Welcome back! If you are just joining us, we are using the YouVersion Bible App to follow a devotional together. Read THIS POST to get all the information you need to join in and then you can read THIS MORNING’S POST to see the promises we are focusing on this week.

I chose my verse this week easy enough but I decided to expand the promise one verse further because I really liked the Message translation and it tends to group verses together a bit more. This is why I encourage you to check out these promises in various translations because God may use one to speak more clearly to your heart than another.

True believers overcome the world system. 1 John 5:4

“Every God-begotten person conquers the world’s ways. The conquering power that brings the world to its knees is our faith. The person who wins out over the world’s ways is simply the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God.”

— 1 John 5:4-5 (MSG)

Do you ever find yourself starting to believe the lies of the world? The world starts telling you that you should be doing more, that you should be doing better, that you should be “having it all.” We live in a society that tells us that without sparkly backdrops and pristine pictures and cleaned off counters that we’re not doing it right. That if our kids aren’t riding a bike by the time they’re four and reading when they’re three and speaking eight languages by the time they graduate college that we’re doing something wrong as parents.

Okay maybe that’s a little extreme but the lies the world tells us as parents are getting more and more absurd and we need to be careful about what we let into our hearts and what we choose to believe.

Thankfully this verse promises us that we don’t need to come up with our own answers because we are already over-comers of this world. We don’t need to beat it on our own. We don’t need to defeat these lies by ourselves because we believe in Jesus and through our faith we are over-comers.

The world will throw all sorts of junk our way to try and get us away from God. It might be in the form of jealousy over a neighbors new car. It might in the form of temptation when everyone is watching a new show that could trigger past struggles. It might be in the form of actual distractions with trivial things that pull us away from what’s really important. But we can defeat every bit of junk, temptations, distractions, or feelings of jealousy because of our faith. After all, “God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13, NIV).

Your faith is a powerful force. In Ephesians Paul calls faith our shield that can, “extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Ephesians 6:16, NIV). Every arrow! Every lie, every temptation, every distraction, every everything that comes from the enemy will be defeated through our faith in Jesus. What an incredible force!

Father God, These promises about defeating the enemy through our faith in you are refreshing and empowering. I’m so thankful that we don’t need to try and overcome these battles by ourselves but by simply believing in Jesus we can defeat the world. I pray that we would all hold our shields of faith with confidence and watch the lies of this world crumble away. In Jesus powerful name, Amen.