Spiritual atmospheres can and do shift instantly, such as in the case of David at the retreat site. Or a shift can occur in a matter of weeks, such as in the case of Dr. Kiteley. And then some shifts require much more. God called Ron and me to repurpose a difficult church environment in a historically “religious” city. Not only were we battling a demonic spiritual atmosphere; we were also dealing with strongholds of thinking and an inflexible culture. As a strong discerner, I suffered week after week in the atmosphere of my church. It was a cold, strife-filled atmosphere with a heavy, oppressive feeling. If you were to look at the congregants on Sunday, they, too, looked sad, bored or angry underneath their plastic smiles. Prayer continued to be my lifeline, because in prayer I could breathe in the heavenly atmosphere, which is peace, joy, love, etc., and in prayer I could get my feelings straightened out. That is, until the next church service, where the battle inside would start all over again. Shifting this atmosphere would need much more than a few one-time commands or a few weeks of praise and worship. We were engaging in a top-to-bottom spiritual overhaul, which largely began with discerning who was for us and who was against us. That will be our topic in the next chapter.
Kingdom Principles
When you operate in the gift of discerning of spirits, you will discern spiritual atmospheres through your senses, often through the vehicle of your thoughts and emotions. We often dismiss what we discern, though, because it is not rational enough.
Spiritual atmospheres are real, and we discern through our senses what God and His forces are doing, as well as what Satan and his forces are doing. It is always a call to prayer.
Discerners are spiritual watchmen and gatekeepers who shut the spiritual gates to the wrong things and open them to the right things.
The things we discern are not the end of the story. We discern so we can respond.
We can change most spiritual atmospheres through our words and with praise and worship.
Thoughts for Reflection
Have you ever noticed an intrusive feeling or thought that seemed out of place, only to discover you were discerning something real in the atmosphere?
Do you experience distinct shifts in your thoughts, emotions and dreams, depending on your location?
How have you acted as a spiritual watchman, opening or closing spiritual gates, depending on what you were discerning in the atmosphere?
Have you ever struggled with overwhelming discernment? If so, how are you learning to manage that?
Are you noticeably aware of how your words and your praise and worship change atmospheres?
5
Discerning Who Is for You and Who Is against You
I knew it would happen eventually, but we had been together only a few years when our pastor flew the coop.
“I’ve had enough!” he said. “I’m going to minister at another, much healthier church.”
And that is exactly what happened. He returned to the church he had planted in another city, but this time as an associate minister. His sudden departure left Ron and me with that weird “dangling” feeling and the insecurity of not knowing what to expect next.
To my shock, the church board quickly turned to my young husband, asking him to become the interim senior pastor. It did not take long, however, for the board to fall into disunity over my husband’s future with this church. As arguments began to stir, my husband sensed the tangible presence of the Lord enter those tense meetings. Again, this is the gift of discerning of spirits in operation. Ron described how the “felt peace” of God filled the room more than once, and those at odds with each other then would supernaturally come into agreement. The plan was for Ron to serve as interim pastor for a year, but within a few months the board invited him to take a more permanent role. Ron, at age 27, became the youngest senior pastor in the church’s 80-year history.
God’s word to us about leading this church had finally come to pass, but now we had a new word: “For a great and effective door has opened to me, and there are many adversaries” (1 Corinthians 16:9 NKJV). It would be years before we understood how this little church in a small town could ever become a great and effective door of ministry. It did not take long, however, to realize that our adversaries were many and they often came in disguise. What I mean is, our adversaries did not look like adversaries. They looked like ordinary people who could quote the Bible, pray and worship in church on Sundays. If we were going to thrive in this assignment, then, we had to see behind the masks. We had to know who was for us and who was against us.
The gift of discerning of spirits will reveal people’s heart motives, whether they are sincere and genuine or evil and deceitful. To be honest, I have found that most people are somewhere in the middle. They are not all sincere, but neither are they all deceitful, and we can still have a relationship with them and they with us, knowing that we all are a work in progress. At the same time, there are those who are really, really deceitful and have evil agendas. They don’t want you to succeed, or they want to take something from you. Some even want to destroy you. The gift of discerning of spirits is God’s security system to let you know who is really who.
At first, this gift worked to reveal and expose malicious gossip that was rampant inside our leadership and fellowship. Some of that, of course, was exposed naturally as people came forward about it. Other times, Ron would rub his head as if he were feeling a headache and say by the Spirit of the Lord, “Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So are stirring people up over the change we made last week. I can feel it right here!”
