Derek Prince - Satan's Main Influence On Us
That’s Satan. Wherever pride enters the human heart, for that’s the influence that caused Satan to rebel against God, pride brings us under the control of Satan. It doesn’t matter whether we are Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics, that’s not the issue. The issue is, what’s our heart attitude toward God. And unless we have a heart that is truly submitted and surrendered to God through Jesus Christ, we can use all sorts of nice religious language, and lay claim to all sorts of titles, but the fact is that we are under the king leviathan. Because he is king over all the children of pride.
How many sermons do you hear against pride? You don’t need to answer that. Basically, I think the church today is majoring on minors. I know when I was a pastor years ago I was right down on people’s smoking. That was terrible. The problem was we would not have people in our congregation at that time that smoked. But we did not say anything about people that quarreled with their wives. And I felt such a hypocrite when I told a young man that he could not be a member because he smoked. And I knew there were people in the congregation that were very wrong in their attitude and relationships to their wives or to their husbands.
See, things like smoking, drinking and drunkenness are just little branches on the tree. But you know what the root is? Rebellion. And the Gospel of Matthew, in introducing the Gospel, causes John the Baptist to say: Now also the ax is laid to What? ...the root of the tree. That's right. That’s what we should be aiming at.