Emma Stark: ‘These 3 Steps to Healing and Deliverance Will Change Your Life’
The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you (Romans 16:20 NIV).
There is a remarkable catalogue of treasures that became yours at the moment of your salvation.
When you surrendered to the lordship of Jesus Christ, an eternity of wholeness, love, life, security, provision, glory, and abundance was made available to you.
When you reached up and acknowledged your need of a Savior, He, your God—the one true living God—withheld no good thing from you. He cascaded the riches of His glory liberally into your life from that moment forward—and forever more!
The King of kings who you have pledged allegiance to is not stingy, tight-fisted, mean, moderate, or withholding in any way. He is abundant, giving, fullness itself—the very source of all being and life. He is life to your dead places, He is friend to your lonely spaces, He is liberty to your stuck places, and He is brilliant illumination to every shadow you might stumble into.
Perhaps the most stridently amazing entrustment that He has handed to you is that you share His power and authority. Right now—this very second—you have the full power of the Kingdom of God at your disposal; you are trusted to invoke the full authority of the name of Jesus in every prayer you pray and every decree you release into the atmosphere! Jesus Christ has commissioned you with this power and that means that you have the capability to overcome darkness. He has also delegated and apportioned authority to you, which is the right to use His name to push back the counterfeit demonic kingdom and to become one of those who occupy until He comes.
Satan and all his minion demons and evil schemes are crushed under your feet. Do you get that weight of what that means? God chooses your feet to trample on the “scorpion” strategies of darkness! God calls you to be His body, His voice, His hands, and His feet—to enforce a victory that He has already secured on the cross.
The expectation of the throne room of God is that you, His warrior bride, are not idly commentating on what goes wrong in the world. Rather, you are the weaponized solution that interrupts and outmanoeuvres whatever satan has on his agenda.
When the great spiritual warfare chapter of Scripture, Ephesians 6, expresses our need to not wrestle flesh and blood but instead go after principalities and powers (verse 12), it is not a polite instruction to be nice to mankind! No, this is a New Testament, New Covenant, exhortation to deal with the demonic realm! How well are you doing in obeying this Scripture to wrestle with demonic rulers, authorities, powers, and spiritual forces of evil?
Now, the word wrestle that many of our Bible translations use in this verse, can unfortunately suggest to our contemporary minds a sense of perhaps modern arm-wrestling competitions, a back-and-forth motion till one party is eventually worn out. This would be a tragic lessening of the true impact of this text. This passage of Ephesians 6 starts us on the trajectory of being “strong in the Lord and in His mighty power” (verse 10 NIV). The apostle Paul is coaching you to stand in an unshakable way. What we read translated in our English Bibles as “struggle” or “wrestle” really means something much more like holding the enemy down with your foot or your hand upon his neck— taking him down to secure your victory.
You have a spiritual duty and life call to join Jesus in rebuking, putting to shame, and trampling under your feet the works of darkness. You are in a truceless war. You are not a negotiator, nor are you a diplomat on a battlefield. Under no circumstances are you to extend a handshake with the enemy by believing that if you leave him alone, he will leave you alone.
This strikingly lifts us out of most of our Christian church experience and practice where we have been unfortunately trained to turn somewhat of a blind eye to the reality of satan or his modern-day impact. Our traditions seem to prefer it if spiritual warfare and the work of demons is a historical enactment that does not apply here and now.
Jesus is ferociously direct in Mark 7:13 (NIV), where he rebukes the religious, “Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.” He is unequivocal in the Scripture that our collective traditions can utterly undo the power of the word of God! This is not comfortable. It is a warning to us all that we can revoke the power of God. You can undo a move of God through a love and deification of tradition, where even God will not override your decisions to keep things “safe,” “orderly,” and “as they’ve always been.”
In other words, you can prophesy but the strength of your revelation and the weight of the word of God (logos and rhema) can lose all effect because you cancel them null and void by insisting on repetitive, traditional behavior.
We must know that there are Pharisees in every age that are conforming man to traditions. The Lord wants you free from the tradition that claims your duty as a high prize and stops you from being full of the Spirit, full of the power and authority of Jesus and living in God-ordained spiritual warfare victory mode. Your traditions are skillful and cunning in starving you of life and you never see it.
Be careful that you are not transmitters of handed-down tradition and accidentally empowering it. Be brave enough to speak over the Church that her customs are making you foolish by taking you off active battlefield duty. It is a time to find a rich well of courage and to call your traditions redundant, so that by decree, in Jesus’s name, you might undermine them.
Of course, it is very necessary to honor that which has gone before us and to stand on the shoulders of giants. We must be humble enough to learn the great lessons of history. However, we must equally be determined and brave enough to not be locked out of the power of God by the wrong enshrining of man’s tradition. Could we be brave enough to call some of our religious heritage contemptuous, and to spiritually stand against those human conventions, in order that we might liberate a people? Can we now call our inherited habits our past, so that they may not leak wrongly into our future?
As we embrace our warrior call, a lifestyle journey of learning opens up to us. First, the warrior within us awakes and deals with the myth that, “I cannot affect any change.” A deep lie that says, “I’m better as a passive person” breaks, and in its place a new understanding arises that peace-making comes at a cost.
Only then a warfare responsibility is able to sit rightly on our shoulders and we find ourselves acknowledging that it is better to commit to war than to suffer the leadership and teaching of the demonic. As you sit in this place a spiritual warfare mindset becomes instinctively yours and you move into warrior experience, learning that without a God-led strategy, war, freedom, and deliverance can wear you out. From this place you next enter warfare maturity and warfare victory, which is a lifestyle that continually transforms everything around about you. The enemy very quickly backs off as your name becomes known in the spiritual realm. You enter an overcoming lifestyle that models for the generations to come how straightforward victory can be achieved in the name of Jesus. You outline the gift of power and authority He has given you. This is open to you as you read this book!
It is vitally important that we become aware not just of the enemy out there, but also of our responsibility to deal with the enemy within. Most of us will be familiar with the biblical Greek word sozo, which is rendered in our English translations as “salvation.” It is formed of three parts: we are first saved, second healed, and third delivered. To be “sozo-ed” or saved requires acknowledging our sin which we continually repent of, to walk out our salvation by continually acknowledging our need of a Savior, to repetitively be in pursuit of our healing and, finally, to frequently enter into our complete deliverance from all bondage. This sozo/salvation lifestyle implies repentance, healing, and deliverance as foundation stones for our everyday. In other words, when we find ourselves partnering with wrongdoing, we should instinctively have a three-step response:
One—we are deeply repentant for anything we have done that grieved God.
Two—we ask for healing where our actions brought wounding to our physical bodies and our emotions.
Three—we banish and cast out any demonic infiltration that came on the back of our behavior that we opened the door for.
Thus, we fully enter into everything the Bible means by being so “sozo-ed”!
You can hold in your hand an explosive gift which contains Jeremiah Johnson’s deep revelation and insight into what will liberate and bring alive the church that we love. His new book, The Warrior Bride, has striking content that will reinforce the power and authority that is de facto yours as a child of the living God. Do not waste this book’s potency! Let its truth wash you and become a tool of great freedom. Truly this is the hour and the day where our spiritual dullness to the plans of the enemy is finally removed! My personal prayer as you advance is that you take heed of Jesus’s advice in Matthew 10:16 and become “As shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”
Onward in His victory!
