Ministering Deliverance

I was in India working with pastors and showing them how to minister deliverance. We had done an evangelistic meeting in a little village. We had about 80 to 100 people attending the meeting. I preached the gospel. A lot of people got saved and it was the first time this village ever heard the gospel. Somebody came to me and said, "Rodney, could you go help pastor Peter? He needs a little help." So, I looked and there was a woman who had been manifesting as I was preaching. I knew she was demonized, but I never had a chance to get over there. But, pastor Peter had made his way over there to minister deliverance to this middle-aged woman. Pastor Peter was sitting on the ground and he had a handful of her hair and was going, "Whoaaa, whoaaa, whoaaa!" I went over and patted him on the shoulder and said, "Now, pastor Peter, we don't have to do deliverance this way. There are other ways we minister deliverance. This isn't the way that we do it."

I began to talk to the woman and I said, "Are you willing to give your heart to Jesus?" And she said, "Sure, I will give my heart to Jesus." And I said, "Are you willing to forsake all of your other gods to give your heart to Jesus?" She said, "Well, no. Those are our family idols and I won't give those up. I will simply just add Jesus to the family idols." I said, "Jesus can't come into your heart with those conditions. The only condition He asks is that He has to be the one and only God in your life and you have to set aside and renounce all those others." She said, "Oh. I can't do that." So, I looked at pastor Peter and said, "If she's not willing to turn from all those other idols and give her heart to Jesus, we're going to leave her as she is." Because if we rebuke that demon, and we could have wrestled that thing out of her, all she was going to do was go home that night and invite this thing back. So, I said, "We're not going to waste our time wrestling with something that's going to come right back." The Bible says the second state is going to be worse than the first, so, we don't want to create something worse for her.

By the way, one of the solutions is finding the root cause for the right for the demonic to be there. I recommend you read Neal Anderson's book, "The Bondage Breaker." Chapter 13 goes through the steps of deliverance. I'm not going to cover all of the things that give a demon a "right" to a person, because it's in the book. It's very well laid out. If you haven't read it, go back and read it. If you haven't got the book, get it.

The other thing that makes it hard to get demons out is when there's no desire or intent to occupy the land. Remember when Israel was told to go in and take the Promised Land? God gave them instructions and He told them what was going to happen. It's in Exodus 23:29-30. It says, "I will not drive them out before you in a single year that the land may not become desolate and the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. I will drive them out before you little by little until you become fruitful and take possession of the land." That is the way God works deliverance. If you're not willing to possess it, conquer it and rebuild a godly stronghold in this place, you're not ready for deliverance.

One of the reasons people are not finding deliverance is because God knows they have no intention of ever building a godly stronghold in this place. They may be lying to themselves and deceiving themselves. You're going to have to discern that by the Spirit if there's really any intent. And that may be one reason there's absolutely no deliverance going on. God isn't going to free them until they get really ready to be freed. God will allow something to stay as a thorn in your side until you're ready for complete freedom. Finally, when you get sick enough of it, you'll do something about it. That's what it took for me and my rage.

The same thing can happen with an illness. It can be a spirit of infirmity causing the physical problem. You finally get sick enough of it. You get sympathy at first and so you kind of embrace it. But, that's short-lived. You can't get the spirit of infirmity out of someone until he truly wants to be well.

After you complete the deliverance session, process the event with other team members. It's helpful to do this. And you should always take time to "deslime" after a session. You always want to take time to pray for each other. For example, let's say you're ministering and there's a woman being delivered who talked about sexual things that have happened, the way she's been abused and hurt. At the moment it's tragic. Your sympathy goes out in stuff like this. Later, the enemy will try to use those thoughts for imagination. You need to deslime so the enemy has no inroad into your life.

So after you minister deliverance, you want to pray for each other on the team. You might even want to call them a day or two later to ask how they're doing. Ask if they are depressed or something like that because the enemy will try to attack later. You need to cover and pray for each other. So after you minister deliverance to anybody, always take time to deslime.

Frequently, after I pray for people on a Sunday morning, I'll try to spend a little time on the altar just kind of desliming. I spend time in prayer just asking God to purge, cleanse and remove anything the enemy would use to gain entrance into my life because I minister to people, or through the stuff that was shared with me when I minister to them.

One of the questions people ask is where demons go when they're cast out? I don't know. I used to always send them to hell. I thought that was a good place to send them. Go to the pit. Then I go, oh, Jesus sent them to the dry places. OK, I send you to the dry places, and then it finally occurred to me that I'm not the one delivering them. Jesus is the one delivering them. I figured He is perfectly capable of sending them where they need to go.

Now I simply say, " OK Jesus, you send them where you want them." A lot of times I'll just tell them to go, I don't have to give them directions, I let Jesus do that. He's the one who's freed and delivered them. Angels, I'm sure, are accompanying them wherever they're going, so I don't figure that I have to do that. I used to really want to make sure they didn't go here or there. I wanted to give them directions as to what they did and where they went. But I don't do that anymore. I just say, "Lord, take these and free this person in this area."

I don't have any real answers on that one. All I know is it's not going to be like a flea that jumps on you from one dog to another. It's not like the movie, "The Exorcist". All of a sudden these demons jumped on this priest at the end. I think that is one of the fears the enemy would try to bring upon us. He lies and says, "If you get too close, I'll get on you. " My response is simple. "I'm covered by the blood. I'm sorry, man. I got my Teflon coating. You can try to slime me, but I'm covered by the blood." So take time to deslime and protect yourself, cover yourself and they're not going to jump on you like some bunch of fleas.

They lie to you. They try to deceive you. They say they're going to and they'll threaten you, and if they ever get a chance to speak, they'll do that. Just don't listen. Just rebuke them and tell them to shut up. That works for me.