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The Requirement of Power
By John R. Gavazzoni
Scriptute says,"For the kingdom of God is not in word but in power" wrote Paul. Mere conceptual communication to which the reader or hearer grants his mental assent will, by God's providence, play a part in the final unfolding of the kingdom of God, but that, in and of itself, most certainly is not at the heart of the kingdom in action. The kingdom in action binds and looses, seizes and arrests, breaks powerful chains, opens prison doors, makes the lame to walk and the blind to see, calms the storm-tossed sea, and orders howling winds to hush.
We're going to need that power in the days to come. Powerful forces are arrayed against the inhabitants of the earth with a special fury toward those whom God has reclaimed as His own. All the extensions of this present dominant system....journalism, politics, law-enforcement, government, jurisprudence, education, the medical establishment, the news media, and anti-Christ religion are now all, in the main, found to be in collusion with the authority of darkness. Don't concern yourself with some supposed personal spirit entity seeking entrance into your mind. It's the spirit of the above that comprises the fortress of vain imagination set against the Lord and His Christ that we are dealing with. Many saints, who think of themselves as the devil's resisters, have minds overflowing with notions from the spirit of this present world-system.
May the Lord raise the level of our expectation toward seeing God bare His mighty arm in delivering power. Never before in mankind's history have the forces of darkness become so purposefully mal-aligned on such a global scale, and with such ferocity of enmity against God. He that sits in the heavens shall laugh; He shall have them in derision; expect it. Expect Him to arise from within you, dear saint. Expect Him to confront the one who comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. Expect it from within you, not sub-normally from the visiting revivalist. Expect it out from within individual, un-acclaimed, believers. Expect the power of God to manifest in simple, local gatherings of the ecclesia as the New Testament attests.
I have been given foretastes of such power... awesome in its effectiveness, as I experienced it many years ago one late evening in my pastor's study. The sister in the Lord who headed up our personal counseling ministry called me there after trying to reach me at home to tell me a young woman, a new believer, whom she had taken, along with others, to a deliverance meeting, that very vulnerable young believer, in the course of someone else being prayed for, had succumbed to demonization. "Karrol's" voice over the phone sounded barely short of panic. Seems she, and the group with her including the new convert, had been gathered around the demonized person being ministered to, when suddenly the very instant the invading spirit came out of that one, the young convert became as someone hypnotized. She stared into space with eyes that seemed to peer out of an empty soul.
It was as if she had vacated her body and something alien had taken over. They laid hands on her, prayed for her, commanded the spirit to depart from her, did all the things charismatics did in those days in such situations, and nothing released her from that coma-like state. Imagine someone in a coma standing upright with eyes wide open staring into emptiness out of emptiness. She just seemed to be gone. Imagine the consternation of those who had hosted that meeting.
In our previous series, I've spoken of that normative peace, that overwhelming calm, which comes upon one when he or she is truly called into service by the Spirit to deal with the enemy of our souls. I've found it to be an amazingly consistent experience. So it was that evening when Karrol called me asking me to please stay in my office awaiting their arrival with the afflicted young woman. Immediately I knew; immediately I was filled with assurance and confidence, that the Lord would not fail to work though me for that one's deliverance.
Believe me, I'd had my share of the opposite. Just imagine me, my co-pastor, and an elder from the church, on another occasion, chasing a young woman around the dining table of her home, trying to catch her for "the laying on of hands." We all, on that occasion, were hoping that maybe something good might come of that comedy of errors. So don't think of me at all as, "God's man of the hour, full of faith and power." No, the evening in question turned out to be a completely different scene with me learning that there is an assured-knowing that precedes real acts of delivering power. ("Whatsoever you shall loose on earth is that WHICH IS loosed in heaven." [rendering from the literal Greek])
After about a half hour, the group arrived at my office. The young woman appeared just as I've described. Looking into her eyes, I saw emptiness. Within probably less than a minute, they edged the young woman toward me and I KNEW I was to touch her on the middle of her forehead just above the bridge of her nose and command that spirit of vacancy to come out of her. It was simple. That's the way it was to be. No ego worrying about being embarrassed in front of the group because I might fail. The atmosphere was filled with the assurance that is intrinsic to being made to participate in the faith OF Christ. I'd been caught up into the faith OF Christ.
I had no more than spoken the command, and there she was, back again; eyes full of her own person. She was completely without any feelings of trauma hanging on to her. Karroll was, to say the least, relieved, as was the group. Since contemporary deliverance ministry is hardly New Testament-normative, it's not wise to bring a young, new believer to such an event. She was probably filled with fear, and that very fear drew that spirit to her. Please understand that I left off years ago believing in a personal devil and demons as non-corporal real beings.
From the KJV we have the fact laid out clearly: "(Jesus) went about doing good and HEALING all that were oppressed of the devil." What happened that night was a healing of the soul, a healing of the mind, a mind caught into such a violent vortex of fear that the woman had to seek escape from her tortured self. The semantics used in the gospels is an accommodation, a concession, to a cultural presumption brought into Israel of that day from their years in captivity mostly by the sect of the Pharisees.
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