Deliver Us From Evil, Part 3

 

March 15, 2019

 

During the past five decades of dealing with deliverance, I have come to realize that the Enemy hides himself and his characteristics in so many ways that folks just don’t realize that what they are dealing with is an evil spirit (or spirits).  These spirits conceal themselves within a person’s character or makeup to the degree that they actually believe that whatever is taking place in them is “normal.”

 

People think that their beliefs, their modes of living — no matter how strange, their various behaviors are “just them!”  NOT SO!  My hope this week is to show you just how these evil spirits camouflage their activity in religious doctrines, in behavioral attitudes or characteristics and in the way a person thinks.

 

Hosea wasn’t kidding when he said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

 

We absolutely MUST respond to the voice and quickening of Holy Spirit when He reveals to us the cause and doors in our lives that we have opened for the Enemy to afflict us.

 

There isn’t a denomination or religious group on earth that doesn’t have that kind of spirit.  I’d venture to say that in the years since, nearly every denominational spirit has named itself in one way or another.  It seeks to blind the individual to truths and realms in God that they’ve never experienced or known.

 

You see, religion — no matter now it is characterized, or by what name it is called, boxes people in.  God wants to reveal things to them that will take them far beyond where they are in their relationship with Him, but they MUST be free of everything that is religious.

 

Bob Mumford shared something with us perhaps 40 years ago that was a real eye-opener.  He said, “If you really want some adventures in God, then begin praying this prayer:   “Lord, deliver me from all that is religious.”  Believe me, that’s the truth!   You don’t really know how much religion has hidden itself in your life.

 

Let me take this a step farther and get myself in real trouble! (grin!)

 

There are certain religious doctrines that cross denominational boundaries with ease.  Just because a person walks away from a certain denomination does not mean that some of the doctrinal spirits associated with that denomination don’t follow him or her.  A good example is the doctrine (make that plural — doctrines) of the seven years of tribulation, followed by (or preceded by, depending on which doctrine afflicts you) some version of the Rapture.

 

Don’t misunderstand me.  The Word makes it clear that in the world, we WILL have tribulation (thlipsis — to use the Greek word, meaning: pressure).

 

The Word also makes it clear that Jesus is coming again!  The problem is that folks try to put a spin on either of these that is NOT what God is saying to His people.  We can also apply this to the doctrines on the Mark of the Beast, or the Antichrist — and I won’t even try to go there today.

 

It is imperative that we be free of all pre-conceived doctrines that have been taught for generations — doctrines that are generated by demons in order to keep God’s people in bondage to fear.  There is absolutely no room for fear of any kind.

 

Let me remind you that ALL religious doctrines — no matter how they are colored — are rooted in the Fear of Evil.  There are so many things we’ve come to accept as tradition that are nothing more than demonic camouflage.

 

No doubt, some of what I share will be really strange to some of you.  You’ll think for sure that I’ve gone off into the Twilight Zone.  Hopefully, it will trigger understanding of things you may be experiencing now, or things you have gone through in your life.

 

Guess I’d have to say that I’m addressing this spirit of fear because this is the one I first became aware of in my own life.  Beginning when I was two years of age, and lasting for nearly thirty years nonstop, I was in some kind of major life-threatening incident – accident? – almost every single year.

 

At age two, I was riding with my parents in Washington state (this happened just prior to our move to Alaska) in our family car.  We were in the midst of a horrific rain storm and blinding driving conditions when Dad lost control of the vehicle.  We skidded off the road and flipped over several times, coming to rest on the roof of the car.

 

The Lord was with us, and we were all protected from any physical injury or death.  Nevertheless, something infected my spirit in that moment, and it wasn’t until 1970 or 1971 when I heard the English evangelist, Derek Prince, sharing an experience in the realm of deliverance when he spoke to an evil spirit and commanded it to identify itself.  (I shared the outline of this experience with you last week!)

 

The evil spirit spoke out of the person and said, “My name is ‘Accident-Prone.’”  The moment I heard him share that experience, something leaped inside of me, and I knew I had the identity of a spirit that had tormented me for many years.  I took the necessary steps to expel that spirit, and the train of year-after-year-after-year accidents came to a sudden halt.

 

Insurance companies today have an insurance category they apply to folks who are in repeated accidents.  They clearly recognize that some people – for reasons they don’t begin to understand – are prone to repeated accidents.  They categorize folks in that insurance bracket as “accident prone.”  If you can get insurance, it costs you a small fortune annually.

 

I was – at that time in my life – one of those insurance risks they categorized as “accident prone.”  My monthly insurance payments exceeded my automobile payments, and the two of them together equaled a house payment on a nice home.  It took three years of consecutive accident-free driving before the insurance companies removed me from that category, and brought my insurance premiums down.

 

Being an “accident-prone,” however, was only symptomatic of the larger issue.  I was afflicted with the spirit of the Fear of Death, and it took numerous experiences of dealing with other spirits in that family before I got to the granddaddy of them all.

