Ministry Team Training

Curses are when one person speaks harm against another and a demon empowers the words to make them happen to the person. Curses range in severity from careless words spoken in anger that the enemy comes along and empowers to ritual/occult curses. There are different levels of curses and each level is progressively "harder" to break and requires us to release a greater measure of authority as we do so.

SIMPLE CURSE. This is when something hostile is spoken once (or a few times). The words themselves were intended as a put down or to make the person feel small and they can be harmful to the person's psyche on their own. But when the enemy empowers them, they become a curse. That means that the devil releases some of his resources (sort of like spiritual energy) to make something negative happen in the person's life in response to the spoken curse.

We see this sort of thing a lot in everyday life. Perhaps someone on the freeway is driving and they cut off another driver. The other driver gets mad and swears at them, wishing them harm. The nature of the angry swearing often has words or phrases in it that give the devil an excuse to empower something against the driver. So maybe the demon arranges for something negative to happen to the recipient of the curse -- The person who is cursed gets in a bad mood, or maybe they get a flat tire or someone dings their car in the parking lot, etc. Typically that type of short angry curse is not a very powerful curse, so the enemy retaliation against the person is not terribly strong.

But at times it can be strong. One time I saw a case where someone obviously cursed another driver (using exaggerated hand gestures by sticking their hand out of their window, and by honking for a prolonged time as they tailgated the car in front of them). From the expression on their face and the way their mouth was moving, I am pretty sure they were saying all sorts of curse words at the other driver. A few miles down the road, the driver they had cursed ran off the road and got into a car accident. That is sort of an extreme case, most of the time the enemy empowerment of a curse spoken in anger is not that strong.

Some curses can have an effect on a person's life and the way they think about themselves. A demon comes along and magnifies the effects of the words on the person (plays mind games with them) and can cause them to engage in self-hurting behaviors. This is a bit of an extreme example, but it illustrates the point. I heard the testimony of a high school girl who suffered from anorexia. She had always been trim and healthy. One day at school, one of her classmates called her "fat." She could not get those words out of her mind. Her mind kept replaying the sound of her classmate's voice saying "you are fat." As a result, she began to see herself as fat and she fell into anorexia. She hurt herself as a result of a curse spoken only once over her, because the enemy jumped in on top of those words and distorted her thinking with them. Most of the time the reaction to a one time spoken curse is not that strong, but it does release power to harm and you may need to deal with it by breaking the curse. In most cases, it is usually sufficient to simply speak to identify the curse and then to cancel (or break) it through the power of Jesus.

REPEATED CURSE. A repeated curse is something spoken repeatedly. This will often have strong effects on people, particularly if it is spoken by someone important in the person's life. If a parent or a bigger brother or sister repeatedly tells someone they are stupid, they probably won't live up to their full potential mentally and may start behaving as though they really were "stupid." They do that to line up with what was spoken over them. People who are told over and over "you're worthless" or "you're no good" will usually have self-worth issues in addition to any curse that may have been empowered against them.

These repeated curses can touch on other issues as well. Someone who is repeatedly cursed in their finances may have financial problems. Sometimes a pastor may get hurt or angry when one of their members leaves their church. They may tell the person something along the lines of, "you won't fit in other places like you fit in here." That can be a curse, even though it is not intended that way. It becomes a repeated curse if the pastor constantly talks about them and says that they won't fit in anywhere else. It can also become a repeated curse if the pastor constantly prays for God to bring the person back to his church and not allow them to connect to another congregation. That type of repeated curse can effect the person's ability to fit in and connect in a new church because demons are released to work against the person in accord with the curse.

When there is a repeated curse, you have to do a bit more in ministry. First, you need to get rid of hooks that allowed the curse to land. This may include some inner healing, it may include helping the person repent of sin or it may include helping them release forgiveness. Proverbs 26:2 says, "Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow, an undeserved curse does not come to rest." I have heard it paraphrased this way: an undeserved curse cannot hurt you. So, when a curse hurts a person on an ongoing basis, that means there is something not right in their life that is allowing the curse to effect them. So, if possible, we want to find and deal with that thing, to remove it from their life so the curse cannot effect them any more.

Second, the curse needs to be broken. You should do this for them in ministry as you pray with them. I recommend that you lead them through a repeat-after-me prayer and have them break the curse, as they need to learn how to break it. If the curse is being repeatedly spoken against them, they will need to break it repeatedly. They won't be able to run to you for ministry each time the curse is spoken, so you need to teach them how to exercise their authority in Christ to break the curse.

