There is one peculiar thing I have been thinking about a lot. We gather together, the Spirit of God is in our midst, we are praising the Lord and feel very spiritual. Yet, Satan could send a man into our midst to open his hand and give you one good wallop or touch your children and put you right out of the Spirit. I can guarantee you, you would be cursing in no time and ready to kill him. However, we must be above situations like that. We must be in the place where we can withstand temptation, rebuke the devil and walk out unscathed. If there is anything in your life that the devil can use to upset you, you are in trouble, because he is going to use it. One day, when he is ready for you, when his psychology tells him that you are vulnerable, he is going to use it.
In my youth, before I was saved, I had a very bad reputation. One thing I couldn’t get away from was fighting. I just couldn’t help myself. I loved to box, I loved to fight. I used to fight on the streets. There was such madness in me that when it took me in a crowd, ten men couldn’t hold me. If anybody said anything against me, I would feel a twitch in my head and get as mad as the devil. You see, I would be mad very quietly; I would just try to destroy the man. After I was finished, I would be sorry for it a whole two weeks. I would be in depression, sorry for how I did it. I wanted to change, but I never knew how to change. There were six of us brothers and we would fight every day. If we couldn’t find anyone to fight us, we would fight each other – just for practice. It was in our blood. It was as if we couldn’t live a day without having a fight, because it was part of our nature, part of our very souls. An ancestral demon spirit held us.
I don’t know if any of you have such a problem. When I tell these things to my poor wife, she doesn’t understand what I mean. She doesn’t understand what a person who loves to fight means. You are walking around and just looking for a fight. You cannot help yourself. You are measuring people you meet whether they would be good candidates for a good fight. You are looking for a fight in your mind. When it comes, you are actually relieved. You are happy that you are in a fight. It is a horrible thing! If a person doesn’t hit you hard enough, you feel that he is not worthy of fighting. You don’t enjoy such a fight. You enjoy it only when you get hit, for then you get mad and can tear up everybody. It is hard to understand if you have never been in it. This was the spirit that was upon my family. We even used to boast about it. The six boys of us would go out in the street and be invincible. I cannot remember a time when all of us would have to fight at the same time. We just watched as one beat somebody up, and if someone else came in, then two more might join. It was madness, it was a spirit. I feel sorry for some of those people I see in the prisons. We could have been there long ago. But God must have had some extra mercy upon us.
One time I almost killed an officer who remonstrated with me about using a shotgun to hunt without permission. That day, God saved me from a vicious crime. I had brought up the gun to his head in such a way that it would appear as an accident. As I touched the trigger to squeeze it, the man, being a good psychologist, saw his danger, quickly spun on his heels, turned and slowly walked away. I could not shoot him in the back. God had intervened.
Once my brother provoked me and I almost killed him. I took a sharp machete and went to take off his head. When I slammed the machete at him, he ducked and the machete fastened into the wood of the porch. I couldn’t get it out for anything in the world so you can imagine how powerful the blow was. It left a big gash in the wood. Every time I stepped through the door, I saw this gash and said, “I will not let a demon use my body anymore.” I was a sinner at that time, but I made a decision that I was not going to let any devil take my body. Time went on. My brother came again, “Fight, man, fight!” punching me. But I would stand on the spot and wouldn’t move. My whole clothes were wet from head to foot – black suit, white shirt, totally wet! As I didn’t move, the demon left me. He left me at that time and for two years I never fought. Considering a person who used to fight every day and didn’t have a fight for two years, neither had any more desire to fight, you must know it was God.
But then, I remember the day when the devil decided to take me. I was sitting on my porch in my white shirt on a Sunday afternoon reading, as I loved to read. I was at peace when a boy ran through my gate screaming, “They are killing your brother outside!” A criminal got another criminal to attack my brother Frank. Frank, however, was good on his feet and got away. But I lost it. It broke the two years of not fighting. I resolved that whoever attacked my brother would be totally dead in a short while. I looked around for a weapon and couldn’t find anything except a piece of iron pipe. The devil had the pipe right there, set down and waiting for me. It had a bend like a handle, where I could hold it and get some power out of it. I rushed through the gate and saw the man coming. The devil began to tell me exactly how to deal with him. I knew he was a dead man. I saw the whole fight in a vision beforehand. He was going to do a certain thing and I would fake with the pipe and get him across his temple. When I did my move and he tried to cover up, he fell to the ground. I took both hands in order to give him the “coup de grace” – finish him off. As I was coming down with the blow I said, “God, if You are God, only You can help at this time. So if You can help, help now!” I don’t know why I said it, but I knew it was finality. There was madness in me. I had no more power but to kill the man and I knew it. At that moment God Almighty came behind me and lifted me up. I felt a woozy feeling. Wooo! When I came to myself, I was standing a quarter of a mile down the street! The Spirit of God translated me out of the fight. Would you believe God would take up a sinner and do to him what He did to Philip?