 

My brother, Howard, and I were sleeping outside in a tent during one of the construction phases of the church we were helping Dad build in Barrow.  It was more fun to sleep in the tent.  It was late fall in Barrow, and the daytime temperatures were somewhere around 25 – 30 degrees.  Naturally, we wanted some heat in the tent, so we lit a Coleman camp stove.  I was pouring kerosene into the tank when it suddenly ignited.  In my anxiety to get away from the stove, I tripped, spilling kerosene all over myself.  In an instant, my clothes were ablaze.

 

Howard (“Howie”) responded in a flash and threw a rug over me, dousing the flames.  His instantaneous reaction saved me from certain severe injury and possible death.  We were teenagers at the time and afraid to tell our folks what had happened lest we lose our “tent privileges.”  Any burns I had were minor, so I put a couple of Band-Aids on the more critical spots, threw away the burned clothing and said nothing.  I don’t think we mentioned it to our folks for a couple of months or more.

 

Then there was the accident we had when we (Howie and I) were riding with Mom in the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming.  We were driving an old 1947 Ford – you know, the upside down bathtub style.  Driving through a pass at 13,000 feet on an infrequently-driven highway, the front end of the car suddenly came apart, and the tie rods broke.

 

Mom lost control of the car, and we skidded toward the edge with a sheer thousand-foot drop.  The rear end whipped around, dropping the rear wheels over the edge, catching, and flipping the car so that we rolled over and over again, landing in the ditch on the opposite side of the road.

 

To say the least, that car was demolished.  There wasn’t much left of it.  Mom and Howie came out of it with glass shards in their hair, and my left wrist was shattered.  By the grace of God, another car came along about five minutes later.  They stopped, helped us out of the wreckage, and took us to Cody for medical treatment.

 

In 1967, while serving at Bethel Union Church in Duarte, California, we decided to take a weekend jaunt up to Big Bear Lake in the mountains with one of my college classmates from Bethany – Alan Parker – and his wife, who had moved to southern California and lived near us.  On the way back, traveling on Highway 18, the road was very narrow and winding, there were no guard rails on the side of the road with sharp drop-offs, and we were in a long line of traffic.

 

It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and we had the windows rolled up and the air conditioning turned on.  I was driving an almost-new Oldsmobile Starfire sports hardtop.  We apparently hit a very sharp rock on the road.  It punctured and blew the right front tire.  When the tire blew, we didn’t hear it because of the noise of our conversation, the radio and the air conditioning.  The car lurched to the side when the tire blew.  I didn’t realize what has happening and didn’t react quickly enough.  In seconds, we went right over the precipice.

 

The car flipped in mid-air, dropping about 250 feet before hitting a berm that kept us from rolling down another thousand feet or so.  The impact shattered all the glass and wrenched the doors open.  We came to a stop with Debbie (my oldest daughter) lying outside the car on the ground, and my wife sprawled out the passenger door.  Alan Parker and his wife were on the back floor of the car with their feet up in the air.

 

Astonishingly, none of us received more than minor bruises.  There wasn’t anything left of that car to even call a car.  Nevertheless, the Lord had protected us – once again!

 

That accident wasn’t unlike one that happened when I was in Bible College and on my way to a Teen Challenge event with my then-fiancée.   Rounding a turn in the Santa Cruz Mountains, we came across an area where road crews had been doing some repairs.  Loose gravel was scattered across the pavement.  I was probably doing 55 – 60 when I hit the gravel.  It caused the car to twitch sideways momentarily.

 

I turned the wheel to compensate, and instead of pulling us out of the skid, it increased our sideways slide.  So I did what I had trained to do driving in the north on ice and snow.  I hit the accelerator and yanked the steering wheel around intending to do a power 360 and get us out of it.  It worked.  Almost!  It was close!

 

“Close” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.  Isn’t that what they say?  Right.

 

Anyway, I realized we weren’t going to make it.  We had accelerated to 70 MPH and were headed off the road.  I shouted at the top of my voice, “JESUS!”  In that instant, the Lord spoke to me in an audible voice and said, “Nothing’s going to happen to you!”

 

The car hit a concrete lip on the roadside and became airborne.  We traveled 120 feet through the air and dropped 90 feet on the nose of the car, taking down trees with it.  The trees cushioned our impact, and we came to a rest in the back, next to the tailgate of my new Dodge station wagon, the seats ripped out of their moorings, and our seat belts snapped like threads.

 

My fiancée had a gouge in her scalp from flying glass, but I didn’t have so much as a bruise anywhere on my body.  We extricated ourselves from the wreck to hear a voice calling out in the darkness, “Is anyone down there?  Is anyone alive?”

 

The climb out of the trees was too steep, and eventually a rope was lowered to help us climb out.  The Good Samaritan who stopped to help took us to the Los Gatos hospital for treatment (my fiancée needed stitches to close up the gash in her scalp).

