Like a Witch, and I Don’t Mean Samantha

 

When I grew up, my long black hair caused me to typecast myself year after year as a witch on Halloween. Samantha on Bewitched proved, after all, that witchcraft was fun and innocent. And I must admit that something in me wished I could manipulate my crumbling world with a twitch of a nose. 
As time went on, I confronted the reality of evil in the world and in my own heart, and I committed my life to Christ. The idea of celebrating anything demonic—a seance, a Ouija board or a booklet of spells from the grocery store checkout line—positively made me shudder. (Maybe that will help some of you understand my revulsion to the purple beads given to me by the guard at Universal Studios.)
I recognized that though I hadn’t been a witch, I was something equally bad: a rebel. I rebelled against God, and in God’s eyes, that’s on the same plane as witchcraft—the stuff of Satanic worship, not the stuff of a cutesy 1960s sitcom.
For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
–1 Samuel 15:23

Rebellion is the determination to elevate your way over God’s way. Plain and simple. It is sin, aka iniquity. And idolatry is putting anything or anyone in place of God. So rebellion is actually a form of idolatry because it involves putting yourself, your desires and your agenda over God, His Word and His Will.

So let’s say God tells you to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and that works well for you—except when you make certain judgment calls. Except when you deal with certain people. Except when you are asked to put your agenda through the filter of His truth.

If this is you, my friend, I beg you to repent. In your rebellion against God (“against You, You only, I have sinned,” David said in Psalm 51:4), you have stirred a bushel of self-will into your cauldron of sin, and the stench of it reaches as far as heaven. 
Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out.—Acts 3:19
Evil is real. Judgment is certain. Life is short. Eternity is long. Turn to God while you still have life. And then celebrate newness of life in Christ.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!—2 Corinthians 5:17
This message has been brought to you by a former rebel who used to dress like a witch.