# Brotherhood of Betrayal

## Metadata
- Author: [[Randall Arthur]]
- Full Title: Brotherhood of Betrayal
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- Convincing yourself that there’s no hope for your family is like waking up one morning, discovering that all the grocery stores have been permanently closed, and concluding you’re going to starve to death. You could starve, or you could fall back on the inner strength and ingenuity of the human spirit and learn to survive off the land. It wouldn’t be comfortable, convenient, familiar, or easy, but it could be done. ([Location 2920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=2920))
- “This type of leadership possesses several inherent dangers,” Faircloth emphasized. “One of those dangers is that it drives people to withdraw into silent and listless obedience. It stifles the natural learning process of questioning, disagreeing, debating, and discussing. It likewise dissuades people from openly sharing their real thoughts and feelings about life, about God, and about themselves. “And when people are driven to this kind of muteness, they become close-range, standing targets for Satan and the personalities of darkness. We know from both Scripture and observation that Satan’s goal is to kill, steal, devour, and destroy. If God prohibits him from devouring and killing a person’s physical body, then Satan will try to destroy the person mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. “His primary weapon for achieving this destruction is his lying. I repeat, his primary weapon is his lying. In the words of Jesus, Satan is the father of lies. He is utterly devoid of truth. This is an invariant.” ([Location 3917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=3917))
- “And Scripture and observation make it exceedingly clear that Satan’s lies are far more effective if he and his demonic ranks can isolate their victims geographically, socially, emotionally, mentally, or religiously and barricade them from hearing what is true. ([Location 3926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=3926))
- “Therefore, if a person is in a church structure where there is no freedom to express one’s thoughts and feelings, but is instead driven to a prison of silence by a menacing, insecure leader, that person, even though he or she is part of a congregation of one hundred or five thousand, will become dangerously isolated. He or she will be alone with the enemy and his lies. Consequently, many such people end up believing long-term lies about themselves, about life, about Christianity, and about God. ([Location 3931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=3931))
- As you know, pastors’ wives usually don’t have the freedom to reveal their negative feelings about their life and marriage without, to some degree, risking their husband’s reputation. They’re under an enormous amount of pressure to uphold their spouse’s public image of being a model husband and father. So they become extraordinarily proficient at concealing their personal struggles from the public eye. From their children as well. Even, sometimes, from their husbands. ([Location 4065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=4065))
- As you know, humans tend to pardon or condemn, based strictly on their view of a person’s actions. Christians especially, because of our moral expectations, look so closely at a person’s conduct that we often forget there’s a life going on inside that person’s heart. ([Location 4166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=4166))
- He quoted, for example, a verse that tells us to pray for one another. He spent only about ten minutes teaching the verse, then he placed four folding chairs in the middle aisle. He had every family, every single adult, and every person who was alone (child, teenager, spouse, or divorcée) each take a turn sitting in the aisle chairs. As they took turns, the rest of the congregation stood around them and prayed for them out loud by name. When I was asked to sit in the circle and listened as eight or nine people zealously prayed for me, I broke down and cried. At North Metro, despite my roots and despite my broken home, I was never prayed for in public by anyone, not a single soul. ([Location 4633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=4633))
- God was right, he rubbed in the rebuke for the thousandth time: The lawless man will die because he does not control himself; he will be held captive by his own foolishness. ([Location 4814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=4814))
- His life in those days had been filled with a righteous purpose, an influential platform, and a positive notoriety. But most of all, his life had been saturated with people—friends, supporters, coworkers, ministry colleagues, a wife, and children. ([Location 5177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=5177))
- God does not playfully place us in circumstantial mazes to see if we can entertain Him by figuring our way, by trial and error, to the end. Rather, he uses His Word and the circumstances of life to educate us with solid, insightful lessons so that, based on faith in His supreme knowledge, we can take clear and decisive steps into the future. ([Location 5209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QH78TMX&location=5209))