Deliverance to the Captives Read Luke 4, 1
-20 Our precious Lord Jesus is everything for
everybody.
Forgiveness of sin, healing of diseases and the
fullness of the Spirit all come from one
source from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Hear Him who was the same yesterday, today
and forever as He announces the purpose for
which He came and the Spirit of the
Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed
me to preach the gospel to the poor,
He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering
of sight to the blind, to set at
liberty them that are bruised, to preach the
acceptable year of the Lord.
Jesus had been baptized by John and Jordan,
and the Holy Spirit had descended in a
bodily shape like a dove upon Him.
Being full of the Holy Ghost, He had
been led by the Spirit into the wilderness,
there to come off more than conqueror over
the arch enemy.
Then He returned in the power of the
Spirit to Galilee and preached in the synagogues,
and at last He came to His old
hometown Nazareth, where He announced His mission in
the words I have just quoted.
For a brief while He ministered on the
earth, and then gave His life a ransom
for all.
But God raised Him from the dead.
And before He went to the glory He
told His disciples that they too should receive
the power of the Holy Ghost upon them.
Thus, through them, His gracious ministry would continue.
This power of the Holy Ghost was not
only for a few apostles, but even for
them that are afar off.
Even as many as our God should call
Acts 2, 39 even for us in this
twentieth century.
Some ask, but was not this power just
for the privileged few in the first century?
No.
Read the Master's Great Commission as recorded by
Mark, and you will see it is for
them that believe.
After I had received the baptism of the
Holy Ghost and I know that I received,
for the Lord gave me the Spirit in
just the same way as He gave Him
to the disciples at Jerusalem, I sought the
mind of the Lord as to why I
was baptized.
One day I came home from work and
went into the house and my wife asked
me, Which way did you come in?
I told her that I had come in
at the back door.
She said, There is a woman upstairs and
she has brought an old man a baby
to be prayed for.
He is raving up there and a great
crowd is outside the front door, ringing the
doorbell and wanting to know what is going
on in the house.
The Lord quietly whispered, This is what I
baptized you for.
I carefully opened the door of the room
where the man was, desiring to be obedient
to what my Lord would say to me.
The man was crying and shouting in distress,
I am lost.
I have committed the unpardonable sin.
I am lost.
My wife said, Dad, what shall we do?
The Spirit of the Lord moved me to
cry out, Come out, thou lying spirit.
In a moment the evil spirit went, and
the man was free.
Deliverance to the captives.
And the Lord said to me, This is
what I baptized you for.
There is a place where God, through the
power of the Holy Ghost, reigns supreme in
our lives.
The Spirit reveals, unfolds, takes up the things
of Christ and shows them to us, and
prepares us to be more than a match
for satanic forces.
When Nicodemus came to Jesus he said, We
know that thou art a teacher come from
God for no man can do these miracles
that thou dost, except God be with him.
Jesus said to him, Verily, verily I say
unto thee, Except a man be born again,
he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Nicodemus was impressed by the miracles wrought, and
Jesus pointed out the necessity of a miracle
being wrought with every man who would see
the kingdom.
When a man is born of God, is
brought from darkness to light, a mighty miracle
is wrought.
Jesus saw every touch by God as a
miracle, and so we may expect to see
miracles wrought today.
It is wonderful to have the Spirit of
the Lord upon us.
I would rather have the Spirit of God
on me for five minutes than to receive
a million dollars.
Do you see how Jesus mastered the devil
in the wilderness?
He knew he was the Son of God
and Satan came along with an if.
How many times has Satan come along to
you this way?
He says, After all, you may be deceived.
You know you really are not a child
of God.
If the devil comes along and says that
you are not saved, it is a pretty
sure sign that you are.
When he comes and tells you that you
are not healed, it may be taken as
good evidence that the Lord has sent his
word and healed you.
The devil knows that if he can capture
your thought life, he has won a mighty
victory over you.
His great business is injecting thoughts, but if
you are pure and holy you will instantly
shrink from them.
God wants us to let the mind that
was in Christ Jesus, that pure, holy, humble
mind of Christ, be in us.
I come across people everywhere I go who
are held bound by deceptive conditions, and these
conditions have come about simply because they have
allowed the devil to make their minds the
place of his stronghold.
How are we to guard against this?
