Without realizing it, many Christians are in bondage with negative spirits and unable to break away despite the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As long as we are in the flesh, we can quench the Holy Spirit, as he remains dormant within us. As long as we are baptized by the Holy Spirit, we cannot be possessed by negative spirits. But, we can be oppressed by negative spirits if we allow them. The locations of negative spirits are different from the location of the Holy Spirit. The key is to take authority over negative spirits. If we allow the Holy Spirit, he will fill us and enlarge himself in us. If we surrender to the Holy Spirit, he will lead us to the presence of God, helping to heal addictive behavior, and serve God’s purpose. While we are under the influence of negative spirits we will not be able to experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit. However negative spirits stay on the outside locations of human soul. This article is devoted to breaking off from the negative spirits of addiction and being set free from the shackles of the spiritual bondage.

What Are Negative Spirits

Once you mention negative spirits, most people quickly think about the devil or demons. Unfortunately many people have been fooled by the enemy they do not know. Yes, there are demons going around terrorizing people who allow them. The biggest enemy we deal with is the human perverted spirits leading to all kinds of addictive behaviors. These are negative human spirits leaping from one person to another without people realizing their activities. The human perverted spirit is the one that opens the door for demonic entities influencing negative behavior outcome. God created a desire for food when we are hungry, otherwise if we do not eat, we will starve to death. The same desire to eat if done in excess can be perverted. God created love attractions between a man and a woman. Today, we have perverted that desire and made a mess of it due to man’s obsession in over indulgence of the flesh. God is the one who created desire to work and make money. We perverted that spirit leading to the spirit of greed. Some people celebrate greed as a good spirit out of self-deception, leading to many social problems. Perverted human spirit is the spirit of excess that we allow to control us because we are not willing to take authority. Instead of taking authority over the negative spirits, we blame the devil, and the spirit of addiction is embraced. Once we embrace the spirit of addiction, we have given him permission to hang around us. When he hangs around, he governs human behavior leading to a bondage situation. When people are in bondage, they tend to obey their master. Similarly, people in bondage with negative spirits obey the instructions of their master.

How Negative Spirits Keep us in Bondage

The mechanism of addiction is the same mechanism involved when people fall in love. When we see somebody that physically attracts our attention, we inadvertently open the window of our souls to let them inside. Letting the person inside is allowing the person to enter into our human spirit when we open the window of human soul. The chemistry of love does not take place at the physical, but at the level of human soul in a very subconscious way. When we open the window of our souls to that person, we allow ourselves to be seduced. The seduction creates a form of spiritual bonding which we express as human emotional desire. Human emotional reaction is reinforced by our physical expression of passion for the object of our affection. If we do not allow the person inside, there is no way we can feel anything for the other person. We can also deal with a person on the physical level without opening the window of our souls. Prostitutes do the same. Their activities with a customer in bed are reduced only to physical level. Once a prostitute opens the window of her soul to a customer, she can easily fall in love with that customer.

The point being, regardless to physical interactions, we have control over whether we open the window of our soul to connect with the soul of another person. For example, a wife can be physically intimate with her husband after she already closed the door of her soul to embrace love passion. Similarly, the husband can close the door of his passion to his wife and still be physically intimate. Physical intimacy and romantic passion are two different things. People can have physical intimacy without romantic passion, and people can have romantic passion without physical intimacy in an emotional affair. Many people shutdown in marriage because of the exchange of too many hurting words, or experiencing painful moments caused by the spouse, or situations they both faced. Closing the window of human passion is partly a protective mechanism to prevent more hurts from the spouse, or the situation. It is therefore not unusual a husband or wife just got up and left after many years of marriage without feeling anything, or regrets because of a history of many painful moments together. This is the more reason why the death of a child tends to lead inexperienced couples to break up, because of too many hurts.

In the same way we fall in love, we develop a love affair with the spirit that we allow to control us leading to addiction. This happens because we open our soul to allow the drug, sex, or perversion to seduce us. The mechanism of addictive behavior is a little different from falling in love. If a human object of our attraction rejects our love approach, we can stop all activities relating to our efforts to seduce the person. But, with any drug, what feels good in the flesh is what reinforces addictive behavior. However, if a person has a very bad drug reaction, that experience may create deterrence to future use of such a drug. As long as the drug feels good to the body, the desire of the body takes over and we remain in bondage of addictive desire. The more we take the drug, the more the desire gets bigger, because the drug feeds the desire. The larger the dose, the more the body become more tolerant even to the point of accidental over dose which has killed many people. The drug is therefore used to nurture that desire, just like we nurture romance. The easiest way to quench the desire for addictive behavior is to stop feeding the desire. Some people have been successful in killing the desire for perverted behavior by stop feeding the desires. However, many people are not strong enough depending on how long they have been hooked on the drugs or perverted behavior. This is where the next level of intervention is more helpful.

Taking Authority by Breaking off From the Bandage of Negative Spirits

The best way to break away from perverted spirits is to take authority over the spirit. Once we take authority over the spirit, we can then command the spirit to leave. Prior to getting to this point, we must go on a fast for about seven days. During this fast, a person misses breakfast, lunch, and eat only dinner anytime after 4:00 pm. The purpose of the fast is to crucify the flesh or deny fleshly desires to accentuate the Holy Spirit within. Once we accentuate the Holy Spirit, he will take control of human spirit. At the point of total surrender to the Holy Spirit, man breaks away from the spirit of addiction. The Holy Spirit then starts to control human spirit, not drug, or illicit behavior.

