God is the One who brings demons into your life, and He does so for specific purposes. His purposes fall into two categories: discipline and refinement. Discipline is about God spanking your rebellious behind back into alignment with Him. Refinement is about pushing obedient souls on to the next level of spiritual maturity. Either way, God is focused on improving His personal relationship with you. He is doing this to you for positive reasons—that is an essential point to keep in mind.

So how do you know if God is disciplining you or refining you? This is actually easy to sort out once you understand a few things about how God communicates. You see, when God is upset with you about something, He tells you exactly what the problem is and He also tells you what you can do to fix it. This is something you can absolutely count on God for. Contrary to what you may have been taught, God is extremely easy to succeed with and He never expects you to read His mind and figure out why He’s mad at you while He sulks in a corner.

Nothing is going to wipe you out faster than thinking God is angry with you when He really isn’t. This is why it is essential that you understand how to sort out real conviction from God from the false conviction that demons pump out. Whenever possible, demons try to impersonate God’s Voice in your mind and get you to think He’s saying things to you that He really isn’t saying. Since demons are such clever little liars, can you really learn how to see through their games? Absolutely. It’s surprisingly easy to sort out true conviction from false conviction, and we break this down for you in three simple steps in this post: Identifying False Conviction: Three Easy Tests. Also read Conviction Q&A. A proper understanding of how to recognize God’s conviction will take a lot of stress out of your life. Read through the conviction posts and determine if there is anything specific that God is convicting you about.