28: How We Surrender Ground: SOUL-L (Series Compilation)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the on the trail podcast. For this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting the series that’s all about the acrostic, SOUL-L. We’ve been looking at some spiritual warfare basics. The last couple episodes, we looked at permission and authority. We’ve covered the CCCC tool, and now that we understand these basic principles, I thought we could start unpacking your acrostic SOUL-L.

S-O-U-L-L, two l’s there. This is a super helpful tool for thinking through the five ways we tend to invite the devil to have a place in our lives. And I was thinking, we’ve talked before about the analogy of when we’re hiking and we know that the snakes like to hang out. So as we are on the trail of life, this acrostic is a tool for recognizing where demonic snakes like to hide and what to do if we encounter one.

On that note – SOUL-L. Want to walk us through an overview, Father?

[00:59] Marcus: Yeah, so the idea here is, what are the most common doorways that we open to give permission to the enemy in our life? And the first is sin that we don’t resolve. You’re like, well, if I don’t resolve sin, what am I doing with it? Well, usually I’m justifying it and not calling it sin. And so either I am trying to hide it, I’m trying to bury it, or I just don’t really think it’s sin. And so I’m kind of arguing with God on that point. That’s the first one.

The second is occult. So that’s the O of SOUL-L. And the occult is really a specific kind of sin. It’s a sin in which we are engaging directly with demons while we sin. So you can imagine if sin opens a door, the occult opens a really big door. That’s the second one.

U is unforgiveness, and that has to do with bitterness. I remember Neil Anderson saying several years ago that he thought bitterness was the primary door that most Christians opened that gave ground to the enemy in their life and created spiritual bondage. That’s our third one.

And then L: lies, we believe. This takes us back to the WLVS: the wounds, lies, vows, strongholds idea, and how, whether it’s based on wounds or not, when we agree with the devil’s lies, it’s like shaking hands with the devil and giving him a place in our life. So that’s SOUL-L, our battle for the soul.

And then we added a Lineage on the end of it, which would be like ancestral or generational issues. Calling it lineage helped keep the acrostic a little more in sync with itself. So that’s SOUL-L that represents five of the most common ways in which Christians give permission to demons in their life.

[02:40] Stephanie: Awesome. We’re going to take a couple episodes and just dig into this acrostic. First, let’s go ahead and talk about sin in this episode. And let’s just start straightforward. When you know you have sinned and given the devil a foothold in your life, how do you handle that? How do you remove the devil’s right to your life?

[03:03] Marcus: When I know I’ve sinned, one of the common mistakes a lot of us make as Christians, is that we sit and beat ourselves up. And sometimes we beat ourselves up for days or weeks until we feel like we have sufficiently punished ourselves for falling into sin. And yet that doesn’t really actually help.

I like Neil Anderson’s illustration of this. He said it’s like if I have a neighbor with a really mean dog, and I’ve got a fence around my backyard, and because of the mean dog, I’m always very careful to keep the gate closed. But one day I’m careless and I open that gate and the dog comes in and bites me on the leg. Does it make any sense to beat myself up and say, “Stupid idiot, why’d you let that dog in here?” And just keep pounding myself on the head? That doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t make any sense. So he would say “Pound on the dog, get this thing out of here, get it off of you, and get it out of the yard and close the gate.”

That’s essentially what we’re talking about. What we need to do when we sin is, as soon as possible we need to Confess. And confession is the idea of agreeing with God about something, and agreeing with God that that was not good. That was not the correct thing to do. And then we Cancel the permission, Command the enemy to leave. And those are the three Cs. The quicker we do those things, the better off we’re going to be.

[04:27] Stephanie: Yeah, it reminds me of Ephesians 4:26, 27. “Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil.” There’s a timetable there, too, to just get this done quickly.

[04:42] Marcus: Right. And that word opportunity, in the version you were reading, the Greek word there is tapas, and it’s a place. In certain military contexts, it’s even used in the idea of a beachhead so I do like that term. Don’t give the devil a beachhead, a foothold, from which to get more territory and more control in your life. So do it quickly. Yes.

[05:05] Stephanie: So if you sin, do you automatically get a demon?

[05:09] Marcus: No. But what you do is you grant permission for demons to come around. It’s a little bit like the radar goes off and they come into the area. So now they’re going to be around and you’re going to have more temptation until that’s resolved. To get a demon, so to speak, you’ve got to really just have to not deal with it. And over time, you give ground to more and more of these things. It gets a little confusing because I don’t know that it’s an inside, outside sort of thing. I don’t know that just any one sin is going to bring a demon inside unless you are summoning it. But it brings them into your satellite and then they begin to orbit around you and you now have to deal with them at some level.

[05:57] Stephanie: Like the satellite. or like the birds that you’ll use sometimes. So if you renounce the sin and remove the devil’s permission to be in your life, if there are demons flocking around, do they just automatically leave?

[06:11] Marcus: Sometimes, if they don’t have permission to be there anymore, they just go look for somebody else. But sometimes if they don’t, then if you’re still having some issues, then that’s a time to take the next step and command them to leave. So I would say that a lot of times that does take care of it, especially if I’m in the habit of dealing with it quickly.

But sometimes it’s been there for a while and it’s been an issue that I’ve been dealing with for a while. And they’ve been hanging around for a while. They don’t want to leave. And so I not only have to take care of the permission, but I have to use the authority to command them to get out of there.

I often tell a story of a young lady who was having nightmares. And her issue was that she had slept with her fiance and that had given ground for these nightmares. Well, she had confessed it like a thousand times, but the nightmares hadn’t stopped. So the key there was, well, what is she not doing? Well, one, she was confessing it, and she was even commanding him to leave. But they weren’t leaving because she wasn’t actually forgiving herself.

[07:19] Stephanie: She wasn’t receiving the forgiveness.

[07:21] Marcus: She wasn’t receiving the forgiveness. And that’s something else I think that’s part of this, is that when we confess our sins, we need to, by faith, receive God’s forgiveness. And saying, “I may not feel forgiven right now. I certainly don’t feel like I deserve it. But God, thank you for your forgiveness. I receive it.” And then that can help to remove ground as well.

[07:40] Stephanie: Now, sin can be a charged word. Do you want to talk about maybe what sin is, what it isn’t?

[07:47] Marcus: Sure, let me tackle this a couple different ways. I think there are three main concepts in the scripture related to sin. I heard Jim Wilder, the first one I heard spell this out, and it made a lot of sense when I heard it. And that is, that there is hamartia, the Greek word hamartia, that has the idea of falling short or missing the mark. The idea is that the good thing you ought to do, but you fall short of it. That is hamartia. That is the classic word for sin.

Then there’s the word transgression. And when we transgress something, you can just hear that trans word, where you are crossing a line that you are not supposed to cross.

[08:25] Stephanie: Yeah, that’s the Latin word.

[08:26] Marcus: Yes, the Latin word there. So transgression is this idea that I am crossing a line that God has said I am not supposed to cross.

And then the third key concept related to sin is iniquity. And iniquity, in Hebrew, the root idea there is deformity. It’s the idea that something has become twisted. It has become deformed. So my character can become twisted over time. A culture can become twisted over time. My thinking can become twisted over time. In fact, this word can even be used for somebody, for instance, who is blind or deaf. And that is that their eyes are not working the way they’re supposed to. Their ears are not working the way that they’re supposed to in the sense that this is a deformity from the way God created things. So in a moral sense then, iniquity is a moral deformity in my character.

So those are the three main concepts of sin. It’s probably also helpful to just go through some of the common types of things that I put under the category of sin just to help think this through a little more at another level.

[09:27] Stephanie: Yeah, that’d be great.

[09:29] Marcus: So I think, first of all, of idolatry. The number one sin in the Old Testament is idolatry. God’s got the most severe punishments for that. And so we look in our own lives: what do we do that’s idolatrous? Well, one of the things we do is actually worship other gods, which we sometimes forget about. There are a whole lot of people around the world that are literally bowing before statues and praying to them, and that’s idolatry.

But there’s also what we might call idols of the heart that have to be renounced. When the Bible says that greed is idolatry, well, that’s a classic example of an idol of the heart. It’s something that I am asking to save me, and greed is asking money to rescue me because I don’t trust God to do it.

So idolatry is a big one. I remember a friend telling me about meeting with somebody and the core issue they had to resolve was a past girlfriend that he had idolized. He had to actually renounce making an idol out of her before he could get the complete freedom from the bondage he was in. So it can look a lot of different ways, but idolatry is one of the big ones.

If you go back to the very beginning, pride was the original sin, and that led to rebellion. And so in Neil Anderson’s Steps to Freedom, he’s got one step on pride, one step on rebellion. Makes sense that I just bring those all under sin. Neil also has something called habitual sin, which is sins I just keep falling into again and again and again. And then I would add to that compulsive sin. And that is sins I really don’t want to do, but I just seem to have this compulsion to do it.

And so all of these things are things that I’m going to particularly pay attention to as I’m going down the checklist of areas of sin in my life that might need some resolution.

[11:14] Stephanie: That’s really helpful. Thank you. I’m just thinking, there are so many things that people will call sin or think about as sin, or even the Ephesians verse that I read, in your anger, do not sin. And so it doesn’t call anger sin, but it says, in your anger, do not sin. And so, I don’t know, are there some things that people tend to beat themselves up about that maybe they shouldn’t, or that aren’t quite there yet.

[11:46] Marcus:  Well, you know, the classic thing here is, I think conceptually, it’s helpful to think about separating guilt and shame. That is, guilt is admitting that I’ve done something wrong. Shame is saying, I am a bad person.

And so what happens is, the enemy likes to take our sin and use it like a wound to plant a seed there that tells us that we’re not worth loving, God couldn’t possibly love us. And it’s that whole thing that we beat ourselves up because we feel so much shame over the fact that we fell again, maybe we fell in the same area again., can’t believe I’m still not getting on the other side of this. And so the enemy will try to add to that sin his lies, which then take it to a whole other level.

Now, in the case of, “in your anger, do not sin,” I like the idea that Jesus got so angry one time with the Pharisees that he healed a man. So it’s that idea where it is possible to feel anger but act like yourself anyway. It’s possible to feel anger but remain relational anyway.

[12:58] Stephanie: Because anger in itself isn’t a bad thing. Because if something bad is happening, anger is the feeling of wanting it to stop, and so if something bad is happening, then you would be right to feel anger that that thing is happening.

[13:09] Marcus: Exactly, right. On the other hand, now then the other side of that is a passage like Colossians which says, “Rid yourself of all such things as these.” And it says anger, rage and malice. And so what we’re looking at here is, have I become an angry person? Do I have a short fuse? Is my anger bigger than the situation calls for?

Maybe road rage; somebody cuts me off and I want to kill them. There is something over the top there. Part of what we’re looking at is, I want to rid myself of anger, rage, malice. And that is the mental state that is constantly angry and constantly mad.

