Delivering You From Deliverance Ministries: A New Session at the Cessationist Conference!

We're not following after the signs. The signs are following after the truth and revival is coming back to truth. Biblical truth. There's nothing more biblical than setting people free from the influence of demonic activity.

Deliverance leads to reformation. Reformation leads to revival.

You can't fight. Something that you don't know is there.

The first deliverance Jesus did was not in a nightclub. It was in the synagogue. The first time the demon manifested, it happened right in the church.

It's happening in the streets, even if it's not happening in the church. Is it though?

Well, Jim. Hey, brother. How are you today? Good good doing fine doing fine. You and I have done a lot of things together ministerially speaking. Of course, I've preached at Kootenai church a number of times but you and I have been at some conferences together, but mostly overseas.

I think this is our first big conference domestically that we're gonna tag team at. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Well, you and I both spoke at the cessationist conference at our church, but it was nothing of a scope or scale of what we've got going on here in Oklahoma in a couple weeks.

Yeah, yeah, so this is gonna be a First Baptist Church, Mustang, Oklahoma, which is kind of like a suburb of Oklahoma City. Jim, why is this conference necessary? A lot of people think, oh, this is we've already dealt with this.

Why is this a pertinent topic? Why is this conference needed?

The Ongoing Need to Confront Charismatic Theology

Well, it's a pertinent topic because as you know, I've been there when people come up to you at various locations and say that the Strange Fire Conference that was hosted by Grace Community Church has had such an impact upon them, helping people think clearly about charismatic issues, charismatic theology and teachers and a lot of the implications of charismatic thinking in modern evangelicalism.

That's what that conference dealt with and people come up to you all the time and say, you know, I first saw you back at Strange Fire or thank you for what you did at Strange Fire. That conference continues to have an impact in people's lives even today.

And that was more than 10 years ago now, I think, that Grace Community Church hosted that. And charismatic theology has not gone away. In fact, it has increased in its spread and in its reach. And it creeps into even what we would consider to be cessationist churches in spiritual warfare practices and hearing the voice of God, which are the things that I've written on and we've spoken on together.

So it continues to have an impact inside of the church and it continues to need to be addressed, I guess. And this is going to be a good venue to do that. This is not really a reboot of the Strange Fire Conference, but it is kind of a focused answer to some charismatic claims and charismatic teachers.

And I think it's every bit as much necessary today as it was even 10 years ago.

Yeah, absolutely. This is going to pick up where Strange Fire left off. And I've heard it described in a sense, you know, Strange Fire 2 and some of the same speakers that were part of Strange Fire will also be at this conference.

So there is very much that connection. And you're right. I have yet to go since Strange Fire. That was 2013. I have yet to preach anywhere domestically or internationally in which I have not had at least one person, it's usually multiple, come up to me and tell me.

How much that conference impacted them, how much it helped them. And so so this is this is I'm really looking forward to this, excited about it. I'm really excited that you are a new addition to the lineup there.

And so tell us what what is your topic?

Demon Slayers and the Dangers of Deliverance Ministry

Yeah, I am a speaker born out of due time, to borrow Paul's words from First Corinthians 15, in the sense that my addition to the to the speaker lineup has been quite almost very late as of late, just a couple of weeks ago that I kind of found that out and got signed up for that.

And I'm I'm replacing Phil Johnson, which is in itself huge shoes to fill. And there's going to be nobody there more disappointed that Phil Johnson is not going to be there than me. And maybe the only people are the people who realize that I'm filling in for Phil.

They might be a little bit more disappointed. I'd rather sit and listen to Phil. Honestly, I love Phil. I'm grateful for his ministry. But but health issues and some other considerations have made him have to drop out.

So my session is on and I got the very last session of the conference. My session is on demon slayers, the dangers of demon slayers and deliverance ministry. So that's my subject matter. It's kind of attached to things that I covered in the book, Truth or Territory, the biblical approach to spiritual warfare.

It's kind of attached to that. And I've just noticed recently in the last few years that there has been this resurgence of deliverance ministry theology inside the church. And of course, it has been aided on by the by the readiness of social media and YouTube and the ability to live stream services that has all sort of brought deliverance ministry back to the forefront inside the church.

And people are being deceived by the teachings and the promises of the deliverance ministry movement. And so I've been doing a bit of reading on that subject, looking into the history of the movement, as well as some of the modern teachers.

And Lord willing, I'm hoping to write a book on that subject in the near future. And at this conference, this is the subject that I've been tasked to tackle.

The History of Deliverance Ministry and Its Charismatic Roots

Yeah. And this is a big deal because the deliverance stuff was, you know, it was making a lot of waves back in the 80s and 90s. Bob Larson and some others. He's kind of the most prominent, I would suppose.

