Laying the Ax to the Root

On behalf of my wife and myself I would like to say thank you to Mrs. Lindsey and to all the faculty and the other workers here at Christ for the Nations for the wonderful welcome that you’ve given us and for the privilege of ministering to the students here and to all those that have come. We shall carry away a warm memory of our fellowship with you and we’ll be praying that God will continue to bless you. I have a real love for young people, myself, and I love teaching. [I think you’ve got this too close.]

Now I have in my pocket my sermon outline but I’m not going to use it. Some while back I decided that preachers spent so much time ministering to people’s needs that we hardly ever got out of the area of need and God’s people were left need-censored and floundering in their own need. So I decided that ruthlessly and regardless of all the needs that might be present, I would begin to teach as if people didn’t have needs and that they were capable of doing the things that God expects Christians to do.

While we live in the depths of our own need we obviously cannot minister to the need of the world. I’ve often compared the church to a lifeboat launched to save the survivors from a ship that has sunk, but by the time the lifeboat reached the scene of the wreck it had sprung so many leaks that out of the twelve men on board, eleven were kept busy bailing. One man every now and then was able to find time to reach over and grab some poor sinking, struggling seaman and get him into the boat, but the moment he got into the boat they set him bailing with the rest.

“Now that is not how God intended the church to be. The apostle Paul said, 2 Corinthians 9:8:
God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to all good works.”

If you are going to abound to all good works it really is necessary that you have all sufficiency in all things, that you’re not continually in need yourself. So this week I have tried to minister, not on the basis of our needs, but on the basis of our responsibility to God and man. However, this afternoon I felt that God prompted me—I trust I rightly understood His prompting—to speak about various areas of need that people do have. At the end of the service I am going to be willing to pray for the sick; however, the praying for the sick will be an after-service and we’ll make a brief break between the teaching and the praying so that those who do not have needs and do not wish to stay for the prayer for the sick may leave. Before I pray for the sick it will be necessary for me to give some further explanation of what I intend to do, but we’ll leave that till later.

I want to speak to you now about on the basis of experience. Let me say I am not a doctor. As a matter of fact, I’m not a doctor of any kind. My academic qualifications were different and we won’t bother to explain them. Certainly I’m not a physician, nor am I a psychologist, nor am I a psychiatrist. I’m a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ and a teacher of the Word of God and my ministry is based on the Word of God, faith in Jesus Christ and experience, and let’s not leave out experience. It’s good to have theology and theory, but it’s much better when it works. If it doesn’t work, it isn’t from God. So I’m going to speak this afternoon on the basis of what I’ve learned, especially in the last ten years, in ministering to people in desperate need—spiritual need, mental need, emotional need and physical need.

I’d like to take just as an introductory text to make what I say respectable because everybody knows a preacher ought to begin with a text, so I’m beginning with Matthew chapter 3 verse 10, Matthew 3:10— these are the words of John the Baptist and in a sense they introduce the dispensation of the gospel. John was Christ’s forerunner and he was a kind of transitional figure between the law and the prophets and the gospel, and one of the opening words of this verse is the word now, and I believe, in a sense, it expresses God’s intention through the gospel.

“And now also the ax is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.”

That’s a very radical statement. How many of you know the real meaning of the word radical? Well, it comes from the Latin word radix, which means ‘root,’ so, that which is radical is that which goes to the root. And the gospel is totally radical. It goes to the root of things. It doesn’t mess around with something higher up, but the ax is laid to the root.

In my personal experience over the last ten years, and I can say just about ten or eleven years, I came to grips in a new way with people’s problems, and it was on the basis of helping them to receive deliverance from evil spirits. And, looking back, I realize I began with the branches, and the top branches, the thinnest, smallest branches, and I had some success in getting rid of branches out of people’s lives. Then I realized there were thick branches below those branches which still had to be dealt with. When I got down to the thick branches, then I realized that those thick branches were supported by a trunk, which had to be dealt with. Then when I got to the trunk, I realized that the trunk was supported by invisible roots, and that the only final way of dealing with a tree is to get rid of its roots.

Just recently we had a very heavy wind in Fort Lauderdale where I live, and one of the trees in our yard was blown over. And because I wasn’t very much interested in it as a tree I decided to get rid of it, and it was a Saturday. There was no one around to help me, so I got rid of the tree by myself. It wasn’t a very big tree but I had to cut off the branches, then saw off the trunk and then I was left with the stump and the roots. I tried to pull the stump out and I couldn’t do it, so I realized I’d have to remove each root, so I went around digging under the stump with a saw and sawing off each root, and I discovered the root structure was very complicated. Some of the roots went under and back again in a circle, and some were intertwined with others. All the time I was doing this I was thinking that’s just like the problems of the people I deal with. Down below the surface, and most people like to keep it right out of sight, are the real deep roots of human problems and they’re complicated and they’re involved and you have to get to them one by one and cut them off, and sometimes one root will protect another root. So I’m going to talk to you about roots. I’m just speaking on the basis of personal experience. I don’t offer you any seminary background. It’s good to have one, but I don’t have one. Most of my real learning of the things of God was done in the British Army, where I spent five and a half years—three years in deserts and that’s where I really was able to come to grips with the Word of God.

Dealing with problems, I’ve come to realize that the deepest roots go back into people’s past; they go back into preceding generations. Some people—especially kind of the evangelical fundamentalist type— don’t like to face this fact, but in many cases our lives are the product of what our ancestors were and what they thought and said and did. I learned the truth that’s in the 20th chapter of Exodus. God says:

“If people make any other gods before Him, He will visit those sins unto the third and fourth generation.”

