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Demon Problems And Intimacy With God
Anna Diehl
Demons are scary. Maybe when you first met yours, they put
on their friendly act in order to lure you in.
But at some point, they started showing their nasty side
and now you’re in serious torment.
Maybe demons are attacking your body. Maybe they’re
attacking your mind. Maybe they’re attacking your surroundings.
Whatever their methodology is, we can teach you how to
deal with these persistent pests in a way that will help your soul.
When it comes to addressing persistent demon problems
(PDPs), the Church can be counted on to point you in the wrong direction.
Instead of teaching you how to grow through the
experience, she teaches you to view the whole thing like a power struggle
between God and angelic beings.
The Church encourages you to be afraid, and then to
imitate dark magic techniques by casting spells, wielding the power of magic
charms, and calling upon powerful, more experienced sorcerers to come cast
spells on your behalf.
Don’t believe it? That’s because you’ve been blinded by
the way the Church has dolled up her forms of sorcery.
Rebuking in Jesus’ Name and shouting out Bible verses - that’s
just basic spell casting.
Holding up the Bibles and the crosses while you fling
around the holy water - that’s just playing with magic charms.
Calling the priest to come perform an exorcism ritual - that’s
just networking among sorcerers.
Fasting - that’s just you trying to coerce God into doing
what you want.
All of these theatrics are based on the same flawed
assumptions that what’s happening to you isn’t supposed to be happening to you.
In other words, God has dropped the ball.
You simply can’t justify going through a bunch of hoopla
in order to get God’s attention unless you first accept the lie that God isn’t
already in control of the situation.
Thanks to the Church’s idiocy and the human lust for
power, most Christians have bought into the theory that their God is some
impotent ninny who has had His own creation run amuck on Him.
He’s now up in Heaven feeling totally overwhelmed by the
chaos that is currently happening in this world of ours, which is why it is so
critical that we constantly bombard Him with instructions on how to run His own
universe.
“Do this. Stop
that. Fix him. Save her.”
How can we sincerely admire a Being who is so stupid that
He takes our shortsighted foolishness for wisdom?
What kind of weird trip are Christians on when they stand
around singing about how God is in control when they don’t really think He’s in
control at all?
How a man prays tells volumes about his theology.
When’s the last time you gave God an update about the
current events in your life? Clearly if you think you have to tell God what’s
going on with you, you believe He doesn’t already know.
So in your mind, what is God doing if He isn’t involved in
every aspect of this world?
Do you honestly think that a universe as complex and
fragile as this one can run on some kind of autopilot? Such logic is insane.
But even more insane is when we sit around telling God
what to do in our lives and in the lives of others. Really??
So you want your God to take the advice of a shortsighted
fool such as yourself?
If we set our egos aside for a moment, we all have to
admit that we humans are a pretty dense lot.
We don’t even understand how our own brains work, but
we’re telling the One who created our brains about what’s best for us because
we think that somehow we’re so much smarter than He is.
Then when He doesn’t do what we want, we go into these
bratty little meltdowns instead of realizing that maybe, just maybe, the God
who created humans in the first place knows better than we do what those humans
need.
This is the great irony of the human race: we’ll gladly
take our cars into a mechanic and admit that we don’t have the first clue how
to fix what’s wrong with their engines.
But when it comes to our own lives - which are far more
complex than a manmade machine - we get all huffy at the suggestion that we
don’t know what is really best for us.
We are swift to defer to experts in the medical field, but
we always act like God’s expertise is dubious at best.
When He doesn’t give us what we want, we gripe that He’s
against us.
When He sics demons on us we rush to assume that it was
some terrible mistake because God couldn’t possibly want us to be in a state of
torment.
Well, since when do things happen in God’s universe that
He doesn’t want to have happen?
Suppose you set up a chessboard to play a game. Do the
pieces get to choose what squares they will start on?
No, you put them where you want them to go. After all the
pieces are in place, do they start moving about on their own?
No, they can only move when you make them move, and then
they can only go where you want them to go.
You are in total control over your own game. Well, God is
in total control over His own creations and this universe is one of His
creations.
Nothing happens
in this world that God doesn’t want to have happen, and that includes demons
making your life hell.
The Church teaches you to view God as your very capable
Servant. She teaches you that God exists to assist you in life and to carry out
your will.
