Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08104. Whether one believer should try to cast out demons from another believer is a question I have been asked in tears more than once, usually by a Christian who has been told that their depression, their temper or their besetting sin has a name and needs expelling. The pastoral damage done by that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08100 The way the enemy attacks churches tells you a great deal about what he fears, and it is rarely what we expect. In my experience he is far less interested in dramatic assault than in the slow, respectable erosion that nobody notices until a congregation looks round and wonders where the life went….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08099 When the enemy attacks families he is going after the oldest institution God ever made. Before there was a nation, a temple or a church, there was a household, and God has been working through households ever since. That alone tells you why the family draws so much fire. Over the years I…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 08098 Understanding how the enemy attacks marriages begins with understanding why he bothers. Marriage was God’s idea before sin entered the world, and Paul tells us it pictures something enormous: the relationship between Jesus and his church. Anything that displays the gospel that clearly is going to draw fire. My wife and I have…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08096 Knowing whether you are under spiritual attack is harder than most books on the subject admit, and I want to be honest about that before offering anything more useful. There is no diagnostic checklist in the Bible, no set of symptoms that appears only when the enemy is at work. What Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08078 The prayer of Jabez occupies two verses buried in a genealogy, and for a few years around the turn of the century it was among the best known passages in the English-speaking church. A short book sold many millions of copies and turned these lines into a daily formula for a great many…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08077 Binding and loosing has become one of the most quoted and least examined phrases in contemporary Christian speech. It is used to bind demons, bind sickness, bind circumstances and loose blessing, favour and finances, often within a single sentence. The phrase occurs twice in the New Testament, both times in Matthew, and in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 08093 Satan’s authority is the subject of the strange title Paul gives him in Ephesians 2, where he is called “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” It is a phrase people quote without ever quite deciding what it means, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08076 The question of whether praying against principalities over cities is a legitimate Christian practice sounds technical, but a great deal hangs on it. Entire prayer movements have been built on the assumption that it is, and many believers have been made to feel unspiritual for hesitating. I do hesitate, and I want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08075 Spiritual mapping is the practice of researching the history, religion and moral record of a place in order to identify the demonic powers believed to control it, so that intercessors can then target those powers in prayer. It grew up alongside territorial warfare and is usually presented as its research arm. I have…