Now, the next thing we're going
to deal with, and I think this will be the last although I wish I could go
further because we haven't much time is their areas of residence. Proverbs 25:28 says: Proverbs 25:28 says this: Whoever has no rule over his own spirit
is like a city broken down without walls. So that compares the inner nature
of human personality to a city. And when the person
has no spiritual defenses that city is open to almost
any evil spirit that wants to come in. You take a drug addict, that's his
description. Anything can get into him because his walls are broken down. But in a city there are
a lot of different areas. The area where the wealthy live,
the slum areas the banking and commerce areas,
the sports areas the various ethnic areas. I used to live in Chicago. There was
the areas where it was all Poles all Swedes, all Jews and so on. And so inside you and me there
is a city with various areas with characteristic residents
in each area, you understand? I'm going to give you
a little list of the areas. I'm not a professional psychologist; this
is simply based on years of experience. The first area, number one,
the main one is emotions and attitudes. And I put in parentheses ‘gangs.’ Because there are gangs of demons. And each one opens
the way for the next. And if you meet one, you should
start searching for the others. My personal opinion is behind
every negative emotion and attitude there is an evil spirit. Anger,
fear, loneliness, misery, self-pity pride, jealousy...
There's a tremendous list. If you are angry
it doesn't necessarily mean you have a demon of anger, but if
your anger falls into the category of those verbs that we've discussed then you probably
have a demon of anger. There are certain root problems out of which the rest grow. I think the greatest single
root problem is rejection. And rejection leads to a whole series. Loneliness, misery, self-pity,
depression, despair and when you've got that far, you're
headed one or other of two ways. Death, if it's passive,
suicide if it's active. Suicide is always under the impulse of an evil spirit. That's my
personal opinion. I can't prove it. Another very typical
problem is rebellion which leads to resentment, to hatred to anger, to violence and you know, produces
the typical gang leader and so on. Number two is the mind. In a way, the mind is the battlefield. Characteristic spirits that affect
the mind are doubt, unbelief confusion, indecision, insanity. And I've discovered that people
who have been in the occult almost always have
a problem with confusion. Depression, you can call it
either emotional or mental. It doesn't matter, but it's there. The next area is... Where are we? The tongue. There are a lot of characteristic demons
of the tongue. The main one is lying. The Bible speaks about a lying spirit. There are people
who are compulsive liars. They don't even know when
they're lying. I had a friend like that. The president of the Full Gospel
Businessmen in a certain city. He was also
characteristically a salesman. He was a fine Christian,
a wonderful talker. And he'd sit in our living
room and start to talk and his talk would get more and
more interesting but improbable. And my head would begin
to swim and I'd think: Does he believe what he's saying? Do I believe what he's saying? But it just kind of flowed out of
the natural into the supernatural. Now, you know the reason I
discovered how that spirit came in? He was an adopted son
of wealthy parents. They had no other children;
all their eggs were in that one basket. They wanted him to be everything. When he came home
with his grades from school they were disappointed.
They weren't good enough. And when they registered
disappointment he decided that wasn't worth it so he just
lied about his school grades. That started him into the whole field
of lying. Ultimately he was delivered. But it was such a revelation to me.
Compulsive liars are very deceptive. They don't know they're lying.
They can pass a lie-detector test. What else? There's the two churchgoing
demons, criticism and gossip. I was in a church meeting
and a lady came up with a demon. I said, Your problem is criticism.
You spirit of criticism, come out of her. About four people around started
to get delivered at the same time! Exaggeration,
the ‘evang-elastic’ demon. Blasphemy. I was a slave of blasphemy
when the Lord saved me. Absolutely incapable
of speaking without blaspheming. Unclean speech and so on. Negative talking. Number four, the thing that
nobody talks about in church, sex. Because it's not discussed in church,
people with problems in the area of sex go to a psychiatrist. He says:
You have a guilt problem that centers in your religion.
Give it up and you won't feel guilty. Now they don't all say that. But I would say if you sat in church
for ten years and still feel guilty your problem is your religion. Really.
I would change to another religion if that's all it can do
is leave you feeling guilty. Now... We have to say
certain things about sex. First of all, sex is not evil. It's good. We have to clear away
that misunderstanding. God created man
and woman sexual beings. And after He checked on everything He
created, He said it was all very good including sex. One of the big problems
in church is we just are not honest about sex, we're ashamed about it,
we're prudish and we encourage
problems by that attitude. I would say every form of compulsive
sex aberration is demonic. Without exception. Masturbation, adultery, fornication homosexuality, lesbianism, effeminacy and all sorts of horrid perversions
that we won't talk about. I would say every one
of those is demonic. Now, you don't have to feel ashamed but you do need
to resolve your problem. Number five. Lusts. We could have included it
but it's such a distinctive area I kept it separate. Perverted desires and appetites. I believe all appetites
initially were healthy. But by sin and demonic power they've
been perverted to become unhealthy and destructive. First John 2:16 speaks about the lust
of the flesh, the lust of the eyes. There is demonic power
that controls eyes. Some men have to look
at women in a special way. They're absolutely incapable
of not doing that. That's a demon
that's focused in their eyes. As I've said already, gluttony is a very
clear example of a perverted appetite. I had a woman once who traveled
seventy miles in a snowstorm to Chicago to be delivered. She was the daughter
of a Pentecostal pastor. Like many she'd rebelled
against her parents and their religion, married an
unsaved man and ended up miserable. She had three children. She came and got delivered
from the demon of gluttony and she said to me afterwards:
Mr. Prince, no one can tell me this isn't real. It's just as real
as having a baby, and rather like it and I've had three. And then she told me she was
so compulsive in her gluttony that she would take food off
her children's plate and eat it even though she knew they
needed it more than she did. You see, let's talk about addictions.