Now it is not every type of sin, as I understand it, that’s visited to the third and fourth generation, but it’s the sins that involve making other gods before the true God, and I have to testify, on the basis of experience, those sins regularly are visited to the third and fourth generation. I’m learning more and more that when people have problems that can’t be dealt with on the basis of the simple ministry of believe in Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, we have to look behind it and we have to go down below the surface to look for the roots. I’ve discovered by experience that a curse is a very real thing. The Bible has a great deal to say about curses, and one thing it says, ‘The curse causeless shall not come.’ If a curse comes, it comes because of a cause.

I might as well illustrate this right now so that you get some idea of what I’m talking about. About just over year ago I was ministering in a Presbyterian church in St. Louis, and I taught on deliverance and then we went down to the basement of the church for the deliverance service. I was teaching and ministering and two rows from me, in the second row, I saw what appeared to be a family—a father, mother and daughter. The daughter was apparently a teenager and very conspicuously she had her left leg in a cast from the thigh right down to the bottom of the foot. I didn’t know them, but as I stood there I had a very strong impression that the family was under a curse. So I just spoke to the father and I said, ‘I have the impression that your family is under a curse. Would you like me to pray and release you from that curse?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’

So standing there and not touching any member of the family I took authority in the name of Jesus and released that family from the curse. And I have to say, objectively, though I did not touch one member of the family at that time, there was a noticeable, physical reaction in each member of the family as I broke the curse. Something happened that was physically visible. Then I learned that the girl had broken her leg, I think three times in eighteen months, the same leg, and that the doctor had said it no longer would set, infection had set in, it could not heal and it would have to be amputated. After having released them from the curse I offered to pray for the girl’s leg. Because it was in a cast there was no possibility of any kind of visible evidence of healing, but I took the leg, raised it in my hands, prayed over it and said, ‘I believe God has touched your leg.’

They went back to the hospital, had further x-ray, discovered that the wound had healed, and she was out of the cast within a few weeks. As far as I know, I heard from the father about a year later, her leg is totally healed. Now I do not believe that healing would ever have taken place if I had not previously broken the curse over the family. I think we run into that one cause why sometimes we seem to minister and do all the right things and yet there’s no result.

Now let me say there are certain things that I consider as evidence of a curse over a person or over a family, and one thing which is very characteristic of this case is the accident prone person—the person who is always having unnatural accidents. I think of a member of my family (who’s now dead )—a clever, able, gifted man, and yet the number of automobile accidents he had was unnatural. Apart from other things, he’d step on a pair of scissors, it would go up into his feet. If there was a deadly bug around, be sure it would get him, and really, I have to say, he’s with the Lord now—he died of cancer, a very close member of my family. Looking back I’ve come to the conclusion that we failed to save him physically because we failed to deal with the root cause. Now his mother was Jewish and she was a spiritist, and furthermore I’ll have to say, he hated his mother. And looking back I see that the evil influence from the spiritist mother was never fully canceled in that case. He was save, baptized in the Spirit, served the Lord as a missionary for seven years, and yet there was a dark shadow over that life that was never lifted.

Let me say this while I’m about it, and I’m not bringing you an ordered discourse today, I’m just speaking as things come to my mind. The first commandment with promise is this:

“Honor thy father and mother, that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long on the earth.”

Now God means exactly what He says, and I’m totally convinced that if a person does not honor his father and mother, it never will be well with him no matter how long he may live. He may be a saved believer, he may be a servant of God, but if he does not honor his father and mother it never will be truly well with him all his days. I know a man who’s going to be working with us shortly in a quite responsible capacity and ministry who realized this, and realized that he hated and despised his father, and that there was a dark shadow over his life. He did something, which I am not saying is necessary to do, but he took a journey of about fifteen hundred miles to the cemetery where his father was buried, and leaving his wife outside the cemetery he went and knelt by that grave and for about two hours he emptied his heart of all his bitterness and resentment and rebellion. Walked out of that place knowing that his attitude toward his dead father was right. His wife said she has a different husband.

I remember dealing with a young man when I first came into this ministry. It was in a Pentecostal church in Seattle. He came to me, he was about twenty-two years old, newly saved and baptized in the Spirit. Now this could make you smile, but on the other hand it’s serious. He was earnestly seeking to serve the Lord and walk with God. He was in love with a young woman who was a Pentecostal girl, a good Christian girl, they were planning to get married, but at times he would become so insanely angry with her that he would actually be on the verge of throttling her. Well, as I say, you can smile at that, but when I sat with him in the pastor’s office and began to talk to him he began to use the word fixation. So I said, on the basis of that, I said, ‘Now, tell me. You’ve been to a psychiatrist, haven’t you?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I operate on a different basis. I’m not criticizing the psychiatrist. I respect what he does. But,’ I said, ‘He operates on a psychological basis, I operate on a spiritual basis. Now,’ I said, ‘you can have your choice, but I’m probably cheaper.’ So he said, ‘I’ll choose you.’

Well, then I felt the Lord prompting me. I don’t know, I sometimes have a word of knowledge, but mostly it comes with me in the way I’m led to ask the right question, and sometimes I know for sure I’m getting question by question, exactly laying bare the roots. So I said, ‘Did you have an unhappy home background?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Was your home divided?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Your father was against your mother?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Whose side were you on?’ And he said, ‘My mother.’ I said, ‘Was your father sometimes unkind and brutal towards you?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Have you ever forgiven your father?’ And he said, ‘Well, he’s dead.’ I said, ‘That doesn’t make any difference, because it’s not for your father’s sake you forgive him, it’s for yours. As long as you have unforgiveness in your heart towards your father you’re bound to him. You can never be free.’

