Sermon quotes on satan
Thomas Adams
Satan, like a fisher, baits his hook according to the appetite of the fish.
A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, Banner of Truth, 2000, p.290.
Randy Alcorn
Satan works on the assumption that every person has a price. Often, unfortunately, he is right. Many people are willing to surrender themselves and their principles to whatever god will bring them the greatest short-term profit.
Thomas Brooks
Satan promises the best, but pays with the worst; he promises honor, and pays with disgrace; he promises pleasure, and pays with pain; he promises profit, and pays with loss; he promises life, and pays with death. But God pays as He promises; all His payments are made in pure gold.
Cyprian
It is not persecution alone that we ought to fear, not those forces that in open warfare range abroad to overthrow and defeat the servants of God. It is easy enough to be on one’s guard when the danger is obvious; one can stir up one’s courage for the fight when the Enemy shows himself in his true colors. There is more need to fear and beware of the Enemy when he creeps up secretly, when he beguiles us by a show of peace and steals forward by those hidden approaches which have earned him the name of the “Serpent.”… Those whom he has failed to keep in the blindness of their old [pagan] ways he beguiles, and leads them up a new road of illusion. He snatches away people from within the Church herself, and while they think that coming close to the light they have now done with the night of the world, he plunges them unexpectedly into darkness of another kind. They still call themselves Christians after abandoning the Gospel of Christ and the observance of His [moral] law; though walking in darkness they think they still enjoy the light.
Quoted in Secret Church 2015.
Ian Duguid
We often forget that temptation can come from any quarter, even from within our own family circle. We expect the Devil to assault us like a roaring lion, as ugly and fearsome as can be. We don’t expect him to come to us dressed up like an angel of light, speaking in the honey-sweet tones of the ones we love. Yet the Bible warns us that such an approach is easy for him to adopt (2 Cor. 11:14). Thus, Satan didn’t only confront Jesus head-on in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11); he also tempted him more subtly through the words of one of his closest disciples, Peter (Matt. 16:23).
Living in the Gap Between Promise and Reality, P&R Publishing, 1999, p. 63-64.
Timothy Jennings
The battlefield on which the war between Christ and Satan is fought is the mind.
Taken from The God Shaped Brain by Timothy Jennings Copyright (c) 2017 by Timothy Jennings. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Timothy Keller
Satan doesn’t control us with fang marks on the flesh, but with lies in the heart.
The Great Enemy (Encounters with Jesus Series Book 6), Penguin Publishing Group.
C.S. Lewis
I freely admit that real Christianity . . . goes much nearer to Dualism than people think. . . . The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.
Martin Luther
For where God built a church, there the devil would also build a chapel.
Satan-Methods
Erwin W. Lutzer
Sociologist Robert Wuthnow suggests that whether or not you believe that the devil has objective existence often depends upon your social class. “Look at the parking lot outside any church,” he says. “If you see Lexuses and Cadillacs, you won’t hear Satan preached inside. If you see a lot of pickup trucks, you will.”
John Owen
Satan’s greatest success is in making people think they have plenty of time before they die to consider their eternal welfare.
Meditation on the Glory of Christ, 1684.
Darren Oldridge
The Devil has many names, and these reflect the many roles he has played in human history and imagination. The ‘Satan’ of the Hebrew Old Testament refers to a being who acts as an opponent or an obstacle; this was rendered in Greek as ‘the adversary’ or ‘slanderer’, and subsequently Latinized as diabolus, spawning the English ‘Devil’.
The Devil: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
J.I. Packer
He [Satan] should be taken seriously, for malice and cunning make him fearsome; yet not so seriously as to provoke abject terror of him, for he is a beaten enemy.
G.H. Pember
No evil ever came from [God’s] hands. . . . Let this truth be fixed in our hearts . . . whenever we are troubled with the thorn or the thistle, with the poisonous or useless weed, with the noxious beast . . . or with any of the other countless inconveniences and pains of our present condition; whenever we feel ready to faint by reason of fighting without and fears within, let us remember that God made all things good, and avoiding hard thoughts of Him, say, An enemy hath done this.
Alvin Plantinga
The mere fact that a belief is unpopular at present (or at some other time) is interesting from a sociological point of view but evidentially irrelevant.
