Alison Morgan, Holy Trinity, November 2001
Introduction
Good morning. We are still following our sermon series on holiness, and the subject we have to tackle today is spiritual warfare. So the first question is, what on earth is it? I think we all believe in it, because we are all aware of that thing we call evil. But I’m not sure that we always understand exactly what it means in practice.
So let’s pray…
I’d like to start by telling you a story, for the fight against evil is not some kind of theoretical or abstract activity, fought with long words in some of the more peculiar pages of the Bible; it’s a real fight, and the arena for it is real life.
About 15 years ago a woman was dragged by her husband into our house in Corby. He was at his wits’ end. She was having a severe mental breakdown, the drugs from the GP weren’t working, and he had this idea that she needed the church. The only problem was, he couldn’t get her to sit through a service. When it got to the communion she’d just rush out. So Roger took the man off to ask him about it, and I was left with the woman. I hadn’t a clue what to do. I tried praying with her, but when I laid hands on her all that happened was that my arms went freezing cold right up to the elbows, and I couldn’t remember the Lord’s Prayer. The bit I got stuck at was ‘deliver us from evil’.
Or I could tell you another story, one we all know, about aeroplanes flown by suicide terrorists into twin towers, killing thousands of people. The fight against evil is now at the top of the world’s agenda.
Or I could tell you another story, about a man who was bitten by a dog. When he was told the dog had rabies, he started writing out a list. The doctor thought he was making a will, and reassured him that rabies could be cured. Oh, I’m not making a will, he said. I’m making a list of all the people I want to bite.
In all these stories there’s an enemy. And that means there’s a battle. And you can’t win a battle against an enemy unless you’ve worked out who the enemy is. Then what his tactics are. And then what yours must be. For the woman the enemy was evil spiritual entities. She’d been like this since she contacted a spirit which said it was her dead mother at a spiritualist sitting. Her husband couldn’t help her because he didn’t know who the enemy was. He brought her to us. We couldn’t help her either, because although we did know who the enemy was, at that stage we didn’t know how to defeat him.
For the planes and the twin towers argument still rages about who the enemy is, and who the battle is between. I don’t know much about Bin Laden, or extreme Islamic cells; but I do know that we have a spiritual enemy who’s laughing. Evil lies all around us in the world. It always has, and it always will.
And then there is the man who wants to bite his enemies. For him the battle is against the evil within. In a way it’s a funny story. But in a way it isn’t. Because all these stories are different illustrations of the same problem. Paul explained it to the Ephesians like this, we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the wold rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. And that’s what I want to talk about today.
Who is the enemy?
Who then is the enemy in all these stories? The Bible calls him Satan. It’s only a word. It’s Hebrew. It means opponent or adversary. The Greek word devil means the same thing. Jesus called him the evil one, the enemy, and the ruler of the world, and the father of lies. As Jesus himself is the Word of God, the incarnation of the love of God, so Satan represents the evil and wickedness which undermines our relationship with God. Created an angel, Jesus says he saw him fall like lightning from heaven. In his ministry Jesus continually encountered evil spirits subordinate to Satan, and in his letters Paul gives these entities generic names like principalities and powers, dominions, elemental spirits and demons.
Now the first question we have to ask is, do we believe all this?
Well, I think the answer for most of us is sort of. We belong to a scientific culture that believes in what we can see and prove, and we can’t see or prove evil spirits. We can see their effects, but nobody has yet seen the shape of an evil spirit, though plenty have imagined and painted them through the ages. We’ve just had Halloween, and any child can tell you that an evil spirit is black, horned, with a forked tail and probably some nasty red bits somewhere or other. And often that’s just why it isn’t PC to believe in them. They belong with Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy, and you grow out of it. It feels rather embarrassing to admit to your neighbours and colleagues that you believe in evil spirits. Not very grown up. And yet plenty of people do believe in them, and even actively engage with them.
