The Guard Dog That Only Works When It's Home

In 2019, a family in rural Tennessee installed a security system after a string of neighborhood break-ins. Motion sensors, cameras, a loud alarm — the works. But for three months, they never armed it. They'd leave the house with the system sitting idle, its red light blinking uselessly on the wall. When a thief finally broke in through the back door, the alarm stayed silent. The system worked perfectly — it just hadn't been activated.

Their neighbor, who had the same system and actually used it, never had a single incident. Burglars tripped the motion sensor once, the siren screamed to life, and they scattered into the darkness within seconds.

James 4:7 holds a two-part instruction that works exactly like this. "Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." Notice the order. Submission comes first. Resistance comes second. You cannot resist what you haven't first positioned yourself against. The family who armed their system — who submitted to its purpose — found that intruders fled at the first sign of opposition. The family who ignored it had all the same equipment and none of the protection.

When we submit our lives to the Almighty — through prayer, through surrender, through daily obedience — we activate something the enemy cannot withstand. Temptation doesn't flee from willpower alone. It flees from a soul that has already knelt before its King. The resistance that sends darkness running always begins on our knees.