Lesson 3

Eddie Smith Good afternoon. Welcome to Houston, Texas. It's a beautiful day in Houston, Texas. That's my dog right there. I don't know what he's doing, she's doing, probably trying to find the cat. They wrestle and fight and search all over for. Now, she's on the couch. Okay, she was on the back of the couch. But she's a good dog. She's a wonderful pet.  We've been talking about making sense of spiritual warfare. The last thing I talked about in the last that was lesson two, was about the armor. How I don't pray at home every day. When I was nine years old, I told the story, in fact about my being a witness. And I began winning solos. When I was nine years old, I put on the shoes of the readiness of the gospel. God put the breastplate of righteousness on me I don't have to pray that on. He put my sin on Jesus at Calvary, he put Jesus His righteousness on me. And and I became the righteousness of God and Christ. So he sees me with that breastplate on. So I don't have to prove anything to anybody I just live with it on. Other people can't see it. Demons can see it.    When I walk into a room they recognize, oh, and I've seen that happen before, by the way and in the eyes of the person in whom they lived. And it's really exciting to realize that Christ Himself is in us. Well, we talked about that. And I told you at the last lesson, and I will explain why I don't have an armor bearer. Now, if you're not familiar, an armor bearer is something that's taught in some churches and, and practice in some churches, where a leader will train young people to serve him. Like a pastor will train young people to serve him or an evangelist, or an apostle, or a prophet will train some young people to serve Him. And they're to carry his luggage and so forth. I was in a church one time and and the pastor didn't have an armor bearer.    I was in his office before the service and he rang a little bell and a maid came in with a tea service and served us tea. Then he rang a little bell and his armor bearer came in and pulled his chair out so he could stand. Then took him behind, a what did you call it a screen I guess, took him behind the screen and took the pastor's preaching suit with him behind the screen. While the pastor and I continued to converse, his armor bearer dressed him in his preaching suit. Oh, yeah. And then they came out, they aren't aware. He got his Bible got the pastor's briefcase, and we all walked out on into the church for the service. I don't have an armor bearer. A lady called me one time and she said, we're so excited that you're coming to speak in our church. I noticed that there was no indication that that you were bringing your armor bearer. And I said, Well, I won't be bringing in our bearer because I don't have one. She said, Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. I said, Well, I'm not sorry. I don't choose to have one.    She said we'll understand that if you want to bring one, we will pay for their round trip airfare, their food, their hotel, and any expenses that they have. And I see, well, that's gracious of you. But again, I don't have an armor bearer, I don't need one. I don't want one. I will carry my own luggage and my own bible until somebody has to carry me. You see, I'm in a pastor, I've read the Bible. I know we're supposed to train people to serve. But we're not supposed to train people to serve us. We're supposed to train people to serve others. I will train people to serve the widow and the orphan. I will train people how to disciple other Christians. I will train people how to win people to Christ. I won't train them to meet my need. That's not why I'm here. And that's not why they're here.    What do you do if you confront a demon? That's our next point. What do you do if you confront a demon? Well, I've confronted a few over the past 40 or 50 years. In fact, many times I confront them. And most times I give them no attention at all. Because when I asked that question, to individuals into groups, they would typically say, Brother, I rebuke it in the name of Jesus. Well, I can't find a place in the Bible where it tells me to do that. I don't know what good it would be for me to do that. Unless the Father told me to do that. I'm here to obey him not to make my own rules and call my own shots. I'm not a Rambo, I'm part of the army. He has assignments for me. So I typically ignore it.    Why do I ignore it? Because one primary thing demons want is to be hidden. And if they can't be hidden, they want attention. It's strange, but that's true. Those are their two primary goals. They love attention, if they can't be hidden. And sadly, a lot of people give them attention. I get calls a lot from people who have problems, particularly at night. And a woman or gentleman doesn't matter, one or the other will call and say, I've got a problem. Pastor Eddie.    In my bedroom at night, I find it hard to sleep because spirits come in, and they they do things and they move things, and they touch me and they touch me in awful ways. And then it's so horrible, and I just want to scream and I don't know what to do. I can't get there. I rebuke them in the name of Jesus. And that doesn't stop them. No, no, it doesn't stop them. Because God didn't tell you to rebuke them.Jesus said, I only do what the Father tells me to do.    So what do I do when I encounter one? And certainly I've encountered them, I ignore it. And that's a big insult to them. Where they've got to go back to their ruler and say, Well, I did what you told me to do. I went to Mr. Smith's house, I went to his bedroom. He was almost asleep, and I did my best to scare him and provoke him, but he ignored me. That's a bigger insult than he insulted me.   