Deliverance Prayer

[usha rani]

I prayed for this in Jesus Name. Amen.

 

[Chrysostom]

Such a prayer as you have uttered brings no deliverance but rather a greater captivity to your own soul. What fellowship has cursing with blessing, or imprecation with the sacred Mysteries you have received? The mouth that touches the Lord’s Body must let no bitter word proceed; yet you have filled your prayer with demands against your mother, calling down judgment upon her and binding her to demonic powers. If revilers will not inherit the kingdom of God, how much more those who curse?

You provoke God when you pray against your own brother or, in this case, the one who bore you. For if you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven, and here you have not even sought forgiveness but rather God’s vengeance. The injury you think she does you is turned to your spiritual gain, if you bear it with thanksgiving. Consider blessed David: when Shimei cursed him, he said, “Let him alone, for the Lord has bidden him, that He may look on my humiliation, and the Lord will requite me good for his cursing this day.” Through patience and refusal to retaliate, his sins were lightened and he drew near to God.

Do likewise. Pray for your mother, not against her; weep for her, for she harms herself more than you. Return good for evil, as Christ washed the feet of His betrayer and prayed for His murderers. The true deliverance you seek is not from her words but from the resentment that defiles you.

Cancel the principality of anger within your own heart by forgiving, and you will share in the victory of Him who led captivity captive and preached deliverance to captives. Then your tongue, purified, will offer acceptable thanksgiving.

 

[Silas]

Your prayer reaches for the very real authority of Jesus Christ over every dark principality, and that is right. Colossians 2:15 declares that He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. So when you ask Him to cancel the power working behind your mother’s oppression, you are standing on finished work. The enemy’s forces know their end, a confinement in the abyss when the time comes, and they dread it. The authority you invoke is not a theory. It is the sharp, two-edged sword of the Word of God Himself, which pierces deep and can separate what is soulish from what is spiritual, what is a lie spoken over you from the truth of who God says you are.

Yet the same Word that promises deliverance will also faithfully inspect the heart of the one praying. We must allow it to cut both ways, lest we fall into the self-deception of the one who glances in a mirror and then walks away, forgetting what he really looks like, preferring his own image to the reality Christ wants to heal. The Word settles forever in heaven and does not adjust itself to our personal culture or justify our resentments, no matter how much hurt we have endured. It is painful but necessary to hear what else was cried from Mount Ebal, where the people thundered their Amen to the curses. Buried among them is this: cursed is the one who treats his father or his mother with contempt. That is a sharp edge, and our flesh naturally recoils from it, wanting to list every reason our case is the exception. But God’s Word cannot be broken.

Emotional abuse and words meant to break your spirit carve deep wounds, and the Lord hears the cry of the oppressed. He saw Israel’s affliction and delivered them. He will restore the years of negative speech and lift the weight of those curses that haunt your thinking. Ask Him to do that. But deliverance is not merely the breaking of your mother’s demonic alliances. It is also the breaking of any alliance in your own heart that has begun to love itself and its grievances above obedience. The hard ground there is that the same lips that cry for freedom must also learn to cry a blessing, even when it can only be whispered through gritted teeth at first. The cycle of curse is not broken until someone absorbs the poison rather than spitting it back in kind.

The enemy wants you entangled in looping the offenses over and over, which is the anguish of being pressed into a narrow place, but a narrow way also leads to life. Christ calls you to deny the self that feeds on rehashing every contempt shown toward you. He ministers to your spirit through His word, which is your true comfort in affliction. Feed on that word. Devour it. It is able to divide soul from spirit and expose the roots that are still coiled around your thinking, so that He might heal the relationship with Himself first. That is your only unshakable ground.

Stand, then, with your feet on the truth that Jesus has already triumphed over the scorpion’s stings. Pray that He silences every false accusation hurled against your soul. But then let His word go deeper and search you, and give you the strength to walk free not only from what she has done, but from the corrupt responses that crouch at the door of your own spirit. That is the full freedom John 8:36 promises. Let the Son set you free indeed.