The Lord has provided us with weapons that
are mighty through God to the pulling down
of these strongholds of the enemy, and by
means of which every thought shall be brought
into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
The blood of Jesus Christ and his mighty
name are an antidote to all the subtle
seeds of unbelief that Satan would sow in
your minds.
In the first chapter of Acts, we see
that Jesus gave commandment to the disciples that
they should wait for the promise of the
Father, and he told them that not many
days hence they would be baptized with the
Holy Ghost.
Luke tells us that he had written his
former treatise concerning all that Jesus began both
to do and teach.
The ministry of Christ did not end at
the cross, but the Acts and the Epistles
give us accounts of what he continued to
do and teach through those whom he indwelt.
And our blessed Lord Jesus is still alive,
and continues his ministry through those who are
filled with his Spirit.
He is still healing the brokenhearted and delivering
the captives through those on whom he places
his Spirit.
I was traveling one day in a railway
train in Sweden.
At one station there boarded the train an
old lady with her daughter.
The old lady's expression was so troubled that
I inquired what was the matter with her.
I heard that she was going to the
hospital to have her leg taken off.
She began to weep as she told that
the doctors had said there was no hope
for her except through having her leg amputated.
She was 70 years old.
I said to my interpreter, tell her that
Jesus can heal her.
The instant this was said to her, it
was as though a veil was taken off
her face, it became so light.
We stopped at another station in the carriage
filled tip with people.
There was a rush of men to board
the train and the devil said, you're done.
But I knew I had the best proposition,
for hard things are always opportunities to get
to the Lord more glory when he manifests
his power.
Every trial is a blessing.
There have been times when I have been
pressed through circumstances and it seemed as if
a dozen road engines were going over me,
but I have found that the hardest things
are just lifting places into the grace of
God.
We have such a lovely Jesus.
He always proves himself to be such a
mighty deliverer.
He never fails to plan the best things
for us.
The train began moving and I crouched down
and in the name of Jesus commanded the
disease to leave.
The old lady cried, I'm healed.
I know I'm healed.
She stamped her leg and said, I'm going
to prove it.
So when we stopped at another station, she
marched up and down and shouted, I'm not
going to the hospital.
Once again, our wonderful Jesus had proven himself
a healer of the brokenhearted, a deliverer of
one that was bound.
At one time, I was so bound that
no human power could help me.
My wife was looking for me to pass
away.
There was no help.
At that time, I had just had a
faint glimpse of Jesus as the healer.
For six months I had been suffering from
appendicitis, occasionally getting temporary relief.
I went to the mission of which I
was pastor, but I was brought to the
floor in awful agony and they brought me
home to my bed.
All night I was praying, pleading for deliverance,
but none came.
My wife was sure it was my home
call and sent for a physician.
He said that there was no possible chance
for me.
My body was too weak.
Having had the appendicitis for six months, my
whole system was drained.
And because of that, he thought that it
was too late for an operation.
He left my wife in a state of
brokenheartedness.
After he left, there came to our door
a young man and an old lady.
I knew that she was a woman of
real prayer.
They came upstairs to my room.
This young man jumped on the bed and
commanded the evil spirit to come out of
me.
He shouted, Come out, you devil, I command
you to come out in the name of
Jesus.
There was no chance for an argument or
for me to tell him that I would
never believe that there was a devil inside
of me.
The thing had to go in the name
of Jesus, and it went, and I was
instantly healed.
I arose undressed and went downstairs.
I was still in the plumbing business, and
I asked my wife, Is there any work
in?
I am all right now, and I am
going to work.
I found there was a certain job to
be done and I picked up my tools
and went off to do it.
Just after I left, the doctor came in,
put his plug hat down in the hall,
and walked up to the bedroom.
But the invalid was not there.
Where is Mr. Wigglesworth?
He asked.
Oh, doctor, he's gone out to work, said
my wife.
You'll never see him alive again, said the
doctor.
They'll bring him back a corpse.
Well, I'm the corpse.
Since that time, in many parts of the
world, the Lord has given me the privilege
of praying for our people with appendicitis, and
I have seen a great many people up
and dressed within a quarter of an hour
from the time I prayed for them.
We have a living Christ who is willing
to meet people on every line.
A number of years ago I met Brother
D.W. Care and he gave me a
letter of introduction to a brother in Zion
City named Cook.
