Can a Christian Filled with The Holy Spirit need Deliverance?

And I began to realize that the Lord was putting me through what I call a postgraduate course of spiritual training. And I must say it was thorough. He spared no time, he spared no expense. He would take me halfway across the continent, back again, just to learn one lesson. There were various things in the New Testament that He opened up to me that I had never understood or been able to apply before.

And one of them was this business of dealing with evil spirits. Now, as a Pentecostal preacher, I’d always believed in evil spirits. They’re in the Bible. Every now and then, I’d been backed up into a corner in an unpleasant situation where I’d had to recognize that what was in front of me was somebody with an evil spirit. And like most people, I used to imagine that if I shouted loud enough, something might happen. And every now and then, something did happen.

But it was a very isolated, unusual, and unwelcome experience, and I got away from it as quick as I could. Furthermore, because of my association with Pentecostal people, I had made an assumption, which most, but not all, Pentecostal believers make, that once you’re baptized in the Holy Spirit, there’s no possibility of having an evil spirit in you, and you cannot possibly need deliverance from an evil spirit. I’d never heard anybody preach a sermon on that or prove it out of scripture, but it was an assumption that was generally made, and I found myself making the same assumption.

As a result of this, looking back on my past ministry, I can realize that people came to me whose needs I was absolutely unable to meet because I refused to recognize them. I can think of two particular cases. One was a young man who got saved in a street meeting when I was preaching. Had a tremendous conversion, baptized in the Holy Spirit, became a very eager, dedicated worker for the Lord. I mean, he put most other people to shame with his zeal and his dedication.

But he had one problem, a very embarrassing one. It was lust in a specific form, and he never could get permanent victory over this. And he would come to my wife and me and say, “Pray with me.” And I remember one occasion, we prayed from about 10 o’clock at night till about 2:00 a.m. And he would say, “It’s leaving me, it’s leaving me. Don’t stop praying. I can feel it. It’s in my fingers. It’s going.” Now, if I heard anybody say that today, I’d know immediately what to do.

But in those days, this didn’t make sense to me. And so, though we prayed by the hour, we never got that young man delivered. And I’ve met him years later, he still had the same problem. A dedicated, sincere Christian worker, but there was one area in his life where he never got permanent victory. And it affected, of course, a great deal of the rest of his testimony. Then there was another man who came, a Jew from Germany.

And I particularly love the Jewish people and particularly delighted when a Jew finds Christ. This man found Christ and made a bold, open confession, which is not easy for a Jew. Now, I got to know a little of his background. Out of his entire family in Germany, only he and an elder brother survived. All the rest of the family, father, mother, uncles, cousins, aunts, every other relative, perished in Hitler’s gas chambers.

Secondly, he was the second child, and his mother had wanted a girl. And when he turned up a boy, she just wouldn’t accept the fact that he was a boy. Until he was about 15 years old, she dressed him and treated him as if he was a girl. Now, if I met anybody with those two facts in their background today, I would immediately know even what demons to look for.

But at that time, no. Now, he was saved, he was baptized in the Holy Spirit. I heard him speak in tongues, and I know German. It was not German. Beautiful, anointed, other tongue. But at other times, he would come to me and say, “Can’t you get this devil out of me?” And he would tell me things that this thing made him do. He would even, to punish himself, he would put his fingers in the door and slam the door on his fingers. And though it’s not pleasant to speak about it, he was driven to drinking his own urine as a form of self-punishment.

Now, if I met anybody that said that to me today, I would know immediately the nature of their problem. He said, “Drive this devil out of me.” I said, “You can’t have a devil in you. You’re baptized in the Holy Spirit. I heard you speaking in tongues.”

And I can, I could add many to that list, but I realized because of my particular doctrinal preconception at that point, I was not able to see, and therefore, I was not able to minister to the needs of these people.

Well, it was when this period of what I call postgraduate spiritual training that one of the main themes God dealt with was evil spirits and how to deal with them. And He brought me face to face with the fact, absolutely in a way that could not be challenged by anybody that’s willing to accept simple, plain facts, that multitudes of people baptized in the Holy Spirit still need deliverance from evil spirits.