So it was getting late. It was about midnight, and after talking to him for a while I said, ‘I want to lead you in a prayer.’ And I led him in a prayer of confession of faith in Jesus Christ, renunciation of sin, and claim for deliverance. Now in my prayer I wanted to say, I intended to say, ‘And I forgive my father.’ Put those words in his mouth, but I forgot. My mind was getting a little tired. So when he came to the end of the prayer, he himself spontaneously said, ‘And I forgive my father as I would have God forgive me.’ When I put my hand on him and prayed for him two fixations left him.

So you understand the two persons you are most closely related to in life are your father and mother. Now everybody here has a father and a mother. Some people here don’t have a wife, don’t have a husband, don’t have a brother, don’t have a sister, maybe don’t have a friend, but there’s not one person here that didn’t have a father or a mother, and you are physically the product of them. There’s a relationship between you and them which is real, acknowledged by Scripture, and it’s a vital part of your life. First and foremost if you are in bitterness, resentment, rebellion against your parents, no matter whether you’re twenty years old or fifty years old, you’ll never have it well with you. So if you want it well with you, you’d better decide to change this afternoon. You say, ‘Well, it was my parents fault.’ I say I can believe that. It always is. There are no juvenile delinquents. There are only adult delinquents. They produce juvenile delinquents. Always it’s the parents’ fault what can that little unborn or newly born baby have to say about that.

But it may be that in the background of your family there are dark forces which you do not understand. It may be that your mother or your grandmother was a fortune-teller, clairvoyant, spiritist, Christian Science practitioner—now those things are what are meant in Exodus 20 by ‘having other gods.’ They’re other sources of spiritual help to which people go. The source to which you go for spiritual help is your god. If you go to drugs for spiritual help, then drugs become your god.

I knew a woman once—in fact I still know her today—a friend of mine was ministering to her deliverance. I was not present. And the spirit that was plaguing her and binding her named itself as ‘the spirit of sleep,’ which is a biblical name—a spirit of deep slumber. The man who was ministering to her commanded the spirit to come out of her in the name of Jesus and it said, ‘I won’t. I’m her salvation.’ Wasn’t that an extraordinary thing to say? But as I mediated on it, I saw the truth of it in a sense. When that woman couldn’t face life, you know what she did? She curled up and went to sleep for sixteen hours at a stretch. Sleep was her salvation. It was her substitute for God.

Now people have many, many substitutes—nicotine, alcohol, drugs, the television—many other things to which we turn for help, for comfort, for strength, and when we do we make those things our god. But the worst and the most serious is when we turn to some form of occult power or practitioner like a fortune-teller, a clairvoyant, a palm reader, a person who practices ESP or hypnosis or handwriting analysis, or a host of other things. We’re agreed about that, aren’t we? There’s a young lady in the front row who had a very strong disagreement with me some years back about the rights and wrongs of handwriting analysis. So I let the Lord deal with her about that and she came round to my point of view, but I think she would tell you if you asked her she would have done better to agree quicker.

Almost any form of supernatural knowledge is very, very dangerous. There are only two sources of supernatural knowledge. One is God, the other is the devil. If it doesn’t come from God, it does come from the devil. If it comes from God it comes through Jesus Christ, because He said:

“I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.”

So if we come to God the Father, it’s through Jesus Christ. If we get into any other supernatural realm of visions or revelations or knowledge or prediction, and we didn’t go by Jesus Christ, we got into the realm of evil and of Satan, and in a certain sense we have tied ourselves to false gods. We need to repent, we need to revoke the claim that they have over us, and we need to loose ourselves from their dark evil influence. And as I say the experience may not be in your life. It may be in the life of your parents, your grandparents or your great grandparents. In relationship to the occult, to witchcraft, to fortunetelling, to divination, to sorcery, I’ve observed that there are certain lines that follow. It usually goes through the female line, most often. Sometimes it will skip a generation and you’ll find that a grandmother who’s a fortuneteller or a clairvoyant is libel to have one favorite grandchild, it’s usually a girl. That favorite grandchild will be the recipient of that evil supernatural power.

My personal experience is that children born of parents in the occult who are practicing the occult are frequently born with the occult spirit in them from birth—spirit of divination, a spirit of witchcraft. Let me try to describe to you divination as I understand it. Divination is essentially the predictive ability. You can predict certain things that are going to happen. It’s very real. The 16th chapter of Acts there was a young woman who had ‘a spirit of divination,’ the King James says. The Greek says ‘a spirit, python.’ A python, you know, is a kind of snake that coils itself around the body of its victims, and is very significant. In the original version of Jeane Dixon’s story, A Gift of Prophecy, it’s related specifically out of our own lips—that her peculiar gift came to her in the form of a snake which came into the bed with her, curled itself round her. That’s left out of the later editions, but it’s there. Nothing, to a person who knows the Bible, could more clearly advertise the source of that gift.

