The devil wants you to backslide
When the devil hooks you into fellowship with sin, he does not want you to commit one sin or a number of sins, he wants you to swim in a pool of sin, where sin would be a part of your life. Indeed, the devil might encourage you to fall into sin by encouraging you to do only one sin. He will lie to you by making you think you would only be committing that one sin. Once you commit that sin, he would encourage you to do more of that sin, until he encourages you to commit other unrelated sins.
In the end, you would be involved in relationships with many sins, and at that stage, you would be insensitive to the voice of God. Your conscience would be dead, and you would not be mindful of the will of God nor His presence.
When you have reached this sad spiritual stage, you would have backslid, you would have moved away from God completely. It might take a few months or even years to sink you into this spiritual state. Be careful with your spiritual life and guard it with everything you have. Sin will never come into your life to give you goodies, it would come with the sole purpose of harming you and everything that is related to you.
Once you backslide, you might never have the ability to come back to the heart of God. The devil is very cunning and he has lots of tricks up his sleeve. When he makes you backslide, he put stumbling blocks in your way, and these stumbling blocks would make it very difficult for you to come back to the heart of God.
If you remain in the spiritual state of backsliding, you will struggle to extricate yourself from all the shackles of the devil. Eventually, if you do not separate yourself from sin, you would miss out on the precious gift of eternal life which God promised to those who have forsaken the life of sin for the righteousness of God.
Be careful with your faith, because it is the only thing that will give you victory over all the powers of the enemy. When your faith is intact in Jesus, you would be able to do what few people are able to do, you would be able to access all the grace of God. When you speak, Heaven will react to your speech. Your prayers would have the power to change whatever undesirable situation you might pray against. Without any shadow of a doubt, your faith will make you eat at the table of the Master, Jesus. The favour of God will always be upon you when you abide in the holiness of God.
Take note that every thought of temptation comes from the devil. You might not understand how the devil is doing this, but rest assured, every thought that encourages you to commit sin comes straight from the serpent.
It is always important to remember that there is no sin that is small enough, nor is there any sin that is big enough. Sin is sin regardless of how the serpent might dress it.
When you are tempted by the serpent, rebuke that thought in the name of Jesus, it shall go away from you.
You must never get tired of rebuking the devil because the devil will never get tired of tempting you. He will tempt you as long as you live. When you rebuke any sinful thought, it will fly away from you because it understands the authority of the name of Jesus. The name of Jesus is the name of righteousness, which is the name of victory against all the powers of the enemy.
The power to defeat temptation is in the wisdom of God. If you know the word of God, it will expose all the tricks of the devil to you. The word of God will give you all the armour you need against the devil.
You must always stay connected to the word of God, by having constant fellowship with it daily. The word of God will always give you spiritual food that you might not see or notice. As you fellowship with it, it would give you spiritual muscles that no one could give you. The word of God is our strength in more ways than one. It clothes us with the power of righteousness which insulates us against all the negative things from the kingdom of sin.
A prayer is another spiritual tool that helps us to have constant fellowship with the Lord. There is also power in prayer because as you pray, spiritual bullets are released against all forces of darkness that might be planning to attack you. Indeed, the prayers of the righteous are a spiritual pesticide, as they kill all the hidden tools of darkness.
“The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16)
Every time a righteous person prays, the skies are filled with fire, and this fire destroys all the tools of darkness. It does not only kill demons, but it kills all the traps the devil has set up in your mind. There are spiritual traps that are cast around us and some of these traps are planted in our minds. As we pray, tools or tentacles of darkness would be annihilated by the fire of God. Assuredly, a prayer is like a dip that is used to kill insects and fungi that have infested animals. A prayer covers us with the spiritual fire that would kill all that is not from God.
The terrain of sin is so fluid, and because of this, it is easy to move from one degree of sinfulness to the next. One person can commit one sin and that sin might totally break him. It could be the only sin that moves him away from the heart of God. Any sin we have not repented for has the possibility of making us backslide.
It is always wise for us to hate all forms of sin because all kinds of sins have the potential to move us from the heart of Jesus. The evil world of the serpent is connected in more ways than one. One sin is connected to all other kinds of sins.
When you do one sin, you are more than likely to do many sins. Any sin you may be married to will open doors for dangerous sins that will destroy your life.
We can never understand sin if we do not understand the cross of Calvary and what it has done for us. The cross of Calvary has not only cleansed us of all the sins we have committed, it has given us a new spiritual heart, a heart that is sensitive to God and His word.
The most important thing about us is our spiritual hearts, which are our souls. The conditions of our hearts determine the likelihood of us doing any sinful action. God knows this hence a process of being born again is a process of spiritual transplantation, where God gives us His heart that is sensitive to His word and righteousness. Our old hearts are not sensitive to the word of God. In fact, our old hearts reject the word of God completely.
We can never be obedient to the word of God if the Holy Spirit does not transform our souls and made them sensitive to the righteousness of God. If our hearts are not transformed, we would force ourselves to follow Jesus. When we follow the Master out of obligation, we will not go far. Pretence does not last, and in due time, we would be tired of pretending to be who we are not, hence it is very important for any child of God to receive a new heart that is sensitive to the word of God.
Our sensitivity to the righteousness of God reveals many things about us. It reveals our love for God and what we are prepared to lose for His name’s sake. When our souls are sensitive to the word of God, the word of God becomes the food that we are not able to live without. Indeed, when we are sensitive to the righteousness of God, our hearts agree with God on all issues of our lives. Our new hearts, which have been reconfigured in the likeness of God sees what God sees, and they are also able to feel what the Lord feels.
What keeps us glued inside the heart of God is our likeness to Him. Anyone who has the likeness of God loves what He loves and hates all that He hates. When we have the same outlook God has, we are naturally inclined to stay in His heart. But as soon as our outlook changes, we are likely to depart from the heart of the Master.
Sin is a tool that the devil uses to change our spiritual outlook. It is a tool that the devil uses to make us different to God. Satan wants us not to love what the Lord loves. When we no longer love what God loves, we would naturally move away from Him. His presence would be a thorn in our side. When we no longer believe in the righteousness of God, we would want to stay away from anything that reminds us about God and His righteousness.
Satan is very clever, and he uses sin cleverly to change us. The serpent introduces us to sin for the same reason, he wants to change the way we look at things. He wants us to look at things through his lenses, the lenses of unrighteousness. Every temptation is meant to move us from God by moving us from the things that God loves. Sin makes us to be in opposition to what God stands for.
It is easy to determine whether you have backslid. If you no longer love the righteousness of God, you no longer love Jesus. We love Jesus because He is the embodiment of the righteousness of God. And when we are no longer mindful of the righteousness of God, we would divorce Jesus in our spiritual hearts. We cannot divorce Jesus and remain unmarried. Anyone who divorces Jesus has found a new lover, that old serpent from the kingdom of death. Indeed, anyone who has divorced Jesus loves sin because they are so much in love with the author of sin, the devil.
The devil knows that it is easy to move us from one spiritual state to the other. He tempts us to marry one sin so that the sin we are married to could introduce us to a host of other sins. In the end, we would be in love with unrighteousness, because we would be wedded to many kinds of sins.