Authors: Praying Medic
I had a dream about this situation shortly after I began praying for my patients. In the dream, I was on the run from the enemy and took refuge in a hospital. I wore scrubs and blended in with the staff. I slept in a bedroom on the top floor where the doctor’s dorms were located. I was there for many days. Occasionally an agent of the enemy showed up at the hospital looking for me. When I saw them, I’d pull a surgical mask over my face and duck down a hallway or get on an elevator. As long as I didn’t draw attention to myself, the enemy didn’t notice me. This was a dream of major revelation. It was God’s way of telling me that I was protected and given favor in the setting in which I worked. I could pray for my patients with confidence as long as I didn’t make a scene or draw attention to myself. I think we’re a lot safer than we believe in the realm of praying for our patients and I believe God will reveal strategies to overcome obstacles if you ask Him.
I’d encourage you to pursue God’s heart for your situation. Ask the Lord if you’re supposed to be praying for your patients. Begin looking for opportunities to test the waters. When you start praying with patients, expect to see a few miracles. But don’t be discouraged if you don’t. It was only through months of praying that I started to see people healed. The nature of our job doesn’t always allow us to follow up with patients. Some people are healed immediately, but they don’t realize it until being tested. Some are healed weeks or months later. Don’t give up. God is faithful. He will honor your obedience, in time.
1.
Journal of the American Medical Association Volume 284 July 26, 2000
B
EFORE LAUNCHING INTO THIS CHAPTER,
I’d like to clarify one point. I consider “demons” and “evil spirits” to be essentially the same thing. For writing purposes, I’ve used these words interchangeably. I believe the Bible also uses them interchangeably. But when I’m with someone who needs to have one removed, I always refer to it as a spirit, not a demon. The term “demon” (in my culture) has the tendency to frighten people, while the word “spirit” is much less frightening.
In 2011, I asked God to teach me more about deliverance. I was in the midst of writing this book and I felt I didn’t have much experience to write from. I wanted to understand it better, so I would have some useful information to share. Be careful what you ask God for. He likes to give us things, and they seldom come wrapped in nice, neat packages. I want to take you back to the beginning of my Christian life and show you the path I’ve taken to get to my present understanding of deliverance.
After being saved, I lived a pretty ordinary life as an evangelical Christian. I was content to study my Bible, sit in my church pew on Sunday and occasionally witness to strangers about Jesus. To my knowledge, I’d never met anyone who was demon-possessed and I’m certain I’d never met a demon face to face. So naturally I didn’t understand the preoccupation some people had with demons.
Were these people deceived by an over-active imagination, or were demons really all around us? And if they are all around us, why can’t everyone see them?
If there was one thing I sincerely hoped had ceased with the passing of the early church, it was all this messy business about casting out demons. As with everything supernatural, at that point in my life, I was skeptical about the need for studying the behavior of demons, much less casting them out of people.
Most of the experiences we recognize as “real” involve things that happen in the physical world. For those who confine their lives to the physical realm – angels and demons and their strange activities are seldom thought of. The happenings of that otherworldly place are mostly ignored. The problem with demons is that most of us can’t see them and for most of us, seeing is believing. Our society has conditioned us to label anyone claiming to see things we don’t as suffering from hallucinations. And yet, isn’t it interesting how often Jesus dealt with demons and those who were harassed by them?
Demons
are disembodied spirits. They don’t possess a physical body as we do, but a spiritual one. They interact both in the spirit world and in the physical, although their ability to interact in the physical world is limited. The fact that demons have no physical body compels them to attach to one if they find an opportunity to do so. (And they are
always
looking for opportunities – which should be kept in the forefront of your mind as you read this chapter.)
In 2009, I had a dream that revealed something about demons I didn’t know. In the dream I walked the hallways of a hospital and I looked into one patient’s room after another. I saw a black presence in each room. I knew the presence was a demon of sickness. Although I don’t see demons like this while I’m awake, God revealed an important truth to me through this dream. Sickness is perpetrated by demons and demons are more prevalent than I suspected.
