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The Third Satanic Protocol
(Too Busy to Be a Christian)
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church, California, USA
Delivery: 2006-07-28
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2006-07-31 06:03Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-toobusy.php
To be a Christian, one must not only accept Jesus’ substitutionary death for oneself and the inward working of the Holy Spirit in oneself, but one must also be a follower of the principles of Jesus. And be careful about assuming that you are already doing that. There may be principles taught by Christ where one is far behind. Very far behind.
If we will be honest, we will realize that some of us are at risk of being too busy to be a Christian.
God’s Word commands us many things that we need to do. It also commands some things that we must cease from.
The casual listener by now has guessed that this is a sermon about the Sabbath. Not so, at least, not primarily so. Consider the following saying of Jesus. We find it at Matthew 13:3-9). Jesus said,
Behold, a sower went forth to sow; and when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear (Matthew 13:3-9).
Jesus went on to interpret the parable in verses 18-23.
Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower. When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the way side. But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended. He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful. But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty (Matthew 13:18-23).
The First Satanic Protocol
God has something in process. But so does His enemy. Jesus here outlines three Satanic approaches. First, a direct demonic influence. “The fowls came and devoured them up” (Matthew 13:4). According to Jesus, demons come and catcheth away that which was sown in the heart. In this case, God’s message was given, it was transmitted to the heart. There was conviction of spiritual realities in a general way, but the message was not understood in any specific. There was also demonic access to the heart. Fallen angels entered the citadel, they strolled right into the capital of the man, carefully dislodged the half-received message, and quietly, deftly removed it.
The Second Satanic Protocol
The second approach is less direct—merely the long-term creation of shallow people. Satan takes advantage of the degeneracy of man, persistently bringing influences into the life that shrink the mental and emotional horizon, that center the life in minutia, culture so-called, or merely that which can be called upon to stimulate. By working to keep those made in God’s image below their potential, more animal than moral, Satan reduces the pool of potential converts equipped to even try to think God’s thoughts after Him. Jesus is not the only physician out there. Satan is a physician too. But what he does is mental liposuction. He’s always looking for volunteers.
The Third Satanic Protocol
The third approach is to keep those who are too spiritual not to be attracted to God’s Word, and too bright to be trapped in a mere life of dull-minded sensory enjoyment, busy. Yes. If he can’t keep you away from spiritual things, and he can’t keep you centered on small-minded things, he will initiate the third protocol. Although you may already be a Christian, he will work so that you will be so encumbered with commitments, commitments to good things, needed things, that you are too busy to be a Christian.
Can a person be too busy to be a Christian? Jesus was enormously busy. But once He understood His mission, He knew He must die at the age of 33. He could burn His candle at both ends, at least to a point. But do you know what that point was? When it came down to being so stressful that it could threaten His spirituality, that was where He drew the line.
Now most of us are very busy people. The relentless, frenetic pace of life isn’t something we intentionally choose. But one day we look around ourself and realize that we are traveling through every moment of life at 80 miles per hour—on a slow day.
We justify our imbalanced life by thinking of how Jesus remained in prayer all night (but He didn’t do that every night!). We think of the word where God urges us whatever we do to do it with might (Ecclesiastes 9:10). We think the of the need, we see the gaps where our fellow church members are not helping.
Did you notice what Jesus said about Satan’s third protocol? “And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them” (Matthew 13:22). God sowed His seed through His servant. The message was from God. It came. But the nature of the hearer this time was, it fell among thorns. Notice that these are active, these are growing thorns. They are rapidly growing thorns. The thorns multiplied very quickly.
You know how it is with a flower bed. From time to time you need to maintain it. You want to keep the weeds down. If you do not keep pulling up the weeds, some are very fast growing and they will get up above the plants you are trying to cultivate. They will begin to blot out the sunlight. The good plants will find it even harder to grow, meanwhile the unwanted weeds have broken out up above the other plants and are basking in sun and rain and growing ever sturdier and thicker. Here is the very scenario Christ lays out. “The thorns sprung up, and choked them.”
