E51 Are You Under Attack? How to Discern Consequences, Open Doors and God’s Refining Process (Part 1)

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Jen Cudmore (00:00)
Maybe what you’re experiencing, this trouble that’s come upon you, maybe it’s not actually an attack from the enemy. Let me explain. Many believers are quick to blame the devil when things go wrong in their lives, but there could actually be another explanation. I’ve had so many people ask me to pray over them when they encounter a difficult situation with the assumption that Satan is attacking, but that’s often not the case.

Join me for today’s discussion as we develop awareness and discernment around what’s really going on when we encounter problems and trials. Let’s dive in.

Welcome back to Into the Depths podcast where we go below the surface. We dive into who we are and we break free of who we’ve been. And today I have a topic that I’ve really wanted to talk about for a while. It just took me a little time to kind of get my thoughts together on where I wanted to go with it. And it’s just the idea that, you know, bad things happen to us. We’re always going to encounter some sort of difficult situation. That’s just part of life. But so many times when bad things

happen. Like

Someone talks bad about you. Somebody lies about you. Somebody blames you for a problem that wasn’t your fault. You’re accused of something you didn’t do or your car broke down. You encounter conflict within a co-worker. You get passed over for a promotion or a raise. You had a deal that you thought was perfect and it fell through and maybe it was a betrayal that led to the loss of a friendship. There’s just like so many different things that we encounter but we have a tendency to call those attacks from the enemy when that’s not

necessarily what they are. I believe that it is a sign of maturity when we can get to the place where we stop blaming all of our problems on the devil and we can start accepting or maybe even dealing with the ways we might have caused the mess ourselves. And so what do I mean by that? Jesus himself said in the Gospels, this world you will have trouble but take heart I’ve overcome the world. And it’s human nature that when something goes wrong we want to find a place to

lay the blame. Like we we want ⁓ a reason or we want something tangible to explain why this is happening to us.

But finding answers and placing blame is actually, it’s not helpful. It doesn’t get us anywhere. It might make us feel a little bit better, but we’re still in that situation.

we still have to learn how to move forward and handle the situation well.

Our tendency is always that we’re going to pray for God to protect us, to save us, to get us out of the situation, to have it not be so difficult. And that’s not necessarily what the Lord wants or…

the right way to pray? What if the situation simply needs us to stop resisting and just accept that it is what it is? Is it just an aspect of normal life? Is it a mess that we created or a problem that we caused ⁓ and we’re not taking responsibility? So there’s a few different things I want to go over. ⁓ So before I dive in, let me just pause for a second because I in no way want to minimize the difficulty of any situation that you might be going

through? How does that saying go? We’re either coming out of a problem in the middle of a problem or going into a new problem, right?

So my goal with this episode is just to get you thinking. want as you encounter difficult situations, I want to challenge you to develop discernment around it. And that way you can better handle it when it comes up because that’s the goal, right? We want to grow and mature as we encounter these difficulties. So here are some different reasons that you may be encountering a trial, a problem, a difficult situation. Number one, there are open doors.

in your life. So what does that mean? Open doors. Sometimes we participate in things that give the enemy access to torment us. Now this is different from an attack and so what I want to explain is this. An attack is when the enemy is coming after you to interfere with your life, to stop you from fulfilling your calling, things of that nature. When I’m talking about torment, it’s the enemy

is still in a way coming after us, He’s just stirring up trouble and he’s picking on us. That’s the difference. An open door is where we have made space for him to interfere with what’s going on in our life. So let me give you a few examples. The biggest one is unconfessed sin. We’re living in rebellion and we don’t want to admit that we’ve done anything wrong. We refuse to repent even though we know we’ve missed the mark and fallen.

short of God’s expectations. And so I would say the biggest one for this is unforgiveness. It says in the Gospels when Jesus explains to us the Lord’s Prayer and he talks about how if you don’t forgive then your Heavenly Father is not going to forgive you of your debts, of your sins.

So when we choose to hold onto offense and resentment and bitterness, when we refuse to forgive people, we are opening the door for the enemy to come in and torment us and pick on us.

