Casting Out Demons

In 1963-64, I was pastoring an independent Pentecostal church in a certain city in the United States. One day, a Baptist pastor phoned me. It was a Saturday morning. At that time, my idea of a Baptist pastor was somewhat different from what they are now. This man had been baptized in the Holy Spirit, and for that reason, he wasn’t pastoring a Baptist church. But he was a Baptist pastor, and he said, “I have a lady who needs deliverance from evil spirits.”

Well, that was a rather unusual statement for me to hear from the lips of a Baptist pastor in the first place. Then he said, “She’s been baptized in the Holy Spirit.” Well, that was still more surprising. And then he said, “The Lord has shown me that you and your wife are to be the instruments of deliverance, and it’s to happen today.” Well, I’d never had anybody say that over me, over the phone to me, before. And I don’t let people dictate to me with their revelations.

So I sent a quick wire up to the Lord while I was still on the phone. “Lord, is this you? Is this all right? Am I to go along with this?” And it seemed to me the Lord said, “Yes, this is right.” “Well,” I said, “all right, bring the lady round.” So, my wife and I prepared for this. In the meanwhile, a Presbyterian married couple came along who also had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, just visiting. And I said, “Sit down and stay and see what happens.”

Well, the Baptist pastor came in with the lady. She was, I would say, about 35 years old. I learned later that she was a mother of three children and perfectly ordinary-looking American middle-class housewife, you would say. This Baptist pastor got down to business very quickly. He sat the lady down in a chair and said, “Now, she’s been delivered from the demon of nicotine, but there are others there.” And I sat there, detached and observing, and deciding not to go along with it, and yet not to reject it.

And then he did something. But now I want to say emphatically this, but I’m not recommending everything that was done as being a pattern of what should be done. By no means. I’m just telling you the way it was. So he sat this lady down in a chair and started to stir up the devil in her. And that’s exactly what he did. He commanded Satan to manifest. And after a while, there was a definite reaction from the lady. I was sitting there watching her, and her countenance changed. It was as though another personality was beginning to appear. And a thing I’ve never forgotten, a kind of yellow, sulfurous glare appeared in the center of each eyeball. And I knew, objectively, that there was something there that wasn’t just a good, middle-class Baptist housewife.

But this preacher, like many, many people, not just preachers, had the idea, which I must say is incorrect, that demons get impressed if you shout at them. It isn’t true. All you’re doing is wasting a lot of strength and energy that would be better used in other ways. And he was shouting at this, whatever it was, in this woman. And, as I say, he got the thing to show its presence, but got no further. So I thought to myself, “Well, if he can do it, I can do it.” And I must thank God that I had a thorough, basic knowledge of Scripture. I’m glad that I had it before I went into this. And everything that I did, and everything that I have, that happened, I checked mentally with reference to Scripture.

So I knew, theoretically, that if I spoke to this thing in the name of Jesus, it would have to obey me. I knew that.

“Even the demons are subject unto us through thy name.”

So I got in front of the lady, and I said to her something like this. I said, “Now, you evil spirit that’s in this woman, I’m talking to you and not to the woman. What is your name? In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I command you to answer me.” And the answer came immediately. Just one syllable, like a serpent’s hiss, ‘Hate.’ And everything in the woman’s features and attitude registered pure, undiluted hatred. I have never seen such total hatred in anybody’s eyes in all my life.

Well, there I was. I’d got the name, and I really didn’t know what to do next. Now, I have to say, in what follows, I was motivated by one thought. Whatever the devil wants, I want something different. If he would say one thing, I would say the opposite. Now, I want to tell you that this was in the presence of about four or five reliable witnesses, all of whom would be willing to testify to this day to what happened. Well, I thought, “What do I do now?” So I said, “Now, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you demon of hate,” or I think I said, “You spirit of hate, come out of her.” And this insolent voice, which was not the least bit like the woman’s voice, said, “This is my house. I’ve lived here 35 years, and I’m not coming out.”

And again, I said to myself, “That’s right. Matthew 12, Jesus said the unclean spirit called the person in whom he had resided ‘his house.’”

“Well,” I said, “you are coming out.” And after that, it became a kind of psychological warfare. I had to beat this thing down stage by stage, and each stage took quite a while. And what I’m describing, I’m going to describe it briefly, actually took 5 hours to transpire. So I said, “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are coming out.” And it said, “I’m not coming out.” And I said, “You are coming.” And I gradually realized, the more I quoted Scripture and used the name of Jesus, the more ascendancy I gained over this thing. So after a while, it began to bargain with me. And it said, “Well, if I come out, I’ll come back.” And I immediately, whatever it said, I was going to say the opposite. I said, “No, you’ll come out, and you’ll stay out.” And we argued that one for a while. And then it came down one notch lower, and it said, “Well, even if I come out, my brothers are here, and they’ll kill her.”

Well, I didn’t know anything about his brothers, but I was going to argue every one. So I said, “No, you’ll come out first, and your brothers will come out after you.” And I picked up the message, there’s something more than one in here. Well, we argued that one. And then it said, “Well, even if we come out of the woman, we’ve got her daughter, and we’ll kill her.” Well, I didn’t know the woman had a daughter at the time, but I said, “No, you’ll come out of the woman first, and you’ll come out of her daughter afterwards.”

Well, after this argument, it changed its tactics. And without any warning, the woman’s arms rose up, crossed over her throat, and she began to throttle herself with her own arms. And now, this was not play. Her face was going purple, and her eyes were starting to protrude out of her head. So the Presbyterian man, who’s taller and heavier than I am, and I rose up, and with our united strength, we just succeeded in pulling that woman’s hands away from her throat. Her strength was totally supernatural.

After this, I went at this thing again. And at this, all this time, in me, there was a tremendous inner, tremendous inner pressure, like an inflated balloon, sort of pushing against this spirit in this woman. But at a certain moment, as something happened, there was a kind of hissing noise out of the woman’s mouth. Her head dropped forward limply. Her body relaxed. And this pressure in me relaxed, and I knew it had gone out.

But after a little while, the woman became tense again, and I realized that there were what the demon had called its brothers there. So we went through this procedure for, as I say, about 5 hours. And it was very tiring. So when one of us got tired, another one would step in front and, more or less, used the same methods. And I think in the course of the day, practically every adult present took a turn in dealing with these evil spirits. The first one that named itself was Hate. The next one, if I remember rightly, was Fear. Then there was Pride, and Jealousy, and Self-Pity. Now that was a revelation to me. Self-pity is a demon. Oh, how many things I began to understand in my own experience and other people’s immediately when I grasped that fact.

By this time, the woman was getting very exhausted, and we had spent about 4 hours. When we got to Self-Pity, I made the next one name itself. It said, ‘Infidelity.’ And at the time, I didn’t understand that. So I put it in my pending file. But I know well now that there are demons that drive women to sexual immorality. I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that word. And let me say that a demon like Infidelity does not necessarily come in because a woman has been unfaithful to her husband. It comes in to make her unfaithful to her husband, or a husband to his wife.