They want your attention, and they want to hear you declare their works, and magnify them. They want to provoke you further to sin. I was in the US Navy on a destroyer in the Western Pacific and I was around burly men. Burly men can become so worldly, and become so fleshly that they'll do crazy things. Oh yeah. Adultery was big. And drunkenness was big, profanity was huge.    But one night I saw one of them break a Dr. Pepper bottle off. I see him there was a different story. So I'm taking a Dr. Pepper bottle and hand it to his buddy, same ship and and said hit me over the head as hard as you could. And he did and when he did blood, just forget everywhere. And they picked up the bottle again. He was drunk and picked it up again. He said hit me again. And he hit him again. Why would anybody do that? Well, that's the way bass men and their lower nature without the nature of Christ. That's how bass they can become. They can be far worse than that by the way.   I've been with people who see things. We talked about this in one of our earlier lessons. There are people that see spiritual things, spiritual dimensions. In one church, they were having problems and they asked my wife and I had to bring a team over to see if there was anything in the church that was keeping the church from being active and alive and vibrant and positive.  They were having relationship problems and other things and no spiritual fruit to speak of. Dennis was dropping off and so we went over with a prayer team. As we were praying for that church, where some of us were walking around the auditorium, some of us were sitting seated, we were praying, God, show us anything you want us to see. All of a sudden three of our intercessors gasped at the same time. I said, What is it? And they said, Brother Smith, there's a huge demon, standing right there beside you.   He's huge. And I said, Father, show us who he is, why he's here, and how to get rid of him.   He said I needed to rebuke him, because God didn't tell me to rebuke Him. But I realized he needs to be gone. And we need to obey God, and we need revelation. I said to several other women, and perhaps even a man or two, I said, Would you go go to the office and look back through the history of the church, there should be a file in there. And there was and they found it, and they're going back through it. And they found out that in 1973, or whatever it was, there was, Baptist churches have business meetings, and they keep minutes of their business meetings. So they're just scanning through those minutes and minutes are a record of what happened at the business meeting. Scanning through those things to see if there's anything troubling.    And all of a sudden, they found this one back in the 70s and it said this. We came to the business meeting with broken hearts tonight because last Tuesday, our new young pastor was killed in a head on car crash. When he died, the vision of our church died with him. What? The vision of our church died with him? That's not necessary. But that's a that's a contract. They just declared it and made it voted in into to being legal. The vision of our church is dead. Oh when we broke that contract, that big spirit in the auditorium, left the auditorium.    I can tell you other stories about churches, some that I've never written about because of privacy of people that it involves. But I will tell you this, that when the pastor finds out that maybe the organist or the pianist is a homosexual, and fires him, and then stains in the pulpit the next Sunday and says, Don't you miss brother Joe this morning? He's been such a blessing to us over there on the piano for so many years. But he feels like, he came to me this week, he feels like his assignment is finished, that God's got things for him. That's not what happened. You called him in you fired him because of what you found out about him. Now you're lying to the people.    At some churches are so bound up in and undealt with wickedness in many cases from the pulpit, and from the leaders and from the deacons and others. There are so much there was a church split years ago. And when the First Baptist Church of that city had some reconciliation issues, and they couldn't resolve them, a portion of the church split off and started another church. My dad became pastor of that First Baptist Church. And it was a pretty large church. In those days it would would have been a mega church. But he was the pastor of that church and he was concerned about what had happened before he was there.    Because there was a church on the outside of town that used to be part of First Baptist that broke off because of dissension. And so one Sunday, he had all of the people, excuse me, one Wednesday night, he had excuse me Sunday night.    Baptist Church is useful it used to have and some still do churches services on Sunday morning and Sunday night. Well on Sunday night, they came together and rather than begin the song service, my dad said, we have a new assignment tonight, we're going to all get in our cars. We're going to go over to that church that was broken off from this church. We're going to repent to them for anything that we did to cause that separation. it wasn't him, it happened before he was pastor. But he realized there were reconciliations issues that needed to be resolved and he did that. And it was an entire blessing to that other church to see that kind of humility.    