So I’m gonna give you an example and this is the kind of thing that we don’t always pay attention to. But I was encountering, this was last year, 2025, okay? I

So I had a recent situation where there was someone in my home that was complaining a lot and sort of stirring up strife. And I was getting really frustrated. And after several months of me praying for relief, and God would fix the situation, finally the Lord told me, like, this is not gonna change because you have judged and criticized this family member. And because of your sin,

I can’t stop this strife from happening. It’s your own sin that it has created room for the enemy to come in and stir up strife inside of your home. So I had to confess and repent. my gosh, Lord, like I did criticize this family member. I was very judgmental and

As easy as that, once I took care of that, the strife in my home stopped immediately. But I didn’t put that together. I was blaming the other person because they were constantly complaining and stirring up negativity. And so that was just a very eye-opening example for me

It doesn’t matter like how mature you are in your faith. You’re gonna make mistakes. You’re gonna miss the mark everyone falls Everyone sins and fall short of the glory of God You’re never gonna stop sinning as long as you’re on this earth that you’re a human The catches that you want to be much more aware catch it quickly deal with it quickly and then move on so that it doesn’t disrupt your life and leave an open door for the enemy to swoop in and cause torment on you and your family and your household so That was a very real example for me

me.

Let’s move on. Another one could be unhealed wounds. If you don’t deal with the past, if you don’t deal with your hurts, ⁓ the enemy can use those against us. For example, if you maybe were abandoned when you were young or you dealt with a lot of rejection, the enemy is going to continue to create situations and get you into situations where you keep being rejected because it works. He’s going to keep using that tactic. So it’s not

attack it’s an open door that he keeps using against you to stir up trouble in your life but we don’t recognize it because sometimes we don’t realize we have unhealed wounds but then also we don’t make the connection between what keeps happening to us and the problems we keep encountering and the wound itself that has been left unhealed. So I’m going to just do more of a broad overview over all of these so if you have questions you can let me know later but for this

of time. can’t delve too deeply into each one of these, but there’s so many different ways we can have open doors. Another one is generational influences. ⁓ There are different things that we carry in our bloodline and I know that for a lot of Christians they have never heard something like this, but

The scripture talks about generational sins and iniquities that can get passed on to children from the fathers to the children. And if those aren’t dealt with…

they will perpetuate things that can impact divorce. Like maybe you’re a family where everyone continues to get divorced or ⁓ addiction or poverty. There’s so many different things that can pass down the bloodline. And so I would challenge you to look into that and make sure that you’ve taken care of that and cut that off so that it can’t become an open door for the enemy

so that the enemy won’t have access in those areas to pick on you and torment you and your family. Another one is having ungodly objects in your home. You may have items that were dedicated to idols and false gods. And because they seem cool, like I had some decorations that I had to get rid of because they were connected to a false god. had a friend who had to get rid of some artwork in one of her the rooms in her house because

it was somehow connected to a deity from a different religion. so God takes those things very seriously and those kinds of things can open us up to torment from the enemy. ⁓

Any sort of participation in a cult activities. could be like Ouija board, horoscopes, crystals, astrology, visiting a psychic, those kinds of things also open us up to the spirit realm and the enemy can get in and stir up trouble and cause issues that way as well. Another one is entertainment. think so many people are blind to this and it’s so sad because they don’t realize that their eyes and their ears are gates to what’s inside of them. And when you’re investing time in entertainment,

when you’re ingesting something, you have to be careful because video games or board games, movies, TV shows, scrolling through social media, all of those things have influence on us that we don’t necessarily easily recognize. It’s really important that you ⁓ take seriously the idea of garbage in, garbage out. If you are spending time on things that don’t honor the Lord, if you are giving your attention to things that…

are not of the Lord, you can open yourself up to the influence of the enemy. And I’m just going to give you a couple quick examples, there’s so many different ways that entertainment can cause an open door. Even like ⁓ an example would be, I used to watch football a lot and I would always come away angry.

