Almost Two-Thirds of 18-29 Year Olds Believe in "Demon Possession" What Is Happening to America? 30OKT13

There is a level of ignorance in this article concerning Christianity and the beliefs and faith of individuals within and outside organized religion. Christianity teaches believers to be aware of the struggle between Satan and the God, of Satan's attempts to lure believers away from their faith, at times using demons. But Christianity also warns believers against false prophets and teachers who will twist and pervert the teachings of Christianity for their own gain, their lust for power (religious and political), to increase their own wealth. Just as these religious leaders manipulate the Christian faith and lead some astray the author of this article is manipulating the teachings of these people to label all Christians who believe in demons as extremist. The religious leaders who pervert Christianity to fit their own beliefs and the author of this article both have a lack of knowledge of the teachings of Christianity and are guilty of self-righteous judgementalism. From AlterNet.....

Belief in supernatural phenomena has spiked.

October 30, 2013  |  

 Are Americans becoming less religious? While church affiliation is probably declining, don't expect the atheist revolution anytime soon:Over one half (63 percent, to be exact) of young Americans 18-29 years old now believe in the notion that invisible, non-corporeal entities called "demons" can take partial or total control of human beings, revealed an October 2012 Public Policy Polling survey that also showed this belief isn't declining among the American population generally; it's growing.
Throughout last year, triumphal atheists and secularists had celebrated (and many of the religiously-inclined bemoaned) a 2012 survey, from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which showed an increase, especially among young adults, in the number of Americans who declared no specific religious affiliation: a chunk of the population now up to almost 20 percent according to the survey. These Americans were dubbed the "nones".
The Pew survey finding was interpreted by some observers (who missed the fine print) as indicating that Americans are becoming less religious. But the survey didn't necessarily indicate that - it simply showed that Americans, young Americans especially, are dropping out of organized religion.
Here's where it gets interesting:

The Pew survey also showed that a whopping 85 percent of those "nones", Americans with no specific religious affiliation - who comprise almost twenty percent of the overall population - nonetheless had spiritual or supernatural beliefs and, as the October 2012 Public Policy Polling survey (link to PDF of survey results) revealed, that included belief in the reality of demons.

In the lead-up to the 2012 election liberal media pounced on the PPP survey's revelation that 68 percent of Republicans evinced belief in demon possession. The finding was ridiculed as scandalous and characteristic of an alleged Republican Party disconnect from reality.
Now, PPP was among the top five polling firms in terms of accuracy in forecasting the 2012 election results, so there is good reason to take the survey finding seriously.
But critics of the GOP who used the survey to attack Republicans typically missed or ignored the fact that PPP's survey also showed that 49 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independent voters believed in demon possession too. In other words, a majority of Americans surveyed believed in demon possession.
And, PPP's survey revealed another astonishing fact; belief in demon possession seems to be growing.
While only 44% of Americans over 65 years of age surveyed by PPP believed in demon possession, 57% of Americans 47-65 did and, among the youngest group surveyed, Americans 18-29, 63% believed in demon possession. The demographic trend line seems obvious.
Just to make things perfectly clear, the Public Policy Polling survey was "Halloween-centric" - also polling beliefs about ghosts and haunted houses. So it was unlikely that respondents thought the survey's question about demons, "Do you think it’s possible for people to become possessed by demons, or not?", was asking about symbolic or figurative demons.
The PPP survey was asking respondents whether or not people could literally be possessed by evil spirits, in the style of actress Linda Blair, from the 1973 horror film The Exorcist.
We've been here before, of course:
During the 14th Century, in Germany, the populations of entire Jewish towns were massacred for an alleged Jewish role in spreading plague and, more generally, partnering with the devil. The massacres didn't stop the plague.
And consider the Salem Witch Trials: in that notorious episode of mass-hysteria, from 1692-1693 in Puritan New England hundreds of people were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen were hung. One, Giles Corey, was pressed to death by stones.
It's reported that around the same time, in North Andover, Massachusetts - the true epicenter of the witch craze - at least one dog was tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft.
Don't such fevers of irrationality lie safely in the past?
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, many fundamentalists and conservative charismatic evangelicals came to the conclusion that the tumult of the 1960s and all that came with it -- the Civil Rights Movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, the women's liberation movement, the incipient gay rights movement, the hippie counterculture and rock music, the rise in crime that began almost exactly when the Beatles set foot on America's shores in 1964, civil unrest and riots in America's cities, and all the other challenges to orthodoxy -- stemmed from a underlying metaphysical cause:
Satan.
Underneath of the tumult was, literally, a spiritual invasion. During the 1960s, a wave of invading demons had gained a beachhead on America's shores like the Allied troops storming France's Normandy beaches in 1944, and by the 1970s they were taking possession of individuals in massive numbers and even seizing whole geographic areas.
Wrote Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee in his 1973 book Invasion of Demons: The Battle Between God and Satan in Our Time,

"It is an invasion of demons, and is being spread like wildfire through the occult practices sweeping America in a satanic revival with demons for evangelists."

