Recognize Your Abusers

I got a great revelation during prayer this morning.

I have a few people in my life who are…jerks. I have never been able to come up with a nicer word for “jerk,” so that’s the word I use. They don’t listen. They are pushy. They constantly insult people, whether expressly or by implication. They are selfish to the extreme. They don’t care how bad they have to make you feel in order to get their way, and they go through life dominating other people by injecting their own problems into them instead of confronting those problems.

God gave me a way to fix them good. I speak defeat to them, in the name of Jesus. I speak victory to myself. I speak defeat to the spirits that drive them. Of course, I also speak revelation, faith, and contrition to these people. That should go without saying. The point isn’t to destroy them.

This works. It works so well that the jerks I know personally are actually feeling bad. They seem downcast and depressed. They seem angry. If you don’t believe it, try it yourself. A jerk can be all over you in the morning, but if you speak defeat to him before lunch, later in the day, he will be cowed. If you do it day after day, he will sort of shrivel up.

I felt bad about this. Mostly, I felt relieved. I won’t lie. But I felt some guilt. But today God showed me something: the things these people feel now would be in ME had I not acted! This is what they go through life shoving into people. They’re just getting what they created. They wanted me to feel that way. And that would be wrong. I would be punished for nothing, and they would be enabled. They would have no reason to repent.

Satan loves to put his seed in people. I honestly believe this is why rape is so common in prison, which is a foretaste of hell. When one man rapes another, he gets pleasure from the other man’s suffering. The more the victim struggles, the better it is for the aggressor. And when it’s done, the victim is full of things that should be in the aggressor: defeat, shame, despair, and powerlessness.

Outside of prison, people do the same thing to us in more acceptable ways. They touch us when we don’t want to be touched. They don’t respect our property. They interrupt us when we speak, as though we’re not there. They give us orders they have no authority to give. They laugh at us in a malicious way. They criticize. They micromanage.

Micromanagement is a form of abuse. Like all abuse, it negates the victim’s status as a person. Backseat driving is a perfect example. It’s fine to give someone a couple of tips about which turns to take, but if you’re on a half-mile drive to the drugstore, and the driver has to follow your orders the whole way, you’re a jerk. You’re an abuser. Obviously, if the driver has a license, and he’s in the driver’s seat, he has the authority to make decisions and drive. If you can’t leave him alone, it’s as if you’re denying his right to exist. He ceases to be a person. He becomes an extension of you. And that’s what you wanted all along.

A jerk thinks he is the most important person on earth. He may be completely unable to understand the misery he causes other people, or he may be aware of it and take pleasure from it. He serves his flesh, like a baby. And to serve the flesh is to serve Satan. Spirits tell the flesh what to do. The flesh tells the jerk what to do. The jerk tells you what to do. When you comply, you’re serving Satan, too.

All my life, I have been too nice to jerks and bullies. I have gone along with their antics in order to have peace, and of course, that makes them worse. That’s called “appeasement.” It didn’t work in Nazy Germany. It doesn’t work when Israel deals with Muslim nuts. It never works. Enabling is not a good strategy, unless you want to become a manipulator and lose your integrity.

The jerks in my life created suffering. It was intended to go into me, like a seed, and bear fruit of despair, defeat, shame, guilt, self-blame, and failure. Now it stays in the people who created it. Good! They’re SUPPOSED to suffer. There are only two options: it goes into them, or it goes into me. For most of my life, I’ve taken it inside me to shut them up. That was stupid. From now on, it goes back into them, and if they die from it, so be it. I am not a vessel for Satan’s seed.

The most effective jerks are the ones who can inflict guilt on you. A bedridden grandparent can be a jerk. Your mother may be a jerk; that’s extremely common. People who do a lot for you (and always remember it and recite it back to you) can be jerks. Many people who seem to be on your side and even THINK they’re on your side are jerks. Don’t be deceived.

Do you feel weak after dealing with someone? Do you walk on eggs around them? Have you ever had a guilty moment in which you imagined how free you would be if they died? Are there dreams they keep shut up inside you?

That’s a jerk. Even if it seems like they’re being nice to you…that’s a jerk. It’s Satan’s suicide bomber, knocking on your front door.

The law told us to honor our fathers and mothers. If you don’t hear from the Holy Spirit, that’s the best course. But Jesus, who expected us to obey the Holy Spirit (who wrote the law) said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” A young man wanted to stay with his father until he died, and then he planned to serve Jesus. Honoring his father would have meant staying. Jesus told him to let the dead bury the dead, which meant, “LEAVE HIM.”

Jesus said he came to bring division. He said he came to pit relatives against each other. That was a major departure from the law. He was referring to separation from people who serve the flesh, and he didn’t care if they were related to us by blood. When we are led by the Spirit, our real relatives are not the people who carry similar genes. They’re other Spirit-led believers. They are the people Jesus was talking about when he said that if we gave people up for him, we would receive new ones, not just in paradise, but here on earth.

If you’re Spirit-led, you definitely have bullies and jerks assigned to you by Satan. You need to throw them off and serve God instead. You’re going to need faith in order to do it. Otherwise, when you speak defeat to them, nothing will happen. Faith comes from daily prayer in tongues. So you better get started.

You don’t have to know the bully you speak defeat to. You can speak defeat to Barack Obama if you feel led. You can speak defeat to a group or a movement. Don’t put a limit on it.

I hope this is helpful. I am applying it, and I have seen results.