The 5 levels of spiritual combat w/ Fr. Chad Ripperger | Chris Stefanick Show

welcome my brothers and sisters from ephesians chapter six put on the whole armor of god that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against the rulers against the authorities against the cosmic powers of this present darkness against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms therefore take up the whole armor of god that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done it all to stand firm stand therefore having fastened on the belt of truth having put on the breastplate of righteousness and as shoes for your feet having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace in all circumstances take up the shield of faith which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one i love this at the end of ephesians where paul is just summing up how to live the christian life he lands really strong on oh by the way this is actually a battle against the evil one and this isn't just for people who are in exorcism ministry this is the the everyday life of christians we are in a spiritual battle and here to talk about that today dear uh friend and we're honored to have father chad ripager and thank you ron thanks again for for being with us thanks for having me chris honored and blessed to have you uh before we dive into the topic today i want to let everybody know about some books you've written okay just short easy read books mostly pictures very few actions no no no fixtures you have dominion tell us about this and how to get it uh so basically dominion was a book um it's i've written it for the lay people but it's basically about the structure of the spiritual battle so if you want to understand you know how demons function how they attack us things that you can do in order to do that combat it's in the book great so we're going to crack into a little of this today but you know we have 30 minutes and this is uh obviously way more thorough okay and then this one that is actually a more extensive book it's actually influence yeah diabolic influence so it's the full title on that is the nature and psychology of diabolic influence this is actually written for priests but specifically for exorcist it's a manual for exorcist basically um and so it contains a lot more information than the late people's book primarily for the training of exorcisms okay and we also do sell it to um psychologists healthcare professionals who are working in this area okay so it's kind of get like a dsm for uh demonic battle yeah it's yeah of a sword yeah and why don't you want the average lay guy getting a hold of that one uh well we call it the csi effect which is basically um so the police complain that people watch csi and then when they commit to crimes they enact what they'd saw in csi to try and cover their crimes and so that's so we call it the csi effect which is basically they'll read the book and then come in and mimic uh what we see there when we really need because the real goal in this ministry is to get to the truth whether it's you know it's not because sometimes people just want their problem to be diabolical so they don't have to deal with you know they think that i'm just going to wave my wand and then they're not going to have to deal with their problems when in point in fact what our real goal is to get to the truth of the matter what is exactly the problem what is the degree of diabolic influence if there is any and so it's the truth it's more important and so we just don't want that to influence people's presentation themselves in an authentic in a transparent manner okay beautiful yes you don't want a teenage kid reading that one and yeah no imitating things that they saw okay right yeah all right so let's talk about spiritual combat sure five levels of spiritual combat uh two of them is uh almost none of us experience right that's correct three of them are fairly common that's right but we often reduce them to just the human and natural experience but you have a correct vantage point that shows they're certainly not purely uh just a human experience right what what are the five levels so the first would be it's just the uh um well there's actually there's technically there's six but there's the ones that people are gonna most likely to experience so the first one is um uh ordinary temptation that's what we all suffer once adam and eve ate the fruits because they used their bodies to commit the sin as a result that seated dominion of the um satan and the demons to influence us on a bodily level so that includes any of our faculties or any aspect of our body god permitting so that's why they can affect us emotionally they can put things into our imagination and so those are the primary ways that temptations occur and all of us are subject to those temptations and i love how you worded that and there's so much we could dive into here my gosh but it did seated dominion yeah some people think well they just made a little mistake no this was a battle between heaven and hell that's right yeah and sometimes we we reduce temptation to the purely natural level and and some of it is uh you know a teenage kid is going to struggle with certain things because of human evolution and the need to correct so how do you distinguish between the the natural and the supernatural where's the overlap in well there's everyday temptation yeah i think that well obviously temptations come as they always said from the world the flesh and the devil so you know so it can just be but a lot of times if it comes from the devil it doesn't necessarily have any corresponding thing externally um also the demons will very often tempt us with stuff that's not our normal difficulties which would normally arise from the flash so they can cause you to have temptations in areas that aren't even your issues right oh my gosh by natural disposition we have issues each one of us has to develop virtue in specific areas to overcome those things so some people are sanguine they're going to have to develop more temperance or more chastity or some say than someone who's cleric right so um but the ultimate way that you're really gonna know is um that that it's actually really a spiritual thing is there's usually three things i usually recommend to people is prayer just pray against it and if you notice