some Scripture. As you start to load up on what's good, you start to become a more positive person, joyful, you become cleaner, you become lighter on the inside.
Does that mean you never read or listen to anything that isn't Christian? No, but you give the priority, the majority of space in your mind to God's ideas and God's way of thinking. Crushing Satan under your feet; that's a war on two fronts. You have to be against what's bad getting into your system, but that isn't enough. You have to take daily opportunities to become smarter about what's innocent. Cut the damaging stuff out of your heart-diet and go heavy on the healthy stuff!