This tape contains the second of a series of six teachings entitled, The Counterfeit Kingdom, presented by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia. The title of this teaching is, Forbidden Territory and the Occult. I asked your prayers last week. Yeah, I did get them, but I want to reiterate the request. Derek Prince said that when he first began teaching on the subject of Satan and the occult and the powers of darkness, that it was the worst time in his life.

C.S. Lewis said that when he wrote that first major book for which he became famous, which was a parody and it was something of a humorous book and yet nonetheless very serious, the Screwtape Letters, that it was a terrible time in his life. Michael Green has just brought out a marvelous book and I'd like to recommend it to you.

It's a scholarly book and yet it's also based in experience and it is a very balanced book. It's part of the I Believe series in which he is the principal editor of the whole series. And this one is called I Believe in Satan's Downfall.

And he said it was a very difficult time as he wrote that book. And I don't want to be melodramatic about this, but the past week has easily been the toughest week in my life. And that's somewhat odd because I would say that in the last ten days or so, I've received some of the most marvelous expressions of love from members of the Christian community, tremendously encouraging support, and yet at the same time, incredible spiritual warfare.

And I don't think I've even gotten to the heavy stuff yet. I'm not going to go into details. One thing that you could pray for, I'm having terrific difficulty in sleeping.

So I share that. It's not a matter of being frightened by what we're about at all, but it is a matter of really needing the support and the anointing of God. We're going to come to the scriptures in a few minutes, but I wanted to start with something that I don't think many of you are at all aware of, a little bit of autobiography, how I became interested in the subject.

That's not really a very good way of putting it, how I was confronted with the subject. about 13 years ago. I was in my second year of chaplaincy at a private school in New England.

It was a girls' school. And we were not only... I was on the faculty.

Karen and I were also house parents. And I don't even remember exactly how it happened, but there was a girl who was literally dropped into our laps. She was not a member of that school at all, but somehow, through some connection, and she had literally no place to go, and they thought we might care enough to try to help her.

She had been living with her boyfriend in his college room, his dormitory room at Wesleyan University, and he threw her out. And her family had long since disowned her, and she had literally no place to go. And she had come to some kind of a rudimentary belief in Jesus, but somehow it wasn't enough.

That was over against a backdrop of being involved in virtually every kind of occult activity that I had ever heard of. I've heard of some others since then, but at that point, everything I'd ever heard of, she was into. She was into fortune-telling with apparently genuine prophetic, albeit occult, powers to predict the future with a remarkably high degree of accuracy.

She was deeply into trances and out-of-body experiences. She had voices speaking to her incessantly and also through her, speaking to her and through her, and that was what was really worrying her because these voices were becoming more and more demanding, more and more insistent, more and more blasphemous, more and more sexually ugly, and they were becoming suicidal kinds of suggestions that she just couldn't shut them off. They were running through her mind all the time.

She had the ability to see spirits, and they frightened her. I can't bear witness to this myself, but it was reported to me not only by her but by others that she had the ability to do levitation and telekinesis. And her mother had been a practicing witch and had raised her in that background.

So the trouble was that she started out being able to control all of those remarkable supernatural powers, but as time went on, more and more they were controlling her. And she was becoming very fearful, fearful literally for her life. We realized that we were way over our heads.

We were going to a wonderfully spirit-filled church at that time, and we went to the pastors. There were two co-pastors of the church and shared it with them, and they felt that they were over their heads too, although they'd had a bit more experience than we had, but they said there was a couple that they knew of that had been wonderfully used of God in deliverance ministry and in what today we would call inner healing. Nobody called it that back then, but that's what it was.

And we talked with them, and the six of us agreed to become a team, Karen and I and the two pastors and this other couple. We set a date for ministering to this girl with her full approval and desire to be ministered to and surrounded that date with prayer and fasting and preparation in the scriptures. It's a footnote that I share very infrequently and with some embarrassment that it was that that brought me into tongues.