Ron would discern rebellion and manipulative speech through a particular feeling of pressure against his mind. He even knew in his spirit who was involved and what it was about. This was his alert from the Holy Spirit to pray for the rebellious gossip to surface so he could confront it.
“I was confronting men and women who were two and three times my age on the sin of gossiping,” Ron said of that time. “I had to call some of them into my office almost weekly until they stopped or left the church.”
Backbiting is what had fueled devastating strife in the past, and it was strife that was being uprooted from the church in this season. The gift of discerning of spirits revealed it so we could deal with it. More than once, the gift of discerning of spirits revealed men and women sent on demonic assignment to harm my husband or me.
I need to point out here that there is a difference between a person sent against you by Satan and a person who is very broken and acts out of his or her brokenness. It can look the same on the surface, but the gift of discerning of spirits will reveal the truth. Discerning an actual demonic assignment against you can be alarming within your emotions, and you need wisdom and patience, not reactiveness, to handle it properly.
There was a middle-aged woman who began attending the church soon after my husband became senior pastor. She was eager, energetic, and had expressed her desire to be more involved in the ministry. I did notice some strange behavior on her part, however. She appeared to create situations on purpose that would set people up to be disappointed with me. She struck me as possibly having a divisive spirit, but then, like an alarm going off, I discerned her real motive. I said to Ron, “She’s here on demonic assignment to destroy me! Please do something—anything!”
It sounded crazy, but I wanted her out of the church right then and there, and I did not care how that happened. You see, when you discern something that sinister, it causes panic and an inappropriate reaction inside you, until you become more experienced. If you are not careful, you might initiate a strong defensive action against someone without any tangible evidence for doing so. That is almost always the wrong thing to do. My husband, being the voice of reason, convinced me just to stay calm and wait it out. Not too long afterward, she popped up on a leadership team in one of the church’s long-standing ministries. This ministry had neglected to check in with Ron or me before they appointed her, and it turned into their big mess. I also knew by the Holy Spirit that she wanted to lead this particular ministry
so she could gain more power through that position. She became so bitterly divisive within that team that she was invited to leave the church.
The gift of discerning of spirits also sifts out the highly deceptive who see the church as a means for personal gain. A board member and his wife introduced one family to us who began attending our church. They acted very charismatic and quite “churchy.” I never felt quite right about the guy, and one day in the hallway I just asked him flat out, “How do you make your money?”
I asked him that because I noticed his peculiar behavior when we received offerings during the church services. He would flamboyantly pull out of his jacket a large, folded stack of cash and then drop several large bills in the offering bucket in an almost choreographed fashion. When he shared with me how he earned his income, it sounded like garble and nonsense words. He did not make any sense! I knew I was discerning a lying spirit with a wicked financial motive. Soon enough, he began his “presentations” to others and to me about a hot investment, an investment that, thankfully, no one gave him money for.
I felt as if we were in a living Whac-A-Mole game. This is a game in which plastic moles mechanically pop up through a game board, and then you hit the moles down with a hammer. The game itself is pretty satisfying because you can usually hit down all the moles. In the church, however, we would take care of one spiritually motivated problem, only to have two more pop up. That is because we really were not fighting with flesh and blood, as the apostle Paul described the battle, but “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). At the same time, we faced unusual spiritual warfare, the kind you would hear about in foreign countries but not expect in your own conservative city. In response, we became very diligent and militant in prayer, and God answered us again and again.
The Tension of Two Extremes
During a conference in another town, I requested a private meeting with one of the speakers. The speaker was connected to a strong and impactful movement, so I trusted this person’s perspective more than my own. I simply wanted counsel on how best to handle the high level of spiritual warfare we were dealing with in our church and city.
The counsel I received was that people such as those in my church and me, people who “see too many demons,” are most likely out of balance. I was told that if we wanted to be spiritually effective, then we needed to look for God—Him only—and not be looking for demons. That thinking also needed to carry over into how we saw and ministered to people. We needed to “look for the good or positive” in people and not fixate on the negative.
I interpreted this counsel to mean that we should not actively look for demons in people. This sounded like solid advice and struck me as a much better option than what we were presently doing. It is true that we had become pretty negative and did see a lot of demons both spiritually and in people, and I was desperate to find a more comfortable balance.
The speaker also introduced a new model of prayer at the conference and called it “soaking prayer,” which is quite different from intercessory prayer. Soaking prayer is an act of entering into the presence of God solely to experience His love and His voice. Intercessory prayer, on the other hand, is passionately advocating, keeping watch and enforcing God’s promises on behalf of another. I noticed that many people around the conference room engaged in soaking prayer by casually lying down on the chairs or on the floor, as if asleep. It looked like a very peaceful experience.