it shuts off or it gets better um so don't just try to muscle your way through the temptation uh because there's often an element that's demonic you should also just what does a prayer against temptation look like so it can just it can be something as simple as just turning toward our lord and our lady and asking them for help but it can also be actually what we call a binding prayer a lot of um catholics are misinformed thinking that it actually came from the protestants it's true that the prophets do talk about binding prayers but in point in fact it actually the binding of demons is through the entire history of the church it's in all its rituals etcetera so um what does that sound like so you're just one of those yeah so if you pray you just say um any spirit of and then you name the behavior so if it's temptation against lust so any spirit of lust i bind you in the name of jesus by the power of the precious blood by the intercession of the blessed virgin mary and i command you to go to the foot of the cross to receive your sentence boom yeah i love the power yeah so it's there's a power that we overlook that god gave us as average christians exactly that's so awesome well and even christ said by my name you'll cast out demons so it's just invoking his name can have that effect of blocking them or so so if you find that in the temptations if you just use you know invoke christ's name and rebuke the demon and you notice it just stops well then that tells you that it's it's there's a spiritual there's a diabolic component whereas if it just kind of continues then that's probably more of a sign that it's it's more natural on a natural level that's actually the primary way that we actually do diagnostics right because if a problem is psychological or natural the prayers aren't going to have hardly any effect whereas if it's diabolic you're going to see a shift there's a very set of patterns you're going to see but you'll see a shift archbishop told me there's certain temptations that he and by the way thank you archbishop for allowing me to have this interview yes i had to ask her special permission because like everybody wants to interview an exorcist that's not they don't want to be rock stars um but he said this one beautiful prairie he said i just covered that temptation in the blood of jesus yes just call the blood of jesus down in particular temptations yeah it takes two seconds and then the prayer of consecration which we talked about earlier i've also i'll tell people consecrate that area of your spirit of your the temptation or that area of your spiritual life a lot of times that'll shut it off as well perfect praise god helpful uh okay so there's two areas of combat that that we talked about in the last episode yes that we don't need to really cover now it's possession which is yes point five percent of people you said who comes very very possessed yeah uh one you mentioned in a great talk on youtube about spiritual combat you should look this talk up uh father rick burger on on spiritual combat which is uh is physical abuse from a demon yeah which is really rare too that's right uh some exorcists call it vexation that's what the italians call it as vexation the problem is the term vexation historically had a very broad meaning of any attack whatsoever okay um so the a lot of the exorcists uh for example father moore who is considered kind of like the father of modern exorcism he he's labeled it by the latin term which is dolor which is pain that they afflict pain on people that's very rare it's usually it's the prerogative of saints yeah if you're if you're padre pio it might happen exactly so people don't have to worry about we don't have to worry about that here in the studio today all right but then there's other there's two others that we we experience in our everyday life and those are oppression and obsession okay let's dive into what those are how do we deal um well let's do with oppression first because we kind of dealt with a little bit with obsession sorry first because it deals with the same faculties that temptation does so impression obsession so obsession is basically um an attack on the psychological faculties but it's much stronger than just ordinary temptation okay all of us sub for ordinary temptation the number of people that have diabolic obsession is you know just a percentage of the people that are again all of us are going to suffer temptation oppression is obsession sorry is much less and this is a very oppression and obsession are much less yeah they are so what percent of the average christian you think is suffering from oppression or obsession um well it's kind of funny because i tend to think it's a little bit higher than some exorcist although i've talked to numerous exorcists and we all tend to generally agree that the number of people because our our world has gone become so sinful especially in the area of oppression there's a specific reason why we're seeing an up ramp in that but in relationship to obsession we're actually seeing uh an increase over the last even 20 years there's been an increase so our general um estimate is probably somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the adult population maybe a little bit higher is diabolically obsessed and it's interesting because just about the time we kind of concluded on that percentage they came out with a um a study done in psychology that indicated that people between the ages of 18 and 22 25 percent of them have either seen a psychologist or currently seeing a psychologist wow so the percentages are or on psychotropic drugs so it's there's uh there's and i'm not suggesting that all psychological problems are diabolic it just means that they can attack our psychological faculties and such exacerbate and exacerbate it and make it feel and so um and the oppression has uh obsession has a very diabolic obsession has a very distinctive difference from psychological obsession if someone's psychologically obsessed it's usually because there's been a series of events in their lives or they've done things that have caused a series of mental habits and they've gotten into a bad situation and it tends to be very constant it'll slowly degrade but it tends to be very constant does that that means the same thing i would in secular terms say obsession like i i just