42: SOUL-L (Part 1: Sin)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 42. Today we continue our conversation about spiritual warfare basics by looking at five ways we can give the devil a place in our lives.

Hello, Father.

[00:32] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to be back together always.

[00:36] Stephanie: And I just have to say, He is risen!

[00:39] Marcus: He is risen indeed! Yes, this is Easter. It is Holy Week.

[00:44] Stephanie: Yes. We’ve just had our resurrection Sunday, and wow! I love Easter so much, and I feel like the older I get, the more I come to terms with how amazing Easter is as a holiday. I feel like when you live in the culture, and the culture knows to point toward Christmas because, “Yay, Christmas!” Easter kind of gets lost as Easter bunnies and stuff. But Easter is epic. This is the holiday of our faith, man. So happy Easter.

[01:21] Marcus: Yes, indeed. In liturgical churches it’s a little bit bigger deal because you’ve got the whole Lenten season leading up to the breaking of the fast on Easter, and the celebration, and the joining in the banquet, and there are neat overtones there.

[01:37] Stephanie: Yes, it’s so beautiful. Definitely. It’s something that year by year, I’m trying to be more intentional about not letting Easter get lost, because it is truly epic. So, Happy Easter, and it’s good to be with you again.

[01:54] Marcus: It is, although we’re not in person today.

[01:57] Stephanie: Yes, it’s true. It’s good to be with you virtually.

[02:01] Marcus: Yes.

[02:02] Stephanie: Hopefully our Internet stays good. We’ve had storms and things.

[02:07] Marcus: Yeah, they’ve been working on the Internet in our neighborhood. It just came back on about 15 minutes ago. So here we are.

[02:13] Stephanie: Dear Lord, please hold us steady. Well, on that note, we’ve been looking at some spiritual warfare basics. The last couple episodes, we looked at permission and authority. We’ve covered the CCC tool, and now that we understand these basic principles, I thought we could start unpacking your acrostic, SOUL-L ( two Ls there). This is a super helpful tool for thinking through the five ways we tend to invite the devil to have a place in our lives. And I was thinking, we’ve talked before about the analogy of when we’re hiking and we know where the snakes like to hang out. So as we are on the trail of life, this acrostic is a tool for recognizing where demonic snakes like to hide and what to do if we encounter one. So on that note, SOUL-L:  want to walk us through an overview, Father?

[03:10] Marcus: Yeah, so the idea here is, what are the most common doorways that we open to give permission to the enemy in our life? And the first is

Sin that we don’t resolve. You’re like, well, if I don’t resolve sin, what am I doing with it? Well, usually I’m justifying it and not calling it sin. And so either I am trying to hide it, I’m trying to bury it, or I just don’t really think it’s sin. And so I’m kind of arguing with God on that point. That’s the first one.

The second is occult. So that’s the O of SOUL-L. And the occult is really a specific kind of sin. It’s a sin in which we are engaging directly with demons while we sin. So you can imagine if sin opens a door, the occult opens a really big door. That’s the second one.

U is unforgiveness, and that has to do with bitterness. I remember Neil Anderson saying several years ago that he thought bitterness was the primary door that most Christians opened that gave ground to the enemy in their life and created spiritual bondage. That’s our third one.

And then L: lies, we believe. This takes us back to the WLVS: the wounds, lies, vows, strongholds idea, and how, whether it’s based on wounds or not, when we agree with the devil’s lies, it’s like shaking hands with the devil and giving him a place in our life. So that’s SOUL-L, our battle for the soul.

And then we added a Lineage on the end of it, which would be like ancestral or generational issues. Calling it lineage helped keep the acrostic a little more in sync with itself. So that’s SOUL-L that represents five of the most common ways in which Christians give permission to demons in their life.

[04:51] Stephanie: Awesome. We’re going to take a couple episodes and just dig into this acrostic. First, let’s go ahead and talk about sin in this episode. And let’s just start straightforward. When you know you have sinned and given the devil a foothold in your life, how do you handle that? How do you remove the devil’s right to your life?