I reasoned, then, that these concepts were exactly what we needed and began to teach them to my church and to our intercessors. I communicated how I felt that we had become spiritually out of balance and needed to look for what God was doing instead of what demons were doing, both in prayer and when we ministered to people. I then reconstructed our prayer services to look more like soaking prayer instead of intercessory prayer—again, just trying to balance everything out.
Seeing Only What We Wanted to See
It did not take long to realize what a mistake I had made. In trying to look for what God was doing, and Him only, we stopped discerning the hearts of people and the very real plans of the enemy. Rather than flowing in the gift of discerning of spirits, we began controlling the gift to see only what we wanted to see, instead of what we needed to see. And because we were mostly “soaking” in prayer instead of interceding in prayer, our spiritual hedges went down. A hedge is defined as something that provides a defense or protection. Job had such a spiritual hedge, lost it and then got it back (see Job 1:10). When he had this hedge, Satan could not touch him. When he lost the hedge, Satan did all but kill him. We had lost our hedge because we were no longer seeing and interceding. I saw more evil come into our church during this time frame, in the form of people and spiritual attacks, than in any other time frame. It was a hard but valuable lesson.
Through this I learned that the truth is often found in the tension of two extremes. What is right for one church is not always right for our church. Remember, the apostle John in the book of Revelation gave seven different sets of instruction to the seven different churches. If these churches did not receive the same instructions, neither will we.
I am not saying that “soaking prayer” is a wrong kind of prayer or that we should stop seeing the positive in people. I am saying that our church was in a unique spiritual battle and needed the right strategy for what we were dealing with. We had stopped discerning our enemy, thinking this other strategy was the right thing to do. In so doing, we inadvertently had laid down our swords.
With that said, we reopened our eyes and hearts to see what the Holy Spirit wanted us to see, without filtering anything out. We had been trying to set the balance for our church, when God is the One who sets the balance. With swords back in hand, we were mindful again to keep watch over the gates by discerning who was for us and who was against us.
Discerning the Motives of the Heart
If you are new to the gift of discerning of spirits, here are some points to help you begin to identify who is for you and who is against you. Remember, this is a supernatural ability that goes beyond natural perception. You are not just reading people or their behavior. You are discerning by the Holy Spirit what the natural eye cannot see.
1. Pay attention to your “knower”
“I just know that I know,” said Charlene, my external ministry administrator from Ceres, California. “It’s never been that hard for me to know someone’s intentions.”
That is because Charlene has learned to pay attention to her “knower,” that internal barometer that tells her whom she can trust and whom she should avoid. Some people call this intuition, a gut feeling or instinct. It is really the Holy Spirit’s gift of discerning of spirits. Char once had a “knowing” about an event she planned to send her teenage daughter to. At the last minute, she decided to keep her daughter home because she knew in her knower that something about the event was deceptive. She found out a few days later that the event was closed prematurely due to the inappropriate behavior of an adult chaperone, which led to his arrest.
Nathan, a program specialist for an adult day program, also pays strong attention to his knower. “It can be difficult at times to explain how I discern if someone is for me or against me,” he said. “I just know inside. My spirit is either drawn to them or repelled by them.”
Still, Nathan tests his feelings with physical observations and observes a person over time to substantiate his initial reactions. Once, he even identified a witch masquerading as a Christian in his church fellowship. He identified her as such in his knower, but waited for evidence before he said anything. The evidence came soon enough, and she was revealed as a notorious witch, one who habitually infiltrated churches to stir up trouble.
Jennie, a parishioner also from Ceres, California, shared about the first time she met her best friend. “I had never felt such a sweet and gentle spirit before,” Jennie explained. “I thought how strange
it was to feel this good about someone whom I had just met.”
This was significant for Jennie, because she does not trust people that easily. She knew in her knower, however, that she had met a real friend, and they have had a relationship that she has since enjoyed for many years. “God had genuinely put someone in my life to be the friend that I really need,” Jennie said.
2. Pay attention to your imagination
When Rose (not her real name) meets new people or is introduced to them, she takes note of the movies that begin to play inside her imagination. If she sees a good movie begin to play involving both her and the person she just met, then she has learned through repeated experiences that the person is someone she can trust. If she sees a negative movie, however, she takes note of it and stays guarded until she can prove out what she just saw in her imagination. Rose is aware, however, that if she is not in a good frame of mind, she does not discern as accurately. Those movies will still play, but she will impose her own vulnerability or distrust onto someone, which is false discernment, not true discernment.
Seeing the Supernatural Page 7