See, I had long since come to believe in the legitimacy of tongues. It's just I didn't want it, thank you very much. but the night before that session I got down on my knees and I said Lord I am way out of my depth and if there is any additional equipping of your Holy Spirit that would be useful in ministering to this girl then I want to receive that and specifically Lord though I've denied it to everybody else you know that I've been resisting tongues and if that would be of help in ministering to her then I ask you to give me the gift of tongues and if it would be of help to minister to her to have a vision then give me a vision Lord I need supernatural equipment for this one and I open myself to receive from you whatever you have for me immediately I began to see a vision it was the first time I ever did it was not a very spectacular vision but that was a brand new experience and I did in fact come into the gift of tongues that night.

Well, I could go through all the details. They are not the point. It was a very long, very tough session.

In fact, it lasted over several days but she was wonderfully, marvelously delivered and she's doing perfectly well 13 years later. As a matter of fact, I baptized her in my living room at that school. She's married now and has a family.

That was the very first thing. Just about that time, I became aware of the fact that there was another couple on our campus, both of them faculty members and both of them house parents, as Karen and I were, who were conducting seances in their living room at precisely the time of our required chapel. That was an interesting coincidence, wasn't it?

And I, you know, very few people even knew about it, and those that did thought it was just a kind of a joke that they were doing. But I became aware of the fact that they were beginning to invite selected students to come, and they would excuse them from required chapel. And one girl in my dorm ended up getting totally involved in and committed to the occult and just as added measure became a lesbian in the process.

There it was on our campus. You may recall that in 1970, it's very dateable, in 1970, spring of 1970, all the major magazines came out with lead and cover articles on the resurgence of the occult sweeping across the country and especially in California. That was exactly the time I'm talking about.

This all coincided, 1970. Anton LaVey opened the first church of Satan in San Francisco and brought back into 20th century America a somewhat sanitized version of the Black Mass. It's front page stuff.

All of you will remember the Charles Manson family and the Tate Bianca murders. That was 1970 that we read about all that. I think it happened in late 69.

What you may not know is that the principal force influencing Charles Manson and his family was something called the Process Church of the Last Judgment. How many of you ever knew that? The Process Church of the Last Judgment.

It was out and out Satanism. And I saw some of their literature because one of their outlets was in Cambridge, Massachusetts and one of our students was getting into that. The first sentence was, Jesus said, love your enemies, Satan is the enemy of God therefore to serve God is to love Satan and the process referred to was that of aiding and abetting the end of the world by chaos, murder and violence and hence the slaying of Sharon Tate you may not believe this but for a very brief period of time Satanism was the fastest growing religion in New England and that is documentable.

And that's what we were dealing with all at once. If you were into youth ministry or college or university ministry in 1970 you couldn't avoid it. So there it was.

One of my fellow faculty members came up to me and asked me if I would please go and visit her son. She said he had joined a commune up in Massachusetts and it didn't sound right to her. Would I go up and visit him?

Sure, I'll go up. So I went up, found a commune of about 250 people living together. I was greeted at the door with all manner of expressions of love, flowers, little gifts, food.

Then they offered free love with any or all. I've never had that offer before or since. They were absolutely serious.

Welcomed me in until I sought out that particular boy and began to talk to him about Jesus. And immediately they came and literally tore him away. He didn't want to be taken away.

He was just a neophyte there. He hadn't been sufficiently indoctrinated and they wouldn't let him stay. They literally hauled him away and the leaders came and formed a circle around me and rank upon rank of the other commune members surrounded them.

And one guy in particular, flaming red hair and eyes that looked like they were coals of fire, started pointing his finger in my face, and his tone of voice just went up by decibel by decibel until he was literally screaming at me, people like you are what is wrong with the world. The world would be a better place if we could eliminate people like you. We need to put people like you to death.

I'm in the middle of a circle of 250 people. I don't know how many of you have had that pleasure. you don't forget it right away I stood there pleading the blood of Jesus and I walked quietly through that angry crowd felt like I was surrounded by wolves snapping at me and something was holding them at bay they couldn't get to the juggler vein somebody was holding a leash on them praise God well that's how I was introduced to this whole very unpleasant subject and I felt it was incumbent on me to study it and I did I've studied not only what many of the major Christian teachers have had to say on the subject but I've also studied many of the occult materials themselves and I need to say that I do not recommend that you do that unless you have a very good reason for doing so related to ministry number one and number two you make absolutely sure you've put on all the armor of God then only as much as you really have to because it doesn't edify at all in the last few years Karen and I have been in places like Hong Kong and Singapore and India and Africa where we've seen witchcraft evidence of pagan, occult power at work.

