The Bible, the Bible, and the Bible!! The Word of God is the single greatest way to combat the lies and deceptions of the devil! A great book to help you realize who you are in Christ is Victory over Darkness by Neil T. Anderson.
Some other good books to read are on spiritual warfare and include Basic Training by Kim Freeman, Spiritual Warfare Derek Prince, Battlefield of the Mind Joyce Meyer, The Beginners Guide to Spiritual Warfare Nail T. Anderson & Timothy M. Warner
If you aren’t sure your sins are forgiven, you will be experiencing guilt, and a feeling of unworthiness to live in victory. The enemy moves right in on this weakness and fault in your belief system, and uses it against you. Guilt gives the enemy room to move in and make you feel worthless, and therefore he keeps you fighting from a defeated position. You must know that your sins are forgiven so the enemy won’t hang guilt over your head! Look at Luke 7:47, where Jesus forgave that woman who lived a very sinful life, with no strings attached! Also look at other stories where Jesus said “Your sins are forgiven” with no strings attached. And Paul is another great example of how he was moved from a sinful lifestyle right into the kingdom of God without any strings or conditions attached!
This is a vital thing you need to understand; it’s the law of grace. Many Christians feel they must goto church every Sunday, and keep a list of laws in order for God to accept and love them. This is not true, God has already accepted you just as you are, and He loved you so much while you were a sinner, that He sent His son to die for your sins! Our good deeds should be a result of our love for God. Scripture says that we have died to the law, and are no longer subject to it. We are under a new law now. It’s a law of grace, and it’s worked out through love. When we realize the love God has for us, and the hate that God has for wrong, we not only stop sinning, but develop a hatred against that sin. This breaks the power of sin in our lives. It’s not a question of doing right, but a question of why you are doing right. Are you doing it because you feel obligated and are trying to earn favor with God? Then you have fallen from the law of grace and into legalism. The reason we are to do what is right should come out of our love for God and as we realize His love for us, we will naturally become more like Him and do what’s right because we want to, not because we feel obligated to.
If you think of yourself as an evil and worthless piece of meat, you will live like it. You cannot live contrary to what you believe. The truth is, you have died to the old self, you are no longer associated with your past! If you have accepted Christ, you are a whole new person! The Bible refers to us believers are saints! We are not simply sinners who are forgiven, we are saints! It may be true that we ‘were’ sinners, and that we’ve been forgiven, but we are no longer sinners, we have been washed by the blood of Jesus, and we are whiter then snow! You are not just a servant of God, but you have been adopted into God’s royal family as a child of God!
The first stage of bondage is caused by ignorance, strong holds, and the enemy’s greatest weapon in this stage is deception. Understanding a correct picture of who God is, and who we are in Christ will dissolve a lot of cases involving stage one bondages.
The primary weapon of the devil to put a person into stage one bondage is deception. It is extremely common and there isn’t a person alive who hasn’t been deceived in one way or another. If you keep in God’s Word, which you use to pull down strong holds, Jesus said that you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Stage one bondages are caused by deception and lies from the devil, so the way to combat them is with the truth, which is found in God’s Word. God also says that, “My people are destroyed by lack of knowledge.” Ignorance is a nasty disease that we need to defeat!
If you see God has a taskmaster, you will act like He’s one, and you will hurt the intimacy that God wants to have with you. You will put up a wall between yourself and God when you don’t see Him as a loving God. Is there one person in your life that you know loves you to pieces? Maybe it’s your spouse, parent, friend or even your pet. You can feel that person’s love, and have a very special relationship with that person (or pet). Now think if you saw that person as a cruel taskmaster with a cold personality? Even though it’s not true, it would kill your relationship, wouldn’t it? Think how God feels when you see Him as a cold and cruel taskmaster? It kills the relationship that He gave His son so that you could have with Him! Why did He give His son? So that we could be reconciled with Him, like it was before Adam sinned! Our relationship with God means so much to Him, that He gave His son so it could be restored!
There are three stages of bondage in the believer that needs to be addressed. I highly recommend attacking stage one first, then stage two, and then if there are still bondages left, proceed to stage three. Even if you need deliverance from level three bondages, attacking the first two stages will prepare you for a successful and lasting deliverance from stage three bondages. If you try to attack stage three without getting stage one and two dealt with, you could be in for an unsuccessful and disappointing deliverance session that takes you nowhere. The enemy can often use stage one and two bondages to fuel his ability to hang a stage three bondage over you. Stage one gets your facts and beliefs strait, stage two cuts off any legal rights the enemy has on you, and stage three is the work of casting him out.
Before I begin I want to make a point very clear, this is only a brief look into the basics of how these three bondages work and how to be freed from them. I highly recommend further reading in some of the books I have recommended at the end of each section. Especially before attempting the stage three of deliverance! Deliverances can be scary, and dangerous if you go into one without knowing what you are doing, or having God’s hand guiding you, and therefore I highly recommend reading at least a couple good solid books on deliverance before attempting to cast out demons, unless you know the Holy Spirit is leading you through the whole process.
A parent or teacher can do tremendous damage simply by saying to a child, “You’re stupid and will never amount to anything!” or “Getting a B on your report card is just not good enough!” Even though that child can grow up and graduate from Harvard, they may never feel good enough because of that lie their heart was made to believe. They may even become prideful over their degree and put others down in order to feel good. That’s because in their heart, they are insecure and feel like they don’t amount to much. Sadly, they will live their life trying to overcome this feeling of inadequacy.