She teaches you that it is possible to manipulate and
coerce God into doing whatever you want if you just learn the right tricks. The
Church is delusional.
God teaches that He is our Master and the Supreme Ruler
over all things.
God teaches that He is an autonomous Being who does not
depend on anyone or anything.
God says that He created us to be utterly dependent on Him
in every way. Sure we have choice, but that choice is always limited to
choosing between options which God has preselected for us.
Heaven or Hell - these are the options God gives us in
eternity. There is no other choice.
We don’t have the option of making choices up just because
we don’t like the ones God has put on the table.
The next time someone tells you that you have free will,
think about the whole Heaven and Hell issue.
How free are you when all of your choices are being
defined by Someone else? We are not autonomous beings.
We are dependent creatures who are incapable of existing
apart from God willfully sustaining us. Demons are the same - they also depend
on God to sustain their existence.
Like you, demons can fantasize about what they’d like to
do, but the only things they’ll ever get to do are the things that God approves
of.
This means that whenever demons interact with you, it is
an interaction that God wants to have happen. He is the One controlling what
kinds of options demons have when it comes to messing with you.
He controls when they can mess with you, how they can mess
with you, and how long they can mess with you.
Be very clear about this: demons want you dead.
So the very fact that you’re reading this post
demonstrates that God is continuously blocking demons from having their total
way with you.
Maybe the things He is allowing them to do are pretty bad.
But no matter how bad they are, they’d be doing a whole lot worse if God
weren’t intervening.
Understanding that God is intimately involved in every
aspect of your life and that He is with you at all times is a vital step in
learning how to deal with persistent demon problems.
Whether or not you are a Christian, God
is always with you. This theory that non-Christians are
free game to demons is utter hooey.
No one can
touch you in this world without God’s permission - that includes both demons
and other humans.
You have to get this, because as long as you aren’t
acknowledging God’s involvement in your life and His supremacy over all things,
you are not going to learn the lessons He wants to teach you through this
experience.
What happens when we don’t learn our lessons? We have to
keep going over and over the same ground until we choose to submit to our
Teacher.
When a PDP arises in your life and you turn to the Church
for help, she focuses you on the goal of making the demons go away as quickly
as possible.
As appealing as this sounds, it’s actually the wrong goal.
The goal you should be focusing on is improving your relationship
with God.
This is the goal that God is focused on, and aligning with
God’s goals and priorities is the only path that is going to lead somewhere
productive.
As long as you are working at cross purposes to God by
trying to attain a different goal than He has chosen, you are going to be
fighting against Him.
Fighting against God is an epic waste of time, for God
will not be trumped by anyone.
He counters rebellion with discipline, and the longer you
rebel, the more severe His discipline becomes until you find yourself dead and
in eternity suffering some terrifying consequences.
We’re not just talking about Hell, here. Hell is the
ultimate form of discipline for the unsaved who refuse to cooperate with God on
earth, but God has plenty of consequences waiting for defiant Christians as
well.
We simply don’t get the option of spitting in God’s face
our whole lives and not paying any price for it. There is always a price.
So then, step one is to commit yourself to the correct goal: improving your
relationship with God. This is
the goal God is always going to be working on when He brings PDPs into your
life.
Step two is to be receptive to the lessons God wants to teach you
through this experience with demons. Every trial that comes into your life is intentionally
designed by God to change you in positive ways.
Because they’ve got their heads crammed full of bad
theology, most Christian leaders are going to give you some very lousy advice
when you come to them with your demon problems.
The knee jerk reaction for many
clergy members is to simply say “It’s
because you’ve sinned.”
This answer is far too simplistic. To say that your sin
has brought on your PDP is to say that God is punishing you.
This is when you’re told to start searching through your
life for every rotten thing you ever did and tearfully confess yourself into
exhaustion.
You’re often told that the demons are prevailing over you
because you are giving them an opening through your rebellion.
Well, no, this is just human ego talking. Let’s go back to
the chessboard: whose world is this? It’s God’s, not yours.
No one makes a move without His permission.
This business about “opening a door” to demons in your
life makes the ridiculous assumption that you - a powerless dot of a creature -
actually have the ability to control the movements of angelic beings.
No, you don’t. You can’t even find the door to the
supernatural realm, let alone open it.
