By Jennie Allen
I remember it so vividly. I was sitting at a table in the Atlanta airport, and across from me was my daughter, Kate. At this point, she was 20 something and she was sharing with me these thoughts, these things that she has believed to be true. Words like, “I am defective. I am broken. I am too broken for God to use me.”
And something rose up in me. I was so angry because it was so obviously untrue. Because she is fire. She walks in every restaurant we go in, in Dallas, every shop, and she knows everybody. Everybody loves her. She is following God. She is married to this great man. Together they are building a godly home and a family. What she’s saying about herself is a lie. It is so obvious to me. When I tell her that, she stops me and says, “You’re my mom. Of course you believe that.” She thought it was all true even when she said it out loud. In that moment, all I want is to shift the way my daughter is thinking.
I have prayed about this shifting. I have fought for it in my own life, and in the lives of people who I love, because these lies, they’re not small. You actually believe these lies, too. You don’t even know that they’re lies, and yet they are shaping everything about you. They’re shaping your relationships. They’re shaping the way that you make choices about what you’re going to do and who you’re going to love. They’re shaping the way you enter conversations, the way you relate to God, the way you think about your life and the world. And these lies have stolen enough.
If you’ve been around church or your Bible for very long, you know the story in Matthew 4. It’s a giant face-off between the devil and Jesus. And I chose this passage for this subject because never is there a more blatant moment where we see Satan’s motives. We see Satan’s plans, we see his schemes played out, and then we see God’s response. We see Jesus’s response to the devil so clearly lived out. As we look at the three temptations of Jesus, in each one, Satan used a lie to try to convince Jesus to deny the truth and to live for a different kingdom.
But the enemy’s attack was obvious to the One who knew the truth through and through. It wasn’t an attack with swords or spears. If you can believe it, the enemy used Scripture to try to trip Jesus up. It was subtle and plotted, it was well conceived, and upon reading, everything Satan presented to Jesus, can seem true. But there’s more—the devil didn’t attack immediately. He waited until after Jesus had fasted 40 days and nights and was at his physical weakest. That’s when the enemy came for Jesus.
He came for my daughter where and when she was weak. He came for me, and he’s coming for you.
But here’s the thing: All of these thoughts—that I’m defective, that I’m worthless, that I am broken, that I am nothing—I’ve thought they were all true. Then there was a moment when something inside me shifted and suddenly I could see the invisible chain of lies that had been holding me back my entire life. That is my prayer for you in this study, that you would see all you’ve been struggling through, it’s not just your circumstances, it’s not just bad luck or even your own failings. It’s a lie, and it’s a lie so familiar that it feels like truth. It’s a lie so comfortable that you’ve built your life around it.
Here’s the bottom line: You have a God who loves you. You also have an enemy who hates you. And the only way the enemy gets to you is through lies. Satan wants to separate us from God. That’s his only goal and his only temporary victory. Scripture says he does this by stealing, killing, and destroying. He steals our truth, kills our hope, and destroys our ability to know the difference.
In John 8, Jesus describes our enemy. He says, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” When Jesus is saying this about the enemy, he knows! Jesus was there in the beginning, when Satan fell. And what Jesus is clear about is Satan is a liar.
Some of you have believed these lies from such a young age. They were reinforced by things that happened to you, by things that were said to you. I’m so sorry. Together, we’re going to learn how to trust that God has a plan to redeem whatever has defined you up until now, and that it will not define the rest of your life.
How do I know? Well, today I can say with confidence, I am free. These lies do not define me anymore. I feel like I’m Lucy in The Chronicles of Narnia, where she’s on the back of Aslan the lion, and they are running through the magical kingdom. I know that I am loved. I’m equipped with strength and authority as a child of God. And by God's definition, I am significant and called to significant purposes.
I'm being given a front-row seat to some pretty incredible things happening. I’m watching God move in the most miraculous ways. I’m seeing college kids by the hundreds, by the thousands, come to Jesus. I am seeing spiritual chains break and lies defeated in prisons where people who have committed felonies are falling on their faces and repenting and coming to Jesus. I am watching miracles regularly all around me.
I feel like I’m in this magical kingdom and beavers are talking and it’s wild and exciting. And yet I also know there are monsters and witches and there is darkness that is coming. And this is why I wrote this study. Because we're here to fight the darkness together, because there’s so much on the line. My prayer is that through this study, you would experience a freedom that you couldn’t imagine, that there would be a joy over your life and a power over your life that you couldn’t have imagined.
Today, I know that I am God’s and that he is mine because I learned how to replace the lies with His Truth. The devil’s lies are not your home. They’re not my home. You were created for something far greater, far truer, and far more incredible.