Next time you sit down for coffee with your friend start the conversation this way, "Have you noticed any demons today?"  Have your camera ready to take their picture.

We don't talk about demons, demon activity, sources of evil, spiritual warfare, or Satan that much.  And yet, when you do people always have a story.

My friend Richard Beck writes a great book, Reviving Old Scratch.  He says really powerful things in that book and here are some of my takeaways:

1.  We need to really consider this subject
2.  Be careful of the extremes:  Everything is demonic or Nothing is demonic and explainable
3.  His words on the Scooby-Dooification of spiritual warfare is worth the price of the book
4.  Two paths converge

That last takeaway is where I landed on the sermon I preached this past Sunday when talking about demon and demonic activity.  There are two paths to this spiritual warfare thing:  1.  physical, tangible, explainable path: where we look at social injustice, inquities, and transgressions.  2 Cosmic, unexplainable path: where we find demons entering people, taking us on in our dreams, demons vs angels, Satan vs Spirit, and Satan vs Jesus.

What I said in my sermon was while these are separate paths of spiritual warfare they do converge and "run into" one another.  In other words we have gross social injustices in our world because there is a live being, Satan, that is wreaking havoc in our world and the cosmic world.  And yet, there is also a God who brings peace and doesn't just win battles, but gave his son to win a Cosmic war against all evil activity.

This past Sunday I preached a sermon I didn't think I would ever preach.  A sermon on Sin.  I would much rather preach a word about grace.  Grace has no joy without its total claim over the thing it erases...sin.  The sermon is part of a new series I began that same day called "Star Wars."  The idea of the series is to talk about the things on and beyond this Earth, seen and unseen to get a fuller picture of God's divine work in our lives.  This past Sunday's sermon was called Episode I and deals with the menace that sin can be for us in our lives.  You can listen to the full sermon here:  Episode I .  

In the course of the sermon I share a working definition of sin for our series.  I poured over that definition last week and it was seriously burdensome and wrought with careful thought.  Here is the definition I shared:

"Sin is a defiant rebellion tied to Satan’s work of evil in the world that distances and divides us from God most Holy.  Sin stirs creation to act against its creator, God, causing suffering in the world and constant disruption of the ongoing divine battle.  Sin is acting its wrathful outcomes on the guilty and the innocent, the just and the unjust.  Sin respects no person, no being, none of creation; it invades individuals and whole communities; as its ultimate desire is to wreak unexplainable havoc upon an impenetrable Kingdom."

​Those few sentences took hours upon hours to write.  I know its not a perfect definition.  It's a working definition.  I wanted to tie into the definition the idea that sin is involved in a battle of cosmic proportions.  Before I preached the sermon I shared the definition with a friend of mine and what caught his attention was, "...it invades individuals and whole communities..."

That drew his attention before the events of Dallas and my response to him was how there are so many instances in scripture where the community at large gives in to their sin.  Just to name a few:  The story of the flood, the Israelites worship of the golden calf, the tower of Babel, Elijah and prophets of BAAL, the Pharisees, the insurrection against Jesus, the stoning of Stephen, and the riots of Acts.

There is much to explore on the subject of sin.  While I'm convicted that one should not glorify evil or Satan's work, I also am convicted that the world, especially Christians, could benefit from not jumping directly to forgiveness and grace without reflecting on what exactly it is that they need forgiveness and grace from in their life.

Jesus holds up either way, the difference becomes in the richness of our lives as we live for Him!