I was in New England about eight years ago speaking to groups of people under the auspices of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship, and every place I was talking about the baptism in the Spirit, and leading people into the baptism. In most places I would get a group of fifteen or twenty people. They’d come forward and practically every person would receive the baptism. Well, there was one woman who followed me around from place to place about four times, and every time she came for the baptism, she didn’t receive it. So she came up at the end and she said, ‘What’s the matter with me? I come up. I say the same prayers as the other people. I don’t get it.’ And I’d noticed that. She stood there like wood. When everybody else was moved by the Spirit, she was unmoved. I said, ‘Do you acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the only way to God?’ She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘That’s why you don’t get it.’ Then she began to tell me what was really a very tragic story. She said, ‘I read the book, A Gift of Prophecy, and I decided I wanted it. So I asked whatever gods there might be for that gift. After that I began to know things that were going to happen.’ Now I’m paraphrasing what she said, I’m summing it up. But in essence

everything she foreknew was evil, was disastrous. For instance, she saw in a dream her aunt dying by drowning, and her aunt died by drowning exactly as she dreamt it. But she could do nothing about it. And then she was under a sense of guilt and condemnation that she had done nothing about her aunt though she knew she was going to drown.

Let me tell you if God reveals things to you, there’s always a practical and redemptive purpose, and basically God does not reveal horror to you. The devil is the one who reveals horror, and his revelations will serve no practical purpose. They’ll simply enslave you. Well, I ministered to that woman. I was due to preach and I spent about forty-five minutes when I was getting ready to preach, trying to help her. I could not get her out of what she was in, and I left that scene with a heavy heart, a sense of almost hopelessness in the face of this evil power that she had submitted to voluntarily but in ignorance.

I remember a man, he’s been used in the Lord’s service today, he’s active in a Christian organization, he has a Catholic background. I was in a meeting with him. I said, ‘Do you have the baptism of the Holy Spirit?’ He said, ‘Yes, but…’ Of course when you get ‘Yes, but…’ to that question, you know what the but is, don’t you. ‘I don’t speak in tongues.’ So I call those ‘trunkless elephants,’ and I find an elephant with his trunk is much happier. So I said, ‘Did you pray?’ He said, ‘Yes, but it wouldn’t come.’ So I said, ‘Did you ever go to a fortuneteller?’ He said, ‘Oh, yes, when I was boy of about fifteen, but I didn’t mean anything by it. I just did it for a joke.’ But I said, ‘You went, didn’t you?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ Well I said, ‘Would you say a prayer of renunciation after me?’ He said, ‘All right.’ I don’t think he was convinced. So I led him to confess as a sin that he’d been to a fortuneteller, to renounce it and every evil influence that he had come under. And he did so in the name of Jesus. Then I put my hand on him and said, ‘Now pray,’ and he spoke fluently in tongues. He didn’t have one moment’s hesitation. You see, the binding thing was removed.

I was ministering in a church in Chicago about maybe seven years ago. A woman came in and she said, ‘Would you pray for me? I need deliverance.’ And I said to her, ‘No, because I believe you’re a medium, and I won’t pray for you.’ So she went away. About some weeks later she came back. She said, ‘What you said was true, but I’ve repented. Will you pray for me?’ Well I didn’t feel really convinced that she had repented, but I thought, I really can’t refuse to pray for her on that basis. So I began to pray for her and command the evil spirits to leave her and some of them apparently left, but it was very hard going. And I’ve learned now by experience when it’s hard going there’s a reason. However, I stopped to rest and I was leaning against the altar of the church and she suddenly said to me in a strange voice, she said, ‘I see you in car and it’s wrecked against a tree.’ Praise God I was on my guard. I instantly recognized that that was a divining spirit. I said, ‘You divining spirit, in the name of Jesus I refuse that. I will not be in a car that will be wrecked against a tree.’

But I saw something. When a person goes to a fortuneteller and the fortuneteller says, ‘You’re going to divorce your husband, marry another man,’ and you say, ‘Oh, am I?’ You know what you’ve done? The fortune teller told you Satan’s destiny for your life, and when you said, ‘Oh…’ you submitted to Satan’s destiny. You made it possible for that destiny in many cases to be actually worked out in your life.

I’m just relating incidents. That’s all I’m doing. In the same church in Chicago, about the same time, a woman came who was the wife of a dentist. She came because she’d heard that I had a ministry of deliverance, so in an after meeting she came for prayer and I discovered that she disliked her mother. In fact she said, ‘My mother’s five hundred miles away from me, but I find myself every day arguing bitterly with her in my mind.’ Well I said, ‘That’s one of your problems.’ I prayed for her, she got a measure of relief. She looked at me and she said, ‘Am I free?’ And I gave my standard answer which is, ‘It’s not my business to give you a certificate, and if I did it wouldn’t be worth the paper that it’s written on.’

Well that didn’t satisfy her so she looked at me again, she said, ‘Am I free?’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you, but to tell you the truth I have the impression that somewhere or other you crossed the line into forbidden territory.’ She said, ‘When?’ and I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ Well she got rather angry with me and went away, but the couple that had brought her were friends of ours and they said, ‘Well, listen. Don’t get angry with Brother Prince. Pray about it. See if it’s true.’ So then she told me the rest of the story herself. In fact, she gave this testimony in public. She said next morning alone in her apartment she prayed and

she said, ‘If there’s any truth in what Brother Prince said, will you show me?’ And immediately her mind went back to a church of which she was a member, a Methodist church, before she knew the Lord personally, and how in this church the most spiritual woman in the church had come—she was spiritual, too, believe me—had come to her and said, ‘May I tell your fortune,’ I think ‘read your palm.’ So because the woman was noted to be the most spiritual in the church she said, ‘Yes.’ The woman told her fortune. She said, ‘You’re going to have a child and it will be born dead.’ Later she had a baby and it was born dead. The doctor who delivered the baby said, ‘I’ve never seen a case like that. It was choked by its own umbilical cord, which was twice wound around its neck.’ There in the apartment, meditating on this which the Lord had brought back to her memory, she realized what I’ve told you, that that woman in that Methodist church had predicted Satan’s destiny over her life and by believing it she’d submitted to it. And, in fact, in a certain sense, that woman was the murderer of her baby, a good respectable churchgoing murderer. And so she renounced that evil thing, confessed all that as a sin, released herself from it all by herself, and she said she had a violent physical reaction alone in her room and was set free. Since then she’s had a baby that was born healthy and lived.

