Stuff Christians Like

My wife directed me to this blog tonight, and I have definitely added it to my favorites list.

Here is one blog post I found particularly insightful and entertaining:

I don’t know if hell has a PR department, but if they do, they’ve done a bang up job of getting satan worked out of the modern Christian vernacular.

I didn’t realize this until recently. In my attempts to be a relevant, culturally aware, cool Christian, I’ve virtually eliminated any mention of satan from my conversations. I’ll talk all day about building community or how to use social media to grow social justice, but satan? That guy gets a free pass.

In almost 700 posts on Stuff Christians Like I’ve only mentioned him seriously maybe 5 times. Here are the posts I’ve written that really reference him …

#15 Calling satan “the enemy”

#206. Putting the devil “on notice.”

#247. A bizarre relationship with CAPITALIZATION. (which explains the lowercase s I keep using)

That seems like a tremendous oversight in some ways. And maybe you’re the same way. When was the last time you and your Christian friends talked about satan or lucifer or the enemy? I feel like to some degree, I associate satan with old school Bible beaters. He’s part of the previous, sweaty generation, but not mine. And I’ve seen friends make the same assumption with some of the things they’ll tell me:

“As long as you’re happy and communicating in your marriage you’ll never be tempted to have an affair.”

“It’s college, that’s what everyone does in college. I’ll settle down later.”

“I know it’s not age appropriate, but my kids really love that show, so what can I do?”

Those statements aren’t a big deal if we lived in a world where we didn’t have an enemy that was actively and aggressively fighting us. Those statements don’t matter if we didn’t have a force of evil that was delirious with hunger for you.

My dad thinks it’s because we typically like to edit John 10:10. We love to roll around in the second half of that verse. We’ll make mugs and calendars with the last part:

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

But the first half of that verse is a lot less sexy. In fact it’s scary:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy”

What’s the solution? To tell you the truth, I don’t have an easy fix. But on Stuff Christians Like, I’m declaring today “National Satan Awareness Day.” (I’m not going to lie to you, I was going to write this as National Awareness Day of Satan” just so I could see if I could get a bumper sticker that said, “I’m kickin’ NADS with prayer.” But I’m apparently very mature and was able to resist. Sort of.)

I don’t think we need to obsess on satan, but I think we need to be aware that he’s out there. And I think we need to pray that the protection and peace of a God who is bigger and stronger and already beaten him will continue guiding us.