I took his letter to Brother Cook, and
he said, God has sent you here.
He gave me the addresses of six people
and asked me to go and pray for
them and meet him again at 12 o
'clock.
I got back at about 12.30 and
he told me about a young man who
was to be married the following Monday.
His sweetheart was in Zion City dying of
appendicitis.
I went to the house and found that
the physician had just been there and had
pronounced that there was no hope.
The mother was nearly distracted and was pulling
in her hair and saying, Is there no
deliverance?
I said to her, Woman, believe God and
your daughter will be healed and be up
and dressed in 15 minutes.
But the mother went on screaming.
They took me into the bedroom, and I
prayed for the girl and commanded the evil
spirit to depart in the name of Jesus.
She cried, I am healed.
I said to her, Do you want me
to believe that you are healed?
If you are healed, get up.
She said, You get out of the room,
and I'll get up.
In less than 10 minutes the doctor came
in.
He wanted to know what had happened.
She said, A man came in and prayed
for me, and I'm healed.
The doctor pressed his finger right in the
place that had been so sore, and the
girl neither moaned nor cried.
He said, This is God.
It made no difference whether he acknowledged it
or not, I knew that God had worked.
Our God is real and saving and healing
power today.
Our Jesus is just the same, yesterday, and
today, and forever.
He saves and heals today just as of
old, and He wants to be your savior
and your healer.
Oh, if you would only believe God.
What would happen?
The greatest things.
Some have never tasted the grace of God,
have never had the peace of God.
Unbelief robs them of these blessings.
It is possible to hear and yet not
conceive the truth.
It is possible to read the Word and
not share in the life it brings.
It is necessary for us to have the
Holy Ghost to unfold the Word and bring
to us the life that is Christ.
We can never fully understand the wonders of
this redemption until we are full of the
Holy Ghost.
I was once at an afternoon meeting.
The Lord had been graciously with us and
many had been healed by the power of
God.
Most of the people had gone home and
I was left alone, when I saw a
young man who was evidently hanging back to
have a word.
I asked, What do you want?
He said, I wonder if I could ask
you to pray for me.
I said, What's the trouble?
He said, Can't you smell?
The young fellow had gone into sin and
was suffering the consequences.
He said, I have been turned out of
two hospitals.
I am broken out all over.
I have abscesses all over me.
And I could see that he had a
bad breaking out at the nose.
He said, I heard you preach, and could
not understand about this healing business, and was
wondering if there was any hope for me.
I said to him, Do you know Jesus?
He did not know the first thing about
salvation, but I said to him, Stand still.
I placed my hands on his head and
then on his loins and cursed that terrible
disease in the name of Jesus.
He cried out, I know I am healed.
I can feel a warmth and a glow
all over me.
I said, Who did it?
He said, Your prayers.
I said, No, it was Jesus.
He said, Was it he?
Oh, Jesus.
Jesus.
Jesus, save me.
And that young man went away healed and
saved.
Oh, what a merciful God we have.
What a wonderful Jesus is ours.
Are you oppressed?
Cry out to God.
It is always good for people to cry
out.
You may have to cry out.
The Holy Ghost and the Word of God
will bring to light every hidden, unclean thing
that must be revealed.
There is always a place of deliverance when
you let God search out that which is
spoiling and marring your life.
That evil spirit that was in the man
in the synagogue cried out, Let us alone.
It was a singular thing that the evil
spirit had never cried out like that until
Jesus walked into the place where he was.
Jesus rebuked the thing, saying, Hold thy peace
and come out of him, and the man
was delivered.
He is just the same Jesus, exposing the
powers of evil, delivering the captives and letting
the oppressed go free, purifying them and cleansing
their hearts.
Those evil spirits that inhabited the man who
had the legion did not want to be
sent to the pit to be tormented before
their time, and so they cried out to
be sent into the swine.
Hell is such an awful place that even
the demons hate the thought of going there.
How much more should men seek to be
saved from the pit?
God is compassionate and says, Seek ye the
Lord while he may be found.
And he has further stated, Whosoever shall call
on the name of the Lord shall be
saved.
Seek him now, call on his name right
now, and there is forgiveness, healing, redemption, deliverance,
and everything you need for you right here
and now, and that which will satisfy you
throughout eternity.