can't stop fixating on this dysfunctional cycle that's right and so psychological obsession is that exactly that whereas diabolic obsession they do experience that but it tends to be different in the sense that it's not consistent it'll turn on and turns off a common experience many priests will see is people will come to confession and they'll confess a sin and then um usually in the area of the sixth commandment they've gone a little while but then they've bounced yeah yeah with less they've felt they've fallen and then they go to confession and they say well it feels like it lifted they'll feel this kind of experience and then it it they go for a few days like maybe in a couple of weeks or even longer and then it just kind of sets back in real strong and that and so that kind of pattern you see that's what that's more of a kind of a diabolical whereas if it was a psychological thing it would have some external stimulus it would also um not respond to going to confession very much it's not going to respond to prayer it's not going to respond to other things and it's going to be much more consistent so uh but diabolic obsession is becoming more commonplace primarily we're seeing is because of uh pornography is where we're seeing the uptick in his results there's the natural and the spiritual going hand in hand there that's right and uh to add to your statistic about young people 2016 was the first year that gen z went into college over half self-described as below average in mental health yes and those numbers are not purely uh all because of neurological imbalances i mean that's no that's very high yeah um do you recommend binding prayers for obsession is it the same kind of response or is it to have a next level response oh you can use it if you say somebody binding prison then you notice it kind of shuts off for a little while but then it comes back well then that tells you that that you're gonna have to do a little bit more one of the things that we developed um when we were in oklahoma when we came to the archdiocese of denver at uh by the graciousness of archbishop aquila when we came here i told the priests i said we can't maintain this vetting process because we were we were spending we were the priests were vetting over 600 people of contacts um a year at the time and now we're up to about through two to three thousand that we vet to the people actually come to you see if they should come to and so i just said we can't maintain this we have to have put in some place so we started this this uh protocol we call it a protocol but it's basically that the name of the place is called you can go online and see some of it it's called libra christo christian crystal which basically means free man in christ so it's that's that's the goal that's the goal exactly so um but what we did is we developed and what we found with um diabolic obsession is that ninety percent of the people didn't need to see an exorcist what we noticed is was a consistent pattern of just a basic elementary lack of discipline in their spiritual life wow not praying on a regular basis and not doing certain things on a regular basis wow they might be going to confession and going to mass on you know on sundays and holy days etc but they're not they're not consistently praying so what we do is we put them on a protocol which is with obsession we say get up every morning do the angelus noon six and six and say the pressure of the argument christian norman six and six just and then cut out we also found if they cut out do a little bit of media fasting where they're cutting out you know looking at their ted their phone the lot and all that but if we if they just do that just gain a certain elementary discipline almost all the cases of obsession don't even need to see a priest to do the prayers it'll just slowly lift them i got it i mean i i almost want to encourage our viewers re-listen to this in slow motion because there's little things being said that you might miss or breathe over an exorcist just said one of the things he does is tell you to look at your phone less yes and just scroll on your phone less and pay attention to that i mean that's literally a foothold for the evil one it is because well it all it it there's a philosopher by the name of bogelin who said every time we use technology we get a pleasure at it which is true we actually know that from modern brain studies we get a dopamine uptake so what we and he says as a result you need to do some type of penance to counteract the pleasure that you're getting out of these things otherwise you're just going to end up in spiritual dissipation and so he was the one who kind of noticed that at first but we've really seen it in relationship to the phone people have to be really disciplined in relationship to it and all those little things the lack of discipline of temperance the lack of basic human virtues creates footholds that's right that's how the demons get and they use it against us and then um in the cases of obsession it's usually something they've kind of driven in the person for a while so once they start this spiritual discipline um of doing the angelus and six and six and their exam christian arm prayers we found that like i said ninety percent of them don't even need to see a priest for prayers there's some of them where the oppression strong enough to where they do need to see a priest to kind of give him that last prayers yeah well or just a minor exorcism a couple of few times just to kind of get them over the hump and then they're fine um so uh they don't necessarily need to see a priest i'm so i don't look i don't see too many cases of of obsession um usually the people that i will see are either possessed or people who um have under a temporary attack and we just not need to clear it out so those are the people i see okay and by the way i want to give a shout out to my son joey who uh he willfully got rid of his phone as a teenage kid he's like i'm not happy with my phone yeah he's got his watch so he can communicate or call him but he can't scroll around because it's it just he could feel it takes over yeah there's a freedom you experience by putting the thing aside for yeah i gotta i gotta get another place where i can follow my son's example and that's tough yeah yeah uh okay so uh temptation obsession oppression