And then it kind of, you know, Mike Warnke, you remember Mike Warnke, Rebecca Brown, Frank Hammond. He wrote the book, Pigs in the Parlor, published in 1973. So it's, you know, the deliverance ministry has kind of always been attached to charismatic theology, goes back to some of the promises and thinking of that, go back to the Azusa Street revival in 1906.

And and it became kind of mainstream to the 1960s. But you're right in the 1980s, I got saved in 1985. And by 1990, I was already being exposed to some of the charismatic teaching on deliverance ministry and exorcisms.

And I never made the connection. This is something I'm going to cover in the in the conference, actual brief history of the deliverance ministry. But I never made the connection between charismatics, charismatic claims and some of the deliverance ministry stuff that I was exposed to and even thought I should be practicing.

I never realized that was charismatic thinking. I never spoke in tongues. I never believed the claims of the healing ministry and movement, never believed that miracles were, you know, the gift of miracles were for today.

That was never part of my thinking. But the idea of binding Satan, rebuking the devil, claiming authority, casting down demons, praying against territorial spirits and performing exorcisms, that was all something that I thought was was part and parcel of just normal Christianity.

And I never really connected it to the claims, the continuationist claims of the charismatic movement. I thought it was something that Christians should be doing. I didn't realize that exorcisms were miracles and classified as miracles in scripture.

Why Christians Cannot Be Demon-Possessed

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And now, especially since it seems like COVID, with the lockdowns and all, just kind of we saw an explosion of this new wave of deliverance ministries, self-proclaimed demon slayers.

And we're talking about guys like Greg Locke, Alexander Pagani, Isaiah Saldivar, Vlad Savchuk, Mike Signorelli, Mark Driscoll, throw him in there as well, and some others who claim that Christians can be inhabited by demons.

You could have one or more of those demonic miscreants running around on the inside of you, even though you are born again Christian. So what are some of the dangers of this deliverance theology?

I think one of the main dangers, what you just identified, is the teaching that Christians can be demon possessed. In fact, Frank Hammond, in his book, Pigs in the Parlor, says that he's never met a Christian who is an exception to that rule.

Every Christian has demons. So, you know, Mike Signorelli, some of those guys, the more modern charismatic teachers, they would make a radical dichotomy between the soul slash spirit and the body. And they would say that while a demon cannot possess or inhabit the soul or the spirit, the demons can, in fact, do inhabit this sinful body.

Because while our soul has been renewed and regenerated and made new, the body has not. This body needs to be resurrected. So they would say we've got these two parts to our being, and the one, the soul spirit, has been regenerated and made new, so demons can't inhabit that.

But our body has not been resurrected, and that's the next step of salvation. When we get a resurrected body, then we won't be able to be inhabited by demons. But in the meantime, we can have a renewed soul or spirit, be regenerated and be born again, made alive in the inner man.

But yet this body of flesh can still have demons attached to it. And so Alexander Pagani would go so far as to say that you can have demons in your toes, your nose, your eyes, your mouth, your teeth, on your tongue.

They just inhabit all the parts of your physical body. And since that hasn't been resurrected and renewed yet, the answer to that now in this time is to have those demons exercised from you. So Frank Hammond would say there's never met a Christian who's an exception to this.

Every Christian has a demon, at least one demon, clinging to their body in some way.

The Distortion of Sanctification and the Power of the Holy Spirit

Yeah, and I smiled when he was naming body parts because the first thing popped into my mind talking about Alexander Pagani. Well, he also believes that you can have demons in your, use a technical term here, in your anus.

In your anus.

That's in his book, Secrets of Deliverance. He goes into all kinds of prayers that you can pray to get demons out of your genitals, your anus, your mouth, your nose, your eyes, your ears, et cetera.

Yeah.

And that's a dangerous teaching.

Do what? That's just dangerous teaching.

Oh, it is.

It really, it really undermines, I think, the work of Christ on the cross and what deliverance truly means.

Yeah, absolutely. It undermines, diminishes the work of Christ. It diminishes, ironically, given that we're talking about the charismatic movement, it diminishes the power, the true power of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

It's an insult to him. It short circuits people's sanctification because they think that their sin issues, whether it's drunkenness, whether it's looking at porn, whether it's bad temper or whatever, it's because you've got a demon.

It's not a sin issue. You've got a demon and you just need to have that demon cast out of you and then you'll be better. So it's a distorted view of sanctification, growth and holiness and all of that.

Why Jesus and the Apostles Cast Out Demons

Now, play, ironically, playing devil's advocate, one of the arguments that I hear from them, it's a common one. Well, if demons are extricated when a person gets saved, once you become a Christian, you can know if that is true, you can no longer have demons inside of you.

Then why did Jesus cast out demons? For example, Mark chapter five, the garrison demoniac. Why didn't Jesus just save the guy instead? But he didn't do that. He just cast the demons out. So why didn't he just, you know, sovereignly save him?