Hagee was no cultural outlier. By the 1990s his books were selling in the millions and his sermons went out on evangelical broadcast networks with global reach. In 2008, Republican Presidential nominee John McCain aggressively sought his political endorsement.By the 1980s, "satanic panic" burst out from evangelical subculture into the secular mainstream amidst allegations that a vast, shadowy conspiracy of satan worshipers was preying on America's children. Beginning in 1982 in California's Kern County, based on a wave of legal cases sent dozens of men and women, accused of inflicting satanic ritual sexual abuse on children.
Now, in our thoroughly modern era according to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation --a nonprofit which fights for the freedom-of-worship and freedom-of-belief rights of United States military personnel-- literature associating Jews with the devil is being distributed by military chaplains, on United States military bases and naval ships.
And witchcraft ? Consider: as of when she was picked by presidential candidate John McCain, 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was a personal friend to not one but two professed witch hunters, apostles in a charismatic movement now sweeping global Christianity, whose leaders promote the need to fight witches and battle "territorial demons" believes to influence cities, and even whole geographic regions.
The notion that demonic forces, and people associated with them, are behind both personal tragedies and collective societal misfortune is not one that humanity, or at least America, has left behind.
But don't take that from me.
Any given day of the week, one can find televangelists proclaiming that this school massacre wasn't due to mental illness and easy access to assault weapons and high capacity magazines; and that destructive hurricane wasn't potentiated by global warming. No, such misfortunes stem from God's wrath at gay marriage and a lack of prayer in public schools.
Aren't those fringe beliefs ? Not really. Not any more.
The outgoing Chair of the House Science Committee thinks global warming is a massive hoax perpetrated by scientists, to get funding, and claims humans can't influence the weather, stating in 2011, "I don’t think we can control what God controls."
A current Science Committee member thinks humans and dinosaurs cohabited the Earth and declares the Big Bang, evolution, and the science of embryology to be "lies straight from the pit of hell".
Isn't this just a case of a few misguided Republicans who somehow slipped through the cracks ?
Over the last year I've read countless opinion pieces, some from thinkers I deeply respect, lamenting an alleged rising irrationality on the American right and in the Republican Party.
Despite the alleged trend, a popular counter-narrative claims that rational thinking - non-supernaturally-based modes of thought - is simultaneously increasing among Americans in general.
But that may not be true at all; if you believe that your fellow citizens are becoming more rational you may be victim of a nasty phenomenon called incestuous amplification.
In short, incestuous amplification is a feedback loop in which propaganda (or bad information) is taken as truth (good information). The result is that people caught in this amplification loop become increasingly detached from reality or make faulty decisions because their underlying beliefs have become corrupted by the incestuous amplification process.
This is happening both on the American left and right, only in different ways.
Here's what I mean by that: people on the left have become increasingly aware that opinion leaders on the right (such as Rush Limbaugh) and members of the Republican Party are promoting ideas that are simply not grounded in empirically-determined fact.
For example, during the 2012 election at least one race for a U.S. Senate seat hinged upon a claim, by the Republican contender, that women who were raped could shut down their reproductive processes; thus, they would not become pregnant, if raped, unless theywanted to become pregnant.
As it turned out, that notion was grounded in medical thinking from the 13th or 14th Century, during which time people were also being burned alive, for witchcraft.
