Why Every Christ-Follower Should Go Through a Deliverance Process
Let’s be honest … Christ-followers are freaked out by the title of this post. They think to themselves …”Why on earth would I need to go through a deliverance process … my head is not spinning off my neck and I am not howling at the moon… So how on earth can you believe I have demons? Christians can’t even have demons - right?”
That’s what most Christians think and have been told in the church. I am here to tell you it is a lie perpetrated by the enemy. I cast demons out of believers all the time now. I have had them cast out of me…. And yet I have been a believer since I was 16 … and a decade ago I would have said the same exact thing that you were thinking above… Christians can not have demons.
So let's talk about it, because now I would say that it is actually the exact opposite … Christians are the only ones who can truly get free!
First, let’s deal with the biggest problem - everyone brings this up - the word 'possession.’ This is a huge sticking point for many. Friends, its not even the right word! It's actually a bad translation from the original KJV and it was poorly translated even then. It should have been transliterated … into ‘demonization’… Here is a great quote from Sam Storms (who is on the board of the Gospel Coalition) that speaks to this very subject matter:
“Some of you are probably wondering why I have chosen the term “demonization” rather than the more popular “demon possession”. This may actually come as a surprise to you, but the Bible never once talks about demon possession. It was popularized by its appearance in the King James Version, although it had appeared in other English versions prior to the 1611 edition (Clinton E. Arnold, Three Crucial Questions about Spiritual Warfare [Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1997], p. 205, n. 11). That should be reason enough to avoid using such language, but in addition we need to consider the emotional impact of the phrase which I believe detracts from an objective discussion of the subject. It is difficult for many to dissociate the concept of demon possession from scenes in the movie The Exorcist. I would also point out that the term "possession" implies ownership, and it is questionable to say that Satan or a demon owns anything.” (https://www.samstorms.org/enjoying-god-blog/post/can-a-christian-be-demonized-part-one)
The problem with the word ‘possession’ is that it implies ownership and of course we are never owned by a demon or the enemy. We have been bought at a price by Jesus … So no, we are never owned by the enemy. The other word people like to throw into the ring instead of ‘possession’ is ‘oppression’, saying instead that Christians can only be affected by demons from the outside. This is incorrect too, because Jesus shows us all throughout the gospels that he delivered God’s covenant people from demons and he did this by casting the enemy OUT of them - not from near them or around them (though at times that may be necessary too!) The idea of oppression isn’t totally wrong … we can often feel the sense of evil in a place that we may walk into… and we may need to deal with it. But it doesn’t change the fact that Jesus cast demons out of people and we need to do it too.
Demons can live in our flesh. They can affect our emotions, will and thoughts and reside in our bodies. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 says, “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This verse shows the 3 parts that make up the whole human… and when our spirit is joined to the Holy Spirit - we are sealed in him - and nothing can separate us (see Romans 8:16, and Ephesians 1:13). BUT our souls - our mind, will, emotions and our physical bodies can be infested with a demon.
Many people will also pushback and say … well the Holy Spirit can not be joined to something that is evil… well then friend, how is He living in you? - if indeed you belong to Christ? Did you sin today, yesterday or will you tomorrow? The Holy Spirit lives within you because Jesus has justified you. He has declared you holy and blameless before Him - you wear His righteousness - YET you still must be sanctified. Which means you move from one degree of glory to another as you turn more and more of yourself over to the Lord. The declaration was made … and now it is getting worked out in life - over your entire lifetime - and then is finally finished when we enter into eternity with Jesus. And until you get to eternity with Jesus you will need to struggle against sin in your life and in the lives of others.
It is in this not-yet-fully-sanctified space that allows for demonic activity in our lives. We are not fully completed in Christ. We do not have total maturity, and we are certainly not perfect in our flesh. This is true from the moment we give our lives over to Jesus until the day we go home. And whatever we came to Jesus with in that moment of salvation … still needs to be dealt with. Some of what we came with in that moment were demons that we carry. But also what about those sins that just don’t seem to go away? The ones you have been journaling about and praying over for years… some people call them ‘besetting sins’… here's the thing … they probably have a demon attached to them. As soon as we take up a lie of the enemy we open a door to him. And he might take it and run with it… this is called a foothold and is talked about in Eph 4:27. I like to call it supercharged sin.
