Day 9: When Someone Aims at You
"Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." — 1 Peter 5:8
Not Everything Is Your Fault
The last several days have been about doors you opened. Today is about arrows someone else fired.
People involved in the occult do come against Christians deliberately. To do it, they must perform rituals — and rituals leave traces. If you know what to look for, you can defend yourself.
Here is the encouraging part: these are among the easiest curses to break, because usually the enemy has no legal right to send them at all. They are also among the hardest to detect, which is precisely why they work. You cannot break what you never noticed.
Drawings That Are Not Graffiti
Ezekiel was taken by God into the temple in Jerusalem to be shown what was defiling it:
"So I went in and saw, and there — every sort of creeping thing, abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed all around on the walls." (Ezekiel 8:10)
Portrayed on the walls. Drawings.
The significance is easy to miss unless you understand the purpose of occult drawings: they are made to place spirits at the site of the drawing. Demons had been installed on the walls of the temple of God through images.
There is a class of such drawings known among occultists as watchers — familiar spirits stationed at a location to keep surveillance over the surrounding area. They can be attached to objects, to animals, or to drawings. Animals move around too much to be reliable. So a drawing is placed at a strategic spot, and its owner returns later to learn from the attached spirit what happened there in his absence.
The forms vary widely. But watchers always contain eyes — or at least one eye.
They show up frequently in gang-related graffiti, where they inform gang members who has been on their turf. For us, their value is diagnostic: they tell you that you are standing in an area of occult activity.
One such drawing was photographed on a garage door in Iowa in 1990, in an alley behind a row of stores. Standing at the watcher and looking where it faced, one could see a symbol painted on a door of the building opposite — in the same spray paint. That symbol, an A inside a circle, is widely mistaken for the anarchy sign. But when the A extends outside the circle, it marks the site of one or more blood sacrifices. The door belonged to a business that served as a center for the local satanist group. Sacrifices were performed in the room behind it, and the watcher had been posted to report who came and went.
Five years later and thousands of miles away, in Guadalajara, Mexico, a nearly identical watcher was found painted on a wall — directly across the street from the home of a faithful, praying Christian woman who had been asking God to show her the source of her physical illness and her troubles. Beside the watcher: the blood-sacrifice symbol, a date, English words reading "We've eyes on you and you…" — written in English so she could not read them — and a drawing of a hooded figure with a sickle, the reaper, a spirit of death.
She had walked past it for months and assumed it was ordinary graffiti. Her troubles had begun almost exactly on the date painted on that wall.
The whole neighborhood was searched. Other graffiti existed; not one other piece was occult in origin. Those drawings had been placed there for one purpose: to watch her, and to curse her household.
The remedy was simple. Take anointing oil and smear it over the drawings in the name of Jesus Christ. Speak aloud, taking authority over every demon placed on them, commanding them to leave at once in Jesus' name. Then obliterate the drawings — spray paint over them, ideally matching the wall color, or better, have them removed entirely.
The drawings had to be destroyed. As long as they remained, the spirits retained legal right to stay.
A woman in Vermont found the blood-sacrifice symbol painted on her front door the morning after Halloween. Within days her household had collapsed into strife, illness, and a string of bizarre accidents. She went home, destroyed the symbol, commanded every curse on her home and family broken in the name of Jesus, commanded the associated demons out, and anointed her house and every person in it individually. Peace returned immediately.
Churches are frequent targets. That same symbol has been found spray-painted on the side of a large Baptist church in the American Midwest and on a struggling congregation's building in London. Too many pastors assume God handles such things automatically and leave the mark on the wall for months.
Curses Sent Straight Through the Spirit Realm
Some curses come with no physical marker at all. A person goes to a practitioner — of Santería, Vodou, Juju, or any of a hundred other systems — and pays to have a spell placed on someone. A spell is a curse: spirits summoned by ritual and sent to a specific person for a specific purpose.
Usually only the Holy Spirit can alert you to these. Threats, open hatred, and rage from someone give hints, but not certainty.
And they are trivially easy to break. Take authority in the name of Jesus, command the curse broken and the spirits gone. Done.
One Thing You Must Never Do
There is a teaching circulating in some Christian circles that when you discover a curse has been sent against you, you should double it and send it back to the sender — in the name of Jesus, of course.
That is absolutely wrong, and you must not do it.
Think about what a curse consists of. Demon spirits. To send a curse back is to send demon spirits onto a human being. To double it is to send twice as many as were sent to you. That is witchcraft, whoever is doing it and whatever name is invoked over it.
