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Our Son in the Unfaith,
We see that you are making progress with your charge. We applaud you for that. The enemy has enough minions preaching His infernal Word faithfully; to see this one begin to totter and swerve from his task causes me great and unholy happiness.
Might we suggest another avenue by which you might neutralize his effectiveness and so undo his ministry? Begin to work ever so subtly that he would become the focus of the sermon instead of God’s wretched Son.
That sounds like a difficult task, we know. Believe us, our general-in-unbelief struggled to get the Prince to move from faith in the infernal Word to faith in Himself and was wholly unsuccessful. And because these minions are supposed to expound the infernal Word, one would think that they would naturally stay focused on lifting up the enemy.
One way, though, you may want to proceed is to encourage your charge to begin using illustrations in his sermons that focus on his own spiritual vitality. Pretty soon, he may believe that those spiritual victories were the result of his cunning, brilliance, and strength rather than the Spirit of our enemy’s enablement.
Another way is to surround your charge with those who love to praise his “authenticity“ in preaching. That will encourage him to become more and more “authentic,“ which will mean that he will talk more and more about himself and less and less about our enemy. We love it when these pastors have “Oprah“ moments!
One final idea is to persuade him that sermons that center on the Prince are passé; instead, what people need to hear are “practical“ sermons that share his life insights. Persuade him that as he grows in influence, people really want to hear his wisdom rather than the enemy’s. It is, of course, the enemy’s wisdom against which we must guard.
In all of this, what your charge can’t be told is that any power that his ministry has is connected to his Prince; the enemy has set it up so that preaching is effective only as it centers on the Prince and what He has done. When your charge applies the bad news (he calls it “gospel“) to every part of life, then we have no hope; but when he talks about himself and his glories instead of the Prince, then we have a fighting chance.
Your Master,
Legion