Some of the lies that I run across in ministry might look like this:
“I’m just not good enough”
“I’m stupid”
“I’m just white trash”
“I’m worthless”
“God doesn’t care about me”
“God wasn’t there when I needed Him”
“My heart isn’t good enough for God”
“I’m not worthy to be healed”
“God doesn’t love me or He would have…”
“I’m unlovable”
These types of heart-beliefs will cause tremendous pain. They usually are believed at the scene of the accident, so to speak, when somebody first does the damage to us. Parents are often the ones to cause the damage, because children tend to look to their parents to form our sense of identity. If they say we’re stupid, we must be stupid, or so our emotions (heart-beliefs) tells us. That’s why somebody can be very intelligent and yet still struggle with insecurity and feel like they are never good enough. Has your mother, father, teacher, or somebody else you looked up to as a child, said something to you that has impacted how you see yourself today?
These lies that our heart believes aren’t just things we are told, they can be born out of things that are done to us (abuse, trauma, abandonment, rejection, etc) or events that happen in our life (car accident, loss of a loved one, etc.). For example, rape and sexual violations have a way of shaping a person for life, but it isn’t because of what happened, it’s because of what we believed about what happened that keeps us in pain. Many times in ministry, it turns out that a woman who has been raped will believe things such as, “It was really my fault” and “I’ll never be clean again.”
There are often more than one lie that hide behind each emotion. For example, if you were molested, you likely believe more than one lie which is causing the pain that you suffer from today. You might believe that it was your fault, thereby producing feelings of guilt and condemnation. You might also believe that you will never be the same, that this has changed who you are and that you’re a prostitute at heart because you allowed it to happen. In a ministry session, we might deal with the part about it being your fault, and get a measurable amount of freedom and healing in that area, but still feel dirty and shameful. That means there’s simply more lies to uncover and get truth on. I like to test the true measure of freedom or healing they have received by asking something like, “On a scale of 1-10, what level would you say you still feel dirty?” This will reveal the healing that they have received, but also give you an idea that there’s more to be done. They might say that they now feel complete peace there. A person who was in a car accident might suffer with panic attacks, but believe it or not, it might not just be from the car accident. They may have felt like they’ve done something unforgivable, and are afraid to die, and the car accident just triggered that belief, and from that point on they suffer from panic attacks. In a ministry session, they may feel the panic, although they are completely safe and what was once a threat is no longer any concern. But for some reason they still get triggered and feel panic and extreme feelings of fear, all while in their mind they know they are safe and have nothing to worry about. This is another classic example of our logical beliefs not being the same as our heart’s experiential beliefs. The lies that a person’s heart may believe might include things like “I am going to die” or “I am going to hell when I die.”
Satan is said to be the father of lies, and when we’re wounded, one of his demons are right there to inject a painful lie into our heart, which will keep us locked down to that pain for the rest of our lives (or so he hopes!). A lie believed in the heart will hold a person in life-altering bondage.Jesus made it clear that the truth is what sets us free from the bondage of a lie, and in saying this, He made it clear that a lie can bring much bondage into our lives.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
John 8:32, KJV
Do you want to know the truth that will set you free from the tremendous bondage and pain that a lie will put you in? Uprooting those lies is something that the Holy Spirit is very eager to do for YOU (the person reading this article, in case I wasn’t clear)! Jesus said that the comforter (or counselor) would come and one of His jobs was to lead us into all truth (see John 16:13). The Bible is also clear that God withholds no good thing from His children (see Psalm 84:11), so we can be absolutely certain that the Holy Spirit’s desire is to lead us into the truth that will set us free. Why would God want His child to live in bondage to a lie?Then why would the Holy Spirit withhold truth from us that Jesus said to clearly He would give us?
“…when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth…”
John 16:13, KJV
We may ask God for a brand new BMW and get turned down, but when it comes to asking Him for truth on what our heart believes, this is an area we can be absolutely sure He desires to speak to us. If we aren’t hearing, then there’s a reason and we need to get to the bottom of it. But don’t think for a minute that somehow God doesn’t want to speak to you, His precious child, about something like this!
When somebody triggers us, it is rarely them who is causing the pain we are experiencing. It is rather that they are rubbing against a painful wound in our past. If a boss tells you that your work just isn’t good enough, it would have very little effect if you didn’t already believe that you weren’t good enough. If your parents made you feel ashamed of a B report card as a kid, you may go through life believing that you aren’t good enough, and when somebody comes along and rubs that wound, it will be 10X more painful than if you didn’t have that pre-existing belief about yourself. I hope that makes sense.
If somebody tells us we’re stupid and we know in our heart that we’re not, their words will have little meaning to us. If we already believe that we’re stupid in our heart (even though we know in our head that we’re not), then somebody comes along and speaks the lie that we already believe in our heart, that will trigger us. We’re here trying to deny that awful perceived fact, and how dare somebody comes up to us and tell us something that we’re already struggling with!
Rarely our present pain is caused by the present condition. The present condition is almost always triggering something we already believe about ourself or about God because of past experiences.
The western mind has really put many of us at a disadvantage. Many times we are told to deny our emotions, that our emotions can lie, or that we just can’t go by our feelings. I disagree. Our emotions tell us our our heart really believes to be true. If our heart believes we are not good enough to be loved by God, that’s exactly how we will feel, even if we know better in our mind. When a child is taught that it’s unacceptable to cry or show or even feel emotion, they are being taught to bury their pain, and that is very dangerous emotionally. We all need to be real about how we feel. Not that we should ever use our emotions to manipulate others, or that we should go around wearing our feelings on our sleeves, thus making others feel like they are walking on egg shells. None of that is healthy, but it is very important that we be real with ourselves about how we feel. Denying our feelings only suppresses our problems, and serves as a hindrance from us getting getting healed.
Our emotions are the bridge to the brief that we hold which keeps us in pain they tell us accurately what it is our heart really believes.
Persecution Live 