We can see this. You can do this even in politics, where you have a spirit of anger. When it comes to politics, you can’t even talk about it civilly. You can have this with all kinds of things right in your life. And so on the one hand, you can’t help things that trigger anger. And sometimes anger is good because even God was angry about things, and rightfully so. But what we want to do is be careful that we don’t become angry people. And the way we become angry people is usually that we have added to our anger lies that we believe. And those lies are keeping us just bound and tied to that anger.

There does come a point where I actually have led people in renouncing their anger because they were so angry with somebody, they couldn’t let it go.And so we do it. We want to separate these things. And that is, the Bible on the one hand says anger isn’t a sin. And the other hand says, but get rid of it, don’t let it take over your life. So we do need to kind of keep those things in balance.

[14:55] Stephanie: On that note, I mean, Satan is the accuser. How do I know the difference between when Satan is accusing me and the Holy Spirit is convicting me?

[15:08] Marcus: Excellent question. I say, basically, it’s how they talk about you as a person. When the Holy Spirit brings conviction, it does not come with a sense that I am a horrible person. It does not come with a heavy dose of shame. Like, “I can’t believe you did this. You are such a  _________. When are you ever going to get this right?” God doesn’t shame me in the process, whereas when the devil comes after me because of my sin, it always leads to a sense of shame that makes me want to run away from God.

That’s one of the ways that we can tell. When the Holy Spirit convicts us, the purpose of the conviction is to restore relationship, and when the devil accuses us is to make us want to run away from relationship. And so I look at it that way. One of them is restorative and one of them is repulsive when it comes to our relationship with God.

[16:02] Stephanie: Regardless, that’s really helpful. On the note of restorative, I’m thinking of reparations and stuff. Does confessing sin mean I’m off the hook for consequences? What is the relationship between confession and consequences?

[16:17] Marcus: That’s a good point. No, confession does not mean you’re off the hook for consequences. There are still consequences to things that we do. For instance, if I get mad at my wife and I say something to her I regret, I can go back and apologize, I can confess to God, but there is now going to be a little less trust. There’s a consequence there. Like, she’s going to be waiting to see, am I going to do this again? That trust is going to have to be rebuilt. Simply confessing my sin doesn’t change that.

In the same way, if I cheat on my taxes, I can confess that I did it, but that isn’t necessarily going to get me out of the consequences of what I’ve done. What we look for here is not just confessing of sin. This is in the spiritual warfare context. I can confess the sin, I can cancel the permission, I can get rid of the demons so I don’t have to deal with that consequence, but it doesn’t mean I can get rid of all of the consequences. And that’s kind of a separation of what we’re talking about here.

[17:19] Stephanie: I’ve heard stories of people  thinking that just saying I’m sorry and recognizing it finishes the journey. So I wanted to make sure.

[17:28] Marcus: You’re probably thinking of the call I got one time by a pastor who’d been invited to a house where the husband had just confessed to an affair with his wife’s best friend. And so the pastor was on his way there to go meet with this couple. Now, what would you expect to find when you get to a home where the husband has just confessed to having an affair with the wife’s best friend? I would expect to find a very angry wife, a very contrite husband. But no, that’s not what he walked into. The husband greeted him at the door and said, “Thank God you’re here, Pastor, would you please tell my wife to start acting like a Christian?” And it caught him completely off guard. Like, what are you talking about? And he said, “I told her I was sorry. She should just forgive me, give me a kiss, and let’s move on like this never happened.”

Now, you know, there are multiple things wrong there, but one of them is, he’s confusing confession, also confusing repentance, with restoration. He’s confusing forgiveness with reconciliation. I often say forgiveness takes one person making a choice. Reconciliation takes two people, and it is a process of restoring trust.

This guy was demonstrating a high level of narcissistic behavior. And it was coming out, and he was still in enemy mode, and he did not understand. And so what he was saying was, his wife was not forgiving. But the reality is his wife did forgive him, which is one of the reasons he was still alive. His wife did forgive him, but her trust had been broken, her heart had been broken. There were a whole lot of consequences there they were going to have to walk through.

I have, sadly, had to walk through that journey with several people through the years and it’s a hard one. It’s a hard one even when both people want to get past it and want to move forward, there are things that just confessing and forgiving doesn’t resolve.

[19:27] Stephanie: Yes. Well, we’re coming up to the end of the time here, and I want to end with some hope. That is, I think a lot of times when we talk about sin, it’s heavy, especially if there are things that you’re needing to deal with or that you’re remembering or thinking of other people’s sins and how they’ve hurt others. It can just be heavy. But repentance is beautiful, and there’s hope there, and God’s heart for repentance is restoration and restoring the relationship. There’s such a peace that comes when you repent and are on the right way again. So I don’t know. Could you talk a little about hope?

[20:13] Marcus: Certainly. Yeah, I know sin is a heavy subject. I mean, there’s a reason why Jesus went to the cross, and it was sin. It was a weighty, heavy thing, and all of the pain that is associated with that. But you’re right about repentance. In fact, in Course One of our Deeper Walk Institute, I make the statement that repentance is the happiest word in the English language because it means you get another chance. Repentance means we are going to reconcile.

So the big picture of what God is trying to do at the cross, the big picture of what he’s trying to do and everything that has to do with the way that he has handled sin is that he wants reconciliation. And the idea of reconciliation is, he wants us to be one with him again. He wants intimacy with us again. He wants the relationship restored.

Some people get this picture: God is going to let me into heaven because he has to, because he promised he’d let anybody into heaven who believes, but they don’t think he really likes them. That’s a really warped idea that comes from the devil on a fairly regular basis sadly.

What we’re talking about here, though, is that God is saying, “I love you so much and I want relationship with you so much that we’re going to take care of this sin thing for you, because I know that you could never take care of it yourself.”

[21:34] Stephanie: This is really important. I’m sorry, I’m just remembering times when you’ve talked about people who have said, “Oh, God could never forgive this thing that I did. I’m unforgivable, my sin is too big.” And just the idea that Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the entire world for all time. Do you think your one life is enough, your sin is enough? That, “Oh, nope. That excludes me.” No!

[22:05] Marcus: It’s a good point. It’s sort of like if there’s a quintillion dollars in debt for our sin in the world, and my sin is a couple million, it’s dust in the pan for God in terms of the price that he paid. So it is all covered. The debt has been paid. And that’s why when it talks about debt, that’s that kind of image. It says, no, it’s been taken care of.

Now what God wants me to do is, he wants me to receive his forgiveness, and he wants me to forgive myself and walk in the freedom that he paid for so that we can be in relationship together. And, yeah, it’s all about the relationship.

[22:50] Stephanie: Amen. So, hey, next week we’re going to continue working through the SOUL-L acrostic with a look at how the occult gives ground to the enemy. But for now, could you wrap us up with some final thoughts?

[23:03] Marcus: Yes. I think in my life, one of the things I had to learn about sin was I was one of those people who just beat myself up relentlessly for days. Especially if I did something I sort of vowed I wasn’t going to do again, and then I did it.  I would sit there and I wouldn’t pray. There were times when I would literally take days and I’d read my Bible and I’d do all kinds of stuff, and once I felt like I’d been good for a while, then I would come back and try to deal with this and restore my relationship with God.

One thing to realize was that God doesn’t want me to wait that long, even if I did it on purpose, even if it was something I swore I was never going to do again. He said, “No, no, no. Even in the middle of it, as soon as you realize, ‘whoops, I am not on the right path,’ get relationally connected with me again as quickly as possible, because you can’t solve this on your own. You need my help, so get me involved as quickly as possible.”

So that would be my encouragement to people. When you find yourself falling, just confess it and say, “God, I am falling. I need your help. Please meet me here and walk me out of this,” because you have a much better chance of walking out of it with God’s help than on your own.

[24:30] Stephanie: So we’re walking through it, and today we are on the occult. You often say if sin opens the front door to the devil, the occult is like throwing open the garage door. As we are starting, can you give us a definition for the word “occult”?

[24:48] Marcus: Yes, it has to do with the idea of hidden. It comes from a Latin word that has the idea of hiddenness or secrecy connected to it. And so through the years, the word occult has been used of people who seem to know the secrets of magic. That is, how to get magical information, how to get magical powers, what are the secrets of those arts?

Going into that has been developing a craft, like witchcraft, or the magical arts, or the dark arts, or things like that. There’s always been this element of secrecy, that it takes some training to learn to master, so you’re going to have all kinds of levels of occult. You’re going to get people doing it who don’t even know what they’re doing. You get people dabbling with it. You get people intentionally trying to grow their skills, and then you get people who are generationally wrapped up in it for centuries.

[25:47] Stephanie: Well, on that note, what are some common practices that people may or may not realize are related to the occult?

[25:53] Marcus: So I think occult, and I think of secrecy. I put it in two categories: knowledge and power. So you’ve heard the expression “knowledge is power”, and there’s some truth to that because if I know things that you don’t know, then I have a power in that situation that you don’t have. This is why it was routine practice in the occult and in paganism, to ask priests to look for omens and to look for signs to see if it was a good time to engage in a business deal, or a good time to go to battle, or which city they ought to invade.

There’s even a passage in scripture where God says that he intervenes in the divination process of the pagan kings to make sure that their omens send them to the city he wants them to go to. He’s like, “It doesn’t matter what they do. I’m going to make sure they come and get you, Jerusalem.” That’s basically what he says in this passage. That’s kind of the idea of knowledge and power.

There are common practices in pursuing knowledge, and then there are common practices in pursuing power. The ones that are related to pursuing knowledge are the horoscopes and all things related to divination and astrology, basically, and the third category would be like actually encountering spirits, either the spirits of the dead, demonic spirits, spirits of supernatural beings.

So people who do things like seances, that would be a form of trying to contact the dead. Ancestor worship is beginning to get very popularized thanks to modern movies. But it’s this idea that I can contact and talk to and have relational connection with people who are dead. And that is strictly forbidden in the scriptures. It’s called necromancy. You are not to gain knowledge and have relationships with those who are dead, or the spirits of those who are dead.

Those are those three main categories for where they get knowledge from: one is the stars and divination, one is from spirits and I guess it was stars, and [one] from divination and from spirits. Does that make sense?

[28:01] Stephanie: Well, and I just think about so many things. That you just walk into a Barnes and Noble and, “Oh, look. There’s a stand all about your horoscopes, and tarot cards, and Ouija boards.” And all of this stuff – just pop culture – everybody knows what it is. Some people don’t think it has any power, and they’re just playing with it because it’s kind of fun or curious or what their friends are doing. And other people think, “Hey, I can get some secret knowledge or some specialized knowledge or power.”

[28:33] Marcus: It’s true because I met with a leader at a company, and they were talking about how they’ve learned to ask younger applicants as a standard part of the interview process, “What’s your sign?”  They’re like, “They all know their sign and they’re all happy to talk to you about it.” This thing has become very normalized. I’d like to walk this through a little bit, if I can.

[28:59] Stephanie: Yeah, please.

