Giving Keys to Thieves

After church one day a few years ago, a solid Christian woman began to be overcome with feelings of extreme sadness. A few of us, my wife included, went with her into a room to intercede for her away from the crowds.

As we prayed, a demonic presence appeared to manifest. She started to growl, drool and claw at the floor like a wild animal. Honestly, I was kind of freaked out. Though we eventually saw her receive deliverance from the evil spirit, within a few weeks it happened again. When I got a call about her experiencing her third bout with the demon, I sensed God telling me to ask her if she had been harboring bitterness and resentment toward a certain family member.

Unfortunately, this is not the only time I have ministered to brothers and sisters in Christ where prolonged bitterness and an unwillingness to forgive allowed evil spirits to have their oppressive way. Sometimes these Christians heard audible, evil, and berating voices, and one believer even heard voices telling him to do harmful, malevolent things to others.

In Ephesians 4:26-27, Paul makes sense of this situation. He writes, “Be angry, and yet do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity.” The word translated “opportunity” in this verse (topon) has a lexical range that includes “place,” “region,” “seat,” and “opportunity.” Jesus says in John 14:2 that He is going to God the Father to prepare a topon, a dwelling place, for His disciples.

So basically, remaining bitter with someone and refusing to forgive him or her is like handing a thief the key to our house. Specifically, Paul tells us this thief is the devil, and the house for which the key is made is our body. To be sure, handing over the key to our house is not the same as signing over the deed to that person. Just because someone has a key to our house does not mean he or she owns it. We still own the house.

If you have been born again, God hasbought you with a price and your body has become the temple of the Holy Spirit. The devil cannot own or possess something that is owned or possessed by God. However, if you have given away the key to your house to him, he has the ability to cause much damage to your life. Again, as Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10). Knowing this, why would you willingly give the key to your house to the thief?

Though what you just read may be outside of your tradition, the early Christians affirmed that unrepentant Christians can be oppressed and demonized by evil spirits.

Holy Scripture teaches us that there are certain invisible enemies that fight against us. And it commands us to arm ourselves against them. … We receive certain initial elements and (as it were) seeds of sins from those things that we use agreeably to nature. However, when we have indulged them beyond what is proper and have not resisted the first movements to intemperance, then the hostile powers size the occasion of this first transgression. They incite and press us hard in every way. They seek to extend our sins over a wider field. – Origen 225CE, ANF Volume 4, p.   [CD-ROM]

Thankfully, all of the individuals experienced full and lasting deliverance once they repented of the sins of bitterness and unforgiveness. They experienced the Spirit of God cast the evil spirits out from their bodies through the power, authority, name and blood of Jesus Christ. These Christians felt incredible spiritual and physical relief as a result of the repentance and deliverance that had taken place. One of them was finally able to start having a full night’s sleep after roughly two decades of restlessness.

What about you? Has a root of bitterness been allowed to run deep in your life for too long? Is there someone you need to forgive?

Today is the day for reconciliation. Today is the day for freedom. Today is the day to reclaim the keys of your house.

Lord's Prayer Pt. 3 - May Your Kingdom Come

Once when my church was still meeting in an elementary school, a well-spoken, gentle young man decided to visit us. We happened to be teaching on Luke 4:40-43 where Jesus heals scores of people and casts out demons from sundown to sunup one night. We talked about how Luke records Jesus saying in verse 43, “I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, for I was sent for this purpose.”

We discussed how many of those people probably felt as if Jesus was turning their world upside down. However, what Jesus was actually doing was helping to set everything right side up again.

So many areas that had been turned upside down by the Fall in Eden were getting turned right side up by Jesus bringing the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

Little did I know, the kingdom of God was about to invade that young man’s life. After the service as folks were tearing stuff down, he came up to me weeping and asking if I would pray for him. So I took him behind the stage and off to the side where we wouldn’t attract any attention.

I felt led to ask him if he was having any compulsive sinful behaviors or thoughts. Areas where he almost felt driven to do or think those destructive things, no matter how hard he fought against them. He mentioned three areas and confirmed that those were the reasons he wanted prayer.

