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I am very excited to introduce my friend Joe Barlow to you all! I was really struck by a blog he posted last Wednesday, and asked him if I could share it. To see more blogs by Joe, please visit his site: josephbarlow.com

Your ability to resist the devil is directly tied to how resolved you are about the will of God.

If you speak to a storm and it does not comply with your words, do you immediately assume that it was not God’s will for that storm to stop? What if that storm then comes and wreaks havoc in people’s lives? Do you still assume it was God’s will for that storm to have its way? Or do you refocus your resolve, go back and determine what is the will of the Lord?

The Thief comes but for to kill and to steal and to destroy, but Jesus has come to give us life and abundance (John 10:10). So then if the storm begins to kill, steal and destroy what is the source and power behind it? Is it Satan? or has God changed His mind that He now wants to kill, steal and destroy?

In the mind of Satan if he is trying to enforce his will and there is a Christian, a resolved Christian standing in his way, speaking with biblical authority and he senses a slow-down or a halt in his progress, what must his strategy be? How can he overcome a resolved Christian, full of faith, speaking with authority? He must attack the resolve. He must come against that Christian’s willingness to stand. The quickest way for him to do that is through the door of doubt. “Hath God said?” It’s literally the oldest trick in the book. If Satan can seed your thinking with some way to doubt your resolve, to let up on the choke hold that is literally strangling his forward motion, then he can make it past you. Once your resolve is gone, you are gone, as far as he’s concerned.

So, know what you know! Fiercely! Believe what you believe. With unflinching resolve.

Oh, did you feel that? Did you feel your conscience being piqued? Did you sense some guilt that you were thinking anything with absolute certainty? “Who, by the way, are you? Do you think you can just command God around? Do you really think the Devil just bows to your resolve? Your motives are impure!”

Actually, most of the time the Devil won’t speak in the voice of second person, but in the voice of first person: So it will sound more like this: “Who am I? I can’t command anything. God is in charge. My motives are impure!” These weakening signals are not coming from a pure-motived Holy Spirit within but from a fearful Devil trying to intimidate you and get you to back off of your single-minded spiritual authority which to him is a great threat.

Know your righteousness!

To get to this place of single minded authority that is full of faith and effectiveness you must be trained by the Holy Spirit to be guilt-free. Since guilt is a handle with which Satan can jerk you around, you must have that handle spiritually, surgically removed. You must be cleansed from a guilty conscience. This doesn’t mean you are hard-hearted and immovable. This doesn’t mean you have no conscience, it just means you have become deaf to internal accusations claiming your guilt for things Christ has already forgiven and cleansed.

If you are in Christ there is no reason to continue in faith-crippling guilt. You must understand that you are loved by God. If you don’t know that you can’t be effective in spiritual warfare of any kind. Just go back and sit in the Heavenly Father’s lap. Go back and listen to some teaching that convinces you of God’s love for you. Go back and get wrecked emotionally by His overwhelming and unflinching love for you. Get saturated. Get deeply convicted. Get overwhelmingly satisfied of His great love for you. (If you think the last few sentences were excessive or superfluous in describing God’s love, then you don’t know His love yet. You need to get to where these words don’t describe it extravagantly enough.)

After you know God’s love for you and are confident in your relationship with him; when you have that sense of son-ship, where you know He’s your Father, He loves you and delights in you, then and only then comes a time when He points you outward to begin to govern over the creation He has made. This is the manifestation of the sons of God that all creation groans for. The Beloved. The ones who know they’re loved. Walking into this world knowing they own it all. Of course they own it all, this world is Daddy’s and He put us here, in charge, full of His authority. We have the precious name – Jesus. We have power of attorney. Nothing is impossible.

View the rest of the article here: Stilling Storms and Knowing You are Loved