2.) Secondly, the power to make this happen is the Spirit of God. You can’t do this work except by the Spirit of God. It requires the anointing and power of the Holy Spirit; and for that to happen, it requires a person to exercise faith. So, one of the things I want to do with you, is to share about working with the Holy Spirit; because deliverance is not about methods. It’s helpful to have a process, or a way of approaching deliverance, but we should not depend on it. We should depend on the Holy Spirit to help us. You can’t do the deliverance work without the Holy Spirit, so your own relationship with the Holy Spirit is vital. “If I, by the Spirit of God, cast out the demons”, so the power that you need working through you, is the anointing of the Holy Spirit; and that comes by faith. We need to learn how to listen to, and respond to, and work with, the Holy Spirit. So, constantly in your ministry, you need to be listening to the Holy Spirit. We’ll talk a little more about that later on.
3.) You notice the next thing He teaches here, “If I cast out demons”. So, deliverance requires a person to confront the spirit. You can’t just pray for God to do it. You yourself need to confront the spirit. “If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you”. So, we see now, in the dynamic of doing deliverance, it requires the person to work with the Holy Spirit, to exercise faith, speak and directly confront the demon; and when the Spirit of God works with them, then the kingdom of God becomes established. So, when we’re doing deliverance, we need to be sensitive to, and working with, the Holy Spirit. We’ll talk a little more about that in another session. We’re just giving some foundations now.
Now, look over to verse 43-45, Jesus said: “When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, but finds none. Then he says: ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first.”
Notice some things that Jesus speaks here. What He is sharing is extremely important, because He’s helping us to understand the invisible spirit world; and He also identifies a problem with deliverance. The issue that He identifies is the one we want to focus on: “When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through the dry places”, or: “he walks through dry places”. Jesus is describing what happens after the person is delivered; and this is of concern for you as a small group leader or a cell group leader: what happens to the person after they’ve been set free. We need to understand that there’s a spiritual dynamic happens after deliverance; and the problem is: so many people focus on doing deliverance, that they miss the bigger picture.
Casting out the demons is only a part of the work; our main work is to disciple people to follow Christ. Deliverance is about removing the spiritual forces that hinder the person; but we have to do more than just remove the demon, and here’s why. Jesus said: “When the unclean spirit goes out of a man”. So, in other words, after deliverance, the spirit is forced out of the person. The question is raised, well what happens to the demon?
Firstly, we notice that it walks. Demons are low-level spiritual beings. They’re quite limited and confined in their activities. When someone exercises deliverance, the demons are literally forced out. Then, they walk through dry places, or in other words: they move to where there is no anointing of the Holy Spirit. They rapidly exit; but they seek rest. Evil spirits constantly seek somewhere to live. They seek a dwelling place. They’re not looking to lie down; they want to gain access to some place they feel at home in. So, the demon is looking for another spiritual home. Evil spirits constantly seek to find a person to get into, so they can express their nature - that is their goal. They want to enter; and then once they’ve entered, to increase their hold and destruction in the person’s life.