Transcription
There was a season in my early ministry when something was coming against me and I could not name it. I was not sick. My faith was not gone. The Bible was still open on my desk. But every morning I woke with a heaviness in my chest that I could not account for, and by evening it was worse. I had been in prayer. I had been in the word. And yet the weight would not lift.
It was only later, after years of study and after sitting with hundreds of people who came to me with the same unexplainable oppression, that I understood what had been happening. There was an assignment against me. A spiritual thing targeted, intentional, and sent. And what I did not yet know was that the same cross that saved me also contained the answer for that assignment, not just to stop it, but to send it back. That is what I want to show you tonight.
You may have tried to explain away what you have been feeling. You told yourself you were tired, that it was stress, that it was the season, and perhaps some of it is. I will not tell you that everything you feel is demonic. But I want to ask you something honestly. Is there a particular weight that follows you into rooms you should feel peace in? Is there a resistance that comes against specific areas of your life, your family, your finances, your sleep, your mind in a pattern that goes beyond ordinary hardship? Have you prayed and believed and done everything you knew to do and yet the thing persists? Then listen carefully to what I am about to say.
Proverbs 26:2. Write this down if you have a pen near you. "As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse that is causeless shall not alight." That is the King James rendering. A curse that has no rightful legal ground cannot land on you. It may be sent, it may be aimed, but if the blood of Jesus covers you and you stand in your covenant, it has no place to land. It will not stick. And here is the part of that verse that is seldom taught. If a curse cannot land on its target, it must go somewhere. And the word of God tells us exactly where it goes.
Now, let me be very clear before I go any further. Because I have seen this subject handled carelessly and I will not handle it that way. I am not teaching you to curse anyone back. I'm not going to put any formula in your hands that you point at another person like a weapon. That is witchcraft and it has no place in the life of a believer. What I'm showing you is something entirely different, the justice of God. When an evil assignment is sent against a child of God who is covered by the blood, the scripture teaches in Psalm 7, verses 15 and 16, that the one who dug the pit falls into it himself. "He made a pit and digged it and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head." God does the returning, not you. You lift the cross. God administers the justice. Your hands stay clean. Your mouth blesses. God does what God does.
I want to teach you the full scriptural picture before we pray. Because I have found over more than 50 years of this work that a person who understands why they are praying prays with far greater faith than one who is simply repeating words. And you need real faith tonight, not performance. Let Let take you to Colossians chapter 2, verses 14 and 15. Paul writes that at the cross, God took the record of all that stood against us, the legal written ordinance of accusation, and nailed it to the cross, cancelled, wiped out. And then, in the same breath, Paul says Christ disarmed principalities and powers, and made a show of them openly, triumphing over them. That word disarmed means stripped. Like a defeated soldier stripped of his weapons. At the cross, every authority of darkness was stripped of its legal right over you. Every assignment, every curse, every inherited burden, every word spoken in the dark against your name, the cross cancelled the legal ground. This is why the backfire principle is not superstition. It is not folk religion or wishful thinking. It is the direct consequence of what the cross actually accomplished. When a spiritual assignment is launched against a person covered by the blood of Jesus, it has no legal ground to stand on. And when it finds no ground, it goes where spiritual things without a home always go back to the one who sent it.
Now, let me pause here and say something that I consider one of the most important distinctions in all of deliverance ministry. Because without it, people go in circles for years. There is a difference between the flesh and a demon. The flesh, what Paul calls the old carnal nature, must be crucified. You cannot cast out the flesh. You cannot rebuke your own bad habits into obedience. Crucifixion is the only remedy for the old nature. You put it on the cross daily, you deny it, you do not feed it. But a demon is different. A demon is a person, a being without a body looking for a place to reside. And the remedy for a demon is not crucifixion. It is expulsion. You cast it out. You command it to leave in the name of Jesus. The two problems have completely different solutions. And the failure to understand this is why so many sincere believers have spent years crucifying something that actually needed to be cast out and have gotten nowhere. A sent assignment typically arrives as the second category. It is not your flesh. It is not your own failure of discipline. It is an external thing that attached itself and began operating in your life. And the moment you understand that, you are already, as I often say, 80% of the way to your deliverance. Because once you know it is not you, you stop condemning yourself and you start dealing with the right enemy.
Now, I am not telling you that every difficulty in your life was sent to you by another person. I'm not telling you to throw away the medication your doctor gave you or to dismiss the counsel of a trained professional. What I'm telling you is this, in over 50 years of this work, I have sat with men and women who had tried medication, who had tried counseling, who had tried everything the world offered and there was a specific assistant targeted oppression that would not lift because it had a spiritual origin. The medicine and the counselor are gifts of God. So is the authority I'm about to put into your hand.
Isaiah chapter 54, verse 17. The Lord himself is speaking. "No weapon formed against you shall prosper and every tongue that rises against you in judgment you shall condemn." This is the heritage. Mark that word. Heritage. This is the legal inheritance of the servants of God. Not a possibility. Not a hope. A heritage. And the verse goes on. "This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord. And their righteousness is from me." Your righteousness is not your own achievement. It is from God. Which means the shield is always up as long as you are standing under the blood.
