Spiritual Warfare

Praying Powerfully and Effectively for our Government and Country

Listen to this teaching here.

This teaching talks about ways to protect yourself and have an aggressive response to evil without falling into witchcraft. Currently we especially need to pray, not only for ourselves but for our whole country and all branches of our government.

This technique of prayer is an effective way to stand up to the enemy safely. Some people spend their time being angry at God that He doesn’t change things as if he’s not a good enough Father, That is pretty absurd.

People in this world have been given free will and they have a right to exercise that. It is not for us to determine what those limits are. I am going to teach you to take charge of your environment in a godly way that will deal with problems created by people’s choices without you overstepping and attacking their free will.

When in prayer we try to manipulate or control others, that is we call charismatic witchcraft.

As we discuss the problem of avoiding charismatic witchcraft or Christian witchcraft, I want to give you a powerful way to pray to change things that is actually an aggressive weapon. But it is not manipulative and won’t push us into the consequences of witchcraft. The consequences of witchcraft are extremely destructive. They are not worth having and must be avoided.

Unfortunately, some Christian intercessors pray against people in ways that they should not. They suffer for it and get sick or suffer set backs and blame it on Satan thinking it is because they are such good prayers. The problems they suffer are mostly not Satan whose punishing them. It is a consequence from Charismatic witchcraft. God wants them to turn away from that destructive behavior.

So I want to tell you about something the Lord showed me that has shown itself to be an extremely powerful way to pray. 20 years ago God taught me this. I've taught this to many people, and there are a couple things I want to say about this powerful way of praying.

One is, if I was teaching them something wrong, the Lord has no trouble disciplining me and straightening me out. Throughout my fifty years of walking with Him, He has easily gotten my attention and let me know I must unequivocally quit something I was teaching or doing. And He does it in a way that I can't safely not listen. His discipline of me is strong and certain. One of the by products of hearing His voice clearly is it is serious to ignore His directives.

The other part of this is that it's had really good consequences in people's lives, and the Bible does say, “Judge by the fruit.”

So now I'll tell you the teaching. When you're praying a prayer to deal with a person responding to a person's behavior or how they're treating you—or a situation (a legal situation, a work situation, even a government situation). You can use this to bring considerable pressure to change things in a way that is positive, powerful and approved of by God. Remember, this technique is not for smaller or inconsequential things.

Let me tell you a question one of my counselees asked me. She heard her husband speaking to someone on the phone in a gruff and hostile manner. She started to pray, “My husband speaks to people in a kind and gentle way.” This sounds good but it’s not. She needed to realize that she doesn’t own her husband but is in relationship with him. So the way for her to pray, is to say, “People in my home, speak in a kind and gentle way.” This will help her avoid Charismatic witchcraft. She makes a positive declaration that she knows lines up with God’s will.

Let me give you an example. I was on a mission trip with Randy Clark, and it was my first one, I think. Those mission trips are quite challenging, and even though I'd been a pastor for 20 years, I had never been put before 500 to 1,000 people with a group of maybe 120 of us and just told to pray for healing for this huge group of people who, in Brazil, are extremely pushy and actually rush you. I'm a very big guy, and they would rush me and jam me against the stage so that I would have fallen over flat if there hadn't been a stage behind me to keep that from happening.

One of the women on the trip was afraid before we got started because she didn't have a background of praying for healing for people, and none of the new people had a background for praying for so many. She was understandably nervous. Normally, when people are on the trip, particularly the people who've been on a trip before, they will say, “Oh, you're going to be fine. By the end of the night you'll have a whole book full of healings, and you'll see,” basically comforting them and telling them—truthfully—that they are going to succeed, because the Randy Clark method is the best method for healing that I've ever seen, and it works.

A woman was pacing around the bus before we got off to go pray for people. This older woman was pacing around, very nervous, and another woman—who was actually a Christian counselor, but she was very negative in the way she spoke. She responded to the older woman, “You're pacing around like a little lost dog.” Instead of comforting her and helping her, she insulted her very much, and the lady took it really hard.

I felt that was so out of line, and yet I had no positional authority on that trip. I probably had some of the most spiritual authority, but no temporal authority. On those trips, you can be sent home, but I wasn't one of the deciders of that. I would have loved to send that woman home. So I said, “Oh, no, this is not going to happen on my trip. At that point, I know the Holy Spirit inspired me.”

I went up to the Lord and said, “This is your bus. You own the cattle on all the hills, and you own the sky and everything that's underneath it. And because of that, I represent you, so I own all those things. So I own this bus, and the rules on my bus are that people speak to each other in a kind way; people speak to each other in a loving way; people are considerate; people treat each other like they'd like to be treated.”

