I was almost sold
When Andrea and I were young, newly married, and fairly impressionable, we went along to a meeting in a hotel that promised a free holiday just for attending. All we had to do was sit through a presentation first.
By the end of the evening, we were convinced. It all made sense, and we were ready to sign up for something that would cost us every month for a long time.
I remember holding the pen, just about to sign, when something didn’t feel right. I couldn’t quite explain it, but it was enough to make me stop. I backed out at the last moment. The salesperson didn’t hide his disappointment—and probably had a few choice words he kept to himself.
I was almost sold.
Looking back, I could see that I had been led through a process in someone else’s playbook. What has this to do with reclaiming your spiritual focus?
Table of Contents
The Playbook and You
Have you ever felt like the world is constantly trying to sell you something? Telling you what you don’t have rather than what you do have? Have you been sold on something before and not realised it was happening?
A good salesperson can easily take you on a journey and before you know it you’ve committed to a purchase.
Maybe you’ve been in sales yourself and know what it takes to get inside someone’s head.
What is a Playbook?
The term ‘playbook’ (apart from ‘play book’ being used in the theatre and dramatic arts to mean a book of plays) originally meant a notebook containing a sports team’s strategies and plays.
It’s now used in other lines of work and means a set of tactics frequently employed by anyone engaged in a competitive activity.
Most sales companies’ playbooks will introduce the company goals and vision. But they will also consider the following:
- The persona and mindset of their target audience. “Sales reps have to get inside the buyer’s head to sell” (Zorian Rotenberg, insightsquared.com)
- The buyer journey – the steps your prospect will usually take before committing.
- Sales process – what it takes to make a sale – call methodology, pitching the product, usual buyer questions and your answers, suggested conversation flow, call and email scripts, sound bytes, objection handling.
In a sporting setting, the coach will spend a lot of time analysing the opposition, looking for weaknesses in their play, and devise a playbook accordingly. They might consider:
- What are our strengths?
- Which of these strengths will the opposition already know about and be prepared for?
- What are their weaknesses?
- Where are they likely to be strong in the next game?
- What else is going on for them? (e.g. key player dropped / injured, tired or energised from recent games, current morale, predicted weather conditions, etc.)
- How can we utilise the above to maximise our chances of defeating them?
Now, imagine a spiritual enemy looking at your life, your family, or your organisation and asking those same questions.
Does the Devil have a playbook?
Absolutely. Here are some verses from the bible that illustrate this, and I’ll unpack how they work later along with more about reclaiming your spiritual focus in this and future posts…
For we are not unaware of his [Satan’s] schemes.
(2 Corinthians 2:11)
Do not give the devil a foothold. (Ephesians 4:27)
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12)
Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8)
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10)
Satan has a plan. He is a strategist of the “dark world,” looking for an opening. But we must remember: he is only a fallen angel. The all-powerful, all-loving God of the universe has a playbook, too.
We just have to be both aware of the devil’s schemes and aligned to God’s.
Let’s first look at God’s playbook and that of our enemy, considering our place in God’s playbook…
Reclaiming your Spiritual Focus: God’s Playbook
God has plans we don’t know about.
He knows the plans he as for you.
We know that they will prosper us and not harm us, that they are plans of hope and with a bright future. But there are lots of details he chooses to keep from us.
Look how he told Abraham to go to a land he would show him after he’d committed to the long journey. He had a playbook for Abraham’s life but only revealed it one step at a time. And think about how he told his disciples not to worry about how God will carry out the end times. The Father knows the future. You don’t have to.
But despite there being numerous plans in God’s heart that are unknown to us, we can still see the headlines of God’s playbook since the beginning.
So what does God’s overall playbook actually look like? In the broadest sense, it’s already in motion.
1. Rescue.
First, there’s the rescue of humanity—done. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This is the defining moment in history, the foundation everything else rests on.
2. Return.
But the story isn’t finished. Jesus will return—pending, but promised. “This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).
3. Reckoning.
And when he does, there will be a reckoning. The devil’s end is already written: “And the devil, who deceived them [the nations], was thrown into the lake of burning sulphur… They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Revelation 20:10).
4. Reign.
And then comes the part that’s easy to overlook, but changes everything—we’re not just spectators in this story. Those who belong to him will reign with him. “He will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15), and “If we endure, we will also reign with him. If we disown him, he will also disown us” (2 Timothy 2:12).
So… great. Off you go then, God—we’ll just sit here and wait for Jesus to come back, shall we?
Not quite.
We’re not on the sidelines watching it unfold—we’re on the pitch.
We’ve been given a position to play, and it’s not complicated, but it does require intention.
