God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
He who lays up treasures on earth spends his life backing away from his treasures. To him, death is loss. He who lays up treasures in heaven looks forward to eternity; he's moving daily toward his treasures. To him, death is gain. He who spends his life moving toward his treasures has reason to rejoice. Are you despairing or rejoicing?
Our Western worldview gets involved here once again. We have a strong tendency to want to analyze everything and place the parts in neat, mutually exclusive categories. So we ask questions like, How do I know whether it is the world, the flesh, or the devil? My response is that most situations will involve some of each element to some extent… (They) are treated as working together so closely that you cannot talk about one without talking about the other. The flesh is the earthly qualities about which enable us to respond to the temptation. The world is the milieu in which we live and which is under the control of 'the ruler of the kingdom of the air.' Satan and his demons know what fleshly parts of us are especially vulnerable, and they use the stimuli of the world around us to arouse sinful thought in us. The Devil would be a fool not to try to take advantage of the world and the flesh in his aim to destroy us.