 

While we were waiting, a CHP officer walked in and I heard him say to the doctor on duty, “OK, where’s the bodies?”   He walked into the room where my fiancée was being treated, and I said to him, “There weren’t any bodies.  We’re OK.”  He stared at us and said, “Impossible!  No one could have survived that accident!”  I shrugged my shoulders and said, “OK.  But we did, anyway.  The Lord was with us.”

 

By now you’re getting the picture.  I’ve given you a small sampling of the kinds of accidents I kept going through year after year.  Now, maybe you will understand when I say to you that this kind of repetition of life and death confrontations developed a reactionary response to anything that appeared to be death-dealing.

 

Despite the continuous deliverance from death by the Lord, time after time after time, I was infected by the Fear of Death.  It was a spirit whose entire purpose was to develop within me unconscious reactions that would contaminate my responses to the leading and direction of the Lord in my life.  With that fear came other physical symptoms that developed in my body.  Allergies were the most apparent.  Nervous reactions.  Hacking coughs.  There were others, as well.

 

I suppose the single greatest unconscious consequence of the Fear of Death was what I would call, “the Daredevil Effect.”  Maybe you’ve seen this one.  Subconsciously you want to prove to yourself that you can beat death, so you deliberately run into situations and circumstances that any sane person would avoid like the plague.  You try daredevil stunts.  You practice beating death.  It’s nothing more and nothing less than the Fear of Death driving, enticing, spurring you on into situations that will either kill or maim you, or render you useless emotionally and spiritually.

 

Hearing Derek Prince talk about an accident prone spirit really began to trigger understanding for me.  As I began to review the events of my life up to that moment, I realized that I had been targeted by an enemy who was determined to destroy me or prevent the call of God from ever coming to fruition in my life.

 

Not until I was ministering deliverance to a woman one day and I heard an unnatural voice speak out of her (the voice of the evil spirit) and whine, “Nooooooooo…..I don’t want to die!” did I realize that spirit had just identified itself in her: the Fear of Death. 

Once I addressed that spirit by name and commanded it to leave, the change in her was nothing less than dramatic.  Her entire countenance changed.  Within a relatively short time, her whole personality changed.  She became vibrant, alive, outgoing!

 

I finally had the identity of the granddaddy spirit that had fathered the accident prone spirit.  In the years since, I have seen asthma as a byproduct of the Fear of Death.  I have seen how Parkinson’s disease and an abundance of nervous disorders stem directly from the presence of that spirit.  I have also seen how the Fear of Death spawns disobedience and rebellion in children, and how it drives rapists and murderers to carry out the horrendous acts they perpetrate on others.  It is the root of alcoholism and drug addiction.

 

Let me share on other aspect of, or symptom of, the Fear of Death that we haven’t touched on — and really, we’ve only scratched the surface!

 

If there is a genesis in our DNA that gets passed on to our children so that we see clearly identified family characteristics in them, the same is true of evil spirits.  If we are free when our children are born, it isn’t as big an issue — although that’s no guarantee.  I wasn’t set free from the Fear of Death until long after my first children were born.

 

Our son, Chris, inherited that fear with a vengeance.  It manifested in him as a daredevil spirit.  The whole idea of a “daredevil” is that they run into situations and defy death as a means to prove to themselves that they are not bound by fear.  They exult in the fact that they can accomplish things that are normally impossible in the face of death.

 

I’ve shared with you previously how we had to send Chris and Melodie to Saint Paul Island to be with my parents after they were repeatedly attacked in Barrow — all as a way of getting to me.  Chris helped my father with his three– and four-wheeler rental service, becoming a first class small engine mechanic.  He began to build his own bike, and eventually got the sponsorship of Yamaha in building a racing three-wheeler that would easily turn 110 MPH.

 

When Della and I got to Saint Paul Island sometime later, Chris was determined to show us his “stuff.”  He took us out to the island’s tallest sand dunes, some with 90-degree inclines.  He backed away from the sand dune with his bike, then roared up the side until he reached the top and had to lay over the front of the bike to clear the edge and land on the top.  Had he failed, he would have tumbled back, somersaulting again and again, likely killing himself.

 

Some of his friends tried the same trick and failed.  They were severely injured, and wound up in the hospital.  Chris thought it was great sport and didn’t realize that he was being tormented by the Fear of Death,  We had to minister to him several times before he understood what was happening.  Lots more to cover, so we will leave it there for this week.

 

See you next Friday.

 

 

In case you are missing out on real fellowship in an environment of Ekklesia, our Sunday worship gatherings are available by conference call – usually at about 10:30AM Pacific.  That conference number is (712) 770-4160, and the access code is 308640#.  We are now making these gatherings available on video using ZOOM.  If you wish to participate by video on ZOOM, our login ID is 835-926-513.  If you miss the live voice-only call, you can dial (712) 770-4169, enter the same access code and listen in later.  The video call, of course, is not recorded – not yet, anyway.

Blessings on you!

 

 

           

Regner A. Capener
CAPENER MINISTRIES

RIVER WORSHIP CENTER
Temple, Texas 76504

Email Contact: CapenerMinistries@protonmail.com

 

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