REBUKING THE DEVIL

REBUKING THE DEVIL

“This kind can only come out through prayer.” – Mark 9:29

(Editor's Note: Even up to this modern times, we still have encounter with the devil indirectly or sometimes directly as what happened on the story. Here is a personal story recounted by Ronna taken from didache.)

I never go to bed without blessing my children with holy water as I make the sign of the cross on their foreheads and pronounce a blessing over them. One night, as I blessed one of my daughters who was burning with fever, she moaned as she slept soundly. I was then led to sprinkle her whole body with holy water. Suddenly, she bolted up and started screaming as if in extreme pain. She turned away from me and tried to climb the wall by her bedside as though she was trying to escape. Every time the holy water touched her skin, she would scream excruciatingly. I began to rebuke the evil spirit that was oppressing her. I continued to pray in tongues until she calmed down and fell asleep again.

(Ed's Note: Charismatic Renewal has bring forth gifts of the Holy Spirit. One of them is the gift of tongues. It is the utterance of prayer in a different language or dialect more often a dialect not understandable to the person saying the prayer.)

The next day, she woke up without any recollection of what happened the night before. Also, her fever was gone. It was neither my prayer that did it nor because I was “spiritually strong.” Praying just aligned me with the will of God, which allowed Him to work through me.

Yes, Jesus still casts out demons in this day and age through us who believe in His sovereignty over all.

Discipleship: Renewing Your Mind

Discipleship: Renewing Your Mind
by Rick Warren

Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts. Proverbs 4:23 (TEV)

To change your life, you must change the way you think. Behind everything you do is a thought. Every behavior is motivated by a belief, and every action is prompted by an attitude.

God revealed this thousands of years before psychologists understood it: "Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts" (Proverbs 4:23 TEV).

Imagine riding in a speedboat on a lake with an automatic pilot set to go east. If you decide to reverse course and head west, you have two possible ways to change the boat's direction.

One way is to grab the steering wheel and physically force it to head in the opposite direction from where the autopilot is programmed to go. By sheer willpower, you could overcome the autopilot, but you'd feel

constant resistance. Your arms would eventually tire of the stress, you'd let go of the steering wheel, and the boat would instantly head back east, the way it was internally programmed.

This is what happens when you try to change your life with willpower; you say, "I'll force myself to eat less ... stop smoking ... quit being disorganized and late."

And, yes, willpower can produce short-term change, but it creates constant internal stress because you haven't dealt with the root cause. The change doesn't feel natural. Eventually you give up and go off the diet.

There is a better and easier way: Change your autopilot; in other words, the way you think. "Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think" (Romans 12:2 NLT).

Change always starts first in the mind. The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel influences the way you act, which means "there must be a spiritual renewal of your thoughts and attitudes" (Ephesians 4:23 NLT).

To be like Christ you must develop the mind of Christ. The New Testament calls this mental shift "repentance," which in Greek literally means "to change your mind."

To repent means to change the way you think - about God, yourself, sin, other people, life, your future, and everything else, and you adopt Christ's outlook and perspective on life.