Jesus was explicit:
"But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you." (Luke 6:27-28)
Break the curse. Command the spirits away. Then bless the person who sent it and pray for their salvation. That is not weakness. It is the single most devastating response available to you, and it is the one Jesus commanded.
Personal Items, Animals, and Gifts
Personal items. Lower-level practitioners often require something belonging to the target before a curse can be sent — photographs, hair, nail clippings, articles of clothing. These serve as markers, identifying to the spirits who is to be afflicted.
If you learn that something of yours has been taken for this purpose, retrieve it if you can. Usually you cannot. That is not a problem for God. Ask the Lord to destroy any such stolen article and render it useless for demonic purposes. Then, in Jesus' name, command every curse broken and every associated spirit gone forever.
Animals. Christians engaged in significant spiritual warfare commonly find curses sent against their pets and livestock. One recurring sign in this ministry's own household was finding the whiskers cut off one side of the cat's face.
Animals are simple to clear: they have no sin, so demons have no legal right to be in them or to afflict them. Anoint the animal with oil, pray, and command every curse broken and every demon gone in the name of Jesus Christ.
Then pray for the animal's complete physical and emotional healing. Animals cannot tell you where they hurt, and spirits injure them the same way they injure us. Many farmers have been driven into bankruptcy through livestock illness and infertility caused this way.
"Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father's will." (Matthew 10:29)
Gifts. "Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds and wind without rain." (Proverbs 25:14, KJV)
One of the most common methods of getting demons into a Christian's home is a gift with spirits attached. Sometimes money is cursed and then given away — and as the recipient accepts it, a curse of poverty or destruction activates.
Money is also used to establish control. More and more is given to an unsuspecting recipient, and with each acceptance additional spirits are placed to bring that person under the giver's dominion. If you have ever felt inexplicably unable to say no to someone who is generous to you, this is worth praying about.
The best defense here is not discernment — it is humility. Accept that you are not perfect and can be deceived. Stay dependent on the Lord to expose deception, because pride makes us harder to warn. When someone is using gifts to bind you, God will faithfully bring the motive to light through the person's words, attitudes, or actions. The problem is that we want the gifts, so we excuse what we see.
If the gift was not made specifically for the service of darkness, it can be anointed, cleansed, and the curse broken off it in Jesus' name. But where a pattern of gifts is being used to control you, the only real solution is to stop accepting them.
Point to Ponder
You cannot break a curse you have decided is only graffiti.
Verse to Remember
"Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you." — Luke 6:28
Question to Consider
When did my current season of trouble actually begin — and what changed around me at that time?
Today's Practice
Look around your property with new eyes. Fences, walls, garage doors, the alley, the utility box, the sidewalk, your front door, your mailbox. Look for symbols and marks you have dismissed as vandalism. Look for anything with an eye in it. Look for anything painted recently that you cannot explain.
If you find something: anoint it with oil in the name of Jesus, command every spirit attached to it to leave, then remove or paint over it completely. Then break the curse over your home and every person in it, individually and by name.
Date the trouble. On paper, write down when your current difficulty began — the month, if you can. Then write what else was happening around that time. Who was angry with you. Who felt betrayed. What you had just started doing for God. Patterns emerge.
Then pray this, aloud:
"In the name of Jesus Christ, I take authority over every curse sent against me, my family, my home, my finances, my health, my animals, and my ministry — by any person, through any ritual, object, image, gift, or word. I command every one of those curses to be broken now. I command every demon spirit sent against us to leave and never return.
Father, I ask You to destroy any personal article of mine that has been taken for use against me, and to render it useless. Shield my household.
And Lord, I bless the people who have come against me. I forgive them. I ask You to save them, and to reveal Jesus Christ to them. Amen."
Say the blessing even if you have to force the words. Especially then.
Prayer
Father, thank You that I am not at the mercy of anyone's malice. Thank You that the enemy must have grounds, and that where he has none, one word in the name of Jesus ends the matter.
Make me alert. Not fearful — alert. Let me stop walking past the things You are trying to show me. Give me eyes that notice and a spirit that asks.
And guard my heart in this. Do not let me become suspicious of people, obsessed with symbols, or eager to fight. Let me stay soft. Let me bless those who curse me, as my Lord commanded, and let my response to attack be so unlike this world that it points to You.
In the mighty name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Day 9 of 12 — When the enemy has no legal right, one word in Jesus' name is enough.