Picture yourself standing in a room that has no doors or
windows. You can hear demons scrabbling around on the other side of the walls
of your room, but you have no way to let them into the room because there is no
door.
The Church teaches you that you are actually standing in a
room with many doors, and that you have total control over how much access
demons have to you by opening or closing those doors at will.
Whenever a demon ends up in the room with you, the Church
then blames you for letting the little rat in, and it’s on you to try and drive
them back out with a bunch of holy rituals.
But this whole idea is ridiculous, because in reality
there is no door that you can open.
The most you can do is lean against one of the walls and
whine about how much you wish you could let the demons in to play with you.
This is what is going on when people try to contact
spirits through things like Ouija and séances. There are many activities we
engage in which are attempts to try and bring demons into our lives.
But the reality is that God is the only One who can give
demons access to us.
The walls of that door-less room are like God’s continuous
protection which is surrounding you at all times.
When you start aggressively trying to make contact with
supernatural beings other than God, God finds this irritating.
Often in such cases, He will allow a demon to come into
the room with you in order to teach you a lesson about how stupid you are
being.
When God does this, it’s like a demon is suddenly able to
pass through one of the walls in front of you.
Now you’re totally trapped: that nasty demon is in your
face inside that room and there is still no door that you can open, so you have
no way of booting the demon out.
Even if there was a door, the demon is far stronger than
you are and you’d never be able to overpower him.
But here again, the Church lies her face off and makes you
think you are some super powerful sorcerer who can triumph over demons with
your great faith. You really aren’t.
Demons aren’t afraid of you, they’re afraid of God.
He is the only One who has the power to drive demons out
of the room where you are and He will only do so when He’s good and ready.
The point is this: you do not control demons’ access to
you. You do not have the power to “open doors.”
So the next time someone tries to tell you that you let
demons into your life, you need to realize that their theology is seriously
flawed.
God is the One who brings demons into your life, and He
does so for specific purposes. His purposes fall into two categories:
discipline and refinement.
Discipline is about God spanking your rebellious behind
back into alignment with Him. Refinement is about pushing obedient souls on to
the next level of spiritual maturity.
Either way, God is focused on improving His personal
relationship with you. He is doing this to you for positive reasons—that
is an essential point to keep in mind.
So how do you know if God is disciplining you or refining
you? This is actually easy to sort out once you understand a few things about
how God communicates.
You see, when God is upset with you about something, He
tells you exactly what the problem is and He also tells you what you can do to
fix it.
This is something you can absolutely count on God for.
Contrary to what you may have been taught, God is
extremely easy to succeed with and He never expects you to read His mind and
figure out why He’s mad at you while He sulks in a corner.
Nothing is going to wipe you out faster than thinking God
is angry with you when He really isn’t.
This is why it is essential that you understand how to
sort out real conviction from God from the false conviction that demons pump
out.
Whenever possible, demons try to impersonate God’s Voice
in your mind and get you to think He’s saying things to you that He really
isn’t saying.
Since demons are such clever little liars, can you really
learn how to see through their games? Absolutely.
It’s surprisingly easy to sort out true conviction from
false conviction, and we break this down for you in three simple steps in Identifying
False Conviction: Three Easy Tests.
A proper understanding of how to recognize God’s
conviction will take a lot of stress out of your life.
If you are a Christian and God is convicting you about
something, then you need to get off the stick and do it.
When God is using a PDP as a disciplinary measure, He
isn’t going to throw the demons off of you until you get out of brat mode and
do what He’s telling you to do.
Keeping unfinished business between you and the Holy
Spirit is a very stupid stand to take. In this post, we are teaching you how to
deal with PDPs in effective ways.
Remaining in a state of willful rebellion is only going to
motivate God to increase the persecution you are experiencing.
Considering that this is the God who dreamt up the horrors
of Hell, you really don’t want to be messing with Him. So if He’s convicting
you about something, do it.
Whenever God convicts us, He always makes it possible for
us to return to a good place with Him immediately, so there is no excuse for
you to be stalling around.
Now once you have dealt with any outstanding convictions,
the next step is to make sure that you are currently in a state of alignment
with God.
Alignment and rebellion are two opposing soul attitudes,
and only alignment is pleasing to God. To learn about alignment, see What
it Means to be Aligned with God.
Once you have established that you’re in alignment with
God, we’re ready to talk about refinement.
