Anytime you mention Satan, you’re going to get a strong reaction, one way or another. I posted a tweet last month and got both trash talk and a lot of “likes” on my Facebook wall.

What did I write? “If Satan is not opposing you, maybe it is because he is walking with you…”

What’s so shocking about that? Look at it this way. If you’re choosing to live your daily life in a way that is not according to God’s perfect will — in other words, if you’re doing evil — that’s what Satan wants to happen. He’s going to walk alongside you and do everything he can to make sinning easy for you!

Choosing instead to resist sin is the harder road. I’d be willing to bet that most of us just give up. Jesus didn’t. Jesus is the only Man who never gave in to sin. So of course he knows how hard it is. Perhaps that’s why he said, “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).

You probably don’t even know how weak your flesh is. As C.S. Lewis said, no person knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it … (From Mere Christianity)

Walk against the wind. Don’t give in. In fact, the writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews set the bar for us — and it’s as high as the cross beam Jesus was crucified on. The author wrote, “You have not yet resisted to bloodshed.”

That may not sound very civilized, but neither is hell. Satan is real and he’s out to get you. Watch your back.