A devil can use and demons can use four main things. The first one is places.
Places. Places specially that are dedicated to devil or places where demonic activity conspired.
Or places where especially hideous acts were done, like somebody was murdered,
somebody committed suicide. For example, there are places. They call them haunted houses. They make
movies about them and these are not exaggerations. A lot of the movies that are based on haunted
houses are actually based on true stories compiled from exorcists. Catholic priests who did exorcisms
on places. Because one of the things that if you were in Catholicism, you know that
one of the things that Catholic priests many times will do. Or people who are on the staff
in the Catholic church who do exorcisms is they actually cast out evil spirits from places.
From people who have places that have evil spirits and this is not
some bizarre, weird Catholic thing. If you see that in the Bible there were places God occupied.
He occupied the temple of Solomon. He occupied the ark. He occupied the tent of meeting,
where God's presence was there. There was stuff happening there.
And so now that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit but we also know that, like for example
in our church we pray all the time that this will be the place of freedom. So when you come in,
a lot of you, you come into places like these. You probably have felt, like man I feel lighter.
I feel, I feel something different about this. I feel a sense of peace, what is that? It's
God's presence that's in this place. But there are places you can go to and you realize, you're like,
man I feel like some semi-truck got loaded on my shoulders. Because there are spiritual forces
in certain places that are predominant, especially if people gave access to the
devil by doing something hideous and something horrible. Like when you move into a new home,
give that home to God. Even if you are renting bless that home. Take some virgin oil and just
anoint that home. Like not too much so that your landlord doesn't kick you out. You can just simply
come with your family together and anoint the doorposts of the house, say, "Lord we dedicate
this house to you." And your place belongs to God. The second thing that the enemy can use and attack
is through people. So places and second is people. There are people who are so full of the devil. You
come in contact with them, I call them emotional vampires. They suck life out of you. Your like,
everything is going great, until you meet with the person. They have a problem for every solution.
It's like literally, you put them in heaven and they'll find a problem there with God.
It's like these people, like they're just, it's so. And some people they're
just their personalities wired like that, but some people they got devils.
And what makes them dangerous. Listen to me very carefully. Now theoretically or legally speaking,
we are full of God and God is more powerful than the devil. We shouldn't be afraid of anything.
100%. But if these people are so deep into their demons and deeper in their demons than
you are in the Holy Spirit. Meeting them, they will affect you instead of you affecting them.
God is powerful, more powerful than the devil. 100%. The question is you are not more powerful.
They can be deeper in a lesser power than you are and they could affect you,
and sometimes you can feel that. But have you met people that you were down,
discouraged. And you met some people and they're literally like just full of the Holy Ghost.
Like life just comes out of them. Even their spit.
Their eyes are full of fire, they're just full of excitement. It's been five minutes with them,
you left the meeting. You're like man, it's gonna be all right. We got this. The ocean to my knees
right here. Everything is gonna be all right. Why? Because they're so deep in God, they pull you out.
But if people are deeper in their sin and in satan, they'll pull you down. Satan can use people
to attack you. If you're not believing me, Jesus was going to the cross and satan used a person.
It was Peter. And he looked at Jesus and said, "Jesus don't go to the cross." And Jesus knew,
this person is now being used by the devil. And Jesus of course, Jesus is #boss and so He
looked at Peter. He says, "Dude. Now get off. Get behind me devil." Like if you have those
people in your life don't tell them, get behind me satan because it might not work really well.
Only that's why I said Jesus was #boss. That's why he could do that. But the rest of us,
we just need to isolate sometimes from those people, walk away and let the Lord take care
of them and get deeper in God. Number three. That the enemy can use objects.
Objects through which power can flow. You have to understand the spiritual world can operate through
a material world. For example in the Bible you see that the staff of Moses is just a shepherd staff.
Moses drops it, picks it up. And from that point on the scripture says, "the staff of the Lord,
the rod of God" It doesn't say, "the rod Moses." Because that became an object
that God used to do miracles. In fact some miracles, God told Moses, "take the staff."
He didn't say, "you speak." He says, "the staff. Hit it with the staff. Stretch the staff. Do this
with the staff. Touch it with the staff." Because it was an object God used to reveal His power. You
with me. We see that in the New Testament. That Jesus had garments you know, long garments. And
they were not like ours right now, so they kind of like were long. And so, and the streets were not
as clean as ours and so they had dirt. And these, like the bottom of the garment collected a lot of
dirt, and the woman had a physical problem for 12 years. She touches the dirtiest part of his
clothes and the scripture says, "that the bleeding immediately stopped and Jesus felt power leave."
Power can flow through clothes. The Bible says they took belts and things that Paul
wiped his face with and they placed it on demon-possessed people and demons would leave
and people will get healed. That tells me that objects is a channel.
That's why as Christians we pray with anointing oil. Even if you're not a follower of Jesus and
you're sitting here like, "Man Vlad, I'm not sure I believe in all this stuff." For your own safety,
it's like literally going and patting a hyena. You're not going to do that. "Well I'm just
curious, I will just take a selfie." No. There are certain things you just don't touch in your life.
And same thing applies to demonic objects, demonic books. You run from that like crazy because the
spiritual forces flow through them. Some of you, you got that stuff in your house and that's the
problem that you have. You need to get rid of that house. Not the house, the stuff. Keep the house.
Burn those things out. The Bible says in the New Testament, in church of Ephesus. Paul came in and
they burned occultic books. The value in today's money was half a million dollars. Five hundred
thousand dollars worth of books. There were occultic books that people burned. I didn't sell
them on Ebay. Because I find out sometimes people like, "Oh man I could sell this ouija board."
It's like really? It's like why would you want to give a demon to someone else?
Get rid of that thing completely, in Jesus name. And the last,
the last part that that evil spirits can flow through is objects. We mention objects,
places and people. And the last one is, and this comes as a shocker to a lot of people, is animals.
Animals can be used by spiritual world. We see God using a donkey to speak to a prophet.
We see God using a whale to swallow a man, teach him a lesson and vomit him out.
I mean that whale was pretty hungry. He could have easily digested him but God touched that whale. We
see also ravens, who if you study ravens you find out that the ravens are so stingy and greedy they
don't even share food with their children. And ravens were used to feed the prophet with steak.
That's a miracle right there. We see the donkey that nobody ever used and we read that flippantly
like, "Oh nobody used the donkey, praise God. This was like a brand new car." No! It's like a horse
nobody ever sat on. You don't want to sit on that! Because especially a horse that was never broken,
a horse that was never ridden on. That's not a horse you want to take for a spin,
not in front of everybody. So Jesus riding a donkey nobody ever sat on is actually dangerous,
and that donkey didn't flip him because the power of God touched the donkey. So that means that
animals can receive the power and power could flow through animals.
Now you say, "What about the demons? Can demons occupy animals?"
But do you remember when Jesus cast out a legion of demons. You know what the demons went to
and what happened with those pigs? They committed suicide. They self-destruct. They did things
that the pigs would never really do. Animals, they don't go for danger. They don't destroy
themselves. But the Bible says, "that the pigs ran from the cliff and they killed themselves." That
means that the evil spirits can enter animals. So what does that mean for us? Pray for your pets.
Seriously. Yeah. Bless your animals. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean I'm not saying
lead them to salvation, that is a little bit too far. The Bible doesn't say that.
But you can bless them, you can pray for them, you can dedicate them to God. Say,
"Hey this dog is to guard my house, not to bite anybody. You know this cat has to do this."
And you just bless because everything we have belongs to Jesus, amen. Can somebody say, amen.