Exorcism - A Christian Manual (5 page)

The next step is to forgive your ancestors.  Once people learn of generational curses they get angry with their ancestors and blame them for all of their troubles-this will solve nothing.  By forgiving them, the demons have no authority to stay in the family.  Once forgiveness is released it cleanses the line and the demons lose their foothold.  Once forgiveness is done, take authority over the curses and the demons attached to them, and cast them out of the family and command them to leave the future generations alone in the name of Jesus.  This should be done by every family but it should especially be done before an exorcism.

Current Curses

Generational curses refer to the sins of the past still in operation today.  However, we can be cursed in the present through several avenues.  First, we can have a witch, a satanist, or a root doctor curse us.  When someone curses us they are praying and loosing an evil spirit to attack and harass our lives.  The curse can be put on us for a variety of reasons, but some common ones that I have seen are:

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Cursing a pastor that is making a difference in the community. One pastor I worked with had to check his office daily because he would find places where witches would leave markings where they had put spells;

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Cursing a neighbor through a root doctor because someone is mad at them;

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Cursing a co-working because someone wanted their job;

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Cursing a baby by dedicating it to satan or any false god;

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A white witch casting a spell for you to fall in love with them.  They believe it is a good spell but it is a curse because magic is forbidden by God;

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A white witch praying for good spirits to bless you.  A white witch does not serve God, but does serve powerful evil spirits.  Whatever they pray is inhabited by demons no matter how good it sounds.

Next, we can allow a curse to come into our lives through sin.  The primary way is through worshipping false gods, but the entire list of curses is in Deuteronomy 27:14-26: making an idol, dishonoring parents, moving a neighbor’s boundary stone, leading the blind astray, withholding justice from the alien, the fatherless, or the widow, sleeping with a father’s wife, having sex with an animal, sleeping with a sister or step-sister, sleeping with a mother-in-law, killing a neighbor secretly, accepting a bribe to kill an innocent person, and not keeping the Law of God.

It is easy to break curses but you must be aware of them.  You never know who might curse you simply because you have made them angry.  A woman came to me in counseling because she was depressed.  She couldn’t figure out why she was depressed as most things in her life were going quite well.  The only bad part of her life was her work.  She had a difficult boss and a co-worker that was continuously complaining about her and lying about her.  She felt oppressed going into work and the oppression began to grow until she felt it all the time.  I felt that the co-worker had cursed her so we prayed together and broke the curse.  She immediately felt better and I instructed her to break the curses off of her every day before and after work.  The depression lifted but her co-worker became more and more agitated and increased her attacks through more outrageous lies.  Eventually, the boss turned on the co-worker because he could not find a basis for her accusations and he began to mistrust her.  She got transferred out of the business as she became more emotionally unstable by threatening the boss.  The curse turned back on the co-worker and kept my client protected.

To be safe, it is wise to break curses in prayer on a daily basis.  If it is a sin based curse you cannot break it in prayer.  You must ask for forgiveness and then walk away from the sin.  But, if a curse is sent to you by another, for whatever reason, you should not let in your life for long.  By daily prayer and breaking of curses you can protect yourself from anyone practicing magic against you from doing any lasting damage.    

Chapter 3

Assessment and Preparation

Before an exorcism takes place a thorough assessment should occur.  There are key areas that must be addressed to determine the level of the possession, the dangerousness of the possession, the duration of the possession, and the spiritual will of the client to fight for their freedom.  There is no specific amount of time that you should spend with a client.  However, the more you know about them the better.  I try to have at least 3 sessions with a client if I can.  In some cases this is not possible, like an emergency situation or when someone has a limited amount of time to see you.  The 5 main assessment areas are the will, trauma, occult activity, sin, and unforgiveness.

The Will

In this area, we are trying to assess how dedicated the client is to be set free.  Some people are seeking freedom from a sin but they really don’t want to work hard to stay free.  For example, a man came in with multiple problems but his main issue was pornography addiction.  When I told him that after the exorcism he could never look at pornography again, he got very silent and a strange look came over his face.  He started to become nervous and I knew what was happening because I had seen it many times before-he wanted God to take away his desire so that he would not have to deal with it.  In addition, part of him didn’t want to stop and he was questioning the need to completely get rid of the pornography.  At this point I stopped the interview and explained the hard work that is needed after the exorcism.  I told him that God will cleanse him of the demon but he had to master his desires when the temptation comes back.   He then stated that he needed to think about it and got up and left.

At some level there are people that say they want to be free but on the other hand they enjoy the sin and can’t imagine life totally without it.  If the will isn’t 100% invested in conquering the sin the exorcism will probably not be successful. In fact an exorcism can make the condition of the client worse for those with a compromised will.  This is expressed in Luke 11:24-26…”When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.  Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order.  Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there.  And the final condition of that man is worse than the first.”

Luke 11:24-26 reveals that after an exorcism the demon that leaves will go and find reinforcements to come back and try to gain entrance again.  If the client is not totally invested in freedom then the exorcism may actually set him up for a worse downfall.  A client will be set free in an exorcism, but the demons do come back, usually at the worst and weakest moments.  As an exorcist you must know when the client really wants to change his life and when he is only playing games: you do not want to participate in his downfall. 