People say, ‘Well, Brother Prince, I went to a fortuneteller but I just did it for a joke. I didn’t mean anything by it.’ I’ll give you Don Basham’s answer to that one which I think is good. He says, ‘What would you think if I said to you, ‘Well it’s true. I did commit adultery with my neighbor’s wife, but I just did it for a joke. I didn’t mean anything by it’’ You see, one is physical adultery, the other is spiritual adultery. I believe the Bible indicates spiritual adultery is more evil than physical adultery.

I want to talk about one other type of personal problem which I find to be very, very common. Really we’ve only touched on one root so far which, in order to explain to you what I’m aiming at, this root is the occult. It’s involvement in Satan’s supernatural realm. My experience today is that three out of every four persons in the United States have in some way or other been involved in the occult.

I was in a meeting, a CFO meeting if you know CFO, Camp Farthest Out meeting, and a Methodist minister had real understanding was preaching on the danger of involvement with Edgar Cayce and Jeane Dixon. I happened to be at the back of the congregation listening. At the end of his message he said,

‘Now how many of you have read either one or other of those writers, been interested in them?’ At least one-third of the people in the congregation immediately raised their hand. They were all professing Christian church members. So let me say frankly, in my personal opinion, the greatest threat to the United States and the one thing that can destroy this nation is witchcraft. It’s unbelievably powerful, it’s unbelievably sinister. I don’t know how far I dare go this afternoon. I think I’d better go all the way.

I have been involved in a kind of private war with witchcraft. I didn’t choose it. It happened. I mean, there’s something about that. I recognize it. Not always, I’m blinded at times. People come to me. They say, ‘Brother Prince, I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but when I come near you I start to shake.’ I say, ‘I know what’s the matter with you. It’s my private enemy in you that doesn’t like me. We recognized one another.’ You know I used to smile at this, but then God opened my eyes to the teaching of the Bible, and I saw that there is one biblical type of witchcraft which is Jezebel. She is the Bible witch. Then I saw that Jezebel almost completely captured God’s people Israel. She did it in a way that is typical of witchcraft by allying herself with a ruler, captivating a weak ruler, King Ahab, and using his influence to captivate the people of God. And then I saw that her influence was so evil and so powerful that God had to raise up one of the most powerful ministers of the Bible to deal with it which was the ministry of Elijah, and essentially Elijah was God’s answer to Jezebel.

Then you know what I saw? This is what really scared me. I saw that even that great man of God, Elijah, ran like a coward from Jezebel. When I saw that, I realized that this was something of tremendous power and evil. Then God showed me in Malachi chapter 4 the promise—the last two verses of the Bible:

“…should come to pass before the great and terrible day of the LORD that I will send you Elijah the prophet? And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”

Notice the word curse. God showed me, Why would we need Elijah? Because Jezebel would be on the scene. The same situation would demand the same ministry. The great end time pressure of evil would be the pressure of witchcraft. God also showed me the result of witchcraft in the home which is to divide the home and parents from the children and the mother against the father.

Let me tell you, if you tolerate witchcraft in your home, your home will be divided and your marriage will be broken. It is the great marriage-breaker. And because of its prevalence in the United States, one out of every two marriages now ends in divorce. The unseen force behind that is witchcraft. And God also indicates in that passage from Malachi the great end-time social problem will be divided homes—parents against children and children against parents. And God showed me too that the great responsibility for this is in the fathers. God does not speak first to the children to turn to their fathers, but the fathers to turn to their children. Let me say to every man and every father here, that’s your responsibility.

God also made it clear to me—perhaps I shouldn’t say that because I put too much responsibility on God—but I have become convinced that the reason why it’s so hard to get men in America to play their part as men is because of the unseen pervading influence of witchcraft which emasculates men. Now some of you men may get angry with me, but I don’t care. American males can be successful in almost every field—commerce, industry, sports, war—except two, the family and the church. In most cases the leadership is in the hands of the women. Let no one say I’m a woman hater, because I’m not. It never has been my problem, believe me. As the Frenchman said in the Bay of Biscay when they asked him if he’d had breakfast, ‘On the contrary.’ I’ll give you time to absorb that. But nevertheless for the woman to dominate the man is contrary to all divine order. In fact, if you go back to the origins of our problem, they started that way. When the woman took the spiritual initiative, the race got into trouble. A preacher friend of mine said, ‘All our troubles would have been avoided if Eve had only said to the snake, ‘I never talk to strange snakes without my husband.’’ Now we can laugh at that, but it’s not a laughing matter. It is deadly earnest.

I find that many men want to take their rightful place in the home and somehow they can’t do it. They’re up against some unseen force that seems to frustrate them. It’s the power of witchcraft and it has to be broken, it’s got to be broken. There’s no other way in which we can have things functioning the way they should. You say, ‘Well, that couldn’t happen to Charismatics.’ Let me correct you. In the book of Revelation there was a very spiritual group named Thyatira that had the gift, and were very active and you know what the Lord said? ‘You suffer that woman Jezebel who calls herself a prophetess to teach and to seduce my servants.’ Could you believe that Jezebel could get into a Charismatic prayer group? Shall I tell you, that’s where she would like to be most, and there are not a few Charismatic prayer groups that are Jezebel-organized. It’s good it’s the last meeting anyhow.

