Examples of Jesus' ministry of deliverance, how He worked, how He operated, and then some of Jesus' teaching as to what evil spirits are and how they operate. How spirits get into people's lives and the ways they operate, leading into a closer examination of the scriptures around deliverance, and what they reveal about demons, and the spirit world. Some basics of the deliverance ministry, leading into a practice exercise (activation).
What we want to start to look at now is, we want to look at how demons enter people, how do spirits get into people's lives and if a spirit got into someone's life, what ways would it operate? What would it do? How would you know that a demon was in a person's life? We'll find there are a number of ways you can establish that there's an evil spirit present, so we want to look first of all at how evil spirits enter, and before we get into how they enter, it's a help to understand what they are. So if you're going to be doing deliverance, you will engaging or commanding an evil spirit to come out, it helps if you understand firstly what Jesus taught about it, and what happened in His ministry related to it, and secondly, how actually they gain entry into a person's life. Then we'll look at the foundations for a person being set free.
So the first thing we'll do is, we're just going to look at the way demons enter in and oppress people. The first verse we'll look at is in Acts, Chapter 10 and Verse 38. It tells us in this verse: God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost, and with power, and He went about doing good, healing all who were oppressed of the devil, for God was with Him. So Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit. That's the same anointing you carry. He had a different level of it, a different portion of it, the anointing flowing on His life, but it's not a different anointing. It's the work of the Holy Spirit, flowing in your life - and it said: He went about doing good, healing all who were oppressed of the devil. Now the word oppressed means literally to exercise dominion or spiritual force and hold someone down, to exercise spiritual force and to hold a person down, so it tells us very clearly in this verse, that evil spirits, whatever they are, exercise a spiritual force on people, so that they feel held back, held down, held imprisoned, like I can't break out, even though I want to. I can't seem to change, even though I want to change.
But behind it is a spiritual force. That's why people struggle to get free of things. They want to get free, they know what's right and what they should do, but there's often anchored to the problem in their life, a spirit being which literally holds them down. In Ephesians, Chapter 2 and Verse 2 it says that spirit that works or energises within the children of disobedience, so when we our life is out of alignment with God, when we disobey or break His laws, and a spirit gains entrance, it'll do one of two things. It'll either hold you down so you're held imprisoned and can't break free, or/and it will energise problems in your life so they stay alive, and keep working, and you can't ever seem to get over them. Say for example a spirit of unforgiveness, or a spirit of bitterness, they often work together these spirits, then what the person would do, they would find that they're constantly feeling offended and hurt by things that people are doing to them. They can't ever seem to get out of thinking about the injuries that have been done to them by other people. It's like it just goes on and on and on. A new hurt comes, suddenly they're preoccupied, and they can't get out of their mind the injustice they've got and what's happened.
Now they may not be thinking that consciously but they get reactionary, so you'll find a person who's got a demonic spirit say working in that area, they get very reactionary over something quite small. The response, or reaction, is out of proportion to the injury that was done. A little misunderstanding and someone can flare up, and they didn't do the most obvious thing which was just, calm down, think about it, ask what's happened, enquire for information, try to establish and work out what's going on. It doesn't happen. It's just this fire suddenly comes alive inside, of anger or resentment or whatever, or reaction or a wall of offence comes, and it feels like there's little control or management. Even though the person knows I ought to, they just can't, and so the demonic spirit will either bring a cap and a pressure and a binding, or it'll energise problems, so they just flare up, and they're hard to manage, like a fire that's suddenly gone out of control. The word the Bible uses is the word energise, to energise or flame something in, so it becomes quite big.