I have prayed for many people with different types of cancer.  What I found over time was that people can have two different thoughts at the same time. They can tell you that they want to be healed of cancer and have faith that they can be cured.  But for some, secretly, in the unconscious, they believe that they don’t deserve to be healed and that the cancer is a judgment from God.  For those with the secret opposing thoughts, these secret thoughts usually won and the person died much too early.  These unconscious thoughts are real and powerful because they are the true beliefs!  Many can verbally say they trust God, but the secret, nagging doubts were the enemy of the healing process.  Getting to these thoughts and getting the client to change them, so the mind is whole and complete, is essential.  

Another bad situation is when people use exorcisms as a way to deal with their issues.  They go through an exorcism, feel good for a while, go back to sin, and then get another exorcism.  Get away from these people as fast as you can because they have no intention of trying to live rightly-they want to do what they want and use the exorcism as a quick fix.  Over time they will deteriorate and the exorcisms will not work because the demons do not have to go because the person truly does not want to be free.     

So, we want to assess how bad the possession is and how serious the person is to live for God.  In most cases we want to minister exorcism to people that are 100% dedicated to Christ and can accept full responsibility for their sins…”No one can serve two masters, either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money,” (Matthew 6:24).

The only exception is when the person is fully possessed and has little will left to make a decision.  Here, the demons have so much power that they refuse to let the person participate in their healing.  In these cases you may have to go ahead and do the exorcism to set the person free.  Usually these people are so grateful to be free that they maintain their freedom quite well.   Here is a sample of common questions that can be asked to assess the will:

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Have you ever been through an exorcism before? If so, what happened?

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Are you willing to renounce all your past sins and work to completely stay away from them? Are you willing to give up alcohol/drugs, television, movies, friends, the internet, or anything else that is necessary to stay free?

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Are you willing to commit to going to church every week? Are you willing to read the Bible, pray, and worship God?

Sin

The person seeking an exorcism must confess their sins and renounce them…”If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness,” (1 John 1:9).  If the person seeing an exorcism keeps a sin a secret, then they are giving the demons an anchor to stay right where they are.  They must be willing to confess all of their sins and renounce them in order to get forgiveness and restoration from God.  God cannot forgive something that we refuse to acknowledge as wrong.

Sin is one of the main gateways to demonic possession.  If you willfully sin you are not in God’s will and therefore you are in satan’s will.  Rebellion is equal to witchcraft (1 Samuel 15:23) and witchcraft is forbidden by God (Deut. 18:10-12).  Therefore, when we habitually sin we are doing what is forbidden and God wants no part of it.  Demons can cross over into sin because that is where they have authority to dwell.  The only way to rebuke their authority is to repent and confess our sins and they will leave, as demons have no authority to dwell in righteousness.  You should ask the client about their:

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Spiritual history
: Questions about their salvation, questions about their relationship with God, questions about their spiritual commitments and questions about their spiritual experiences;

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Personal History
: Questions about their family of origin, questions about generational issues, questions about criminal history, questions about mental health history, and questions about all sin areas.

It is possible for someone to silently confess before God if their sins are embarrassing, but I find that it is more helpful if they can say it out loud and admit before another person what they have done.  It helps the client to confess out loud because the impact of their sins feel more real; saying things out loud makes the private life become public and usually the one confessing admits more fully what they are doing-they cannot hide anymore as the sin is exposed.  In addition, many do feel a burden lifted when publically confessing to another, and they feel as if they have come clean.  

Occult Involvement

Occult activity is all around us.  There are television shows that glorify communicating with spirits, there are horoscopes in the daily newspapers, and there are psychics on every street corner.  We are forbidden to practice any form of divination and we are forbidden to consult with people who use them.  This is how serious God views this…”A man or a woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death.  You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads,” (Leviticus 20:27).

There are many forms of occult involvement.  There are people that do the occult activity (practitioners) and those that receive the information (clients).  This partial list is used to represent the major areas of occult involvement and the people that do them:

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Witch
: A person that practices magic spells.  A warlock is a male witch.  They may be white witches, black witches, green witches, solitary witches, and so on. 

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Psychic
: Those that receive supernatural information by special abilities.  For example, picking up an object and being able to tell the people that owned it and its history.  Or, being able to see who committed a crime by going to a crime scene and getting a vision.

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Divination
: A method used to tell the future or to discover hidden knowledge.  There are hundreds of ways to practice divination, such as palm reading, tea leaf reading, scrying (gazing into something like a crystal ball or a mirror), tarot card reading, and horoscope readings.  Divination is satan’s counterfeit for prophecy.  Divination is seeking supernatural information from someone besides God.  Demons inhabit divination practices because God will not honor them so demons are the ones communicating through them.

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Necromancy
: Summoning the dead to consult with them. You can either summon their spiritual form or dig up the body and invite them to speak through the corpse.