The seed was there. But realize that it is seed. It needs to lodge firmly in the soil. It needs to germinate. It needs to sprout up and break through the surface and present its green infant blades to the world for sunlight that plants use in photosynthesis. In a rain forest sometimes only one percent of the light that reaches the canopy reaches as far as ground level. How tall are the thorns getting in your life?
Jesus explained Satan’s third protocol this way: “He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22). These people are listening. They hear the Word. There is not even a problem here with understanding. They understand the Word—they receive the Word. But Satan’s subterfuges are operating, and they are closely related.
The care of this world is one of Satan’s devices. There are many good and not necessarily evil activities involved in a life. Providing for your family, whether at a nine-to-five job or all day in the household is a positive. But what if you become too busy? What if addressing the basics of everyday living becomes so overwhelming that spirituality begins to suffer? What if you begin to slack on your morning devotions?
So many things—good things even—can consume. Even church life. Keeping a church spiritually operational takes a lot of hearts and a lot of time and energy. Do we come here to consume or to give? Is a church dysfunctional when you hold a class in Bible Worker training and one person shows up? Could it be that some of us are wearing ourselves out and that we don’t have time to do God’s work of soul-winning?
Prayer time decreases, phone time increases. If we are spending more time on the phone talking to people than we are praying and talking to God, could it be that our priorities are messed up? Now that we have cordless and cell phones, aren’t we spending more time on the phone than in previous years? And some of us have those giant television sets now, and satellite receivers. Hundreds of channels. And if it is not television, there is always the internet. Hundreds of channels? You could surf the web from this moment for the next 100 years and you’d only visit a fraction of the available content. All this can easily become part of the deceitfulness of riches.
Now keep this in mind too. God’s truth lays a very heavy demand upon the believer. Brothers and sisters take up responsibilities and tasks that need to be accomplished in order to keep a church running, and the stack just gets higher and higher. This takes its toll on a person psychologically, don’t you think?
The more it means to us to try to do the right thing, the more dangerous it is for us to fail. It costs more to try to be right—and to fail. And we don’t like to fail. Failing directly stresses us.
They did an experiment. They set up this situation where they brought people in and gave them a performance evaluation. One group was given a negative evaluation in a room with mirrors on every wall. The other group was given a negative evaluation but in a room where there were no mirrors on the walls. They timed the people, how long they lingered in the room after being evaluated. The numbers showed that people did not stay as long in the room with the mirrors as they did in the room without mirrors. When they had been evaluated as failing, they did not want to spend any extra time looking at themselves. It costs something to fail. We tend to take one incident of failure and generalize from that to accepting the idea that we really are failures. So we don’t want to fail.
They did another experiment. Monkeys worked in six hour shifts pressing a button to avoid electrical shocks. The monkeys were actually very effective. They only needed a few shocks to learn the ropes. Or so things seemed. After about three weeks do you know what happened? The monkeys died. They did animal autopsies and found ulcers. Now the ulcers had not been caused by the electrical shocks. Other monkeys who had received the same number and power of electrical shocks were fine. Here’s what they determined. For the button-pressing monkeys, the stress became fatal without requiring anything bad to happen. What killed the monkeys was the demand for constant vigilance. It was the alertness needed to be ready for the threat that killed the monkeys. Under the stress of constant vigilance they developed ulcers and died. You see, you can be under a great deal of stress without ever experiencing a harmful event. But what if you are constantly working, constantly worn out, relentlessly active in doing the Lord’s work because others are slacking?
Now you know how this goes, don’t you? The vast body of a church becomes preoccupied with the care of this world and the deceitfulness of riches. Many are so busy following and swallowing Satan’s third protocol, that they begin to slack. Even at home spirituality becomes second place. The Christian life is reduced to a few hours on Sabbath morning. Just like in some of the sunday churches. Same drill; different day. The seventh day Sabbath becomes the seventh day pretense. We are not only no better than our Sunday counterparts, but more censurable, because we should know better. We do know better. But the operational needs of the church are left to bear down on a few valiant hearts—hearts that may sometimes be just barely ahead of the curve of collapse; maybe they are just inches ahead of breaking. Meanwhile, too many are lollygagging around the barracks. The fruit we enjoy, but we are draining the blood of our friends. Are we putting this too strongly? Don’t we all know this is true. But we haven’t done well with finding an answer.