And so I think I have come to know a little bit about the subject. I'm not an expert, and I don't want to be one, but I do know a little bit about it. I choose not to major in this subject because my commission is to proclaim Christ, not the other guy.

You've heard me say very little on this subject. I think that if we proclaim the light, it's going to drive the darkness away. But we do need to say a little bit from time to time.

Just a warning before we go any further. I believe that an excessive preoccupation with the occult is itself occult. Just let that register.

In 1973, David Wilkerson wrote a remarkable book, a very controversial book. It was called The Vision. it's interesting to read it ten years later and see how accurate it was in the middle of it he said this he prophesied a fear of demon possession will grip many sincere Christians they will turn to teachers who speak more often of the power of Satan than they do of the power of God I have seen however that this movement toward a fear of Satan within the church will be short lived those who continue in an emphasis of satanic possession of Christians will return to the old law and a life of works.

That's an interesting comment, isn't it? And then he adds, also growing numbers of sincere Christians will sell everything and join Christian-type communes that feature monastery-type living and a set of laws by which to approach God. I think that has come remarkably true.

It is becoming true. So that's just a warning. We need to know enough to be forearmed and forewarned, and we need to know enough to enter into genuine situations of ministry, but don't become excessively preoccupied with the subject.

What I want to say about the occult tonight is really just three things, and I've said them before. I want to say them again. The first is that it's not nonsense.

It is not nonsense. C.S. Lewis said a generation ago that the devil's favorite strategy is to get people to think that he doesn't exist.

And I referred last time to the fact that even leading theologians and bishops of the church scoffed when the Bishop of Exeter published his study, his serious study on exorcism. They just don't believe that that sort of thing happens. We have a total nonchalance because we don't really believe that there is a devil, not a personal devil, There may be some powers of evil.

And there are therefore no demons and there's therefore nothing to worry about. Most people have absolutely no hesitation to fool around with things like Ouija or palm reading, you know, at a country fair, fortune telling, table tapping, tarot, I Ching, the reading of horoscopes. How many Christians?

How many millions of Christians read their horoscope every single morning in the daily newspaper? Maybe even the visiting of mediums. It's just parlor games.

It's just fun. And if anything weird happens, well, that just adds to the fun. I mean, that's a coincidence, isn't it?

And if something really weird happens, well, that just proves that the universe is still more mysterious than we want to believe most of the time. But what's wrong with that? It might even be a good thing.

If you could predict the future, wouldn't that be a good thing? If you could communicate with your father who died ten years ago, wouldn't that be a wonderful reassurance? Aren't there things that you'd love to say to your father?

And so the attitude is one of saying, it's foolishness, but if by any chance there's an element in it that isn't foolishness, well, there's certainly nothing wrong with it. It might even be a good thing. The biblical answer is that you've got to judge something not only in terms of its apparent effect or how it's used, but also in terms of where it comes from.

You see, people would make a distinction consistently between white and black magic. White magic is supernatural power that is used for good. Black magic is supernatural power that is used to harm others.

And they say white magic is good because it's used for good. That's like saying that the mafia is good because they use some of their money for charity. You've got to ask not only how is it being used, where is it being directed, but also where does it come from?

and the scripture says there's absolutely no question that there are supernatural realities other than God but the very fact that they're other than God tells you that they are an abomination to him and you tap into their power and even if your intention is to use that power for what seems to you to be a perfectly legitimate thing the power itself is out and out evil the word occult literally means secret or hidden and the occult therefore is searching for the quest for the pursuit of knowledge or experience or gratification or power that God has forbidden or it's searching for those sorts of things through channels that God has forbidden. If you'll accept those definitions, I submit to you that the very first temptation was a singularly occult temptation. Come, eat, and you will receive knowledge that God has told you he doesn't want you to have.

That's the occult. What rose up in Eve's heart was the desire for that hidden secret wisdom. And she was willing to have it on terms forbidden.

Now I have absolutely no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the time people dabbling in these sorts of things is in their mind nothing more or less than fun and games. They are completely innocent in their intention and the overwhelming majority of the time nothing significant happens, at least not immediately. At best, it's fun.

