Message
Jesus Christ cast demons out of people during His earthly ministry, and He also charged all Christians to do the same thing:
Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils:freely ye have received, freely give.
Deliverance, however, is beyond casting out demons. True deliverance happens when a demon is unable to return and repossess a fellow that has been delivered from it. Jesus said in that when an evil spirit comes out of a fellow, it wanders around looking for a place to stay. If it doesn’t find a place to stay, it will go back to check if its former home is still empty. If it discovers that the place is empty, it will invite other demons that are more wicked than it, and they will reside in the fellow’s life. The end of such a fellow will then become worse than when he or she was possessed by only one demon. As a child of God, the moment you cast out a demon from someone, see to it that the fellow is filled with the Holy Spirit. If the demon returns and finds that the Holy Spirit already occupies the fellow, it can’t repossess him or her.
After Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary Magdalene, she became one of His followers and followed Him until the end of His earthly ministry. The moment the Lord set her free, she became a divine treasure and committed to serving God with all that she had. Her commitment made her one of the first people to see Jesus after he was resurrected (). In , after Jesus cast the legion of demons out of the madman of Gadara, He told him to go about preaching the gospel. It is not enough for a demon to be cast out of a fellow; the real deliverance is when he or she is filled with the Holy Spirit such that the demon cannot return to repossess the fellow.
Beloved, true deliverance is when your heart is filled with the Holy Spirit because you pray and feed on the word of God daily, fast regularly, and live a holy life. True deliverance is when a delivered fellow does not return to his or her old lifestyle but rather remains filled by the Holy Spirit such that there cannot be a repossession by demons.