When you believe the lies of the enemy … and really take up ownership of that lie and claim it as our own … This is how the enemy gets a foothold in your life. That lie you are believing becomes an open door for the enemy to take up residence in your flesh. Then he entangles within and will begin manifesting his presence. So for instance, let’s say worry is a problem for you, even though Matthew 6 commands us not to worry, it is just still a struggle not to play ‘What If’ in your mind. Then a fearful event takes place in your life that confirms you were ‘right’ to worry about it. The event can even be really small, but in the midst of those moments maybe without you even recognizing it you believed a lie like, ‘Oh my gosh, I am never going to let that happen to me again, or I am unsafe, or the world is unsafe, or God does not keep me safe.’ Anything like what I just described can give the enemy a foothold in your life, because you have believed something contrary to God’s Word. This kind of unbelief is just the kind of open door the enemy needs to come and supercharge that fear, create a wedge and breed more fear, until anxiety takes up residence in your life in a way you never thought possible. These things can even lie dormant for many years and then some new trauma in our life can stir it all up, something you thought you were over and do not even struggle with anymore seems to resurface and expand.
But here’s what’s true, the enemy has no real authority over us. BUT he wants you to think he does. Actually Jesus has all the authority and if you belong to Him, He even confers it upon you, but you probably don’t know it (Matt 28:18). When you gave your life to Jesus and asked for His work of salvation to cover you, you moved from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. Jesus on the cross put to death all authority of the enemy (Col 2:15) … yet in this world he is still called the prince of the power of the air (Eph 2:2). The only real authority he has over a believer now is when we believe the lies he tells us. Even then it is not true authority it is stolen… What he has over you is the powerful enforcement of the lie you have chosen to believe as he takes up residence in your body.
So how do we get rid of the demons once they are there? Actually the process is a lot of confession and repentance. It is coming back into alignment with God and His Word. It is the maturing process of learning to understand and stand in the truth of what Jesus accomplished for you on the cross. God’s Word is really important! He does not use words lightly like we do, His Word is true, it is living and active and it is a place we can come to truly rest in! As we lay claim to the truth of who we are in Christ, and lay claim to the truth about who He says He is …. We can at the same time break agreement with the lies of the enemy and thus break the power that he has over us. As we make these declarative statements - literally speak them out loud - we are breaking the legal grounds that the enemy has over us in the spiritual realm. It is in understanding our authority and living in the truth that breaks up all the ground that we have given over to the enemy. Once his power is disrupted it is pretty easy to kick most demons out.
So here is how the process works… at least as you work with me. Some people have a slightly different process based on their knowledge, experiences, personality and style… but generally after you have studied deliverance enough most people are doing essentially the same things!
I use a guide to help people with the words they need. It is called the Deliverance Training Manual by William Suddoth. I find it easy to use because it is not a bulky book, and it seems to have most of what I need to help people. Because we are breaking legal agreements, words matter. These words in this book are not perfect or magical though, but they are good and helpful. I say this because I never want anyone to become a legalist about this book. Someone else’s words may also be good and be slightly different! Anyway, in this book are some prayers to pray. These always need to be prayed out loud! Demons can’t hear what is in your head. We have to speak out into the spiritual realm.
The first prayer is an overall deliverance prayer… it is our first statement to the spiritual realm that helps us declare truth and begin to break our agreement with lies, and speak out forgiveness for those who have harmed us. This prayer helps us start well and gives us an opportunity to understand what this process is all about.
The next steps are about closing doors! When our soul (mind, will, emotions) and body have open doors to the enemy he has the opportunity to come back into our lives through these open doors. So we want to make sure we are shutting down his pathways! The first is breaking soul ties. So you may be asking right now, what is a soul tie? This is not a biblical phrase but is a word that helps us describe a biblical concept. In essence, it is any ungodly sexual experience, whether we desired it or not (there can be inappropriate emotional ones as well that have crossed a healthy boundary). Our soul and body can literally be entangled with another’s because sex creates a one-flesh relationship. This can happen even if that was not what you were intending it to do, because that is how God designed sex to function. It is this entanglement that we are breaking off in the soul tie prayer. We choose to forgive and release anyone with whom we have had ungodly sexual contact and ask God to heal our fragmented pieces. This closes all the doors the enemy has to enter… at least from this avenue.
