Steps for Deliverance

If you are seeking deliverance there may come a moment where you have to choose between two things: your dignity and your deliverance. Now if dignity is more important to you than deliverance, you know what your problem is? Pride, that’s right. I always think of this doctor’s wife in the state of Alabama. She was a kind of Southern-style lady. She’d heard me teaching and she came up and said, “Mr. Prince, if I understand what you’re saying, if I’m to be delivered I may scream.”

I said, “It could happen.”

She said, “I was brought up that a lady doesn’t scream in public.”

“Well,” I said, “suppose you were in a river drowning and you were going down for the third time and you thought there might be someone on the bank who could rescue you, would you be too ladylike to scream?” Well see, that’s an option, you can choose to drown or you can be a little less ladylike for five minutes. My advice to people is let your dignity go because it’ll come back. And when you’ve been delivered you’ll be much more dignified, you won’t have this thing inside you struggling all the time. Okay. But I really say humility is the key.

All right. The next is confess your faith in Christ. I won’t put “your” but you understand that. Because He is the high priest of our confession. When we confess right, He comes to our help. But if we don’t make the right confession, we don’t get Him on the scene.

Number four, confess any known sin. All right, I’ll write ditto there, any known sin and I want to put but I don’t have room on the line, by yourself or your ancestors. In some cases you have to identify yourself with the family problem and say it’s my problem, I confess it, I ask for forgiveness. Even though it was your grandmother or your aunt or whoever it was.

Number five, repent of all sin. Without repentance, remember what we have been saying all along, without repentance, there is no deliverance. And I’ll put here Proverbs 28:13, which says:

“He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” (KJV)

Do you want mercy? You’ve got to do two things: confess and forsake. That’s old-fashioned but then God hasn’t changed, you understand? A lot of people have the attitude if I don’t confess my sin, God will never know about it. Really, I’ve met many people. That’s a mistake, God knows already. He’s not asking you to confess in order that He can find out, He’s asking you to confess in order that He can have mercy on you, understand? And let me tell you some other good news, God is unshockable. You can tell Him the worst about yourself, He already knows it and He still loves you. But if you hold it in, you’ve held your problem in.

All right. Number six, break with occult, curses [which we’re going to deal with tonight, I can’t go into that in detail now] and secret societies. Okay. Especially Free Masonry. That is a source of the most tremendous demonic problems. And it goes from generation to generation, including retardation, crippling, all sorts of problems. All right. Really, that’s part of repentance, you understand, but I’ve put it up separately.

Number seven, forgive others. All of them, everybody. Don Basham and I had a friend years back who was a veterinarian. He needed deliverance but he didn’t get delivered till he had forgiven the whole IRS. That was his problem. None of you have that problem, I’m sure. Jesus said in Matthew 11:25, “When you stand praying, forgive if you have anything against anybody.” That leaves out nothing and nobody. It’s your responsibility to forgive. You don’t wait till they humble themselves and say, “I really am sorry for what I did to you.” You forgive them not for their sake primarily, but for your sake. I tell people forgiving others is not being superspiritual or sentimental, it is really simply enlightened self-interest. That’s all it is.

And number eight, one beautiful, brief word. Expel. We’ll come to that a little later, but passivity doesn’t get you anywhere. You’ve got to take action. The simplest action to take is to begin to breathe out. In both Hebrew and Greek, the word for spirit is the same word for breath. I remember a little boy, or rather a mother who came to me, asked me to pray for her little boy of about four or five. I said, “What’s his problem?” She said, “Allergies.” “What kind of allergies?” “Food allergies.” “What’s he allergic to?” “Tell me what he isn’t allergic to!” “Well,” I said, “I’m going to deal with it as an evil spirit, is that okay?” She said fine. I said, “I need to talk to your son.” Now I talked to him in very simple child language, said, “There’s a bad spirit like a breath inside you. I’m going to command it to come out in the name of Jesus. I want you to let it go. So when I say, ‘In the name of Jesus,’ you blow it out.” So he was like a little soldier, prayed for him, said “in the name of Jesus” and he went (blowing sounds). That was all. So I thought did it work or didn’t it? So I just had to leave it with the Lord. But three days later the lady came back and said, “Pray for me!” I said, “What is your problem?” She said, “Allergies.” I said, “Tell me first what happened to your son.” “Well,” she said, “he marched straight home, went to the refrigerator, opened it and sampled everything in it and nothing did him any harm.” See how simple? Except you become like a little child you don’t get these benefits.

All right. Now that’s how to get them out. That’s the most important piece of information. And even if you don’t understand how they came in, what matters is to know how to get them out.

Now we’re going on to the problem area, why some people are not delivered. Okay. This is mainly for those who are going to be in this ministry. Why some are not delivered. Basically it’s for not meeting the conditions. Listen, deliverance is not so much a test of your spiritual power, it’s a test of whether the people have met the conditions. Don’t focus on yourself. Focus on getting the people to meet the conditions. Because once they’ve met the conditions they will be delivered. You may feel yourself a little midget, but you’re representing a victorious Christ.

All right. Number one, lack of repentance. Okay. There’s no guarantee to anybody who is not willing to repent.

Number two, lack of desperation. I say deliverance is for the desperate. Summed up in one word, passivity. You’ll find that particularly in people who’ve been in Oriental cults. Because they’re encouraged to kind of putting your mind in neutral, you understand? And many times you’ve got to do something to prod them. You see, it’s... I want to say again, Christ has given us authority over evil spirits but not over the human will. You cannot will for the other person. The person has to will for himself.