[05:13] Marcus: When I know I’ve sinned, one of the common mistakes a lot of us make as Christians, is that we sit and beat ourselves up. And sometimes we beat ourselves up for days or weeks until we feel like we have sufficiently punished ourselves for falling into sin. And yet that doesn’t really actually help.

I like Neil Anderson’s illustration of this. He said it’s like if I have a neighbor with a really mean dog, and I’ve got a fence around my backyard, and because of the mean dog, I’m always very careful to keep the gate closed. But one day I’m careless and I open that gate and the dog comes in and bites me on the leg. Does it make any sense to beat myself up and say, “Stupid idiot, why’d you let that dog in here?” And just keep pounding myself on the head? That doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t make any sense. So he would say “Pound on the dog, get this thing out of here, get it off of you, and get it out of the yard and close the gate.”

That’s essentially what we’re talking about. What we need to do when we sin is, as soon as possible we need to Confess. And confession is the idea of agreeing with God about something, and agreeing with God that that was not good. That was not the correct thing to do. And then we Cancel the permission, Command the enemy to leave. And those are the three Cs. The quicker we do those things, the better off we’re going to be.

[06:37] Stephanie: Yeah, it reminds me of Ephesians 4:26, 27. “Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil.” There’s a timetable there, too, to just get this done quickly.

[06:52] Marcus: Right. And that word opportunity, in the version you were reading, the Greek word there is tapas, and it’s a place. In certain military contexts, it’s even used in the idea of a beachhead so I do like that term. Don’t give the devil a beachhead, a foothold, from which to get more territory and more control in your life. So do it quickly. Yes.

[07:15] Stephanie: So if you sin, do you automatically get a demon?

[07:20] Marcus: No. But what you do is you grant permission for demons to come around. It’s a little bit like the radar goes off and they come into the area. So now they’re going to be around and you’re going to have more temptation until that’s resolved. To get a demon, so to speak, you’ve got to really just have to not deal with it. And over time, you give ground to more and more of these things. It gets a little confusing because I don’t know that it’s an inside, outside sort of thing. I don’t know that just any one sin is going to bring a demon inside unless you are summoning it. But it brings them into your satellite and then they begin to orbit around you and you now have to deal with them at some level.

[08:08] Stephanie: Satellite – or like the birds that you’ll use sometimes. So if you renounce the sin and remove the devil’s permission to be in your life, if there are demons flocking around, do they just automatically leave?

[08:23] Marcus:  Sometimes, if they don’t have permission to be there anymore, they just go look for somebody else. But sometimes if they don’t, then if you’re still having some issues, then that’s a time to take the next step and command them to leave. So I would say that a lot of times that does take care of it, especially if I’m in the habit of dealing with it quickly.

But sometimes it’s been there for a while and it’s been an issue that I’ve been dealing with for a while. And they’ve been hanging around for a while. They don’t want to leave. And so I not only have to take care of the permission, but I have to use the authority to command them to get out of there.

I often tell a story of a young lady who was having nightmares. And her issue was that she had slept with her fiance and that had given ground for these nightmares. Well, she had confessed it like a thousand times, but the nightmares hadn’t stopped. So the key there was, well, what is she not doing? Well, one, she was confessing it, and she was even commanding him to leave. But they weren’t leaving because she wasn’t actually forgiving herself.

[09:30] Stephanie: She wasn’t receiving the forgiveness.

[09:31] Marcus: She wasn’t receiving the forgiveness. And that’s something else I think that’s part of this, is that when we confess our sins, we need to, by faith, receive God’s forgiveness. And saying, “I may not feel forgiven right now. I certainly don’t feel like I deserve it. But God, thank you for your forgiveness. I receive it.” And then that can help to remove ground as well.

[09:50] Stephanie: Now, sin can be a charged word. Do you want to talk about maybe what sin is, what it isn’t?

[09:57] Marcus: Sure, let me tackle this a couple different ways. I think there are three main concepts in the scripture related to sin. I heard Jim Wilder, the first one I heard spell this out, and it made a lot of sense when I heard it. And that is, that there is hamartia, the Greek word hamartia, that has the idea of falling short or missing the mark. The idea is that the good thing you ought to do, but you fall short of it. That is hamartia. That is the classic word for sin.