The man was still on the ground. When the blow didn’t take him, he began to look around. He didn’t know where I was. People started running and crying for murder. This happened in the city of Kingston, which at that time was the most densely populated area in the whole West Indies. The people began forming a big crowd. However, nobody noticed that I was not there anymore. I don’t understand what they saw, but what I saw was that I was down the street looking at this crowd, looking at the man, and looking at them searching for me, yet nobody saw me. I entered into a yard of a friend who lived down the street and stayed there until the excitement was over.
That day I learned a lesson. I learned that God loved me more than I could have ever conceived for He saved me. It was not the man’s life He saved, it was my life. He saved me from killing the man. The peculiar thing about it was that I immediately lost the temper. Generally, when I got into a temper it would last me for weeks, but this time I was immediately sober. This time I lost it right away and the demon spirit left me. It was the second time the demon left me. Brethren, “The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell.”
When I came to Jesus and He delivered me, I was very glad, because I thought that now all that madness was gone out of my soul. I thought all the fighting was over. I shouted, I danced, I was so happy! I really thought I had lost all the ancestral spirits that plagued my life. I began to preach the Word of God and thought that I was all right. I was so good, I was so sweet, I couldn’t find anything wrong in me. I loved everybody. I wanted to preach the Gospel and that was all I wanted. Little did I know that there were certain compartments in my soul that still retained some of the old man. Among others, the demon of fight didn’t leave me permanently, it was still there. I didn’t get rid of it so easily. In order for me to understand it, God sent a devil to provoke me. One day I was sitting on a horse and one of the men from the farm I was working on came up to me. He said, “Get down off that horse and I will show you something here today!” He was mad and was ready to fight me! When I was a sinner, a man like that would never dare to look at me much more talk about fighting. But this man challenged me, “You dare not put your foot down off that horse!” I began to tremble and the same old-time feeling I used to know as anger started to come over me. I thought to myself, “Boy, I’d better not come off this horse.” I couldn’t trust myself. I went to God, and said, “Oh God, I thought I was all right. But I’m not all right at all. I need help.” I went on praying and fasting and believed I was now really cleansed.
Shortly after that I was working on the farm again, sitting in my office. I wanted to stretch my legs and as I sometimes used to do, I went down to the stable. I saw two men fighting inside. One of them was beating the other. He was taking advantage of him. He knocked him down on the ground and picked him up, then he knocked him down again and picked him up again. One thing I could not stand was to see one person beating up another one that was helpless. I rushed in between them as a peacemaker, “You’re going to kill the man! Stop it!” I thought he would have backed off, but instead of obeying me, he attacked me! At that moment an evil spirit from the man came into me. All of a sudden, I was transported back to the street. In other words, I had a door open in my soul, I had a vacancy and this man ministered the spirit of violence to me which I had no desire or reason for. I was not vexed with anybody, I was not mad with anybody, but I began to manifest the same madness, the same shortness of breath. Furthermore, I began to act just like I would if I were out in the street fighting again. But this time I was a Christian. I was preaching the Word of God. However, when it came upon me, I used a tactic that came from my street-fighting days, from the other life.
