Stop Letting The Enemy Play You | Steven Furtick

Take Back What the Enemy Tried to Play: A Call to Rise Again

When you hear those words, do you believe them? Gideon didn’t — not for a long time. He struggled to reconcile what God said about him with what he saw in himself. He couldn’t understand the kind of instrument he truly was in God’s hands.

Scripture shows us again and again that God uses unusual instruments — and even more unusual people. Samson fought with the jawbone of a donkey. Jael defeated a wicked king with nothing more than a tent peg and courage. God uses unexpected tools, but even stranger are the unexpected people He chooses. Look at someone next to you and say, “You are an interesting instrument.” It’s true — more true than you know.

Gideon didn’t see himself that way. In his eyes, he wasn’t a mighty warrior; he was the forgotten one, hiding in a winepress because Israel had been oppressed so long that they forgot who they were. Gideon had been in the wrong hands — the hands of fear, the hands of oppression — for so long that he lost sight of his identity.

Romans 6:13 calls us to take our members — our minds, our words, our lives — and place them back in God’s hands. Not in the hands of sin, not in the hands of the Enemy, not in the hands of old patterns that keep playing us. You are a living instrument, brought from death to life by the One who chose to die for you. You are not cheap. You are not a pawnshop instrument. You are costly. You were worth the blood of Christ.

Pastor Steven tells a story about saving all summer to buy his first expensive guitar — a Paul Reed Smith. It was beautiful, valuable, and full of potential. But when he played it, it didn’t sound like it did in the hands of a skilled musician. The guitar didn’t change; the hands did.

Your life is the same way. Many of us have placed our minds, our imaginations, our desires, and our decisions in the wrong hands — the hands of sin, lust, fear, insecurity, comparison, addiction. What started as something “fun” eventually trapped us. The Enemy knows how to play us like the Midianites played Israel — pressing, shrinking, suffocating, draining.

And then God steps into Gideon’s winepress — and into yours — and says, “Mighty warrior.”
Not because you feel mighty, but because He placed something mighty inside you.

You are an expensive instrument. And God wants you back.

It’s time to snatch back your instrument.
Your mind.
Your imagination.
Your emotions.
Your purpose.
Your calling.

Why hand over the priceless gift of your imagination to fear when God gave it to fuel faith? Why give your soul to an enemy who wants to use it against you?

Everyone who is good at worrying could be incredible at praying — if you place your imagination in the right hands. Everyone who uses desire destructively could experience true intimacy with God — if you place your heart in the right hands.

The message is simple:
You don’t need new strings. You just need the right hands.
And God is reaching for you.

It’s time to take your life back.
To take your mind back.
To put the whole instrument of who you are in the hands of the One who created you for purpose, power, and victory.