The devil manipulates people, to accomplish what he wants. When you find yourself in conflict, you've got to stop being in a reactionary mode to people. You've got to govern your own spirit, and learn to understand where the battle is, and what you're fighting, and how to fight, so that in the end, you win the victory.
The only one you have management over is yourself. If you can't control yourself, then you're going to be wiped out every time there's a spiritual conflict, because the devil will manipulate you in the places that he has access. Jesus said: the devil comes, but he's got nothing in Me. There's no place in Me that he can manipulate Me.
I want to talk specifically about the battle... Paul wrote about it, to Timothy…
1 Tim. 1:8 – “Timothy, war a good warfare by the prophetic word, the revelation God has given you”.
Use it as a weapon to war against invisible beings. The ministry of Deliverance is literally the manifestation of God's kingdom, bringing an exposure of the demons, and bringing them out into the open, so you see the warfare. I never hide it. I don't mind if demons manifest, not at all. Great stuff!
Let's point out what's going on here. Jesus did that. In fact, if you have a look at His ministry, it was His Deliverance ministry that caused Him to become famous. He became well known everywhere, because He had the authority to subdue demons, and they did what He wanted. He gives that authority to you. He has won the battle for you. He gave His life, for you to become empowered. You need to step up in the game!
I want you to look in the Old Testament, at a particular power that operates - an invisible power. There's a difference in realms of the spirit. Most of us are affected by mere demons, just the little, low-level spirit beings, trying to gain access, and put themselves at work in your life to destroy you; but there's other beings that run those ones, and that's the one we want to have a look at.
The Bible tells us very clearly that there is a warfare that will take place in the End Times. The last verse in the Book of Malachi, just before the Old Testament ends, it says:
Malachi 4:5-6 - “I will send the prophet Elijah (or literally, the spirit of Elijah) before the great and dreadful day of the Lord's coming and he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to their fathers, lest he come and smite the earth with a curse”.
Without going too deeply into that, we see several things in there...
#1 - At the End Times there'll be significant breakdown in families, and family relationships, to the point where there's great bitterness and strife and conflict in families.
#2 - That would end up with a curse coming into the earth, because of the dishonour in the families (parents of their children, and children of their parents) - so God has to intervene.
#3 - The intervention is the anointing that was on Elijah. What did Elijah do? Elijah confronted a spirit power that affected the whole nation and corrupted the nation.
In the last days, God will put a prophetic anointing on us, empowering the church to uncover, expose, and tear down the very thing that Elijah had to deal with in his day. It was a spirit power that corrupted the nation, corrupted the governance, corrupted the morality, corrupted the worship, corrupted the family life and broke down the nation. That same spirit will be powerfully at work in the end times, but God will raise up an anointing, to overcome that spirit.
Elijah came out of nowhere. God has many people, who will come out of nowhere – anointed, because they've been in the presence of God, and they have an authorisation to start moving in the supernatural, to confront spirit beings. But before you'll do anything on a bigger scale, you've got to fight your own devils, and so we want to talk a bit about the strategy of that.
1 Kings 16:30 – “Now Ahab the son of Omri… “
Ahab was a ruler appointed by God, but it says he did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than everyone that was before him. He wasn't a good guy - he was a corrupt leader. Corrupt leadership in the nation brings corruption throughout the nation.
It says: as if it had been a trivial thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, he did something worse. His ancestors were evil, but he does something worse! He forms an alliance with Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians; then he served Baal and worshipped him, setting up an altar for Baal, in the temple of Baal, which he built in Samaria. Ahab made a wooden image, or an Ashara, and Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.