Then there’s the word transgression. And when we transgress something, you can just hear that trans word, where you are crossing a line that you are not supposed to cross.

[10:35] Stephanie: Yeah, that’s the Latin word.

[10:37] Marcus: Yeah, the Latin word there. So transgression is this idea that I am crossing a line that God has said I am not supposed to cross.

And then the third key concept related to sin is iniquity. And iniquity, in Hebrew, the root idea there is deformity. It’s the idea that something has become twisted. It has become deformed. So my character can become twisted over time. A culture can become twisted over time. My thinking can become twisted over time. In fact, this word can even be used for somebody, for instance, who is blind or deaf. And that is that their eyes are not working the way they’re supposed to. Their ears are not working the way that they’re supposed to in the sense that this is a deformity from the way God created things. So in a moral sense then, iniquity is a moral deformity in my character.

So those are the three main concepts of sin. It’s probably also helpful to just go through some of the common types of things that I put under the category of sin just to help think this through a little more at another level.

[11:38] Stephanie: That’d be great.

[11:40] Marcus: So I think, first of all, of idolatry. The number one sin in the Old Testament is idolatry. God’s got the most severe punishments for that. And so we look in our own lives: what do we do that’s idolatrous? Well, one of the things we do is actually worship other gods, which we sometimes forget about. There are a whole lot of people around the world that are literally bowing before statues and praying to them, and that’s idolatry.

But there’s also what we might call idols of the heart that have to be renounced. When the Bible says that greed is idolatry, well, that’s a classic example of an idol of the heart. It’s something that I am asking to save me, and greed is asking money to rescue me because I don’t trust God to do it.

So idolatry is a big one. I remember a friend telling me about meeting with somebody and the core issue they had to resolve was a past girlfriend that he had idolized. He had to actually renounce making an idol out of her before he could get the complete freedom from the bondage he was in. So it can look a lot of different ways, but idolatry is one of the big ones.

If you go back to the very beginning, pride was the original sin, and that led to rebellion. And so in Neil Anderson’s Steps to Freedom, he’s got one step on pride, one step on rebellion. Makes sense that I just bring those all under sin. Neil also has something called habitual sin, which is sins I just keep falling into again and again and again. And then I would add to that compulsive sin. And that is sins I really don’t want to do, but I just seem to have this compulsion to do it.

And so all of these things are things that I’m going to particularly pay attention to as I’m going down the checklist of areas of sin in my life that might need some resolution.

[13:25] Stephanie: That’s really helpful. Thank you. I’m just thinking, there are so many things that people will call sin or think about as sin, or even the Ephesians verse that I read, in your anger, do not sin. And so it doesn’t call anger sin, but it says, in your anger, do not sin. And so, I don’t know, are there some things that people tend to beat themselves up about that maybe they shouldn’t, or that aren’t quite there yet.

[13:56] Marcus: Well, you know, the classic thing here is, I think conceptually, it’s helpful to think about separating guilt and shame. That is, guilt is admitting that I’ve done something wrong. Shame is saying, I am a bad person.

And so what happens is, the enemy likes to take our sin and use it like a wound to plant a seed there that tells us that we’re not worth loving, God couldn’t possibly love us. And it’s that whole thing that we beat ourselves up because we feel so much shame over the fact that we fell again, maybe we fell in the same area again., can’t believe I’m still not getting on the other side of this. And so the enemy will try to add to that sin his lies, which then take it to a whole other level.

Now, in the case of, “in your anger, do not sin,” I like the idea that Jesus got so angry one time with the Pharisees that he healed a man. So it’s that idea where it is possible to feel anger but act like yourself anyway. It’s possible to feel anger but remain relational anyway.

[15:10] Stephanie:  Because anger in itself isn’t a bad thing. Because if something bad is happening, anger is the feeling of wanting it to stop, and so if something bad is happening, then you would be right to feel anger that that thing is happening.

[15:20] Marcus: Exactly, right. On the other hand, now then the other side of that is a passage like Colossians which says, “Rid yourself of all such things as these.” And it says anger, rage and malice. And so what we’re looking at here is, have I become an angry person? Do I have a short fuse? Is my anger bigger than the situation calls for?

