Releasing Secrets

Finding Freedom, part 1

**The posts in this series include sensitive content. Please read with discretion and preview before sharing with younger readers.**

There are some topics within the body of Christ that are rarely touched. They might be seen as too divisive, extreme or eccentric; or they may simply be left alone out of ignorance, or perhaps fear. One of these is the concept of deliverance. Defined simply, deliverance means to rescue, or to set free. In a spiritual context, deliverance is the act of setting a person free from the grip of the enemy, free to love and worship and walk with God in a full and unhindered way.

Please know that I don’t consider myself any sort of expert on this issue. My goal is simply to share my own experience as a believer in Jesus who once had no concept of the extent of freedom and transformation yet available to me through the process of deliverance. Since coming in to this element of faith, however, I have found new depths of intimacy and trust with my Lord that I simply would have had no capacity to reach otherwise. My hope is to provide encouragement for those who are much like I was: longing to love and serve God, yet without understanding or knowing how to effectively scale the barriers to a thriving relationship with Him and with others.

To set the stage, I need to go back to the beginning of my story. I was a highly sensitive, imaginative child, anxious to please, to do things right, to keep the peace, to excel at whatever I tried. I was bright, obedient, compliant, and basically had all the markings of a model child. Except …

I also had a secret. From my earliest memories, I had been caught up in temptations and fantasies that were completely foreign to anything I had experienced or been exposed to. I had no way to process them, no concept of the spiritual forces involved, but the power and intensity behind them caused me to act out in ways that only drew the web of shame and secrecy tighter.

Looking back now, it is so clear how my enemy sought to destroy me: he would pile on the shame, the fear, the lies, the anxieties. He sought to manipulate my emotions, destroy any sense of worth, corrupt my identity, thwart life-giving relationships, and completely sever my tenuous connection to my Father God — after all, surely He must have abandoned me in my helplessness, despising me for the wretch I was!

I shudder to think how close this diabolical campaign came to succeeding. Only the grace of God upheld me through years of living a hidden life. On the outside, I was a model student, daughter, Christian … but I trusted no one with the weight of the struggle going on inside, sure everyone would despise me if they knew what I was really like. My shaky theology convinced me that God alone could love me through the depths of my sin, could endure my endless tearful confessions, but that His love was really a distant, disapproving toleration rather than an unconditional acceptance and favor. I was an anxious, fearful loner, filled with a contradictory mess of spiritual pride and condemnation, and I kept my walls up, high and thick in every direction.

Yes, only the grace of God — a loving Father, so counter to my conception of Him! — stepped in to save me from myself, and from the enemy’s relentless assault on my life. My Lord worked first to establish me in healthy spiritual community, to build solid, life-giving friendships in which, for the first time in my life, I began to feel like it might be safe to be truly known. He also had to completely dismantle my warped view of His character and rebuild it according to Truth and principle; all this was the work of years.

Scripture speaks of God’s kindness that leads us to repentance; at the time, I would never have seen it as such. Essentially, He allowed the enemy to turn up the heat so high that I was forced to seek help. My anxiety grew so extreme that I could not function: I couldn’t eat or sleep normally, I began losing weight, I had trouble concentrating and making even the simplest of decisions. I can’t fully express the terror and despair, the weight of condemnation and self-hatred pressing down on me. Again and again, I would cry out for forgiveness, for cleansing, for freedom and a new start, but I was convinced I was unworthy of such a gift; somehow, I was excluded from the promises of God. In my darkest moments, I wondered whether life was even worth the fight.

The trained counselors I eventually sought out were believers in Jesus, with good hearts and good intentions, but they had no more concept of deliverance or the personal dimension of spiritual warfare than I did. I’m not sure they knew what to do with me, or how to reconcile this young woman who so evidently loved God and desired to walk in His ways with my confessions of torment and regret. They scoured my memories for any hint of early abuse or possible addictions that could somehow explain what I was struggling with, but the search came up empty. Where had all this come from, and how did it still hold such power over my life? Why could I not find the freedom and forgiveness that I so desperately sought?

This wrestling stretched for nearly a decade, from when the Lord first began to break this particular stronghold open, to the place it would come fully exposed to His healing Light. The preparation for that healing came in waves. I would find a measure of peace and forgiveness through the counseling process, enough so my anxiety would gradually subside, and I could return to normal function. I’d go on for some time, believing all was well, until some major life change or hidden minefield triggered the anxiety again, worse than before, causing it to burst through the walls of my reserve and forcing me to reach out for help.

Finally, the Lord connected me with a friend who believed in deliverance, and her pastors and other leaders who were equipped to walk me through it. Before I could experience the challenge and gift of this practice for myself, however, I had to let go of the pride, skepticism, and resistance that held it at arm’s length. More realignment of my view of God’s character was necessary, along with a completely new understanding of the reality of the spiritual realm, and what it meant to me personally. Little by little, this growth in understanding and acceptance allowed me to enter in to the battle being waged for my life. Now, rather than feeling victim to both the enemy’s hand and my own ungodly whims and passions, I was discovering how to partner with God in taking back what the enemy had so desperately tried to claim: the ground of my own heart.

Continue reading in *Reclaiming Hearts* to discover some of the Scriptural foundations for the practice of deliverance and to follow my ongoing journey toward freedom!