The Devil Shall Not Prevail. A.W. Tozer (with James L. Snyder) 2023. 160 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: Every battle begins with understanding who the enemy is. If soldiers do not know who the enemy is, how then are they going to be prepared to deal with them? I believe a lot of Christians today do not know their real enemy. The enemy is not in the church pews. Many Christians spend a lot of time in conflict with one another, much to the great delight of our enemy the devil. It's in our understanding of the enemy that we can begin to prepare ourselves for the battle and ongoing conflict that is before us. As Christians, we are engaged in what is called spiritual warfare, and this war cannot be fought with physical or military might, guns, and torpedoes. How we comprehend spiritual warfare says a lot about our relationship with Christ.
Almost all of the A.W. Tozer books being published in the past forty to fifty years are really more compilations of sermons grouped together by theme, subject or topic. The topic in this one is either a) spiritual warfare in general or b) the tactics of the devil our adversary.
The chapter titles:
Facing Our Real Enemy
The Danger of Compromising Our Confidence
Causes of Backsliding, the Devil's Toolbox
Symptoms of Backsliding the Devil Uses
Self-confidence vs. Confidence in God
How We Can Prevent the Devil from Taking Advantage of Us
Discouragement: A Valuable Tool of the Devil Against Christians
The Mistakes of Israel and Possibly Ours
How the Devil Manipulates the Plague of the Heart
The Dangers of Arrogance and Defeat
The Root of Our Spiritual Warfare
The Wall Between Us and the Devil
The Ultimate Spiritual Temptation
Standing Against the Wiles of the Devil
I will say you can tell this is a compilation of different sermons. The flow isn't super-polished; the chapters don't always build upon one another. All of the chapters--many of which have a stand-alone feel--do share a common theme or subject. Some chapters were incredibly helpful and beneficial--true must reads. Other chapters perhaps less so.
A.W. Tozer, I believe, died in 1963. In some ways, his writings turned out to be prophetic. Yet if Tozer was alive and preaching, it would be a whole new world to him. I don't know that the state of the church in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s is similar enough to the state of the church the past twenty or thirty years that his statements still ring true. I will try to clarify. Truth does not change. I believe--and Tozer believed--in absolute truth. The Bible is the VERY Word of God--inerrant, infallible, inspired, God-breathed, TRUE. When Tozer is preaching the Word (which is often, his sermons are saturated in the Word) then he's always going to be relevant and worth reading. I am referring to Tozer's assessment of the world, the culture, the church. Like when he says that the enemy is NOT in the church. I think enemies can be found IN the church--in positions of power and influence, coming from the top down. I think that spiritual warfare includes discerning the dangers within the church as well as those outside the church. Tozer lived at a time perhaps when that was rarer. He saw no reason at all for denominations and saw [almost] all differences between denominations as insignificant and petty. While I do tend to agree that there won't be divisions and denominations in heaven, I do see them as a 'necessary evil' of sorts in the here and now. We are called to discern between truth and error.
Quotes:
You cannot have the armor of God and indulge the flesh.
Confidence in God releases us from the need to understand all that God is doing.
Whatever threat to our spiritual health we choose to ignore, the enemy twists around so as to compromise our confidence in God.
Because of the fall, we have been robbed of the power and desire to do this naturally. Sin remade our nature, thus it's not natural when we go to pray. We must override all the accumulated ages of sin if we are to say with sincerity, "Our Father in heaven." If sin hadn't entered the picture, we wouldn't have anything to override. Rather, we'd simply raise our voices like the songbirds that sing God's praises without effort.People, then, tend to turn away from God, their desire and passion for Him growing cold, and go back to what comes natural to them.
We are backsliding when we have lost the relish for the Bible we once had.We are backsliding when we're more tolerant of evil than we once were, when we don't have the horror of sin that we pray and sing about.We are backsliding when we have less enthusiasm for spiritual things than we used to have.
I doubt that discouragement is the greatest enemy the Christian has, but it can easily be the greatest nuisance a Christian has to deal with. It is valuable to the devil in his war against us because it is seldom recognized for what it is. When Christians become discouraged, common sense tells them they are just begin realistic. We forget that it is not realism but discouragement, and it often works when no other temptation will. A Christian who would not be guilty of any sin willingly, and who has victory enough not to fall into temptation unwillingly, may yet be visited by this infernal dark shadow from the pit, which we call discouragement. And this greatly hinders the Christian life. Discouragement can easily become a ruling emotion. It is more than an emotion; after a while, it becomes a disposition, an outlook, and an attitude. A darkened lens through which we view everything before us. The mood is the mental climate. IT isn't the individual person so much as the weather on the landscape of their life, which has captivated the person. Just as the weather isn't the field or the farm, and yet it goes a long way in determining if the farm will yield a good crop or not.You must go to God completely alone as if He were in the desert or in a cave.
We must respond to God's Word with a "Yes, He means what He says, and I surrender my life to Him."
We need to restore in the Church today that passionate love for God that nothing else can satisfy. If you're satisfied with something else, you haven't met the God of the Bible. The more of God you have, the more of God you want.
If you're not worshiping God in our prayers, we're not praying.
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