At worst, it's superstition or perhaps outright fraud. And over and over again, some of the most famous mediums in the world have been exposed as having elaborate systems for gaining knowledge about you so that when you go in there, it will appear that they're getting this information supernaturally, but the truth is they've got it on a computer somewhere. So there is an enormous amount of fraud as well as superstition and just downright foolishness.

I have no doubt that that's 85, maybe 95% of the time. But every now and then, something does happen. Something that is unmistakably and undeniably real.

So much so that it can literally change your life. so much so that it can lead you into the most desperate kind of bondage. And perhaps the most notorious example in the Episcopal Church was the sad history of Bishop Pike out in California.

Bishop Pike had come to the point where he disbelieved literally everything that we hold to be Orthodox Christianity. He visited my seminary just before I graduated and gave a sermon in which he went through the Nicene Creed and denied every single clause of it. No virgin birth, no God incarnated in flesh, no resurrection from the dead, no life after death, no second coming, nothing.

The Bible is just a handful of stones. Jesus had nothing different from any of the rest of us. He just used what he had a little better than most of us.

And he was still a bishop. Scandal. Do you know what happened shortly after that?

He left the Episcopal Church and drifted on into spiritism. His son committed suicide, and immediately after that, bizarre and frightening things began to happen in the bishop's flat in England. Postcards and books flew around the room and landed to form angles with each other that was exactly the same angle as the hands on the clock, which also stopped at precisely the hour of Jim Jr.'s death.

People had their hair burned off in the middle of the night and needles stuck into their fingertips and all kinds of horrible things. And Bishop Pike, who had rejected the supernatural in biblical terms, began to suspect in spiritualist terms that perhaps Jim Jr. was trying to contact him from the other side, which became the title of one of his books, The Other Side. And he ended up eventually engaging in a whole series of televised seances with some of the world's most famous medium.

that is a notorious and extreme example of what happens on a much lesser level so often folks who don't believe it's even real in the slightest way there's nothing out there they don't believe Christian orthodoxy they don't believe in any supernatural power of God let alone the devil and then something happens that's real and they literally become converted only they usually make the gullible assumption that I've already stated above that if it's real, it's got to be good which is exactly the opposite of what scripture says. My first point, it's not nonsense. There's an enormous abundance of nonsense but there's enough reality there that we need to take it very seriously indeed.

Second point is it's not neutral. it's absolutely forbidden the classic biblical passage the key passage many of you could tell me is Deuteronomy 18 I want to look at it with you these are the laws given by God to Moses just before the people of Israel are to enter the promised land you remember their calling is to to claim the land to inhabit the land and to bring it under god's kingship and in the process to clean it out from the pagans who have been occupying it to this point deuteronomy chapter 5 i want to pick up at verse 9 not sorry 18 deuteronomy 18 verse 9 When you come into the land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations that are there before you. Specifically, there shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering.

That was common practice to Moloch. Anyone who practices divination, a soothsayer or an augur or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a wizard or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominable practices, the Lord your God is driving them out before you.

It's a very important statement. Folks sometimes say, you know, why were the Israelites given permission to go in and just devastate all these other people who were living there? That's why they were sent in.

Those people had been given chance and chance and chance after chance to repent of the occult. and this was God's judgment upon them. It wasn't just for the blessing of Israel.

It was for the judgment of paganism. You, he says, shall be blameless before the Lord your God for these nations which you are about to dispossess give heed to soothsayers and to diviners. But as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you to do so.

Now, let me just paraphrase the first part of that because there are a whole bunch of somewhat unusual words There shall not be found among you anyone who sacrifices his child, who practices fortune-telling or astrology or who reads horoscopes or who practices any kind of magic or witchcraft or hypnotism, which is a spell. Nobody understands how it works. It is a spell.

or anyone who allows an alien spirit or personality to guide him, or speak to him, or speak through him, or anyone who practices the black arts, or anyone who tries to contact the dead. I think that's what I just read you. And why?

Because anybody who does these things is an abomination to the Lord God. Those are Israel's marching orders. when we fool around with any of these things, however casually, however innocently, we are stepping onto forbidden territory.