It’s quite possible that you were already in alignment
with God when He dropped this PDP on you.
If that was the case, this has never been about
disciplining you - it has always been about refinement.
If this PDP is just being used as a disciplinary tool,
then once you get back into alignment with God and out of rebel mode, He will
flick the demons off of you.
God doesn’t need a priest going through a bunch of hoopla
in order to throw demons off of you.
Whatever you do, stay away from deliverance ministers,
because those guys will only scramble your brains and make everything worse.
Now let’s assume that you have ruled out disciplinary
issues and your PDP is not resolved.
This is an extremely common situation, which is why “you
must have sinned” is a really lame answer to give someone who is being
tormented by demons.
Sin is not a given, and even if sin is playing a role, it
can be easily dealt with. Among obedient Christians, God frequently uses PDPs
as growth tools.
Refinement is
a term we use to refer to the process of God pushing you to new levels of
spiritual maturity. If discipline is a spanking, refinement is an intense
workout session at the gym.
While discipline is about getting your car back onto the
right road, refinement is about moving your car further down the right road
that it is already on.
The point is this: your PDP is not an
indication that God must be mad at you. God could be quite pleased with you in
this moment, and He is using demons as a tool to help you grow closer to Him.
So how does getting plagued with a PDP help you get closer
to God? It’s all about correcting and deepening your understanding of truth.
When we talk about your theology,
we are talking about everything you believe about God. Your theology is
seriously flawed.
This doesn’t mean you haven’t been listening to God. The
reality is that everyone’s theology has some major problems.
We’re all lugging around a lot of false assumptions about
God. We’re all mistaking lies for truth and truth for lies.
Simply put, spiritual growth is the process by which God
fixes your beliefs about Him.
He doesn’t fix them all at once, for that would completely
overwhelm you.
Just as a five-year-old isn’t ready for a lesson on
calculus, you aren’t ready to have God download a comprehensive knowledge about
Him into your tiny little mind.
If you’re going to thrive in your walk with God and not
end up utterly confused, overwhelmed, and terrified, God needs to fix your beliefs
about Him one teensy little step at a time.
This is something which God thoroughly delights in doing.
Nothing pleases Him more than teaching souls who are eager to learn.
God absolutely loves taking care of human beings, and He
finds immense delight in helping you understand more and more about Him.
If you want to teach your physics student about gravity,
you can lecture him in a classroom, draw diagrams, and talk about formulas.
That will certainly give him the basic idea.
But if you were to then take him up in an airplane and
skydive with him down to the ground, he would understand the force of gravity
in a much more personal way.
To God, demons are excellent tools for really drilling
home certain key principles into your mind.
When you are aligned with Him, God doesn’t stick you with
a PDP just to torment you. Instead, His goal is to help you get a firm grip on
concepts which can be very hard to get your mind around without hands on
experience.
When it comes to thriving in your walk with God, some truths
are more critical than others. Understanding your absolute dependency on God is
one of these more critical truths, and saddling you with a PDP is an excellent
way to help you grasp this concept on a core level.
As obvious as it should sound to say,
“We can do nothing without God,” the
reality is that Christians work overtime to downplay their dependency on God.
Humans are very prideful creatures and we lust after
control and power that we will never have. We fight intensely hard against
accepting just how utterly dependent we are on God.
The way we direct God about in our prayers, the way we
treat the Bible like some contract that He is bound by, the way we fast and go
through other holy motions to try and get Him to do things - these are all ways
of trying to assert our independence and reject our role as servants.
We don’t want to serve, we want to lead. Dependency and
submission are two concepts which our pride really gags on, yet these are
concepts which we must learn to embrace if we are going to thrive in our
relationship with God.
By plaguing us with an upsetting PDP, God forces us to
acknowledge how frail and powerless we are.
It is so beneficial for the developing Christian to
experience rebuking his brains out only to have demons laugh in his face,
totally unaffected. We must get a real faceful of how impotent we are.
We must be forced to see that we are totally at the mercy
of a God who will not be led by us.
If God were to always drive demons off the moment you
command them to leave, you are guaranteed to conclude that you are the one
causing them to leave.
All of this guff in the Church about prayer warriors,
powerful intercessors and the power of faith is nothing more than humans
running amuck with the notion of being in control.
We are not in control. God says this over and over,
but we don’t really believe Him until He sics demons on us.
