“Let us fight the devil with God’s word.” || George Whitefield

On the temptation of Christ:

Whether beset with this or any other temptation, let all us learn of our Lord to fight the devil with the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Though he had the Spirit without measure, yet he always made use of this. We pray say of it, as David did of Goliath’s sword, “none like this,” none like this. And supposing Satan should be permitted to transform himself into an angel of light, and by false impressions, and delusive applications of misquoted texts, attempt to turn this weapon upon us against ourselves; let us not therefore be prevailed on to let go, but by comparing spiritual things with spiritual, as our Lord did, find out God’s mind and our duty.

Had Christ’s children and ministers only observed this one lesson, how much strange fire would quickly have been extinguished? How much real enthusiasm been easily stopped? How may imaginary revelations have been detected? How many triumphs of Satan and his emissaries been prevented? And how much more would the comforts of Christ’s people and ministers been continued and increased, not only in this present, but also in every age of the Christian church?

But let us not be discouraged or think worse of Christ, his cause, or his word, because through Satan’s subtlety, any of us, or others, may have been drawn in to make some wrong applications of it; others have been thus tempted and mistaken before us. However, let us be humbled before God and man, and be excited by our past ignorance of Satan’s devices, to adhere more closely to the written word, and to pray more earnestly for God’s holy Spirit to give us direction by it. “Then will it still be a lantern unto our feet, and a light unto our path;” we shall yet be enabled to behave more skillfully under all our future trials.

Excerpted from Selected Sermons of George Whitefield by George Whitefield. Public domain.