The Old Testament made all occult activities punishable by death. Did you know that? It was a capital offense.

Just look at a few representative passages. Let's go back to the left, to Exodus 22. Verse 18.

You shall not permit a sorceress to live. Turn over to Leviticus. Exodus, Leviticus, chapter 19.

Verse 26. Middle of the verse. you shall not practice augury, that's fortune telling, or witchcraft.

You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard. That had to do with special markings that were a sign of devotion to pagan deities. Leviticus 19 verse 31, do not turn to mediums or wizards.

Do not seek them out to be defiled by them. To go to a medium, to go to a wizard, to go to a fortune teller, to go to a palm reader is to be defiled. Do not do that.

I am the Lord your God. Chapter 20, verse 6. If a person turns to mediums and wizards playing the harlot after them, that's a very harsh image.

That goes back to the fact that God consistently speaks of himself as having wooed and wed Israel. Israel is God's bride. And to go off after other gods, to go off after other practices, is to commit adultery, is to commit spiritual adultery.

It's to play the harlot. He says to turn to a medium and a wizard is to play a harlot after them. Christians who are reading their horoscopes every morning are spiritually in harlotry.

And God says, I will set my face against that person and I will cut him off from among his people. it's pretty strong isn't it verse 27 a man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death they shall be stoned with stones their blood shall be upon them look over at 1st Chronicles about a third of the way through 1st Chronicles chapter 10 and the last two verses of the chapter verse 13 so Saul first king of Israel anointed by God Saul died for his unfaithfulness he was unfaithful to the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord and also consulted a medium seeking guidance and did not seek guidance from the Lord. Therefore the Lord slew him and turned the kingdom over to David the son of Jesse.

Some of you know that story. Saul himself had published the laws according to what Moses had handed down from God. There shall be no one who consults a medium.

Then when Saul found himself up against it he went out seeking a medium. He disguised himself went and found the witch of Endor and asked her to call up the spirit of Samuel for him. And God says he lost his kingdom.

The Lord slew him for that. Look over at Isaiah chapter 8. Not quite halfway through the Bible.

Isaiah 8. Having been commissioned by God to go in and cleanse the land, drive out those abominable practices before you, the problem is that instead of that, the Israelites are now actually falling into occult activity themselves. They're picking up the very practices they were supposed to drive out.

Verse 19 of chapter 8, And when they say to you, consult the mediums and the wizards who chirp and mutter, Should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living? To the teaching and to the testimony.

Surely for this word which they will speak, there is no dawn. They will pass through the land greatly distressed and hungry. And when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will curse their king and their God and will turn their faces upward and they will look to the earth.

But behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and they will be thrust into thick darkness. That was the very heart of their rebellion. They did all sorts of other things that were also abominations to God, but the very heart of it was that Israel, having been called by God to cleanse the land of the occult, ends up embracing it, and God warns them, first he allows the Assyrians to decimate the northern kingdom, and finally allows the Babylonians to carry off the southern kingdom to purge Israel of her spiritual harlotry.

We're very familiar, most of us, with the next chapter because we read it at Christmas time. It's one of the great prophetic passages about the coming of Messiah. But I wonder if you ever made the connection.

The people, verse 2, who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined. The light is the light of Messiah who comes as God's gift but the backdrop is that of folks totally involved in the darkness of the occult we could go on let's just look a couple more Jeremiah 27 verse 9 Well, let's take it from verse 8.

The warning about the Babylonian captivity. If any nation or kingdom will not serve this Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, I will punish that nation with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence, says the Lord, until I have consumed it by his hand. That Babylonian captivity, for all of its horror, was in fact God's purging judgment.

And some of you that went through the Old Testament series with me last year will remember that the medicine worked. Finally, finally, it took the Babylonian captivity, but Israel was cleansed of its idolatry. They may have any number of other things wrong with them ever since, but the Jews have never gone back to idolatry because of that.

Verse 9, So do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your soothsayers, or your sorcerers who are saying to you, you shall not serve the king of Babylon, that's what the occult is saying the occult is saying that's not so for it is a lie which they are prophesying to you with the result that you will be removed far from your land and I will drive you out and you will perish but any nation which will bring its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and will serve him I will leave it on its own land to till it and dwell there says the Lord consistent pattern all the way through the Old Testament it carries over right into the New Testament and I'm not going to trace that all the way but just look at one more passage the very end of the story, Revelation, last chapter. Well, let's take chapter 21 first, verse 8. Where does it all end?

