Recovered In Christ

“The Hour of Revival is a time of crisis and few go through it without deception by the enemy. Bluntly, the Revival Hour is the occasion for evil spirits to fool the most spiritual believers into becoming deceived & possessed by evil spirits in their outer being through unwittingly accepting Satan’s counterfeits. The aftermath of the Revival in Wales, which was a true work of God, revealed many ‘honest souls’ swept off their feet by evil supernatural powers, which weren’t discerned as not being the true working of God. This is a glimpse into the mixed ‘manifestations’ which have come upon the Church, as almost without exception, in every land where revival has broken forth, within a very brief period of time the counterfeit stream has mingled with the true; and almost without exception, true and false have been accepted together. Evil spirit possession has followed, and checked every similar revival throughout the centuries since Pentecost and these things must now be understood, and dealt with, if the Church is to advance to maturity.” – Jessie Penn-Lewis

How many things go on in the Christian life that are misdiagnosed? Attributed to other things? Chalked up to one of hundreds of plausible reasons and excuses, yet they never really discern the problem bull’s eye?

How many of my friends; earnest and honest seekers…skim through passages like this,  barely scratch the surface of this, and quickly rush to “yes…but what is the solution?” sounds good right? What’s the magic formula? Which deliverance package should we use? What prayers do we do? In and of themselves they are not bad questions. But they are, in a way, part of the problem.

Imagine this, you walk into a hospital emergency room, you are quite sure that something is seriously wrong, and you are willing to allow the doctors to look into it. You answer all of their questions as honestly as you can and do your best to wait patiently for the test results, you also take their advice to ignore all of the suggestions being made by the mental patients loitering about, and all of the pharmaceutical company reps hanging around hoping to sell you something they can profit from. For a while.

Soon, through a mixture of fear, inexperience and that good ol’ self reliance, you start to listen to yourself. You start to demand different tests, you want a second, third and fourth opinion. You demand to be operated on immediately, you want chemo…just to be on the safe side.

There’s nothing wrong with a blood transfusion after all? Surgery can save your life. Sometimes chemo is necessary. So what’s the problem??

The problem, dear readers, is that spiritually speaking you are as terrible a patient as our friend here in the emergency room. He cannot trust the doctors, or the process. He cannot trust that there is good reason to avoid going in blind. How many books and teachers and Bible studies has the Lord provided you. But you can’t sit still in it. You read 2 chapters about the nature of deception and counterfeit spiritual experience and start drowning out the wisdom it could teach you with either your questions or your attempts to teach it 🙂

Come on guys, a BIG part of the solution is understanding the problem. You can’t skim over the depth of demonic deception and jump into truth in an attempt to avoid the fear and confusion that looking at your foundation brings – as the truth discerns and exposes that deception! Truth is not meant to hide you from how you’ve been deceived, rather it exposes all of the counterfeit experiences and beliefs you hold and delivers you from them.

Pray for patience, pray to know the difference between questioning all ideas/experiences against the truth in the word of God vs. neurotically questioning every move you make. One is being cautious and the other is trying to save yourself. One is trusting that the word and Spirit of God will discern those ideas/experiences and the other is trusting your investigative skills. Pray for God to make you a good student, pray for him to make you a good patient. Trust in the Great Physician.