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Re: Mental Illness or Demonic Influence?
Lafon,
I agree completely about personal responsibility. However that does not preclude demonic influence or mental illness for that matter.
For examples, I know a Pentecostal preacher with early onset dementia who has been married for over 40 years but is now in a nursing home where he says one of the women there is his girlfriend. He has no clue as to who his wife is. Not long ago when she visited him she asked him what relation she was to him. He looked at her confused and after thinking a bit said tenatively "sister?". Now this man is one of the finest christian men I have ever known but I do not hold him responsible for not knowing he is married .
I am not saying demonic influence is an excuse for anything. I am just contemplating how much of the time when we see some horrific thing done by someone where it is totally out of character it might be a direct attack by satan on that person that succeeded. In New Testament accounts of demon possession how much of what that person did, once possessed, was controlled by them? Obviously we can resist satan, call on the name of Jesus, and he will flee. However once a person is possessed can they, without external help, eject that demon or demons?
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"I think some people love spiritual bondage just the way some people love physical bondage. It makes them feel secure. In the end though it is not healthy for the one who is lost over it or the one who is lives under the oppression even if by their own choice"
Titus2woman on AFF
"We did not wear uniforms. The lady workers dressed in the current fashions of the day, ...silks...satins...jewels or whatever they happened to possess. They were very smartly turned out, so that they made an impressive appearance on the streets where a large part of our work was conducted in the early years.
"It was not until long after, when former Holiness preachers had become part of us, that strict plainness of dress began to be taught.
"Although Entire Sanctification was preached at the beginning of the Movement, it was from a Wesleyan viewpoint, and had in it very little of the later Holiness Movement characteristics. Nothing was ever said about apparel, for everyone was so taken up with the Lord that mode of dress seemingly never occurred to any of us."
Quote from Ethel Goss (widow of 1st UPC Gen Supt. Howard Goss) book "The Winds of God"
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