While a charming personality is of some value when a person’s spiritual life is not threatened, it does little to protect those in our care or advance God’s Kingdom when evil slithers its way into our lives unnoticed. We cannot charm evil away. The authority of evil must be severed with the sword of truth by defining the difference between light and darkness, good and evil, and faith and fear. 

As Paul instructed the Ephesians how to live out their faith, he told them not to “give place to the devil” (Ephesians 4:27). When hell attempts to enter a relationship or a place of fellowship, we are instructed not to give it an audience by attempting to charm it into submission. Its head – the place of its thinking – must be severed or we will repeat the Garden deception again allowing lies about God and His truth to move freely among us.

Too many believers want to be nice. We are not called to be nice. We are called to be kind. Kindness is not expressed by trying to nicely charm the enemy of our soul. There are times the kindest thing we can do is to swing the sword of truth midsentence and lop off the head of a lie to save those weak in discernment.

We are in a season of Church history where deceivers have diminished the stature of Jesus reducing Him to a vague universal force and giving Him equal status on the pantheistic smorgasbord of false gods.  The words of Jesus, “no one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14), are dismissed as too exclusive. The Father is called a cosmic force, an impersonal deity. We are told the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t really a physical resurrection, it was a resurrection to “higher” thinking – a burst of light into a dark world. Truth is subjective and lives in submission to our evolving interpretation of what we consider as truth. God’s original design of human sexuality is our choice. We are the new creators.

The venom of these lies and many others like them will lead people to eternal separation from God. They must be challenged not charmed into submission Cutting the head off a lie is a kind and loving act.  Until we muster the courage to speak the truth in love and become willing to swing the sword of truth with kindness, the Church and wider culture will continue to be injected with the venom of lies “so clever they sound like the truth” (Ephesians 4:14).