There is a visual I want to give you. Think of a sealed letter. Someone writes your name on it. And the inside is full of evil accusation, depression, fear, financial ruin, sickness, confusion. They send it. But when it arrives at your door, there is a hand at the threshold. The hand of Christ. The letter bounces. And because a spiritual thing sent with intent has to go somewhere, it travels back the way it came. That is not poetry. That is the principle embedded in Psalm 7 and confirmed by Proverbs 26. God is the postmaster. And he does not allow unauthorized mail to be delivered to his children.
And uh let me add something to that picture. When the assignment bounces, it does not simply dissolve. Scripture does not teach that it disappears in midair. It returns to the one who sent it. And this is not your doing. It is the operation of divine justice. Romans chapter 12 verse 19, "Vengeance is mine. I will repay." saith the Lord. God does not forget what was sent. He keeps the record. And what was launched against a blood-covered child of God with no legal cause becomes the very instrument of judgment against the one who sent it. This is not something you have to arrange. You simply lift the cross, stand in your covenant, and let God be God. That is the backfire principle, and it is as old as the Psalms of David.
Let me tell you about a woman who came to one of our meetings many years ago. She had been in a long dispute with a business partner, and the relationship had turned deeply bitter. After a particular confrontation with this person, strange things began happening in her household. Sleepless nights that had no medical cause, a persistent feeling of being watched, arguments between her and her husband that erupted from nothing over matters that would ordinarily never have caused friction, a fog that settled over the house, that is the only word she had for it, a fog. She was a praying woman, she read her Bible, she was not someone who ignored God, but she had not made the connection between what had been spoken over her in anger and what had entered her household afterward. When we sat together and I began to walk through the scriptural picture I am giving you tonight, something broke open in her face. She said, "I thought I was going mad." She was not going mad. There was an assignment on her household, and it was not her fault. She was not weak, she was not faithless, she had simply not been taught this. She prayed that evening with a group in our meeting, and she told me afterward that she felt for the first time in months that the ceiling of her house was gone, that there was open sky above her again.
I remember another man, a quiet, steady fellow who worked with his hands. He came forward after a seminar with his hat held in both hands, turning it slowly, the way men do when they're trying to find words they are not sure they have the right to use. He said, "I feel like I'm always one step behind, like something is tripping me." He had felt it for years. There was a particular area of his life, his livelihood, the thing he did every day to provide for his family that seemed marked, not by his own poor decisions. He was a careful man, a faithful man, but there was a pattern of loss and obstruction that had no ordinary explanation. We sat together and we traced it. And at the root, there was a relationship in his past where very dark things had been spoken over him in anger by someone who had knowledge of certain spiritual practices. He had not known what to do with that. He had not known it could have an effect. We prayed, we broke the assignment by the blood of Jesus. He went back to his seat. 3 months later, he wrote to tell me the fog had lifted. He was not living a charmed life, he still had ordinary hardships, because hardship is part of this world and the scripture does not promise otherwise. But the thing, that specific targeted thing with its signature of obstruction, was gone.
I want to name what you may be up against because as I often tell people, what has a name has to go. If there is an assignment against your life, it may operate through a spirit of fear, a persistent, irrational dread that has no proportionate cause, that wakes you at 3:00 in the morning with your heart hammering for no reason you can identify. It may come through a spirit of heaviness, that gray cloud I mentioned at the opening, a weight on your chest and behind your eyes that no amount of sleep entirely removes. It may carry confusion, a cloudiness over your thinking, an inability to make decisions that should be simple, a forgetfulness that is not natural for your age or your circumstances. It may press on your family in the form of strife, sudden, disproportionate conflict between people who love one another, arguments that spiral far past any sensible cause. It may target your finances through a spirit of poverty and obstruction. A pattern of loss that arrives just when things were beginning to stabilize. It may target your sleep because the enemy knows that a man a woman who cannot rest becomes vulnerable in body and in mind. These spirits often travel together. The assignment opens a door and then they pile in through that door, the spirit of heaviness, the spirit of fear, the spirit of confusion, the spirit of strife. They work as a company, as a team, and they can all be evicted at once in the authority of the name of Jesus.
The open doors for a sent assignment include any point of unforgiveness that you carry toward the one who sent it. Bitterness is a legal opening and unforgiveness is a door the enemy can walk through. Any prior involvement with occult practices in your own history which may have left a structural weakness. Any agreement with fear or hopelessness where you have spoken in your own heart, "This will never change." And sometimes sometimes there is simply the injustice of someone who has set themselves against you, who has prayed destructive prayers over your name, who has spoken curses in anger or in envy, who has used practices that the scripture forbids against you. None of these doors can stay open if you stand in the full authority of the cross. And tonight you will stand in it.