So I began by helping him with a prayer of confession in each of those areas. Then, starting with the first area of concern, I prayed that God would bring him cleansing and deliverance from that stronghold, and that His kingdom would come.

Suddenly, he began convulsing and vomited all over the floor and a little on one of my boots. Assuring him everything was okay, I gently began praying for the second area and… another big puddle of vomit. This time, though, I was able to get my feet out of the way in time. God blessed us with similar success in the third area as well.

The young man was overwhelmed with a feeling of peace as he shed a few tears of joy. It was amazing to watch Jesus’ kingdom begin to flip upside down areas of his life right side up in such a dramatic way. Praise God!

However, when Jesus commands us to pray for His kingdom to come, He isn’t speaking only of exorcisms and healings. He’s mostly speaking of us letting the King be Himself in us. And can you imagine what a tremendous blessing we Christians would be to the world if we believed and prayed the promise Jesus made that His disciples would do the same works as He did?

Cyprian did:

In the prayer, “Thy kingdom come,” we ask that the kingdom of God may be set forth to us, even as we also ask that His name may be sanctified in us. … He who dedicates himself to God and Christ desires not earthly, but heavenly kingdoms. … We add, also, and say, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” … Now that is the will of God, which Christ both did and taught. Humility in conversation; steadfastness in faith; modesty in words; justice in deeds; mercifulness in works; discipline in morals; to be unable to do a wrong, and to be able to bear a wrong when done; to keep peace with the brethren; to love God with all one’s heart; to love Him in that He is a Father; to fear Him in that He is God; to prefer nothing whatever to Christ, because He did not prefer anything to us; to adhere inseparably to His love; to stand by His cross bravely and faithfully. – Cyprian 250CE Volume 5, p. 788-789

Tertullian on the Dark Forces Behind Abortion around 198CE

Argument: The Story About Christians Drinking the Blood of an Infant that They Have Murdered is Barefaced Slander. But the Gentiles, Both Cruelly Expose Their Children Newly Born, and Before They are Born Destroy Them by a Cruel Abortion. Christians are Neither Allowed to See Nor to Hear of Manslaughter.

“And now I wish to meet him who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant. Do you think that it can be possible for so tender, so little a body to receive those fatal wounds; for any one to shed, pour forth, and drain that new blood of a youngling, and of a man scarcely come into existence? No one can believe this, except one who can dare to do it.

And I see that you at one time expose your begotten children to wild beasts and to birds; at another, that you crush them when strangled with a miserable kind of death. There are some women who, by drinking medical preparations, extinguish the source of the future man in their very bowels, and thus commit a parricide before they bring forth. And these things assuredly come down from the teaching of your gods.

For Saturn did not expose his children, but devoured them. With reason were infants sacrificed to him by parents in some parts of Africa, caresses and kisses repressing their crying, that a weeping victim might not be sacrificed. Moreover, among the Tauri of Pontus, and to the Egyptian Busiris, it was a sacred rite to immolate their guests, and for the Galli to slaughter to Mercury human, or rather inhuman, sacrifices. The Roman sacrificers buried living a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman; and to this day, Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with murder; and, what is worthy of the son of Saturn, he is gorged with the blood of an evil and criminal man. …

They also are not unlike him who devours the wild beasts from the arena, besmeared and stained with blood, or fattened with the limbs or the entrails of men. To us it is not lawful either to see or to hear of homicide; and so much do we shrink from human blood, that we do not use the blood even of eatable animals in our food.”

Commodianus on Inter-dimensional Visitors Before the Days of Noah in 260CE

In the law, the Lord of heaven and earth and sea has commanded, saying, “Worship not vain gods made by your own hands out of wood or gold, lest My wrath destroy you for such things.” The people before Moses, unskilled, living without law, and ignorant of God, prayed to gods that perished, after the likenesses of which they fashioned vain idols. The Lord having brought the Jews out of the land of Egypt, subsequently imposed on them a law; and the Omnipotent enjoined these things, that they should serve Him alone, and not those idols. Moreover, in that law is taught concerning the resurrection, and the hope of living in happiness again in the world, if vain idols be forsaken and not worshipped.

