A couple summers ago, my kids and I had been swimming in a lake. Well, my kids had been swimming. I had been standing, supervising and enjoying time with my family (and wondering what was beneath the surface that I couldn’t see—lakes are creepy). Everything was going, ahem, swimmingly until we all got out of the water.
My kids were fine. But they took one look at me and screamed because I was covered in small creatures—leeches. I don’t know if you’ve ever had leeches all over you. I grew up in the country, so this wasn’t my first rodeo. But still, it’s not a pleasant surprise. As water creatures go, leeches aren’t particularly dangerous. But they are obnoxious: You have to remove them one by one.
Why was I the target of these tiny blood-sucking water worms? Because I was being lazy.
You see, if I had actually been swimming, like my kids were—moving from point A to point B—the leeches would have left me alone. They simply aren’t fast enough to swim along and latch on to people. But since I stood there, soaking in that lake, I made for an easy target.
There’s an analogy there, I think, for what it means to live in the world but not of the world. Culture is like the water we swim in: If we soak in it long enough, we’ll absorb its thinking and values without even knowing it. Before long, we’ve got “spiritual leeches”—sinful, even demonic, ways of thinking—attached to us and slowly sucking the life out of us.
If that sounds gross to you, I think it should. Which is part of the trouble with spiritual leeches—we don’t recognize them as the disgusting things they are.
So what’s the solution? What does it mean to “keep moving” in our war against spiritual leeches? The Apostle Paul would tell us that we need to be filled with the Spirit. When we’re filled with the Spirit, we’re engaging in spiritual warfare—against spiritual leeches and any other little buggers that come our way.
And to engage in spiritual warfare, we need armor for the battle. When Paul taught about spiritual warfare in his letter to the Ephesians, the first piece of armor mentioned was the belt of truth (Ephesians 6:14). A belt might not be the first item you think of in defeating leeches, but go with me here.
In Paul’s day, a belt did more than secure your pants. All of the imagery of Ephesians 6, after all (drawn from Isaiah 11:4–5 and 59:17), is related to warfare. Paul is painting a picture of a warrior preparing for battle, not outfitting someone on their way to the golf course. And the belt of the warrior’s armor actually protected the midsection, the most vulnerable and exposed parts of the body. Paul is saying, in essence, that we have to surround our vulnerable parts with the truth of God’s Word.
In the Garden of Eden, Satan’s first line of attack was about truth: “Did God actually say …?”, and he’s been repeating that lie ever since (Genesis 3:1). The human quest is one for truth. Unfortunately, that quest often leaves us feeling completely lost.
Many determine truth by their internal moral compass, doing whatever feels right in the moment. The trouble is, what feels right and what is right don’t always align. Adam and Eve felt like listening to Satan was right. But Satan was lying to them. They weren’t following the truth; they were marching after a lie.
If we don’t have the firm foundation of God’s Word, we open the door to all manner of “leeches,” little lies that culture sends our way that just stick. For most people in the church, I’d say our problem isn’t that we outright reject God’s Word; rather, we’ve failed to learn what it says. We don’t train ourselves to know and recognize the truth.
When we engage with culture, we have to get serious about helping one another see and navigate the world through the lens of Scripture. This doesn’t mean we should only listen to K-LOVE or only watch Christian television, but we discuss what we watch, asking questions like, Was this glorifying? What does this present as our primary problem and what does it point to as the primary savior? What does this get right? Where does the Bible present a different truth?
We have an Enemy who presents falsehood in creative, fun, lighthearted, whimsical corruptions of truth. But every one of those corruptions is a spiritual leech, angling to attach itself to us.
The good news is, we don’t have to fear any of the Enemy’s schemes. He may be more creative and clever than us. But we have something he doesn’t—God’s Word. And when we put on the belt of truth, reminding ourselves of what God has said, then we’re gliding along the waters of culture, untouched by any of the creatures out there.
