07/28/2026
The Enemy Has a Target
(The Battle for My Family, Part One)
The enemy has a target, and it is your family.
Peter warned us plainly. Be sober, be watchful, because your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8).
Think about that!!!!
Not to annoy.
To devour.
So if your home has felt like it is under siege lately, the strain, the isolation, the lies whispered to the people you love, hear me before anything else: you are not imagining it, and you are not failing. You are in a real war.
I know, because twenty years ago the enemy tried to take my family apart one child at a time. He nearly did.
Let me tell you how it came to my house.
For years I traveled, serving God with an evangelistic team all over the world, gone three weeks and sometimes a month at a time. And the enemy tried to use every mile of it.
Here is the first thing you need to know about him. He does not attack a strong family head on. He picks off one member at a time. He isolates them, gets them alone, and whispers.
From the very beginning, he has only ever had one weapon. Lies. And every lie he has ever told is a version of the same three he told in the garden. Watch them, because he is still whispering them over your home tonight. And watch what the Word does to each one, because a lie only dies one way, by the truth.
The first lie: "Did God really say?" (Genesis 3:1)
He makes you doubt God's Word. If he can get you to question what God actually said, he has already won half the battle. But hear the truth that kills it: "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever" (Isaiah 40:8). God's Word is not up for debate. It stands.
The second lie: "You will not surely die." (Genesis 3:4)
He makes you doubt God's warning. He tells you there are no consequences, that the fence God built was cruel instead of protective, that you can do the thing and nothing will come of it. But hear the truth that kills it: "Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows" (Galatians 6:7). His warnings were never to rob you. They were to guard you.
The third lie: "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5)
This is his oldest and deepest lie, that God is holding out on you, that He is not truly good, that you would be better off deciding for yourself. But hear the truth that kills it: "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father" (James 1:17). He is not withholding good from you. He is the source of it.
Doubt His Word. Doubt His warning. Doubt His goodness. That is the whole playbook, and it has not changed in six thousand years. But now you have seen it. And a lie you can see, dragged into the light with the truth of God held up against it, cannot survive.
This is exactly how Jesus did it. When the enemy came at Him in the wilderness with these same lies, He did not argue. Three times He answered with three words: it is written (Matthew 4:1-11). And the devil left. The Word in your mouth is the sword that ends the fight.
And Scripture even tells us his names, and every name is a lie he speaks over you. He is the accuser of the brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night (Revelation 12:10), so he whispers, something is wrong with you. He is the father of lies, and when he lies he speaks his native language (John 8:44), so he whispers, God is not good, He is holding out on you, the very thing he told Eve. And he is the thief who comes only to steal and kill and destroy (John 10:10), so he whispers, you are alone, and no one is coming for you.
Accuse. Lie. Isolate. That is all he has. And he ran every bit of it on my little girl.
He went after my daughter Bri first, and she was just a little girl.
In Florida the mosquitoes find you the second you step outside, and for whatever reason they always found her. The bites were just part of life there. But Bri began to pick at them and never let them heal. Again and again, until the marks became so noticeable that her teacher pulled my wife aside to ask what was happening at home.
A little girl was carrying something in her skin that she could not yet say with her mouth.
Now let me answer the question some of you are already asking, because it deserves an honest answer.
Was my being gone hard on my family? Yes. It was. I am not going to stand here and pretend otherwise, and I felt every mile of it. God's design is for a father to be present with his children, and any man who tells you the road costs nothing is lying to you.
But hard is not the same as wrong, and difficulty is not the same as an open door.
Scripture is full of men with families who went where God sent them. Peter had a wife and a home in Capernaum, and he left to follow Jesus for three years. And Jesus Himself promised that no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and eternal life in the age to come (Luke 18:29-30). Moses left Zipporah and his sons behind with Jethro while he went to confront Pharaoh and lead a whole nation out of bo***ge (Exodus 18:2-5). These were not neglectful men. They were sent men. And the Word that tells us a man must provide and care for his household (1 Timothy 5:8) is speaking of provision and covering, not of a man who never leaves his driveway. My children were provided for, prayed over, called every single day from wherever I was on the earth, and brought out to stand beside me and watch thousands come to Christ. They were not neglected. They were loved, and they were covered.
So when the enemy came for my daughter, he did not find a hole in our home. He found a family that was becoming a threat to his kingdom, and he went looking for the smallest one.
And now the harder question, the one I know will get me letters.
The world has a clinical name for what my daughter was doing. I am not going to argue with the name, and I want to be very careful here, because some parent reading this needs to hear it plainly.
Get your child help. See the doctor. See the counselor. If you can, find a Christian physician who believes the Word and walks in faith, one with the mind of Luke, who was both a doctor and a man of God. Medicine is sent by God. But prayer, faith, and surrender are keys just the same. Use every one of them.
We have watched God heal instantly with nothing but a prayer, and we have watched God heal slowly through skilled hands, good medicine, and wise counsel. Both were Him. Luke, who wrote a quarter of the New Testament, was a physician. Paul told Timothy to take something for his stomach. Never let anyone shame you into choosing between prayer and treatment. That is another story I will tell you sometime.
But a name is not a cause, and a diagnosis is not the whole picture.
Because we are not only bodies. We are body, soul, and spirit, and the Word says our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the spiritual forces of this dark world (Ephesians 6:12). My daughter was a hurting little girl in real distress, and there was a real liar whispering into that distress. Those two things were both true at the same time.
We loved her, we watched her, we got her help, and we also fought for her on our knees. We never had to choose.
And if you think the spiritual side is not real, let me tell you what my family has seen with our own eyes. Over these twenty years we have been asked more times than I can count to come and pray over a house. Dark, heavy, nasty things going on in those homes. And after we prayed and put the name of Jesus over that place, it lifted. The oppression left. The house changed. I have watched it happen again and again.
The spiritual realm is not a metaphor. It is just invisible.
Now hear me carefully, because this is what I most want you to take with you today.
My daughter lacked nothing. She was loved, prayed for, provided for, surrounded by family and a church that adored her, in a good school with teachers who cared. And the enemy came for her anyway.
So if you have been tearing your house apart looking for what you did wrong, stop. Sometimes the attack is not because you failed. It is because you are following God, and the enemy has noticed.
We could have spent years fighting the wrong battle. Blaming ourselves. Blaming each other. Looking everywhere except at the one who was actually doing the whispering.
But God opened our eyes to what we were really up against. And then He handed us the weapons.
Tomorrow I will show you exactly how we fought back, and the five things we stood on that broke the enemy's grip on our home. If you are in this battle right now, do not miss it.
"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world." (Ephesians 6:12)
P.S. We're walking toward something special. This August marks twenty years since the day everything changed for our family, and I'm telling the whole story between now and then, one piece at a time. Stay close.