1. The woman under attack
So the first thing to acknowledge is that there are evil spirits out there, and they are capable of inflicting serious spiritual, emotional and physical damage on individuals. The woman who came to see us in Corby had been ill since she had successfully contacted a spirit which she thought was that of her dead mother, at a spiritualist meeting. She needed deliverance, and I still regret that we were incompetent to give it to her. But I have prayed with a number of people since then who have been wrecked by their participation in occult activities. One was a PhD student whose behaviour was certifiable. She hadn’t slept for 7 days, she was seeing things and hearing voices, any computer she touched went completely haywire, and when we tried to pray with her she spoke in an altered voice and different personality, gave a different name, talked to her dead grandfather who she said was in the room with us, and remembered nothing afterwards. It turned out that her grandfather had been the top freemason in the country she came from. She wrote out her family tree for us, and in every branch of every generation there was suicide and cancer. Even then she’d been fine herself up to this point. But when she arrived in Leicester she’d done two things: she signed up for the Alpha course and she went to a psychic fair. She was looking for answers, but instead she found herself the centrepiece of the most spectacular spiritual battle I have ever witnessed. Setting her free took several nights of prayer. Eventually as she was holding a little wooden cross she felt something red shoot out of her head and hit the cross, like being struck by lightning in reverse. The instant that happened she looked up and said ‘it’s gone’. She’s been fine ever since, and was last heard of back home leading her family to Christ.
She was the worst case I have met. But there have been others. They all got themselves into a spiritual mess the same way: through ignorance. They were looking for answers, and they looked in the wrong place. You get it a lot in Africa, where traditional spiritual practices lay people open to demonic attack. But there as here, the remedy is simple. Evil spirits are unpleasant and destructive. But deliverance is simple. Deliverance, for us or for others, is no more complicated than this: deliverance comes through yielding our lives to Christ as our only Lord. It’s a form of ministry in which it is possible to feel completely confident: if they turn to Christ, they will be set free. There is no other possible outcome. All that is required is a determined appeal to the authority of Jesus, and the spirits have no choice but to go.
Now for most of us this isn’t where it’s at. There are covens of witchcraft in Leicestershire but we don’t belong. We have the largest freemasonry library in Europe, but we don’t use it. There are spiritualist churches, but we don’t go. So is all this relevant to us?
Well, I think it is. Peter warns us that our adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. And we need to make sure that it isn’t us.
One question people often ask is, is it possible for a Christian to be possessed? Well, if by possession you mean what the PhD student was going through, no it isn’t. But actually if you look at the words used in the New Testament to describe the relationship between evil spirits and people, you find it’s not really a matter of possessed or not possessed, it’s more of a sliding scale. At one end of it is takeover of the personality by another. At the other end of the scale we need to remember that Jesus said the devil is the father of lies, and so every time I believe a lie about myself or someone or something then I am being influenced by the devil.
But let me say a bit more about the kind of spiritual warfare you might need help with. How do you know if you are being directly affected by an evil spirit, and what do you do about it? The short answer is, get someone to pray for you. We are meant to live in dependence on one another. Often people come for healing prayer or prayer ministry with problems which they think are purely psychological, but somehow they can’t seem to get on top of. And sometimes it turns out that they are under attack from evil spirits. We know, because prayer to send them away results in an immediate cessation of symptoms. So for example we prayed with a young man who was struggling to overcome lustful thoughts which he couldn’t get rid of. One simple command to a spirit to leave him alone solved the problem. We have prayed for people with fears that they knew to be irrational, but which nonetheless gripped them; and those fears have gone instantaneously. We prayed recently for a woman consumed with angry thoughts against her husband. When asked was she angry with him about anything in particular she protested no, he was a good man and she loved him, and the anger just kind of swept up on her from nowhere. We prayed, and she had a frightening sensation of something being on her back. We continued to pray, she coughed and coughed and then suddenly burst out laughing as the Holy Spirit brought release to her. Her husband said afterwards she was a different person.
Now at this point some of the more sane of you will be screaming. Surely I am not saying that every negative emotion or uncontrollable thought is to be dealt with by the casting out of evil spirits? No, I’m not. The human soul is a complicated thing, and always we need to look for simple explanations first. I don’t know about you, but if I am angry with my husband it’s usually because he has just done something which has upset me. I don’t need prayer ministry, I just need to talk to him about it! So just as we don’t need to adopt the secular view that there is no such thing as evil spirits, we don’t need to rush to the opposite extreme and see them lurking behind every human problem either. Some years ago a book was written called Pigs in the Parlour. Its authors identified 53 demon clusters, which they named. They attributed particular powers to particular demons, so you get things like spirits of sexual impurity, spirits of alcohol, spirits of fear and all sorts of other things. This led to a great overemphasis in certain circles on casting things out, often at the expense of self-understanding and individual discipleship. It is important to realise that although there is plenty of scriptural warrant for believing in the existence of evil spirits which afflict people in various ways, there is no warrant whatsoever for seeing a demon of something or other behind every problem. Satan is the accuser, the tempter, the father of lies. Normally he doesn’t need to send evil spirits to live within us. What he tempts and accuses and tells lies to is that which is already there, our own weakness, our own sinfulness, and our own vulnerability. So just as we don’t dismiss demons as figments of the superstitious imagination of a previous age, nor do we need to give them names and powers they don’t have.
