Liberation in the Biblical sense, as it was intended in the early church, is liberation from sin and enslavement to sin. My experience teaching in Vancouver’s Inner City for 9 years exposed me to the devastation of sin and its death over those enslaved to it. Our modern language calls this enslavement “addiction” but when you look at how people behave, you can see it is also slavery–a behaviour dictated by the inexorable demands of an evil force. If you are born of the Spirit (John 3:5) you are called by God to live through hearing His voice and direction for your life. That life is a life of inner freedom (Gal. 4:23). Yet often I saw people liberated from “addiction” only to go back and become enslaved again. What do we make of that? The Bible calls for continual effort to fast and pray for freedom, as in the example where the Apostles could not drive out a demon from the boy stricken by seizures (Matt. 17:21). The work of the late Father Gabriel Amorth, the Vatican’s former chief exorcist confirms this Biblical teaching as he had returned many times to victims of oppression and possession to pray for liberation. If it does not work the first time, keep going back till the job is done. Although why demons remain is a mystery, God has revealed to me that it could be that the individual will often have a twisted emotional attachment to some particular sins and refuse to let go, or they let go and welcome those demons again because it makes them feel good (Luke 11: 24-26).
Freedom in Christ