and didn’t recognize this for like a year or two. And I eventually, and this happened to me when I was watching the news a lot too. And I had to put boundaries around that. I had to stop watching football and stop watching the news because it became an open door for the enemy to get me stirred up and get me angry about all the things that were going on. And that is not what the Lord wanted for me. It was causing a lot of… ⁓

tension and disruption within me that was so unnecessary, but I didn’t recognize it. You wouldn’t think something like that would be be evil and I’m not saying that it’s evil. I’m saying that it can cause ways for the enemy to access you and pick on you and torment you. Another example is ⁓ social media. There’s so much to this but…

The things that you see on there can influence your mindsets and the things that you believe. relationships have been ruined by things that have been said or done on social media. mean, there’s just, there’s so many ways that can be an open door

People who are involved in the occult and people who have come out of Satanism talk about how they directly target things like video games and Hollywood and social media as a means for drawing in people and getting them distracted and.

and getting them to move away from the things of the Lord. It is very real. So I just challenge you to pay attention. And then one other thing is like, there’s been a couple of times where ⁓ we have watched a movie in my home and unbeknownst to us, there was evil attached to the film and it allowed a demon into our house. And I don’t say that to scare you, but these things happen and it’s a matter of paying attention and keeping those doors

shut so the enemy cannot access them and cause you torment. As far as that specific situation it was fairly simple once I recognized what was happening you just bind up the demon and cast it out because it’s just there to cause trouble.

I know some people get really uncomfortable when you talk about the spirit realm and when you talk about demons and curses, but these things are actually real and avoiding them and not learning about them doesn’t do you any favors. So just keep in mind.

There could be things going on in your life where trouble has come because you’ve allowed it, another way to, I’ve heard it phrases, because you’ve given the enemy a legal right to torment you and pick on you because there are certain things you have allowed to happen in your life. So I just say all that again, the point is to develop awareness and begin paying attention. How am I accidentally giving the enemy access to me?

my home and my family.

The second thing that it could be is consequences because for every action there’s a reaction, right? So if you don’t pay a bill, creditors are going to come after you. If you commit a crime, you’re going to get in trouble, most likely go to jail or get a fine. If you eat too much sugar, there’s going to be health consequences. You’re going to get sick short term and long term. If you don’t put gas in your car, if you don’t take your car for a regular tune up, right? It’s going to stop working. It’s going to stop running.

So there are some things that we ⁓ encounter in life that are simply consequences of decisions that we’ve made. And it’s not necessarily sin, although that is there too. Just because you confess and repent of a sin or a mistake when you’ve missed the mark and you didn’t meet the Lord’s standard, it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have consequences. Grace and mercy don’t negate the results of that action. ⁓

While God can redeem anything and make anything better, a situation ⁓ can be made more difficult than it really needed to be because of your sin. And so you’re going to have these kinds of things happen. And it doesn’t have to be a big deal.

confessed and repented and you may need to make restitution depending on the situation you may need to like restore a relationship or you know go to a person and apologize I mean there could be other things involved in that but the thing is that

Sometimes the difficult situations we encounter are of our.

our own making, whether we did it intentionally or not, and we just have to accept it and move forward, like make the most of it and move forward. So for example, like maybe your teenager doesn’t want to anything to do with you. They don’t want to talk to you. They roll their eyes all the time. mean, I’m not talking about normal teenage behavior. I’m saying like, could it be that you were a workaholic and you never had quality time with your child? Maybe it’s because you were always focused on your interests instead of finding common interests with that, with

that kid. I mean maybe it’s because for years you didn’t speak life into them, you didn’t sew into them. There could be so many different things that

⁓ Contributed to that child not wanting anything to do with you And so once you recognize where you missed the mark or where you made the mistake, it doesn’t suddenly make that kid like your relationship perfect, right you still have to rebuild the bridge and ⁓ Put effort and intention into making that better. I mean, so that’s an example of a consequence So just some things to think about

where can you take some ownership and take some responsibility and then begin taking action steps toward ⁓ fixing that situation instead of just blaming it on the enemy and throwing up your hands and ⁓ not taking any action So and then here’s a couple other things like

A friend of mine had to have two knee surgeries in less than a year and it wasn’t because of any sin. It wasn’t anything that he did wrong. I mean, it was a matter of aging. That’s just a consequence of getting older.

