Recently a man came up to me during church and handed me a paper, on that paper was a short write up saying this:

I saw an eagle over you

I feel God saying your prophetic and that he gives you words for people, and he is going to increase this BECAUSE HE TRUSTS YOU. He sees your heart and that you have a heart after him, and he is going to draw you closer to him.

Now, when i read he wrote "you are prophetic and he gives you words for people" and "because he trusts you" my mind was blown. To be frankly honest, Ive been thinking with satan as my right hand up in my command center for so long. Thing is, satan may be in my mind battling my faith, but God has already won the battle of faith in the heart. And same goes for every one of you reading this. You may think, why does it feel like God is so against me? How can he trust me? I've done so much wrong in my life, ive hurt people, ive manipulated people, Ive destroyed relationships, done drugs etc. How can he trust ME? A sinner? Well, there's a few reasons i feel the holy spirt is saying.

We are all worthy just as God is worthy.

Christ died for our sins, he died so that we can repent and be set free from our transgressions. So we can be used as God's right hand in his mighty army.

Because you are in him, he is in you.

God trusts us to use his power to do even greater things then he, and he is confident we will be obedient and do his works (share the gospel, heal the sick, etc)

I was running for my life, high on drugs, no clue how far behind me the man who wanted to stab me was, i could hear him screaming after me, repeating my name. Thinking to myself, how on earth has he not caught up to me? He's at least 6.2 in height and he has much longer legs then i do. So out of breath, i stopped around the corner in an effort to loose him and to hide. As i checked breifly around the corner, I saw two police cars parked in the middle of an intersection. Althought i couldent see what was going on, i had an idea of what had happened, And in my heart i could feel a calming spirit come over me, i knew then and there, it was safe to walk back to the youth shelter and that my enemy has somehow in someway, had been taken care of.

Its not always the things we see with the naked eye that save us, sometimes, its the things we don't see that saves us from the evil one. Although ill never know truly what happened that moment at the intersection , whether the man with the knife gave up, got hit by a car, or if someone random stopped him in his tracks. Whatever the reason, I knew God had the sitaution under control and that he had me protected.

Reminds me of what we were talking about in church yesterday a bit, In 2 Kings 6: 14-17 they see a glimpse of the spiritual battle (Gods army) that is invisible to the human eye. Elisha prays and asks God to open the eyes of his servant to see through the eyes of the holy spirit. And when he does , he sees chariots of fire, thousands of them, proctecting them in the same way God protected me in my sitaution. When i looked at the police cars from down the block at that intersection, i believe there were mighty warriors in the midst. Not because i was on drugs but because I had a strong sence of safety. And safety comes very rarely on the streets, i knew it was no coincedence.

Do you ever look down the block and only see the physical elements to the sitaution? Are you so focused on running from satan in fear, that you forget who you should be focused on running to for shelter and safety? For myself , i still am struggling with running from satan, but the way i look at it is that he is LOSING the race, he is no match for the Mighty God running the race with me, by my side. I encourage you to not run with a goal or a destination, but to realize we are constantly running a race against the evil one and that our destination/finish line is WITH us, there is no end to the race here on earth, there is just a constant race we run when we run with God while we are alive and breathing. And we can either run with God and continue running the good run till we reach heaven someday, or we can race the evil one in our own strength. The choice is ours to make.

I've been playing a newly released game these past few weeks quite heavily called Deceive Inc and have been absolutely loving it. Its in the extraction shooter genre and you basically go undercover as an NPC (non playable character) with 6 other players also who are undercover, all against each other, to achieve one goal; Extract the package. Now that you know a bit about the game, lets jump into the message.

We all have the mindset to make right decisions, but are they always correct? Course not, we make bad decisions too in life. One thing i catch myself being deceived by in this new game quite a bit is the fact that not all weird, odd, glitchy movements from NPC's are players. Like this ridiculously suspicious NPC I encountered just yesterday that i saw moving back and forth in a very strange way on-top of an umbrella. My first thought was he was a player who was legitimately stuck, so id put him out of his misery. Nothing in me told me i was wrong or could be wrong, i was 100% convinced that this NPC was in fact a player. By shooting my gun at this NPC, i also blow my own cover kind of like breaking out of a shell. So its very important to know when to shoot, and when to stay undercover.

It is wise to know what lies the enemy may be deceiving us with, weather it be an umbrella glitch or a NPC defying gravity, or just a random player walking past. In life, there are thieves in this world who hang around to steal your belongings, there are people who label themselves as your friend who only stick around as long as there are drugs in your pocket. Or the feeling of true love in a relationship can be deceived by a spirit of lust if tempted too much to do wrong things with each other. Its important to examine our decisions and not become affiliated with being deceived by people or satan or emotions. For us, Its super easy to blow our cover and become vulnerable, sometimes being vulnerable has its benefits. For Satan, he stays undercover, hiding yet still deceiving us behind a mask/cover that we dont recognize similar to the NPC's in Deceive Inc. He may even convince us to put cover on and hide too, this is where depression and loneliness come in to deceive us. The difference between God and Satan is obvious , but the armor given to us by each is much different. As Christians, we put on the armor of God and use the sword of the spirit (the word of God), while all Satan has is his mask and whole lotta super glue. Yes he is powerful, but we have a God who is much mightier then he is and can show us through prayer if we are being deceived by the evil one.

For myself I'll be honest, prayer has always been very hard for me, not because saying the prayer is hard, but hearing God's response. Sometimes we expect him to answer right away, but what I've been learning lately is that God works on his own time, that deceiving voice that says yes or no right away inside of my head is and has always been the enemy. We must not expect change or confirmation to happen right away because sometimes God SHOWS us the answer to our prayers instead, and only he can take the mask off Satans lies of deception in our lives through the power of prayer. To extract the package of truth and salvation, we must first give ourselves and our entire life to him, including our mask no matter how hard it is to get off our beautiful faces. If we trust in him to guide us in a walk to seek real truth and avoid false lies, we are setting ourselves up for success! We need not not blow our cover for satan and the world to see, but for God to see and for God to use our true selves for doing good. For he is who we find rest in and who we can rely on to save us from the clutches of the devil and his deceptional actions.