2. The world in the grip of evil
Some of you will identify with these stories, and you might wonder if you would benefit from prayer for deliverance. If that’s you, please don’t ignore it. Speak to your cell leader, who will be able to arrange prayer for you; or come for prayer next Sunday evening when Leisl Alexander will be speaking and we will be offering prayer for healing during communion.
But others of you will be only too well aware at the moment that evil is not just a problem individuals grapple with, it is a problem which afflicts the whole world. Two months ago 20 men committed suicide in aeroplanes in order to strike at the heart of the Western world. I am not a political commentator, and it is not my job to offer political analyses. But we can’t help but wonder what is going on. There’s a battle on all right; but who is it between? Is it between an evil fanatical terrorist organisation on the one hand and the right to freedom of the world’s peoples on the other? Is it between an authoritarian, Islamic world view on the one hand and a western, secular world view on the other? Is it between a wicked individual called Bin Laden on the one hand and an interfering world power called America on the other? Is it really just the old conflict between Jews and Palestinians brought onto the world stage? It could be all these things. It probably is all these things. But behind them all are other forces. For as Paul reminds us, we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. I very much doubt whether the 20 suicide hijackers are enjoying their martyrs’ welcome in paradise at this moment, for God doesn’t like murder. But I can’t fail to notice either that they struck at two symbolic targets, the Pentagon for military power and the World Trade Centre for the oppressive materialism of a secular culture which they correctly perceive to have gone far from God. And I doubt that the exponents and victims of that culture are enjoying a martyrs’ welcome in paradise either. For it seems to me that in this situation everybody is lost and everybody loses - except the world rulers of this present darkness. And they are having a lovely time. Most especially, at the present moment, in Afghanistan.
What then is the solution? Well of course, I am not qualified to say. But I watched a video the other week that many of you will have seen. It’s called Transformations, and it tells the story of a number of places across the world where the spiritual hosts of wickedness have been defeated and where the love of God working through repentant people has changed whole communities. One is a city in Columbia called Cali. Cali was once notorious as the centre of the drug dealing industry of Colombia. It was a place of fear, violence and extortion. The video tells the story of the transformation of Cali into a city of worshipping Christians. God sent pastors. He told them to pray. He told them to work together. They preached, they prayed, they held prayer meetings. One was murdered, but God told him beforehand that the evil that was done to him would be the catalyst for change. The churches carried on praying. They filled a whole stadium with people for a whole night to pray for the city. The next day, the newspaper headlines were ‘no murders’. For the first time there had been no murders for a whole 24 hours. And as people prayed, drug dealers were arrested. The place changed. Someone asked the pastors what was their mission strategy. They don’t have one; they’re too busy dealing with the converts. The spiritual atmosphere over Cali has changed.
The video documents similar happenings in other places. God sent two extremely reluctant pastors to work in a violent and alchohol-crazed township of Nairobi. He told them the problems in the place stemmed from the occult activities of a particular woman who was a witch. They prayed her out of town. As if a block had been removed, people began to flock to the churches. Once it was a place where state employees paid bribes not to have to go to. Now outsiders are moving there in droves, it has become such a good place to live. The bars have closed and been converted into churches, and thousands of people meet for prayer and praise. And there are other stories too.