But this growing awareness doesn't seem to translate into knowledge of the very well funded and organized national-level movement, among politicized American right-wing Christianity, which is promoting such beliefs and has the power to shut down, for a few weeks at least, the government of the most powerful nation on Earth. Or, for that matter, loft one of its own into the race for the vice presidency of the United States:
Perhaps the greatest failure of our media establishment during the 2008 election was the failure to probe Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's friendship with two religious leaders who had publicly boasted of hunting witches.
But perhaps that was to the good, because if news of Palin's ties to the New Apostolic Reformation had emerged, liberals and progressives might have become even more smug about their supposed grounding in evidence-based reality.
Since the mid-1980s, mainstream media has been noisily proclaiming the death of the religious right as a political movement, and poorly-informed mainstream media pundits downplay the influence of dominionism in American politics, even as some of the most prominent Senators in the GOP are publicly anointed to help "take dominion" over all sectors of society.
Many liberals and progressives believe in these factually-challenged narratives.
Meanwhile, during the current session of Congress, Republicans who reject the theory of Evolution and the reality of man-made climate change now sit on the science committees of the wealthiest and most militarily powerful nation on earth. Partisans of the religious right dominate entire U.S. states.
The religious right movement is gradually siphoning off funding from American public schools, redirecting that money to religious schools that teach from textbooks which reject Evolution, teach Young Earth creationism, and portray LGBT teens as hated by God and damned to hell - as covered in the October 2013 issue of Rolling Stonemagazine, in The Hidden War Against Gay Teens.
The movement is vacuuming billions of dollars each year through various federal funding streams - for example, 1) through the George W. Bush-founded Faith Based Initiative, which continues under the Presidency of Barack Obama and gives money directly to churches and religious nonprofits, some of which practice faith-based discrimination; 2) through federal funding which pays for students to attend Young Earth creationist, biblical literalist, gay rights-unfriendly schools such as Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and Pat Robertson's Regent University; 3) annual USAID funding for international aid, which under George W. Bush was shifted from secular nonprofits to religious ones.
Most of these entities receiving such government money hold open at least the possibilitythat demon possession can cause various maladies, both physical and psychological - including the alleged malady of non-heterosexual orientation.
But government largesse is far from the only factor, let alone the most important one, driving the growing belief in demons and demon possession. Besides the promotion of such ideas in charismatic churches across the nation, belief in demon casting gets promoted in breathless, shallow sensationalistic and almost wholly uncritical broadcasts from mainstream media, such as the Oprah network - which has aired sympathetic footage of exorcist and faith healer Todd Bentley, who in the recent past has claimed to heal people, up onstage, by punching and kicking them with his biker boots, and National Geographic, which in October 2012 ran a credulous episode on exorcism featuring virulently anti-LGBT exorcists Kimberly Daniels, now an elected Jacksonville, FL city council member, and Bob Larsen (whose three comely female "teen exorcists" were also featured in a September 2013 BBC Vanguard segment), whose recently exorcism tour in the Ukraine was facilitated by the church network of charismatic apostolic church leader Alexey Ledyaev, who in turn has promoted the book The Pink Swastika by American evangelist Scott Lively.
Lively is currently being sued for "active participation in the conspiracy to strip away fundamental rights from LGBTI persons" the African country of Uganda. Lively's book The Pink Swastika claims that Hitler and top Nazis were homosexual and presents the Holocaust as an outgrowth of alleged homosexual psychopathology.
For her own part, Kimberly Daniels' promotes notable demon-haunted views. In an April 2011 story, I described (also see A Kim Daniels 'Demonbuster' Quote Base),