I got off a plane in I can tell you, I got off a plane in Singapore. The missionary that picked me up, the US missionary picked me up, we're on the way to his house and he said, you know, we're really glad to have you. This is going to be a great conference. And, and he said, our church, we meet on Sunday morning at 11 o'clock, at a squash court. Now, that makes no sense to most of us, because squash is what we eat. Well, in some places of the world, it's a game they play, and kind of like handball as I understand it. And in Singapore, there's no land because it's an island nation and all the land has been taken up.    If you're going to build a church and have to build it somewhere on top of a building, maybe. But in this case, it was a squash court. And, and we've got primetime 11 o'clock. In fact, by the way, there was a charismatic church that that had primetime. They had the 11 o'clock Sunday morning time. And I got my men together, we found out what they were paying the owner. We made an appointment with the owner, and we offered him more money. They bumped that charismatic church to Friday nights and gave us the, the primetime. And I said, Well, that's interesting. So we were almost to his house and I said, this is Friday, you know? He said, Yeah. And I said, What are we doing tonight? Nothing, man, we got night off, get to rest. I said, Well, I don't want to rest. But I do want to do something.    He said, one. I said, I want to take you to that church that meets at the squash court tonight in their service on Friday night. He said, Why would we do that? I said, well, to give you an opportunity to repent to them for what you did, taking the church away from them, taking the building away from them. I said, because if you don't, I said, I'm not going to spend a minute teaching your people. He got it and we went. When we got there, I asked who the pastor was they pointed him out, I went to him and I say my name is Eddie, I'm from the United States. You don't need to know anything about me. But that Pastor right there is the one who pastors the baptist church on Sunday morning. And he's the one who took the Sunday morning time from you and your church. And had you boosted to Friday nights. And he's here to repent to you and apologize to you for what he did.    He knows it was wrong. And so he gave us graciously gave his time in the service. And that pastor, who was my host got up and genuinely repented. A year later, I was talking to him and asking him what was happening. He said, it's amazing. He says, you know that the Friday night where you had me repent to the church. I said, Yes. He said, I want you to know that since then, we've shared pulpit several times where I would preach to his people, he would preach to my people. We've also had several church wide, double church wide picnics, where we go to the park together both churches and have picnics. And we have real love between our members and with each other. That's what honors God. So spiritual church cleaning is an important thing.    My wife, Alice is a world class intercessor. And that's how I refer to her. Our kids thought God lived in our closet, because that's where she was so much of the time. But the truth is, she was praying for the city of Houston one time. And she said, God, would you tell me, what are the names of the ruling spirits above the city? God gave her five names. Pride was one I don't remember the others. And for the next few weeks, in her prayer closet, she ranted and railed against those names against those spirits. And over the next six, eight months, we had surgeries that that weren't covered. We had surgeries that weren't covered. We had car wrecks, we lost all of our savings. We had she could tell you in fact, I think she wrote about it in one of her books. But many many things happened to us bad things happen to us. And one day later she asked God why did that all happen?    He said, Alice, remember when you asked me the name of the ruling spirits over the city? And she said, Yes, sir. He said, You didn't ask me what to do with them. Remember, we only do what we see the Father doing. We only do what we do in concert with the Father. We're ambassadors here, ambassadors don't make decisions. Ambassadors declare decisions. When we have an ambassador to France, that Ambassador can't make any agreement with France. Nor that, can they make any decision. Basically, they can only make an announcement of the decision made in Washington, because they are simply ambassadors, and that's why we're here. How can the devil but by the way, the devil is not your enemy. All that comes as a shock to some people. The devil is not my enemy. He's gone. He's God's enemy. The reason I have trouble with him, and the reason you have trouble with him, and the reason others have trouble with him, is because he was trying to hurt our Father.   The devil can't hurt God. Except for three ways. What kind of battle is it? I asked God one time, I said, God, it's called spiritual warfare, it's You, all powerful, all knowing, ever present. And Satan is not all powerful, he's not all knowing, and he's not ever present. How can he possibly hurt you? How could that possibly be a war? and he does hurt God Three ways. Number one, he keeps him from having children. You see, God's all about kids. He's all about new birth. Saving the lost. In that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.    