When Adam sinned, he lost his glory and felt ashamed, and he retreated and hid, and lost his dominion. Jesus came to restore you, by positioning you back in relationship with God, where you have no need to have any shame, so it says the righteous, those who have no shame in the presence of God, are bold as a lion, see? So boldness is not something you feel. It comes out of knowing where you stand with God, and living in His presence, feeling that I'm clothed with glory, knowing that His glory is over my life, that I carry His nature, His divine presence. I'm His representative, and so the devil's going to put you down. Here's the second that'll put you down, people will try and put you down. Now the devil tries to put you - notice when Jesus was being tempted in the wilderness, the devil said you're the son of God, why don't you prove it? Why don't you do something? But people will do it too. People will reflect the kingdom that rules in their heart, so if people are ruled by shame or ruled by being put down or ruled by demonic spirits, they will naturally reflect out of them what is in their heart. So it's a tendency in people to put us down, and it's rooted in envy, and it's rooted in the desire to control people, to hold them down so we're on top of them, or to pull them down so we feel better about ourselves.
So put downs just come, and everywhere you get them; schools, put downs are very, very common see, so it's a way of controlling people. Usually the way its done is by words, words of abuse, name calling, laughing and mocking and ridiculing, anything that will cause you to feel humiliated as a person. So of course if you're a Christian, called by God to be an ambassador, naturally even if you don't do anything, you will experience some ridicule, because the devil knows that if he can get the ridicule to stick, you will be put down on the inside, and you will never express what God called you to express. So when we allow ourselves to be put down, see you can't stop it coming, but what you can do, is decide whether you'll allow it to put you down. If you come into agreement with it and let it put you down, then you can never be what God called you to be, so one of the challenges in our walking with God and representing Him, is how can I deal with the put downs? People laugh at you, they laugh at you because of what you look like, they laugh at you because you're a woman, laugh at you because you're a man, laugh at you because you're smaller in your body, laugh at you because your nose is big, laugh at you for all kinds of reasons. There's all sorts of ways, and in schools particularly, the environment can be incredibly cruel to people.
I can remember vividly times in my own school years of being ridiculed and scorned and how painful it was. I can remember a teacher standing over me when I was in the seventh form and literally red in the face, shouting and abusing me, and telling me I would never pass, I'd fail. That's put down. That's straight out of hell, that's a tongue on fire by hell itself. It is demonic, and it comes to people, and often people in positions of power will use their power to put others down, so they can stay in that place of power. That's not godly leadership. In Asia, they have an issue called scalding. We'd probably call it something different here, you know, got a growling or something like that, but it's actually more than just a growling. They actually use their position to speak and yell, they actually yell and put people down, and it controls the Chinese people.
I remember having an altar call one time, and got people to come. I was just moving in the spirit, and God spoke to me about scalding, started to drop a download of some scriptures on it. I got people up, and they were absolutely screaming with the wounds, and the pain, and as the demons came out of them, because when a person abuses another one by putting them down, by speaking words, they unleash a spirit of murder against them. They unleash a spirit of murder, because the Bible says there's death and life in the power of the tongue, so people can unleash a spirit of murder. They can unleash a spirit of life. We are called to bring life, we're called to prophesy. We're called to speak creatively. We're called to build! We're called to lift people up! But the devil wants to use your tongue to create something different, and so you will create around your life your own atmosphere you'll live in, and you'll be in, the atmosphere around you, so you're either going to be under that thing or over it.