The ability to sense the presence of demons is not available to most of us for a reason. That reason is illustrated in the following story, told by a friend who is a seer. A
seer
is someone who receives revelation from God in the form of visions and dreams (see 1 Sam. 9:9). A seer will often see into the spiritual realm, which is invisible to most of us.
My friend and his six year old granddaughter, who are both seers, were riding in the car when the girl saw an elderly woman hunched over, pushing a shopping cart. The girl noticed that the woman had many demons clinging to her, making it appear as if her hunched over condition was due to the weight of the demons. She asked if they could turn the car around and help the poor woman.
If we were able to see demons clinging to people everywhere we went, but had no power to do anything about them, it might drive us to the brink of insanity. This might surprise you, but if you could see into the spirit world, you would see spirit beings (both good and evil) literally everywhere you looked. But because God is merciful, He hides demonic activity from those who don’t need to see it. The ability to discern the presence of spirits is a gift from God given on a need to know basis (see 1 Cor. 12:10). Most of us don’t need to know about demonic activity because we aren’t engaged in warfare against them.
God has a plan and a purpose for everyone. Each person’s purpose comes with some unique assignments. You are free to accept or reject the purpose of God for your life. If you accept an assignment to battle demons, you’ll be given the ability to recognize their presence. The presence of demons can be discerned through any of the five senses as well as an intuitive type of knowing.
My introduction to the world of the demonic actually began many years ago, when out of curiosity, I started interviewing patients who reported hearing voices. For years, whenever I transported a patient with a mental health problem, particularly if they were diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis, I asked if they heard voices and what the voices told them. I would then ask if they knew who the voices were. The answers surprised me at first, but about 80% said the voices belonged to demons. Many of my patients said that at some point the voice had revealed its identity to them. These people had no reason to lie about their experiences. The likelihood that all of them were wrong seemed unlikely. I had to consider the possibility that maybe I was wrong. After interviewing hundreds of patients, I began to understand that demons were more active than I realized.
One day on my long drive home from work, I had an open-eyed vision. During most of the visions I’ve had, my eyes have been closed, but this one was different. I saw into the spirit world with my eyes wide open, while I was driving my car. In the vision, I saw myself responding to a call at Tacoma General Hospital for the transport of a woman who was demonized. She was in the emergency department in room number four. I saw myself transporting her to St. Joseph’s hospital for mental health treatment.
The next day at work, I responded to a call to Tacoma General Hospital to transport a young woman to St. Joseph’s mental health unit. She was in room four in the emergency department. She had no history of mental illness and was being treated for what the doctor called “acute psychosis.” According to her mother, she experienced a sudden change in behavior. For some reason she became obsessed with telling everyone about God, angels, demons, Satan, the approaching judgment, and the torment of hell. Her “witnessing” about these things was random and had no continuity of thought. The only recent change that might have contributed to her behavior was that she admitted that her boyfriend had convinced her to smoke marijuana for the first time. This poor woman had come under the control of a spirit of religion. Evil spirits have specialties, which we’ll discuss shortly. I have to assume that her experimentation with marijuana was the thing that opened the door for the evil spirit to come into her life. I’ll admit this is an assumption, which may or may not be true, but there was no other plausible explanation available and the timing of the two events seemed too precise to be a coincidence.
I transported another woman who suffered the same symptoms. This woman was a middle-aged Christian. We were called to her church to transport her for a mental health evaluation after she suddenly began ranting about God, Satan, angels, demons, the coming judgment and the torment of hell. Once again, her statements were completely random and without continuity of thought. This time I recognized that she was under the influence of a religious spirit, so I attempted to cast it out of her. The more I commanded the spirit to leave, the louder her witnessing became. The yelling became so loud that it concerned my EMT partner and since I was making no progress I gave up.