Maybe road rage; somebody cuts me off and I want to kill them. There is something over the top there. Part of what we’re looking at is, I want to rid myself of anger, rage, malice. And that is the mental state that is constantly angry and constantly mad.

We can see this. You can do this even in politics, where you have a spirit of anger. When it comes to politics, you can’t even talk about it civilly. You can have this with all kinds of things right in your life. And so on the one hand, you can’t help things that trigger anger. And sometimes anger is good because even God was angry about things, and rightfully so. But what we want to do is be careful that we don’t become angry people. And the way we become angry people is usually that we have added to our anger lies that we believe. And those lies are keeping us just bound and tied to that anger.

There does come a point where I actually have led people in renouncing their anger because they were so angry with somebody, they couldn’t let it go.And so we do it. We want to separate these things. And that is, the Bible on the one hand says anger isn’t a sin. And the other hand says, but get rid of it, don’t let it take over your life. So we do need to kind of keep those things in balance.

[17:06] Stephanie: On that note, I mean, Satan is the accuser. How do I know the difference between when Satan is accusing me and the Holy Spirit is convicting me?

[17:17] Marcus: Excellent question. I say, basically, it’s how they talk about you as a person. When the Holy Spirit brings conviction, it does not come with a sense that I am a horrible person. It does not come with a heavy dose of shame. Like, “I can’t believe you did this. You are such a  _________. When are you ever going to get this right?” God doesn’t shame me in the process, whereas when the devil comes after me because of my sin, it always leads to a sense of shame that makes me want to run away from God.

That’s one of the ways that we can tell. When the Holy Spirit convicts us, the purpose of the conviction is to restore relationship, and when the devil accuses us is to make us want to run away from relationship. And so I look at it that way. One of them is restorative and one of them is repulsive when it comes to our relationship with God.

[18:14] Stephanie: That’s really helpful. On the note of restorative, I’m thinking of reparations and stuff. Does confessing sin mean I’m off the hook for consequences? What is the relationship between confession and consequences?

[18:27] Marcus: That’s a good point. No, confession does not mean you’re off the hook for consequences. There are still consequences to things that we do. For instance, if I get mad at my wife and I say something to her I regret, I can go back and apologize, I can confess to God, but there is now going to be a little less trust. There’s a consequence there. Like, she’s going to be waiting to see, am I going to do this again? That trust is going to have to be rebuilt. Simply confessing my sin doesn’t change that.

In the same way, if I cheat on my taxes, I can confess that I did it, but that isn’t necessarily going to get me out of the consequences of what I’ve done. What we look for here is not just confessing of sin. This is in the spiritual warfare context. I can confess the sin, I can cancel the permission, I can get rid of the demons so I don’t have to deal with that consequence, but it doesn’t mean I can get rid of all of the consequences. And that’s kind of a separation of what we’re talking about here.

[19:29] Stephanie: I’ve heard stories of people  thinking that just saying I’m sorry and recognizing it finishes the journey. So I wanted to make sure.

[19:39] Marcus: You’re probably thinking of the call I got one time by a pastor who’d been invited to a house where the husband had just confessed to an affair with his wife’s best friend. And so the pastor was on his way there to go meet with this couple. Now, what would you expect to find when you get to a home where the husband has just confessed to having an affair with the wife’s best friend? I would expect to find a very angry wife, a very contrite husband. But no, that’s not what he walked into. The husband greeted him at the door and said, “Thank God you’re here, Pastor, would you please tell my wife to start acting like a Christian?” And it caught him completely off guard. Like, what are you talking about? And he said, “I told her I was sorry. She should just forgive me, give me a kiss, and let’s move on like this never happened.”

Now, you know, there are multiple things wrong there, but one of them is, he’s confusing confession, also confusing repentance, with restoration. He’s confusing forgiveness with reconciliation. I often say forgiveness takes one person making a choice. Reconciliation takes two people, and it is a process of restoring trust.