As for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur which is the second death. And then almost the very last words of the Bible. Chapter 22, verse 18 I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book if anyone adds to them God will add to him the plagues described in this book.

If anyone takes away from the words of this prophecy God will take away his share of the tree of life and in the holy city which are described in this book Don't think that that's a transitory word. And just before we came to that, verse 15, outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. I hope it's abundantly clear that none of these things, as terrible as they are, are the unforgivable sin.

He's speaking of those who persist in those things, those who are committed to those things, without having ever repented of them. You follow that? Okay.

There is good news if you've been involved in any of those things. But you need to hear the bad news if you don't consider it serious. It is forbidden.

Number one, because it's an abomination to God, it is a total denial of who He is. It is an investing of other forces and other personalities with authority and prerogatives and honor that belongs to Him. It is an abomination to God.

Number two, it is a tremendous danger to us. You may fool around with this for years and never have it do anything that you're aware of. Or it may begin to get its hooks into you as spiritual forces of evil.

Take opportunity. You've stepped onto their turf. You've opened the door and they just may come through it.

And that can lead to bondage. That can lead to incredible dislocation of your personality. It can lead to incredible problems in receiving the gospel.

It can lead to suicide. If you've been involved in any of this, and I passed out some sheets at the very beginning. It's a very complete list.

If you've been involved in any of this, if you've never confessed it as sin, I urge you to do that. You may have stopped doing it years ago. It may have been a one-time experience.

You haven't even thought about it for years. You're not committed to that. You did it as a lark, as a teenager.

You went and had your palm read. You went to a crystal ball gazer. You never confessed it as sin.

I urge you to confess it as sin. You didn't mean it to be sin. Your motives were fine.

Satan doesn't respect your motives. You opened the door to him coming in. You stepped onto his turf.

If you have never asked God to forgive you for that, I urge you to do that. And to repent of it. To renounce it.

And ask him to cleanse you by the blood of Christ. Before we quit, in just a few more minutes, I'd like to invite those of you who would care to stay to do just that together. We'll have a prayer together.

And we will do just exactly that. We'll bring this under repentance and under the blood of Christ. Please don't stay if you don't want to.

But I urge you in the name of Jesus that if this applies to you that you should stay. And if you're not involved in any of that, you might want to just stay and pray with the rest of us. We're not going to take a long time.

If you've been deeply into any of these things, you may need to come and chat with me or one of the other clergy. We may need to really do some ministry together. But I urge you that, even if it's been incredibly minimal involvement.

And I know some of you may be offended at some of the things that are listed on there. Secret societies, which are, from one point of view, service organizations and trying to serve their communities. And yet, the truth of the matter is there are secret vows and secret ritualistic practices which have their origins in paganism and which may not overtly deny Jesus, but the truth of the matter is they're offering a God whose salvation is not dependent upon the unique sacrifice of Christ.

And that is a false God. and that is occult and that is an abomination even if you meant it only for good. My father when he was in college became a hypnotist.

He got into that just quite accidentally. A friend of his was interested in the subject and asked my father if he would allow himself to be hypnotized and he said sure. and the friend tried and tried and tried and couldn't do it and he said you take the book and you try it on me and my father did it like that and this became such a talent that he had that it became very well known at his university and some of the science professors became interested in it and asked him if he would participate in some experiments with them to the point that one experiment he told me about was they went into a laboratory and he hypnotized a guy.

They took an ordinary door key and put it in a Bunsen burner until it turned red hot. And then he said, I'm going to lay this on your naked arm and it's not going to hurt at all. He put it on the guy's arm.

Nothing. Took it off. Took an ordinary ice cube, not dry ice, just ordinary ice, and he said, I'm going to put that on your other arm.

it was going to burn and he did and the guy screamed in pain took it off took him out of the post-hypnotic trance I mean took him out of the trance and had no post-hypnotic suggestion at all immediately he looked to the arm that had the ice on it and there was a huge angry blister there the other arm was perfectly normal he gave up hypnotism because an experiment exploded one time and he almost left campus not realizing that there was somebody left in the room who had been inadvertently hypnotized and would have been left there under hypnotic trance with nobody who could get him out of it until the next week. And that scared him. He never engaged in that in any way other than just a curious thing.

