Oh. Yeah. He is absolutely right.
The first night of our trip to Seattle in October of last year we had a profound sense of "You are not welcome here" as we walked around downtown. Crazy feelings like "the people of this city will never take you seriously" and "you are not good enough for us" were almost crippling.
The funny thing was that every person we had encountered was very gracious to us. There was something else.
In C.S. Lewis's masterful satire, The Screwtape Letters, the author comically writes in a demon's voice calling God Almighty "the Enemy." The entire set of letters from an experienced demon to his novice nephew describes God as the Enemy of everything darkness and deceitful. In the same way, the more we do not follow the prince of the power of the air (see Eph. 2:1-3), the more we are a threat to the culture he works to create.
Just because we are in Christ, we are a threat. Not just because Lewis said so, but because Jesus did:
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. (John 15:18-19 ESV)
Before I write about how "the world" will hate us the more we are like Jesus, I want to remember that there are maleficent powers behind that hate. We are unwelcome. We are always unwelcome to darkness.
We are unwelcome, but we are not uninvited.
We are invited into a life where things will not be "safe," but in which we will know that even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we don't have to fear any evil.
We are invited to a life where we may be intimidated, but never alone.
I long for the day where my heart isn't weighed down in believing the lies of the real enemy, but until that day comes I will hold to this precious truth:
"My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." (Psalm 73:26)
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