A friend of mine phoned me long distance once and said—he didn’t introduce or anything, he said, ‘Brother Prince, are their Pentecostal witches?’ I said, ‘Yes, there are. There are Charismatic witches too.’ He said, ‘What’s the difference?’ Well I said, ‘Pentecostal witches operate in Pentecostal churches. Charismatic witches operate in home prayer groups and other places like that.’

Well, we might as well go all the way through with this if we’re going to talk about it. I’ve been in the Pentecostal movement over thirty years, so there’s not much you can tell me about Pentecost. I’ve seen it all. I mean, I’ve never actually seen people swing from the chandeliers, but I heard that one. And I thank God for what I’ve learned from the Pentecostal movement. They brought me salvation, they brought be the baptism of the Holy Spirit, they taught me all I ever knew about the Bible. But nevertheless, I know there are a lot of Pentecostal congregations which are dominated by a woman, and the woman is usually a powerful character who prophesies or gives interpretations, and when you analyze what goes on in the church, the pastor is just a figurehead, but she’s the one with the power.

In 1963 my wife and I—I became pastor of a Pentecostal congregation in Seattle, Washington. They were the most dead-alive group of people you could ever hope to meet, and yet they were sweet Christian people. And this was one of the hardest situations I’ve ever been in, in my life. If I hadn’t found the answer in Scripture I wouldn’t have known what to do. I discovered that the previous pastor’s wife had divorced her husband while they were still in the church, become entangled with one of the board members, persuaded the board member to divorce his wife, and the pastor’s wife and the board member were just about to get married. And the amazing thing was that she’d convinced about two hundred people in the Pentecostal congregation that it was all right for her to do that. And people told me that she would stand behind the pulpit and say, ‘How many of you are with me?’ And if they didn’t put their hands up, this man told me, ‘I was scared of the look in her eyes.’ I met that woman once, I looked in her eyes; it was like looking in the pits of hell. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to handle that situation until I read Galatians 3:1:

“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you…
And I discovered the Galatians were Pentecostals, because a little later on it says: …received ye the gift of the Spirit by the words of the law, or the hearing of faith?”

So I knew that a Pentecost congregation could be bewitched. And my wife and I are pretty tough people. I mean, we went to war against that thing. We stood together and it was broken, but it’s come as near as anything in my ministry to breaking me. And, looking behind, I see the sinister force of witchcraft dominating a congregation.

All right. I want to talk about one more thing. I forget when I started. I’m looking at the clock but I can’t remember when I started now. But anyhow, let me talk about one more thing, and then we will come to action. All right. We’ll do something about it. It’s not fair to preach this message without doing something about it at the end, because I suppose at a minimum estimate twenty-five percent of the people in this audience are in some way implicated in what I’ve said, either directly or through your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. Many cases there’s a dark shadow in your life, an oppressive influence that you’ve never been able to analyze or laid bare, and I’m laying the ax to the root today.

People say to me one thing. They say, ‘You know, Brother Prince, I’m saved, baptized in the Spirit. I love to worship the Lord, but when I’m closest to the Lord in worship and feel I’m nearest to Him, something comes down over me and shuts me off.’ And you know through experience I’ve learned to ask, ‘Did you ever go to a fortuneteller?’ And I find about three times out of four the answer is yes. When that’s renounced and broken there’s no barrier to worship.

Now I want to talk about one other thing which is—I’ll name it—it’s the problem of rejection. And in my experience, this is just the way I find it, at least one in four persons in the United States today has a problem of rejection. Talking again about parents, father and mother, the two persons we must have in our life, a father and mother. And every child is born into the world with a deep inward desire for love and acceptance by father and mother. But in modern America I would think fifty percent of the children born today are denied that in its full measure. In many cases you’ll find—and this I’ve actually dealt with since I’ve been here in this seminar, I’ve actually dealt with a person in this category—that a mother resents the coming of a baby while it’s still in her womb. There may be many reasons. She’s not in love with her husband, she feels it’s another tie to the marriage, there may be financial problems, that’s another mouth to feed, the child may have been born out of wedlock and there’s all the embarrassment and shame that’s involved with that. Or, this is very common, the mother herself may have the problem of rejection, and she simply transfers it to her child which is very common. At any rate, the baby in the womb—and let’s not deceive ourselves—an infant in the womb is a person. All right, not according to the Supreme Courts, terrible decision.

John the Baptist was, what? six months in his mother’s womb when he heard the voice of the Virgin Mary, he leaped with joy. He was a person. He could respond. He knew what was going on around him. Do you realize that? And a little unborn baby in its mother’s womb is very well aware if its mother doesn’t love it, rejects, resents it, and doesn’t want it. When it comes out it will come out with a spirit of rejection already in it. Or it may be born without that, but it may be born in a home that becomes divided, father and mother separated, the father never shows the child the love that a child expects, and maybe the father actually loved the child but just didn’t know how to show it. And the child grows up feeling lonely and unwanted and unloved. And the root of that is rejection.

And very, very briefly I’ll tell you how I find rejected people act, people with the spirit of rejection. There’s basically two kinds of reaction. One is the passive—‘Well, nobody loves me. I’m on the outside looking in,’ And it goes basically like this. The little, I could write it out on a blackboard—loneliness, misery, self-pity, depression, despair and you know the next one—suicide, that’s right. Or it may be simply the desire to die. I wish I were dead. Have you ever said that? Don’t put your hand up if you have. It’s one of the most dangerous things you’ll ever say. It’s inviting the spirit of death.

