Sifted Saint

"Simon, Simon, Satan has asked me to sift
you as wheat. But I have prayed for you,
Simon, that your faith may not fail"
(Luke 22:31,32, NIV).

Place your name, where Simon name is! 

Sifting wheat involved placing grain in a
sieve and shaking it hard to remove the chaff
from the kernels, separating the usable part
from the unusable. In human terms, sifting
means "to agitate and prove by trials and
afflictions". You could say that the process
separates that in us which is usable to God
from that which isn’t.

The King James Version of this verse reads:
"Satan hath desired to have you, that he may
sift you as wheat."

So the question is, who’s doing the sifting
here, God or the devil? The answer is both.
God is Sovereign. The devil can’t do anything
without His permission. But the purpose for
sifting us is different for each. Satan’s goal
is to prove our faith weak and lead us to abandon
Jesus. God uses trials to increase our faith and
to draw us nearer to Him.

For awhile, it looked like the devil was winning
with Simon. When Christ was arrested, he cowardly
denied three times that he knew Jesus (Luke 22:54-62).
But God always wins out in the end. Simon, as the
renamed apostle Peter, was a mighty voice for the
LORD in the face of persecution. Eventually, he
was martyred for spreading the Gospel.
Friends, you and are being sifted just like Simon
was. The devil would like our chronic health
problems to pull us away from God. But just as
Jesus prayed for Simon to stand in faith and
resist the devil, so, too, is He praying for us
to draw near to God in the midst of difficulties
and stand firm in Him.

Simon Peter gained the ability to be strong in the
LORD when he was filled with the Holy Spirit
(Acts 2:4). When Jesus anoints us with the Holy
Spirit, we, too, are given the power of God to
overcome the attacks of the devil. We don’t have
to fear the sifting process because Jesus is on
our side.

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