29: Guard Your Ground – Practical Spiritual Warfare, Part 4

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 3, episode 29. Today we are closing our Practical Warfare series and also season three. And we are happy to be with you.

Hello, Father.

[00:11] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s hard to believe the season’s coming to an end.

[00:14] Stephanie: I know we’ve covered a lot of ground in this season. It’s been a season of breakthrough and all the things.

Before I forget, I want to announce. Well, I guess we announced it last episode. I want to remind people that next week we are starting our summer schedule which is going to be a weekly lesson going through the A Deeper Walk book. It’s basically a small group study that you can go through. You can download a free discussion guide. It’s all free. You can find it at our website, but also you can find it on YouTube.

We’re going to drop it weekly on YouTube and we are encouraging you to gather a group or join our community online on our Mighty Networks platform. All those links are in the description. You want to say something, Father?

[01:09] Marcus: Well, I thought of most highlighting that if you do want to do this with a group, I believe David Yarborough is leading a group through these sessions as they come out.

[01:23] Stephanie: He is our shepherd on Mighty Networks, so if you’re in the Deeper Walk online community, he is going to be helping shepherd people through that. Yeah.

[01:33] Marcus: So I may have gotten that a little bit wrong, but there’s an opportunity to do this with other people.

[01:39] Stephanie: Yeah.

[01:40] Marcus: Just check things out at the website.

[01:41] Stephanie: Yep, it’s gonna be fun and we’ve got a good group over there. So yes, we’re very, very excited about the study and the opportunity. It’s gonna be a 10 week study. If you want to get a head start over looking at what to expect from it, you can find it on our website in our free learning library streaming service as well. So, looking forward to that.

But for today, it is our final little episode in our SONG acrostic series. We’re working through our practical warfare acrostic, SONG, which is Stop giving permission, Oust the enemy, Nurture new habits, and Guard your ground.

So today we are talking about guarding your ground. And to me this is, once you reclaim the ground that you surrendered through this renouncing and ousting process, then you want to know how are we going to guard that. Or preventatively, how do we keep it from getting claimed in the first place? So do you want to give some initial thoughts?

[02:49] Marcus: Yeah. So where I begin with this is, Jesus taught his disciples, “Watch and pray so that you do not fall into temptation.” So if you’re looking for how do I not surrender ground again, the recipe Jesus laid out was watch and pray so that you don’t fall into temptation.

We’ve kind of taken that and turned it into our SLOW acrostic, which is Stop, Listen, Obey, and Watch. And then from Watch, you go right back to Stop and Listen so that you can Obey.

A new kind of pattern that we do to kind of guard our steps is practicing walking in the Spirit. Practicing walking in the spirit involves this watching and praying idea, that I am paying attention to those times in my life when I am most easily succumbed to temptation.

Is it right after lunch when I’m just tired and I’m all alone? Is it after school? When I’m by myself at night? What are the rhythms where I find it? Let’s kind of make some plans around some of those things.

So that I am watching and praying, and I am aware that I am entering into a season or an area or a time of my life where I’m just more open to demonic attack than normal, I’m going into his territory in a different way.

That’s part of watching, right? I’ve got to watch when I’m going into those seasons or those areas. So watching and then walking in the Spirit, through tuning in and asking God to show us the way of escape when we are in those situations. That’s one basic step that we can take as we are guarding ourselves.

[04:32] Stephanie: That’s really good. As you were talking, it did remind me of, sometimes when people have gone through an eviction process, you will actually warn them the enemy might try to be like, “No, I’ve still got permission here.” And you just say, “No, you don’t.” But he’ll try to come back in. Could you address that?

[04:52] Marcus: Yeah. I routinely would tell people after they went through some sort of a deliverance experience that the devil’s going to try to get his ground back. He’s lost it. He’s gone. He’s now going to try to come back. He’s trying to come back. And you can think of it as now it’s the difference between evicting and just holding up that shield of faith and resisting.