what does that look like okay so you overcome it so obsession is actually an attack on the interior faculties where oppression is an attack on the outside it's on our externals okay so this will be things like our job situation or our workplace they'll attack people your relationships you see this a lot with in marriages so they'll attack the relationships they can attack people's health um sometimes someone has health problems that can be a demonic attack yeah financial problems that can be a monster yeah so yeah they're financial problems so it's from the outside yeah so with and you know by the way i'm not suggesting that you know if you have a health issue you normally go to a doctor first yeah and it's going to normally respond to medication but once in a while get stuff that doesn't respond and so um we also with people of oppression we actually put them on the same protocol we do with obsession and we have found that it actually uh will cause a significant lifting over the course of time it's a kind of a slow climb out the primary thing that we discovered is the most effective thing against oppression is that consecration which you mentioned earlier really consecrating the very specific thing yet the more specific it is the more effective it seems to be so consecrating like if they're attacking your finances so there was a doctor who's a benefactor of ours very good catholic man um one day he calls me says you know i he's he said nobody has paid their bills we can't get people to pay their bills loans paid we have had no money coming in in over a month we said there's you know there's something this is just not normal so i said well here's to consecrate the the the inflows of your finances to our lady he did he called me back a week later she's not going to believe it everybody settled up within a week incredible so you know and i've i've noticed similar differences in my life from that specific prayer uh because and it's it's hard with as an average christian going through life you know you don't know if it's like is this a regular sickness or is it uh maybe it's my time to go and that's why i'm not getting better maybe there's a demonic influence that the lord wants me to push back on and experience victory right but it's not like these prayers take that much time no you're still normally done why not just pray them yeah that's it too you know as an exorcist because you get attacked quite a bit i just do any anything i'm just i'll i'll i'll put it in there and then if it if it has an effect it has an effect and then otherwise i know it's it's uh it's kind of a it's not a natural problem and we've even there was one time this one nun she said she had this one sickness she was like a flu she was not getting better she tried everything so i just did a minor exorcism over her and she said halfway through the first prayer she felt the whole thing lived wow so i'm not suggesting everybody like i said their illnesses are but they're sometimes they do kind they can they can basically mimic or cause every form of physical or psychological illness it doesn't mean that even the majority of them are diabolically caused it just means that they can do that and so people need it so why not say a little prayer you know and i i'm again i'll put that prayer in the show notes we mentioned it in the last episode where you consecrate yourself to a lady and say these external goods that god has given me by virtue of natural law i give to you mary to keep him safe from the evil and even if it's from a natural cause of giving that target it's still a good thing yeah can't go wrong and i love your um there's a there's a part of your charism and personality i think god communicates through that lowers the uh the the the fear of like yeah that if i if i start going there am i crazy am i seeing the devil under every every rock right and he's like well no he is actually probably under a rock but that's fine who cares my jokes are under every other rock but uh no you see and i think the thing is is that well saint peter himself says be vigilant and watchful so we watch if we see it then we deal with it if we don't we don't pay attention to it and even when you see it i don't think you you how do you how do you avoid obsessing on the presence of the evil one yourself well part of it is i'm just so busy with other stuff i just did a time there you go but um no part of it is it goes back to that normalcy of life they want you to obsess because then that's not normal right and so that's why i just took st peter's uh words to heart i watch and if i see something that i notice okay there's the pattern that you would see if something's diabolic then i'll address it otherwise i don't yeah wow uh and i um i'm not gonna i i i do you start to pick up on it while you're watching right we're talking about this in the in the break that there's actually you're following the lord for a long time you see certain patterns you start to pick up on the fact that almost like oh there's actually something assigned to tail me yeah and i won't even give the dignity of calling it someone uh you know it's just kind of more annoying than anything it is yeah and you just learn to you know focus on the lord and be normal you can see why teresa of avila when satan appeared above her was floating above her she's like oh you again yeah yeah like i've been dealing with you for a long time exactly yeah and i've heard a john vianney's story similar devil's the foot of his bed yeah just you i think one of the things too that can be helpful too within relationship to people as far as you know keeping themselves protected against oppression obsession is just leading a normal catholic life this is actually true even in possession or any form of diabolic influence leading a normal catholic life what does that look like getting to mass every sunday on holy days of obligations getting to confession never committing mortal sin staying in the state of grace doing prayers you know developing the normal catholic devotions um but a consistent prayer life and following the church's rules on fasting and things like that doing those things just leading a normal catholic life if you do that your odds are becoming diabolically influenced in an extraordinary way you're still going to get some temptations because that's just all