"Her avowed "demonbuster" persona includes performing exorcisms to cast out demons alleged to cause homosexuality, drug abuse, and insanity, claims that "the Jews own everything!" and that President Obama is part of a Harvard-based Illuminati plot, and a declaration of being grateful for the historical institution of American slavery without which, according to Kim Daniels, "I might be somewhere in Africa worshiping a tree." "

Such beliefs on the pervasive presence of demons in daily life, promoted by influential American evangelicals such as New Apostolic Reformation leader C. Peter Wagner and former Foursquare Church head Jack Hayford (who gave the closing prayer at the 54th Inaugural Prayer Service for President George W. Bush, in 2001, at the Washington National Cathedral) may be exerting a less-than wholesome effect on African evangelical culture:In November 2012, one of the more influential publications in the world of American charismatic Christianity, Charisma magazine, published an article titled "Can You Be Raped by the Devil?" which explained,

"The two most identifiable sexual demons are the incubus, which is a male sexual demon that traditionally assaults women, and the succubus, which is a female sexual demon that assaults men. Sometimes they also lure people into homosexual behavior."

Only a few days later, across the Atlantic in Africa, the government controlled Ugandan news service New Vision revealed lurid details of a Ugandan woman whose marriage was described as "on the verge of collapsing" due to the nightly attacks of a sex demon.C. Peter Wagner, Jack Hayford, Kimberly Daniels, and Todd Bentley are all part of the demon-obsessed charismatic neo-Pentecostal movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose apostles and prophets have blessed and anointed numerous Republican political candidates - such as 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palinand 2011 presidential hopeful Rick Perry.
In 2003, the demonology-laced book Out Of Africa, co-edited by Wagner, featured contributions from internationally influential, rising Nigerian evangelists in Wagner's movement such as E.A. Adeboye - credited by some as being the 49th most influential person on Earth.
In Uganda, Wagner's movement claims participation of top leaders in Uganda's two main born-again and Pentecostal umbrella groups, which are actively working to incite anti-LGBT sentiment in Uganda, where since 2009 a bill has loomed before Uganda's parliament that in its original version would mandate the death penalty for repeat acts of homosexuality and compel all Ugandan citizens to report suspected homosexuals to authorities or else face three-year prison sentences.
 http://www.alternet.org/belief/almost-two-thirds-americans-18-29-years-old-believe-demon-possession-and-number-growing?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Sermon on Baptism and the Devil 27JAN13

I believe in the Devil and his demons and the struggle between good and evil in this world. My faith is in God the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, and the forgiveness of sins and the promise of salvation and the resurrection through Jesus. I believe in the legions of Angels God has watching over us, and the power of the Saints among us to help all believers along the way, if we have faith and seek them out. This sermon on Baptism is a powerful statement of faith and God's love and grace, and the Devil's constant attempts to turn us from God. From the Sarcastic Lutheran, Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber....

2013-1-27 NBW Sermon    <—-click here to listen along.

In the church of my childhood it was taught that the “age of accountability” was somewhere around 12. To hit the age of accountability was to, like,  spiritually go off of your parents’ insurance. At age 12 the clock starts ticking, spiritually speaking; you know right from wrong now and because of this you are accountable for every time you screw up. And if you sin knowing right from wrong and then die before you chose to be baptized, you might burn in Hell for eternity. So age 12, as you can imagine, is when kids start choosing to get baptized. The lag time between entering the age of accountability and having your slate wiped clean through baptism can be terrifying. Many of us kids would pray not to die in a car crash before we were baptized, like other people pray to not get sick before their employee benefits kick in.  So basically, Twelve year old Church of Christ kids experience a wave of devotion like a Great Awakening comprised only of 6th graders. And this is partly because we were all terrified of the devil and temptation and sin. Since, as we were told, all the bad things we’d done may have been washed clean in baptism, but the devil was waiting right outside the baptistery to try and get us to be bad again.

While I am certain evil exists I’m not sure it’s in the form of a red man with horns and pitchfork and tail.  That image that terrified me as a child is now a bit too cartoon-y for me to take seriously.

31 years later I still don’t know what to do with talk of the devil and demons or that whole “powers and principalities” thing. Like a good middle class mainline Protestant, I tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at all of it as superstitious snake handling nonsense, as though it’s all the embarrassing spiritual equivalent of a Monster Truck Rally. At best I think the talk about demonic forces I hear in some parts of Christianity is no more than a result of ignorance and lack of education; at worse it’s just a way to externalize our own sin. Because if the Devil made me do it, then I don’t have to face the reality that perhaps I made me do it. Not to mention it’s all so ripe for abuse:  some of you guys have fallen victim to other Christians trying to cast out the so-called demon of homosexuality as though spiritual warfare and culture wars are one in the same thing.

Yet I know for a fact that evil exists.  And more and more I think it’s dangerous to pretend otherwise. Call it the devil, call it darkness call it what you will, it is out there. Darfur, Sandy hook, Penn State.  But it can be more subtle than that too: white lies, self-involvement, cheating.  Addiction, compulsion, depression. There are forces that seek to defy God that swirl around us and even within us.

Which brings me back to baptism and the Devil.  How awesome is that a few minutes ago we stood here and vowed to renounce the Devil and all his empty promises.  Take a moment to take that in.  When else do you get to stand in public and renounce evil?

So were you to ask me what good is baptism to us, I would have to say that, in part, it is humans partaking in an event of God which defies evil and forever claims us as God’s own.