But we still need to be aware of the fact that just because you’re experiencing a temptation doesn’t mean that you didn’t find freedom. The being tempted still happens, but the more often that we win those moments of temptation, the devil tries different tactics after a while.

[05:36] Stephanie: So can we maybe start with the idea of cleansing and whether that’s property or… Let’s start with property, actually.

[05:47] Marcus: Yeah, sure. So cleansing property. The process for cleansing property is the same as evicting. It’s the CCC process.

I often confess here on an “if” basis, “God, if something has happened that has given permission to something demonic to be on this property, then I renounce that in Jesus name.

“I ask you to cancel any permission that it’s given to any wicked spirits or their works and effects. I now command them to leave in the name of Jesus, take their works and effects with them. And I now commit this area to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

So that’s a pretty straightforward process. It’s confess, cancel, command, commit. First time I heard about this, and I’m sure I’ve shared this on the podcast before, but it was of the guy in the hotel room who went through basically that 4C prayer.

I don’t think that was exactly the model he was using, but that was basically what he went through. And all the light bulbs burst, right? And that was pretty dramatic. He found out that there had sure enough been a fortune teller in that hotel room before him. You think about it, hotel rooms, a lot of sin takes place in there, right? There’s whole comedy routines that people do about how much stuff happens in hotels. But it’s not just hotel rooms.

You stop and think about how many places we go where we are entering into territory where wicked spirits have permission to be active there. Sometimes we can cleanse it because we’re now in control of this territory.

I’ve not only seen it in hotel rooms, I’ve seen this with school teachers who say, “Can I cleanse my classroom?” And I was like, “Absolutely, yes, cleanse your classroom.” I’ve had testimonies from them saying it’s amazing how much less out of control my classroom has been since I started cleansing it in the morning and praying for God’s hedge of protection around it.

School bus drivers, same testimony. Even workplaces where people are in their workplace and they’re like, “In this area, I claim whatever authority God has given me in this area, I command [Satan] to get out of here. And I commit it to Jesus Christ.” I get testimony after testimony from people about how they have seen a noticeable difference in the environment after doing this.

[08:08] Stephanie: So guarding your literal ground is a great way to start helping bring more protection and more established freedom in your life. Can you talk about how literal ground could be related to what people are actively confessing, canceling, commanding for themselves?

[08:42] Marcus: Give me an example. What are you thinking?

[08:46] Stephanie: I guess you used an if prayer sometimes.

[08:51] Marcus: Sometimes it’s not an if prayer. You know what, they’re done. Yes, that’s true. So I know a person, for example, who bought a new house, and weird things were happening in the house, and so they asked God to show them what was going on.

They took a second look at their garage and realized that the garage floor was painted red. And they’re like, “That’s kind of weird.” And then they noticed that at one end there was like a riser, a platform.

And then they took a closer look at the paint job and realized that somebody had painted over a pentagram above that platform, that there were actually clearly occult rituals happening in their garage by the people who owned it before them. God showed that to them, and once they did the research, they found it. Now you know what’s going on.

So it’s like, “God, I renounce any occult activity and all the occult activity that took place here. I renounce any rituals that took place here. I break any connection or access and anything demonic has to this property, to the people in this property.”

You know what you’re praying about. Now we’ve got to break this. In fact, my dad used to humorously, some half-humorously, say that Christians should go buy haunted houses cheap. Yeah. So they could kick out the, you know.

[10:10] Stephanie: Oh, yeah.

[10:11] Marcus: Kick out the ghosts and have a cheap property.

[10:14] Stephanie: Oh, I know. I remember a meme going around a while back where people were like, oh, choose: you get all this fancy stuff, beautiful mansion of this and that and this, but it has a ghost or blah, blah, blah. And I was like, “I’ll take the one with the ghost. I can deal with that.”

[10:26] Marcus: Yeah, right, exactly.

