In Acts 10:38 it tells us that Jesus was anointed with the Holy Ghost, and it says to heal all who were oppressed, or held down by the devil. So if evil spirits are operating, you feel pressure, or you feel strong energy inside, trying to move you or manipulate you, so for example if you're in the grip of temptation, it's like your whole inner being is energised. It's like your mind and thoughts get captured by this thing. If anger is starting to flood your soul, it's like a huge amount of energy inside you that rises up, and demons manipulate that. So the word that's commonly used to describe the activity of demons, is that they energise problems in your life, or they bring to life and give power to things inside you. Likewise it tells us that God also does that. He energises, but He energises us to do good, and the Bible also tells us the word of God works mightily in you who believe, so God's word energises us.
The spirit of God energises us, but also demons energise us, so we see that our inner life can be energised, either negatively by demonic spirits, or positively by the spirit and word of God, so there are common areas that demons attack. It helps if you're just aware of it; in the body with addictions and sicknesses or weaknesses or weariness, in the soul with conflicts and emotional turmoil, feelings that rage out of control, accusations or condemnation in the mind, pressures of temptation that seem so real and powerful, and when you're in the grip of temptation God seems so far away, and the temptation seems so very real. But once you've resisted it, the energy of it dies down, so some of you may have - can you remember a time when you were going through an immense spiritual conflict, how much energy it took inside to overcome it? It's like it's real energy that's there, and then after it's subsided, it's like you're back at peace and at rest again, so there was a real energy almost took over, and took all your thinking and emotional and spiritual effort to get over it.
Spirits can come around and bring heaviness, and bring oppression, passivity. These are common sorts of things that spirits bring, so if you notice some of those things happening, you can identify perhaps there is a spiritual pressure around me. They come on finances. There was a season when we were establishing the church here where we had accident after accident after accident. We had financial difficulties and pressures and setbacks one after the other, and it become really distressing, until God spoke to me what it was about, and I was able to stand up and assert spiritual authority against it. From that point on it changed, and then it just subsided. We went without any insurance claim for years, but prior to that I'd been turned down from a company because we had so many. It was just in the season when there was spiritual conflict I had all of these problems happen.
Difficulties in your circumstances - Sargin was sharing with you last night how just even trying to get the notes out, the machine violently resisted printing. You put anything else in it prints it; you put this in, it won't print it. Last time we were [laughs] last seminar we did I remembered after we'd talked, he put it in and we got the notes out, and it's printed only the odd pages, every even page had not printed. Now it's never done that before, it just did that on that seminar. It's never done it before, never done it since. It just did it for that seminar - so these are the kinds of things. You get setbacks, and they create irritations. You've got to learn how to rest in God, and just find a place of peace in the middle of it, and assert your authority.
So demonic spirits can bring these pressures around. When I go to Asia I have all kinds of things happen over there. One of the churches tries to look after me very well, but they know from experience that things tend to go wrong when I go there [laughter] and so they had a car. [Laughs] They put this lovely car outside to pick me up from the hotel. When we got to the car it wouldn't start, so they've got this nice car, and it's just shut down and won't work outside - and we're talking about nice hotel, and it's on the main street of Singapore, and the church car is broken down right there at the gates. That was really embarrassing for them, they really got so embarrassed so they rang up for the spare car - the spare car's got a flat tyre. [Laughter] So it's like they were oh, so sorry, so sorry.
So next year they remembered the experience, going to really do this right, so they got an Audi, and they had it all serviced the week before I went there. I get there and their head's hanging down [laughter] and they said we're so sorry about the air con. I said what about the air con? He said well something happened with the window of the car, it's just dropped down. We've never seen it, we've no idea why [laughter] and now there's no air con. They took it to the firm, and the firm says we've never ever in all our cars in all the world had that trouble. They said it doesn't happen to this kind of car, so they fixed it for nothing. But it's just we had lots of things like that, all kinds of stuff, so the spirit world is very real, and if you start to come alive in spiritual things, you will experience things that you had not perhaps experienced before, which are not so explainable by natural means, but they can be explained if there's energy, and something reacting from the spirit world against you.