Rid Yourself of Illegal Immigrants

The positive comments I’ve been getting are surprising to me. My readership has gone down by about 98% (although I can’t account for accumulation sites that steal my work and redistribute it without impacting my Sitemeter), and apart from that, this is the Internet, where everyone claws and hacks at each other. When you write something here, you don’t expect waves of love in response. On the contrary, you are more likely to worry that nuts will find your house and vandalize it.

I’m glad I’m not getting a lot of criticism for discussing God without a divinity degree. There are denominations that have nearly zero interest in hearing from people who haven’t immersed themselves in church history and in misguided publications written by ancient figures who read a lot of books but never encounted the Holy Spirit.

For the most part, what I relate here is testimony. That means it’s things I experienced, or it comes from personal revelations. That’s as good as it will ever get. I am not going to spend ten years getting a Ph.D. in theology before saying what I know to be true. That can’t be helped. It’s an unreasonable expectation.

You can’t require God to work through the people you choose. He picked Amos the vinedresser and Rahab the prostitute. He chooses whomever he wants, and he seems to delight in picking people whose nature offends church bigwigs. It happened over and over in the Bible. Jeremiah the kid, Jepthah the son of a prostitute, Moses the stuttering murderer with low self-esteem…it’s not just a freak occurrence when it happens. It’s actually a pattern.

We love anything that seems “official.” We look for a stamp of human approval. This is why so many people idolize (word chosen carefully) greedy louts they see on TV. God doesn’t work that way. He is not about centralized authority. He came here and died so authority could be distributed among millions or billions of his children. He did not come to create levels of closeness to him, with a few really impressive saints who are his children and lots of little people who are stepchildren, grandchildren, or subcontractors. Every one of us is supposed to be right up there next to him. There is God, and beneath him there is one (and only one) generation of children, and we are brothers and sisters.

You may call a person your “father in the faith,” and that’s okay, and it has a valid meaning in its own way, but he’s still just a brother. If he tells you one thing, and God tells you another, you should listen to God.

There are people out there who will get very angry if you disagree with Benny Hinn, based not on the quality of his teaching, but on his personal wealth and the size of his audience. Nonetheless, Benny Hinn is a pretty unproductive role model, and he is wrong about many important things. The Pope is wrong, too. People you know may be better sources of information. It’s a mistake to refuse to listen to a Spirit-filled Christian just because you know him, and because he isn’t famous. If you don’t think a supermarket bag boy can be a prophet, you need to open your eyes.

People could come here and tell me I’m useless because I didn’t go to a seminary and turn Christianity into calculus. They’re not doing that, and it’s a relief.

Testimony from a truthful person connected to the Spirit is much better than dusty books written by people who became famous after the church fell into a state of rot. Books are full of theory, guesses, mistakes, and lies. Testimony is what actually happened. The conclusions you draw from it may be wrong, but the testimony itself is not. It is reliable. That’s a big deal.

Much of the doctrine of old denominations comes from wrong guesses and deliberate lies. This was also true of Judaism in Jesus’s time. He said the Jews of his day venerated man’s traditions and, in so doing, made the scriptures ineffectual. He used ignorant men from Galilee to spread his knowledge. The scholars were useless to him because they had no respect for his education, so he used people who listened, and by doing that, he proved that the whole notion of religious scholarship is misguided. Heaven isn’t full of geniuses.

The other day I realized that in practical terms, a genius can be less intelligent than a person who has a low IQ yet is willing to listen. I know people who are very smart, who do very stupid things over and over for decades. I also know people who aren’t smart, who listen to good advice and do smart things. These people have better lives than stubborn smart people. They live wisely. So regardless of their mental limitations, effectively, they are more intelligent than smart people.

I have spent a lot of time living stupidly, and people my age who are not as bright, who listened to God from their youth, have led lives that have been much more prosperous and peaceful. I suppose I, better than anyone, have the authority to say that brains can get in your way, and so can knowledge.

God gives me a lot of revelation now. I’ve read the Bible, but I haven’t memorized it, so I don’t know everything that’s in it. Very often, I’ll tell people something about God, and then weeks or months later, I’ll see it in the Bible, in a passage I don’t remember reading. If I get a true revelation from the Holy Spirit, and I pass it on honestly, it’s as reliable as the Bible. People forget that the Bible was written by ordinary human beings. If every copy were burned tomorrow, and it were impossible to rewrite it, its teachings would still live. God would continue revealing them to people who pray in tongues. Eventually we would have a new and different Bible, if we needed it, and it would be accurate.

If you don’t respect me, it doesn’t matter. Don’t read my blog. Just pray in tongues, be honest with God, and keep moving. Eventually you’ll know everything you need to know. But if I can be useful to you, keep reading. I am not making stuff up, and it really does work.

I keep learning about spirits. It seems like a lot of charismatic preachers are taking pains to discourage people from “blaming the devil” for everything, and that’s dangerous, because every one of us has demons and fallen angels to fight. It’s not just epileptics and people who cut themselves.

