Learning to depend on God in fighting evil (part 1)

This is a blog that ends with me confronting poltergeists and begins with an observation about Jesus.

Jesus was always assessing the faith levels of people around him, particularly his followers. “I’ve never seen such great faith,” he’d say, or “Oh ye of little faith.”

He apparently wants to partner with us in building what he called “the Kingdom of God.” What he brings to the table is supernatural power, while we bring a willingness to depend on him.

Dependence on anything requires a learning process. We don’t trust our own legs and balance as we graduate from infancy to the unsteady phase of toddler-hood. We are forever falling down. Our father may have his arms outstretched, urging us to walk, but as we cling to some stable object, we trust it more than we do our father or even our own legs.

So it is with our heavenly father. Jesus proclaims that he has given us all authority to roust out demons and to heal all kinds of diseases. It’s his authority to give, but we have to learn to depend on it, to trust the authority-giver. Yet whole denominations have built up theological excuses to not trust that authority. “Demons can’t really bother Christians,” we say, or, “God no longer heals supernaturally, he restricted that to the apostles and gave us modern medicine.”

What a load of hogwash! The theologians who feed us these excuses have developed the bad habit of clinging to furniture instead of learning to walk spiritually – that is, to depend on God.

I remember the first time someone (a Presbyterian elder) told me that demons exist and that I as a Jesus-follower had all the authority I needed to kick their rear-ends. He told me incredible stories of power encounters with evil.

I was 30 years old and I was astonished and curious and had not a clue how to depend on God in that way. A few years later as a Presbyterian elder myself, I was called upon to wield that authority in obeying the James 5 command to pray for the sick.

When the root cause of the sickness proved to be a hideous evil force, my feeble trust in God and the authority he’d given me was exposed. When plates began flying out of cupboards at my wife and my own family was attacked by the powers of evil, the battle was on. At that point, Karen was more effective confronting the enemy than I was.

It was time for me to grow up and start learning how to wield the spiritual light saber (actually called the sword of the Spirit) Jesus had entrusted to me in confronting an enemy that he himself had confronted at every turn and which he had plainly declared that I, as his follower, would have to confront as well.

(continued tomorrow here)