Dear Father’s children:
When you live alone, the enemy loves to use it as an opportunity to attack. Last Friday night, I did myself in as usual on Friday nights by thinking, “Wow, its Friday, what are my friends doing? Where can I go? Who can I call?” In the West, Friday is the first evening of the weekend and the work week is done. It is a joke at work to say TGIF which means Thank God It’s Friday. Traditionally, friends and relatives get together or husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends go to a movie and dinner. But that life is past for me but I don’t want to let it go. The problem is that in Japan, Saturday is just another workday and Friday night is just another night of the week.
Last Friday night, as I wanted to be with someone for fellowship, that sick feeling of loneliness sunk into my soul. But I know that when I long for fellowship, that is the time that the Lord wants me to seek Him. He told me many years ago through the Word that He gave to Abraham, “I am your exceeding great reward,” that He wants to be my Rest and Relaxation in His peace and joy as I worship..
The loneliness feeling wants me to get out of my apartment and do anything but be alone. And so the battle begins. I want to run and God wants me to stay. This time though I remembered Paul’s writing to the Ephesian Christians in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood (humans), but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” That lonely feeling that feels so horrible was a flaming arrow of the evil one that got through my shield of faith because I looked to man for my R & R when God had already spoken to me that I am to look to Him. My disobedience opened the door for the enemy to attack.
The Apostle Peter wrote in 1 Peter 5:8 “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. (Watch for it). Your adversary the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.” Then in verse 9, he tells us what to do. “But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brothers who are in the world.” Peter said to resist the devil. Jesus said in Luke 10:19 “Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.”
So in the Name of Jesus, I spoke to that feeling/spirit and told it that Irejected it and commanded it in Jesus’ Name to leave me and to get out of my apartment. IT IMMEDIATELY LEFT. Human emotions do not work that way. You cannot tell your sorrow over a lost love one to go away and it goes away. After the spirit left, the Holy Spirit touched me with his joy. I started to worship Father and the joy increased. I then broke out in tongues and the flow was obviously the freedom of the Holy Spirit.
It would be wrong of me to leave you with the impression that it is just that easy to tell these things to leave and they will immediately leave all the time. I have had counsel and put my heart under the Holy Spirit’s microscope to search out my personal problems for 25 plus years and am now free. The spirits know me from past battles. This is something we grow into and we have to have the Holy Spirit heal our past hurts, and experience a heart that immediately forgives others of hurting us/you. But we must not let the thought, "Oh, I am too weak too fight," stop us from fighting back. Jesus wants us always to act in faith in His power to fight on our behalf. We don't let a lack of faith hold us back from trying. We will not learn to fight without trying to fight.
When I was in seminary, I suffered from attacks of anxiety. It would not go when I told it to leave because there was a weakness in my heart that left the door open for the spirit to attack. However, I was not defenseless. Jesus told Rick Joyner as related in his book The Final Quest or The Call that if we fall off the road of sweet fellowship with Him and fall into the ditch of despair, we cannot think our way out of the ditch because it was our thoughts that got us there. The remedy is to call out to Jesus, “HELP,” and He would come and put us back on His road. And that is what I would do when I was attacked by anxiety. Sitting in front of my computer staring at the beginning of a paper feeling anxiety, I would pray, “Dear Lord Jesus, please take this anxiety away so I can write my paper.” And immediately He would take it away and I would write a B+ or A paper.
After seminary, God gave me a gift in a prophet friend who prayed with me and together we discovered the thing in my past that caused the anxiety and I spoke to that spirit and it left too. When it left, CONFIDENCE, flooded my soul. It is as Peter wrote: “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” We don’t have to put up with loneliness, fear, worry, anxiety etc. if we have laid our hearts on Jesus’ altar, opened up to let the Holy Spirit search us for our weak areas caused by past hurts, and get healed and completely set free. We will have power and authority over all the works of the enemy in our life. There is no blame in having a problem. The solution is to find out what the problem is and take it to Jesus and ask the Holy Spirit to heal our heart and forgive anyone who may have hurt us. A healed heart is a free heart and a powerful heart against the enemy.
God bless you all
Gordon Tippett