Because Satan is the father of lies,9 he goes to enormous lengths to misrepresent the nature of God to us -- and to get us casting aspersions against each other.

Some years ago I visited a village where the church was being torn apart by those pesky spirits of division I have referred to in various places throughout this book. My concern was how I could help them to realise that they needed to resist the devil rather than accuse each other without sounding patronizing.

The Lord surprised me by saying, ‘Play a game of Chinese whispers!’ So I divided people into a large circle and whispered a decidedly silly message to the person next to me and waited to see what would emerge at the other end. ‘Six hundred sausages in a cemetery,’ turned into ‘I shot myself last Saturday’! The penny dropped, as one person after another began to see how they were allowing their lines of communication to get hopelessly scrambled.

For every situation that we face, God has a promise in His Word. The more these promises live in our hearts, the more faith we will exercise and the greater the threat that we pose to the powers of darkness. No wonder they leap to do all they can to make it as difficult as they can for us to understand what God is saying. Distractions, distortions, aspersions, red herrings, doubts and self-doubts. You name it – they will send them out in salvoes.

Without building a theology around Frank Peretti’s novels, This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness (both published by Monarch), contain powerful examples of how the powers of darkness pepper out minds with distractions on the one hand and full-scale gales of accusations against other Christians on the other. The books are a timely reminder to remain alert to the Holy Spirit’s promptings to pray and to overcome all the devil’s efforts to scramble our lines of communication.

For Reflection and Prayer