Which is nice theological language, but what good is it to us really?  I mean really, really.  Well…that’s where Luther comes in.  Luther had some very real encounters with what he believed to be the devil.  But for him, rather than the devil tempting him to do bad things, the devil mainly tried to get him to doubt the power of God’s promises.  When Luther started to revert back to thinking that God was an angry hostile vengeful God he knew that it was the Devil trying to get him to doubt God’s grace.  And when Luther experienced this despair and discouragement he was known to throw an occasional ink pot at the devil while yelling I am baptized! Not I was baptized, but I am baptized.

To yell I am baptized! is to again renounce the devil and all his empty promises.  To yell I am baptized! at the forces of discouragement and addiction and every other thing that tries to rob you of the peace that is yours in Christ is to again renounce the devil and all his empty promises.  To yell I am baptized! when the power of fear and self-loathing and hubris and hatred creep in to try and tell you who you are, is to again renounce the devil and all his empty promises.  And this is now at your disposal Cassie.  It may sound crazy, but use it. It should totally come in handy.

Renouncing the Devil is awesome, but if baptism is in some part about the defiance of evil and all of its empty promises, it is even more so about the receiving of God and all of his binding promises.   So today as the waters of your baptisms glisten on your head from the mark of the cross, may you know this: You had about the same chance of choosing your God as you had in choosing your parents.  This God of Sara and Abraham, this God who so madly loved the world God created that God slipped into skin and walked among us as Jesus…this God who speaks through crazy prophets and kisses lepers and makes whole that which is broken, this very God has chosen you…claimed you and named you as God’s own.  It’s a wonderful mercy.  A wild mystery to have a God who comes down to claim you in water and words forever marking you as God’s own.

These promises of God are forever bound to you Cassie.  And to all the baptized.   It’s what we call a “done deal” You can’t escape them.  Because these promises will hunt you down and bring you new life as you die and are raised again and again in your baptismal walk.

And this will happen to you Cassie; this death and resurrection of the baptismal life.

So I really hope that you grow to love metanoia, which is repentance, changing your thinking and returning to God. For in the act of repentance there is the hope of new thinking, new acting, and new life which you simply don’t get when you still think you are right about something.  Don’t listen when people say that following Christ means being right.  To follow the crucified and resurrected one is to live as a people who get to be wrong –and be re-born to new life in Christ.  So I hope you are often wrong Cassie …so that you might drink deeply from this grace of God which makes all things new.  Because this is now a life of returning to your baptism.

So I hope in this baptismal life ahead of you that when you encounter water – this most common of substances which surrounds land and comprises our bodies…I hope when you drink it in; when you dive deep in a pool of it; when you wade in a stream of it; that even when you wash dishes with it; I hope that you are reminded of the promise of life eternal: a promise that life with God is as close to you as water and bread and wine and human bodies.  Because to be Christian is to know that the eternal is always contained in the present.

So may you not neglect to gather around the table in the community of Christ with all the other blessed and annoying sinners so that there you might behold who you are and become what you receive:– the very body of Christ for this hurt and broken and beautiful world.

And when voices other than God’s try to tell you your worth – when the categories of late stage capitalism or the siren song of professional advancement or the various ridiculous ranking systems in society, or your own head tries to tell you your value and trust me, this will happen, but when it does may you again remember your baptism – remember that you have renounced the Devil and all his empty promises and are marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit and that you belong to God, because nothing…nothing else gets to tell you who you are.

Amen

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/01/sermon-on-baptism-and-the-devil/

Sermon: Baptism of Our Lord and How To Tell Demons to Piss Off 9JAN11

Another great sermon from Sarcastic Lutheran with lessons in life for all of us......one may not agree with everything in it, but the core message is a crucial one for all believers and those interested. I do believe in the devil and demons and the evil they bring to this world, but I also have faith in Christ in the power to resist this evil through Him.

Sermon: Baptism of Our Lord and How To Tell Demons to Piss Off

At the Baptism of our Lord heaven simply could not contain God the Father and God the Spirit who interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to bring a very important message.  That message is that this Jesus who just moments ago was standing in line with all the other rif-raf, this Jesus who has just been baptized is the Son of God, the beloved in whom God is well pleased to offer to the whole world. That was God’s first move.  From this place of identity Jesus was then equipped for his purpose.   Check out the next few verses:
And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. ³The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” ⁴But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
And the Word that had most recently come from the mouth of God was This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased. Identity. It’s God’s first move.

