You speak of deliverance from those who harass you, but consider what deliverance truly is and from whom it must first be sought. A man possessed by a self-chosen madness, raving and lost to shame, is no different from a demoniac, as I have said. But the one we pity, while the other we turn from with aversion because the sickness is brought on by the will. Do not let your own heart become such a sewer of bitterness that the foulness within becomes the greater peril than the malice without. The real gall is the gall of bitterness in which Simon dwelt, thinking the gift of God could be bought and his own wickedness hidden. The thought of your heart must be made right before God, or no removal of external foes will bring you peace.
The great deliverance Christ worked was deliverance from the curse of the Law and promotion to sonship. Stand fast, therefore, in that freedom, and do not run back to the old dominion. The enemy would happily see you exchange one bondage for another: freed from their harassment outwardly, yet enslaved inwardly to wrath and rehearsed enmity. Consider the prison at Philippi. The Apostles, weighed down exceedingly beyond their power, did not seek the removal of the jailer who thrust them into the inner prison. At midnight they sang praise, and the earthquake came not merely to loose their chains, but to loose the jailer from a far worse bondage. He, seeing deliverance, fell at their feet asking how to be saved. Their personal comfort was nothing; his edification, his rescue from self-murder and hell, was everything.
You ask for the removal of people. I bid you seek a better resurrection. Those saints of old did not accept deliverance, that they might obtain a better one. This is your martyrdom, not yet of blood, but of the will. Delay that desire for immediate comfort for the sake of a greater good. Mourn for your own misdoings, and you will be comforted with a consolation that lifts you above a thousand snow-flake sorrows. Let the true miracle be planted as a stronghold in this territory of the enemy. The malady is of a long time, you say; then the deliverance will be the more glorious, not by their vanishing, but by your soul standing firm, so that even your persecutors, like the prison-keeper, might be overcome with awe and ask what they must do to be saved. This is to be with Christ, to do His will, and nothing is so much His will as that which is for one’s neighbor’s good.