Taking Down Your Giants

This article is a follow-up to the teaching my wife Anita Tisdale gave on the topic of Our Worship War Against the Giants. I recommend that you watch this teaching video before reading this article.

I have been seeing that there is a particular giant we need to take down in our individual lives as well as in our corporate expressions. This is a giant you may have faced in the past who may have taken you out a number of times. But the Lord is giving access to whole new arsenals of His most advanced weaponry. In the Old Testament, God’s people faced this spirit of sorcery of the philistines who occupied their inheritance land and resisted the establishment of God’s Kingdom.

James Mark Massa says: “We, as God’s people of the New Covenant, still have to contend with this Philistine spirit of sorcery. But today this spirit does not come at us in the form of a Philistine giant. It has changed its costume. The transition occurred during Jesus’ days on earth. The spirit of sorcery was very active in the land of Israel. But this time the spirit of sorcery did not resist Jesus as a Philistine giant, instead, it operated under the disguise of the Pharisees and religious leaders. The sorcery of the Philistines in the Old Testament has been replaced with the religious spirit of the Pharisees in the New Testament. There is a direct connection between a spirit of sorcery and a religious spirit.”

The Lord has been showing me that we cannot see how much this religious spirit influences us because it is a blinding spirit Jesus repeatedly warned the Pharisees that they were blind – the blind leading the blind. This blind spirit masquerades as a spirit of the light but its agenda is to subvert God’s ways and resist His Spirit from a hidden position. It convolutes the purity of God’s Spirit with humanistic agendas and demonic thought structures (strongholds). It causes us to resist God’s new move and remain stuck in old dead structures and lifeless activities of performance and striving.

This spirit is far more pervasive in the Body of Christ than we realize and it resists change at all costs. The reason we need to take out this soothsaying giant now is that it blinds us from seeing our spiritual landscape accurately. This prevents us from identifying what spirits are occupying our land and getting God’s strategy to take them out. This Lord will uproot this giant in regions where His people take up their weapons and do the work needed to dispossess it.

Sorcerers Come Out of their Strongholds!

In the Bible, sorcerers are often portrayed as serpents. One of the Heb words for serpent is na-chash. This word is pronounced with a “hissing” sound. It is derived from the root word na-chash which means “to practice divination, an enchanter, to whisper a magical spell, to hiss, and use sorcery”. Snakes and sorcerers are alike due to their whispering and hissing. But God changes the heart of hissing sorcerers for one reason. It’s because He wants to change them!

During the days of the prophet Micah, the sorcery of Israel had brought desolation to the land. God is coming to clean the land of the sorcerers’ strongholds. Speaking prophetically of our day, the prophet Micah declared: “I will tear down all your strongholds. I will destroy your witchcraft, and you shall have no more soothsayers” (Mic 5:11b-12).

Micah cries out for the Lord to “come and rule Your people; lead Your flock; make them live in peace and prosperity…as the days of Thy coming out of Egypt; show us Your marvelous wonders” (Mic 7:14-15 TLB/KJV/Sept/ABPS). Like Israel, our nation is full of sorcery and dead religion. Come Lord Jesus and rule Your people! Lord fulfill Your promise. We cry out, “Let all the world stand amazed at what I will do for you, and be embarrassed at their puny might. They shall lick the dust like serpents; like worms of the ground, they shall come trembling out of their strongholds to the Lord our God, Whom they shall turn and revere, and they shall stand in awe of Thee” (Mic 7:16-17 KJV/TLB/RSV/MSB).

In the day of God’s power, the sons of sorcery (like serpents) shall come trembling out of their caves and strongholds. Faced with God’s power, they are embarrassed at their puny might. They shall return to the Lord in holy fear and stand in awe of Him. This is a prophetic word to the Church today that is so steeped in religious sorcery that it works against the movement of God’s Spirit.

Galatians 3:1-3

“What has happened to you Galatians to be acting so foolishly? You must have been under some evil spell! Didn’t God open your eyes to see the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion? Wasn’t he revealed to you as the crucified one? So answer me this: Did the Holy Spirit come to you as a reward for keeping all the Jewish laws? No, you received him as a gift because you believed in the Messiah. Your new life in the Anointed One began with the Holy Spirit giving you a new birth. Why then would you so foolishly turn from living in the Spirit by trying to finish by your own works?“

IT IS TIME TO TAKE THIS GIANT DOWN SO WE CAN OCCUR OUR LAND OF INHERITANCE!

Before we can take down the giant of religion corporately, we must do business dispossessing it in us. (1 Peter 4:17) The Lord is giving us access to an unprecedented level of breakthrough weapons but He will not use them for us. We have to put in the work needed to learn how to use these powerful resources so we are skilled in their use!!!! This is so critical to the days and years ahead!

This takes spiritual violence because Kingdom warfare is done from a place of intimacy, resting, and being. The reason this requires spiritual violence is that the religious spirit resists intimacy, resting, and being. It wants you to work, strive, and do – out of self-strength, to try to finish your own works!

We must be willing to be humbled, self-abased, and stripped bare because that is what it will take to get free of its entanglements.

• Over the past several months that Anita and I have been going through this season of massive revelation outpouring, I said yes to God’s dealings to dispossess this religious spirit operating in me.
• I have been shocked to discover just how prolific this spirit of sorcery was operating in my life.
• I couldn’t believe how much access I had given this spirit to speak witchcraft curses over myself.
• I had grown self-reliant, arrogant, boastful while experiencing spiritual malnourishment.
• I was settling for all kinds of religious ministry activities instead of just sitting at His feet casting my devotion upon Him and obeying His will.
• So, the Lord started stripping me of virtually everything – all my self-strength.
• Until I began feeling there isn’t anything left of who I thought I was.
• It has been very alienating.
• I stopped hearing God’s voice for months and only recently came to realize it was because this spirit was so pervasive that the Lord wanted me to discern how much this occult voice was occupying my thoughts.
• There are some things God needs to knock down in us so that He can rebuild us in the purity of His image and likeness.

Here are confessions to make:

• Thank you, Lord, for exposing the giants in my land
• Give me strategies to take them out
• Train me how to use my worship weapons
• Teach me to battle in intimacy and rest
• I come out of an agreement, with all forms of sorcery and defilement
• I choose the low road of humility and brokenness
• Cause me to overcome resistance to change
• I will put in the work to be students of Your Word led by Your Spirit
• By faith, I declare, that I will take this giant down
• Here are some prayer points:

I repent for resisting the change Your Spirit Has been moving us into righteous God!

• Shift me!
• Change me!
• I break the spirit of dullness off minds and souls in the name of Jesus! Be broken!
• I break the spirit of hopelessness of every person in this room or watching online!
• I break the spirit of aptly and indifference off wounded hearts!
• The Lord is restoring prodigals.
• Return to me with all your heart!
• I am doing a new thing even now. Do you perceive it?
• Stop looking backward. Stop agreeing with the deceiver. Stop releasing witchcraft curses over yourself and others.
• The blood of Jesus calls you righteous. Stop contradicting my word because you’ll never win that argument. I call you righteous.