[10:29] Stephanie: No longer haunted. Well, okay, that’s good. How about ground when it’s not literal ground? We’re dealing with how to be proactive about guarding our ground.

[10:45] Marcus: Yeah. I heard a story years ago from somebody who was speaking at one of our events. He had invited somebody over for dinner and later found out that the person he invited over was the high priest of the witches in the area.

And so he just prayed, “God, would you just surround this property with your hedge of protection? Would you assign holy angels to prohibit anything demonic from entering the property when this person shows up?” Because he’s like, “I don’t want to be afraid to have somebody like this over. This is an opportunity to have a power encounter and show him that greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world.”

And so he prayed this very concrete prayer and may have even walked the property and just said, “God, would you put a wall of protection around here that allows no demons to pass?”

Well, as he tells the story, the evening for the dinner came, and the guy showed up, and the first words out of his mouth were, “I don’t know what kind of power you have, but I want it.” Which kind of got his attention. He goes, “What do you mean?” He says, “Well, there’s a spirit that goes with me everywhere that I go, and it’s the one who tells me things about other people and gives me guidance. And it could not come onto the property with me.

“It’s standing out there on the road throwing a hissy fit because, for whatever reason it couldn’t come onto the property. I have never seen that before. I’ve never seen him, this spirit guide, not be allowed into a property before.” So that’s kind of the most dramatic. And sometimes the dramatic stories help you understand the principle and the point involved. And so that’s kind of what we mean by, let’s not only cleanse the property, but let’s pray protection around it.

[12:40] Stephanie: And I like that story because it shows someone still being in a heart-focused community. That’s not quite what we mean by it, but still have somebody living without fear and being in relationship and community with people.

[12:58] Marcus: Yeah, it’s an evangelistic setting and some of the most dramatic power encounter things happen in evangelistic settings. A lot of the spiritual warfare we talk about on our podcast and in our ministry is about freedom.

It’s about helping Christians get free from things that have them in bondage. But there’s a whole other realm and dimension of spiritual warfare that is almost exclusively evangelistic.

That’s where you are confronting the powers of darkness in another place. People who are invading enemy territory to take ground from the enemy that, in the context in which 2 Corinthians 10:4 & 5 talk about strongholds, is actually evangelism. It’s not personal freedom.

And so the strongholds they’re talking about are the strongholds in the culture that keep people from the truth of the gospel. And how the Apostle Paul is invading enemy territory constantly and tearing down the strongholds that have blinded people to the gospel.

It’s just that there is an application then of that that says, in the same way that you have to tear down these strongholds so that the gospel can be received in our own lives, we sometimes have to tear down these strongholds so that God’s truth can come to life and really take root.

[14:14] Stephanie: Yes. And that is where I want us to go next, is how do we guard that ground?

[14:19] Marcus: How do we guard that ground?

[14:20] Stephanie: Right. Because we’ve been in a process of STOP: Stop giving permission, Oust the enemy. Stop giving permission to the ground, the enemy, the demon, whatever they’re called.Whatever they’re called.

Having placed my land, my ground, whether that’s literal or my heart ground, and then we’re going to oust him from that ground, and then we’re going to be nurturing new habits, new soil, new ground. We’re going to be tending that ground. And so how do we guard it?

[14:58] Marcus: Every day I pray for a hedge of protection around myself, my family, all things related to the ministries that we’re connected with. It’s a standard thing. I look at it like washing your hands to avoid viruses and germs. It’s just standard practice to pray. “God, would you just grant us that hedge of protection around anything?” Because I know there’s going to be enemy attacks, so I want to cut off unnecessary ones, the ones that I don’t really need to be facing.

This is also why you need community and why you need not just your own self standing up in all of this. Having people who pray with you, having people you can talk to about your struggles, having people who can help you with your own freedom issues along the way.