Then there’s the person who’s aggressive—not passive, but active. The reactions then usually are resentment, hatred, rebellion. First Samuel 15:23:

“Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,…”

Rebellion leads to witchcraft, so the rebel goes into the occult. Many of you here—you don’t need to raise your hand—you know that by personal experience. When you became a rebel you began to reach out for the Ouija board, the horoscopes, drugs (which is a form of sorcery), and so on. The schizophrenic is the one who reacts in both ways at the same time—both passive and active, and both lines of action are there fighting each other continually, until that person doesn’t know he or she really is. The person with this problem always feels left out. The attitude is, ‘Others can; I can’t. I’m on the outside looking in. Other people are loved; I’m not. Other people are accepted; I’m not.’ And usually as a consequence there is an inability to love, because I think it’s true, scripturally and psychologically, that we cannot love until we’ve been loved. It says in the first epistle of John, ‘We love Him because He first loved us.’ If He had not first loved us, we wouldn’t know how to love Him. That’s true of every child. The parent has to love the child before the child can love. A child that’s never experienced love doesn’t know how to love. You probably think, somewhere in this congregation, you’re the only person like that and I’m talking to you specifically. Let me tell you, there are thousands and thousands just like you.

Now God has shown me the basic remedy for rejection, and I stumbled into it kind of gradually, but I’ve proved it in one dramatic incident. I was in a camp meeting and busy and on my way to speak, and a lady going the opposite direction literally ran into me. So when we’d recovered she said, ‘Brother Prince, I was praying that if God wanted me to speak to you, we’d meet.’ Well I said, ‘We’ve met.’ And I said, ‘I’m committed to preach. I can give you about two minutes.’

She began to tell me her problems and I realized that the root problem was rejection. So after about one minute I said, ‘Listen, I can’t afford to listen any longer but I know what your problem is, and I’ve got the remedy. I want you to say these words after me.’ She had confidence in me. See, if a person doesn’t have confidence in you, you cannot help them no matter how hard you try. She had enough confidence in me to launch out and say it without knowing what she was going to say. And I led her in a statement which is something like this. ‘God, I thank You that You gave Jesus to die in my place, that Jesus is my Savior, I am Your child, I’m not rejected, I’m accepted in Christ, God is my Father, heaven is my home, I’m a member of God’s family, God loves me, He doesn’t just tolerate me, He actually loves me.’ Now I said good-bye and went.

About a month later I got a letter from the lady and she described the incident and how we’d met and what had happened so I’d be surer to remember who it was. She said, ‘Just those few words that I’d said there have changed my life. I’m a different person.’ You see, the remedy for everything in our lives is found at the cross, and let me share something precious with you. You think you’re the only one that was rejected. Nobody else has ever known the heartbreak and the loneliness and the frustration and the sorrow that you’ve gone through. I want to tell you somebody else does know, and His name is Jesus. God showed me that on the cross what killed Jesus was rejection. Up to that hour He’d known sweet unbroken fellowship with His Father. But when He was made sin with our sin, and He cried out to God, ‘My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?’ He was rejected. No answer came back. Can you picture a little child holding a Daddy by the hand saying, ‘Daddy, Daddy, help me,’ and there’s no answer. The father turns away, shrugs his shoulder, dismisses the child. That’s what happened to Jesus on the cross, and I believe it was rejection that broke His heart. Every evil consequence of sin Jesus suffered on the cross. That’s why He can redeem, deliver, and save. Jesus bore your rejection. Why? That you might have His acceptance with the Father. It may be too late to change your background, your past, your family, but it’s not too late to know for sure experientially the joy of being a child of God the Father, of having a home in heaven, of being a member of the best family in the universe, of never again feeling lonely, unwanted, rejected and misunderstood. You don’t have to suffer that. Jesus suffered it in your place.

One of the great end purposes of the gospel is to bring us to the Father. I think we Protestants, in fact most Christians today, we stop short. Christ died to make the way for us to go to the Father, and our redemption is incomplete until we come to the Father and know Him as Father, till we know what it is to have a Father. Every child is born into the world with a big gap which can only be filled by a Father’s love. You know the problem with the modern generation, the dropouts, the people that are wandering to and fro across the face of this nation—you know what they’re looking for above all else, they’re looking for a father because their natural fathers have failed them. I don’t hesitate to say that. And God help me, I’m a father. I know that I’m judged by the words that I speak. Fathers of the past decades in America have given their children education, clothing, cars, sports, college, everything but fatherhood, and many of those young people have said, ‘What’s the use of it all? I don’t need it.’ And they started on a quest that’s led them into drugs, witchcraft, and immorality. What are they looking for? A Daddy.

Well I have news for you. There is one. You know what impressed me about the 17th chapter of John’s gospel? I read again and again Jesus says to the Father, ‘I’ve made known unto them Thy name.’ And I thought, ‘Lord, what is Your name?’ He didn’t give them any name. And then one day I realized His name is Father. That’s the name that He revealed. He revealed a father. Isn’t that good news? I don’t care how big you are and how intellectual you are and how wealthy you are, you need a Daddy. Maybe you’ve been running around for years bottling up inside that loneliness and that misery and that frustration—too big, too proud, too educated to say, ‘I want a Daddy.’

“We have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but we have received the spirit of adoption by which we cry Abba.”

‘Daddy, I know you. Take my hand. I’m lonely. I’m afraid. I can’t face life. But God, if You’ll take my hand and call me Your child I’m not afraid any longer.’

“Hallelujah! Glory to God! Thank you, Jesus.”