[29:00] Marcus: So Clinton Arnold, who’s head of New Testament, now I think dean at the Talbot Seminary in Los Angeles. He’s an excellent New Testament scholar. He’s written a lot of commentaries. I heard him do a presentation one time where he said that in the pagan world, the highest source of knowledge were the fates. The fates knew what was going to happen to you. And here we are as mere humans far below, and between us mere mortals and the fates were the gods and various other spirits. And so we would ask these divine ones if they could get us some information from the fates. “Can you tell us what our fate is? Is this day fated to be good or is it fated to be bad? Is this business deal fated to be good or fated to be bad? Am I fated for victory or defeat in this battle?” That kind of thing. That’s where the word divination comes from. You would ask these divine ones for information about your fate.

Again, the Bible strictly forbids this. You are not to gain that kind of power, because what we’re doing when we practice the occult is we are trying to gain control of our life without reference to God. I’m saying, rather than turning to God and trusting him to be my refuge and my fortress, my shield, my buckler, my shepherd – all these wonderful things – my Father, I am going to try to take control of the situation myself by getting enough knowledge and power that I feel like I’m in control and I can handle this. And that’s one of the reasons why this is so forbidden. Another reason is that it puts us in direct contact with demonic spirits. And so God does not want that for us.

[30:38] Stephanie: Yes, yes.

[30:41] Marcus: Small little thing.

[30:41] Stephanie: Just a small thing. Yeah. Well, like we said, to start, if sin is opening a door, occult is like throwing open the garage door, because you’re not just doing things that attract demons, you’re literally summoning them, oftentimes saying, “Hey, please come.”

[30:59] Marcus: Yes, exactly. And the problem here is there are children’s games for all of these things. Ouija boards is divination, but just bordering on summoning of a spirit. Seances directly [summon] a spirit. There’s an old parlor game kids used to play called Bloody Mary, I’m sure it’s still played, where you’re summoning something, the idea of a summoning circle in witchcraft. All those things of summoning a being, and you’re hoping that that being will give you both knowledge and power.

And then when it comes to the psychics and fortune tellers, what are we looking for from a fortune teller or psychic? We want secret knowledge. People want to know whether my dead relative is okay, are you in heaven or are you in hell? So they’ll go to a psychic who supposedly knows the secret knowledge that gets you access to the secret realm.

I remember watching an Oprah show several years ago, and they had a psychic on there. Basically everybody in the audience, the psychic went through and told them things about their relatives that there is no way that psychic could have known. But all of the information that they told their guests was the kind of information that would be easy for a demon to know.

So I picture it this way: a psychic standing on the stage, a demon bird perched on his shoulder, and the guest stands up and says, “Oh, what’s happening with my grandma? I loved her so much.” And the bird over here is like, “Hey, anybody out there know? Any of my other demon friends? Oh yeah. Oh thank you.” And now suddenly whispers in the ear, “Yeah, well, they used to live in a house like this. They had this kind of stuff.” That’s easy, like you could google on the Internet.

It’s like stuff you could know that would be easy for anybody to know and that now the person is hooked and they think, “Okay, this person definitely has an inside track to the spirit world. I’m now going to believe anything that they tell me from this point on.” And that’s kind of the way that works. And so they would always tell them, don’t worry, your relative is in heaven no matter what the situation was. And you know, they’re happy.

[33:01] Stephanie: Which teaches a worldview that says you don’t need God., that Jesus is not the only way.

[33:05] Marcus: Exactly. And so it teaches heresy. And that heresy is supported by signs and wonders, but in this case they are counterfeit signs and wonders. And that’s why it says that the Antichrist comes with all sorts of counterfeit signs and wonders. And I don’t think he’s talking just about the ultimate Antichrist at the end of days. I think it’s talking about all things that are Antichrist. They come with counterfeit signs and wonders so that people, on the basis of the sign, of the wonder, buy whatever the truth is that comes next, regardless of whether that truth (I say truth kind of in quotes), so whatever the message is that the person has, will be taken as true from that point on because something supernatural has happened.

[33:44] Stephanie: This is making me think of that time at an ICBC conference when there was a psychic that was brought in, not to the ICBC conference, but it was meeting at a hotel. Anyway, do you know what story I’m telling? Do you want to?

[33:58] Marcus: I do. That is actually where I was going to go next. So great minds meet a lot. There you go. Or as my dad used to say, “Great minds get stuck in the same ruts”. But yes, this was before I was with ICBC and Deeper Walk. Before that, when Mark Bubeck was president, they had their conferences at the conference center in Sioux City, Iowa. They would have some of the rooms set aside for their conference, but other people might use some of the other rooms at this relatively large conference center.

So they got there for the ICBC Conference on Spiritual Warfare and how to help Christians with this aspect of ministry. Sure enough, the business that had rented the space next to them had hired a psychic for their entertainment for the evening. So, discovering this, all of the leaders of ICBC, the board, key staff members, whatever, prayer-walked the property, they prayer-walked the area, which they always did, but now they specifically forbade any spirits from me being able to communicate to that psychic tonight. They just said, “As people who are also in this thing, we forbid any demonic activity here and cut it off.” Well, sure enough, when the psychic got up to perform that night, he said, “I’ve never had this happen before, but I’m getting nothing.” And he packed up and left without doing a show. So I could tell bunches of stories like that. But, yeah, that’s a classic one.

[35:25] Stephanie: Yes. Well, and I think it’s a great illustration of our practical authority in Christ, and that it’s not just a matter of avoiding or staying away from things. It’s also that we can interact on a practical level.

On that note, I’ve heard people afraid of: is witnessing the occult enough to demonize someone, or do you have to participate in order to get demonized?

[35:55] Marcus: That’s a very good question. You know, reading about the occult won’t demonize you. Witnessing the occult doesn’t demonize you, but what happens is whether you’re reading about it, watching it in a movie, witnessing it in person, what that does is now you have to do something with that. What happens is it makes a lot of people open the door to fear or open the door to curiosity. And both of those doors can open a door to the dark side, to quote Yoda. It’s like this also is a path to the dark side. The idea is that there is a sense here that the event in itself isn’t what demonized us, but it was our response to that.

[36:37] Stephanie:  Well, I was even just thinking, we’ll talk about this in a couple episodes, lies we believe. That there is a matter also of what is discipling you. And so if you are not rooted in truth and you are witnessing occult things and receiving it as true, like, “Oh, yeah, well, that would be the right thing to do”, or that “I would be right to be afraid of that because of this”, or “I would be right, or I don’t see a problem with that or whatever.”

That still wouldn’t necessarily give you a demon. But I think that’s another avenue wherein it’s shaping your worldview, and so you have to be discerning as you are interacting with it.

[37:15] Marcus: That’s very true. Today’s kids are definitely being discipled in an occult worldview. And even the Avengers, as much as I love the shows, and as fun as they are, the worldview there and even the multiverse itself, while there is a dimension of truth to the idea that there’s an unseen realm that can be explained in terms of a multiverse, what happens here is that whether it’s Indiana Jones saying the Ark of the Covenant is an occult object and it can be used for good or for evil, or whether it’s Disney saying black magic can only be overcome by white magic, whether it’s Star Wars, if you want to defeat a Sith, you need a Jedi. All of these things are kind of moving us into a subconscious kind of acceptance of, “Oh, yeah, that could be.”

It’s because it’s relentless and it’s everywhere that we turn. And those are the major franchises, but it’s everywhere. And so what happens is we begin to accept things that we didn’t used to accept as being okay. It’s that classic frog in the kettle thing where if you had taken me out of the sixties world I lived in and dropped me into today’s world, I would have jumped out. Right? It’s like, are you kidding me? But having lived through the last 60 years and the whole gradual transition, and you experience this and you experience that, and you experience this and experience that. They don’t jump out and startle you with the same kind of shock that they would have if this had all happened at once.

[38:47] Stephanie: Right. I guess I would just circle back to the idea of discernment. And I think every person is at a different stage with understanding where they’re at, with how they interact. We just need to inform ourselves and make sure that we are being discipled first and foremost by God and the Bible.

But I don’t think we have to be afraid. Like you said, we watch Avengers and enjoy Avengers, and there’s a lot of good in Avengers, but we also have the discernment to sift through stuff.

[39:20] Marcus: Well, yeah, whether it’s in Percy Jackson. You can learn a lot about Greek mythology from Percy Jackson, but it also has the effect, if you’re not careful, of making you like the Greek gods. You start thinking fondly of them, which is a common satanic theme, and it’s called sympathy for the devil. This idea, “Oh, you know, they’re not that bad. They’re misunderstood. There’s actually some good here if we just look for it.”

And so you get a lot of people from what we call white witchcraft, and they will defend it as, we’re just trying to help people. And they’ll even call themselves Christians, that they have this very syncretistic brand of Christianity that incorporates the occult into it and because they believe that what they are trying to do is good, they don’t see a disconnect between that and New Testament Christianity. So we can talk about that more in some future episode.

[40:13] Stephanie: I was going to say, oh, man, there’s so many branching episodes coming out of this one that we definitely should talk about more at some point. Do you want to just touch briefly on syncretism, since you mentioned it?

[40:23] Marcus: And I also probably need to get back to some basic practices related to power, because all we’ve talked about is knowledge up to now.

[40:30] Stephanie: Yes.

[40:30] Marcus: Okay, so syncretism. You can hear in there two words: syn is the Greek word sun, which means “together with”. So it’s not sin, like I’m sinning. It’s sun, meaning together with. And then you can hear cretism comes from credo, which is the Greek word for belief. And the idea is that syncretism is putting beliefs together that don’t belong together. That’s the basic idea of what syncretism is.

So it is a Christian practicing the occult, that’s syncretism. It’s like those two things do not go together. They should not be together. And if I create a worldview as a Christian that allows for some level of occult, I am a syncretistic Christian.

The first time I ran into this, my father, your grandfather, who was professor of missions, was talking about one of the missional challenges in Africa, where witch doctors were so powerful and this occult worldview was so powerful and so ingrained that a lot of Christians were converting but not getting rid of their occult practices. And so syncretistic Christianity was this huge problem in Africa.

That was the first time I heard about it. Well, now we see it everywhere. And everywhere you look for it, once you begin looking for people who are blending Postmodernism into Christianity are syncretistic. People who are blending the worship of the ancestors, the worship of saints into Christianity, are syncretistic. People who are transforming the honor of Mary into the worship of Mary are syncretistic. People who are putting objects around their house thinking those objects will ward off evil spirits, that’s syncretism. That’s Christians practicing occult solutions to their problems.

So we do need to be aware and be careful of these things. And my point here is, I may have sounded like I was attacking Catholics, and my point here isn’t to attack Catholics. My point is to attack the form of Catholicism that moves too far with these things. That’s my point. Just like my point is to attack forms of evangelicalism or the charismatic movement that move too far with these things and sometimes do things in the name of Christ, not even realizing that what they’re actually doing is just flat out occult. And that’s what syncretism is.

[42:48] Stephanie: Thank you for that explanation. You wanted to move into power.

[42:53] Marcus: Yes. So while knowledge is related to wanting to get information from spirits and from divination and from omens and things like that, what power is about is wanting to make things happen. I want to use spiritual power to make things happen.

