Saturday Morning Sermons (IV)

This another excerpt from our sermon series in Acts.  The passage was Acts19:11-20, looking at Paul's "deliverance ministry" in Ephesus. 

My earliest and most vivid experiences with "deliverance ministries" was listening with chagrin-tinged flabberghastment to Bob Larson broadcast "call-in exorcisms" (and then advertise a wide range of expensive Christian "resources" between calls) on the local Christian radio station back in the day, so I've always been pretty cautious with this stuff.  But one of the things about a Biblical preaching ministry is that the text chooses us, we don't choose the text, so I had to exorcise my own Bob-Larson-demons and work through this one honestly. 

You can listen to the full sermon here, but here's a key insight that was really significant for me while I was working on the sermon:

I mentioned already that I don’t have a lot of experience in this area, so I’ve been doing a fair bit of research this week, and one of the things I keep coming across is that spiritual deliverance is about truth. Not power.

This is vital for us, because we’ve grown up with images of Linda Blair twisting her head around in the Exorcist and we figure that casting out demons is about some sort of power struggle with the devil. I mean: That’s certainly what the Seven Sons of Sceva thought it was about, wasn’t it? But when Jesus starts to set the captives free in Ephesus, notice it doesn’t happen through power.

Freedom comes through truth.

At least, that’s what it looks like in verses 18 and 19. It says that “many of those who believed now came and openly confessed their evil deeds. A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly.”

Confessing the lies of Satan. Publicly renouncing them. And then claiming the truth. That’s what deliverance looked like in Ephesus: people bringing the lies of Satan out into the open—rejecting them—and then discovering the truth about who they are and how they’re loved in Christ.

Neil Anderson puts it like this: “In a power encounter, the struggle is between some outside agent and the demonic stronghold. But it’s not power that sets the captive free, it’s truth. Living in defeat, believers often falsely conclude that they need power, so they look for some religious experience that promises power. ... [But] the power of the Christian lies in the truth. ... In contrast, the power of Satan is in the lie, and once you expose the lie, you break his power.”

Jesus himself said it like this: you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.