The devil wants you to be miserable
One of the typical requirements of studying music in college is the need to perform several solo recitals. During my own senior recital, I decided that for one of my selections, I would perform a piece of music that many would consider… odd. The work is made up of three movements. The first movement is thirty three seconds, the second movement is two minutes and 40 seconds, and the final movement is one minute and 20 seconds long. In performing this piece, you find that the length of each movement is important and you actually need some kind of clock or stopwatch at hand to be sure that it is performed well. The piece, if you are not familiar with it at all, is John Cage’s 4’33”. During the performance, the person on the stage will simply stand relatively still, begin the stopwatch and after the movement concludes, the time is stopped. The performer does not sing or make any sound with his or her instrument during this time.
Responses to this piece vary, but they typically can evoke some kind of astonishment, anger, or outright confusion. During the first performance of this piece in 1952, one local artist apparently even shouted, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town!” . When I performed this piece during my senior recital, my own father thought that I was too nervous to begin or that something went wrong. Cage himself offers his own insight into what he hoped to accomplish in creating this strange piece of music: “They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
The sounds of program pages turning, chairs creaking, a cough, a sigh - Cage wanted to emphasize how important the “noises” that surround us really are. While I will leave you to form your own opinion on the piece, I think that the principle of taking the noises around us for granted can very much be applied to other areas of our what we experience each day - especially our spiritual lives.
Our aim with knowHis.love is to help people come to a better understanding and experience of the personal love that is available to them from our Triune God. I can write a lot about the love that our God has for you, but I think that sometimes it may be helpful to approach this topic from a different angle. Today, I wanted to shift perspectives as I find that one of the biggest obstacles that many people have in recognizing and living in the love of God, is actually taking for granted how miserable the devil wants them to be.
It’s true. The devil wants nothing more than for you to be miserable. The sooner we come to realize it and find ways to combat his tricks, the more open we can be to truly recollecting ourselves in the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The problem comes when we become so accustomed to the “noise” of the devil’s lies that we no longer really see it as something meaningful - just a natural part of our daily routine. These lies, however mundane or simple they may seem, are doing a tremendous amount of damage to the way that we see God, ourselves, and others.
So today, let’s take time to listen a little more closely to what lies the devil is trying to speak into our lives. While these lies are numerous, I’ll simply focus on three that I can see the devil trying to keep us in a place of misery: that we don’t need a savior, that we don’t need to be healed, and that pleasure equates to happiness.
The devil wants us to believe that we don’t need a savior because if we take Jesus out of the picture, this means that we have to be our own messiah, we have to save ourselves. The devil loves this trick because he knows that it can play into our deep insecurities and trust issues that we already deeply feel from the consequences of Original Sin. When the chaos in the world continues to draw us deeper into our own self-absorbed little bubbles, the devil knows that he can continue to push us further into isolation by convincing us that the only person that can deal with these problems is us. The world can feel like it is falling down around us and if we just had more control over our lives, if we just shut everyone else out, only then can we start to feel ownership of who we are and where we are going. The subtlety of this lie leaves us wondering why we are always alone as our eyes are closed to see the self-sabotaging behavior that leads to our own self-imposed isolation.
A second way that the devil wants us to be miserable is by convincing us that we don’t need to be healed. This lie can show itself in many different ways - perhaps we are struggling physically, emotionally, or spiritually, yet no matter how much the loved ones in our lives plead us with us, we have bought into the lie that we are not made for health and wholeness, that we are simply meant to be miserable. We can have such deep wounds and the devil loves to manipulate these pained areas of our lives to the point that it distorts our ability to properly see God, others, and ourselves properly. We can come to believe the lie that God wants to constantly rob us of any feelings of joy or happiness - that if something good comes along, God is just waiting in the wings to snatch it away from us, so it’s better to just be miserable and, in the process, lose any sense of faith, hope, and love.
Finally, one incredibly mischievous way that the devil convinces us to be miserable is by making us believe that the pleasure we are feeling is bringing us satisfaction, while in reality it is only leading us to feel more worthless, unlovable, and irredeemable. Sin can feel so incredibly good. If it didn’t feel good, we probably wouldn't be drawn to it as much as we are; yet, over and over again we can find ourselves pulled towards the same habits because in the moment, they can feel like the most important and pleasurable things to do. The devil knows how to take something good and distort it just enough that it no longer leads us towards God, but only away from Him. It doesn’t matter if is is food, drinking, sex, or friendships - the devil can distort all of these things and relationships to the point that we can feel good for a moment, but deep down our misery continues to grow.
In the same way that if we don’t make an effort to pray every day to grow and deepen our relationship with God it can become easy to practically forget that He exists, it can also be easy to completely forget that there is a being that desires nothing more than for our lives to be a complete misery. The devil wants you to be miserable, and if he can do that better by encouraging you to forget about his existence, then he is all too happy to turn the focus away from himself and point all the fingers at you.
Every day - every moment - is an opportunity to experience the great personal love that our God has for you. The more we develop our relationship with Him and draw closer to His heart, the easier it will become at the end of our lives to enter into our eternal homeland and share in His love. The devil - whether we can acknowledge it or not - wants us to seize every moment in preparation for the end of our days as well. He will do everything in his power to come to believe that love is not for us, that it is repulsive, that love is some kind of suffocating and oppressive force. If we believe the devil’s lies, it becomes so incredibly easy to turn away from true Love as our hearts have become hardened to the point that our image of God, others, and ourselves has become corrupted beyond recognition.
There is a being who personally hates you so much that he desires you to be completely miserable. He wants you to believe that your misery is entirely your fault and that it is good for you to be alone and cut off from those who truly love you.
If his lies ever start to creep into your mind and heart, in Jesus’ name reject them. Ask that Christ - your true savior, your true healer, and that the God who longs for you to be filled with joy, reveal the lies and tricks that lead you to believe that you deserve to be anything other than radically and deeply loved.