There is one more important factor with repeated curses. If the curse is spoken in the person's hearing often enough, they begin to believe it and to incorporate it into their thinking. After a while, they begin to speak to over themselves, or to self-curse. And if they do that, you must also deal with any self-curses the person has spoken against himself.

SELF-CURSES. Self-curses are a form of repeated curses that have a sort of interesting twist to them. The curse is not spoken against them by someone else. The person who is being cursed is the one who speaks the curse against themselves. Then the enemy comes along and empowers their words against them, making it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here are a few examples of self-curses: "I'm fat," "I'm stupid," "I'm ugly," "I wish I were dead," "I am a terrible person," "I don't deserve to be happy," etc.

Self-curses are broken like a regular curse, but in addition you need to get the person to renounce the curse and also to repent for having spoken these curses against themselves. In addition, you may need to get the person to forgive himself or you may need to help them work through some self-hate issues.

As you minister to someone who does self-cursing, be very careful that you don't do or say anything that the person might perceive as a put down. They have been putting themselves down for a long time, and if you appear to do that to them, most people will simply come into agreement with you and put themselves down even more. Don't allow that to happen, you don't want to empower the curse. Treat the person you are ministering to with dignity and respect and handle the situation in a very matter-of-fact manner. Encourage and bring out the best in them, not the worst in them.

RITUAL CURSE. Ritual curses are curses that are placed with some sort of ceremony or occult practice to bring great harm to a person or to a group. The curse is empowered through the demonic or through witchcraft. It may involve the use of fetishes (demonically empowered objects that carry a curse), which are often buried in the ground, but may also be placed above ground.

A ritual curse is the strongest form of curse, and certain types of occult and voodoo curses can actually kill people. This type of curse is so powerful because it is overtly empowered by the demonic. A lot of people find this type of curse very scary. But in truth you don't have to be afraid to break this type of curse, because you carry the authority of Jesus.

Jesus' authority and power are much greater and stronger than the devil's. However, you should not minister into this type of situation if you are not right with God and being spirit-led. If you have sin or separation from God in your life, you become vulnerable to enemy counterattack. And when you deal with occult level curses, the enemy will almost always counterattack you. That is why you must be right with God and have your spiritual armor on and be in the center of God's will before you break with ritual curses.

The actual breaking of the ritual curse is similar to how you break a repeated curse. But it is a good idea to also have intercessors praying into this. And you should also look to God for clear directions about other things that He may want you to do. For instance, He may want you to remove a fetish -- He will give supernatural revelation of where the fetish is and then you have to go get it and remove it and break it's power. Or God may have you do some other type of act to break a curse.

One time I was walking my dog in the hills by my house and I found an altar where animal blood sacrifices had been performed. The sacrifice has probably been done the night before, because the blood had not totally dried. It was sticky and smelled terrible and there were flies all over it. I went home and called an intercessor friend. We fasted and prayed for 24 hours and then came together to break the curse from the ritual sacrifice. God instructed us to do several things. One of them was to take communion near the altar. Another was to write certain scriptures on wooden stakes and drive the stakes into the ground near the four corners of the altar. God may ask you to do some unusual things to break ritual curses. So be sure to listen to God for direction and do what He tells you to do.

(An epilog to the blood sacrifice altar story. I live in the Oakland Hills where the famous firestorm was. This incident happened a few months before the firestorm. When we finished "purifying the altar" and repenting for the blood sacrifices done there, God spoke to us. He told us, "Since you have repented and cleansed this altar, I will spare this neighborhood from My judgment. If you had not done this, your neighborhood would have been destroyed by fire." We did not understand what He meant at the time. A few months later, the famous Oakland firestorm broke out and many whole neighborhoods were destroyed by the fire. It was not far from where I live. The fire headed towards our neighborhood, but when it came to the border of the neighborhood, it changed direction and moved away. Our neighborhood was not damaged in the fire at all.)

Also, there will be times when God will direct you to "do nothing" in regard to a ritual curse. There are times when God wants to break the curse on his own, just like He protected the children of Israel from the curse that Baalam was hired to put on them.

Finally, we need to be aware that curses tend to have a boomerang effect on the person who pronounces them. In other words, the person who speaks the curse will often discover that the curse comes on them as well. Because of that, we usually plead for protection for the one who spoke the curse; we ask that God will help them to repent and forgive them and release them from the power of the curse they released.