While we are fasting, we are also praying, reading the Bible and meditation of the Word of God. The process of meditation replaces the thought process which ignites craving of desires. During the fast, we must abstain from all kinds of physical activities feeding the body including alcohol, smoking, eating favorite dish, sex and all other physical activities designed only the feed the flesh. Fasting is a process of training the flesh to kill craving desires. This is why St. Paul told us to die to human desires of the flesh and embrace the desires of the Spirit of God. The days of fasting should focus on entering into the presence of God. At the moment we enter the realm of the Spirit, that moment is the time of breaking away from addictive behavior. Addictive behavior only feeds the flesh; it does not feed our spirit. This is a critical point we need to understand. Many people act as though the drug feeds human spirit. It does not! It only feeds the human flesh. If the drug feeds the human spirit, why do we constantly need more and more drug everyday? The complication is the flesh sending signals to human emotions that the drugs make the flesh feels good. Such emotional feel good is temporary and always mistaken for the human spirit feeling good because the human emotional perception is inside human soul, and the human soul is house in a location inside human spirit. Once we leave the flesh behind and enter the realm of the Spirit of God, we can break off the flesh from human spirit. We can easily break away from any addictive behavior because the human spirit is being nurtured by the Holy Spirit once we choose to surrender human spirit to God’s spirit. Once the Holy Spirit takes control of the human spirit, the spirit of addiction no longer has power over the human soul. The spirit of addiction has control because we have not surrendered to the Holy Spirit. When we surrender our human spirit to the Holy Spirit, we are empowered according to what Jesus said in Act1:8. This empowerment gives us power to take authority over any negative spirits and cast them out. The critical point in the willingness of a person’s desire to want to break away from the spirit of addiction. If the person is not willing to break away, his love affair with the drug will continue to reinforce addictive behavior.

Reasons Why Some Treatments do not Work

First, it is important to know that we cannot take authority when we do not have authority. We receive our authority from Jesus through the Holy Spirit. Once we allow the Holy Spirit to enlarge in us, he can easily squash the addictive spirit curing any form of addiction. Second, a person under treatment must be willing to change by fighting addictive behavior. Many people do not want to change. They want people to fight addictive behavior for them. This does not work. A person must be ready to fight addictive behavior himself. If you cannot cast out the addictive spirit, it will continue to govern your behavior. Third, continuously mingling with the people that are still addicted carrying the spirits of addiction with them will reinforce the spirit of addictive behavior. Addictive behaviors are controlled by negative human spirits capable of jumping from one person to another. This is how a young lady who never drank in her life, but lived in a home where the father was an alcoholic ended up marrying an alcoholic. The alcoholic spirit from her parents hangs around her even though she was not an alcoholic. When she sees another alcoholic male, there is a magnet of attraction between two people. This is not a physical attraction, but a spirit-to-spirit magnet. This happens because of the alcoholic spirit of her parent is still hanging around her. The attraction was not because of her beauty, but to the spirit that hangs around her. The alcoholic spirit hanging around her from her parents made her vulnerable to the predator. To complicate things, she herself becomes attracted to the same spirit she hated, but has inadvertently fallen in love with. She ended up marrying an alcoholic because of her previous relationship with the spirit of her parent who wears such a spirit and passing it on to her.

As long as we allow the spirit of addiction to hang around us, it will control us. We have to cast them out because we have the authority. Once we cast them out, we pray and position the ministering Spirits and Holy angels of God to take spirit positions around us. Once these spirit positions are left empty, the negative spirits can come back and take positions. Around us are spirit positions that were formerly filled with the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit change location and become indwelling, these locations are empty. Many Christians fill these locations with negative spirits due to their daily interactions with other people carrying such spirits. Once you get back home regardless to where you have been, pray to cast and break all those negative spirits around you so they will not hang around you, or your house to influence your behavior. Unfortunately, what we do in the physical sometimes opens the door for negative or demonic influences in our lives. Sadly, many people are unaware of the events of the spirit realm; they are therefore victimized by them. This was why St. Paul said we war not against the flesh, but in the spirit realm.

Perverted Human Spirit leads to Perverted Behavior

Jesus alluded to perverted human spirits influencing bad behavior when he said, "For from within, out of the heart of men proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man" (St. Mark 7:21-22).

Jesus was saying that the negative spirits are the ones influencing human thought processes and leading to bad behavior. We know from life experience that the eventual outcome of bad behavior is orchestrated by the devil even though perverted human spirit started the initiation. Jesus did not mention the devil because he was referring to human perverted spirit influencing bad thoughts. Jesus was also alluding to the fact that we have control over such thought processes.

"We were like grasshoppers in our own sight" (Number 13:33).

When some of the Israelites were sent to spy the land of Canaan, some of them brought bad report saying the people were like giants, based on their own human perception. But Caleb quieted the people by telling them to be ready and possess the land. The key to the influence of distorted human spirit misleading them was given by God when he said to Caleb, "But my servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit in him, and has followed me fully, I will bring into the land where he went, and his descendants shall inherit it" (Number 14:24).

God was saying that he would reward Caleb because he did not allow human distorted spirit to mislead him compared to the people who brought a bad report and doubted God’s ability to protect them.

Finally, the process of controlling addictive behavior is to take authority over the behavior by entering the spirit realm of God, and not play helpless as if it is the devil influencing the behavior. Many of the addictive behaviors are due to human perverted spirits. We have control over them if we are willing to cast them out of our sight instead of having a love affair with them.

By Yinka Vidal, author, Closer Walk With Jesus