When Almighty God, to beautify the nature of the world willed that that earth should be visited by angels, when they were sent down they despised His laws. Such was the beauty of women that it turned them aside; so that, being contaminated, they could not return to heaven. Rebels from God, they uttered words against Him. Then the Highest uttered His judgment against them; and from their seed giants are said to have been born.

By them arts were made known in the earth, and they taught the dyeing of wool, and everything which is done; and to them, when they died, men erected images. But the Almighty, because they were of an evil seed, did not approve that, when dead, they should be brought back from death. From there, wandering, they now subvert many bodies, and it is such as these especially that you this day worship and pray to as gods.

Tertullian on Persecution and Demonic Oppression Around 200CE

We believe that persecution comes to pass, no question, by the devil’s agency, but not by the devil’s origination. Satan will not be at liberty to do anything against the servants of the living God unless the Lord grant leave, either that He may overthrow Satan himself by the faith of the elect which proves victorious in the trial, or in the face of the world show that apostasizers to the devil’s cause have been in reality His servants. You have the case of Job, whom the devil, unless he had received authority from God, could not have visited with trial, not even, in fact, in his property, unless the Lord had said, “Behold, all that he has I put at your disposal; but do not stretch out your hand against himself.” In short, he would not even have stretched it out, unless afterwards, at his request, the Lord had granted him this permission also, saying, “Behold, I deliver him to you; only preserve his life.”


So he asked in the case of the apostles likewise an opportunity to tempt them, having it only by special allowance, since the Lord in the Gospel says to Peter, “Behold, Satan asked that he might sift you all as grain; but I have prayed for you that your faith fail not;” that is, that the devil should not have power granted him sufficient to endanger his faith. Whence it is manifest that both things belong to God, the shaking of faith as well as the shielding of it, when both are sought from Him—the shaking by the devil, the shielding by the Son. And certainly, when the Son of God has faith’s protection absolutely committed to Him, beseeching it of the Father, from whom He receives all power in heaven and on earth, how entirely out of the question is it that the devil should have the assailing of it in his own power!


But in the prayer prescribed to us, when we say to our Father, “Lead us not into temptation” (now what greater temptation is there than persecution?), we acknowledge that that comes to pass by His will whom we beseech to exempt us from it. For this is what follows, “But deliver us from the wicked one,” that is, do not lead us into temptation by giving us up to the wicked one, for then are we delivered from the power of the devil, when we are not handed over to him to be tempted. Nor would the devil’s legion have had power over the herd of swine unless they had got it from God; so far are they from having power over the sheep of God. I may say that the bristles of the swine, too, were then counted by God, not to speak of the hairs of holy men. The devil, it must be owned, seems indeed to have power—in this case really his own—over those who do not belong to God, the nations being once for all counted by God as a drop of the bucket, and as the dust of the threshing-floor, and as the spittle of the mouth, and so thrown open to the devil as, in a sense, a free possession.


But against those who belong to the household of God he may not do ought as by any right of his own, because the cases marked out in Scripture show when—that is, for what reasons—he may touch them. For either, with a view to their being approved, the power of trial is granted to him, challenged or challenging, as in the instances already referred to, or, to secure an opposite result, the sinner is handed over to him, as though he were an executioner to whom belonged the inflicting of punishment, as in the case of Saul. “And the Spirit of the LORD,” says Scripture, “departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled and stifled him;” or the design is to humble, as the apostle tells us, that there was given him a stake, the messenger of Satan, to buffet him; and even this sort of thing is not permitted in the case of holy men, unless it be that at the same time strength of endurance may be perfected in weakness. For the apostle likewise delivered Phygellus and Hermogenes over to Satan that by chastening they might be taught not to blaspheme. …


He who fears to suffer, cannot belong to Him who suffered. But the man who does not fear to suffer, he will be perfect in love—in the love, it is meant, of God; “for perfect love casts out fear.” “And therefore many are called, but few chosen.” It is not asked who is ready to follow the broad way, but the narrow. And therefore the Comforter is requisite, who guides into all truth, and animates to all endurance. And they who have received Him will neither stoop to flee from persecution nor to buy it off, for they have the Lord Himself, One who will stand by us to aid us in suffering, as well as to be our mouth when we are put to the question.