When the Enemy Isn’t the Main Character

“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” is one of those scriptures that’s been preached so often that I think many of us have become so familiar with the words, without really taking in what they actually mean for our lives. We hear it and quote it, but the principle behind it is so much deeper than simply thinking positively or trying to change your attitude. The renewal of our mind is about allowing the Word of God to confront, uproot and replace every belief system we carried into salvation that doesn’t agree with who God is, who we are in Him and the life He’s made available to us. Before salvation, there are a lot of things we absorb about ourselves, life, relationships, money, suffering and even God, often without realising how deeply they’ve settled into us. Some people have grown up believing that life is always hard, that good things don’t happen to good people, that they have to hustle for everything, that people can’t be trusted, that disappointment is inevitable, that they’re always one step away from things falling apart, or that they have to stay on guard because something is always waiting to go wrong. Some carry poverty mindsets, rejection mindsets, fear mindsets, survival mindsets and victim mindsets, and because those things can feel so normal to us, we don’t always recognise them as beliefs that need to be renewed.

Then we get saved. We pray, fast, serve, go to church, join ministries, attend conferences, listen to sermons, learn the language of Christianity and we try our best to do all the things we’ve been taught a believer should do. But sometimes, underneath all of that, the way we see ourselves and the world hasn’t actually changed. We’ve received salvation, but we’ve not allowed the Word of God to renew the lies, fears, assumptions and internal narratives that have governed us for years. What I’m learning is that you can genuinely be saved and still live far beneath the life God has made available to you if your mind remains unrenewed. You can know that God loves you, yet still constantly expect rejection. You can know that you’re free in Christ, and still live as though you’re at the mercy of everything happening around you. You can know God is able, and still approach every difficult situation expecting the worst because somewhere inside you’ve already decided that life happens to you, and that you are powerless whenever circumstances don’t go your way.

I started to really think about this when I began paying attention to the kind of Christian life I was experiencing around me and, if I’m honest, the kind of Christianity I had adopted in some areas too. Growing up around African church culture, especially within some West African church spaces, I’ve seen so much that is beautiful and deeply valuable. I’m grateful for the reverence for God, the seriousness around prayer and fasting, the hunger for the Word, the expectation that God can move and the refusal to make faith something casual. There’s so much in those spaces that has genuinely shaped me for the better. At the same time, I’ve also noticed that in some of those spaces, spiritual warfare can become so central to the Christian experience that the enemy starts taking up more room in our theology than Jesus does. We can become very good at identifying witchcraft, ancestral altars, generational curses, monitoring spirits, evil arrows, delay, sabotage and spiritual attacks, but not always as confident when it comes to explaining the finished work of the cross, the authority we have in Christ, what it means to abide in Him, or how deeply secure and loved we already are because of Jesus.

Sometimes we spend more time learning the supposed strategies of darkness than we do learning the heart of Christ. We can become so focused on binding, rebuking, casting down and fighting that we forget how to simply sit with Jesus, enjoy Him, trust Him and allow Him to renew our minds about who He is. We’re constantly looking for what the enemy is doing, who he may be using, where he may be hiding and what he may be planning, but I don’t think we reflect enough to ask whether we’ve accidentally made him much bigger in our minds than Scripture ever intended him to be. Now, I’m not saying spiritual warfare isn’t real, because Scripture clearly tells us that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, that we should stand firm, resist the devil and fight the good fight of faith. I believe the enemy tempts, accuses, distracts, lies and exploits and I believe that there is spiritual opposition, so I’m not trying to water that down or pretend that evil doesn’t exist. But I’m also not convinced that spiritual warfare was ever meant to become the centre of our Christianity, or that every difficult thing we experience should automatically be interpreted as evidence that the enemy is attacking us.

This may be unpopular, and maybe even a little controversial, but this is my little space on the internet, so I’m going to say it anyway. I genuinely think that some of what we call spiritual warfare is actually a victim mindset that hasn’t yet been renewed.

Think about the language the average African (sorry) Christian uses . When a woman isn’t married by thirty it immediately becomes “the spirit of delay.” There’s conflict at work and suddenly the enemy is attacking your job. Money is tight, your child is struggling, your relationship is difficult, somebody misunderstands you, your plans change, you get rejected from something you really wanted, and before we’ve even had a chance to pray, reflect, take responsibility where necessary or ask God what He may be teaching us, we’ve decided that the enemy is attacking. Again, I’m not saying he can’t oppose or exploit, but I do think we need to slow down and ask ourselves why we’re so quick to give so much credit to an enemy that Scripture says has already been defeated.

Defeated doesn’t mean inactive, but it does mean he’s not sovereign. He doesn’t have ultimate authority over the life of a believer. He doesn’t have God-given power to control, dominate or determine the outcome of our lives. What he can do though, is exploit ignorance, fear, trauma, insecurity, offence, unbelief, a lack of identity and an unrenewed mind. He can whisper into the places where we still don’t know who we are, and he can use those areas to keep us living beneath the freedom that Jesus has already made available to us. That’s why the Scripture in Hosea about God’s people perishing for lack of knowledge is so weighty to me, because it’s not saying that God has left us powerless or that the enemy is simply too strong. It’s showing us that there’s a danger in not knowing who God is, what Jesus has done, who we are in Christ and where ultimate authority actually sits.

The story of Job is one that I keep coming back to when I think about this. Within what felt like a matter of moments, Job lost his wealth, his livelihood, his children, his health and almost every visible thing that made his life feel secure and comfortable. Then, as if the grief wasn’t enough, his wife looked at him in the middle of all of that madness and told him to curse God and die. Now, this is where perspective and mindset matter so much, because one person can read Job’s story and say, “Job was spiritually attacked by the enemy,” while someone else can read that exact same story and say, “Job was tested through suffering.” And before anyone says that two things can be true, I agree, they can. But what I’m trying to highlight is that the perspective you take, matters. The enemy was involved - yes, but God was still sovereign. The difference is that the mindset you carry will shape the conclusion you take from what happened.