30 years later when he became a Christian he read a little booklet called The Challenging Counterfeit which also is a good book that I recommend and realized that what he was dealing with was a supernatural power from the evil one hadn't thought about it for 30 years and repented of it and asked God to forgive him and cleanse him it's not neutral to the extent that it's real it is not neutral let alone good it is an abomination to God but my third and final point is praise God it is not necessary there is nothing that the occult offers that a living relationship with the Lord Jesus doesn't provide what the occult offers spuriously and falsely and with all kinds of strings attached the Lord Jesus offers as his gift to those who would know and love and follow him guidance the book of James says if any of you lacks wisdom he should pray to God who will give it to him for God gives generously and graciously to all healing the prayer of faith will save the sick man the Lord will raise him up support, comfort, my grace is sufficient for you. The conclusion that I want to draw tonight is exactly the same as the conclusion a week ago. We need to take these things with utmost seriousness, but we don't have to be frightened by them.

We have the victory through Jesus Christ. It's ours to enter into. It is our birthright.

I remind you, this is why the Son of God came into the world, to destroy the works of the devil. I want to read one more passage before we go to prayer. Ephesians, chapter 5, starting with the sixth verse.

Let no one deceive you with empty words, For it is because of these things that the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not associate with them. For once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.

Walk as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true, and try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. for it is a shame even to speak of the things that they do in secret but when anything is exposed by the light it becomes visible for anything that becomes visible is light therefore it is said awake O sleeper and arise from the dead and Christ shall give you light Amen?

Amen Let's bow our heads I think this might just surprise you. Before you bow your heads, how many people have never been involved in any way in anything on this list? Would you raise your hands?

never never in any way how many will raise your hands there's one two and here's three and I don't know why God protected me from it but we are the extreme exception to the rule let's bow our heads together Praise you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.

Thank you for your victory. Thank you for calling us out of darkness into light. thank you that the powers of darkness have no authority over us if we belong to you bless your name tonight hallelujah to you I'm going to lead you in a prayer invite you to repeat it after me and we'll come to a point where I'll pause and ask you very quietly between you and the Lord to specifically mention any occult sins of which you've ever been involved.

Don't pray this unless you mean it. But if you do, make this your prayer. Lord Jesus Christ I believe you are the Son of God the only way to God and in you resides all the power of God I confess that you died on the cross to take away all my sins becoming accursed in my place so that the penalty for my sins has already been paid.

And I need not ever bear it myself. Specifically tonight, I want to confess all of those sins in which I ever trampled on the forbidden territory of the occult. I renounce and repent of the following occult sins.

Thank you. If there were any more, I ask you to bring them to mind now. I also renounce.

Cleanse me of all this unrighteousness. purge me and I shall be clean wash me and I shall be restored I receive your forgiveness now with the authority you have given to all who believe in you I command that any spirit of evil that entered my life through any of this occult involvement, depart from me now and from this place never to return. I break your bondage.

I bind your influence. I command you in the name of Jesus to go to the place prepared for you. Satan, I renounce you in the name of Jesus and I confess you are a defeated enemy.

I loose myself from you and I command you to leave me in the name of Jesus. Amen. Hallelujah.

Thank you, Lord. Bless you, Lord. Hallelujah, Lord.

Hallelujah to you. Bless you. Father let your peace just be upon this place thank you Lord thank you Lord bless you Lord bless you Lord not by might nor by power but by your spirit thank you Lord let God arise and his enemies be scattered Hallelujah to you.

Hallelujah to you. Hallelujah. Lord, folks whose lives have been wounded or hampered or truncated in ways they weren't even aware of, Lord, I pray that they'll experience new freedom, a new closeness to you.

Pray that you'll pour out your Spirit upon them and fill up all those places with yourself. Pray that the joy of the Lord would be our strength and we'd know you in a more wonderful, in a deeper way than we've ever done before. Bless you, Lord.

Thank you, Lord. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

And all God's people said, Amen.