There are two views on this: One is this idea that spiritual power is relatively neutral, that it’s like electricity. And in this sense, witch doctors, high priests of pagan and witchcraft, think that shamans, witch doctors, priests, these kinds of people, are like electricians who have studied and know how to manipulate power for good or for evil. In this sense, there are people who approach the occult like it’s this neutral thing that can be used for white magic or for black magic. It can be used for good or for bad.

But then there’s another approach to it that says no. They realize that there is actually a personality. There’s a being behind this power. And not just one being. There’s not one all powerful devil. There’s this whole kingdom of darkness where a whole lot of different beings have different kinds of powers and are able to do different kinds of things. What happens is, people begin to become infatuated. Well, which being do I need to connect to in order to get this done? And which being do I need to connect to in order to get the other thing done? And which being will protect my home, and which being will help me defeat my enemy. And that’s where you start to get paganism.

And there are various types of witchcraft. For example, there’s witchcraft that is more neutral in its way that it looks at magic, and there’s witchcraft that definitely knows that they are summoning spiritual beings to get what they want. And so when we look at this kind of power, that’s what we’re talking about. There are both kinds of occult that are pursuing power. I can do this through words like incantations and spells. I can do this by spells and curses, or I could do this with a magic wand. That’s one way of practicing occult power.

Another is to do some sort of a ritual or a sacrifice. And the idea here is that the greater the sacrifice, the greater the level of power you should be able to summon. That’s the thinking behind it. So that’s the power side of the occult. How do I gain control of this, of what I want to control? And in that process, I’m not trusting God. I’m trying to take control. So you can even see this in syncretism, where Christians will try to create the reality that they want with their words. And they don’t understand that they’re not trusting God at all. They’re trying to coerce God into creating the reality that they want created. And that’s not really what’s supposed to be happening.

[45:36] Stephanie:  Faith isn’t just that he can do something and so you’re going to believe that he’ll manifest it into reality because there’s capability there.

[45:47] Marcus: There’s a very blurry line there between Christianity and the occult once you start saying as a Christian that I can declare something and turn it into reality by my words. That’s a very occult concept, and it’s something we need to be very careful of.

[46:03] Stephanie: Oh, man, there’s so much more to talk about. But we are coming up in the end, and we haven’t even gotten to R.E.D. yet, so we need to jump to RED. I think this is really important for us to cover. When it comes to the occult and reclaiming the surrendered ground in someone’s life, you have another helpful acrostic. It’s Renounce, End, Destroy. So let’s talk about this.

Let’s talk about if you have been in the occult or you’re working with someone who has, and you need to get out of it, or you’ve got an occult object that you didn’t realize was occult, or that you now know you don’t want around anymore. What do you do? How do you get the enemy out?

[46:40] Marcus: Yes, this is important, right? “Renounce” is this legal declaration that I make when I say, “I now renounce my participation in…” whatever it was, and I’m as specific as possible. “I now renounce my participation in those seances. I now renounce my participation in that coven. I now renounce my participation with Ouija boards.” That’s the R of the RED. I now renounce those things.

And you say, well, what’s the difference between that and creating reality with your words. What I’m doing when I say this is I’m making a declaration of agreement with God that this was wrong and I shouldn’t have been doing it. I’m not creating reality with my words, I’m agreeing with God’s reality. So it’s a different thing.

The E is Ending memberships. So if I actually joined a coven, I need to end that membership somehow. If I joined an occult society, I want to end that membership.

And then the D is I’m going to Destroy any objects that keep me tied to those practices and to their membership. So the rule of thumb on what do I destroy? What I do destroy is if the object was created for an occult purpose, like a Ouija board. You destroy it. If it was something that somebody put a curse on, like somebody gave you a bracelet, but the bracelet came from a witch and they put some kind of incantation on it, you can cut off the incantation. Normally, you can cut off the curse, you can break that, you can make the demons leave, and you can keep the bracelet. But there are people who will destroy it just to be safe. I’m just saying that the rule of thumb here is if it was created for an occult purpose, you destroy it. If it was something that a curse was placed on, you can generally cleanse it. So that’s RED. Renounce, End membership, Destroy. Yes, destroy things that keep you tied to it.

[48:29] Stephanie: That is so helpful. Well, we need to wrap up this episode, and next week we’re going to continue working through the SOUL-L acrostic with a look at how unforgiveness gives ground to the enemy. But for now, any final thoughts on this very large topic?

[48:44] Marcus: Yes, well, this is one of those topics that a lot of Christians want to avoid. I had a theology professor say, “I never talk about this stuff because whenever I do, weird things happen around my house.” I’m like, but isn’t that the exact reason why we need to prepare people? Isn’t that a good reason? Why shouldn’t you know what to do to keep all that weird stuff from happening around your house? I think it’s just a completely wrong answer. Too many Christians are like, “I just stay away from it. I just avoid it.”

But as you’ve heard me say a hundred times, the devil is not a big bumblebee. The principle isn’t, leave him alone and he’ll leave you alone. The principle here is resist the devil and make him flee from you. So what we’re trying to do here is expose things that Christians need to know about so they can avoid them, so they can renounce them, and also for parents, so they can protect their kids from this stuff.

[49:38] Stephanie: Today, we are onto the, “U”, Unforgiveness. I’ve talked to Christians before who were surprised that unforgiveness could give the enemy a place in their life. And, I don’t know. Let’s start there. Can you talk through some of the biblical principles for why unforgiveness is a problem?

[49:55] Marcus: Yes, I think I remember what you’re talking about. There was a lady who heard this acrostic and heard that unforgiveness could open the door to the enemy, and she’s like, “What? I’ve never heard that before.” She goes, “I have some things I need to do. Kind of like, “I need to go deal with my bitterness towards some people.” This idea, I think, surprises people because we tend to think of bitterness and unforgiveness and we have a lot of misconceptions about it.

The Bible has a lot to say. Obviously, it’s in the Lord’s Prayer: “Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Another version of this has “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” And then Jesus follows up his teaching on the Lord’s Prayer with reinforcing the forgiveness part of this. “If you don’t forgive people when they sin against you, God’s not going to forgive you your sins.”

That was petrifying to me as a kid because I thought that meant if I didn’t forgive people perfectly, I was going to lose my salvation. That’s not what that means. What it means is that if I don’t forgive people, I’m going to stay in bondage. God’s not going to set me free, give me the emotional freedom I’m looking for if I’m not willing to grant the same thing to other people. So this is more of a freedom statement than a salvation statement.

It’s important to know that God took care of the sin problem on the cross, so when we’re dealing with forgiveness, what we’re doing as Christians, we have an advantage in this because we are cooperating with God, that the ultimate goal of forgiveness is reconciliation. But it isn’t reconciliation, it’s just one of the elements that goes into that bigger process.

Forgiveness: I think the simplest way for me to think about it is, forgive people their debts just as God has forgiven you of your debts. In Matthew 18, you have this classic parable of the unjust manager who asks and begs for forgiveness for this enormous debt, and then turns around and refuses to forgive his servant for a small debt. His master finds out about it, ends up sending him to jail until he pays off the debt. Why? And the word there is interesting, because specifically he says he’s handed over to the tormentors.

This is something a lot of people dealing with spiritual warfare have picked up on. And it’s this idea that if I don’t forgive people of the debts that they owe me, if I don’t forgive them those emotional debts, then I can end up in torment. That would be the idea that in this case God may forgive me in the sense of, I’m in heaven, I’m part of his family, but I might still end up living in an emotional prison and not with the freedom that I need simply because I am not forgiving others.

So we tell people all the time that forgiveness is actually a gift that God gives to you so that you can experience freedom and don’t have to be stuck in the bondage of bitterness.

[52:53] Stephanie: Yes. It always stuck with me how you said, “Bitterness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” So it’s an emotional freedom, and then it is also a spiritual freedom, because you are giving permission to the enemy to have a place in your life if you are holding on to bitterness and resentment.

[53:12] Marcus: Right. So what that tends to look like when the enemy gets permission because of bitterness, is not so much inhabitation, where you’re rolling around on the floor and levitating and talking in strange voices, but it tends to come more in the sense that there are now thoughts in your head, voices in your head that are keeping you in bondage. You are thinking things that are just ruining your life and that are keeping you angry, keeping you in despair, keeping you in bondage to emotions you don’t want to be stuck in. There are demonic spirits that are not necessarily in you and controlling you, but they are actively engaged in keeping your mind in a place that is fostering captivity.

[54:00] Stephanie: They’re going to keep feeding the narratives. They’re going to keep feeding the tapes that are playing. They’re going to be whispering things like, “Oh, and don’t forget about that!”

[54:09] Marcus: Which is one of the reasons why there’s that classic thing, “Why does my wife always bring up everything I’ve ever done?” It’s not just, talk about the last thing, and it’s not just women who do this, but that’s just the stereotypical thing that comes up. The answer is that the reason that people do this, the reason that people will often bring up your whole history when they’ve been triggered by something in the present, is because what happened to them in the present is triggering all of the times that they felt this emotion. And so this emotion that they’re feeling is not a new thing for them. It’s like, “I felt this emotion before with you. I felt it here and here and here and here.” And so what that does is it tends to tell us that I may need to forgive people for the whole pattern of behavior that they have had in my life.

And I don’t necessarily have to go down and make a detailed list of every way in which they’ve ever offended me. It is enough, generally, to say, “I forgive them for this pattern of what they’ve been doing in my life.” Sometimes I have to forgive them for something specific because there are some things that really took it to another level when they happened.

[55:12] Stephanie: Do you have to forgive people if they have not asked for forgiveness?

[55:15] Marcus: Good question. I do remember watching Veggie Tales back in the day, and while generally that was good, I remember wishing they had done a little bit more with their one on forgiveness because they came across like, “I don’t have to forgive people unless they ask me to forgive.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s not actually the message we want to send out there to people.”

I’m glad they were at least addressing the issue, but I would take it a step further and say that the beauty of forgiveness is that you don’t have to wait for somebody to ask for it. In fact, you can forgive somebody who’s dead. And I know people have done this. They had a very abusive father who’s now passed away, but they don’t have to wait for that abusive father to come to them and say, please forgive me for what I did. Forgiveness takes one person, and that’s me.

Reconciliation is something that takes two people. So if I’m going to begin the process of reconciling with a person, then yes, they have to ask me for forgiveness in order for that to be part of that reconciliation process. But I can choose to forgive somebody. I don’t have to wait for anything from them. And that’s good news because it means I can be free regardless of what they do.

[56:26] Stephanie: Well, let’s continue that. You’ve got a really helpful acrostic that actually is FREE, F-R-E-E. So the obvious remedy for unforgiveness is forgiveness. Let’s talk about what forgiveness is, and what it is not, with FREE, can you?

[56:42] Marcus: So what it is not: the “F” of this is that forgiveness is not forgetting. This comes up both in the sense of people are like, “Well, I forgave that person, but I still remember it. It still feels painful when I think about it.” That’s not what forgiveness does. Forgiveness does not make you forget either the pain or the memory of what has happened. That’s not how that works.