This guy was demonstrating a high level of narcissistic behavior. And it was coming out, and he was still in enemy mode, and he did not understand. And so what he was saying was, his wife was not forgiving. But the reality is his wife did forgive him, which is one of the reasons he was still alive. His wife did forgive him, but her trust had been broken, her heart had been broken. There were a whole lot of consequences there they were going to have to walk through.

I have, sadly, had to walk through that journey with several people through the years and it’s a hard one. It’s a hard one even when both people want to get past it and want to move forward, there are things that just confessing and forgiving doesn’t resolve.

[21:38] Stephanie: Yes. Well, we’re coming up to the end of the time here, and I want to end with some hope. That is, I think a lot of times when we talk about sin, it’s heavy, especially if there are things that you’re needing to deal with or that you’re remembering or thinking of other people’s sins and how they’ve hurt others. It can just be heavy. But repentance is beautiful, and there’s hope there, and God’s heart for repentance is restoration and restoring the relationship. There’s such a peace that comes when you repent and are on the right way again. So I don’t know. Could you talk a little about hope?

[22:24] Marcus: Certainly. Yeah, I know sin is a heavy subject. I mean, there’s a reason why Jesus went to the cross, and it was sin. It was a weighty, heavy thing, and all of the pain that is associated with that. But you’re right about repentance. In fact, in Course One of our Deeper Walk Institute, I make the statement that repentance is the happiest word in the English language because it means you get another chance. Repentance means we are going to reconcile.

So the big picture of what God is trying to do at the cross, the big picture of what he’s trying to do and everything that has to do with the way that he has handled sin is that he wants reconciliation. And the idea of reconciliation is, he wants us to be one with him again. He wants intimacy with us again. He wants the relationship restored.

Some people get this picture: God is going to let me into heaven because he has to, because he promised he’d let anybody into heaven who believes, but they don’t think he really likes them. That’s a really warped idea that comes from the devil on a fairly regular basis sadly.

What we’re talking about here, though, is that God is saying, “I love you so much and I want relationship with you so much that we’re going to take care of this sin thing for you, because I know that you could never take care of it yourself.”

[23:45] Stephanie: This is really important. I’m sorry, I’m just remembering times when you’ve talked about people who have said, “Oh, God could never forgive this thing that I did. I’m unforgivable, my sin is too big.” And just the idea that Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the entire world for all time. Do you think your one life is enough, your sin is enough? That, “Oh, nope. That excludes me.” No!

[24:16] Marcus: It’s a good point. It’s sort of like if there’s a quintillion dollars in debt for our sin in the world, and my sin is a couple million, it’s dust in the pan for God in terms of the price that he paid. So it is all covered. The debt has been paid. And that’s why when it talks about debt, that’s that kind of image. It says, no, it’s been taken care of.

Now what God wants me to do is, he wants me to receive his forgiveness, and he wants me to forgive myself and walk in the freedom that he paid for so that we can be in relationship together. And, yeah, it’s all about the relationship.

[25:01] Stephanie: Amen. So, hey, next week we’re going to continue working through the SOUL-L acrostic with a look at how the occult gives ground to the enemy. But for now, could you wrap us up with some final thoughts?

[25:14] Marcus: Yes. I think in my life, one of the things I had to learn about sin was I was one of those people who just beat myself up relentlessly for days. Especially if I did something I sort of vowed I wasn’t going to do again, and then I did it.  I would sit there and I wouldn’t pray. There were times when I would literally take days and I’d read my Bible and I’d do all kinds of stuff, and once I felt like I’d been good for a while, then I would come back and try to deal with this and restore my relationship with God.

One thing to realize was that God doesn’t want me to wait that long, even if I did it on purpose, even if it was something I swore I was never going to do again. He said, “No, no, no. Even in the middle of it, as soon as you realize, ‘whoops, I am not on the right path,’ get relationally connected with me again as quickly as possible, because you can’t solve this on your own. You need my help, so get me involved as quickly as possible.”

So that would be my encouragement to people. When you find yourself falling, just confess it and say, “God, I am falling. I need your help. Please meet me here and walk me out of this,” because you have a much better chance of walking out of it with God’s help than on your own.

[26:21] Stephanie: Amen. Thank you. Yes. God is for you. He loves you, and he is the only one who can help you. So there we have it.

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