Next we get into generational consequences that come down from our ancestors and parents. So here’s the thing … stuff can get passed down to us from our parents. We talk about this in regards to disease all the time… that’s why when you are at the doctor's office you have to fill out page after page of diseases that your family has struggled with. But disease … which by the way could be the result of demons … is not the only thing that gets passed down from our parents. Family sin patterns and demons can be passed down as well. So dealing with this and closing these doors are a must. We see this idea clearly delineated in scripture in Exodus 34 when God declares His name from the top of Mt. Sinai to Moses in verse 6-8 “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
So we can see here that generational consequences are a real thing to the Lord. He even put it in His name! So in the Deliverance Training Manual that I mentioned above are a bunch of lists that help us identify and put words to all these generational sins. Categories like abandonment, fear, anger, shame, manipulation, and pride to name a few… each of these categories has a bunch of words under it that help us say - ‘yes my family and I struggle with those things.’ Then we pray through a generational prayer where we confess and repent on behalf of our ancestors, our parents, and ourselves. We follow that by asking for forgiveness, renouncing these lies and we ask God to break them off of our lives in accordance with what He did for us on the cross! Finally we ask the Lord to replace these curses with the opposite blessing so that we are filled with all that He wants to give us!
It’s after this that we do the casting out of demons - we do this for each category that we have just processed and prayed for. There is no weird dance or screaming or head spinning. Just a firm authoritative voice that tells the demons to get out. While we do this we stop and ask the Holy Spirit if there are specific things in your life that the enemy has gotten a grip on. Are there specific things or people to forgive, specific lies to renounce, specific truths you need to own, specific parts of your identity in Christ you need to take in, word curses that need to be broken off, or oaths you have made that need to be renounced. We do this by inviting the Holy Spirit to speak to us and remind us of anything that could be impeding the process. All of those specific items can give the enemy a foothold in your life. And as we clear through them … we are breaking off those footholds… and it makes it really easy to kick the enemy out.
Casting out is a process of calling the particular demons we have listed to attention and then kicking them out based on our authority in Christ. Usually during this process I will pray in my tongue because that aligns my mind with the mind of Christ. This allows me to discern things in the Spirit more easily and I can tell if there is a blockage or if we are finished in this area. After we feel it is complete, then I invite the Holy Spirit to come and press everything out that is trying to linger and for Him to take up residence in the places where the enemy once lived. The Holy Spirit seals up all the holes within us and brings His healing and light to those places!
Most of the process is really about confession, repentance, and forgiveness, it is about realigning with God and His Word. The casting out is a small portion of the process. Though necessary… because even if we learn to stand in the truth, if we never cast the demons out they could decide to stay put and disrupt in other ways. They bring disease, pain, continue to lie to us, and generally bring torment, insomnia and even just background noise to your brain. All of these things can cause HUGE problems in your life. Medications do not really help these problems. We may see a little relief for a time, but it usually gets worse and worse as we get older. The source of the problem must go, demons must be cast out.
This ministry is something that every Christ-follower should have some knowledge of and should be able to do for one another. This is what Jesus sent the 12 and the 72 out to do when he said the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. He sent them out to preach, heal and deliver people. This is Jesus's Kingdom ministry for the church. And we need to be learning about it and doing it!
I have seen so many lives change as a result of this ministry and I have seen huge changes in a short time! Transformation is so much easier when we don't have to continually fight against an enemy inside of us! And once again - I believe we all need to be on the receiving end of deliverance because everyone has generational components and sin that just never seems to let go no matter what they have believed or prayed. That’s because a demon is probably attached to it. This is no different than our continual and regular need for confession and repentance, in fact I believe we need a regular opportunity for healing and deliverance in the body of Christ!
Everyone has footholds in their lives. No one escapes the need for confession and repentance on a regular basis and thus everyone also needs to have deliverance as well! Demons are real and their desire is to steal, kill and destroy … and they are doing their evil job all over the church! We need to put these things to an end because who wants to live bogged down in sin their whole lives… struggling with an overwhelming sense of shame, or a porn addiction, or explosions of anger, abusive behavior, or can not seem to ever read and enjoy the Bible, or a constant pit of worry in your gut, or a wicked pride that won’t allow you to enjoy a friend’s joy. Any and all of these things could be demonic… wouldn’t you like to be free of it? I am definitely glad I am free of a lot of the demonic junk that was plaguing me! Deliverance is a process … but it is a process we all need to undertake. Choose it and be free!