By Rhoda Collins

We must war against familiar spirits, because familiar spirits are robbing our identity, our blessings, our destiny and our position on our throne in the Kingdom. They are throne takers. Familiar spirits take people down false and dead-end trails, all the while people thinking that they themselves made the decisions to take these routes in their lives. We need to know who we are in Christ; we need to learn how to exercise our authority and how to rule as kings and priests in the kingdom of God. We need to know how to recognize and deal with familiar spirits and get back on our thrones!

Proverbs 23:7 says: “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.” Luke 6:45 talks about what comes out of the man’s heart: “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks”.

The heart is a place of intimacy; where the Bible says our thoughts flow from. When the blood leaves the heart, the first place it goes to is the brain; the heart conditions your brain how to think. Your heart carries fully oxygenated blood to your brain. You think the way your heart is. What you are listening to from your heart are the things that command your attention. “For I have heard many whispering and defaming, [There is] terror on every side! Denounce him! Let us denounce him! Say all my familiars, they who watch for my fall, perhaps he will be persuaded and deceived (Jeremiah 20:10).

Familiar spirts position themselves in your heart and thoughts in order to alter your thinking process. The word “familiar” means: well known from long or close association, intimate or informal. Familiar spirits sneak into a person’s mind and produce whispering conversations that become so a part of a person, that many people believe its their own thinking. Many people also have deceitful or stupid conversations going on inside their brain all the time.

Research in spiritual warfare and deliverance sessions have shown, that most of us will have at least half a dozen familiar spirits who speak to us regularly, unless we have dealt with them.

That last sentence shocks every person who reads it (except those experienced in spiritual warfare). Christians never believe that they are afflicted with evil spirits until they agree to a deliverance session. Then they’re revealed and cast out. After deliverance of familiar spirits, people say their minds feel clear now or empty. All of the false thoughts and concepts that they thought were theirs are gone. This especially includes those trapped in false religious doctrines that have kept them from their thrones with Christ in the Kingdom. Familiar spirits don’t want anyone operating in their inheritance with God. When a person chooses their doctrine rather than what is clearly God’s standards in His Word, you can be pretty confident that familiar spirits are doing that thinking for them! When a person will attend “church” and accept prayer for themselves but adamantly refuses a deliverance session, look to evil spirit intrusion of the thought process, as a deliverance only harms evil spirits, not the person. Evil spirits don’t care if you go to a religious church. They actually encourage it, as God powerless, religious activities reinforces their position.

Do a familiar spirit test on yourself or in a denomination or group you’re associated with. Take a few scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 2:4-5 or 1 Corinthians 5:11-13 or Galatians 1:6-10. Present these directions from God to yourself and/or to your group. Are demonstrations of Spirit and of God’s power being conducted or is God’s power being ignored or replaced with “persuasive words of human wisdom”? Are you or your group associating with people that God says you’re not to? Is a false or alternate gospel being accepted by you or your group? When you reveal just these few scriptures to your own mind or the minds of your group, what happens? Is there acceptance of God’s directions or pushback or excuses to maintain alternate thinking (alternate gospel)? Perhaps anger? The response is the answer to your test.

So, let’s expose some more of these crafty enemies.

There are typically 8 familiar spirits that have been identified that we need to wage war against on a daily basis:

1. Fear
   This is a big one for many. Fear is a tool the devil uses against us to make us miserable and to destroy our lives. It begins as a thought and then creates emotions that can rule us. Because it’s such a common way that Satan attacks people’s lives, this is the main or master spirit that he uses to manipulate people to keep them out of God’s will.
2. Rejection
   A lot of people have grown up on a “merry-go-round” of trying to please people so they won’t be rejected. We all have an inbred need to be loved. People usually love you based on your performance. If you do what they want you to do, they accept you; but if you don’t, they reject you. This is the operation of human love, and none of us know how to do anything else until we taste God’s agape love that’s not based on man’s performance but is based only on God. He loves you and accepts you because He decided to, not because of what you do or don’t do. God desires to heal His people from past hurts caused by rejection. He wants you to know He will never reject you. He says in Matthew 11:28: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”.
3. Pride
   There’s a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It’s deceptive because when you have pride, you’re usually too proud to admit it.  Proverbs 16:5 says: “Everyone proud and arrogant in heart is disgusting, hateful, and exceedingly offensive to the Lord.”

The following questions will test your heart of pride:

Are my viewpoints and thoughts, always right and others wrong?
How do I think about or treat others?
Do I talk about myself more than I talk about God and what He’s done?

Choose Godly humility. With every success you have, tell the Lord, “I know I’m nothing without You. I can do nothing without You and I’m successful because of You.” When people compliment you, thank them and give it to God. That’s where the glory really belongs. It’s all about Him.