On the other hand, forgiveness is not forgetting in the sense of just because you haven’t thought about it in a while, just as you have sort of forgotten about it, doesn’t mean you actually forgave. And so if God brings something up to say, “You need to forgive this person for that,”  and you haven’t thought about it for a long time, that’s kind of irrelevant, because forgiveness isn’t about forgetting.

Now, the forgetting part of this tends to come from this idea that God takes our sin and separates it as far as the east is from the west, never thinks about it again. And it creates this impression that we should be able to do the same, that we should be able to forgive somebody and take it away and never think about it again. One, it’s a metaphor. Two, it’s God. Three, it’s a part of this process. But it’s not what forgiveness in and of itself does. It’s not something we can actually choose to do. So if we are trying to forget about it, we usually just end up suppressing it and pushing it down, and that creates other problems.

[58:02] Stephanie: So forgiving is something we can choose to do. Forgetting is something we cannot choose to do.

[58:06] Marcus: So the “R” is reconciliation. And again, I put it this way: that forgiving takes one person. That’s me making the choice to cancel the emotional debt that you owe me. Reconciliation takes two, because reconciliation is about rebuilding trust in a relationship and about reconnecting at some level.

So there are levels of reconciliation. For example, reconciliation doesn’t mean that I suddenly now trust you as if nothing ever happened. We can’t do that either. It would be unwise to do that. If somebody’s committed a violent crime against you. The Bible doesn’t say, well, you need to reconcile with that person in the sense of, go ahead and make them your best friend, but in the sense of forgive them for what they’ve done so that you don’t become in bondage to bitterness over it.

In reconciliation, there are levels to this, and that is there are boundaries in our trust, and setting boundaries is not in opposition to reconciliation or for forgiveness. What boundaries have to do with is both protection and also building trust and establishing trust. So if somebody has to earn our trust as we move forward, it’s a complicated thing, and I can’t do it justice in, you know, 30 seconds here.

[59:27] Stephanie: But I think that’s a good start.

[59:29] Marcus: Yeah. So at least people understand that forgiving isn’t reconciling. Those are two different processes.

The third one, the first “E” of the FREE acrostic, is that it’s [forgiveness] not an emotion. I’ve had people say, “I don’t think I’m ready to forgive because I don’t feel it yet.” In other words, they’re saying, I still feel bitterness. I still feel wronged. And I’m like, that’s fine. You can feel whatever you want to feel. You can feel not only what you want to feel, but, I mean, you can’t help what you feel.

The question is, would you, despite how you feel, be willing to choose to forgive? And so I’ve walked a lot of people through a prayer like this saying, and the prayer even starts off, “God, you know I still don’t like this person. You know I still hate them for what they did. But right now I ask you to forgive me for hating them. Help me with that. But, I’m also choosing to forgive them for what they did to me out of obedience to you. I’m just going to make that choice despite the fact that I don’t feel anything about it right now.”

And I’ve seen a lot of those people, in fact, most of those people find greater peace later, not just from forgiving, but then from the other things that you do related to emotional healing, which is like we talked about in Understanding the Wounded Heart: building joy, taking thoughts captive, listening prayer, as well as forgiving. I just encourage people, you don’t have to wait until you feel that you have already forgiven them in your heart. Then you don’t have to wait till you’re free from the bitterness to do this. You’re choosing to do this as a step towards getting free from all that bitterness and not letting it rule you anymore.

[01:01:05] Stephanie: Well, I think it’s similar to, you don’t go clean yourself up and then come to God and be like “Hey!” You come to God and be. It’s very similar.

So what does it look like to forgive from the heart? The Bible tells us to forgive from the heart.

[01:01:21] Marcus: I pondered that for a while, too, because it was like, “Well, doesn’t that mean I have to feel something first?” And when I began to realize in walking people through that, what I had them do is to say, “Because the Bible wants you to forgive from your heart, let’s try to get in touch with your emotions about this.”

That is, a lot of people just wanted to kind of do an intellectual forgiveness exercise. And I was like, “Well, before we do that, why don’t we actually go and revisit this memory a little bit? Revisit how living with your dad made you feel. Revisit how living with your mom made you feel. What are those emotions that you’re feeling?” Because part of what we’re forgiving the person for is how they’ve made me feel all my life. I’m choosing to forgive you for making me feel this way all my life.

And so I want to get them into that so that they can forgive from their heart, is the idea. I want you now, knowing the full weight here of what’s going on, you’re still choosing to forgive. So that’s the way I brought those two things together.

[01:02:16] Stephanie: That makes sense. All right, how about the fourth letter? The “E” or the last “E”?

[01:02:22] Marcus:  It’s this idea of an explanation or an excuse, and that is, forgiveness is not excusing somebody by explaining away their behavior. And you hear this a lot, “Well, you know, when I stop and think about, the mom they grew up with and the family they were in, or I stopped and think about what happened to them and the abuse they went through, and I guess I can forgive them.” I say, that’s not actually forgiveness. That’s a completely different process.

It’s a valid process. I mean, it can be helpful to have those kinds of things, but that’s more dealing with our beliefs. I don’t have to know why they did something or understand it in such a way that I can justify it and say, “Well, what they did wasn’t really that bad”, because actually, when I do that, I run the risk of not forgiving them as fully as they need to be forgiven. And that is, I want to make the choice to forgive them whether I understand it or not. And have led a lot of people through a prayer that, again, started with something like, “I still don’t understand this, God. I don’t think I’m ever going to understand them, but I choose to forgive them anyway.”

[01:03:23] Stephanie: You’ve described before, if somebody owes you $10,000, but you explain it away, like, “Oh, I understand why they haven’t given that back.” And so you end up, when you get down to forgiving them, you forgive them for $200 or something.

[01:03:39] Marcus: That was Darrell Brazell who used that illustration. He’s been running a recovery ministry in a church focusing on helping men with porn issues for a long time. And one of the advice that he would give men is, if you’ve been really deep into porn, you can’t confess to your wife that now and then you look at Sports Illustrated stuff. You can’t say, “Well, you know, I accidentally found some porn online and I spent 15 minutes looking at it. Would you please forgive me?” when you’ve actually gone to Porn Hub for hours and hours and hours on many, many, many occasions, because if you confess to just a little bit of it, then she forgives you for just a little bit of it.

When you come back and you tell her the whole thing, she’s going to feel doubly betrayed because you not only betrayed her the biggest time, you lied about it. So in the same way, if we are excusing people and explaining it away, we end up forgiving them for a smaller debt than what we actually feel like they owe us. And so we want to make sure that we’re dealing with all of what’s on the table when we choose to forgive, and not just forgiving a portion of what’s happened.

[01:04:44] Stephanie: So then in addition to FREE, we’ve touched on it briefly, but there is healing. Forgiveness is not the same thing as healing. It’s a step in the process. So can you talk more about that?

[01:04:55] Marcus: Yeah, I’ve talked to people who are like, “I thought I forgave this person, but there’s still pain about this whole thing. We haven’t reconciled, and I still don’t feel good about any of this. I don’t think I did it right.”

And what they mean is I don’t think I forgave correctly or I would be over this. And I’m like, no, there’s more to healing than forgiving. You can forgive somebody and still not be over it.

Again, I’ll go back to the four tools from Understanding the Wounded Heart. Some of the recovery from it is changing the way we think about a lot of things. There’s some taking thoughts captive, there’s rebuilding some joy, there’s listening prayer, and even building some relational connection that has to go on that forgiveness in and of itself isn’t going to address.

There’s this kind of myth out there that all you need to do to feel better about your past is forgive somebody. There’s just more to it than that. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t start with forgiveness.

I remember talking to a couple one time where there had been an affair, and the wife forgave the husband for the affair, and they stayed together. But a year later, I met with them again, and she started this way: “I don’t think I did it right because I’m still really struggling with this.” Part of what we kind of uncovered that day was that what she was needing to forgive him for, at this point, was all of the consequences that she hadn’t yet dealt with. The fact that other family members looked at her differently now, all the struggles that she was having, all of the other issues that had come up.

It’s one thing to forgive for the sin itself. Now, I had her make a list of all the consequences that had come from her husband’s sin and list them out. And then she just said, “God, I choose to forgive him for all of these consequences as well.” And she once again left with peace. Now, that is, again, not all there is to healing and reconciliation and everything else, but it needed to be done. She needed to.

[01:06:53] Stephanie: And that’s the sort of thing that’s going to continue to need to be done because consequences will continue to pop up.

[01:06:58] Marcus: Yes, that is correct. Well, I know it is absolutely correct that one of the reasons that we revisit things and forgive, and can sometimes need to forgive more than once, is that sometimes we’re forgiving different aspects of what happened, and I’m coming at it from one angle or a different angle.

My only hesitation in saying that is, I don’t want people to feel like they’ve got to keep revisiting painful things to try to decipher whether or not they have really fully forgiven. I’m just saying if God keeps bringing it up as something you need to deal with, and you’ve already chosen to forgive, you might go back and say, “Is there a different aspect of this that he’s asking me to forgive?” And I’ll just leave it there for now.

[01:07:34] Stephanie: That’s good. Well, I don’t want to spend too much more time on this next question because we’re running out of time. But I did want to address consequences from the angle of mercy and justice, because forgiveness doesn’t mean expunged consequences. So what is the difference between forgiveness and mercy? What’s the relationship between forgiveness and justice? And I know that’s a huge topic.

[01:07:55] Marcus: Yes, it is. But I think the simple answer to that is, every parent has to deal with this all the time. Right? And that is, if I have to, as a parent, if my child has done something that deserves consequences, when I say to the child, “I forgive you,” that doesn’t mean there’s no consequences. It means our relationship is good. “I forgive you, I still love you, our relationship is still solid.”

Now, in terms of what happened, there are consequences simply because it’s part of discipline, it’s part of life, it’s part of training. So that’s why the Bible presents God as a parent who disciplines his children, and that if he didn’t love them he wouldn’t discipline them.

And so this idea of consequences: when, for example, I can forgive somebody and still press charges against them that sends them to jail. Now, at first that sounds like, no, that doesn’t sound like forgiveness for me. But there’s a difference between forgiving somebody and saying, “Relationally, I forgive you. Spiritually, I forgive you. But there are still consequences for what’s happened here that need to be followed through on.”

[01:08:58] Stephanie: Well, particularly if they’re unsafe, then forgiving them is kind of the same as reconciliation. It’s not the same as reconciliation. You’re not saying, “Okay, I forgive you, go out and hurt more people.”

[01:09:19] Marcus: Exactly. You don’t say to somebody like a serial rapist, “I forgive you now, so I’m not going to press charges. So go rape more people.” That doesn’t make any sense at any level. Same way, if I’ve got somebody who’s trapped in addiction and is routinely hurting themselves and hurting other people, I can’t just say, “I forgive you. We’re going to pretend this never happened.” That’s not how that works. I can forgive you and still put you in a place where there are consequences for this, for your own good and for the good of other people. So that’s why I say forgiving doesn’t always mean that there’s no consequences.