Now I want to deal with two types of problems that I’ve spoken about. I want to deal with those who know that there’s a curse in their background. Now if you don’t know, don’t probe, don’t dig, don’t get all psychological, but there are quite a number of you here on the basis of the evidence that I’ve given you, that you know that somewhere from the background there’s a curse, a dark shadow that follows you up. I talked to one young lady here. I don’t think she’s here this afternoon. Every one of her aunts had had a mental problem. Every one of about six aunts and her mother. And as I sat there God gave me insight. I said, ‘You know your basic problem? You know your family’s under a curse, and you’re afraid that that curse is driving you to do things that you don’t want to do and into places you don’t want to go. And in the last resort you’re afraid it will drive you mad.’ She said, ‘You’ve told it exactly the way it is.’ All right, you’re under a curse. Now the remedy is in the cross. ‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse, being made a curse for us.’ Hallelujah! He took the evil that we might have the good. What’s the good? What’s the opposite of the curse? The blessings, and remember when you have God’s blessing, no occult power can touch you.

I like the story of Balaam called by Balak to curse Israel, and three times he tried to curse it. And in the end he said, ‘It’s no good, Balak. I can’t curse the one whom God has blessed.’ See, actually this is very interesting. The last attempt of Satan to keep the children of Israel out of their inheritance was occult power. That was his last attempt. It wasn’t war, it was witchcraft, but praise God witchcraft didn’t work against the children of Israel because they were the blessed of the Lord.

“The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him. Underneath are the everlasting arms. There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. A thousand shall fall at they side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.”

Now I’ve never done this before this way, but there’s got to be a first for everything I suppose. Those of you—I think I’m going to do it, I don’t want to embarrass you, but I think you have to stand. Those of you who realize that there is a dark shadow in your life following you up, you want to get rid of it here this afternoon, I want you to stand. Don’t be embarrassed. I’m not trying to, you know, psychologolize you into doing something that you don’t do under conviction.

All right. Now then I want you to do it in your words. I’ll put the words in your mouth and I’ll pray with you, but I want you to do for yourself. I want you to talk like this to the Lord Jesus Christ. Say these words after me. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, I believe that You’re the Son of God and the only way to God. You died on the cross for my sins. You took my sin, You were cursed with my curse that I might receive Your blessing, and You gave me authority in Your holy name to bind and to loose. And as Your child I now take that authority. Whatever dark shadow, whatever evil power has followed me through life from my family background, I now renounce it. I take authority over it, I loose myself from it, and I forbid it ever again to affect me. I pray this is in the name of Jesus, and I thank God now that by the blood of Jesus I am redeemed out of the hand of the devil.’

Now lift your hands and praise God. ‘Father, in the name of Jesus we just side with these people against the evil powers in their lives. We bind those evil forces in the name of Jesus and we take dominion over them on the authority of the Word of God that what we bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. We bind every evil, occult, dark power that was at work in any of these lives and families in the name of Jesus, and we loose these that have prayed this prayer in Jesus name, from every curse, every dark shadow, every occult background right now in Jesus name. Amen.’

Praise God. All right, you may be seated. And I want to take one more group, that is, those who on the basis of what I’ve said this afternoon, you know that deep inside you there still remains the problem of rejection. All right, and you want to be released from it. I want you to stand to your feet regardless of what people may say or think, if that’s your problem I want you to stand to your feet. All right, now this is a faith transaction. There are two or three things—you’ve got to recognize your problem, call it by its right name. You’ve got to be willing to forgive your parents. In many cases, they have failed you. That’s granted, but you still have to forgive them because until you forgive them you are bound to them by your unforgiveness, and then you have to thank God that in Christ you’re accepted. That’s a faith transaction. Ephesians 1 says:

“God hath made us accepted in the beloved.”

Turn your attention, maybe for the first time in your life, directly to God your Father and thank Him that you’re His child. Now when you do this, there may be no particular feeling or emotion, but in quite a number of cases something inside you is likely to turn loose, and if it does, just let it come out. I tell people there are a lot of knots tied inside us that only God’s finger, the Holy Spirit, can untie. If those knots begin to untie and you feel you’re going to sob or weep, that’s not unmanly, that’s not emotionalism, that’s relief. Accept it and you’ll be a different person when you walk out of here. Maybe for the first time in your life you’ll really know that people who’ve loved you for years do love you. You’ll really be able to love people and show them love.

All right, I want you to say these words. ‘Heavenly Father, I thank You that You loved me and You gave Your only Son, Jesus Christ, to bear my sin, to bear my shame, to bear my loneliness, to bear my rejection, to die in my place. I have received Jesus as my Savior, and I believe His blood has cleansed me from all my sin. Lord, I now forgive my parent any harm, any wrong. I forgive them, God, as I would have You forgive me, and I now lay down all bitterness, all resentment, all hatred and all rebellion. I thank You for Your forgiveness and for Your acceptance in Christ. I thank You that You are my God, that You are my Father, that You do love me, I’m not unwanted, I’m not rejected, God is my Father, heaven is my home, I’m a child of God, a member of God’s family accepted in Jesus Christ. For this I thank You now and praise You in Jesus’ name.’

Now begin to thank Him, turn loose, accept it by faith. Thank You, Lord, in the name of Jesus. ‘Now, Lord, we pray for any that’s bound by the spirit of rejection. We loose them now in Jesus’ name from inner turmoil and conflict. We release them in the name of Jesus, right now from any inner binding that holds them back from loving and responding. We release them in the name of Jesus. We thank Thee for sweet release in Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ precious name. Thank You, Lord.’

All right, if you’re standing up turn round to somebody and tell them right in the face, ‘God loves me. I’m His child.’

“God bless you.”