Hey friend,
This is a gooder. Get ready to dive deep. Seriously. Toss the snorkle and strap on an oxygen tank. We be going deep sea diving.
A few months after I'd been going to my new church, I felt like asking the pastor and his wife if they wanted to go out for lunch with me that day after the service. I didn't know that it was anything important but I've found that when God is nudging me to do something, it always just works out and of course that Sunday they didn't have plans. And it's funny because I didn't really have a reason why except for just wanting to get to know them better.
Well of course God was getting ready to rock my little world again.
So we are having lunch and it's great. We talk about what's going on in our lives and it's totally awesome. We have chatted a lot and things are winding down as we finish our meal. Then it suddenly hits me. I haven't told them the incredible story about how God led me to their church. (Read that post by clicking here.)
So I ask if they have time to stay and talk more?
Of course they do. God always thinks ahead when he plans something for me.
So I go through it all and I tell them all about how God started telling me to come every week to this new church and all of the craziness that happened through that, but I also feel compelled to tell them about how controlling some people in my old church were. Like the one time the lady who played the organ blew up on me because I told her she couldn't play on my week of leading worship. (Click here to read about that)
They stopped in the middle of that story and asked me: "Do you know what spirit you were dealing with there?"
Me: Uhhhh, what spirit?
Them: The spirit of Jezebel, of control.
Me: Oooohhh. . . soooo. . . what does that mean?
They taught me a little about it and then I continued on with the rest of my story. I finished up my stories about God changing my life and by then it was getting late so we went our separate ways. But later that day I realized that I needed to learn about this Jezebel spirit so that I knew I had for sure kicked it out of my life and not left room for it to come back in.
I found two sermons from pastors we've come to trust on T.V. The first is Robert Morris (click here to see his sermon on youtube) and Jimmy Evans (click here for his sermon). It just so happened that those two exact sermons are what my church recommends for learning about this spirit.
Then I met with the wonderful lady who runs the prayer ministry at my church. Carol taught me some basics about spiritual warfare and then more specifically about Jezebel.
You know, from all the information I learned from the videos and from meeting with Carol, everything I went through in 2018 when I left my old church was basically fighting the Jezebel spirit. I was breaking free of the spirit of control.
I recently found out that when I started going to my new church, a neighbor of ours wanted to come over to our house and confront me to tell me that what I was doing was wrong. We farm right beside each other and that man is one of the founders and one of the main financial supporters of my old church. He wanted to come to my house and tell me that disobeying Brenton's wishes was wrong.
Flat out wrong.
Going to a new church where God was filling my heart and soul with his perfect love and made me full of joy - it was wrong. Because my husband didn't want me to go (at the time).
That is the Jezebel spirit.
Don't get me wrong. These are the nicest people in the world, they smile all day long and have the best intentions. I really considered them family, my church family, and they do some very nice things like making food to give out when people are sick. They will welcome you with smiles every Sunday and they will help you in times of need. They are just clueless when it comes to listening to the Holy Spirit and they are tolerating the Jezebel spirit within their church.
Robert Morris says in his sermon about this: "Some of these people, they are really good people. They really are. They don't even know that this spirit takes up residence through an open door of rejection."
In Revelation God says to this one church that they are great people, but they are tolerating Jezebel:
“I know all the things you do. I have seen your love, your faith, your service, and your patient endurance. And I can see your constant improvement in all these things.
But I have this complaint against you. You are permitting that woman—that Jezebel. . ."
Okay, now catch how good this church seems. They have love, faith, service, and patient endurance and they are even growing in those things! My old church is all of those things. They are loving, serving and patient people. Totally and without doubt. The thing is that the spirit of control can hide under all of those things.
And the Jezebel spirit uses them because it can hide behind really nice people who look like stand-up Christians and then it controls them from actually being effective or listening to the Holy Spirit.
I see this operating my old church in two ways: one is in the organ and the other was in the songs we played. The church there hates new music and will always say, "it's not meant for group singing."
They won't admit that really they just don't want to sing new songs. They don't want to change. But they won't be honest about it.
Shortly after I left, my husband brought home a recording of that week's sermon. The preacher talked about why they should be keeping up with the new music but he ended his sermon with this line: "as long as the songs are meant for group singing."
What a load of bullshit.
That is their cop out, their excuse for not liking whatever new songs they decide not to even try. And then they refuse to get rid of the organ - adamantly. Like they would die before taking the organ out of their church. In that church, they think they have to learn a new song before they can really sing it at church. At my new church, we sing new songs all the time and you don't worry about "learning how to sing".
WE JUST SING IT.
Here's what they need to do if they want to stop tolerating this spirit of control: Toss the organ, sing all new worship songs every Sunday and stop being so damn afraid of change. I'm not saying that can't ever sing How Great Thou Art ever again but they are so afraid of change that they need to totally surrender and start to really serve the needs of their community by singing the songs we like. They can listen to hymns all week long, but blast the Hillsong music on Sunday. They can howl all day on Saturday to The Old Rugged Cross, but they need to crank the stereo Sunday morning to Reckless Love, Waymaker and Do It Again.
And then they need to do that, again, and again, and again.
