Jesus did not blame the father or the child. Jesus said to the disciples: it requires faith. Then he said an interesting statement – this kind comes out by nothing but by prayer and by fasting. In other words, Jesus is saying two things: 1) there are different levels of authority or power that evil spirits have; 2) we require faith that we’ll move them; 3) that prayer and fasting helps establish faith in our life.
You noticed Jesus did not stop and pray and fast - He just immediately delivered the demon out of the child; but when we read of His life, we find that He prayed, and He fasted. So moving in deliverance, we need to recognise the place prayer and fasting has, and we’ll talk a little bit about some aspects of prayer later on. I’ll just perhaps get a chance to share with you some things I pray around my life; but there has to be faith in the heart - so without faith, nothing happens.
So we see then, an example of a child who needed deliverance; and the single requirement: that there be faith - we have to believe God for the breakthrough; and that sometimes, there can be resistance. Notice that when the demon came out, Jesus identified what it was – a deaf and dumb spirit. It’s very helpful if you can name the spirit you’re commanding out. Naming it weakens its power in the person’s life. You notice also, that Jesus spoke directly, he commanded: “I command you come out”.
The last thing I noticed there is quite different - it’s the only place I’ve seen it. He commanded the spirit not to enter the child again. That’s the only time that’s actually mentioned, as far as I’m aware: “Don’t go back into this child”. So, when we do deliverance, the only example we have for forbidding the demon to return, is this particular one. I think that Jesus said this, because it’s a child. In the other cases, Jesus taught (Matthew 12) that if the demons do try and re-enter, the person has to be responsible, to build a good life with God. So, here is an example then, of what appears to be a generational, demonic spirit in the family.
Let me share with you a couple of stories of people we’ve prayed for, where there was clearly a generational spirit. The first one concerns a young child. Two people came to me, and they said: "we’re having a major problem with our child”. I said: “What is the problem?” They said “when the child wakes up, he immediately starts to destroy things in his room - he’s extremely destructive, and we have no idea why”. The child was around about the age of two and three. When it woke up, it would just go in a rage, and begin to be destructive. The parents had no understanding of why the behaviour would be like that.
So, I began to enquire about both of their backgrounds, and I looked for a spiritual root for what was a really unusual behaviour. It turns out that the husband had been involved equally in drug addiction, and had major anger problems; and the mother’s family had been involved deeply in the occult. So it would appear to me that the spirits that were there, came as a result of what the family, or the parents, had opened their lives to.
So in this particular case, praying for such a young child - we prayed when the child was asleep. It just was an easier way of doing it. You can pray when they’re awake, but you’ll find that often the demon will manifest, and the child will scream and shout and fight, and it becomes a very difficult process - can be quite unnerving. So, we prayed - I had the parents there with me, I didn’t want the child to wake and find a strange person in their room. So even if the child would maybe have recognised me, I didn’t want them to be awake and be frightened, so I had the parents with me, and the parents agreed that we would pray for this child. So I didn’t put my hand on him, I just put my hand just slightly above his head, so as not to wake him.
Then I spoke and prayed, and we broke the curses operating down through the father’s side of the family, and the mother’s side of the family – commanded the spirits to go. When we commanded the spirits to go, the child just began to yawn and sigh. He was asleep all the time, and several times as I prayed, he kind of gave a big sigh - it was quite evident that something was happening. We then just prayed that the spirit would not enter the child anymore; we released peace over the child; and he never woke up through the process.
The next day, the parents called me, and they said: “The child woke up today with absolutely no destructive behaviour - the problem has just completely gone! It’s just not there anymore.” So that was a great learning experience for me, of the reality of these generational spirits. This is what we’re going to look at – to identify these things, and discover how they occur, and primarily, what to do about it.
So that’s an example of a young person. I’ll give you an example of an older person. I had a woman come to me, and she must have been in her 50s I suppose. She said “I’m a Christian worker, I’ve been working for the Lord for many years of my life”. She said “I have a problem that greatly disturbs me, can you help me with it?” So, you notice the thread of questions: what is the problem; how does it affect you; how long have you had this problem?
She said: “Here’s the problem. I have these tormenting, unclean, sexual images coming into my mind - it disturbs me during times of worship.” So I said: “How long have you had this”. She said: “Since I was very young”. So then I asked the next couple of questions: “Did you have any traumatic experience, or were you exposed to any sexual abuse of any kind?” She said: “No”. So that left the only possibility open – that it was a generational spirit of some kind. The fruit was torment by an unclean spirit. She was experiencing these horrendous, unclean images in her mind - often as she worshipped.