Addictions grow on frustrations. They're branches on a trunk. And if
you merely deal with the addiction you haven't solved the problem.
Take alcohol and gluttony. One woman is Episcopalian her husband runs around with
other women, doesn't care for her doesn't give her enough money and
so on. All right. She gets frustrated she's got to get some relief,
she walks across the living room to the cocktail cabinet,
becomes an alcoholic. The other woman is Church of God.
Her husband does exactly the same. But for that woman to get to the cocktail
cabinet would be a lengthy journey. So where does she go? To the
kitchen and opens the refrigerator. But she becomes a food-aholic.
But the difference is minimal, really. And in either case, to help them you've
got to deal with the basic frustration which is their attitude
toward their husband. We have to go on with the list. Number six, the whole realm of the
occult. I'm just going to write occult. But that is a vast realm.
And every part of it is demonic. Even the respectable parts. And I would not involve you to
be involved in Yoga exercises let me say that. I was in Yoga,
I was a practicing Yogi. I would tell you, there is nothing in that
I would touch with a ten-foot pole. You don't have to depend
on Yoga for physical health. The Lord will give you physical health. I'm just saying, the occult
is a deep, dark pit. It's one of those caves where all
the steps, footmarks lead inwards and none ever lead outward. All right, number seven. All false religions. Islam, Mormonism Jehovah's Witnesses, Buddhism Hinduism and in some respects, Judaism. All false religions
have a demon about it. Satan is an expert in the field of religion.
It's the main area in which he operates. Number eight, all heresies. And by heresies I mean departures
from the Christian faith. Let's turn to 1 Timothy
chapter 4 for a moment. 1 Timothy 4. Now the Spirit expressly states
the Spirit... Capital S, the Holy Spirit... Now the Spirit expressly
states that in latter times that's the times in which we're
now living, some will depart from the faith What faith?
The Christian faith. Why? Giving heed to deceiving
spirits and doctrines of demons. This is happening
on a wide scale today. And then it goes on to say, he gives
some examples of their errors. Speaking lies in hypocrisy, having
their own conscience seared forbidding to marry, commanding to
abstain from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving. Particularly on the West Coast
of the United States you'll find hundreds of thousands
of people to whom that applies. They're becoming super-spiritual, they
decide not to marry, or if they marry they don't cohabit with their spouse,
and they're going to be super-spiritual by what they eat. Now I believe in eating wisely,
but I don't make a religion out of it. The moment it becomes
a religious issue you're on the verge of the demonic. You'll notice that people who get into
food fads can't talk about anything else. That's another mark of the demonic. No matter where you start,
you always end up with food. Don't eat this and that.
There are lots of things I don't eat but I do not make a religion out of it. All right. Number nine,
the area of our physical bodies. And we've dealt with many
examples in the gospels. Certain things, I think, are normally
demonic, I would never say always. The first one I'd put on the list is
epilepsy. And I have seen many many people delivered. Ruth and I
were in Lexington, Kentucky about two years ago now,
and I had a blessing. A woman came to me,
she was probably about forty with her daughter about eighteen.
She said, Mr. Prince, ten years ago you prayed for me and I was
delivered from the spirit of epilepsy. Here's my daughter,
she has the problem. Pray for her. I was happy for that testimony.
We prayed for the daughter. I have no doubt that she was delivered.
I have seen scores of people delivered from epilepsy
when it's treated as an evil spirit. If a person comes to me I'll say:
Now I believe that's an evil spirit. I'm prepared to command
it to go out, do you want me to? Are you prepared, because there may
be a fight. There may be a struggle. If you don't want to, I won't do it. Some people say yes, some say no. That is as far as we can go. We've dealt with the primary activities
of demons. That list of nine verbs. And here's the primary areas in which
I have observed them operating. You see, a person may be
completely clear in the area of sex but may be in a false religion. Or a person may have
no spirits in the mind but may be bogged
down in the emotions. Or a person, let's say,
may be in a heresy but be perfectly healthy. So there's a whole choice of areas. That's the end of the first session. God helping us we'll complete
this in the second session.