Russ Ramsey
The Tempter, sometimes a subtle serpent, sometimes a roaring lion, came to Jesus in the wilderness not as a predator, but as a negotiator.
Alan Redpath
It’s Satan’s delight to tell me that once he’s got me, he will keep me. But at that moment I can go back to God. And I know that if I confess my sins, God is faithful and just to forgive me.
Tony Reinke
Satan blinds hearts by filling eyes with worthless things. His veil over human hearts today is a veil of pixels, and the chains of his spiritual bondage are tethered to the world’s theater.
Taken from Competing Spectacles by Tony Reinke, © 2019, p.133. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Bertrand Russell (For Contrast)
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Philip Graham Ryken
The devil’s cleverest ruse is to make men believe that he does not exist. Or to give us the false impression that he is a silly old character in a red suit with little horns and a forked tail. Or to convince us that his devilish powers are so overwhelming that we are helpless to resist.
Lead Us Not Into Temptation from When You Pray by Philip Graham Ryken, © 2000, Crossway Books, a division of Good News Publishers, Wheaton Illinois 60187, www.crosswaybooks.org, p. 163.
Satan [John Milton]
So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear, Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost; Evil be thou my Good. . . . Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.
The Serpent
Did God really say . . . ?
R.C. Sproul
Satan’s two most effective ploys are (1) to get people to underestimate him so that he can lure us into a hidden snare, or (2) to overestimate him that we may be so intimidated by him that we are paralyzed by his threatening power.
Quoted in Erwin W. Lutzer ,God’s Devil, Moody Publishers, 2015.
Charles Spurgeon
Satan always hates Christian fellowship; it is his policy to keep Christians apart. Anything which can divide saints from one another he delights in. He attaches far more importance to godly intercourse than we do. Since union is strength, he does his best to promote separation.
Wallace Stevens
The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. A capital destroyed him in his tenement…
It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud:
The assassin flash and rumble . . . He was denied.
Phantoms, what have you left? What underground?
What place in which to be is not enough
To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place
Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,
As the eye closes . . . How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality.
Esthétique du Mal
W.E. Stuermann
There is a wild antagonism at the heart of things. There is a madness there. . . The countenance of Satan is indelibly inscribed in nature.
The Divine Destroyer
Mark Twain (For Contrast)
We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.
Voltaire
“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies.”
(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)
N.T. Wright
“Have you considered,” asks God to Satan, “my servant Job?” Well, Satan had and he hadn’t, and part of the puzzle of Job is why God put the question like that to Satan in the first place.
The Gospels tell the story of how the evil in the world—political, social, personal, moral, emotional—reached its height, and how God’s long-term plan for Israel (and for himself!) finally came to its climax.
Taken from Evil and the Justice of God by N.T. Wright Copyright (c) 2006, p.83, by N.T. Wright. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Hildegarde of Bingen
And when the Evil One brandishes his sword against you, you break it in his own heart.
Julian of Norwich
Accepting Our Lord gave me a spiritual insight into the unpretentious manner of his loving. I saw that for us he is everything that is good, comforting and helpful; he is our clothing, who, for love,wraps us up, holds us close; he entirely encloses us for tenderlove, so that he may never leave us, since he is the source of all good things for us.
Rudolf Stier
Self-renunciation is the way to world-dominion.
The Words of the Lord Jesus, I, translated by William B. Pope, 1855, T. and T. Clark, 1874.
Benedict of Nursia
There are times when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence.
The Holy Rule
Lauren F. Winner
The insight that we can exercise some control over our thoughts and feelings is deep in Christianity.
Gretchen Rubin
There’s some debate about the nature of self-control. Some argue that we have a limited amount of self-control strength, and as we exert it, we exhaust it. Others counter that willpower isn’t limited in this way, and that we can find fresh reserves by reframing our actions. As for me, I wake up with a reasonable store of self-control, and the more I draw on it, the lower it drops. I remember sitting in a meeting and resisting a cookie plate for an hour—then grabbing two cookies on my way out.
Rudolf Stier
Self-renunciation is the way to world-dominion.
The Words of the Lord Jesus, I, translated by William B. Pope, 1855, T. and T. Clark, 1874.
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