Sid Roth

Sid:  I remember talking to a man once and he was a prophet and he had a vision of someone’s heart and when he looked at this person’s heart through use of a gift of the Spirit he saw cracks all over the heart and he said boy, you must have been hurt a lot.  My guest who’s been a guest previously on Messianic Vision is Mark Virkler.  And Mark has produced a CD series called prayers that heal the heart.  And Mark after going through this just based on my experience of being a human for all of these years, most people have areas of their life where their heart has been broken.  Is that your experience?

Mark:  Sid, that’s exactly my experience.  When I first got saved, Jesus healed my heart and I felt very very free but, after I’d lived for twenty more years after that I had a lot of wounds that had built up.  I’d been through tough situations and put up walls and my heart was much more wounded and hurt twenty years after I got saved than the day I got saved.

Sid:   Now, just out of curiosity you have a program with seven supernatural prayers that when someone prays these prayers with understanding you say it will totally dismantle a demon’s home and then it’s easy as opposed to difficult to get that demon to leave what they consider to be their home; and people experience freedom.  I don’t get it, but you were in ministry all of these years.  There’s issue of whether a Christian can have a demon or not; will just put that one aside.  How after being in effective ministry for all these years did you need your heart healed and did you need these demons cast out of you?

Mark:  Well, I was on a trip to Australia to teach for twenty-one days and when I got there during the worship time I just realized I’m spending my time battling fear, fear of rejection, self rejection, anger, hatred and I spent the whole 45 minutes of worship time binding any demons that were causing that.  And I realized you know Mark you’re really messed up here, you really should not need to spend forty-five minutes of worship time just binding demons and getting these negative pressures away from you.  You shouldn’t have to war negative pressures within you so consistently.  And I had picked those up because life had slapped me up and I lost a few jobs, got wounded, got hurt, put up walls of defensiveness and demons came along and said we can help you with those walls of defensiveness and so I was pretty messed up.

Sid:  But if someone had walked up to you and said Mark, I discern you have a demon I don’t think you would have received that until you realized it yourself.

Mark:  Well, your right you know most people don’t want to say gee I got a demon here, you know its kind a hard pill to swallow here for a lot of people.  It’s not so hard for me to swallow at this point because I believe Satan is a attacker, destroyer, he’s constantly out to do within and I believe we do fall into sin from time to time, I sure do and whenever I fall into sin there is a demon right handy saying I can help you with that one.  And So I find that were under attack and we can get mucked up pretty regularly and pretty easily so the need for deliverance isn’t a great big thing for me, it’s just a part of life.

Sid:  Okay, I happen to believe what you’re saying is correct and that’s why I’m making this available for our Mishpochah, but what about the question “Can a Christian have a demon?”

Mark:  Well, it’s a tough question I have debated that and the debate would go away if there was a verse in the Bible that answered it and there isn’t; there is no verse that says a Christian can have a demon.  And there’s no verse that says a Christian cannot have a demon; so what do we do when there is not clear verse on the topic?  I mean do we interpret some verses, interpret some principles, we try to make our best guess and that’s fine and I think that we ought to allow a variance of opinions since the Bible doesn’t clearly state it.  In my early years I didn’t believe that a Christian could have a demon, now I believe that they can and part of that came from examining the fruit of life.  The Bible says that you can test things by their fruit and I ran into a deacon in my church who came to me and said, “I believe I have a demon and by the time we were done ministering to him we had cast out several demons and his life was radically changed.  And so the fruit of life spoke back to me and said Mark maybe it is time to change your theology especially since there’s no clear verse on it, maybe you should allow life to speak to you.

Sid:  Yeah, but some would say how could a demon cohabit with a Spirit of God in the same body?

Mark:  Well, how can sickness cohabit with the Spirit of God in the same body?  I know lots of Christians who are sick and so do you and God is perfect health; so how can you have perfect health in your body and sickness at the same time?  And the answer that I see is that that there are many parts within us, we have a spirit, we have a soul with many compartments in our soul plus we have a body with many different areas of the body and yes our spirits indwelt with the Holy Spirit, but what we’re doing is working out our souls’ salvation and the light of God is getting brighter and brighter and as it does it drives darkness, sin, sickness and demons out as that light penetrates area after area of our inner being.

Sid:  Okay, listen that deal with sickness would push anyone over the line, I think that’s extremely convincing let’s talk about that first case that you were exposed to, that deacon.