The man began to resist me and all of a sudden something went ‘click’ in me. I slipped on my knee, got him over my shoulder and ran with him. In my youth I used to be as strong as an ox so running with this man, who weighed nearly 200 pounds, on my shoulder was no difficulty. I ran toward a wall and something in my little mind said, “Put him down on the wall and lecture him.” I was a government officer and he had no right to be fighting in my presence. In addition to that, a worker could not fight an officer or else he would be immediately arrested and never come back on that farm. In other words, he should have obeyed me when I told him to stop. So I was running toward this wall. It was a dry wall, a wall packed with stones only, no cement to hold it together. It was about three feet tall. Instead of putting this man on the wall, I found myself slamming him down. It shattered the wall and the man was dazed. When I saw it, I could not believe I’d done that. I said to myself, “Why did I do that? I am not vexed with anybody.” I was in a temper, gasping for air and mad. I thought I had gotten rid of the devil, but the devil was still with me! I ran back to my office, sat down at the desk and prayed. I said to God, “My God, I thought I was delivered! I thought you had taken this thing away from me! I thought I was free! Now I am going to lose my ministry!” I was ministering to many people, God was using me to do many miracles and now I smashed a man on the wall! I was in trouble. I told God, “God, I can’t live like this, I can’t live with it any longer. I’m not going to live with this demon that my father and my father’s father had. I don’t want it!”
I am sharing all of this with you, because this is what God is doing for us – closing up our vacancies. It says in the Word that some kind of demons cometh not out but by prayer and fasting (Matthew 17:21). If you are really serious about cleansing your temple, you must pray and fast for that temple to be cleansed!
I began to pray and fast. I don’t know how long I was fasting, but no sooner had I finished, God sent a young man to beat me. I had gotten promoted, sent to a new office and had other people working with me. This young man came in to be my assistant. He was making a lot of mistakes in his work and I had to chastise him for doing so. I said to him, “Billy, unless you do better, I don’t know how I can work with you. You make too many mistakes. Everything you do I have to do it over. You don’t set on one figure right, you have everything wrong. You are just not paying enough attention.” I continued working at my desk with my head down and did not notice him get up. All of a sudden, I saw a fist coming up to my face. I jumped backwards, the chair flew from under me and he began to beat on me.
You have to understand, I don’t remember ever losing a fight in my life. I was wild. Now this guy came and was throwing at me. The worst part about it was that he wasn’t a good fighter. Physically, he was not in my class. I could tell when a man was good, but he wasn’t good at all. I was determined in my heart I was not going to hit him. I also decided that he wasn’t going to hit me in the face, because I wasn’t sure of myself. I didn’t know how I would respond. When he made a blow at my head, I would move away and move around and made sure I didn’t let him hit me. As he was driving into my body, I was praying, “Oh God, don’t let me hit him. Oh God, help me!” My arm would sometimes jump and the devil was there showing me every mistake the man made. When he hit me, the devil said, “Get him under the arm!” That is what I would do when I was fighting on the street. I said, “No, Lord!” I didn’t think I could live if I beat up that man. It seemed like ages, a very long time, but it might have been just a few minutes.
Finally, I got against the wall. The man threw a left cross, which caught me in my chest and cut the skin off from one side to the other. I tightened my muscles, he rolled off and fell against the wall. Then, he got up and went back to his seat. As he did, a bubbling of joy came up into my heart. I just started to laugh. I’d won! God gave me the victory! The demon left and from that moment I was set free forever! That day my complete deliverance came. All the women in the office began to say, “He is mad! He’s an idiot!” But I couldn’t help myself, I had to laugh. It was such a joy! The demon of my forefathers, the demon that had taken my brothers and sisters, my father and grandfather had been defeated that day!
My family was set free. They started to come to salvation one by one. My sister, my brother, my aunts, my uncles. All the people who had that same spirit ministering death to them. I didn’t even report the man who was beating on me. If I reported him, he would be fired from his job right away. But I didn’t do anything to him. You might ask why did this all happen? You know God is a creator and He was creating in me a new man. This experience of being beaten by another man and not replying was a part of the creation. It was the first day of my victory. From that day to this I have never taken my hands to hit anybody nor had the inclination to do it.
Never make any excuse for anger, for anger is of the devil. It is a demon possession. Go to God in prayer and fasting and He will bring deliverance to your soul. We are talking about anger here, but I do not mean anger alone. There are some deep, dark sins that we as Christians have in our lives and we hate to think that anybody else would know about them. But God said that there is nothing that has come upon you “but such as is common to man” (I Corinthians 10:13). Talk to God about your problem, submit to His dealings and He will set you free.
Sonlight Devotional 