We don’t blame the enemy for stuff like that. Was it a trial? Yes, it was. It was quite a growing experience and the healing took a really long time. I just felt so bad for him. But I mean, that’s just an example of of a result from a normal life experience. Another example would be there were a few times in my life where I was just exhausted and I kept getting sick and I was so frustrated and I would be like,

the enemy’s after me trying to keep me from doing, you know, whatever. And really the problem was I was too busy. I didn’t have any margin in my schedule. I did not get enough rest. I wasn’t doing enough self care. And so it wasn’t had nothing to do with the enemy. There was a result of my lifestyle that I had chosen. So sometimes what we think is the enemy coming after us is really simply just a result of a decision that we made.

we just need to make some changes and some adjustments in our lifestyle and move forward.

So the third reason that you may be experiencing a difficulty or a tough situation Normal life like there’s no reason there’s just no reason that this happened. Nobody did anything wrong. It’s just life These kinds of things are gonna typically come out of the blue

What if you get hit with an unexpected bill and it’s huge and you don’t have any way to pay it? I think of like last year, I think it was in the fall, our fridge went out and we were super frustrated. Like we didn’t have an extra 1200 bucks lying around to buy a new fridge, I knew that appliances don’t last forever. This is just.

fact of life. These are normal things that happen. So what do do? You make the most of it. It wasn’t the enemy picking on me. It was just simply part of normal everyday life. Your kids are going to get the flu. They’re going to get sick. They’re going to throw up. They’re going to have a cold or sinus infection. That is normal. And while as a mom, when you’re going through that and taking care of them, it sure can feel like a lot, but

We don’t want to blame every illness or sickness on the enemy because that’s not necessarily true Part of living in a fallen world is that sometimes sickness is going to come on us ⁓ Dogs are going to make a mess in the house, right? These things happen electronics are going to stop working Bad weather is going to cause inconveniences

There’s so many aspects of life that we make into a bigger deal than necessarily they really need to be. I’ve even I’ve seen people and I know that I have done this myself is, you know, we blame the enemy and we we feel like we’re being attacked when really it’s not. We just need to pull back, calm down and accept, OK, this is just something that sometimes happens in life and go with the flow and move forward. Whatever, you know, action or decision we need to make.

If you blame the devil when stuff like this happen, you can fall into a victim mentality. And so instead of, you know, trying to move forward and rectify the situation or make the most of it, we fall into a pity party and that gets us nowhere. So just something to watch for and be careful of.

The fourth reason that you may be encountering difficulties is honestly about formation. Like the process of sanctification where we’re becoming more like Jesus every day. I mean, if you are a believer and a follower of Jesus, you are going to be challenged to become more like him. And guess what? That means you have to encounter difficulties. What if what you’re dealing with right now is simply a test?

Just like job the whole book of job is about God testing him God was saying my this is my servant He’s so faithful and he’s so good And he allowed the enemy to come in and do all these horrible horrible things to this poor man And guess what? He wasn’t always in the best mood and he wasn’t always happy about it But he ended up getting to the place where he could accept

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. So sometimes we’re going to encounter difficulties because God’s goal is about refining us and growing our faith. It’s not about our comfort.

So much of our culture, especially in the West, is we’re all about our own happiness, our own comfort. We’re all about having a good life. And that was never God’s goal. While he does want us to succeed and he does want us to experience happiness and he does want to bless us, he’s more concerned with our character than our comfort. And I think sometimes we forget that because we get really focused on being comfortable. We don’t like to be uncomfortable, right? So

Let me throw out an example. In December, my son had a car accident. my first question to the Lord was kind of along the lines of, why did this happen? But not so much of…

How could you let this happen? was a help me understand so that I can pray for my kid and know how to move forward in this situation. And what the Lord told me immediately was he’s testing my child. He’s teaching him some things. he allowed this ⁓ accident to happen to grow his faith.