The Bible calls us “houses.” A house is a structure in which beings dwell. Your spirit dwells in you. No other spirit should be in there, except for the Holy Spirit. Satan is a spirit. Other fallen angels are spirits The demons–our half-human cousins, who were birthed by women–are spirits. Jesus made it very clear that they can dwell in us. He described a man as a house an evil spirit can leave and then return to, bringing seven worse spirits. He wasn’t just talking because he had a big mouth. He was serious. He was warning us. You can’t be a Christian and not believe in Spirits. To believe Jesus was God was to believe he knew what he was talking about, and he believed in Satan and demons.

I believe people from certain segments of society are more likely to be oppressed by spirits. I’m from Eastern Kentucky, where people live in defeat, and my family has had all sorts of demonic issues. I know a lot of black people, and they have the same problem. One powerful sign of demonic aggression is dysfunction in a family. My family is highly dysfunctional. When I was a kid, we were afraid to see my dad come home. My sister could not do right to save her life. I had nightmares every night until I was eight or nine years old. I never saw my parents show affection for each other. My sister and I could not stand each other. My parents didn’t know God, so they opened the door to every spirit you can name, and in they came.

My sister’s current state of defeat, misery, anger, and bitterness is impossible to describe adequately with words. I had all sorts of failures and problems in life, in spite of my intelligence, talents, and advantages as a white American from an upper middle-class family. My dad has no grandchildren. My sister and I are single. My mother died from self-inflicted lung cancer. My dad is tense, angry, and hopeless, and he resists God in spite of every sign God gives him.

We didn’t get here on our own. We had lots of help from Satan. Even when we tried to turn things around, forces we could not resist slapped us down. We were not children of God, so we had not inherited authority. When you have no authority, it’s normal for bad things to happen to you.

I spent most of my life making myself a boarding house for demons. I indulged sexual lust. I indulged anger and bitterness. I cultivated pride, thinking self-esteem was the secret to success. I thought I was a good person because I told the truth and didn’t try to hurt anyone (physically). I left the front and back doors open all day, every day. To think I would not end up with demons, because “that was only in Bible times,” would be truly fatuous.

I have been delivered from a number of things in services at my church. Some people are embarrassed or not honest enough to ask for deliverance in front of other people. Not me. I don’t care if it’s on national TV. I want these things OUT. So when God tells me to, I will gladly go up and get help.

I was delivered from acedia and a spirit of murder before the whole church. Maybe some people thought I was nuts. I don’t care. I felt these things leave me. They were real. I felt their fear when my pastor said people needed to be delivered. My body turned cold. My hands were like ice. And after they left, I was changed. Deliverance is not phony, and it is not something only a few people need.

This morning I received a deliverance here at home. For as long as I could remember, I had had a problem with a crazy voice that said awful things in the back of my mind. I am extremely creative, so I am used to having ideas fly around in my head, and I had always assumed this was the source of the voice. It would say or think terrible, disrespectful things about God. It would put obscene images in my head. This morning God told me what it was, and I was amazed. It was a spirit of antichrist.

I didn’t realize a committed, sincere Christian could have this problem. I am a hundred percent serious about my walk with God. I have no interest in going back. I am Spirit-led. But there was still a snotty voice that said strange things about God. I paid no attention to it, and I thought it was ineffective, but it wasn’t something I liked.

Today I spoke to it, and I told it to be cast into the sea. I felt the powerful faith that comes from prayer in tongues, and I felt the fear of NOT believing, which helped me even more. I felt the spirit’s defeat.

When it was over, my mind was still. This happens when you receive deliverance. An unwelcome voice that yaps and yaps is gone, so it seems quiet. It’s a great relief. Like having a splinter removed.

Here’s an interesting thing: one spirit may do more than one thing to you, and it may have buddies. If you have a spirit that makes you angry, it might do something else that seems unrelated. Maybe it will make you gluttonous or lazy. Who knows? But if you receive deliverance from a spirit you know to be involved in one area of your life, you may get relief in areas that seem unrelated.

This thing didn’t like God. In particular, it did not like Jesus. It envied him. But I think it also hated people, because the people who treat me badly don’t annoy me as much now.

Spirits can come back. You may have to keep throwing them out. But they can’t win. They don’t have the authority to overcome you when you persist.

I put this out there because it’s important. Many Christians hush this stuff up, and that hurts people who need to know it. I don’t feel like hushing it up. I am too old to whimper about the negative opinions of people who don’t know anything.

This morning I got a word from God, and I kept repeating it back to him: “Thank you for cleansing my house.”

If there are parts of you that you don’t like–if you get sick of yourself sometimes–it may be that you have spirits to deal with. If you feel compulsions and attitudes that don’t appeal to you and seem foreign to you, it may be because they ARE foreign. You can be rid of them. You’ll need faith, so pray in tongues every day. But you can be free.