If You Love People
If you love people and want them to be free you will do almost anything.
When you love people you will do almost anything to see them free. It is for this reason that I have been promoting the deliverance ministry for thirty-five years; ever since I discovered that it existed and could be done today. I train others in it. I write books and articles about it. And, most importantly, I practice it with men, women, and children multiple times a week. I am pretty good at what I do. But it is not the only thing that I do. I also teach graduate counseling classes and do private practice therapy. I like to think that this keeps me balanced because I clearly recognize that not everything is a demon, nor is every problem an ailment spiritual. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a problem is just a problem, and a physiologically based disorder is just a physiologically based disorder.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t like to generate discussion about deliverance (and a bunch of other things as well – just ask me about motorcycles). But I’ve given much of my career to asking people to consider the legitimacy of the deliverance ministry and I sometimes do it in unusual ways.
If you were to pull up behind my car as we drove down the road, your attention would immediately be drawn to my rather distinctive license plate. It reads XORCST. I’ve had it for several years now (as you can see from the 2014 sticker) and, during that entire period I’ve only had two people ask me about it. One person was a police officer (we won’t go there), and another was not.
I got the tag in the hope of generating some discussion about deliverance. I thought that would be the case, as I live on the outskirts of the Mecca of Christian Evangelicalism, Lynchburg, VA. Lynchburg is the home of Liberty University, “the world’s largest Christian University” and the Falwell dynasty. As a result of having nearly 15,000 residential students, plus supporting faculty, staff, administration, etc., most of who are purportedly Christian, this area is a hotbed of all kinds of religious activity.
As a result, my guess is that the territorial demonic spirits overseeing our fair community are primarily religious. It has been proven empirically that if you were to fall out of a plane over Lynchburg you would have a 50/50 chance of being impaled on a steeple.
In any case, I thought that in a town like this at least some people would ask me about my provocative license plate. I thought that someone would ask me what it means. That hasn’t happened. In fact, what I have discovered is that nobody wants to park their car near mine. In addition, when I pull up to a red light and look to the right and to the left, just to see who is there, every driver is staring straight ahead, refusing to make eye contact. I have, for all intents and purposes, become invisible to those who are around me. My license plate apparently freaks folks out.
That accurately describes how most Christians and Protestant churches view the deliverance ministry. After more than thirty-five years of involvement in this kind of work, I find that most people would just rather see this whole ministry of Jesus just disappear. Church leaders, in particular, seem to resist it, as it would appear to threaten their theological position or the status quo of their churches. This, in spite of the fact that the Fathers of the Church practiced deliverance long after the Apostles had gone to glory. As a church leader once told me, “If the word ever got out into the community that we do deliverance here, people might start coming here for help!” I thought that was a positive thing. That church’s leadership apparently did not.
In 2007 I wrote a book (published in 2009) that was entitled It’s Only a Demon: A Model of Christian Deliverance. It laid out pretty much everything that I knew at the time about deliverance. In the next month or so I am going to be publishing the second edition of that book as I’ve learned a great deal more about the whole process in the past ten years. This edition will tell you everything that you will need to know about deliverance, but also everything that you will need to know to do deliverance. It even has an actual script so you know exactly what to say. No excuses now. The only thing that I can’t give you is experience. You are going to have to get that on your own.
All of you are receiving this newsletter because you asked for it. Most of you receive this newsletter because you have either received deliverance through Spiritual Interventions, Inc. or because you have contacted me at some point, or because you have heard me speak at a conference somewhere. That means that you have an interest in it and probably already know a lot more about all of this than the average churchgoer. With that knowledge comes the responsibility to share the freedom that you have received or information that you have obtained with others. While most of you won’t want to put XORCST on your license plate, you may want to see people that you know and love set free. After all, being set free from the influence of demonic spirits is part of the Gospel, part of the Good News. Who wouldn’t want to be free? Who wouldn’t want to help others to be free? Okay, so maybe that’s going too far for you. Maybe you would just as soon leave that to someone else. That’s okay. But still, talk to your friends and family about it. Give them something that I’ve written or something that someone else is written so they too can be exposed to the truth. And, if you don’t want to actively participate in seeing them free of demonic influence, send them to me. We will do it.
