Deliverance the Pathway !

Deliverance the Pathway to Freedom and Liberty

By Abraham Israel

The word deliverance means the state of being saved from harm or danger. Harm or Danger in the Bible is referred to as trial, tribulation and temptation. Jesus said in John 16:33, “…In the world you will have tribulation…”. Tribulation is inevitable as long as we are in the world system of governance. These tribulations are not from God but it is planned and executed by the evil one [Satan]. So only Jesus told His disciples to pray in this manner, “And do not lead us in to temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” (Matt 6:13).

This prayer is a pattern that Jesus had taught His disciples. In other words this was the model for all other prayers that they were going to pray in the future (Luke 11:1-4). If deliverance was daily needed for the apostles who were working with Jesus, driving out the demons and healing the sick, how much more the believers need deliverance today, who are growing from babyhood to maturity and onwards. This also brings us the information of how important it had been for even the apostles who were with Jesus Christ to be delivered from the evil one daily by praying this prayer to the Heavenly Father for deliverance.

This prayer is that which will cause us to humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord and it will make us realize that ‘it is not by our effort that we are living this Christian life but by His grace that we are living a victorious overcoming life’. “Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). With out God intervening in our daily life, we cannot be delivered from all our daily difficulties that we face and the temptations that we go through daily. So only in Jeremiah 30:11 God says, “I am with you, says the Lord, ‘to save you [deliver you]…”. If God intervenes in our daily life by our humble invitation and submission to Him, then every problems we face we can be victorious, in every area of our life.

God is the most wonderful gentleman you can ever find, until and unless you will, He will not. In other words until you invite and desire and ask Him to deliver you, He will not act.

Deliverance ministry to the unbelievers is to “Preach the gospel, to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; [by] proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18-19). Some uninformed people reason out by saying, deliverance ministry is not needed because “...if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed”. My question to them is, if deliverance ministry is not needed for the believer’s, ‘why did Jesus teach the believers to pray, “…Deliver us from the evil one [daily]” (Luke 11:1-4)?’ The believers, who understand this scripture wrongly, should make a paradigm shift to understand it in the right way to see positive results in their life.

Jesus said to the believers, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free….whoever commits sin is a slave of sin” (John 8:31-32, 34). Here we can clearly understand three main things, one is the believers need to abide in His word and if the believer abides in the words of Jesus, then the truth that He holds will make him free from all bondages. To experience this liberty the believer need to understand the truth [know the truth] and practice it. It takes time to practice. All the believers need to be constantly fed with the truth of the word of God through the teaching ministry of God ordained Bible teachers and the more they experience that truth the more they will live in freedom. From this we can conclude that the deliverance ministry to the believers is essential to make them understand the truth in the right way and help them practice it to keep them in the freedom that Jesus had already purchased for them (John 8:31-36).

Here Jesus does not speak about a one time event of deliverance so that the believer can do whatever he wants deceiving himself to be free from all evil. But here Jesus speaks about the analogy between a slave and a son, comparing one’s body as a house (John 2:21), He was emphasizing that the believer will live in the body if the Son [Jesus Christ] makes him free from the fear of death [“the soul that sins will die” (Ezek 18:20)] (Heb 2:15) or else the body will die eternally because of sin in the flesh.

A slave does not have the rights to live in the owner’s house [i.e. Creator God’s possession] except for the specified leased time given to him [i.e. until he dies physically]. But a son does have ownership rights over the house of his father and will live in the house forever. We become God’s children and we become owners of our body through Jesus Christ our Lord. A slave of sin is the one who does not have the right to be a son because he does not have Jesus and he will not have his body raised up in the resurrection of life, so he will not live in the house forever.

So taking John 8:36, one cannot wrongly say that deliverance ministry is not needed because Jesus answered the skeptical Jews who wrongly understood like the modern day Christian believers that they need no deliverance because they were already Jews who are the true children of Abraham.

Yet some other believers say that “Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Cor 5:17). Taking this they say that deliverance is not necessary for the believers because all things have become new. My question to them is, if that is the absolute truth, why should the Apostle Paul who wrote this should say”…put off concerning your former conduct, the old man….put on the new man…” (Eph 4:22-24)?

The believers should know that 2 Cor 5:17 is true in the spirit man level but in the believers soulish level, the battle is still on between the devil and the believers (1 Pet 2:11; 2 Cor 10:3-6). The devil will try his best to keep the believers in bondage in his soulish level, so only Apostle Paul was advising the believers to put off the old man which is the former ways of the influence of the worldly system of governance which is controlled by impulsive demon spirits that had influenced them.

From the above detailed exposition we can clearly understand that the deliverance ministry is needed in two ways,

(i) To the unbelievers so that they are brought in to the kingdom of God through salvation [i.e. accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior].

(ii) To the believers to experience and practice the truth and in turn keep the new found freedom and to act in the authority by growing in the knowledge of the truth that Jesus has already given to us [i.e. experiential knowledge of the truth].

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