S is an instructor who has been a Christian since she was 12. For as long as she could remember, she struggled with deep anxiety. Here is her testimony of casting out the evil spirits that took a hold over her life after she was dedicated at a temple as a toddler. Praise God!
(See Chinese versions: 简体中文 > 耶稣使一位教授从焦虑得释放 | 繁體中文 > 耶穌使一位教授從焦慮得釋放)
For as long as I can remember, I have been afraid and fearful but I couldn’t figure out why.
During a women’s fellowship meeting at church, we studied Psalm 139. Everyone thought that the passage was comforting because it was about how God is present and pays so much attention to us. But I found myself angry because it told me that God knew things that I didn’t know. I told the group so and that I felt called to discover what my “fear of emotions” meant.
I started to tear up a bit, and the fellowship leader said it was okay to cry and asked two ladies to join her in praying for me. At the beginning of the prayer, the leader said that she sensed a spirit of hate around me, and asked me if that made any sense to me. I said I felt like my family hated me, and that there was something wrong with me. The leader asked if I really believed that something was wrong with me, and I said yes, I believed it.
A memory from when I was five or six came to my mind.
I was walking behind my mother after we had been shopping at the night market. A man with long curly hair and hazel brown eyes touched me inappropriately from behind me. I turned around and looked at him and then ran to my mother, but she never knew because she never saw it. I felt so dirty.
The leader asked if I could see Jesus in that scene and what He was doing there. I knew He was there but I couldn’t see Him doing anything. I was so angry and afraid. As the ladies led me line by line to forgive my mother and my molester, the leader received a word. In that scene, the leader saw Jesus standing behind the man and writing down the man’s offence for judgement day. The lie that was being told to me in this memory was that I was abandoned, and I had to renounce it.
We continued to pray, and in the next memory that came up, we were in a market again during the day. This time, I was walking in front of my mother. We came to a turn in the market, and I walked right. After a while, I looked back and I saw that my mother had turned left but she didn’t tell me. I had to run back and I felt so afraid and ashamed. I also felt angry, and I thought my mother was stupid. This time, the leader led me in a prayer of forgiveness again but we prayed against the judging spirit when I called my mother stupid because it wasn’t my job or my place to do that. I had to pray for forgiveness for myself too, but I could barely speak the words out loud.
The leader then came around and put her hand on my back and said that we needed to pray for my back.
She asked me to close my eyes and imagine my body as a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). In the temple that I saw, there was light, but there was light only at the very front. Behind me, there was a lot of darkness and I felt very, very afraid of the darkness, but I didn’t know what it was or why I was afraid.
We continued to pray, and suddenly, she asked me, “Were you dedicated as a child?” In my head, I thought I had told them that, but clearly those words hadn’t come out of my mouth, and she said, “We should have started here.” The leader then started to lead me in prayer, line by line, to cast out the demons that had entered me after I was dedicated at a temple when I was about a year old. I was brought to the temple as a baby because I was always sick. In both my grandparents’ homes, there are altars to ancestors and the gods of the land, and it was part of my childhood until I became Christian at the age of 12. My grandmother would get pieces of paper with “blessings” written on them and she would light them on fire then throw them into a cup of water for me to drink.
As we began to pray and I started to repeat each word after the leader, it became almost physically impossible to speak. I could barely hear my own voice.
Praying was an actual physical battle for me, and I was seriously afraid the darkness behind me would never leave.
At this time, one of the other ladies said that she sensed there was something behind me. But I couldn’t see it because it was always behind me. All I knew was that I was very afraid of the darkness behind me. The ladies praying for me didn’t know that all throughout my childhood, I had a recurring dream where I was walking round and round and carried a huge burden on my back. This burden was enormous and it was way bigger than me.
I knew at this moment that the fear that I could not name and did not know was these demons that were now reluctant to come out, and that they were invited in when I was dedicated at the temple.
As the demons were cast out, I started to feel my back straighten and become more upright.
The demons were all gone, and I felt like something had been cut out from the left side of my back. In my vision, my temple is now brighter and bigger than before, and instead of darkness at my back, I feel Christ standing right behind me.
One of the ladies hugged me and said, “Oh, I just hope that you can feel Christ hugging you.” I was still too dazed to tell her that I felt as if Christ was standing so close to my back that I couldn’t move without bumping into Him. At the end of the meeting, my legs felt shaky as if I was learning to walk again because the thing on my back was gone.
I can say today that I am no longer afraid of evil spirits; they have absolutely no power over me.
At the end of the prayer, two thoughts kept repeating in my head: “It’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone,” and “I don’t need to know, I don’t need to know, I don’t need to know.” I felt a deep sense of freedom. You see, to me, knowledge, and wisdom and the intellect are above all. They are more important to me than anything else and that was why Psalm 139 made me so angry—because it told me that God knows things that I don’t know.
I realised that while God gave me the love of knowledge as a gift, the demon on my back had turned it into a curse and a burden. The demon took that gift and turned it into an anxious, worrying spirit. Because I was always worrying about something else, I was too busy to know it was there and it fed off my anxiety. After the prayer, “knowledge” and “wisdom” are still important values to me but now, they are placed under “revelation.” Knowledge and wisdom are set under God’s revelation and they will come as God’s gifts.
God’s revelations didn’t end there. The next morning as I prepared for church, God gave me the name of the spirit—its name was “malevolence” (which is another word for “malice / nastiness / hatred”) and it is gone. God gave me its name so that when it tries to come back, I can send it to the feet of Jesus, so I have nothing to fear.
My old self continues to tug at me and I still feel the pull to want to know more. But the word of the Lord comes back to me too, “I don’t need to know.”
At church that Sunday, we heard a sermon on the life of Daniel who was forced into service of the occult in Babylon. This further reminded me that while I was born into darkness and the occult, I have nothing to fear. God’s love surrounded me even when I didn’t know it. I was never abandoned and Christ was always there even when I was a baby at the temple.