Satan's Tools--Accusation

I Peter 5:8 (NLT)  Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.
Revelation 12:10 10 Then I heard a loud voice shouting across the heavens, “It has come at last—salvation and power and the Kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ.  For the accuser of our brothers and sisters has been thrown down to earth—the one who accuses them before our God day and night.  11 And they have defeated him by the blood of the Lamb and by their testimony.  And they did not love their lives so much that they were afraid to die.
Divide and conquer are tactics of Satan.  His tool to separate is accusation.  He wants to separate you into isolation so that you feel alone and forsaken by friends and God.  From the time you first realize how much God loves you, Satan begins to erode that certainty.  You begin to lose that awareness of His love that had driven you forward and upward into that relationship that was above all other desires or relationships.  Other things crowded out the thought of God or the time to spend with Him.  The delight began to fade.  Tragically so does trust and faith.  Long-time Christians belittle that childlike faith until the numbness of unbelief begins.  The accusation of Satan against God becomes lodged in the soul and soon you doubt the very Love that brought you to freedom.

Satan is also the accuser of your family relationships.  This accusation of another to you enhances your feelings of self protection.  Protecting yourself becomes a deception, for you can no longer follow closely the Lamb Who gave Himself for you.  Following afar off gives you more room to follow your own desires.  The problem is that agreement with Satan becomes more comfortable than your agreement with God's Word.  Voicing blame, criticism and even antagonism becomes a weapon of self-defense against viable or imagined wrongs.  It is easier to see wrong in someone else than face it in yourself.  Opinions formed in such a climate are very hard to break or be forgotten.  These chains that bind you become as uncomfortable to you as to those around you.  Bridges are formed that no one wants to cross.  Families become disfunctionable.  This happens also in the Family of God.  Opinions of ritual, doctrine and what is considered sin begin to erode connection between individuals and churches.  We do not realize we are working for Satan and not for God.  We become accusers.

What is the answer?  The love of God.  God loves.  Because He loves, we, too, are enabled to love.  When we listen to Satan and lose sight of God's great love for us, we begin to lose that ability to love.  Go back to that first realization of God's love for you and how He revealed it in Jesus Christ, and follow the Lamb.