[01:09:54] Stephanie: All right, well, to wrap up, before we get to your final thoughts, I was just thinking, if someone is listening right now and is feeling convicted, like, “I really need to forgive that person.” Could you just walk us through right now how to do that?

[01:10:08] Marcus: Yeah. I tend to think of this as ABC, and that is, “A” is I Accuse the person. And they might say, “What? I thought we were forgiving.” But you start by accusing. What is it that they did that they need to be forgiven for? And it might be just that they made me feel this way.

I could be saying what I’m accusing them of is, my mom made me feel like I was worthless, or my dad ignored me and made me feel this. So I tend to word it this way: “I accuse them for __________, they made me feel _____________. They did this and made me feel that.”

So that’s kind of the formula I use.

[01:10:42] Stephanie: And this is internal. You’re not recommending people go…

[01:10:46] Marcus: No, I’m not saying go to the person and accuse them. Because again, this is something between me and God. This is something I am doing as an individual, between me and God. I’m saying, “God, you know how this person has wronged me. You know what they did to me. I’m spelling it out, and this is how it felt. And I’m putting it, all of it, out there.” And this is big.

And then I go to, kind of like, how Big is it really? This is sort of the “B”. This is big emotionally, just how big is this for me? And then I make the Choice and I say, “God, I now choose,” And say something like, “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I choose to cancel the debt that they owe me. I choose to forgive them. And I hand them to you. I hand all of the debt to you and I ask for the grace. I ask for your grace to help me live with the consequences they’ve created for me.”

And then I can go on from there. But after that, I’m not actually in forgiveness mode. I’m now layering things on top of the forgiveness. But I’m saying, I start by sort of laying out what it is that they’ve done, how did that make me feel? And then I’m choosing to forgive. So I’m kind of stating the crime [Accuse], if you will, stating what the wounding was, stating what the emotion was it created in me, or this group of emotions it created in me [How Big]. And then I am making the Choice to forgive.

Now, following up on that, I will often ask God to bless that person because it says, “Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who do bad things to you.” So I’ll pray, “God, would you bless them? God, would you give me grace? God, would you heal? And would you give me a new picture of how you want me to see them?”

There are other things I will layer onto a prayer like that, but we’re starting to get into other territories beyond forgiveness.

[01:12:28] Stephanie: So we are onto the first of the two L’s. The first “L” is Lies we believe. First question: it is certainly not nice to believe a lie. We don’t like that. But how can believing a lie give ground to the enemy?

[01:12:45] Marcus:  Yeah, it’s a fair question. You know, there are a lot of people who write about lies.: leaders believe lies, women believe lies, you know, so and so believes. There’re a lot of books out there about the negative impact of believing lies in our lives. What we’re focusing on here is the warfare element of believing lies.

Since the devil is the father of lies, what that implies is that if you are believing a lie, at the source, at some level, is this father of lies, and it’s the devil. And so whenever we believe a lie, we’re putting ourselves in the devil’s turf. We’re in his realm of operations. To be even more specific, when we agree with the devil’s lies, we’re essentially shaking hands with him and saying, “You’re right and God is wrong.” And so that’s entering into an agreement with the enemy.

If I enter into an agreement with the devil, I shake hands with him saying, “You’re right. I’m going to believe what you’re telling me, not what God is telling me.” Then I am now giving him permission to a place in my life, and that’s where it becomes spiritual warfare.

[01:13:49] Stephanie: So how does this manifest? Like, how do people know that they’re dealing with a lie they’re believing?

[01:13:56] Marcus: There are really two main kinds of lies that I run into. One is what I would call the illusionist, and the other is the bold lie. The illusionist lie is this idea that, if I go to see a magician perform, they are going to do an illusion. What they’re going to do is really a misdirection. They show me things that are true, like the famous one where they cut a girl in half. This girl gets in the box. The guy saws the box in two. He separates the box, and there’s legs sticking out of one and a head sticking out of the other. And everything I see is true. There’s legs there, there’s a head there. The box was separated. I saw all these things. And so what happens is they’re counting on me just looking at all these true things, but directing me away from other true things that would change my impression of what was going on. And so I’m deceived because everything I’m thinking about is true, but it is leading me to a lie.

So, for example, the classic illusionist thing is lies about myself, where I say, “I have failed. I let that person down. I harmed them. I did something bad. I have disappointed people.” All those things are true. And so if I put only those things together, I come up to a conclusion, and the conclusion is, “I’m a bad person. Nobody would love me who really knew me. I need to make sure that I hide who I really am from other people.”

I let these lies come, but I don’t recognize them as lies because it is the logical conclusion of all of the things I’m thinking, and the things I’m thinking are actually true, just like the illusionist who leads us away from some true things that would change our whole perspective, that’s the way the devil lies to us in that regard.

This also works with our view of God. And that is, it can be true that God did not keep a bad thing from happening to me. It can be true that I tried to cry out to God for comfort, and I couldn’t find him, and he felt distant. It can be true that when I needed him most, I couldn’t find him. And so I’m thinking about all these true things, and it’s leading up to one big lie that is, “God doesn’t care. God’s cruel, God’s distant.” And so I don’t necessarily recognize that I’m deceiving myself or that I bought into a deception because the primary things going through my head are true. And so in that way, it’s like an illusionist.

So pop in there, and then I could talk about the bold lies here, but I didn’t know if you had anything.

[01:16:32] Stephanie: I guess the follow-up to that would be, what do you do to recognize the other true things that are being hidden from you? How do you combat that?

[01:16:42] Marcus: So one of the ways that you start is that you’re looking for the fruit of the Spirit in your life. You’re asking yourself, “Are the thoughts that are running through my head promoting love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, self control, all these things, fruits of the spirit? Or am I having a struggle? Am I feeling depressed? Am I feeling angry?”

If I have no internal desire to connect with God, if I’m feeling like hiding from people, if I’m feeling shame, then I want to go underneath there and take a look at, “What are the beliefs that are driving the way that I’m feeling right now? What are the beliefs that are sucking that energy for wanting to get close to God?”

So I look for the symptoms or the fruit, and if that fruit is not the fruit of the Spirit, then there’s a very good chance that underneath there, there are going to be misbeliefs, beliefs that are coming from the enemy to sabotage my walk with God.

[01:17:46] Stephanie: That makes a lot of sense and makes me think of a discussion about strongholds, which we can circle back to because I want to talk about WLVS here in just a bit. But let’s go back to bold lies first.

[01:17:57] Marcus: Yeah. So a bold lie is, somebody always says the biggest lie is the best lie, which is this idea that, just come right out and say, “Satan’s the good guy, God’s the bad guy.” That’s a bold lie. Somebody coming out and saying, “Well, you know, you’re just an idiot,” when you’re actually quite intelligent. You’re just smart in a different way maybe than they are.

In other words, somebody tells you a bold lie, somebody will call you a name, and because it’s a bold lie, we can buy into those too. So that’s just a completely different thing. But both of them function like what I would call an internal propaganda engine. And just like you can’t have warfare without propaganda, the devil doesn’t engage in war against us without a lot of propaganda.

His primary focus there is the lies he gets us to believe about ourselves and the lies he gets us to believe about God. So bold lies are a form of propaganda. And he’ll sometimes get us to try to believe bold lies about God, or bold lies about ourselves especially.

[01:19:01] Stephanie: So you talk about propaganda, which makes me think of things that the world does. So how is the world involved in the lie process? Is it just internal with me and with the devil? Or does the world factor in there?

[01:19:17] Marcus: When I think about the world, there are two kinds of things that come to my mind on that. One is in 1 John, the apostle says, “Do not love the world.” The way that always struck me was, if you picture the world, in my case like a guy, picture the world as a woman, or like a seductive woman, say, from the Book of Proverbs, the woman, Folly, who’s trying to seduce you. I picture the world as the devil’s mistress, and she is seductive, and trying to get you to cross a line that you shouldn’t cross, and it’s promising you something good if you’ll just cross the line.

And so what happens is, the devil uses the world to lie to us. In this sense, the world is the devil’s marketing agency. It’s like the big billboards that he puts out there. It’s all the things that the devil does to try to get us to look at life his way, or to look at life in some way that causes distortion, so that we do things that we wouldn’t normally do.

That’s why when, like in 1 John, when it says, “Do not love the world,” I think of it that way. It’s like, don’t let yourself get sucked in by folly. Don’t let yourself get sucked in by the seduction or the enticement of what the world is selling, because it’s going to ruin your life. It’s not going to lead you to the good life.

[01:20:46] Stephanie: Well, hey, we’ve talked about the Wounds, Lies, Vows, Strongholds model before. But as my professors love to say, repetition is one of the keys to learning. So will you walk us through the WLVS model here?

[01:21:00] Marcus: Yes, it connects and it brings all these things together also, because the world Wounds us, the devil Lies to us, our flesh makes Vows. So you’ve got the world, the devil, the flesh. The idea is that, in this fallen world we all get wounded. And it’s not the size of the wound that determines how much impact this has on us. It’s really the power of the lie that determines how much impact our wounds have on us.

Sometimes we fall into this trap of comparing our wounds with other people. Like, “Well, that person’s so wounded, I have virtually no wounds compared to them. So since I’m not as wounded as they are, I have no excuses. I shouldn’t have had a problem.” But that’s not the issue. We all get wounded, and all it takes is a little bit of a hole in our heart and it’s just big enough for a seed to get planted in there. That seed of deception, the seed of the enemy’s lies, gets into that little place in my heart, and now it starts to grow, now it starts to build something out.

The power is in the lie. And then when that lie takes root, as my flesh now believes it to be true, I stop trusting God, because that’s what the devil wants to do with his lies. He wants to get us to not trust God and to take control of life for ourselves, and that puts us in the role of entering into an agreement with the devil.

So the world wounds us. The devil gets his lies in there. If we believe them, we start making vows about how we’re going to live and in agreement with the devil, as part of that vow, I’m going to do this the devil’s way. I may not put it in those words, but that’s functionally what I’m doing.

The result of all of this is something begins to grow in my life. It may have started out small, but it begins to grow. And it turns into this vine that is growing and wrapping itself around the good things that God is doing. And it creates a different kind of fruit. [stronghold]

So I sometimes picture it this way: It’s like God has planted a tree in my heart that is growing, and good fruit is coming off of what God has planted in my heart. But the devil has wrapped this vine around that tree. And so now I’ve got this mixed fruit. It can be very confusing to people. I’ve even talked to people who questioned whether they were even saved, because they’re like, “How can I be saved and have so much struggle with this emotion or so much struggle with this behavior?” And they don’t understand that they do have the good fruit that comes from the Spirit. They just have this vine that’s wrapping itself around the tree.

Well, the good news is the vine can be gotten rid of. We can get healing for the wound. We can replace the lies. We can get rid of the devil. And when we do those things, we can get rid of that vine and restore what the spirit is trying to do in our lives.

[01:23:49] Stephanie: Amen.

[01:23:50] Marcus: A little more complicated, but that’s the gist of it.

