Why Do Deliverance in Church?

And from then on, my wife and I were launched into a new phase of ministry. We didn’t choose it. It just was like an explosion. It was like an avalanche. People came from everywhere. And most of them did not come to the church. They came to our home. How they knew we were there, it’s hard to say.

But for week after week, we never went to bed before about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. We had people in our home, counseling and praying with them. Now, as a result of this, my own physical strength began to break down, and I got a very serious lesson that if I didn’t watch my own strength and spiritual condition, I wouldn’t be in a position to deliver anybody. I’d need deliverance myself.

And also, I began to see that this was really not a practical way to handle the situation. I soon discovered that the basis for getting a person delivered is proper instruction out of the Word of God. And that to give a person the instruction they needed would take probably about an hour. To pray with them would take, say, another 30 minutes. In other words, each individual took an hour and a half. So if you took 30 people a week, that was 45 working hours, which, by modern standards, is a working week.

And furthermore, it was extremely wearing physically for the people doing it. So, I didn’t quite know what to do, but the Lord gradually showed me that this isn’t necessary. As a matter of fact, I really cannot recall exactly how I got into it, but I found myself preaching on deliverance, calling people forward, and instructing them how to receive deliverance, and then seeing them delivered without all this individual counseling and praying.

I remember vividly one of the first situations in which this really happened was the International Convention of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship in Chicago in 1965 in the Conrad Hilton Hotel. And I was doing the afternoon Bible teaching each afternoon for five days. And one day, I taught on deliverance. There were about 600 people in the Bible class. And at the end, I made one appeal for those who felt they might need deliverance. And immediately, 200 people put up their hands, at a minimum.

I called them forward, and I found 200 people standing in front of me needing deliverance. And I thought, “What do I do now?” And it really was at that point that I saw that if I gave them the correct instructions and prayed a general prayer, they could get their own deliverance. And many did. I can still meet people over the United States who say, “I got delivered in that service in the Conrad Hilton Hotel in ’65.” But I’ll have to admit, it was a chaotic scene. There were a couple of epileptics that fell to the floor and were frothing. And there were women screaming, and some women just rushed out in panic and went up to their hotel rooms and decided they wouldn’t come down again as long as I was preaching.

So, I have to agree with my critics, of whom there have been some, that it wasn’t the standard type of service. And really, I suppose the Conrad Hilton Hotel isn’t really the place for that sort of thing. We had another instance of deliverance in those meetings, the last afternoon when I didn’t preach on deliverance. We got landed with a young woman. And again, this was a five-hour case. And I did not count, but a lady who was present counted and wrote down the names of 72 different spirits that named themselves and came out of this one girl. Now, we know this girl today. She’s a friend of ours. She’s living for God. This is not just a temporary flash of emotionalism. She’s a trained nurse. She’s not the type of person who’s ignorant or couldn’t express herself or could be misled as to what was happening. And some of these spirits that came out of her were fantastic.

For instance, there was one that was the spirit of fetishes that understood Swahili, which I spoke from East Africa. The girl had never been near East Africa, didn’t understand a word of Swahili. This spirit knew everything about East Africa that was needed to know. See, it could name politicians and answer questions, and so on. So, in many ways, I got objective proof of the validity of this thing.

And then I began to think, “Well, is it right to do it in public? It embarrasses some people. Some people don’t feel it’s appropriate to a church service,” and so on. But I began to study the ministry of Jesus. And it was made very clear to me that Jesus regularly did this in the synagogue. He taught, and then He cast out demons in all the synagogues of Galilee. And they were not quiet. They screamed. They threw people on the ground. They frothed at the mouth. They identified Him as the Son of God, and so on. It wasn’t done in that decorous, seemly way that some people like to associate with a synagogue or a church. There was plenty of action.

But I said to myself, and I still say that today, if it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me. As far as I’m concerned, I have no ambition to improve on the methods of the Lord. If I can attain to that, that will be my ambitions satisfied in that respect.

And I can only praise God that in the years between then and now, without exaggeration, I have seen thousands of people delivered from evil spirits. And I have written testimonies from those who must number well over a hundred. All sorts of persons: physicians, lawyers, teachers, attorneys, not ignorant, emotional, unstable people who don’t know what they’re talking about, who cared enough, without my ever pressing them to, to write down and express what deliverance meant, and to express their gratitude to God, and also to me, for receiving deliverance. And I will say this, of all the torments that people endure today, there is no torment, in my opinion, that equals the mental and spiritual torments that demons inflict on people. And if you want to have some idea what it’s like, go to a mental institution.