In Robert Morris' sermon, he says this spirit will show up and attack in these ways: illness and disease, strange attacks on your life. He says that when he fought this spirit, he had regular sinus infections because he was not listening to his sense of discernment. One pastor we had for a while at my old church, his wife got cancer and died. This spirit is like a cancer on that church and they are slowly dying. And all they do is smile and say, "we don't want to change. We'll just lay down here and die instead."
I think most people in that church are relatively safe because they accept the spirit and are under it's control but my husband and I had so many accidents and close calls while we were going there. Plus, after I left, God told me that I was protected now on the roads and I've never had a close call since. Even animals often run away from my vehicle. I laugh at it now that when they look up and see me and turn around and run, it's like they are recognizing me. Oh shit! It's Heather! We aren't allowed near her! Bahaha.
The Jezebel spirit is also usually connected with a religious spirit. The people who are controlled by this spirit may have a deep knowledge of the Bible and be able to quote scripture but they are legalistic. That means that if you don't do Christianity exactly their way, you're probably not a real Christian. It's a faith that limits people and holds them back instead of creating freedom like God intended.
Jezebel uses this religious, controlling type of faith, to keep people from really doing anything important for God. Instead of going out and really evangelizing, they will sit back and say, Jesus is coming soon and I'm just so glad I'm saved. Too bad for all those people who don't believe in Jesus and won't come to our church so that we could help them get saved.
Okay. Honesty time.
That was me saying those things.
At our old church I would always say those exact things and nobody ever disagreed with me.
Yup, Jesus is coming soon, glad we're in the safe zone. Too bad for all those heathens who won't come to church. Brenton often complained about this before we left, saying that he wished our church would actually do something effective to reach out to people.
Here's the key though. Jezebel can only control people when it is allowed to. There will always be people in authority who could stand up and oppose it, but they don't. There might only be a few people in that old church who do the controlling, the rest of the people there are allowing it. Tolerating it. And as long as Jezebel is tolerated, it will keep that church paralyzed from actually doing anything worthwhile.
Here is one place in the Bible where God talks about a church tolerating Jezebel:
Revelation Chapter 2:19-22
The Message to the Church in Thyatira
19 “I know all the things you do. I have seen your love, your faith, your service, and your patient endurance. And I can see your constant improvement in all these things.
20 “But I have this complaint against you. You are permitting that woman—that Jezebel who calls herself a prophet—to lead my servants astray. She teaches them to commit sexual sin and to eat food offered to idols.
21 I gave her time to repent, but she does not want to turn away from her immorality.
22 “Therefore, I will throw her on a bed of suffering, and those who commit adultery with her will suffer greatly unless they repent and turn away from her evil deeds.
It says there that she encourages sexual sins and leads people astray to eat food offered to idols. Now we don't have food offered to idols these days but I did see evidence of the sexual temptation and some people falling into sexual sin at my old church. I won't talk about the other people but I do have something really embarrassing to admit.
I know that if you're one of those people who are really getting my posts and who understands me, you'll be kind and you won't judge me.
I used to have bad sexual thoughts come into my mind randomly and without reason. They were always completely out of the blue and would catch me by surprise. I would always just push them away thinking it was just Satan trying to tempt me, but I would often wonder why they came and I wished I could do something to get them to stop.
Let me be very clear that I've NEVER cheated on my husband but it still sucked to have those awful, gross, impure thoughts come into my mind. It always made me wonder what was wrong with me, but now I know that I was allowing those thoughts into my life because I was tolerating the Jezebel spirit.
Since the time when I left that church, stopped tolerating, and prayed Jezebel out of my life, those thoughts have completely stopped. Completely.
So if you've learned how to recognize the Jezebel spirit, how do you fight it?
In prayer, asking God to forgive you for tolerating it and then commanding it to leave your life and your house in Jesus name. But also with your life and your choices. God told me this year, 2019, that my main word is righteousness and my secondary word is humility. So I'm talking with Carol, our prayer leader at my new church, and you know what the first thing she said was?
She said, you righteously oppose it. RIGHTEOUSLY. (Gee, funny how God seems to know exactly what I need to learn each year.) This righteous opposition requires the following:
1) Submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
2) Being humble and having a serving heart toward other people. (My words that God gave me in 2019 just keep popping up all over this thing.)
3) Righteously standing up to controlling people. I had to stand up against being controlled and overcome my people pleasing weakness. I was allowing myself to be dominated and I had to stand up and say no. But I also could not go too far and try to control them back. Jimmy Evans talks about this in his sermon which I linked above closer to the top of this post.
Now this is just for you kicking Jezebel out of your own mind and life. If you have to fight Jezebel in a group of people, like a church, you can't do it alone. My prayer leader said it takes a team of people. So you can bet I won't be going marching into my old church trying to pray out the Jezebel spirit on my own. That's not my job anymore anyway, it's for the people who are still there but it can't be one person doing it alone. They need a team.
There is much more I could go into but I think we've dove deeply enough for now. Let me just add that God has been bringing Colossians 3:15 back to me a few times lately.
Colossians 3:15-17 The Message (MSG)
15-17 Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness. Let the Word of Christ—the Message—have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.
Comments