When all of your prayers, fasting, and other rituals
accomplish nothing and all of the so-called experts in the Church are tossing
up their hands in defeat and saying you’re a lost cause - that’s when you’re in
the perfect position to get over this crippling delusion that you are in
control.
God will not be led by us. But we will not really
believe this until He puts us into situations where we are desperate for help
that He refuses to give us.
It’s ideal if such situations involve God not doing
something which we are certain must be in His will - such as healing us from
some disease or throwing demons off of us.
Remember, your theology has some serious flaws in it and
God is in the process of fixing those flaws.
The topic of God’s will is one that we all start off
massively confused by. The Church really leads you astray by teaching you it’s
not God’s will for there to be evil and suffering in the world.
Some denominations really push for the idea that it’s not
God’s will for Christians to ever be sick, poor, or miserable.
Such things are absolute lies, and when we go through life
totally confused about what God’s will for us is, we end up with all kinds of
problems.
Wrestling with a PDP is a great way to realize that God’s
will is a lot more complex than you’ve been led to believe, and this kind of
realization is going to do a lot to strengthen your bond with God.
PDPs are great ways for God to work on correcting false
beliefs that you have about Him.
But in the process of showing you what’s wrong with your
thinking, God also shows you what’s right, and then He uses PDPs to challenge
you to rehearse the new truths He is revealing to you.
For example, most Christians have enormous difficulty
believing that God is really in control and that He is good.
They claim to believe these things with their lips, but
they don’t really believe them, which is why their prayers are so filled with
angst and criticism about the way God is running the world.
When you’ve got demons in your face freaking you out with
their antics and God isn’t rushing to throw them off of you, suddenly you are
going to find yourself seriously questioning God’s Character and His control
over the situation.
After all, does a good God really let demons torment His
obedient kids? Yes, He does.
Trying to measure God’s goodness by the kinds of the
trials He brings into your life simply doesn’t work.
God works on the principle of “the end justifies the
means”.
This means that you’re often not going to see what’s so
good about God’s methods until He makes a certain amount of progress.
What we can tell you is this: when you are aligning with
God in the midst of your PDPs, you’re going to end up looking back on them as experiences
that taught you critical truths about God and greatly strengthened your
personal bond with Him.
PDPs are not signs that the universe is spinning out of
control or that God has turned His back on you.
PDPs are critical opportunities to grow closer to your
Creator, and you get there by focusing your energy not on a bunch of religious
rituals, but on praying a prayer like this:
“God, I know that You have
brought this trial into my life for a good reason. Help me to learn everything
that You want to teach me through this. I want to grow so much closer to You
because of this. Make me all that You want me to be.”
A prayer like this is a billion times more effective than
shouting “In Jesus’ Name, I rebuke you!”
When you rebuke, you’re just trying to escape discomfort
and you’re not open to learning anything.
When you pray something like the prayer we suggested, you
are submitting to God’s will for your life, and you’re trusting in the critical
truths that God is for you, that He is in control, and that He wants to draw
you closer to Himself.
Suppose God were to materialize in
your bedroom and say, “I’ll throw the demons off of you right now if you want,
but if I do, you’ll never learn certain things that I wanted to teach you and
you and I will never be as close as we could have been.”
What would you say? Is momentary relief really worth
missing out on some eternal gain?
God is for you and there is so much that He wants to give
you.
But He’s not going to give it away for free -you have to
choose to cooperate with His program, and that means submitting to His
Authority in your life and putting His wisdom above your own.
Of course we want the demons to leave - demons are
terrifying monsters and they make us feel vulnerable, weak, and helpless.
Demons tell us that we are all alone and that the only
reason they are in our faces is that God has left us.
But demons are chronic liars. The truth is that God is
with us, and that He wants to use our PDP to unearth some fabulous spiritual
treasures that will eternally change our dynamic with Him.
Don’t settle for spending all of your energy searching for
the quick fix.
Choose to go for the higher prize and ask God to help you
get the most spiritual gain out of this experience.
When we align our goals with God’s, we end up in such an
awesome place.
It’s a given that God will oust the demons once they have
served their purpose in your life.
Trying to push His schedule up is the wrong focus. You
need to grow from these experiences, not just run from them.
Choose to trust God. It’s a decision that will change your
life.
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