How do people come under that spirit?
If you look at the story of Ahab, you find two things that he did. Number 1, he entered a marriage relationship, or he became entangled in a wrong relationship. The second thing he did was, for the sake of peace, he sold himself out, to do what would keep her happy. Just to keep the peace, he tolerated ungodliness. Does that sound familiar?
He was passive, in the face of things being wrong. That goes right back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam was silent, when something was going down. Silence - no fight, no resistance, just for the sake of peace. You see this all come out again, in the final confrontation with Jezebel, where she's finally taken out - you'll find the key issue is ‘peace’.
Can we just be more ‘tolerant’? But the thing is, it's a tolerance of ungodliness; and the moment you stand up for what is right, there's a vicious reaction against it. It's not tolerant! It's totally intolerant - full of hate! We must champion the truth - champion God's word!
How does it get in?
Let me give you a few ways that the spirit gets to operate into people's lives, so you can recognise that it's far more common than we realise.
The number one doorway is: unresolved heart pain. When we are wounded in relationships, when we are hurt by people - it could be in family, with a father, a mother, in life, in school… There are so many ways that we get hurt… we live in a fallen world - stuff happens.
When we're hurt, we're faced with a decision, a crisis. I can either surrender myself to the Lord, turn to the Holy Ghost, and bring that pain, and injustice, and all that's happened to me, to the cross; and find the grace of God to forgive and bless - and I grow stronger, and more yielded to the Spirit. Or, I can decide to save myself, by building walls around my heart to defend me, and now I begin to control my pain, and control my relationships, and my circumstances, so I can't be hurt again.
That's how it gets in, very simply. Every time, instead of letting go the pain, and being healed, and releasing forgiveness, you decide to bury it, and try to control it - you get into alliance with that spirit.
Now it works on you: fear, loneliness, rejection, torments. It draws you then, to addictions. The cause of addictions, the root cause, is disconnection in relationships, because of pain in the heart. You can't solve it just getting off the stuff - you've got to fix the pain in the heart. That's how it gains its access - it manipulates people, by seducing them into things that will offer a comfort, but they eventually end up being in bondage to. Pornography, alcohol, drugs, all manners of things - it's a seduction, to try and bring a false comfort to pain, so you can control and medicate your pain, instead of bringing it to the cross - to the price that Jesus paid, and getting free, and healed.
That makes all of us open to the possibility of tolerating that spirit in our life. When you tolerate unresolved offences and hurts, you are tolerating that spirit gaining access to your life. Why? Because you will be afraid of being hurt, so you will try to control life, conversations, and relationships, to prevent being hurt (or to medicate being hurt).
I did that, for a long time; I had my own ways of medicating the pain. I had no idea what it was, but it was all attempting to control pain, to try and soften the pain, to keep myself protected, and it left me isolated, alone, and under the power of that spirit - until I broke my agreement with it, and broke my patterns of doing it.
Here's another way it enters in: it enters in through generational strongholds; through broken family patterns. If the family is broken, and there's generational strongholds of control - a controlling mother or controlling father, then the spirit is in the family. The children are wounded by controlling behaviour.
When a parent is controlling… there is legitimate control; but we're talking about ungodly control. Legitimate control is good boundaries, guidelines, discipline; illegitimate is where you dominate the child, and they have to comply, and they're never able to share their feelings, their heart, what’s going on in their life - their dreams and their passions. They are under pressure to comply with a parent who makes them perform. Their heart gets broken, they get wounded; and then they will try and control the pain - firstly by hiding it. Then they start looking for ways to medicate it, and eventually they repeat the pattern; or marry into someone who is also a controller and perpetuate the problem.