My Restore Story Chap 4: How Evil Keeps Us From Love
If God created us to joyfully receive His love, Satan’s task is to keep us from God’s love. Satan lies and schemes in order to deceive us, to distract us, to discourage us, and to divide us. I’d felt the weight of Satan’s schemes grappling with the sexual assault I had experienced. I knew what it was like to lay awake at night and question God’s goodness, care for me and control of my life.
But halfway through Restore, I began to experience Satan’s lies in a new way when my husband and I found out we were pregnant with our first child.
As we discussed the Fall during Restore, I learned that spiritual warfare seeks to undermine our loving relationship with God. I had always thought the goal of spiritual warfare was to persuade God’s people to do bad things. While Satan certainly is in the business of leading God’s people into sin, Restore was helping me to understand an even more perverse goal of the enemy. He is daily trying to cause me to doubt God’s love for me.
It has been his goal since the beginning.
I felt the force of these lies during the early months of my pregnancy. I was plagued with fear about potentially losing the baby. Every twinge or ache caused panic to ripple through my body. I became obsessed with Googling statistics and symptoms, hoping to find something on the internet to provide lasting comfort. I justified my fear by acknowledging that a healthy pregnancy is never promised. “God would still be good if I lost my baby,” I told everyone.
If the temptation to fear was Satan’s invitation to turn away from God, as I’d learned in Restore, then God was inviting me to turn to Him. I had learned previously the difference between temptation and sin, but I had never viewed temptation as an opportunity to delve deeper into a loving relationship with God.
I knew that the fear and anxiety I was experiencing about my baby’s health were from Satan because the fear often led me to question God’s character. It was as if Satan was saying, “Did God really say that He hears you and cares for you? Are you sure that God even wants to provide for you?”
The truth I found in Scripture directly countered Satan’s lies. In God’s Word, I was reminded that Jesus “is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). I began to read Matthew 6 every morning. I let Jesus’ words about the birds, who do nothing to provide for themselves yet are cared for by God, wash over me. “Are you not of more value than they?” (Mt 6:26). On days when these truths were particularly hard to believe, I would go for walks and pray simple prayers, repeating the words, “You love me. I am valuable. You provide. I will trust you.” While Satan wanted my fear to cast out God’s love for me and my love for God, God wanted His love for me to cast out my fear so that I might love and trust Him more.
Every lesson of Restore ended with a question: “How is God calling you to trust and obey Him right now? How is God calling you to love him and others?” I wrote in my booklet that God was inviting me to turn my worry into worship. As an act of faithfulness, I committed myself to going quickly to prayer anytime I felt fear and anxiety creeping in. Praying didn’t always make the fear go away, but I was comforted in reminding myself that God hears me and provides for me. Like the twelve stones the Israelites placed by the Jordan river to remind them of God’s provision, the comfort I had previously received while processing the sexual abuse actually served as a reminder of God’s abiding, comforting presence.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing how Restore has shaped one woman’s life, and helped bring the healing of God’s love into her story. Interested in having God’s story speak into yours? Check out Restore: Changing How We Live and Love today.