[01:23:53] Stephanie: But there is so much hope to follow up on that. Once you’ve recognized the lie, how do you deal with it and take that ground back away from the enemy? How do we dismantle that vine?

[01:24:04] Marcus: At the simplest level, we replace our thoughts. So I love how Karl Payne explained this. First time I heard it, I just laughed because it’s right on the money. But he said that if I’m having trouble thinking about pink elephants with green booties and giant sunglasses, it doesn’t do me any good to say, “Stop it! Stop thinking about pink elephants with giant sunglasses and green booties!”

That doesn’t do any good. You’ve got to replace the thought. So he said, “Picture an iceberg floating in the North Atlantic with polar bears on it, and the polar bears are waltzing, and let’s think about polar bears waltzing on an iceberg in the North Atlantic.” The more we do that, all of a sudden I realize, “I’m not thinking about pink elephants with green booties and giant sunglasses anymore.” You get the idea. You’ve got to replace your thoughts.

Where spiritual warfare factors in here is when I can’t do that. If I can’t just replace my thoughts and focus on something else, it probably is a sign that I have a stronghold and that there’s something deeper going on. In one of my books, and I honestly don’t remember which one right now, I talk about the difference between beliefs that just kind of pass through our mind – a fleeting thought, tapes that we have, and voices that we interact with.

All of us have a tempting thought come to us now and then. And that’s like, lift up the shield of faith, quench the fiery dart coming your way. You know, that’s the moment of temptation kind of battle. But then there are tapes that we have. And by tapes, we mean these recurring things that we have to deal with over and over and over again that are like, “Why do I always seem to have this same battle in my life?”

And then the third level is voices, and a voice becomes a voice because it will talk back to you. You can have a conversation with it. You’ll try to tell it to leave, and it’ll just laugh at you. The devil can be involved in all three of those things. He can be involved in sending out the tempting thought. He could be the one who kind of got that tape going in our head. And then if it gets to the point where I can have a conversation with it, that’s like a sign of demonization as well.

And so I start by replacing the thoughts. I start by resisting the temptation, and then I’m replacing the thoughts. And then eventually, I get to the point where I have to do that CCC pattern that we’ve talked about so many times. In this case,

“I Confess that I believed a lie, (even if I’m not sure what the lie is. I confess I believed the lie, and there are a lot of them.) I Cancel the permission that’s given to the enemy, and I ask you, Jesus, to cancel any permission that’s given in the courtroom of heaven. And now I Command whatever demon has been taking advantage of these lies, have been assigned to tell me these lies, I command you to leave in Jesus name. I commit my mind to the truth, and I ask you, God, to show me what is the truth you want me to replace these thoughts with.”

Sometimes I’ve got to go through that CCC process of confess, cancel command, and then I can ask the Spirit of God to help me give a thought that will replace the other thought, and get me back into setting my mind on what is true.

[01:27:18] Stephanie: That’s really good. Do you. Do you want to go as deep as dealing with voices and things here?

[01:27:26] Marcus: Well, I kind of did. You know what I mean? It’s like if we… I don’t have a lot more to say about that. If I’ve got voices in my head, there’s one of three things going on: I’ve got something schizophrenic going on, I’ve got something dissociative going on, or I’ve got something demonic, or, I guess some combination of those. That’s the way I look at it. Now, I may be missing something, but..

[01:27:50] Stephanie: Those are the three categories that are helpful to address, because I think we’ve probably talked about that before, but I don’t know.

[01:27:54] Marcus: On the podcast? I know you and I have talked about it. I can’t remember if we did it on the podcast or not.

[01:27:59] Stephanie: Very good. How about a couple tools for people? Like, I don’t know. I’m thinking about the T-bar chart that you’ll do, or some listening prayer? Or do you have any strategies for people to be on guard for lies that they might already believe or that the devil is currently trying to get them to believe?

[01:28:21] Marcus: The T-bar chart you mentioned, is a tool. If I find myself routinely struggling with depression, or routinely struggling with anxiety, or shame, or some other emotion, it can be helpful to make a T-bar chart about that emotion. There’s a column on the left and in this column on the left, you ask, “God, help me to recall the beliefs that run through my head when I feel this emotion.” Kind of like, “It never works for me. It works for other people, but not me. I have a history of this. Nothing is ever going to change.”

And all of a sudden, I realize I’m telling myself a lot of things. Whenever I feel depressed, I’m feeling like, “It’s hopeless. It’s not going to work for me. It’s hopeless because I never get this right. It’s hopeless.” Whatever it is, I start writing down. There might be as few as one lie, but I find generally there are about three, and sometimes there are a lot more if this has been going on for a long time. And so you write down, what are these beliefs that are very commonly present when I feel that emotion? So that’s the left hand column of the T-bar.

The right hand column of the T-bar chart is where I now am going to replace that. Whenever I find myself thinking that thought, I now recognize it, going, “Oh, that’s that familiar thought that I have, and I am training myself now, and when I recognize that I’m thinking that thought, I need to replace it with this new one.”

And this new thought will be, “God loves me, and he knows my weakness, and he loves me despite my weakness.” Just a reminder that this is actually a call to go find Jesus right now and know that he wants to be with me right now. So for me, that’s usually one of the first ones if I hear that first lie. It’s a reminder to me, that is a signal that I need to go find Jesus right now, not a signal that I need to go beat myself up for a while.

And so you have to find replacement thoughts and replacement strategies, and you put those in the right hand column. So that’s kind of theT-bar chart. We do have a lot of these tools and various resources that we offer that are explained there. So I could give more, but that’s one big one.

[01:30:39] Stephanie: I think that’s a really helpful one. I was just thinking about the fact that so often when you discover a lie that you are believing, it’s usually a two part lie, a lie about yourself and a lie about God. And do you need to dig into both sides of that every time, or look for it, or is it just what God prompts.

[01:30:57] Marcus: You start with what God is prompting, but it’s not a bad exercise to, if you find that you are believing a lie about God, it’s not a bad exercise to say, “God, am I also believing a lie about myself?” Because lies about God and lies about ourselves tend to be flip sides of the same coin.

When the devil shoots an arrow at me and it wounds my heart, it’s like he shoots it through this coin. Well, it’s going to puncture a hole on both sides of the coin, and so it’s going to have an impact on how I see God and an impact on how I see myself. So if I do find that I’ve got a lie in one of those areas, chances are super high that I’m going to have a lie in one of the other ones, too. So it’s worth looking into.

[01:31:38] Stephanie: So we are on to our final “L” –  lineage. Let’s start by setting up a biblical understanding of lineage.

[01:31:47] Marcus: Sure. Well, in our western culture, we tend to be very individualistic, and we tend to think that, “I am the creator of my own destiny and what I do affects me, but why should my life be affected by other people?” And yet, when we get to it, there’s some obvious ways in which the family line I’m from has had a profound impact on who I turn out to be, just from the environment that we were in.

But you take this even further biblically, and the Bible has a lot to say about generations being culpable, and future generations being culpable. What’s interesting here is you just start with the Torah, and in the Torah there’s this interesting command that says that Moabites and Ammonites are not allowed into the tabernacle for ten generations. That’s a very specific thing, right? It’s just always intrigued me. One, why ten generations? And why is there any kind of a generational moratorium on a people group? This is talking about ethnic groups having consequences generationally that keep them from entering the tabernacle.

Now, I will point out that one of the things that becomes very clear here is that there are generational consequences to sin. That is a very common idea in scripture.

Second, is that this doesn’t mean that individuals within the Moabites and the Ammonites could not be saved during these ten generations. I just want to spell that out because we know this, because Ruth is right in the middle of that ten generations. Ruth, who married into the Israelite community, would not have been allowed into the tabernacle, even though she was a convert. It didn’t mean she couldn’t be saved, it just means that there are consequences.

We see this in the life of Jesus. He talks about this generation: the queen of Sheba’s generation would rise up against his generation. It’s just a very interesting way to talk about it. It’s like this generation is going to bear consequences for everything that’s come before.

Well, we even see where in the prophets it’s told that because Manasseh was so wicked and he was so depraved in the way that he sought the pagan world, and the sexual immorality, violence, and paganism that he combined in his reign, that it says exile had become inevitable. But what’s interesting is that God postponed that judgment for a generation because of the revival that happened under Josiah. That revival postponed it, but it still came a generation later.

We just start off by saying the Bible has a whole lot more to say about generational consequences and things being passed on from one generation to the next than we might think.

[01:34:48] Stephanie: On the flip side of that is their generational blessings.

[01:34:52] Marcus: Yes. In the Ten Commandments, it says that God sends the punishment for iniquity to the third and fourth generation, but that he extends his blessing to a thousand generations. The idea is, “Begrudgingly, I have to. Justice demands that there be consequences on this,” but his mercy is going to cut it off after three or four generations. He says, “But I love to bless people, so there’s going to be generational blessing.”

We see this a lot, too. I saw an article several years ago about Jonathan Edwards and the generational blessing in his family line and how many of his descendants went on to be very successful, influential people. And there’s just a blessing on the family. And so we see this often.

[01:35:45] Stephanie: Interesting. So I know sometimes people still wrestle with this understanding of lineage. It seems unfair, or why would what one person does affect a whole group of people or your lineage? And so could you talk maybe about some of the problems people have with lineage?

[01:36:05] Marcus: Well, the Bible comes right out and says in Ezekiel that God does not punish the son for the father’s guilt, nor will he punish the father for the son’s guilt. The idea is, if my dad commits murder, I don’t get punished for that. But what it’s talking about is in the legal justice system. It’s saying that if my dad commits murder, I can’t be punished for the murder that my dad commits. If I commit murder, he can’t be punished for the murder that I commit. You’re punished for your sin.

However, if my dad had committed murders, would that have any impact on my life? Yeah, I’d live with a whole lot of a different reality around me because of what had happened in my ancestry than I currently have. This idea that there are consequences that get passed down is a very real thing.

I think there’s a difference between somebody being culpable in a court of law – which is not fair and does not happen and God’s very clear about that – and this idea that there are negative consequences that get passed on, which is a very different thing.

[01:37:16] Stephanie: So on one hand, you have the family’s systems issues that develop, and on the other hand, you have children who learn the ways of their fathers, and so they continue the sins of their fathers. And so there are different avenues that can be taken.

[01:37:31] Marcus: Well, that’s true. Jesus, you know when he said that on his generation, God was going to send all of the wrath for all of the sins from every generation kind of thing, it’s a pretty profound thing. He said, “From Abel to the death of Zechariah who died near the altar,” he said, “All of that’s going to the consequences, the punishment of all that’s going to come on this generation.” Well, the reason is because this generation continued in all of those sins.  If his generation had received him as Messiah, had recognized the day of God’s visitation and repented and embraced what God was doing, that wouldn’t have happened. But his generation continued in the sins of the fathers. It continued on in that.

And so what we see and what we’re trying to do here when we talk about lineage is the same idea, and that is that if I come from a family line that has been practicing evil, or where evil has gotten into this family line and I continue in it, I’m inviting all kinds of problems including demonic consequences for their activity in my family and in my family system. This is precisely what we’re encouraging people to do, is to cut that off, repent of that, and be done with it.