So we can have the victory not just over individual evil spirits which may afflict us personally, but over whole hosts of principalities and powers in the heavenly places. The method is the same: prayer. Without prayer nothing happens. With prayer, anything can happen. Ask God if he wants you to pray for Leicester. There are many evil spirits wreaking havoc in Leicester. There is misery in many of the communities here, and the church is making little difference to that. This church was rebuilt 15 years ago. Many people gave money they couldn’t really afford, to turn it into a place which could act as a centre for the evangelisation of the city. But what happened after that was a most immense spiritual battle within the church itself, and our witness survived by the skin of its teeth. At the same time, other nearby city churches saw their leaders crippled by mental illness and conflicts of other kinds. At the moment one of the most vibrant of the churches in Leicester seems to be teetering on the verge of a battle for power and control. As we saw Trinity get back on its feet, Roger was nearly killed by a road accident, and I think would have died without the hours of prayer people offered for him. We need to pray for our city, and to ask God to change it. Once universities were places of Christian learning. But if you’re a student you will have noticed that the atmosphere in the universities here is not Christian. It’s your job to change that. Meet together and pray. Ask God to give you people who want to live a different way; there are loads of them out there. Your generation will soon be running the world. On what basis will you run it?
3. The man with the rabies
That brings us to the man with the rabies, the man who wanted to bite people. Now this is the normal scenario. There are evil spirits out there, looking for people to afflict. There are evil powers out there, looking for worlds to destroy. But there is also evil within our own hearts. Someone said we have conquered outer space, but we haven’t conquered inner space. Everyone’s preoccupied with the evil out there at the moment; but there’s only evil out there because there is evil in here. There is evil, sin, and failure in our own hearts. We don’t need to hit ourselves over the head about that; it’s just a fact of life, God knows it, and he has given us a way out. This sermon series is about holiness. And holiness is the way out. Holy is what God is. Sinful is what I am. I have rabies. When you annoy me I want to bite you. rabies comes from the word for anger. And anger is in every one of us. And yet I am made in the image of God, and so when God looks at me he doesn’t see a person with rabies, he sees a person with the potential to be holy.
So how do I become holy? How do I deal with the rabies, with the infection that would destroy me and make me behave as if I too, like the PhD student and the terrorists, was mad? Well, in two ways. The first step is quite simple. Two years ago I went to Zambia, and my GP said to me you’d better have a rabies jab. So I paid my hundred quid and had a series of 3 jabs. Bit like doing an alpha course, really. The first steps towards holiness are taken by moving out of the lostness of the world into the life of Christ. You think it through. You become a Christian. You receive the Holy Spirit. And you acquire the spiritual armour which Paul talks about, the armour of faith and salvation, truth and peace, righteousness and the word, which will protect you from the assaults of the evil one. This is step one, and if you are not absolutely sure that you have taken that step please please talk to someone about it straight away. No other strategy will work.
So I had my rabies jabs. But then my GP said to me that if by any chance I should be bitten, I’d need to make sure I had another course of rabies jabs straight away. In other words, the protection you get from a rabies jab is not complete. You need to top it up whenever you are placed in contact with the disease itself. And so it is with the spiritual life. When I became a Christian I was rescued from the power of evil for ever. I had a basic jab which I will never lose the benefits of. But I have to keep topping it up. I have to keep taking the medicine. And so every day I do. Every morning I begin the day by submitting myself to God in prayer. It’s like drinking a cup of tea. Do you know anyone who gets up in the morning, makes a cup of tea, puts just one drop of poison in it, and stirs? That’s what you’re doing if you don’t begin the day with prayer.
So I need to get up and pray. It’s the only strategy we have in spiritual warfare, whether it’s against evil spirits which afflict us from outside, or against hosts of wickedness which dominate the world we live in, or against the sinful inclinations of our own hearts. Pray. But perhaps you say, I don’t know how to pray. Then you need to pray more in order to find out. Focus on God – for holiness, like rabies, is catching. And in your prayer use the weapons you have been given. Put on the whole armour of God, Paul says. That doesn’t mean go through some kind of ritual, imagining yourself putting on Roman armour piece by piece. It means filling yourself with truth. It means reminding yourself that you are forgiven. It means living in faith and relating to others with a message of peace. It means knowing you are saved from the present darkness, and it means waging war on it through the power of the Spirit. This is the ordinary battle of the Christian life. And this you do by prayer, prayer by yourself and prayer with others. The battle is not easy; battles never are. But the victory will be yours.
So let’s close in prayer.
Father, we see evil everywhere. But we also see you everywhere, and we know that we are your children. So Father we pray to you as Jesus taught us: lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil. In the name of Christ, amen.