Well, we know that Jesus went on to describe the good ground hearer, the one who hears, and understands, and brings forth fruit. And what a ratio! Thirty, 60, even 90 returned to one. This is telling us about an extraordinary kind of efficiency. If we are on God’s team and doing things His way then will we not, rather than choking under the care of the world, rather experience this level of efficiency? And did you notice that in both cases—the eventually thorn-choked hearer as well as the good ground hearer—they both hear the word and both understand the word? The difference is that in the one case the laziness of one group of church members means overstressing the other group. But in Christ’s system, the third protocol is defeated. The church works together like a well-oiled machine. The burden is shared, the load is distributed, the gospel is effectively advanced, present truth is powerfully delivered, souls are saved.
Which picture do you see for us here? At this church?
You want the good picture don’t you? The vast majority of us pulling together, in unison, the Spirit moving, the work of God advancing. So how do we get there?
A Formula
The Scriptures suggest a formula. There is in this Word help for people just like you and just like me—people who are prone to be too busy to be real Christians. But the only way it is going to happen is if we radically reorder the priorities and the activities in our lives. And experience suggests that most who hear this message, and even who understand it, may have a very hard time in implementing it.
Don’t walk out of here today with your toes stepped on, flattened, and fail of getting the benefit. We can do this. So how?
Must Have: A Personal Walk With Christ—But Then Less of What?
Everyone has to have the root, the source. Your water must be from the true spring. If you don’t have a personal walk with Jesus, you don’t have anything. Everything starts with Jesus. In our hymnal this is exemplified by the Spiritual. “In the morning when I rise, In the morning when I rise, In the morning when I rise, give me Jesus.” To get the thought, let me recast the thought. Try “O, if I want to breath, O if I want to breath, O if I want to breath, give me air.”
Have you talked with God today? Notice, talked with. Not just talked to, but talked with. Telling. And listening. Can you say with John speak as a heart witness of
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you (1 John 1:1-3).
If you are not having an experience of living personal devotions, what will it cost you to have it? Will you have to go to bed earlier so you can get up earlier? Will you have to set aside the morning newspaper and read it after you get home from work? Is there a television program you are watching in the morning that you can watch a different time? Or not watch at all?
Do you have a good, serious Bible for devotional reading? Some become distracted by looking up all the texts in the margin. There is certainly a time and a place for that. But some have also found that reading through over and over again large tracts of Scripture helps wallpaper the mind in spiritual things. Do you have a quality Bible with readable-sized and formed text? Do you set it in the same place at the end of each day so that you can find it in the same place at the beginning of each morning? Have you made it a practice to kneel before Him first thing in the morning, consecrating hour day and yourself to Him? And if you have mobility problems with your health, do you at least mentally consecrate your heart to Him from a sitting or laying position?
Hear from God, talk with God, before your email, before your television or radio. His mercies are new every morning. He has something new to share with you every morning.
Must Have: More Spirituality In the Family—But Then Less of What?
We are guardians first of our own walk with God, but secondly, of the walk of our family. The family can be a great challenge in this respect, because they see us every day. If we fail of modeling Christian behavior, they see it. And especially in the spiritual realm, in one’s own house and own country it is the hardest (Matthew 13:57). Again, in practical, pragmatic terms, doing what we can often comes down to how we spend time.
Consider: “The curse of the Lord is in the house of the wicked: but he blesseth the habitation of the just” (Proverbs 3:33). “In the house of the righteous is much treasure: but in the revenues of the wicked is trouble” (15:6). “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
Is there treasure in your house? Do you take devotional time each day with whoever is there? Is there structure, of any kind, in your home? Morning or evening prayer? Prayer before or after meals? Did you know that Jews pray after the meal too?
Prayer should never become a mere form; it should always be meaningful, it should always be from the heart. Is it that way in your home? Can it be prayer from the heart if it is done unthinkingly? How can I change things in my home so that I materially improve its spiritual riches, so that it becomes not just a place where I live, but a spiritual space? Not just the space, but the conversation, the activity in your home—how can it be more spiritual? Changing the ambiance means more than putting on a Christian CD. Often it means starting with a plan of removing unchristian media.
