Guarding Our Children from the Lies of the Enemy

This new series God has laid on my heart, Warrior Mamas, is meant to help open our eyes to the enemy’s lies that he introduces to our children through media, peers, and culture, and to help us combat these attacks in two ways:

Defensively, by guarding our children from the lies the enemy hurls
Offensively, by teaching our children to fight off the lies by rejecting them and claiming God’s truth

This first blog in this series will focus on the detrimental effects these lies have on our children as they grow and on defensively guarding them from the enemy’s deception, especially when they are young and innocent.

My next blog, Combatting the Enemy’s Lies with God’s Truth, will help us teach our kids to offensively reject lies and confidently claim God’s truth.

Finally, we will take a deeper dive into five areas the enemy uses to slip his deceptive lies into our culture: books, songs, movies and shows, peers, and social media. We will discuss ways to guard our children from these lies and teach them to fight against them using biblical truth.

The Enemy’s Strategy Against Our Children

The enemy is real. He seeks to steal, kill, and destroy, and he has no mercy on our children just because they are young and innocent. That is why we must be aware of the enemy’s attacks, and intentionally guard our children from the lies he wants them to believe. To help us understand the gravity of these lies, consider this analogy…

A Picture of How Lies Slowly Harm Our Children

Suppose there is a certain virus strategically placed in delicious foods that we eat, but people are unaware and fall into the trap of eating these desserts and becoming sick. To make matters worse, they don’t even recognize they are sick since the symptoms are subtle and blind them to the negative effects of the virus. Their eyesight becomes slightly blurred, their hearing declines slightly, and those infected over time can’t think as clearly. Because they cannot reason as well, causing poor decisions, they don’t even recognize their symptoms. The virus can even progress to cause them to only crave foods containing the virus, which further complicates the problem. Because everyone is consuming the virus to some degree and experiencing similar symptoms, no one recognizes just how harmful these foods are.

But you have been given a manual to open your eyes to the validity of these disease-causing agents and how they are harming your family and humanity. This guide helps you understand how these awful pathogens are toxic and how to spot them in foods. As you gain the ability to recognize these harmful microscopic creatures and stop eating the foods containing them yourself, you begin to think more clearly and are now on a mission to stop your family from consuming them.

At first, your children are upset with you and don’t understand. After all, these foods are delicious and pleasing to the eye, and all of their friends are eating them too. You share the manual to help them recognize what is truly in these foods and how to spot them by their subtle yet apparent traits.

As you help your children understand what this virus does, why it is so harmful, and how to spot it in a variety of sweet treats, they begin to recognize the virus on their own, have a personal conviction to stay away from it, and even begin to tell their friends about the harmful effects of the foods. As a result, they begin to see more clearly, hear better, and make better decisions, which in turn helps them succeed and thrive in life.

How the Enemy’s Lies Affect Our Children Spiritually

This virus represents the lies of the enemy and how these lies can make us and our children spiritually sick. These lies are so infused into our culture through books, movies, songs, friends, and social media, that they are hard to spot. Once our children begin to believe them, other wrong beliefs flow from them. They no longer see the world from a Biblical perspective. They start to live their lives based on the world’s belief system, stemming from the enemy’s lies, and apart from God’s purpose. Just like the virus slowly distorted vision, hearing, and thoughts, the enemy’s lies lead our kids away from God’s plan for their lives without them even realizing it. From these lies flow wrong beliefs that in turn cause them to make wrong decisions.