God's paid a price to get new children. The second way here is God is he hurts God's children. You and me. You see, perhaps you couldn't hurt me. But if you were to hurt one of my children, that would hurt me. In fact, that would hurt me more than if you hurt me. So he hurts God by keeping God from having children. He hurts God from by hurting God's children. And then he hurts God by causing God's children to hurt their daddy, God. Nobody can hurt me like my children. The first years of my Christian life, I feared that I would do something wrong and God would hurt me. Now I live in fear that I'll do something wrong and hurt him. What's the difference between warfare prayer and warfare proclamation? There's a lot of proclamations and declaring going on these days, and somebody needs to speak to some of it. Prayer, I can pray anything I can ask my father for anything. He's my dad. So warfare prayer is asking my Father. And as I said, in one of the earlier portions of this, this teaching is tattling. It's telling Father, what the enemy is doings and allowing the father to deal with it.    Our son, Brian was a junior high student, then he was a loving and kind young man, and at the time was a wonderful growing Christian. And one day he came home from school, and he kind of missed me and went into his room and close the door and went and find out what might be wrong. And I discovered that he had a bloody nose. And I said, What happened to you? He said, Charles hit me. I said, why did he hit you? He said, I don't know. What did you do to him? Nothing. Well, you must have done something to him or he wouldn't have hit you. Dad he's just like that and he was angry and he was calling me names, and he hit me. And I said, I'm so sorry. I said, after dinner, we'll deal with that.    Well, Charles, Charles lived about three houses down from us. And so after dinner, I told Brian, I said, Look, son, don't worry, this is going to be a little unusual. But we're going to go down and talk to Charles. And you don't have to worry about anything. So we went down, knocked on the door, Charles's dad came to the door, which I expected, and he said come in, and we did. And I said, we're here to talk to Charles and to apologize to him. Charles's daddy said, do what? I said to apologize to Charles. You see, Brian came home today with a bloody nose because Charles hit him. So I know that Brian must have done something awful to Charles to make that happen and we just wanted to apologize to Charles   Charles, come here. Charles came walking into the room. Boy, was he shocked when he saw the two of us sitting there on the couch. He said, Charles, did you hit him today on the bus? Huh? Did you hit him today on the bus? Why? What did he do to make you hit him? Nothing. He did nothing to make you hit him and you hit him and bloodied his nose on the bus? Come with me and he took him back and spanked him. Charles was howling with pain. And when they came back in the room, I said, Charles, thank you, and he apologized to Brian, thank you for your apology. If something like this happens again, we'll just come back and talk to your dad.    You see, when we tattle God's got ways of dealing with stuff that we don't have and we don't understand. If we trust him, he'll take care of it. The battle is the Lord's and it's one primarily with praise. You remember when there was a battle to be won in Jericho? And the praise team caused the walls to fall? What about Jehoshaphat when the battle was raging and about to be engaged, and he sent the praise team in and they praised and when the army got there, there was no battle. Remember in Egypt, when they celebrated the Passover, which was to celebrate how I brought you out of the land of Egypt. And they were still in Egypt? Yeah, they celebrated it to see it. The next chapter talks about how they were taken out of Egypt. So we celebrate it, to see it because the battle really is the Lord's. So the battle is won with praise in many cases. We need to be careful what we proclaim and declare.  I hear people declare without declare your wealth is going to come to you proclaim that wealth is going you can't do that. In fact, most of that's based on a verse out of Job, where Job's friend was correcting job taunting him, and said, Why don't you get up and decree your day, declare your day. I don't declare my day. My days were written in his book before I ever lived them. So it's important for us to understand the Bible and how things work Binding and loosing. I can only loose and bind what is loosed and bound in heaven. One lady sat there and she said, If I don't know what's bound in heaven, how do I know what to bind? I said, if you don't know, don't bind. We're here to be obedient.    We used to have a meeting here called mighty warrior, here in Houston, it was 30 years ago or more. And I attended it once and it was quite interesting. It was about an hour of warfare music so loud, and so anti devil and we're gonna stomp the devils in the ground and he was so loud and so exciting that it would peel the paint off the walls actually. And at the end of that warfare meeting, a strange thing happened. They began to play the song mighty warrior, mighty warrior dressed for battle member, I love that song.    But all of a sudden, I look behind me and my heart dropped. Here comes the mighty warrior. He's a CPA. He's about five feet tall, and he's got own leotards ballet shoes, a toy plastic shield and a toy plastic sword and helmet. And he's dancing in front of the ladies with the banners. And I thought this must surely strike terror in the heart of the enemy. You see, we're not very thoughtful in the ways that we handle this sort of thing. I've got some more to tell you. But I'll tell you in our next session, thank you for being with me today. And if you want to write to me it's [email protected]. Thank you for being here. God bless you.