While typing this article the following two headlines scrolled across my screen on my Internet tickertape: “Strict Parenting Linked to Overweight Kids” and “Study: Yoga helps breast cancer patients combat treatment side effects.” The insinuations of these two subtle headlines are clear enough. Christian parenting—training up children in the way they should go—is bad for children, while eastern religion—yoga—can help cure cancer.

Everyday we are bombarded by satanically inspired insinuations and innuendos. These, like gossip, “are…choice morsels [that] go down to a man’s inmost being” (Proverbs 18:8 NIV). If you doubt this, just wait and see if the next time you discipline your child is not accompanied by an inexplicable concern over little Junior’s expanding waistline.

Unfortunately, most people never suspect the serpent’s presence in anything they hear, read, or see. This, despite the fact that the “whole world lieth in the evil one” (1 John 5:19). Today’s world carelessly swills the serpent’s poison, totally unaware of the deadly effects it is having upon it.

Jesus, who called the devil a “thief [who] cometh not, but to steal, and to kill, and to destroy” (John 10:10), warned us that the thief is most effective when his presence is undetected (Luke 12:39). All who fail to daily discern the hoof prints of our enemy are easily deceived by the father of lies (John 8:44).

From the Internet to our inner thoughts, the devil daily bombards us with subtle insinuations and innuendos designed to call into question what God has said (Genesis 3:1). The discerning Christian continuously guards his mind and heart, “out of [which] are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). Everyone else, however, has their good sense easily stolen by a thief who is ever on the prowl (1 Peter 5:8).