David Diga Hernandez - This Religious Stronghold Traps Many Christians

You can experience permanent deliverance. The life of the believer is meant to be one of victory. God did not create you to struggle under the power of these strongholds. Deliverance is yours today, and the truth will set you free. I believe God wants you to hear this: first, I want to look at what a stronghold is. Second Corinthians chapter 10, verses 4 and 5 say this: «For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds; casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.» The context of this portion of Scripture is Paul the Apostle defending the legitimacy of his apostolic authority. Certain pretenders, who were very jealous of what God was doing with Paul the Apostle, began to speak against him, saying that he wasn’t a true apostle. They began to belittle him in front of the church. So, Paul the Apostle responds to this and he calls their slander, gossip, arguments, and reasons strongholds. Now, a stronghold in the natural realm is like a fortress, castle, or wall—any structure that prohibits the movement of one army into the land that belongs to the one who owns the stronghold. It’s a term of war, describing a place of safety and strength. The enemy can build strongholds in our lives, which is where God’s people need deliverance. God’s people need deliverance from strongholds and spiritual bondage, and the root of all strongholds is deception. Paul the Apostle compares these imaginations and deceptions to these mighty structures that are difficult to remove. He says the «weapons of our warfare are not carnal,» meaning we wage a spiritual war, «but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.» I love that phrase, «pulling down of strongholds.» It describes the utter obliteration of these structures in our lives, casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. So we come against these strongholds with truth. These strongholds are points of deception; this is how the enemy works against the believer. This is how a stronghold works: strongholds first begin with a lie. I want you to see this up here on your screen: strongholds begin with a lie. That lie, once it’s believed, becomes deception. Now listen to me very closely here—a lie has no power over you if you don’t believe it. The only way a lie gains power is if it goes from being a lie to deception. A lie is anything that contradicts the truth, and once you believe that lie, that belief in the lie is what we call deception. If someone lies to you and you don’t believe it, you’re not deceived. If someone lies to you and you accept it, now you’re deceived. That deception becomes the pattern that governs your thoughts and feelings. Those thoughts and feelings begin to follow the way of that deception, or that stronghold, and then those thoughts and feelings begin to affect your behavior. If you feel like God has rejected you, if you think God has rejected you, you’re going to begin to behave like God has rejected you. If you feel like you can’t overcome sin and you think that you can’t overcome sin, you’re going to behave like you can’t overcome sin. If you think the enemy has power over you and you feel like the enemy has power over you, you’re going to behave like the enemy has rightful power over you. That behavior becomes your habits. Those habits are daily or frequent repetitions that eventually become life cycles. This is where people don’t make the distinction they should. Habits are actions you perform frequently—whether that be weekly, daily, or hourly—whatever the cycles are, that’s what you get stuck in. When you go back and forth between a lifestyle of bad habits and a lifestyle where you’re not committing those bad habits, and then a lifestyle of bad habits again, this is what happens to many Christians. They’ll get free for six months, then be bound for six months; free for three weeks, then bound for three weeks. Those habits represent frequent performance of something you do, but those cycles are where the habit comes on again, then off again. Some people even repeat these cycles over years—four or five years at a time, ten years at a time—one good decade, one bad decade. Those cycles are what we refer to as spiritual bondage. That bondage produces the symptoms of guilt, shame, torment, angst, and heaviness; you feel that weightiness upon you. Here’s the problem: many Christians try to address the bondage itself or the symptoms, and they never address the root lie. They never address the root lie that is actually causing the deception. Therefore, the root lie remains hidden under all the symptoms that bondage produces. Many different effects arise in our emotions and our lives, and those cycles repeat again and again. But until you get back to addressing that lie, you’re addressing the result and not the root—the symptom and not the source. Now, when you learn to expose the lies, then you learn to get to these spiritual strongholds at their very root—not at the surface level, to where you feel good for a few weeks and then have to go back to get deliverance again—but instead addressing the lie at its root, uprooting it, removing it, and then you watch the fruit.