Deliverance Counseling Strategies:
Dealing With Temptation
It is amazing that a major Christian Counseling strategy is to guide and prepare believers to overcoming temptation is built right into the Lord’s prayer, particularly the statement, “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” It is Satan’s job to tempt and it is the work of the Holy Ghost to keep us from being led into temptation. So it is really a matter of commonsense to focus Christian counseling toward practices that reveal how the devil tempts each of us as individuals and to ensure that we do not grieve or quench the Holy Ghost as He protects us from yielding to temptation. Since He is our Helper during Christian counseling, we have to create and maintain conditions conducive to receiving His assistance.
ICertainly, repeated sin should raise a counselor’s eyebrows about a client’s salvation because as the Apostle John stated, Without a knowledge of the law, there is no sin. So the first step to effective Christian counseling is to guide the client to search for the root cause of their particular style or pattern of sin by uncovering the overall temptation strategy the enemy uses against each client.
THE BIG SET UP!
1. The first thing the devil must do to set you up to be led into temptation is to lie about what God has or has not said. Satan did so with Eve and tried to do so with the Lord Jesus Christ. He will either out and out lie, or take a scripture out of its context and mis-apply it to your particular circumstances.
2. The lie is skillfully planned to coincide with the client’s major character defect. Consider the root cause of sin for someone as being a lack of patience. So deliverance counseling, the first sessions will focus on how and when. For example, sessions may uncover that a particular client is set up by “prophetic words” uttered by Christian leaders. For example, the client’s pastor uttered a so called “word from the Lord,” and then caused the client to have to wait so long, that ultimately he took matters into his own hands to “make things happen.” After many, many mistakes, the client’s virtues or fruits will develop patience.
3. False assumptions cause the enemy to “not have to work so hard.” For example, if your client is a woman who assumes that just because she has the desire and the need for a mate, that God is going to send her a man fit to be her husband, she may be already “set up.” No where in the bible does God declare that every woman has a divine soul mate. In fact, there are several other assumptions that God’s people make from submitting their souls to the doctrines, teachings and practices of false and or deceived prophets and ministers. The devil’s purpose is to use these people to cause the elect to make the false assumptions necessary to “lead each of them into temptation.” In deliverance counseling, we examine your dreams, visions and prophecies to find the set up.
4. Another way of seeking the Father to ”deliver our clients from evil,” when the client is ready, we ask the Father to expose ALL of the darkness that is around him or her. God may not expose the darkness unless the client sincerely desires to know the truth, wherever truth will take him or her.
5. What keeps darkness from being exposed is a client’s “rose colored glasses.” As long as darkness is not exposed, the believer will not overcome sin. To remove the veil of deception, learning from the discipline of the Holy Ghost means that after a person has experienced the hand of the Lord dealing with him, he is gradually broken by the Lord. When this process is complete, Christian clients will be delivered from their former state of murmuring, fretting, complaining, personal opinions, self interest, into a state of peaceful obedience.
According to the Apostle John, We have 3 enemies that lead us into temptation: the world, the flesh, and the devil. According to experience, the world is the first to be overcome. If you can overcome the temptations brought to you by the world, then you are on a path leading to your victory to overcome sin. Next is the flesh. The Holy Ghost, through breaking and crucifixion will lead you to walk in the spirit and not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. To deal with the devil, you will need to uncover his agenda, a specialized set-up that is specifically designed to cause YOU to sin.
To do so, we need to always keep in mind that the demons assigned to both the Christian counselor and the client will resist unity at every turn with the very elements of the world and our flesh that are already against us. Such elements are in the very makeup of our personalities. Therefore, at the end of each counseling session, we consistently seek God in prayer in order to know ourselves better than the devil knows us. We need to understand ourselves so that we know how to act and walk in humble dependence upon the Risen Lord for protection from the evil one–a protection which can only operate as we look to the blood of Jesus.
Therefore, the Lord’s prayer can function as an outline for not falling to temptation that leads to sin, particularly, “lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil or “the evil one.” If you find that you have resisted and refused any specific ground and you still cannot get rid of it, you must seek light from God regarding the cause. The cause can often be found in your past thoughts and beliefs. When God exposes the darkness and you have repented by refusing to act and function in former ways, the enemy has to give up the ground. However, he won’t give it up until you have disavowed it. Disavowing the temptation is not only verbal descent. All ground is not necessarily removed at the moment that you have expressed your refusal. No! Your refusal must be reasserted by your actions or lack thereof, and you’ve got to stand your ground until each point of captivity is detected and refused. Faith without works is dead.
6. Another significant weakness that all of the elect must overcome is the power of rejection. In Face the Devil,” you will find these words:
Evil spirits obviously attack their prey with accusation, condemnation and guilt. Yet, rejection is a more subtle demonic strategy of choice. Deliverance ministries teach that there are demons called the spirits of accusation, condemnation and guilt. My belief is that accusation, condemnation, guilt as well as rejection are strategies or tools and are not demons themselves. The unseen being behind such attacks is the spirit of the Antichrist, aka religious fallen angels and demons.
Many people who have faced rejection when abused as a child, grow up with unresolved emotional wounds. Rejection is the unveiled cause of those wounds, which if not cleansed, will grow and fester into spiritual wounds (such as a lack of forgiveness, envy, blaming God, jealousy, etc.). Spiritual wounds fester, opening us up to evil spirits which love to take advantage of this opportunity to invade us.
The goal of the enemy is to get us built up with emotional baggage inside our souls and negative feelings in our hearts against one another, ourselves, and God. The first step to devising a spiritual warfare plan is to deal with the emotional issues of our own souls so that the weapons of spiritual warfare will work for us. Why? Because rejection as a spiritual warfare issue produces a harvest of evil fruit which can widely vary from one person to another. Some of the common symptoms of rejection include: rebellion, fake personas, the need to fit in, a desire to always want to be a part of everything, inability to be corrected or to receive constructive criticism, self pity, being love starved, a tendency to blame God for being rejected, pride at being rejected, opinionated personality and a need to always be right, seeking of parental approval, envy, jealousy, insecurity, prideful independence, not able to depend on others because you expect rejection.
To book one exploratory trial deliverance counseling session, email deliverancecounseling@yahoo.com or call PSM at 838-217-0104 and ask for Evan
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