When we only say, “Job was attacked,” it can very quickly position the enemy as though he was in control of Job’s life, when he wasn’t. He was never in control. In the story of Job, Satan was involved, but he was a tool, not the author. That’s the part I think we can easily overlook. Satan didn’t just wake up one morning, decide he wanted to destroy Job and then carry out his own independent plan while God stood back and watched it happen. He had to present himself before God. There were limits around what he could and couldn’t do. God set the boundaries, not Satan. The enemy could only move within the parameters that God allowed. So yeah, the enemy’s intention was evil; he wanted Job to curse God, he wanted Job’s suffering to break his faith and he wanted to prove that Job only loved God because of what God had given him. But the enemy’s intention was never the final interpretation of Job’s story, because even within that pain, God remained sovereign. The enemy wasn’t an equal opponent to God, he had to ask for permission because even he knew who held all authority, and I think that’s where our perspective has to change.

The same principle is there in Joseph’s story when he said to his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” in Genesis 50:20. Joseph wasn’t pretending that what happened to him was okay. His brothers betrayed him, they sold him, he was falsely accused, and he was imprisoned. There was nothing good about those things in themselves, and I don’t think faith requires us to pretend that evil is good or that pain doesn’t hurt. But Joseph had enough of a renewed mind to see beyond the evil intention of the people involved and recognise the sovereignty of God over the whole story. He was able to look back and see that what was intended to destroy him had actually positioned him for purpose, because God had been working in places that Joseph couldn’t understand while he was living through them.

This season has taught me on a experiential level that a mind set on the victory we have in Christ will endure differently, not because it never feels pain or disappointment, but because it knows that whatever happens, God still has the final say. It knows that even when something is unfair, confusing, painful or completely outside of what we would’ve chosen, God is still able to work it together for good. It doesn’t need to call evil good. It doesn’t have to minimise trauma, grief, loss, rejection or heartbreak. But it refuses to believe that evil gets the final word over the life of someone who belongs to God. A victim mindset can become so focused on the evil of the enemy that it forgets the sovereignty of God. It sees the attack, but not the assignment. It sees what was lost, but not what God may be producing. It sees what happened to them, but not what God is able to do through it, in it and on the other side of it. The circumstances may be exactly the same, but the lens you look through will determine how you carry them.

One person looks at a difficult situation and thinks, “The enemy is trying to destroy me.” Another person looks at that same situation and says, “This hurts, I don’t understand it, I don’t like it and I wouldn’t have chosen it, but the enemy isn’t the author or the finisher of my story. God is still sovereign, God is still with me, and whatever was intended for evil won’t be wasted in His hands.” That said, I personally don’ think a renewed mind means that we should suddenly enjoy suffering or become emotionally detached when things hurt. To me it means that you learn how to hold pain and faith in the same hand. You’re honest about what’s happened, but refuse to let it become bigger than God in your mind. I believe we can cry, grieve, ask questions, feel the weight of what’s happened, while still maintaining a confidence that God hasn’t lost control of your story.

James tells us to consider it joy whenever we face trials of many kinds, because we know that the testing of our faith produces perseverance, and perseverance has to finish its work so that we may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. I don’t think James is telling us to pretend trials are enjoyable or to force ourselves to smile through things that have genuinely broken our hearts. I think he’s reminding us that trials are never empty in the hands of God. Sometimes the very thing we would never have chosen becomes the thing that develops our endurance, exposes the areas of our hearts that still need healing, teaches us how to trust God beyond what we can see, and brings us into a depth with Him that comfort alone could never have produced. I’ve learned (the hard way) that there are things we learn about God in the valley that we couldn’t have learned from the mountain top, not because God enjoys seeing us suffer, but because He is intentional enough to meet us there and refuse to waste what the enemy hoped would break us.

Additionally, this season has genuinely shown me just how meticulous the Lord is. I’ve come into an emperical understanding that there’s a purpose behind everything He allows, even when I can’t immediately see it, even when it doesn’t make sense, even when I would’ve chosen a completely different route for myself. There may be things I don’t understand until I see Him face to face, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that nothing surrendered to God is ever meaningless.

At the beginning of this year, I made a very conscious decision not to give the concept of spiritual warfare the same level of energy I’d been taught to give it culturally. I didn’t make that decision because I stopped believing that darkness and evil exist, and I didn’t make it because I stopped caring about spiritual things. I made it because I wanted to test something for myself. I wanted to know whether the quality of my Christian experience would be different if I stopped centring every difficult thing around what the enemy might be doing and instead focused on enjoying Jesus, enjoying my life, and walking in the dominion that God has already given me. We’re only seven months into the year, but I can honestly say that I really like it over this side. That doesn’t mean everything has gone the way I wanted or expected it to and it doesn’t mean there haven’t been tests, trials, discomfort, disappointment or moments where I’ve had to choose what I believe over what I can see. There definitely have been. But what has changed is that I don’t stay stuck in those moments in the same way, because I’m not immediately asking what the enemy is trying to do to me. I’ve become quicker to ask God what He may be teaching me, what He may be protecting me from, what He may be producing in me, and how He wants me to respond. I’ve learned to look for the lesson and the blessing in every difficult situation without pretending that the process is always easy and I’ve realised how intentional I must be about constantly reminding myself that all things work together for my good, not because all things are good, but because the One who holds my life is good.

And maybe that’s a question we all have to sit with at some point: is this really warfare, or is this an invitation to renew the way I see God, myself and my life?

Love & Grace,

P xx