Stop Speaking Satan
“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” –Jesus Christ
The language of Satan is lying. God’s language is sharing the truth in love. Satanic language leads to distrust, condemnation, slander, and destruction. Godly language builds people up in love. The problem with the human condition is that we are bilingual. We speak both the language of God and the language of Satan. But, we are all called to become illiterate in Satan’s language and become literary scholars of God’s love language. We become illiterate in Satan’s language when we stop lying to others, stop lying to ourselves, and stop hiding from God our Father, who knows everything. We become experts in the language of God when we hold on to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, obey His commandments, and confess our dark secrets in the light of God’s grace.
Everyone hates being lied to. Why lie to others? We need to tell the truth to others just as we want to hear the truth. Plus, God hates it when people lie. “The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy” (Proverbs 12:22). We must share the truth in love. This is not an option but a command. The truth is always to love. And love must always have the truth in it.
The lies we believe about ourselves shape our identity. What lie do you believe about yourself? The biggest lie you can believe is that God does not love you. God is Love and God loves you (1 John 4:8). No matter what you have done and no matter what has been done to you, God’s love in Jesus Christ is the ultimate truth. That loving truth covers us in righteousness.We do not need to seek our value from our own performance, but we must find it in the finished work of Jesus Christ. We no longer need to seek approval from others; instead, we should live freely in the enjoyment of the acceptance that we already have in Christ Jesus.
Confession means to speak the same thing. In other words, confession is acknowledging what God already knows. As the late Carrie Fisher said, “you are as sick as the secrets you keep.” We must expose our secrets under the divine spotlight of grace by confessing them to God and others. When we confess, there is always forgiveness at the end of the tunnel.
God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. -1 John 1:5-9
We must be witnesses to the truth—we must not bear false witness. We must delight in the reality that God is a loving Father who is quick to forgive because of Jesus Christ’s finished work on the cross. We must rely on the Spirit of Truth to illuminate and guide us into all truth (John 16:13). This is how we can eliminate Satan’s vocabulary from our minds and speak the language of God.