Many times when there's roots of rebellion in a person's life, you'll have spirits of witchcraft operating as well, so rebellion is wilful resistance, and in New Zealand one of the most common forms of rebellion is what you call passive rebellion. Passive rebellion is not so easy to spot. Passive rebellion is the person resists, but they're not showing it outwardly, they show it in different other ways. They show it by, I'll do it my way, I'll do it on my time, I'll do it when I feel like it, and so they may comply, but actually there's no heart in it. There is a rebelling and imposing their own will around it, and so you'll find you can't get things done, you can't get them done on time. There's actually a wilful resisting of you, and you can feel the lack of flow, the pressure that it seems to bring around. So rebellion, they'll just nod and smile and say yes, but then not do it. You see the pattern, you know there's rebellion underneath, in the heart - but the person doesn't feel rebellious. That's their behaviour they've gotten used to.
Another area is the area of lying. Lying brings people directly into agreement with an evil spirit. In Isaiah 28 it tells us that when we lie, we come into agreement with demonic spirits, the spirit of death. We've made a covenant with death, with hell we're in agreement, because we made lies our refuge. Isn't that amazing? We're in a covenant with death, and with hell we're in agreement, because we made lies our refuge, so lying opens the door immediately then, for demonic spirits to come in and torment a person's life. So those are some of the patterns of sin that you'll find. There are others which I've mentioned here, because I want to identify them specifically, so remember patterns of sin, usually there's a trigger cause. It helps to find out when this thing started, what lies behind it, because often there's grief and pain, or an injustice. When you talk that out, then the person comes to a place of resting, and releasing forgiveness, and repenting of their sin.
A third area, which is a significant area, is the area of occult involvement. Deuteronomy 18, God wants us to be connected to Him. God is a spirit, and we are made for spiritual experience, we're made and designed to live and operate and move in the realm of the spirit. It's not to be a complicated thing, it's actually a natural part of our life that we would engage with God who is a spirit, and learn how to activate, walk and operate in the flow of the spirit. But people who do not know God, get drawn into the demonic realm, so when we talk about occult - the word occult means to be concealed, or covered, or hidden, or to be covered over - so when we refer the occult, it's any practice where the source of the power is concealed. So when you get involved in the kingdom of God, it's a kingdom of light. Everything is in the open. What we see, is what we get. There's no big surprises in that. Jesus is the king of that kingdom, the kingdom has His nature, the power behind anything that happens is the Holy Spirit, and when we open our life to Jesus the king, we open our life up to the Holy Spirit. The source of power is always identifiable.
When you get in the kingdom of darkness, you have no idea who the king is, but the king is Satan himself. He's a king over a kingdom, and it takes on his nature, cruel, deceptive, treacherous, murderous and dark. The second thing is, the source of power in the occult practices, is concealed. You don't know where the power comes from, so you'll find in the occult realm, when people get involved and drawn into these things, they have no idea what the power is. They just know that there's power there, and many times people are drawn to the occult because of deep rejection or rebellion in their heart, and they look for power to try and compensate, and they find they're drawn. It's quite addictive, it's like a drug, that once people start down that track they get drawn further and further and further into it. So when we talk about the occult of course, we're aware that recently there's been just a huge interest in these things, like all the Harry Potter movies. They're all about the occult. They're about two kinds of occult; about divination, which is telling the future, various ways of finding the future, or trying to find out what will happen ahead of us; and the second is sorcery, which is the dimension of power, gaining power from hidden spirits, and of course Hollywood dresses it all up, so it all looks wonderful, and they say it's good against evil. But really in all of it, the power is never identified, and so occult areas will always open the realm of the spirit. People come into direct agreement with evil spirits.