So one of the ways that we guard our ground is by actively engaging with people where we encourage each other on this journey and we help each other with the battles that we face. And they can often give perspectives or notice patterns that we’re not noticing. And so I think an important way that we guard ground is by being in a heart-focused community.

[16:12] Stephanie: And a community who prays together and who watches each other’s backs like that. I love it. Any thoughts on proactive protection? Like, community would be a proactive thing, but like any proactive protection, proactive guarding?

[16:33] Marcus: Not a lot more. I mean, the main thing here is, one, you don’t want to live in fear. Like every day I’ve got to wake up and if I don’t pray my hedging prayer, I’m in trouble today. And if I don’t…

[16:43] Stephanie: The thought that comes to mind is what you always say about if you’re hiking, you know where the snakes are, you know where snakes tend to like to hide.

And that’s giving you the freedom to walk down the trail knowing, “Oh, I’m going to step on the log, not over it.” or things like that. So you know how you’re walking and what to do if you encounter it. But you’re not hunting for the snakes. You’re not looking behind every rock and expecting it behind everything. But you’re right. You know what to do if you come across it.

[17:15] Marcus: Right. And that’s why we study spiritual warfare in the first place. It’s a part of life. It’s much more common than people think. And it just makes sense that we should have some idea of how the enemy likes to attack. Are we prepared for that attack? What do we have to do to stand? That’s the point of Ephesians 6 is when I’m attacked, how do I survive that attack? I can come out standing.

There are other types of spiritual warfare besides the Ephesians 6 model of just standing when you’re attacked. And those are taking back ground and tearing down strongholds, which is actually a different thing than just standing and surviving.

Then there’s the whole evangelistic element. There’s always spiritual warfare in evangelism. And so we have all of these things factor in. Part of what we’re doing is we have to have a warfare worldview so that warfare is just a part of the lenses with which you look at life so that you notice things.

And again, that’s part of coming back to watching and praying. And that is, what is it that the Holy Spirit wants me to notice in this situation so that I can form the proper plan?

[18:26] Stephanie: Excellent. Well, I just want to remind everyone, gather your groups for our Deeper Walk study happening starting next week.

And also thank you to everyone who supports Deeper Walk as a monthly donor or even a one time, if you’re just once a year, that’s great too. Thank you to you too. Thank you to everyone who supports us. We could not do what we do without you and you are making an impact. So thank you, thank you, thank you for that.

Father, would you pray? I’m trying to think of final thoughts first or prayer first. Why don’t you do final thoughts on practical warfare and then I would love for you to pray for us.

[19:12] Marcus: No doubt. You know, I just got a text message today from a pastor of an enormous church talking about the mental health challenges that they face in their congregation, the huge challenges they have with people with deep issues, and can Deeper Walk help?

What can we do? And I think about that, that all of us in our own lives and the lives of people that we love know people who are just trapped and they’re looking for a breakthrough in their life. They’re looking for how do I win this battle, how do I get to the next level of maturity, how do I deal with root level issues? So it’s a big topic.

That’s why we talk about five engines and different practices for the different engines and all these things. If it was as simple as just pray this one prayer and you’re done. That’s all anybody would ever do.

The thing is that there are some things that you’re not going to be able to do the rest of it until you do the freedom praying that is involved in spiritual warfare. And so I just want to encourage people, keep on the journey, stay on the trail and let me pray.

Father God, I am grateful that Jesus Christ emptied himself, made himself human, made himself our servant, mind boggling, died for us, and then rose again and was raised and seated at the right hand of the Father where all authority in heaven and on earth have been given unto him.

We thank you that we serve the Father of all and the Lord of all in Jesus Christ and that because of that you have given us the resources to face every situation that we encounter in life.

I just pray that there would be the abundance of all of that would become increasingly real to us and increasingly available to us in the battles that we face and in the day to day challenges of life. And I just pray your blessing and your peace on each one now listening. In Christ’s name, amen.

[21:20] Stephanie: Amen.

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. And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.