And so there were just all these different things that sort of fell into place over the span of a few days. And because my son lives in a different state, and he was so busy that we didn’t get a lot of communication from him for the first few days. And so it was difficult to not know what was going on ⁓ and just to trust that God was teaching him and showing him and helping him. And so then what I realized later is that this was also a test for me to trust the Lord with my kid, which

as a mom can be a really tough thing to do. And so looking back, I’m so grateful that this happened. He didn’t get hurt. He had a bunch of people from his church help him out. ⁓ Someone from the base came and picked him up. Like all these really amazing things happened, but God did that for him and he could recognize the hand of God in this situation. Whereas if mom and dad had swooped in and tried to help him fix it, he wouldn’t have learned the things that he needed to learn. And so while our human nature is

is to get this fixed, get it done right away, don’t have anybody have to deal with pain and discomfort. That wasn’t God’s goal in this situation. He wanted the suffering. And that can be really tricky for us is that why would God want us to suffer? And it’s not that he wants to cause us pain or that he enjoys us being in pain. It’s nothing like that. It’s the point of… ⁓

We learn obedience by the things that we suffer and the refiner’s fire is painful. In order for him to make us into who he’s designed us to be, we have to go through suffering and difficulty so that it draws out the good in us and it shaves off the bad. So there’s a Bible verse I wrote down here. Hebrews 5, 8,

The scripture talks about how Jesus, who was the son of God, in human form, he still had to suffer while he was on this earth. And so the question that I have asked myself multiple times over the years is if Jesus was the son of God and he learned obedience from the things that he suffered while he was a human on earth, how much more for me?

to have to suffer to learn the things that the Lord wants me to learn. And we don’t like that. We don’t like the concept of suffering being part of God’s plan for us,

But suffering is actually good for us. And that’s something that I want to go into a whole lot more later in another podcast is about why God allows suffering and how we as a culture over the last one or 200 years have really developed this mindset that if God loved us, he wouldn’t allow us to suffer, which is it’s a relatively new concept because for thousands of years, everyone just

Accepted that suffering was part of life and we’ve we’ve entered this sort of new new era her new phase where we’ve developed this idea that Suffering is bad for us when actually it can be really good for us And so I’ll delve into more of that later. All right now. I was trying to just do an overview of the whole concept of Dealing with difficulties, so I’ll just wrap up this idea of how the scripture says in James 1

verses two through four, consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of any kind, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may mature and, so that you may become mature and complete, not lacking anything. So what if this difficulty that you’re going through is actually the Lord trying to grow you and stretch you, make him more like you, ⁓ strengthen your faith, those kinds of things.

Yeah, you are going to experience a direct attack from the enemy at times when you are smack in the middle of the Lord’s will when you are doing the things he’s called you to do the enemy is going to do his best to try to disrupt that create problems stir up trouble to prevent you from accomplishing God’s will to prevent you from doing your kingdom assignment. Yes that

is going to happen. But I think that a lot of times the difficulties we encounter get blamed on the enemy way too often. So as difficult situations arise, instead of rushing to blame the devil and

tell everybody that you’re under attack. What if you were to pause and just have a little chat with the Lord and ask him the source of the problem? Is there something that you need to own? Maybe you need to take responsibility and deal with the situation. Maybe you just need a role with it. Maybe you just need to accept that there was no reason that this happened. You aren’t being picked on and maybe God just wants you, maybe God’s trying to grow your character and he just wants you to practice more endurance or resilience. Maybe he wants to build fortitude or patience. Maybe he wants to teach

you another level of what it means to forgive. mean there’s just so many different things in our journey that God challenges us on. So as you go about this week, let’s explore the depths of this final thought. You will always encounter trouble, but if you don’t recognize the source of the problem, you can’t handle it correctly and you’re gonna make life harder on yourselves a lot of time. So when a negative situation arises, make it a habit to go to the Lord. Instead of blaming the enemy,

accept what you might need to accept Get healing where you might need healing confess and repent if it’s a situation where you miss the mark as you take responsibility though and you begin to handle trials well, you’re gonna mature in your faith and you’re gonna become a better version of yourself and you’re gonna make God proud of you. So bless you friend. I’ll see you next time