A Stronghold Is Not a Demon

Jesus Way Ministries

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Settle this before anything else, because men have wasted years on the other side of it.

A stronghold is not a demon. You cannot cast it out. People have tried — some of them for a decade — and then concluded that God did not answer them.

A stronghold is a structure, and structures are not cast out. They are pulled down.

Here is the definition. It is worth writing in the margin of your Bible.

A stronghold is a system of thinking, built on something false, which you have come to hold as simply true.

Why it never comes up for examination

The word Paul uses is a military one. It means a fortified place, a castle, something built to be held against attack — and he applies it to the mind.

That is exactly right, because a stronghold is never experienced as a lie. Nobody wakes up believing something he knows to be false. It is experienced as the way things simply are.

Which is why it never gets examined. And why it can sit inside a believer for thirty years while he reads his Bible over the top of it.

What it costs you, practically

No decision can be better than what you believed when you made it.

A stronghold is a source of bad information sitting inside your own head, quietly feeding you a distorted reading of your marriage, your leaders, your money, your calling, and yourself. You then make decisions that are perfectly reasonable given that information.

And they fail. And you are bewildered, because you were sincere the whole way through.

Paul is the case study, and he wrote it down himself

I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.

He was not a cynic. He was devout, disciplined, scholarly, and certain he was serving God — while he was hunting down the people God had bought.

So take the lesson where it lands. Sincerity is not evidence. Conviction is not evidence. A man can be entirely honest and entirely wrong at the same moment, and be dangerous precisely because of it.

Where the enemy gets his ground

Paul told the Ephesians not to give place to the devil. Place is a location — a bit of ground, somewhere to stand.

James answers where it comes from, and he answers in an order, working outward from the inside. He starts in the heart with bitter envying and strife in your hearts. Then one ring out, to what other people can see: from whence come wars and fightings among you? Then the whole shape of a life.

Heart, then relationships, then the pattern of a life. That is the order it spreads in, and therefore the order to search yourself in.

In the heart. A stronghold here blurs the line between your own soul and your spirit, so that you lose the ability to tell your own strong feeling from the voice of God. From there it is a short step to the most damaging thing a man in ministry can do, which is to promote his own opinion to the level of revelation. He is not lying. He genuinely believes God said it. He has simply lost the ability to tell his own furniture from God's.

In relationships. This is where the fighting shows up: envy, strife, anxiety, and above all the need to control — my wife, my children, my pastor, my circumstances. It produces what can only be called begrudging love, which says I will love you for as long as you behave in the way that makes it comfortable for me to love you. And it magnifies offence beyond recognition. An ounce of injury becomes ten tons, because the stronghold keeps insisting on one thing: they meant it.

That single assumption is what makes forgiveness feel impossible. It is almost always false.

In the shape of a life. Here a stronghold hides the cycle from the man living inside it. The same failure. The same kind of job ending. The same friendship collapsing in the same month of the relationship. And every single time there is an explanation, and the explanation is always somebody else.

Stated plainly, that reflex says something no believer would ever say out loud: what was done to me is larger than what God can do in me.

Written down like that, it is obviously false. Lived out, it governs entire lives.

The weapons are not what you would reach for

The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds.

Not carnal means not willpower. Not better arguments. Not more information. Not a stronger personality.

And notice what they actually do. They pull down. They cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God. Then the aim of the whole operation: bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

Every thought. Not just the ones you say out loud.

Four things bring one down, and none of them work alone

Repentance, and it has to be specific. Not Lord, forgive me for my sins, which costs nothing and changes nothing. The lie has a name. Name it. David did not pray in generalities — he asked for a clean heart to be created and a right spirit renewed, and he said God desires truth in the inward parts, which is the hidden place where the thing actually lives.

The Word, deliberately put in the place of the lie. A stronghold is not defeated by being scolded. It is replaced. Be not conformed, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind — and renewing is not passive. It means the old material is taken out and new material is put in, and the man himself does the putting in.

Submission, then warfare, in that order. James gives the order and it is nearly always quoted the wrong way round. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Submission first. A man who resists without submitting is shouting at something he has left the door open for.

And time. This is the part nobody wants. A structure that took twenty years to build does not usually come down in one evening of prayer. Expecting it to has left a great many people convinced God did not answer them, when in fact they walked off the job on day three.

Then guard the gate

What you look at, you end up thinking about. What you think about, you eventually act on. What you act on repeatedly becomes a habit. Habits harden into character, and character sets the direction of a whole life.

The chain is not mystical. It runs in one direction, and it starts with what you look at.

Where to begin

Find the sentence you have never once questioned. Not a doctrine — a sentence about yourself, or about people, or about how things go for you.

Say it out loud. It will feel foolish, and it will keep feeling foolish for about a week.

Then ask a person who is allowed to tell you the truth whether they have heard you live by it.

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This article is adapted from Part Three of The Progressive, First Edition: The Deep Work by Jesus Way Ministries. The book closes that section with a thirty-day assignment for pulling one stronghold down, and an order for each day.

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