part of the god's providential plan but you're not going to your odds of getting extraordinary diabolically um attacked is rare very rare i i really i love the the answer come back to the basics exactly just be serious about the basics because your spiritual war uh you do you see particular trends among teen behavior that is it's often chalked up to just psychological experiences but from your point of view you're saying no that's majority of the time something spiritual we had mentioned the trend with cutting cutting yeah there's two areas that we that i've personally seen it there other exorcists might be able to speak to other aspects of their experience because exorcists experience even though it's all within a certain kind of gamut that the it's demons are the opposite of god god is very simple his demons are very complex so you know depends on whether you get the tail of the elephant or the trunk you know determines what your experience is going to be so a lot of times uh exorcists will have a slightly different experience but that being said what we have found out is is that at least in my experiences is that doing minor exorcisms over people that cut just a few times will usually clear it out they just stop they just stop in fact in most cases especially with women you do it once and it's over but wow but they don't again they don't necessarily have to have a priest to help him do that just doing that protocol or just getting some spiritual discipline itself will cause a lot of that to stop because it tends to find it tends to follow the patterns of diabolic obsession the other area that we've seen in is in certain kinds of eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia so especially bulimia we have found that if you do the exorcisms minor exorcisms over people with bulimia almost always the binging and purging stops almost immediately what whoa so it's um it doesn't mean that they still don't have psychological issues that they have to process but the more extreme parts of that just tend to stop wow and so we found that happens and i'm not suggesting if you have that problem you just automatically go to a priest but i'm just saying that we have noticed that consistent pattern or at least that i have that if i've prayed over women who had those particular issues that it tends to clear up again even those can be cleared up by just following our protocol you know spiritual discipline doing those things will eventually help it to clear out what does someone do they're they're listening right now thinking my kid's cutting uh you get 3000 requests a year uh who do i go to what the heck do i do yeah i actually have what we call a case facilitator so they can't really contact me directly anyway you know unless they're um someone like you who i've known for a while you know obviously you can just call me but um but if the uh but basically what it boils down to is that we um they can contact us at deloreans d-o-l-o-r-a-n-s dot org and we can put them in the direction but what we usually tell him is you need to really go talk to your pastor first because he's gonna be and especially like in the diocese of um of denver archdiocese of denver a lot of the priests actually understand this work to some degree and so they're able to help you at least to begin the initial process so some some prayers with your local parish priest even if it's not father chad ripper that's right this can they have that that authority that's right in fact you don't need to be an exorcist to help people in these areas in fact with oppression obsession you don't even really need to see an exorcist in most cases okay you know unless maybe there's a curse that's connected to it and that's extraordinarily rare you can maybe go to your parish priest and say hey pray the prayer on page 54. just read it dude okay is there like something that simple because a lot of priests are like in fact that's they can actually contact us as well there to help priests in fact what we usually try and do there's a versus a very specific reason why we're trying to get people in contact with their local pastor the first is that he's more likely to know them and be able to help them more on a concrete basis and also because avail i you know we're just a limited resource as exorcists because there's so much of a demand and so much stuff that we have to deal with but also what we've found is that by putting people in contact with their local pastor and by working with it it also solidifies their relationship with their parish local parish church so that once they are liberated they're more likely to continue that relationship beautiful uh the the motto of the of the green berets is to liberate the oppressed and i'm just really grateful for that that mission that god's entrusted to you yeah thanks for being a spiritual warrior and for for being driven by the the joy of liberating the oppressed yeah like i said i'm kind of one of these guys that it's like standing in a field someone hand me a gun and i get shot at so i have to shoot back you know it's not necessarily my chosen work not more probably of an academic but i do think this is where god wants me to work praise god i'm grateful for you i'm grateful for your time today too and brothers and sisters thanks for watching listen lean into the basic stuff of ordinary spiritual life because this isn't just about you becoming a better person this is about winning in a spiritual battlefield forever man wasn't that great listen if you don't want to be happy be sure not to subscribe but if you want a more joyful life the kind of life that god creates you for the kind of life jesus promised when he said i came to give you life to the full then make sure you hit subscribe and share this channel with everybody you know

Channel: Augustine Institute - Catholic Church Explained

Views: 450,800

Keywords: eucharist, Catholic eucharist, transubstantiation, catholic sacrament, 7 sacraments, augustine institute, formed catholic, ignatius press, lighthouse catholic media, lighthouse talks, Dr. Tim Gray, Dr. Brant Pitre, Chris Stefanick, holy communion, catholic church, Catholic Faith, the augustine institute, catholic theology, catholic graduate school, christian theology

Id: b65maySJEmc

Length: 27min 29sec (1649 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2022