Now, let me bring you to the turn. You do not need a minister present to break this. I would always encourage you to walk under proper pastoral covering and to have the fellowship of believers around you. But the authority you need tonight is not mine. It is not any man's. It is given to every believer in the name of Jesus. >> [snorts] >> Mark chapter 16 verse 17, "in my name they shall cast out demons." In his name. That means your name in his authority. You have access to the same legal victory that the cross accomplished. What has a name has to go. The assignment against your life has a name. And the name of Jesus is greater than every name in heaven, in earth, and under the earth. You can be free tonight right where you are sitting.
I am going to lead you in a prayer now. This is the moment you have been watching for. I want you to say this out loud with me. Not in your head, out loud. The demons are not impressed by thoughts. They respond to the authority of the word spoken in faith. And if you feel you cannot speak, if there is grief or exhaustion or shame sitting on your chest right now, even a whisper will do. The Lord hears the whisper of faith. He always has. Say this with me.
Father God, I come to you right now in the name of Jesus Christ. I confess that Jesus is Lord, Lord of my life, Lord of my household, Lord of every area the enemy has tried to occupy. I acknowledge that the blood of Jesus covers me. I stand under that blood right now. I plead the blood of Jesus over my mind, over my body, over my family, over my sleep, over my finances, over every relationship the enemy has tried to enter. Father, your word says in Isaiah 54:17 that no weapon formed against me shall prosper. I receive that promise as my heritage tonight, not as a wish, as a legal right purchased by the cross. Now, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I address every spiritual assignment that has been sent against my life. I do not know every name of the one who sent it. I do not need to. God knows. And I leave the sender to the justice of God. I take the blood of Jesus and I apply it to the entry point of every assignment against me. I cancel the legal ground. I revoke every right the enemy claims over my name. By the cross of Christ as Colossians 2 declares, where principalities and powers were stripped and disarmed, I strip this assignment of every authority it claims over my name, my household, my body, my mind. Spirit of fear, I name you and I command you to go in the name of Jesus. Spirit of heaviness, I name you and I command you to go in the name of Jesus. Spirit of confusion and mental fog, go in the name of Jesus. Spirit of strife that entered through this assignment, go in the name of Jesus. Spirit of sleeplessness and night torment, go in the name of Jesus. Every spirit that entered through the door this assignment opened, I close that door now by the blood of Jesus. You have no more right to be here. You are trespassing on territory covered by the cross. Go now in the name of Jesus.
And now, Father, this is the part I want you to pay close attention to. I bless the one who sent this. I bless them because your word commands it. Luke chapter 6 verse 28, "bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." Romans chapter 12 verse 14, "bless and do not curse." I am obeying your word. I am not asking you to excuse what was done. I'm releasing the person into your hands. You are the righteous judge. I am not. Whatever assignment was sent from their hand, I return it not by my authority but by yours. The proverb says the curse without cause shall not alight. Your word says the mischief returns upon the head of the one who set it in motion. Let your justice, Lord, do what your justice does. I ask for mercy for the sender and I close the door between them and my household, my name, my family, and my inheritance forever in the name of Jesus.
Father, I receive now what the cross purchased. A mind that is clear and at peace. A household where your presence rests. Sleep that is untroubled. Finances and relationships no longer marked by an outside hand. I receive the garment of praise in the place of the spirit of heaviness as Isaiah 61 promises. I receive it by faith right now. It is finished. And I thank you in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
If you prayed that with me, if you said those words out loud in your own faith, even through tears, even with a voice that shook, then I want you to hear this. Something shifted. You may not feel it immediately. Feelings follow faith. They are not its source. But the word of God does not return void. What has a name has to go. You named it. You covered it with the blood. You left the sender in the hands of God. The assignment has no more legal ground to stand on. Stand on this. If the heaviness tries to return, and it may attempt to, because the enemy does not always leave without a rearguard action, you command it to go again in the name of Jesus. You remind it that the door is closed. You remind it of the blood. James chapter 4 verse 7, "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." That word resist does not mean feel better about the situation. It means stand your ground, hold the word, speak it out loud, keep the territory you've just taken, do not give 1 in of it back. You are not crazy. You were never crazy. You were not weak. You were not faithless. You were fighting something real with a real authority that perhaps you had not yet learned to exercise. But, you exercised it. And that is not nothing. That is everything.
If this teaching helped you, share it with one person who needs it. You almost certainly know someone carrying this same weight. Let them know there is a name for what they are feeling, and that there is an answer.
One last word before I let you go. What I shared with you tonight is biblical teaching on deliverance. It is not medical advice, and it is not a replacement for the help of a doctor or a counselor. If you are on medication, please do not stop it. If you are in crisis, if your mind is telling you to hurt yourself or anyone else, please reach out for help tonight. In the United States, you can dial 988. Outside the US, contact your local emergency services. The Lord works through doctors, too, my friend. Use every gift he has given you. And if this teaching helped you, share it with one person who needs it. May the Lord keep you and bless you. Good night.