Sabbath is an opportunity. What can I do to make it a delight rather than an apparent burden? Can you take the family out into some space filled with the Creator’s paint work of greens and browns and blues?
Must Have: Higher Priority For the Church family—But Then Less of What?
We alluded to this before. Church is not just a place of getting; it is also a place for giving. It is a place for every church member to give. Yes, every church member should be returning tithes and giving offerings. But I’m not particularly talking to you about that right now. I am thinking of something much more priceless than money. I’m thinking about time and energy.Personal commitment boils down to certain irreducible terms. The value of money is relative, but when it comes down to time, no one has any extra, everyone has only one lifetime’s worth. People say, Put your money where your mouth is. Sure. We need to do that. But shall we put our time and our personal energy where our heart is? That is how things happen.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not trying to lay any guilt on anyone. Besides, those who are the most conscientious and who have actually spent their time in this Christian way, will often be the first to feel as if they have not done enough. So no, I am not trying to lay blame or cast guilt. I do want to urge each of us to think more about what we can do to help. What can I do that my brothers and sisters led of God tell me will be helpful?
Yet again, we come down largely to how we spend our time. Your time should be invested on this wise:
- My own spiritual walk. If I am not right with God, I can be no help to Him or my fellow creatures.
- My own family’s spiritual walk. Am I meeting the needs of my family, am I providing appropriately, meeting familial obligations and spiritual ones with them?
- Next (after my personal walk with God and my ordering a Christian home) comes my church family. Am I doing enough? Am I being responsible? How can I do more? Are there frivolous pastimes that get in the way? Am I adding or consuming? And isn’t it true that we should all be doing some of both—some adding to the church and some consuming at the church?
Conclusion
There are concrete ways you can help. You can respond positively when asked to serve in a capacity of responsibility in the church. You can come to church work bees; you can come to the various working and organizing meetings of the church. We need quorums. You can help with food preparation and with clean up. You can help with this or that improvement or repair that is made to the church or the school. There are times when we need to start the engines on our weed-eaters and trim down the overgrowth.
Are we willing to spend and be spent for the gospel and for the Lord Jesus. Or just to spend? Do we think of church as a valet service or a spiritual opportunity to serve? If this church asks more of you than you have been giving, will you drop into the convenient California church-hopping mode?
I suggest these things to you for your own spiritual growth. And you know I am right. We have it easy and our spirituality will rot unless we take heed to ourselves. Moses warned his people, “Take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons” (Deuteronomy 4:9).
Friends, brothers, sisters, unless we make radical (such an overused word these days) changes in our lives, the thorns of the world around us will grow up and, even if we hear it, even if we understand it, choke our walk with him. Overwork can do it. Under work will certainly do it. What influences are you surrounding yourself with in life? Will someone here today, between you and the Lord, ask God to help you take steps to a dramatic reordering of your life, a new you? A you that pitches in and in whom faith worketh by love? (Galatians 5:6).
Service grows character. What steps are you taking to grow yours? Striving to help your family toward the kingdom develops character. Creatively sharing your faith with others grows character. What gifts has God given you to build up His church? what steps are you taking to mortify the deeds of the body (Romans 8:13).
Our purpose at the end of this message is not to shut the whole church down by urging those who are overworking to drop everything. Our purpose is to wake some up so that they can reorganize their priorities and their lives so that they can live the Christian life in their homes and in their church family. We would like to see some of you who are hear today, in the next three months, so reorganize your life that you can become a more persuasive Christian in your home and in the midst of your church family. In so doing, some will take up duties that have been braking your brother’s and sister’s backs and help this church come closer to its potential to be the premier witness for Christ in this community.
Are you too busy to be a Christian? What will a man give in exchange for his soul? What price will you pay? If it costs you a reallocation of just one hour a day—even just one hour—is that too high a price to pay for eternity? Is that too high a price to pay to be a blessing to others? May Heaven help us to rightly weigh and decide today—fresh—for Christ. GCO
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