Review We talked about a particular power, a spiritual power, that impacts people, impacts believers, impacts us - by shutting down our gifts and operations. It's a very real power, a very real presence. The Bible says that there are spiritual powers in the atmosphere that are arrayed against the church of Jesus Christ. We'd be silly not to actually realise that's a great reality. The Bible also tells us that there are strongholds, holds inside our life, places of brokenness, sin or other kinds of things - where spiritual powers work through our lives, to manipulate us.
I shared about a particular phenomenon called the ‘Slumber of Jezebel’, where a spiritual power puts people to sleep - they can't see what's going on all around them; they don't see what's really taking place.
Main Message
Ecclesiastes 4 - Today I want to share with you about recognising and withstanding Jezebel's attack.
Jezebel was a woman in the Old Testament, but we need to understand that there was actually a spirit power that operated behind her. So it's not about women; it's about this spiritual power - call it a ‘spirit of witchcraft’.
Witchcraft is a spiritual power that seeks to do a number of things:
1) It attacks your identity - who you are - to try and shut you down, so you become passive. When a person experiences a witchcraft attack over them, they may not see what's going on naturally. You may be uncertain where it's coming from, but inside you feel a number of sensations. You feel knotted in your stomach, with no apparent reason; a feeling of dread; a feeling of pressure coming on you; or feelings and thoughts coming in your mind you don't belong (get out of here – go - you don't belong, you're not wanted).
Those kinds of pressures come out of the spirit realm, and into our mind and heart. We can feel turmoil and confusion, where you can't think clearly. Your mind just doesn't think clearly; or you don't even hear things, or see things - you just become unaware.
When spiritual witchcraft works against us, it has several goals. When we look into the Old Testament, and look at how this particular spirit power operated, there are a number of things it did, which it still does.
The first thing is - it seeks to shut down the prophetic flow - the flow of hearing God, the flow of the spirit in your life. When Jezebel ascended into the throne, she immediately set out to kill all the prophets of the Lord - to actually come against, and shut down, the prophetic gifting. I have seen prophetic gifting shut down on men and women of God; I've seen it shut down in churches; I've seen it shut down even in whole movements - the prophetic flow, literally stripped out, by witchcraft attack. We should have no doubt about it - this is a very real power.
God is calling the church to rise up and become apostolic. That means to take a missionary mindset - the mindset that you and I are called to be kings - to go and bring influence around us: spiritual influence; natural influence; finance/economics; in the family area; in the political area. In every area of the community, God is calling the church: “rise up and go forth”.
You have to be aware, when you do that - all apostolic advance faced spiritual resistance. You find in Acts 13, when the apostles advanced, they ran into sorcerers and witchcraft, all kinds of things. We saw how Paul had to confront a spirit of witchcraft - which had come, not only over the apostles, to actually confuse them - but over whole churches, to shut down the supernatural and miraculous power.