I was reminded this week by my friend Dave Lose  that when The Devil says to Jesus "If you are the Son of God...." he calls into question Jesus' relationship with his Father because he knows that Jesus, as with Adam and Eve before him, is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that his is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God.”
So perhaps there’s a reason why when Jesus was baptized and given an identity and purpose from God that the devil’s first move was putting this very identity and purpose into question saying If you really are what God says you are… Identity. … It’s like the end of the spool of thread that when gotten ahold of can unwind the whole thing.

I wonder if we too are vulnerable to temptation: whether it be temptation to self-loathing, or self-agrandisment; depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence….I wonder if we too are prone to these temptations precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from and relationship to God. We are vulnerable to darkness precisely to the degree in which we doubt the identity and purpose given us by God on the waters of our baptism.
For the record, I have very little predilection for thinking about demons or the devil or that whole powers and principalities thing.  Like a good middle class mainline protestant, I tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at all of it as superstitious snake handling nonsense. As though it’s all the spiritual equivalent of a Monster Truck Rally.  At best I think all that talk about demonic forces is no more than a result of ignorance and lack of education. At worst it’s just a way to externalize our own sin.  Because if the Devil made me do then I don’t have to face the reality that perhaps I made me do. It’s all so ripe for abuse…. some in this room have been victim to other Christians trying to cast out the so-called demon of homosexuality as though spiritual warfare and the culture wars are one in the same thing.

So I hope you hear me when I say, I in no way have any desire to believe in spiritual warfare yet in the last couple years I’ve quietly began to change my ideas about this.  Based on the Biblical text and my own experience, I now think that there are indeed forces that seek to defy God in the world and that this is demonstrated not only in the evil we see swirling around us in the world – demonstrated not only in the bullets which flew from a legal handgun in Tuscon yesterday into the head of a US congresswoman.. bullets that killed a 9 year old girl and 4 others.  That sort of defiance of God’s love and purpose for humanity is obvious.  But I think that in more subtle ways these same forces also can seek to defy God’s purpose in our own individual lives… and in our Christian communities. And the first move of the devil is always the same. Attack your identity as the beloved with whom God is well pleased.  And the precision by which the Devil, or evil or darkness (what ever you want to call it) worms into our own lives in just this way is breathtaking.  Like a radioactive isotope custom made for each of us calling into question our identity as children of God.
The longer I try to participate in God’s redeeming work in the world the more I am convinced despite my proclivity to cynisicm that there are indeed forces that seek to defy God. And nowhere are we more prone to encroaching darkness than when we are stepping into the light.  If you have ever experienced sudden discouragement in the midst of healthy decisions, or if there is a toxic thought that will always send you spiraling down or if there is a particular temptation that is your weakness then I make the following suggestion: take a note from Martin Luther’s playbook and defiantly shout back at this darkness “I am Baptized” not I WAS but I AM baptized.   When Luther himself was hold up in a castle translating the Greek Bible into German so that for the very fist time somewhat regular folks could read the Word of God for themselves, well, while he was doing this he struggled mightily with doubt and discouragement from what he understood to be the devil.  And he was known to not only throw the occasional  ink pots at whatever was tormenting him and causing him to doubt God’s promises, but while doing so he could be heard throughout the castle grounds shouting “I am baptized”.

Lutheran Theologian Craig Koester says that From an earthly perspective, evil can seem so pervasive as to be unstoppable.  And watching the evening news would seem to support that  idea. But from a heavenly perspective evil rages on earth not because it is so powerful, but because it is so vulnerable. Koester claims that Satan rages on earth because he has already lost and he is desperate”   So if you are going to join me in this crazy practice of picturing our discouragement and doubt as a force that wants to defy God then join me in picturing it not as powerful and unstoppable but picture evil and darkness for what it is:  desperate and vulnerable…. because a light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not, will not can not overcome it
And when the forces that seek to defy God whisper IF in your ear….if God really loved you you wouldn’t feel like this…If you really are beloved then you should have everything you want … Remember that you, all of you, have been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit in your.  God has named you and claimed you as God’s own in the waters of your baptism.  You, like our Lord, have been given identity and purpose, so when what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God’s grace and mercy in your life and then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it “I am baptized” because the water that covered you in God’s promises in your baptism is simply the only thing that gets to tell you who you are.
And this is not a matter of having high self-esteem.  This is about nothing less than God’s redeeming purpose in the world and that purpose will prevail.  Indeed has already prevailed. Amen.