Mark:  Well, this deacon came to me and he said, “You know I have a sin that I cannot overcome.”  He said “I prayed, I fasted I’ve beaten myself up, I’ve memorized scripture and this sin was lust and he said, I undress every woman every Sunday in church and it makes me so sick I can’t stand it and he said, do you think that it could be a demon?”  And I’d never cast a demon out of anyone, but I had heard about it so I said, well maybe and I so the elders of the church, two elders and me got together.  We prayed for this man and we commanded any demon of lust to manifest itself and come out, and a really gruff voice began to speak to us and this man began to shake and the voice said I’m not coming out.  At that point I decided a Christian can have a demon because I have a deacon in my church with a sin he can’t solve and a gruff voice speaking to me; and we said, “Yes, you are coming out.”  And we agreed and we commanded that thing come out with several other demons.  I went back and I checked with that deacon a month later, a year later and a few years later and I asked him, “Okay this sin issue of lust has it been dealt with?” “He said, now it’s like any other sin area of my life.  Now I can control it, I can crucify it, where before deliverance he could not control it and he could not crucify it.

Sid:  And I’ve seen the standard way of casting spirits out of people, did it take a long time to get rid of that spirit?

Mark:  Well, this was our first experience so we were inexperienced so, the first time we prayed nothing happened, so we said well we’ll just pray again and we did and the second time he began to vibrate and shake and it took an hour to get everything out.  But it’s now quite easy to get demons out because if we know how to detach them first then the deliverance process is smooth and easy, but back then I had no idea the steps of detachment which were the various different prayers that God taught me over the years.

Sid:  Now you were set free of a demon of fear in particular, fear of stroke.  Tell me about that. 

Mark:  Yeah exactly, my Grandfather died of what I pictured as a stroke when I was about seven or eight years of age somewhere around there.  It wasn’t exactly a stroke, but that’s the way as a child I remembered it and I was very close to my Grandfather.  I was traumatized and demons are not gentlemen so when I was traumatized my defenses were down so a demon of fear of stroke entered me and showed up in my dreams for the next ten – fifteen years.  And I would wake up five days out of the week generally with feeling I had had a stroke feeling I was paralyzed my mouth was paralyzed; my tongue was paralyzed, my arms where I couldn’t…they were bloated, I would shake it off and I would be okay.  And when we got in deliverance I asked the elders to pray for me and my wife and the two elders were in the living room sitting there and praying commanding the demon that I thought I wanted deliverance of to come out and that was depression and heaviness, but what actually came manifested was this stroke thing.  And Patti said I felt like my face was paralyzed, I felt like my tongue was paralyzed as they were commanding the demon to come out and Patti was sitting in the living room.  She said that it looked like my tongue was paralyzed and it came out with tears and I cried and it was released and the pressure was released and I’ve never had that dream since then and nor have I had fear of stroke.  And before then I didn’t even know what a stroke was but I remember going into the nurses office in high school saying to her I got chest pains, I think I am going to have a stroke; and a stroke is the head not the heart and…

Sid:  But seeing such fruit from this deliverance for a long period of time, you stopped praying for deliverance why?

Mark:  Well, I did after I prayed for a few hundred people for Christians to get delivered I got very frustrated, because in the day that I quit was when this man, we spent an hour shouting at this demon saying in the Name of Jesus we command this demon to leave now, and the demon was…the guy was shaking the guy was sweating and the gruff voice was saying I’m not coming out and we said you are coming out in Jesus name and it would not come out; and it didn’t come out.  And I was really frustrated because I said, “God, the Bible is very clear and at the Name of Jesus every knee must bow and this demon did not bow his knee and I have no idea why it didn’t work and I am so frustrated I am going to quit because I can’t understand what is going on here.  So I quit.

Sid:  For how long did you quit?

Mark:  Ha-ha, probably for about ten years or so.

Sid:  And you know what, the devil succeeded in taking away a part of your ministry that was a part of Jesus’ ministry.  He spent a lot of time casting demons out of people.

Mark:  He sure did, I have counted up all of His prayers for supernatural intervention and between 1/4 and 1/3 of His prays were to cast demons out of people and if He’s the pattern I’m following then that mean’s between 1/4 and 1/3 of my prayers I should be casting out demons out of people and for ten years I didn’t do that.

Sid:  Well, I think that it’s so wonderful for everyone that is listening to get their heart healed, and we’ll talk about that on tomorrows broadcast.  And once their heart is healed you’ve literally dismantled…these demons are like an attorney, they go after what they call legal rights.  But you can dismantle their legal rights and then they have to go.  But until you dismantle them it’s a fight; I like the idea of these seven supernatural prayers to dismantle all legal rights these spirits have on you.  And what’s it like to be free Mark, really free?

Mark:  Ha-ha I have been free now for the last ten to fifteen years of my life.  My heart doesn’t free, it doesn’t have rejection, it doesn’t have anger…

Sid:  Whoops we’re out of time.