By Pam Sheppard

I don’t particularly like the name.  From a psychological perspective, the Jezebel spirit is a personality type.  It is called narcissistic personality disorder.  You cannot “cast out”  someone’s personality. Personality transformation is a renewal of the mind over time, a part of the deliverance counseling process.  However, from a spiritual perspective, the Jezebel “spirit” is simply a religious demon or a religious spirit. I called my third book “Faces of the Religious Demon,” because there practically countless ways that this demon manifests itself.  In the book, I present cases or profiles that were like “faces” or various facets of this demon.

There are people with religious demons who are tormented either with hearing voices, fears of having committed the unpardonable sin or of going to hell  as well constantly are bombarded by blasphemous thoughts. Some can’t even read their bibles out loud or silently. I recall a case where a captive could only read a pocket bible for fear that a demon would use her arm to pound her in the head with a hardcover, and possibly sustain  a concussion.

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So it is easy to embrace  a quick-fix  simply to relieve or stop the torment. Most workers  simply attempt to cast out demons  as a means to remove ALL  of a person’s bondages.  It never really works. I have found that setting captives free who have a spirit of religiosity  in any form,  involves more than simply driving out the demons.

There are usually various strongholds to be torn down. Since strongholds are incorrect thinking patterns, this is done through the renewing of the captive’s  mind according to the Word of God. As the Lord said “you can’t put new wine into old wineskins or it will break. You can’t put a new patch of cloth on an old garment or it will tear, and you certainly cannot serve 2 masters, or you will hate the deliverance worker and love the preachers and teachers who are a significant yet hidden cause of your captivity.

The purpose of deliverance is to gain freedom from any hindrances in your life that would keep you from walking in the fullness of God’s plan for your life and your relationship with Him. Remarkably to some, it is often habitual religiosity that is the most difficult stronghold to overcome, even stronger than an addiction to alcohol or drugs because religion and “going to church” is culturally engrained and is therefore considered “the right thing to do.” It takes much time and patience to free captives from religion or a deceptive form of spirituality–a form of godliness that denies the power thereof.

The bottomline is that I cannot work with a “religious captive” who continues to go to church, feed from the tables of either deceived or false prophets, and who is praying to a fake god. Therefore I mandate that while involved in deliverance counseling or mentoring with Sheppard’s Counseling Center, the captive must cease and desist from all religious activity. Old things must pass away so that all things can become new.