Any biblical positive is fine for you to say. Don't deal in negatives at all. Don't say, “People don't speak in a mean way; people aren't mean.” Just say a series of positives over wherever you are—whether it's your business, your house, your home—it doesn't matter. You can do this within your home. I have clients who have had large trouble within their marriage and start to pray these positives and see their marriage partners changing in a positive way toward these biblical positives.

Let's say there's another person there who has as much authority spiritually as you do, or even more. They're not really going to be against biblical policies happening in that territory, so you're not going to conflict with them.

So anyway, I said that, and I saw shooting down the center of the aisle strands that looked like razor wire, about two inches thick. They were about 60 feet long—the buses were big; they seated 60 people each. Shining, kind of aluminum-colored, they moved through the center of that bus. The woman who had spoken to the older woman in that unpleasant way lost her voice for three days. That was the manifestation of her running into the barbwire. That calmed her down.

When you effectively use barbwire, largely what happens is people will lose their voice or they'll get sick. We don’t hope for that or cause it as if we are cursing those people. No. It is our hope they will repent of their ways and agree with God.

It's much more like a barbed wire fence, which is why I call it the spiritual barbed wire. The men who put up barbed wire are not out to hurt their cows. They don't want their cows to be hurt; they want them to be contained in a way that they can be harvested and sold. So you don't want sick cows. In the same way, we're not trying to hurt people, but we are making rules about what is permitted in our territory.

And in the Bible, it says to go out and take territory in my name. Well, we don't do that by buying many houses or condos. We take territory by asserting God's influence wherever we are, whether it's at work or at home. I've had many people do this type of praying. Most of the examples have ended up with the people who are acting badly rubbing against this spiritual barbed wire. Sometimes people will turn away from their evil choices. But if not, they may lose their voice, or get sick, or something unpleasant happens to them. Once again, we are not causing that. It is not our fault. If they choose to rub against a barbed wire fence, then there are consequences to that. We're not rubbing it on them.

I've never seen God rebuke people for using this or have a consequence. I have seen people repent and turn towards God’s way.

People speak like they like to be spoken to. People speak in love. People's hearts are open. People are generous. People are kind—using all biblical positives.

Okay, so here are two points I want you to remember.

Number one: You can do this because Jesus owns everything, and you, as his proxy, can do it. Because he owns it, you own it.

Point two: Only use biblical positives and say them in a general way. You say, “On my bus, people are kind.” You cannot say, “On my bus, Susan is kind.” If you do that, then you are doing witchcraft on Susan, because Susan has free will, and if she wants to not be kind, that is actually her right—even though it's an annoying right. So just use general terms. Do not name people specifically or even necessarily aim at them.

This is the Lord’s Prayer in action—‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ We declare what aligns with His will and apply it wherever we carry authority—in other words, in our territory.”

There was a man who worked with a client of mine who was the head psychiatrist of a large hospital. He was not an intern but someone in residency, being taught by her how to be a psychiatrist, and he was showing up very inappropriately dressed, unshaven, and he was actually giving prescriptions that were counteractive, one against the other. She was in charge of him—basically the buck stops with her. She told me about it, and I said, “Do the barbed wire.” In just a few days he showed up properly dressed, clean-shaven, sought out her advice, asked her for guidance, started running his prescriptions by her before he gave them, and actually turned into a pretty good psychiatrist. That's was a happy outcome.

I have a few little hints about this. Let's say you're a gossip, and you pray that “in my world, people are careful with their speech.” Well, the barbed wire will get you just as easily as someone else. It doesn't care; it's just a fence. So don't pray for things you can't live with, because it doesn't matter who gets the barb, so to speak.

But you're not actively cursing people. I've never gotten a consequence for teaching this, and I've never seen a consequence for someone who used it. I encourage you—this is a much better way to pray actively without doing witchcraft against someone who's behaving in a way that absolutely should not be tolerated. Declare God’s will over people and situations.

Lately, the warfare in our country has escalated within our government and within the population as a whole in a way that we can no longer sit idly by. At the same time, we don’t want to fall into witchcraft with our prayers.

This method is extremely powerful, though it sounds benign and perhaps even weak—but it is not.

Here’s what we should do. Let me give you some suggestions.

Say: In my world, the people in the House of Representatives are sane, truthful, kind, and they make good decisions.

In the same way, pray directly for the Senate:

• The people in the Senate have common sense.

• The people in the Senate have the country’s best interests at heart.

• The people in the Senate love our country.

• The people in the Senate are honest.

• They tell the truth and have goodwill toward all the citizens of our country.

• The laws they make are for the good of everyone.

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If you apply this, then you can also pray for the whole country. The confusion and the mist of lies in so many of our fellow citizens’ minds need be broken up.

Pray people in my country are honest. People in my country hear and recognize the truth. They are moved by the truth. They are moved by love, and they love our country.

In this way, we can participate powerfully in our government and in the well being of our country instead of just complaining about it.

We are a government by the people and for the people, and so all of this is our territory and concerns us deeply.