4. Low self-esteem, worth, value
   This will keep you from the success God intends for you. It will keep you down, make you believe you are worthless. Familiar spirits give people thoughts that they are no good, no one loves them, they deserve to die (suicide).
5. Insecurity
   This will make you blind to who you really are: a child of the king, and heir to all that He has for you. “Insecurity, self-doubt, and fear can totally prevent us from ever reaching our full potential… where there is potential, all the parts necessary for success are there, but they are not yet put into action. Potential cannot manifest without form. There are three things that stand in the space between potential and manifestation: time, determination, and hard work!”
6. Doubt, unbelief
   Don’t believe every word that comes into your head. If you don’t believe it, you can never have it. Familiar spirits want to keep you in that place where every word that comes out of your mouth builds a world of uncertainty and delusion around you. 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 tells us how to win the battle in our minds.
7. Anxiety, worry
   These are just another manifestation of fear. They (familiar spirits) will seek to take your eyes off your destiny and fasten them onto short term difficulties in order to keep you from being effective.
8. Strongholds, mindsets, belief systems
   Mental strongholds are areas of thinking not based on truth but on lies. They imprison us. Unless we renew our mind, we risk continuing to believe those lies and making important decisions based on deception. These are subtler, but if we allow God to reveal them, we will see how they have robbed us and caused us to miss what is going on right before our eyes.

God wants you to deal with these areas in your life. He wants you to receive a crown of royal identity. He wants you to receive your destiny. The trophy room of Satan is filled with those crowns. It is filled with destinies of people who he’s robbed. Each person needs to go and get their destiny back. Everything that belongs to us, everything that belongs to our family line that has been robbed in past generations, God can restore them to us. We can get things back we didn’t even know we had lost.

More on familiar spirits

Self pity, bitterness, rejection, abandonment, isolation are evil fruits of familiar spirits. If you can identify a constant negative thought or emotion, you can identify a familiar spirit working in your life. They generate feelings.

Most of us have a craving need for affirmation of people. This isn’t the real you.

Gossip is another familiar spirit- anyone who has a need to obtain and spread information on others, especially negative news. Reading books and gossip magazines or personal info about other people online are other examples. People are interested in this stuff but they don’t need to know this info. If you want to know about someone go to Heaven and ask Jesus. WHATEVER YOU READ YOU COME INTO AGREEMENT WITH.

A familiar spirit uses your body electromagnetic field for its information. Whatever you’ve given yourself to, has power over your life; they form bondages and strongholds in this field to establish a pattern in your life that bend towards an area they want. For instance, leaders get addicted to their ministry because they get fulfilment out of what they are doing instead out of their relationship with God. Most people wouldn’t see a problem with a nice, generous, hard-working leader, yet if they’re doing their ministry in the flesh (apart from the Holy Spirit’s direction and power) or for themselves or to please people, they’re being manipulated and deceived.

Familiar spirits are intimate activators. They activate an individual to yield to the nature that lives inside of them. A familiar spirit is a demon expressing itself through a person’s life into the world around them. A person becomes its waterfall on the face of the earth. So instead of the river of the glory of God coming out of a person’s heart and mind, there is another river flowing out of their life. When the kingdom of God through the Holy Spirit doesn’t flow from their life, the kingdom of satan flows from familiar spirits instead.

The more a person pays attention to familiar spirits the more they occupy their life. A familiar spirit is demanding but also comforting, as it comforts people over their sin and hides them from what God calls sin.

After a sin it also likes to remind people and torment people that they’re sinners. Familiar spirits are accusers that bring condemnation to make a person feel that they want to hide from God.

Familiar spirits will also give hidden thought patterns; have people conduct secret, sinful behavior; reveal themselves in erratic behavior such as bursts of anger when things don’t go their way.

They can be picked up from others (transference), although usually they move through specific family lines which is more familiar to them. After the death of a parent, they’ll move to the children. Some enter into a person while they’re still in their mother’s womb. Cancers, diabetes, heart disease, certain behaviors, transfer down through family lines. These are also known as generational curses.

Deal with them. Get rid of them out of your life. Daily!

Father, I pray with the power and the authority that you have mandated to me. I exercise that authority and I challenge the familiar spirits that are operating in the lives of the person reading this right now. I declare that you familiar spirits will not whisper, defame and denounce this child of God anymore, but that you will come under their feet and you will be crushed and leave to go into a spiritual prison and remain there bound until your judgment from God. Angels of God, please assist with this deliverance and imprisonment now.

Father, I declare in the name of Jesus, a revelation of sonship and authority and Your power on this person today.

And I pray that you release their crowns of royal identity. Cause them to rise up to take hold of their destiny and pursue it until it is fulfilled.

Right now, I declare the destiny of God released over this person for them to get hold of in the heavenly realms.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen

Do self-deliverance daily, especially when you notice a strange thought or negative emotion that isn’t you. They lie in wait for people to sin to give them the right to enter in. If you’ve sinned, quickly repent to Father God, cover yourself with Jesus’ Blood and then do self-deliverance. Remember to cast them out into a spiritual prison as you don’t want to just cast them out, as they will wait to come back or just go and afflict someone else. Take them out of commission permanently!

Don’t forget to help others that are afflicted. Inform them. Most aren’t aware of these deceptive creatures destroying their lives. Brothers and sisters in Christ are family.

Seek guidance from the Holy Spirit on how to direct your life. Don’t be self-directed, religion-directed or familiar spirit-directed.

Remember, right now you are a royal-priest of God and joint-heir with Christ (1 Peter 2:9; Romans 8:17)!