Our Position in the Playbook: Our 3-Point Play
We’ve been given a position to play, and it’s not complicated, but it does require intention.
Here’s a 3-point play I believe God wants us all in on:
1. Love God.
It starts here: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Luke 10:27). That’s not just a nice idea—it shapes everything. It shows up in worship, in communion, in serving him, in obedience, and sometimes in sacrifice.
2. Love people.
Flowing straight out of that, “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Luke 10:27). In practice, that looks like doing life with others, showing genuine care, and bringing that love into your workplace, your neighbourhood—wherever you find yourself day to day.
3. Make disciples.
And then there’s the outward call: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:15–16). This is Jesus’s great commission, and it involves every believer. We’re not just making converts to a religion—we’re helping people become wholehearted followers of Jesus, baptising them and teaching them to live his way.
Because God’s plan is so vast and our position in it is so vital, the enemy is extra hard at work.
The enemy’s playbook
Over the next few weeks, I want to explore the specific tactics he uses to get us off-track.
We will be looking at:
Distraction
Shifting our gaze from the Kingdom to the temporary things in front of us.
Doubt
Attacking our identity and God’s character, undermining what we know to be true.
Despondency
Using disappointment and delay to wear us down until we feel like giving up.
Division
Breaking the unity that gives us strength when we stand together.
Defilement
Drawing us into compromise so that we slowly blend in with the patterns of the world.
Running our Play
Let’s go back through the five points in the enemy’s playbook and see something important: when we are working from God’s playbook, the response is always ultimately the same.
The enemy may have multiple plays, and this list isn’t exhaustive, but we don’t need a different answer for each one. We just need to stay anchored in the same response.
As Hebrews 12:1–2 puts it: “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith…”
Here’s how we run our play:
Defeating Distraction
Distraction is often subtle—it doesn’t usually announce itself as something dangerous, it just quietly pulls our attention away from what matters most.
We see this even with the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. They were heavy-eyed and overwhelmed in the moment, and as a result they missed the weight of what God was doing right in front of them. When the world offers its own distractions we must keep our eyes fixed on the Lord.
The fix? We keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.
Defeating Doubt
Doubt rarely begins as full unbelief—it usually starts with a shift in focus.
Take Peter walking on the water. His failure didn’t start when he stepped out of the boat, but when his attention moved from the Savior’s command to the storm’s roar. The moment the waves became more “real” than Jesus, doubt began to take hold.
The fix? We keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.
Defeating Despondency
Despondency often builds slowly, through repeated disappointment and delayed hope.
After years of suffering and failed attempts to find healing, the woman with the issue of blood had every reason to give up. But in a moment of faith, she reached out—realising that a single touch of the King was worth more than a decade of human effort. Despondency dies when we stop looking at our list of failed solutions and start looking at the only answer—Jesus.
The fix? We keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.
Defeating Division
Division creeps in when our identity shifts from who we are in Christ to categories, preferences, or camps.
We often spend our energy building fences around our denominations and differences, but at the foot of the cross, those labels quickly become irrelevant. Jesus is returning for a unified body defined by its devotion to the groom rather than loyalty to a specific banner. When He is our central focus, the walls we’ve built between one another naturally begin to crumble.
The fix? We keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.
Defeating Defilement
Defilement usually doesn’t happen all at once. It happens through gradual exposure and shifting attention.
The world is messy, and if we spend all day looking at the mud, we’re eventually going to get some on us. Sanctification isn’t just a matter of trying harder. It is a byproduct of being so captivated by him that the allure of the shadows loses its grip on our hearts.
The fix? We keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.
We fix our eyes on Jesus
The devil might know your weaknesses.
He might play on them.
But we know his.
It’s Jesus.
This is how we reclaim our focus.
I was praying for someone who had a relative who was severely oppressed and there was a sense that this was not just a natural problem. We were in a static caravan. The door was closed but not locked. I began to pray about the cross. I was thanking God out loud for his sacrifice, for the crucifixion, for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As I got to the end of my prayer the door flew wide open and slammed shut. There was a sense of calm from that moment on.
So that’s the playbook.
God has a story that is already in motion—rescue accomplished, return promised, reckoning coming, and reign secured. The enemy has his plays too, and while they show up in different forms—distraction, doubt, despondency, division, and defilement—they are not new, and they are not final.
And in the middle of it all, we are not left guessing what to do. Our response is not complicated, even if it is not always easy: we fix our eyes on Jesus. Again and again, in every situation, that is the play we run.
Because when our focus stays there, everything else begins to fall into its right place.
Next time, we’ll take the first of those enemy plays—distraction—and look at how it quietly works its way into our lives, and how we learn to recognise it before it takes hold.
Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)