And that would have taken care of the demons. So why did he cast the demons out?

Yeah, I'm not sure that the argument holds water for a couple of reasons. One, because how do we know that salvation did not accompany the exorcisms of the demons? That's an assumption that people are bringing to the text, like with the gathering demoniac.

He was in his right mind and he saw who it was who had done this, performed this miracle. Why should we assume that salvation did not come to his household? Right in conjunction with the exercising of the demons.

But to go further into their argument to suggest that they're suggesting that. That Jesus didn't just save them and have the demons flee, but actually exercised a power, control and authority over the demons.

There's a reason why Jesus did that, and it was to demonstrate that the kingdom of God had come among them. They had they had somebody in their midst. And this was believers. The unbelieving people in Israel had somebody in their midst who was claiming to be of Davidic origin, Davidic of the Davidic line.

He was the greater son of David. He was the Messiah. And he was making these claims of himself and calling himself equal with the father and claiming to be lord of the Sabbath and claiming to be the one who has power over all of creation and all of authority and to speak on behalf of the father and demonstrate the power of the father and speak the words of the father.

These are the claims that Jesus made of himself. And one of the evidences of those claims was his ability to bind the strong man and to plunder his house. So Jesus having these bold confrontations with the demonic was not intended to be a pattern for the entire church age as if it's necessary for the entire church age, just as Jesus healing everybody he came into contact with or many of the people he came into contact with was not intended to be a pattern for us to follow.

These things demonstrated his authority over disease, over death, over illness, over creation, and over the demonic. Those miracles demonstrated that he has control over everything. And so you put together all of his miracles and you see that when he raised the dead, he's demonstrating he's the lord of life and can control, has power over death, that he is the resurrection, the life.

When he heals the sick, he's demonstrating that he is the creator who can make the blind to see. He can create seeing eyes. He can create speaking mouths. He can restore withered hands. He can make the lame to walk.

He's lord over creation. He turns water into wine, creates wine out of water. This is a creative miracle. Same thing with feeding the multitudes. And then his exercising demons and casting out demons demonstrates that he is lord even over Satan, that he has power over the demonic realm.

These were all intended to be evidences of his messianic claims so that this one standing in their midst who was saying, look, I'm the son of David. I'm lord of the Sabbath. I'm here to save people in fulfillment of all Old Testament expectation and promise.

And then they would want some proof of that because any Jew could say those things. So what is the proof of that? Well, the proof of it is that he heals the sick, makes the lame to walk, the blind to see, raises the dead and exercises demons.

Right.

And these were unique historical instances that were done. These unique historical events in the life of Jesus intended to demonstrate that he is and was who he said he is.

Yeah.

And and by extension, the apostles, they cast out demons as well, but those were also signs, right?

Yeah.

Giving evidence that they indeed spoke on behalf of Christ, that they were his spokesman and they were signs. In fact, in the New Testament, exorcisms are called miracles whenever they're mentioned in the book of Acts.

And they're even classified as extraordinary miracles. And so there are people today who claim that all Christians should be exercising demons, that this should just be the part and parcel of everybody's ministry within the church and that every church should be exercising demons.

But I don't see churches multiplying bread and fish and feeding, starving multitudes in Africa. I don't see them walking around, raising the dead and emptying out hospitals and and mausoleums and cemeteries and funeral homes.

They're not doing those things. Yet they're claiming the power to do the same thing that is called an extraordinary miracle, namely exorcisms.

Right.

So that's not for us to do today. That's why there's no instruction in the New Testament regarding exorcisms given to the church.

Kind of like hearing the voice of God. There's no instructions on how to do that.

Yeah, exactly right.

Yeah, yeah.

All right. Well, that's just a little, dear friends, that's just a little foretaste of Jim's session coming up at the Cessations Conference. Jim, I'm really, again, really, really grateful you're a part of it.

I can't wait. Looking forward to the conference and worshiping and serving with you. And this will be a big help to a lot of folks.

Yeah, I hope so. And I hope that the Lord uses this, if he even does it, uses it a fraction as much as he has used the Strange Fire Conference, then I'll be pleased with that.

Well, indeed, indeed. All for the glory of Christ.

Yeah.

Amen.

Jim, thank you for your faithful service, brother, and giving us your time today.

All right.

OK, dear ones, all the links down below in the description there to the Cessation Conference. Again, this is October 3rd through 5th. And First Baptist Church, Mustang, Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, conveniently located within the easy days drive of most of the country.

So right there in the middle. So y 'all come join us. It's going to be a great time. It's going to be an important conference. And this will have, by God's grace, a lot of positive fruit bearing ripple effects long after the conference is over.

All right.

Well, until our next time together, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of his Holy Spirit be with you all.