We actually see a few examples of this in scripture where in Nehemiah, in chapter nine for example, he prays and he confesses the sins of his forefathers. He said, “Look, you sent us into exile justly because of the sins of our fathers. And yet here we are beginning to step into those same sins again. So I repent not only of the fact that we’re stepping into them again, but I repent of what they did and say it was wrong.”

We do see Ezra do something similar, and David making this interesting thing, like, “I was steeped in sin when I was born.” It’s an interesting idea. How can a baby be steeped in sin when they’re born? To me, that’s generational. And we’re talking about demonic elements of this.

There’s also that intriguing story in the gospels where a boy sometimes throws himself into fire and sometimes into water, and you’re like, “What would give permission to a demon to have that level of impact on a child?” Because this was a young child, probably not something the child did. It’s probably something that gained access in a different way, either through a curse being put on the child or through something being passed down to that child generationally.

[01:40:04] Stephanie: Right. Well, it makes me think of an extremely severe case of Alaine, I don’t know how much you want to say on that.

[01:40:12] Marcus: I have talked to people, especially in occult, where you have generational occult in the family, and they’re intentionally trying to pass this down. And so Alaine told me a story of, we’re talking about Alaine Pakkala. She’s a friend of Deeper Walk. She runs Lydia Discipleship Ministries and has done a lot of teaching for us on ministry to the deeply wounded. But she told me about this idea of intentionally passing on spirits from one generation to another in an occult system where a grandfather would literally place the hand of a granddaughter on the hand of a deceased grandmother and pray, “May all the spirits that were in my deceased grandmother pass to my (grand)daughter.” You know, that’s a pretty profound thing. And that makes sense because it’s actually being invited to transfer to the next generation.

[01:41:06] Stephanie: That’s like a blend between occult and lineage.

[01:41:09] Marcus: Yes, that’s like a blend between the occult and lineage. That’s a summoning exercise. What we’re talking about is a little less severe than that. It’s more of something that is automatically present. Because I look at it this way: if my grandfather got in some gambling debt on one side of my family, my great grandfather, and so opened a door for that. Let’s just say that he never repented of it, that he just continued in his gambling and his problem ever since, and he never, never turned away from that. And then it passed down to the next generation. What you would look for is, in the next generation, is there any kind of a gambling or maybe some other addictive behavior that created problems for the family? And did that pass down, do you see it in the next generation?

I know, for example, my dad worked with a lady whose husband had been a pastor who divorced her and abandoned the family. Turns out that his father was a pastor who had divorced his mother and abandoned the family. And his grandfather had been a pastor who had divorced his wife and abandoned his family. It was now the third generation of pastors divorcing and abandoning wives and abandoning their families. And so you’re like, is that just environment, or is there something else going on there?

What we’re saying from what we’ve learned about how spiritual warfare works, is that demons don’t say, “They’re in enough trouble, I’ll stay out of it.” If I’ve got all these environmental issues, demons will take advantage of those environmental issues. But there’s also something legal going on here where demons will say, “I have a right to be in this family because I was invited into this family, and nobody has ever kicked me out.”

Now, that doesn’t mean that everybody born in that family is born possessed. That’s not what we’re saying. But they are born in a soup, so to speak, that includes demonic activity in the environment. And because of that, they’re going to have to deal with things they wouldn’t have to deal with because of that.

One of the most concrete ways where I saw this at work was in adoptions, where someone would adopt a child who came from an entirely different lineage than theirs. Maybe they were four generations of devout Christians and a lot of divine blessing in their family, but they adopted somebody out of a very broken family system. Maybe there was paganism or false religion in that family system. And now they’re like, “What do we do?” Well, one of the first things that we often recommended was, “You need to cut off the generational inheritance, the spiritual generational inheritance from the family line they were born into, and then bring them under the spiritual family inheritance of your family line.”

I know, for example, my dad used to tell the story of a boy who had the reputation of being a “holy terror”, and he just drove everybody nuts. And his parents found out about this idea of cutting off lineage or generational iniquity. And so while the boy was sleeping, the father went into the room, next to him, and prayed and said, “I hereby cut off all spiritual inheritance from this boy’s birth family, and I command those demons to leave now,” and the boy literally flew out of the bed and landed on the floor.

[01:44:36] Stephanie: Wow.

[01:44:36] Marcus: And he woke up, and he was like, “What’s going on?”

And his dad’s like, “Don’t worry about it. I’m just praying for you. It’s going to be okay.” Tucked him back in. The next morning, this boy came down to breakfast with a different demeanor. That Friday, the teacher sent a note home with the boy saying, “I don’t know what’s changed in your home, but whatever it is, keep it up. This is a different kid.” And it all came back from breaking the spiritual inheritance that had been passed down through the birth family. Now, in this case, he had been born into a family that practiced a false religion. And so they had to cut off all of these religious spirits from that false religion.

[01:45:13] Stephanie: Well, because, again, with the blend of occult, usually when you see something as dramatic as flying out of a bed or something, it’s because there’s occult involved.

[01:45:23] Marcus: Yes, absolutely.

[01:45:26] Stephanie: Can you tell another story for people who suspect there’s some lineage involved in their own lives but want help exploring cutting it off?

[01:45:36] Marcus: I basically start with the assumption that there is generational or lineage issues in any family. For example, I look at our family and, just the one I was born into, one side goes back to religious dysfunction, and the other side goes back to irreligious dysfunction. And so we will pray to cut that off. Is there any ground that was given, any door that was opened from the anger and the rage in this family line that led to divorce? We cut that off. Or on my other side, all this controllingness. It was like a woman controlling the man with religion. We had to cut that off. We had to cut off the spirit of criticism and criticalness and so on.

There are things that have had to be cut off along the way. And every now and then, something new will pop up and surface, and you begin to realize, you know what? This pattern seems to be continuing from what I saw, my father or my grandfather or my mother, my grandmother’s generation. You notice that, so there’ll be new things you cut off, but you start with a blanket, “In the name of Jesus. I just cut off anything ancestral that’s been passed down.” And then you deal with specific things, as you know about the specific things to deal with. And so that’s the idea, is we use the same 3C, 4C approach:

“I confess that it’s true that my ancestors opened these doors, and this is what they did, and this is what I know. And then if I don’t, there’s stuff I don’t know about. I cut. I confess that, too. And I cut it off. I cancel it in Jesus name, I ask Jesus to cancel any permission that was given, and I now command any demons that have gained access to my family line, I command you to leave, go where the Lord Jesus Christ sends you, and I commit ourselves under the blessing of Christ.”

So you just use that same 4C system that we have talked about in pretty much every one of these podcasts on Confess, Cancel, Command, Commit. That’s how you break this stuff. That’s how you walk through it.

And I’ve done it for our family. I’ve done it periodically on specific things that have come up along the way, even after the more general, and it’s something I think that everybody would benefit from doing. I also think about the split family idea, too. It’s like you can do this for your biological family, and if you have step parents, you can do it for their family tree as well. And for some people, “What if I’m married and I’m the only Christian in the marriage, can I do it for my wife?” And the answer is, you can do it. Yes, for anything that is your nuclear family and beyond, you can cut them off.

[01:48:16] Stephanie: Would you recommend doing it with other people?

[01:48:20] Marcus:  It never hurts to do it with somebody else, but I think a lot of people have done this on their own by themselves successfully. This is actually step seven of Neil Anderson’s Seven Steps to Freedom. Step seven is dealing with generational stuff. If you want a guide to walk you through it, that’s a good guide. I also have prayers or recommended guides in What Every Believer Should Know about Spiritual Warfare. And some of the older ICBC content talks quite a bit about this as well. I know in our last conference, Karl Payne had a whole session just on generational iniquity. So we have quite a bit of extra material on this for people who want to take a deeper dive.

[01:48:59] Stephanie: I would just reiterate, all of this with soul and such, and even with spiritual warfare, these are all tools. And so it’s not a one size fits all, “Oh, if you deal with the lineage, it all gets better.” If the lineage was the really severe issue, then maybe it will all get better.

Anything final you want to say on lineage specifically? And then maybe we can wrap up the series as a whole.

[01:49:21] Marcus: The lineage and generational, ancestral, stuff like that, we tend to wonder sometimes, how real is this? And so we just start off saying, “Look, the Bible actually has a lot to say about ancestral and generational consequences to sin.” Now, does the Bible come right out and say you can have demons in your family because of this? No, but it also doesn’t say it can’t happen, and there are some stories, like the boy throwing himself into the fire or the water, that seem to suggest that may exactly be what’s happening. What we’re talking about, though, is there is biblical reference for cutting off or renouncing the sins of the fathers. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Let’s make sure that we’re doing this and that, especially if we see patterns emerging or developing. This is one of those tools that you want to use. No tool fixes everything, but there are things that can’t be fixed if you don’t employ this particular approach, and that’s why we talk about it. And I think it’s pretty serious. I’ve seen a lot of people get significant help by dealing with the generational issues involved.

[01:50:28] Stephanie:  Exactly. All right, any final thoughts for the SOUL-L Series as a whole?

[01:50:34] Marcus: Originally, the idea behind SOUL-L was I was looking at Neil Anderson’s Seven Steps to Freedom and I was trying to think, “Is there a way I could simplify this, and remember these seven doors that he had that open up things?” And I went, well, he talks about pride and rebellion and habitual sin. Well, that’s all sin, so we’ll call that sin. So underneath sin, we talk about idolatry and rebellion and pride and habitual or compulsive sins, and put all these different categories of sin there.

And then his Step One was the counterfeit vs. the real. So we talk about the occult and we talk about counterfeit Christianity that includes occult elements in it, even though it calls itself Christianity, and put it there.

His third step was about forgiveness and unforgiveness and bitterness. So that inspired this idea, well, let’s talk about unforgiveness. And then there’s lies that we believe. And again, he’s got a step there on deception, and we’re just taking that and unpacking it in a little bit different way.

So I just want to give credit to Neil, to the idea Steps to Freedom that has sort of inspired the thinking around this, have kind of repackaged things. And I’ve had other people suggest, you know, adding this or adding that. And you can add other things. There’s nothing magical about these five. They’re just very common.

If I was going to add another one, it would probably be fear. I’ve tended to include fear underneath lies we believe, because usually there is a lie underneath our fear. So there are other things that could be included in a list like this. It’s just meant to get us started. And I used it because it helped me to keep it in my head so I didn’t have to look it up every time. It’s a memory device so that I know what to look for.

One of the ways that I used SOUL-L throughout my ministry was as I would listen to people tell their story, and I would be writing down and taking notes, a lot of times I could just put an S or an O or a U or something like that, or L1 or L2 next to it, just to remind me, go revisit this point because there’s a good chance, based on their story, there’s a good chance that they’ve opened a door here that we need to go back and close.

That’s kind of how it got used in my ministry time. And hopefully this will be helpful both to people who are engaged in that kind of ministry and people who are looking for ways to find freedom in their own life.

[01:52:49] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to, like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend.

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