I’ve had a number of experiences where members of my family were being harassed by demons. When my son was swimming competitively, I prayed with him frequently for healing of aches and pains. One day he came home with a partial separation of the AC joint in his shoulder, which caused a lot of pain. We prayed and it was healed. Weeks later he told me about a pain he had in the middle of his back. I commanded it to leave and he immediately felt better. But the following day it returned. I was curious, so before commanding it to leave, I closed my eyes to see if God would reveal anything and sure enough, in a vision, I saw my son standing before me with a black creature about 12 inches in diameter attached to the middle of his back. The pain was caused by a demon. I commanded the demon to leave and after it did, I commanded the pain to leave. It left and didn’t return.
I’ve also seen co-workers attacked by evil spirits. While working in Tacoma, my EMT partner was healed at least a dozen times. In the two years we worked together, he was healed of headaches, neck pain, back pain, knee pain, a nasty injury to his hand and numerous other injuries. One day he was complaining of knee pain that was bad enough to make him walk with a limp. I began to command the knee to be healed as usual, but nothing happened. After four or five tries, the pain wouldn’t budge. That surprised me, since knee pain usually responds quickly to this approach. Then it dawned on me that I didn’t command the spirit of pain to leave.
When I take the time to ask God to show me what’s going on, He frequently shows me some kind of demon. Because I saw demons so often, I developed a routine of commanding a spirit of pain or sickness to leave. But this time, I didn’t. So I commanded the spirit of pain to leave. Next I commanded his knee to be healed. He felt heat all around his knee and in a few minutes it was healed.
One day I transported a young woman from a fitness club who was hysterical. It took a lot of reassuring to get her calm enough to tell us what her problem was. My partner and I put her in the ambulance and did an extensive interview. We learned that for the past year, she had been hearing voices in her head. There were at least two different voices, possibly more. The voice that she heard most often was a male voice that continually threatened her. The threats involved killing her sister. The second voice sounded exactly like her sister. Often while the male voice was threatening to kill her sister, she heard the second voice screaming in terror as if her sister was being killed. I referred her to a friend who had a deliverance ministry, since I knew virtually nothing about deliverance at the time.
Soon enough, my education about demons became personal. One evening I was praying for my wife to be healed of neck pain, which was so severe it left her in tears at bedtime. I had been praying for her healing for months, to no avail. That night I did something foolish, which you should never do. In desperation, I asked God to put her afflictions on me, if it would take away her pain. I went to sleep and had a dream. In the dream I was walking through a shopping mall looking for something I couldn’t find. When I came out of an elevator, the dream suddenly came to an end. This is a classic type of dream that God gives to people who are searching for answers.
I awoke from the dream and a few seconds later I felt something like a net being spread over me. Seconds later, I realized that I couldn’t move my arms or legs. All I could do was roll a bit from side to side. As this happened, I also became aware that my voice was being taken away from me. I tried to speak but no words came out. I was aware that what had gripped me in this paralysis was a demon. As my voice left, I tried to say, “Get out, in the name of Jesus,” but I could only mumble. My rolling back and forth woke up my wife, who heard me mumbling. She immediately knew it was a demon that had overpowered me and began praying in tongues. She then commanded the demon to leave. A few seconds later my voice returned and the paralysis left.
We later learned from John and Mark Sandford’s book,
Deliverance and Inner Healing,
that attacks from paralyzing spirits are common. When I shared my experience on Facebook, I received at least a dozen confirmations from friends who experienced similar attacks. They reported being paralyzed to some degree and most felt a strangling sensation or a loss of their ability to speak. Most people reported that the attack came early in their spiritual life. All of them reported that the spirit left at the mention or thought of the name of Jesus. The mistake I made was asking God to put my wife’s afflictions on me. In doing so, I gave the demon permission to attack me and the paralyzing spirit was happy to pay me a visit, since I had agreed with its agenda. Never ask God to give you the afflictions of someone else and never under any circumstances invite sickness or affliction into your life.