[24] Prayer focus - Deliver us from evil

Worship led by Peter Lambros was focussed on praise and used some liturgy from the Iona Community. 

We prayed and sang together for about 20 minutes - it was really good. The group loves to spend time like this!

Deliver us from evil

This week we considered how it makes us feel to think that the devil may be opposing us. While we recognise that we are in a spiritual battle, instead of looking at the enemy, we need to focus on God our Father being the one who will deliver us. The overall message here is that God has 'rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves' (Colossians 1:13).

A word study of 'dominion' from that scripture - dominion = power, sovereignty and control. That's a complete, rigorous rescue!

We considered that Jesus didn't engage in what some call "spiritual warfare". He was tempted by the devil several times, but just stood his ground, affirming the truth using scriptures. When Jesus taught us to pray, all he taught us about this was to pray "deliver us from evil".

We also reminded ourselves of the armour of God, as described in Ephesians 6, which is all given in the context of struggling not against people, but against spiritual forces. The whole tone is of standing our ground, as opposed to going on the offensive. This is illustrated by the story of Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 4). There was opposition and even threat of violence. But Nehemiah instructed the people to carry on building, just keep your sword to hand, so that if there is any attack, you can defend yourself. But he did not instruct the people to take the fight to the enemy. Do not get distracted. Stay doing what God has called you to do.

We also considered the question of whether some illnesses may be the result of the devil opposing us. What should we do if we are worried about this or suspect that this is the case? The principle here is about authority. We know that Jesus now has all authority and the devil has no right over us (remember Colossians 1:13?). Through his death on the cross he has defeated the devil and sickness. So we can stop worrying, trust Jesus and claim our healing.

Finally, you do hear of people cursing others. What of this? It is very unsettling to think that someone somewhere is trying to make bad things happen to us. First we thought about what a curse actually is. We looked at Deuteronomy 28 which lists blessings that accompany those who are obedient to God and curses that follow those who are not. Curses are in the bible, then, and are like the opposite of blessings. Blessings are when there is a multiplication of goodness on what we do, when our lives seem to have more fruitfulness than we would ordinarily expect. Curses are the opposite, when our activities and lives are less fruitful than we would expect. 

Next we noted that our words have power and assignment - meaning that what we speak affects our reality and the reality of those around us. The book of James warns us about the power of the tongue. So what if someone has deliberately spoken negative words over us and we don't know about it. Are we going to have problems? We affirmed that if we are in any doubt about this we can have assurance that Jesus delivers us from evil. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him, and when we believe in him we are born again, united with him. No one has authority higher than that. So we agreed a simple prayer - "in the name of Jesus I break off any curse spoken over me".

Our prayer activity this week was to write, in pairs, a simple prayer to affirm the truth of what Jesus has done for us and for Southampton, to deliver us from evil.