Good afternoon everyone, MB here once again. Have you ever wondered exactly what? The verse in James 4:7 “ resist the devil and he shall flee from you” actually means? I know I have and I have a theory. If you’ll allow me to, I’m gonna share that theory with you now.

We’ve all heard those words from scripture, “ resist the devil and he will flee from you ” found in James 4:7. What does that actually look like though? I’m sure a lot of us get an image of the devil running away, but in a world where we cannot visually see him and his demons running away from us what does that look like?

In order to understand what this actually means, I’ve learned to change the scripture in my head slightly. So that it says “resist temptation and it will leave you.” if we do that, then you get a real world, flesh and bone visual representation of it. If you find yourself addicted to something sinful, if you cut yourself off from it long enough, and you resist the urges when they come back to you through the power of the Holy Spirit, they will leave you. For those who are addicted to X-rated material for example… if you bring that addiction to Christ and allow him to take it from you, you will eventually lose your hunger for those things. You will eventually lose your desire for the pleasure that you once felt in dealing with those things. Is it immediate no but such as the case with any addiction. It takes strength, it takes time and it takes dedication to beat an addiction such as that.

The time it’s going to take for you to beat an addiction and therefore the time it’s going to take for the devil to truly flee from you is different from person to person. It’s a conscious choice that you have to make to not indulge in sinful activity. It’s a conscious choice for you to say no… I’m not doing that anymore., no, I’m not acting that way anymore, no, I’m not living like that anymore. Once you make that choice, the devil‘s actually gonna try harder to make you fall. He’s going to try to make you falter. He’s going to try to make you back off on the decision and or promise you made. And he’s going to keep trying until he sees that those methods of temptation are no longer working on you.

Does the devil truly flee from us? No, and he never will not until the day we die and he’s forced to leave us alone because we will be with the king… Because we will be with Jesus. What he actually does is change his tactics. He’ll move on from the sin that once got your goat as it were and try to bring in a new one to replace it. He’ll try to bring a new way of controlling you into your life. And just remember when something flees from you it always can come back if you let it.

If you really think about it, the sin doesn’t actually flee from you. You just turned your back on it, you repented… or Metanoia which is the namesake of our little website here.

If I may invoke the actual name of this page, Metanoia means: change in one’s way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion.”what he demanded of people was metanoia, repentance, a complete change of heart”

When you repent of a sin, when you turn your back on it… You can no longer see it. You can no longer interact with it, and since it no longer can influence you, the devil won’t use it.

So resist the devil and he will flee…. Completely relies on our decision to live in the changes that Holy Spirit makes within you and me.

The devil won’t flee if you keep chasing after him.

-MB