{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpodcast.edstetzer.com%2Fepisodes%2Fjp-pokluda-belief-in-demons-changes-how-you-live-IqSgo7OA","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"JP Pokluda: Belief in Demons Changes How You Live","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/7c8e14e6-69fa-45b7-ad44-531ec8f8bb9c/af6581cd-1586-4f0f-8965-0161a7458aba/cropped_1792005363064.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"","height":200,"description":"Jonathan “JP” Pokluda says spiritual warfare aims at a pastor's faith, and that a gap between public ministry and private life gives it an opening.\n\nEd Stetzer asks Pokluda a question many church leaders carry: when a community shows a pattern like consumerism or performance, a leader has to decide whether to call it idolatry and call for repentance, address it missiologically, or rebuke it as demonic, and each choice shapes how that leader prays. Pokluda draws no firm line between them. He says the enemy runs many strategies and that the main one is distraction from God, with comparison and discontent as its ordinary means. He adds a third error to the two C.S. Lewis named, ignoring the devil and obsessing over him: believing the enemy exists and letting that change nothing about how one lives. He points to the shield of faith and to Jesus's prayer that Peter's faith would not fail to argue that faith is what the enemy targets and what protects, and he says that teaching a congregation to perform faith, rather than live it, ends in disaster.\n\nPokluda is Lead Pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, and the author of Your Story Has a Villain, Welcome to Adulting, and Outdated. He previously led The Porch in Dallas, a weekly young adult gathering."}